Reclaiming Old Heritage for Proclaiming Future History: The Knowledge-for-Development Debate in African Contexts

In the context of the overarching processes of globalization, a model including two intersecting dialectics is offered: one between education and development, and another between indigenous and modern knowledge. It is argued that globalization, as we know it, must be reinvented; and the new definition of African development must accept limits to growth while using all the possibilities offered by African imagination, intellect, and existing material endowments. The dialectic between indigenous and modern knowledge will have to be self-consciously and systematically guided to be mutually enriching. Knowledge resulting from the integration of the indigenous and the modern will have to be systematically institutionalized within schools and universities. At the same time, indigenous knowledge must become a dynamic part of social processes of communities through organized classes for adults, first in the mother tongue, and then in the language of politics and the economy in the larger system.