![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This study proposes African ways of knowing as viable alternatives to Western theories, and demonstrates how Indigenous African epistemologies can be systematised for critical analysis of cultural productions. It builds on the argument that knowledge production in and about Africa should begin to utilise local frameworks to reflect African cultural specificities and instantiate how self-generational concepts from African cultures can be intellectualised. The study adopts Yorùbá Ọmọlúwàbí, Xhosa/Zulu Ubuntu/Hunhui and Shona Ukama, converts them to canons and uses them as models to validate empirical reality, propositional truth and epistemological premises of home-grown African theories. It discusses theory development and interrogates how these Indigenous epistemes can be structured and turned to theories using evidential, coherential, aesthetic and diachronic theoretical virtues. It also identifies the validity of these theories in cultural praxis, worldviews, proverbs of matrixes under study and generates five premises for the local frameworks, arguing that home-grown African theories can be adopted to remind and reawaken Africans to their cultural history and values.
Acknowledgments
This article is part of my research outcomes for the Visiting Fellowship award at the African Studies Center, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, in the winter of 2023. My special thanks go to the center for the opportunity. I express my profound gratitude to the Convener of the ‘Africa in the World’ Collaborative Research Group at the center, Prof. Dr. Mayke Kaag, as well as Prof. Uche Chibuike, Dr Akinyinka Akinyoade, Jos Damen, Dr Ibrahima Poudiougou, and many other people at the center for their insightful comments and criticisms of the initial draft of this paper and the invaluable comments they provided during my seminar presentation on Indigenous African knowledge at the center. I also thank my anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This refers to both African and non-African researchers whose object of study is Africa. In African Studies, these researchers can be found in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, and cultural studies. Except in comparative capacity with African themes, an African working on Japanese, Russian anthropology or linguistics cannot be said to be in African Studies. As used in this context, an African researcher is someone whose research is on issues, people, culture, literature, language, philosophy and epistemology of the people of Africa both at home and in the Diaspora.
2. Some of these concepts include Nyerere’s Ujamaa African socialist thought, the Akan Sankofa theory, the Shona Nhimbe, Pio Zirimu’s Orature theory, Ngugi’s Decolonisation.
3. See ‘No Man is an Island’.
4. From 50 Yoruba proverbs and idioms, https://steemit.com/nigeria/@leopantro/50-yoruba-proverbs-and-idioms.
6. The concepts are abundantly present in other Nguni cultural and oral practices.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Emmanuel Adeniyi is of the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society, Leuphana Universität, Lüneburg, Germany. His research interest covers Decolonial Literature, Environmental Studies, Film and Media Studies, Folk Literature, Subaltern Studies, intersection between music and literature, among others. He has published in reputable journals, including African Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Literary Studies, among others.