from Africa Today Volume 49, Number 3

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

H. S. Bhola

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions or reprint use contact:

Rights and Permissions, Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton St.
Bloomington, IN 47404

FAX: 812 855-8507
E-mail: journals@indiana.edu

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.

Introduction

Biocultural coevolution is now widely accepted as reality (Lumsden and Wilson 1981). The human species has indeed continued to reinvent itself throughout its time on earth, creating and recreating cultures and civilizations. CultureÊcollective knowledge created, tested, organized, accumulated, and communicated within and across generationsÊis all that is human-made: from stone tools to high-tech machines, and from communal living to the creation of complex institutions of religion and governance.

Knowledge use in the making and remaking of individual identities and human societies has not always been a self-conscious process. The self-conscious, self-confident, assertive, and aggressive use of knowledge for making behavioral and social interventions may be a phenomenon of the twentieth century. In today's "Knowledge Society," knowledge has become more essential to nations' wealth than capital or labor (Drucker 1993).We are entering "the age of the mind" (Riley 1998), wherein knowledge is used in the systematic development of both hard and soft technologies, which, in turn, transform economies, societies, polities, and cultures.

Political and Theoretical Frames

The complex and crass politics of knowledge for development under globalization was captured by Deane, Dahlman, and McNamara (1999) in their role as comoderators of a recent World Bank symposium. Around the same time, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa brought the discussion nearer home to Africa when he said:

I think all of us recognize that nowhere in the world has sustained development been attained without a well functioning system of education, without universal and sound primary education, without an effective higher education and research sector, without equality of educational opportunity.

I believe that our present phase of development requires a growth and consolidation of a class of intellectuals, whose fundamental task must be in the economic and social area. If we are to build entrepreneurs in Africa, we must at the same time build the intelligentsia.

We must proceed with ongoing African studies and research, into our rich creative and cultural past and rekindle interest into African knowledge systems, so as to make younger generations aware of the achievements emanating from our continent and impress upon them their inherent creativity, that is setting the stage for new developments and discoveries. . . . for building mental universes of their own, for Africa's progress and prosperity.

We must use, we must encourage the use of information technology in education, so as to link far-flung places and institutions of learning, to bridge the gap between the urban and rural areas, to enable African children to advance scientifically so as to compete on an equal footing with the rest of the world. . . . We must ensure that measures are put in place to ensure that women, especially those in rural areas, have access from which they may have been traditionally excluded. (Mbeki 1999)

The perceptive reader will see in President Mbeki's statements a mixture of the sentimental and the social scientific. Mbeki exudes great hopes for an African renaissance to appear as a result of a well-planned project of sustainable socioeconomic development--imagined by Africa's intelligentsia and implemented by its entrepreneurs. On the one hand, this imagined future of Africa will be built on Africa's cultural traditions and indigenous knowledge and, on the other hand, by incorporating the modern information technology that can overcome time and space, reach the unreached, and include the excluded.

The above narrative can be abstracted into the following model, which shows two intersecting dialectical poles: one of education and development, and another of indigenous knowledge and modern-scientific knowledge. The model assumes and anticipates the contradictions and uncertain resolutions of those contradictions as implied in the concept of dialectics. The dual dialectic has been situated in the context of globalization to make the point that structures matter. Social processes take place within structures and superstructures. The production and use of knowledge to educate communities and serve the objectives of development take place within structures of the political economy and the superstructures of values.1

Globalization as Context of the Dialectic between Development and Education

An important part of intellectual discourse today, globalization has been discussed in regard to political economy (Greider 1997) and education and culture (Green 1997). Most common folks, however, do not understand that globalization may have gone too far--and possibly in the wrong direction (Rodrik 1997).

Globalization is both old and new. It is old in being continuous with the age-old processes of colonization, decolonization, and neocolonization. It is new in that electronic technologies have condensed time and space to create a postmodernist consciousness that is both overwhelming and exhilarating. History has accelerated, and political, economic, social, and cultural processes have intensified. Globalization, of course, has not brought global solidarity and a just moral order to encompass the globe. It has in fact expanded worldwide profit-making opportunities that border on predatory behavior. In every country, developed and developing, it has created winners and losers, the exalted and the excluded, billionaire "fat cats" and breadless "have-nots." The welfare state that took more than a century to create has been dismantled in a few years. The world political order has made a mockery of state sovereignty and created the category of weak states in Africa. Cultural imperialism is a reality. The offspring of those made newly rich by deregulated economies in the Third World are serving as globalization's Trojan horses as they sing and swing to Western music, eat Western food, wear blue jeans and drift aimlessly in a normless culture, seeking thrills.

Ironically, globalization has brought about its dialectical opposite: the desire for localization; the search for community, indigenous values, mother tongues; and the wish to preserve cultural heritage and indigenous knowledge. The challenges ahead are truly monumental: globalization as we know it must be reinvented. In the processes of reglobalizing, we should not unthinkingly swallow the mantras of free-market competition, entrepreneurship, partnerships, and the illusionary blessings of the civil society. We need to define afresh our own special possible places on the globe. That will, of course, mean redefining development as well. With a new definition of development, we shall be able to determine the role and possibilities of indigenous knowledge and our cultural heritage.

All this is easier said than done. The irony is that African intelligentsia, academics, and policymakers are themselves citizens of the citadel of globalization: they are the children of the West, and the products of Western university systems. They are Westernized Africans living in non-Western places. Their pretensions to reflexivity and patriotism notwithstanding, they have internalized the values, norms, and criteria of the West, and will, therefore, be judging globalization, development, and indigenous knowledge with Western visions, Western assumptions, and Western criteria.

Ideally, development has been defined comprehensively in terms economic, social, political, and cultural. In the less than ideal world, however, it is implemented merely in economic and technological aspects. In the early 1970s, attention was drawn to the inherent limits to growth (Meadows et al., 1972) on this "spaceship earth." The point was made that the high levels of consumption in the West, accompanied with the profligate use of the world's natural resources, could not be sustained, even for the West. Surely, within the existing patterns of development it would be impossible to bring any meaningful development to the poor populations and peoples living on the globe.

The warning was not heeded, by either the developed or the developing countries. Countries of Africa, as all other countries of the Third World, blindly bought into the concept of development defined in the West, promoted by international development agencies, and drummed up by their own Westernized governing elite. As a consequence, what they have to show for forty years of development efforts are national debts so huge that in many countries, servicing the debts takes half of the national revenue (UNDP 1999).

No lessons seem to have been learned from this predicament. Development, more than ever before, has come to be defined as competing successfully--and profitably!-- in the global market. Unfortunately, politicians do not fully realize the necessity of developing a definition and a program of development that is truly non-Western, though by no means anti-Western, and certainly not seeking to do development without borrowing from the knowledge and material resources of the West. That would mean inventing a vision and a program of development that is a product of African imagination, is rooted in the values of African peoples, and is possible to achieve, not exclusively but essentially, using African resources--human, material, and spiritual. This development would be measured, not by the rate of growth in a nation's GDP, but by success in the eradication of poverty from a nation's homes and communities.

Education for development thus conceived will also have to be reinvented. Education will be designed to serve two masters at the same time: community-centered education for meeting the needs of those living in the informal subsistence economy, and education for the social reproduction of labor for the newly developing service and industrial economies that are slowly emerging in developing countries of Africa and Asia (Bhola 1999).

The Second Dialectic: Between Indigenous and Modern-Scientific Knowledge Systems

The other dialectic embedded in the above model is that between indigenous knowledge and modern-scientific knowledge of the West. This raises several questions. What is knowledge? What are the referents, in the real world, for oral heritage and indigenous knowledge (OHIK), and modern-scientific knowledge generally associated with the West and disassociated from indigenous peoples?

In the cultural-constructivist theory, to be is to know. To know is to become cognizant of, or have concept of, in the mind, through seeing, and hearing, and through reading in literate societies. The word knowledge has come to have connotations of facticity, certainty, and truthfulness. However, what passes as knowledge may not always have all or any of these qualities. Such "ignorant knowledge" will survive until it is tested in operative settings in the world of practice. Through the process of testing, knowledge keeps on acquiring more and more "truth content."

Knowledge is an individual construction, but not in an absolute sense. We come into a world where knowledge of the world is already half constructed by the social organizations in which we are born: the family, the community, the ethnic group, and the larger culture. The dialectic between the individual construction of knowledge and the social construction of knowledge is ever existent. It allows individuals, on the one hand, to inherit their cultural traditions and indigenous knowledge; on the other hand, it enables each individual to renew and transform the received knowledge in the very process of receiving it.

A considerable amount of collective knowledge may be passed tacitly, intergenerationally, and intragenerationally. Other knowledge may be embedded in the customs, habits, rituals, and social institutions of the community. In preliterate societies, stated knowledge of the collectivity was codified in verse to assist storage in memory and transfer within and between generations. Special roles were created, roles such as those of village elders, praise singers, bards, shamans, and medicine men. When writing was invented, some five thousand years ago, knowledge was codified in written languages, and sometimes in graphics and schemata. As science and technology advanced, knowledge could be stored and disseminated through print, tapes, and wireless electronic modes, which have now given us the Internet.

The possibilities of the codification of knowledge and its storage for retrieval and dissemination around the world have had far-reaching consequences, leading to the commoditization of knowledge and the political economy of knowledge. Traditional knowledge of indigenous cultures may also have developed a political economy of knowledge, especially where contact between indigenous and Western peoples occurs frequently.

Knowledge individually constructed and held by individuals is quite incoherent. In today's world, individuals everywhere are wearing cloaks of knowledge made from a crazy patchwork quilt with pieces of different fabrics, of many shapes, of multiple colors, some woven tight, and others knit loose. The mix of knowledge items we work with is incoherent and bewildering. Our understanding of the world remains a matter of credibility rather than truth, of loose fit rather than perfect match. Relatively speaking, a body of collective knowledge is more coherent than individually held knowledge; however, as a body of knowledge, collective knowledge is also cluttered and contradictory.

Indigenous Knowledge

It must be asked if the category "indigenous knowledge" makes sense. Does indigenous knowledge exist somewhere in pristine form within a well-bounded local community? Or is it the knowledge that the people of a community apply to their daily lives and which is predominantly indigenous but has absorbed multiple items of the so-called modern-scientific Western knowledge through segmented contacts and idiosyncratic additive processes?

There are some further related questions. Since knowledge is embedded in language, and since many languages are spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, are we faced with several thousand bodies of indigenous knowledge? In other words, can we talk of an African oral heritage and indigenous knowledge that is an accumulation of indigenous knowledge of communities spread all over the African continent?

The answer seems to be that there is indeed an all-African traditional heritage and knowledge. While sometimes subtle and significant differences occur among African regional and ethnic cultures, relative to the outside world it may be possible to speak of one African culture. Edward W. Blyden, a Liberian of West Indian birth, in promoting Pan-Africanism in the 1880s was talking of "the African Personality" (Legum 1962:20). More recently, Willie E. Abraham was able to hear "responsive throbbings in the collective consciousness of Africa" and to identify a "paradigm of African society" along all these central concepts: philosophy of life, theory of man and society, theory of government, legal system, military organization, literature, ethics and metaphysics, and institutions (Abraham 1962). Over the years, other scholars of African philosophy have identified persistent assumptions, beliefs, and values in African culture and historical experience (Audi 1999; Tessler, O'Barr, and Spain 1973).

Western Knowledge, Scientific Knowledge, Modern Knowledge

A series of questions can be raised in regard to so-called modern knowledge. What is modern knowledge? To what people is this knowledge "indigenous"? To what community of inheritors? What is scientific knowledge? Is modern knowledge coterminous with scientific knowledge? Is modern scientific knowledge essentially the product of Western civilization? What constitutes the West and the Westernized?

These questions cannot be fully answered within the scope of this paper. It can be stated, nonetheless, that what has come to be called modern knowledge has emanated generally from the West since the industrial revolution; and most spectacularly as part of the electronic revolution of the last half of the twentieth century. It is scientific knowledge in the sense that it has been developed using hypothesis-testing methods, often within experimental conditions. It should be noted that most of it is material knowledge, of the sort amenable to this kind of "scientific methodology."

The Necessary Dialectic between the Two Knowledge Systems

In today's world, a dialectic between the two bodies of knowledge--indigenous and modern-scientific--is necessary and unavoidable. Consideration of the nature and result of the process of mutual shaping involves the lurking suspicion that indigenous knowledge may be inferior: it is localized, its ontological assumptions are supernatural, its epistemology is "culturally coded" and obscure to the outsider (Behera and Erasmus 1999), and its content is descriptive. It is not "scientific" and will not survive the encounter, though some of its nonmaterial, social components may not only survive but make important contributions.

We assume that we should redefine development and rise above the polarities of development-underdevelopment and indigenous-modern to escape our own ethnocentrism (Pfeifer 1996). At the other end, we need to avoid the traps of sentimentality. We take the position that while indigenous knowledge is necessary for development in Africa, by itself it will not be sufficient. Indigenous knowledge, and collective memories, even in local contexts, may not be sufficient to illuminate and solve all of the problems faced by African communities today. We take it as a fact that, for the development processes to be generated and sustained, indigenous knowledge, whether it is "scientific" or not (Carroll 1996; Heyd 1995), will in some measure have to be integrated with new scientific, technological, and modern knowledge. Indeed, such an integration has been taking place over the centuries. Under the processes of globalization, it has taken place at breakneck speed. The challenge before us is really not to save the indigenous from the modern (which is an impossibility), but to organize a dialectic that is neither cannibalistic nor exploitative, but mutually enriching.

In the dialectic between indigenous and modern bodies of knowledge, modern knowledge is at an advantage. Howsoever development is defined, the regeneration and renovation of indigenous knowledge systems will have to be part of the developmental challenge. Knowledge stored in elders' secret groves must be harvested, organized, and stored for retrieval. In an irony of ironies, for such a dialectical encounter to take place effectively, indigenous knowledge, which is oral, will have to be codified and written down.

The Nature, Structure, and Content of Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous knowledge is by definition indigenous to a community. It does not perhaps imply contributions from "far away," or universality in its application. Its assumptions about reality have been asserted to include a mix of the magical, sacred, and empirical. Processes of its production may involve revelation, intuition, inspiration, and experience.

Indigenous knowledge supposedly deals more with the what and the how than with the why. We do not mean here the "magical why" or the "experiential and associational why," but the "epistemological why." It is indeed possible to have an argument without necessarily dealing with the epistemological why. The content of indigenous knowledge may be as broad as human existence: from history, to astronomy, biology, health, and agriculture. Its accumulation is additive and idiosyncratic. The processes of its validation involve use and usefulness in the real world. Its application to new situations is by metaphor rather than by deduction or causal chains.

In sum, indigenous knowledge is holistic at its best and inert at its worst. It is because of these differences in habits of thought and experiences with symbolic transformations and manipulations that the nature and structure of science and technology in oral cultures is seen, on the one hand, as holistic, organic, problem-oriented, and people-oriented, and, on the other hand, as rooted in trial and error, lacking in taxonomies, unsure of "active agents" in cause-and-effect chains, and, according to a certain set of criteria, not even qualifying as science.

Most of what has been said above is contested ground. The debate around the relative goodness of the epistemologies and the ideologies of the traditions of indigenous knowledge and modern knowledge continues unabated (Mudimbe 1988; Owomoyela 1994; Wiredu 1992). Since the criteria of judgment used by debaters are located in different standpoints, the debate will not be won by one or the other. Yet the debate at the theoretical level will become a dialogue if the debaters establish and reveal their respective standpoints, thereby making both agreements and disagreements informed. At the level of praxis, the decisions of what is good and what is bad in indigenous and modern knowledge must be left to the community of knowledge users as they engage in self-conscious reflection on and renewal of their own cultures in the context of new existential realities. Scholars need not, of course, sit on the outside and watch in silence, but should help in the processes of questioning, contesting, affirming, converging, and creating new collective constructions.

Modern Scientific Knowledge of the West: Its Nature, Structure, and Content

Modern knowledge is almost invariably conflated with scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is considered to be assertions about external reality: a codified, tested, and objectified abstract set of facts and principles, independent of the subjective knower, claiming to be universally true. All reality does not, however, "sit out there" waiting to be discovered. A large part of knowledge, particularly social knowledge, is constructed. Constructivists dismiss the absolute power of science as no more than a pretentious "cognitive style" of a particular community of intellectuals acting as the priesthood for a particular paradigm. Scientific knowledge is thus seen to break down with shifts in paradigms. While theory building can be intuitive and imaginative, knowledge production in modern scientific knowledge is based in processes of Aristotelian logic, and now more and more in dialectical logic.

The parameters of modern scientific knowledge typically extend beyond the what and the how, to the why. Indeed, the "why" element of knowledge is considered crucial to applying insights developed in one setting to unseen and unforeseen settings in other situations. Modern knowledge is hierarchical, organized in networks and clusters. Modern knowledge is categorized in disciplines, and its topics are organized in taxonomies and thesauruses. Its accumulation is not additive and idiosyncratic, but is often highly systematic, looking for the generative break and the significant need. The processes of validation are a combination of the theoretical, empirical, and praxeological. Importantly, there is a division of labor in the process of validation of modern knowledge. Though the metaphorical is not omitted, transfer to new situations is handled by the inductive, the deductive, and the retroductive.

It seems that the dialectics of integration between indigenous and modern knowledge would involve the validation of what is known within indigenous knowledge by modern scientific methods. Sometime in the future, there may also be attempts to integrate at ontological and epistemological levels, but that may lie in the distant future, should it happen at all.

Integrating Indigenous Knowledge with the Modern: Institutional Setting of Formal Education

Change happens both in transmission and by transformation. Indigenous knowledge as a living system, embedded in social processes, changes on its own and unselfconsciously, in transmission, over time. But to plan-fully and systematically promote the integration of indigenous knowledge with modern knowledge for the mutual enrichment of both traditions, and to use newly integrated knowledge (i-K) to achieve sustainable development, locally and globally, the processes of integration will have to be institutionalized.

Successful institutionalization will mean bringing about a social condition wherein i-K is the knowledge used in all the institutions of a society, including economic, political, social, cultural, educational, and technological institutions. That is, the roles and rules of these institutions must be formed and enacted using i-K assumptions, values, and contents; and decisions should be made and evaluated on the basis of the same assumptions, values, and contents.

Among the social institutions mentioned above, education is the most potent and generative, almost without limits. This is so because education is the institution that colors all individual identities, directly or indirectly, and influences all other social institutions.

The educational enterprise today is divided into three parts: formal education, nonformal education, and informal education. Formal education is the hierarchically organized, graded system of education that typically leads to certification. It is the institutionalized system of education that includes primary and secondary schools and institutions of higher education, which in turn include community colleges and polytechnic institutions.

Nonformal education is out-of-school education seeking to provide lifelong learning to meet the educational and training needs of all people, of all ages, in all places, in all possible time, when the need arises. In today's world, nonformal education covers programs and projects varying from literacy classes for illiterate adults, to teaching sewing and canning and awareness of HIV/AIDS in urban slums and rural communities in Africa and elsewhere, to upgrading the skills of salespersons working with cash registers and software engineers learning new programming languages. Informal education is equivalent to socialization.

Formal education systems as currently established were imported from the West. First, these systems served the personnel needs of the colonial systems: training elementary school teachers, village preachers, policemen and revenue-collection agents, and lower-level clerks for the rudiments of a colonial government. Over time, Africa's experiments with formal education, where they did indeed exist, have been absorbed into current educational systems or rendered marginal and irrelevant. Koranic schools now prepare children for entry in the secondary-school system or teach skills for employability in the job market. The great "University of Timbuktu" is no more than a distant, though prideful, memory.

Postindependence regimes have found the colonizers' educational systems useful for their own purposes: to train functionaries for governance and to deliver development projects as defined in the West and in Africa by Westernized Africans. These systems have been neither efficient nor effective in the achievement of their objectives.

Today, African schools teach already-codified texts, written more often than not in a Western language and projecting unfamiliar Western epistemologies, Western ideologies, and even Western economic, political, and cultural contexts. By any standard, a meaningful integration of indigenous knowledge with modern school knowledge is a challenge. Knowledge is embedded in language. For integration to take place, translations must be undertaken, with all their concomitant complexities and problems of literal, free, and radical interpretations (Hallen 1995).

Integration is not a simple add-on process. Even an interface (a challenge less severe than integration) between two traditions of knowledge, by exemplifying, comparing, and contrasting, will have to be carefully articulated and codified. Going from interfacing to integration is an even greater challenge because it involves picking up curricular themes and developing them as if modern and indigenous knowledge had already been made coherent in one body of knowledge.

Some good teachers may be able to do some of the interfacing anecdotally ad hoc, and could sensitize children about indigenous knowledge. Teachers could also use school breaks for their own immersion in indigenous realities, engage in collecting and organizing knowledge to bring it to their classes, and encourage children to develop projects dealing with indigenous knowledge. But to do a decent job of integrating indigenous knowledge with modern knowledge is beyond most teachers' professional capacity. Also, being smart is not enough: teachers would need time and resources for undertaking such tasks.

Outside schools, structural and infrastructural needs and tasks are overwhelming because they involve three challenges: systematically integrating indigenous and modern knowledge as part of a well-conceived integration project; writing textbooks to carry the curriculum; and establishing new schemes of instruction and examination for certification on regional and national scales.

A Cautionary Note

It is understandable why so few credible attempts have been made in Africa to connect indigenous knowledge with modern school knowledge. Nation-building and national development as defined in Africa during the last half of the twentieth century were not well served by indigenous knowledge. For development as defined in Africa (and in most of the Third World), the present decontextualized Western school system is in fact quite all right! Education is not for the community any more, but is indeed meant to serve the political economy and virtual culture of globalization. Education is not meant to serve the productivity needs of subsistence economies wherein people are eking out an existence, but is rather for the social reproduction of labor needed for the global economic machine. Education inherited from the West works well as a sorting machine, rejecting most and preparing a few for the jobs available in the formal economy and within dysfunctional bureaucracies. The governing classes know that African OHIK is a blind alley for their children. The country road takes you home, but they want to go to London.

Pai Obanya, a well-known African educator, has been able to keep the faith, as he calls for "enculturation before acculturation as Africa's number one educational goal, with a call for African cultural values, African indigenous languages, Africa's societal resources to be fully mobilized as essential inputs" into education (1999:3). He encourages home education, African style, relating to "head, heart, and hands"; is impressed with the pedagogical possibilities of African games for children; and finds a place for Africa's inherited knowledge, even in the university system, to help the "authentically (unseen) African trait" of personality to survive and flourish (1999:559–579).

Indigenous Knowledge for Development: Adult Literacy as Vehicle

Historical experience connects (Appiah 1992:130–133; Bhola 1984, 1998b), theory compels (Bhola 1997; Freire 1970; Todd 1987), and research affirms and confirms (Bhola 1998a; 2000) the essential role of literacy in today's world of print. Literacy is indeed "potential added" to individual new literates, enabling them to make more effective transactions with others in the political, economic, and social environments surrounding them. The accumulation of knowledge capital within communities transforms communities and consequently larger social formations. While the role of literacy in cultural transformations is an absolute necessity, it is not by any means a sufficient condition. The governing elite within state and civil institutions must concurrently provide conditions and structures within which uses of literacy can be found for new identities and new communities.

Adult literacy can play an important part in development of Africa in the present historical context:

In the process of developing a project of adult literacy, it would be possible to offer educational opportunities to adult men and women bypassed by the formal education systems. With literacy and the knowledge that literacy texts would include, adults will become participants in the development processes and in so doing may be able to redefine development itself. (Bhola 1998a)

The adult literacy project could be used as an instrument for mobilizing adult men and women who come together in groups to learn and act as members of the community (Freire 1970).

To teach literacy in the mother tongue will require codification of the spoken language if it has not already been committed to writing. This would mean valorization of the language and culture. The written language will provide the possibility of organizing indigenous knowledge for storage and retrieval by future generations. Through the literacy teacher and extension agents, the literacy project will bring into the community new developmental knowledge in agriculture, health, and environment. The codification of indigenous knowledge achieved as part of the literacy project will enable a more systematic mutually enriching encounter between indigenous knowledge and modern-scientific knowledge.

A literacy project is at the same time an orality project, a project to improve language skills. When people come to read, they do not stop talking! Conversations begin among all knowledgeable people. To enter into the encounter with modern knowledge, they do not wait for the knowledge to be collected, collated, coordinated, codified, and textualized. As the literacy teacher instructs adult learners and a visiting extension agent interacts with farmers, a pragmatic integration of indigenous and modern knowledge will have begun.

There is more to learning to read and write. As people learn to read words, they learn to read the world in which they live (Bhola 1998a). Literacy changes their "technology of intellect," that is, the way they think. Literacy as the new technology of intellect will provide a new potential for adult men and women to make more effective transactions--economically, socially, politically, technologically--with people and processes in their environment, and it may open the floodgates of African adults' creativity. Only literate adults will be able to listen to the intelligentsia intelligently and understand and undertake entrepreneurial projects in small and distant places (Bhola 1997).

Those who learn to read and write in the mother tongue almost always want to learn a second literacy: literacy in a regional lingua franca, thereby expanding their horizons and opportunities for earning livelihoods. Literacy in a third language--English, French, Portuguese--is also demanded. Literate people learn more effectively from mass media (Bhola 1990).

Adult literacy is of course connected with adult education, a term used interchangeably with nonformal education and lifelong education (Bhola 1998b). Adult education is important in Africa. As Obanya (1999:36–38, 45) implies, adult education can serve as a project of reparation in ruined African school systems. In some African countries, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, and Congo among them, schools remained almost permanently closed during the 1980s. Adult education may be the essential tool to catch up.

Promoting Indigenous Knowledge for Development through Research, Development, and Dissemination

Field research related to OHIK is in itself "purposive action" on behalf of the community (Bhola 1996). In studying the language and culture of a community, a researcher affirms the indigenous people's language and culture. In making social transactions with the bearers of indigenous knowledge, he or she will be initiating interaction between the indigenous knowledge system and his or her own. In so doing, that researcher will be initiating valorization, rejuvenation, renovation, and validation of indigenous knowledge, leading to its reconstruction and preparation for a mutually enriching encounter with other knowledge systems.

Two interrelated points must be made:

Themes, Issues, and Questions: Research

Research in indigenous knowledge includes a wide spectrum of approaches, from philosophical to epistemological, historical, political, sociological, ethical, theoretical, and methodological. The right to culture and language as a human right may be the central philosophic research question. The related epistemological question will be: how is cultural heritage, including language and the knowledge it carries, to be defined and bounded in the social world? These questions are related to a political question: in a world dominated by global processes without global governance, who will guard the right to culture and language? What colonialism did to the devaluation of OHIK will be an important historical question. How OHIK has come to be associated with the poor, the marginal, and the excluded will be an important sociological question. A theoretical question is then implied: is it possible for cultures to be in intense intercommunication under globalization and not move toward commonality? The methodology of studying OHIK needs to be the subject of research: how to ensure reflexivity to guard against preconception, misperception, false consciousness, and naive logic? Then an ethical question follows: how to ensure that the powerless are not divested of their knowledge by corporations that test and package peoples' knowledge to sell it back to them at a high cost? A hundred variations of these questions can be imagined.

A large body of OHIK research will be descriptive and archival. Facts are, of course, theory-laden, and pure description is impossible. Yet it is possible to say that a considerable amount of OHIK research will be descriptive and archival in its variations of historical research, oral history, ethnography, and so on. This descriptive and archival research will provide the grist to the mill of all other research in OHIK. A large amount of knowledge about OHIK will be embedded within customs, social organizations, and institutions of naming (christening), initiations, weddings, funerals, governing, and resolving conflicts. This knowledge will involve analysis, and may be called analytical research. Analytical research may then be joined with taxonomic research to develop various sets of categories of knowledge, such as spiritual, survival, social, environmental, agricultural, and health–related knowledge.

As has been indicated above, for languages to survive they have to be written. It is a written language that will contain and preserve a community's OHIK. This fact will require that researchers engage in a development process to create practical knowledge formats and usable knowledge products. Examples of such formats and products are dictionaries; books of proverbs; collections of myths and folktales; descriptions of rituals, religious beliefs, art symbols, customs, and traditions; and printed environmental strategies, agricultural and health practices, recipes, prescriptions, and so on.

Collective knowledge, though collectively present, is not necessarily democratically held. This is true also in the case of indigenous knowledge within communities. Strategies for systematic dissemination will have to be designed to enable members in a community to share indigenous knowledge democratically within the community and with those outside. In case of variations in assumptions, descriptions, and prescriptions among communities, there reconciliation for planned emergences will have to occur at higher levels.

The Epistemic Triangle: An Integration of Paradigms of Theory and Research

Since the early 1960s, the paradigmatic debate between positivists and constructivists has changed into the integration of paradigms. Bhola's (1996) practical epistemology is a composite of three paradigms: an epistemic triangle, formed by systems thinking, constructivist thinking, and dialectical thinking. For understanding, elaboration and intervention, all purposive action, including research, development, and dissemination can be located within this triangle.

Positivism is not rejected either, but is seen as one particular type of construction of reality, marked by "contexts of control." By borrowing assumptions implicated in the epistemic triangle, situation-specific models can be developed to solve the exact problem of understanding and/or intervention under consideration in RD&D events and processes in particular contexts. Thus, the epistemic triangle privileges mixed models and mixed methods for RD&D (Dewey 1936; Greene and Caracelli 1997).

OHIK researchers will not be spectators to the reality they study, but will be immersed in that reality. Indeed, they will transform communities as they study them. In such a research process, an observer's subjectivity needs to become self-conscious and made objective in conversations with others who are immersed in and knowledgeable of the same realityÊof the language and culture in motion. What the researcher will come up with will not be generalizeable assertions about reality (in the sense of the positivist paradigm), but insights that will illuminate happenings in other contexts of reality, both similar and different.

OHIK research will not always be done by the native son. The person doing the research may be more or less congenial to the culture, but may not know the language at all. Informants and mediators will have to serve as the researcher's eyes and ears. Voices may be muffled, gestures may be misunderstood, and cultural cues may be lost. That is not to say that observation, communication, and understanding are impossible, but we must not pretend to have found positive truth: we must validate socially (and statistically), we must be careful in interpretations, and we with due humility, must offer our findings to others as "tentatively held finalities."

Conclusion

Africa at present does not offer optimism. Seen from today's perspectives, Africa's leaders seem unable and unlikely to question globalization as we know it. Will they succeed in finding a place on the globe from where they can make economic, political, and cultural transactions with the West on terms of mutuality? Will they dare invent a new definition and program of development that their own people see as lowered aspirations, a retreat from the modern, and from dreams of a better quality of life, and which may yet demand sacrifices that must accompany equitable distributions of economic, power, and cultural goods among citizens? Will they seek to invent a system of education that offers success to all in their particular places in rural and urban areas, and at the same time provide opportunities for lateral and vertical mobility for the deserving and the prepared? Will they lead their people to return to their roots of oral heritage and indigenous knowledge? Or will they simply waste opportunities in sentimentality, rather than doing the systematic work necessary for a productive dialectic between indigenous and modern-scientific knowledge? All that remains to be seen!

NOTE

1.This paper was prepared in the context of the "Ford Foundation Institute: Incorporating Africa's Oral Heritage and Indigenous Knowledge into a Changing World," held at Indiana University from 9 July to 4 August 2000, and later revised.

REFERENCES CITED

Abraham, Willie E. 1962. The Mind of Africa. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Audi, Robert, ed. 1999. African Philosophy. In The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Behera, Deepak Kumar and Pietm A. Erasmus. 1999. Sustainable Development of Indigenous Populations: Challenges Ahead. South Africa Journal of Ethnology 22(1):1-7.

Bhola, H. S. 1984. Campaigning for Literacy. Paris: UNESCO.

------. 1990. Literacy in Development Communication: A Symbiotic Model for Media. Media Development 37(1):3-6.

------. 1996. Between Limits of Rationality and Possibilities of Praxis: Purposive Action from the Heart of an Epistemic Triangle. Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Change 5(1):33-47.

------. 1997. Literacy. In The International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, edited by John Feather and Paul Sturges. London: Routledge.

------. 1998a. They Are Learning and Discerning: An Evaluative Status Review. Studies in Educational Evaluation 24(2):153-77.

------. 1998b. World Trends and Issues in Adult Education on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century. International Review of Education 44(5):485-506.

------. 1999. Equivalent Curriculum Construction as Situated Discourse: A Case in the Context of Adult Education in Namibia. Curriculum Inquiry 29(4):459-84.

------. 2000. A Discourse on Impact Evaluation: A Model and Its Application to a Literacy Intervention in Ghana. Evaluation 6(2):161-177.

Carroll, Jane. 1996. Indigenous Science. Re-Vision 18(3):6-10.

Deane, James, Carl Dahlman, and Kerry McNamara. 1999. Summary of the IKD Discussion List. Electronic symposium: ikd@jazz.worldbank.org. Archived on the World Bank website: http://www.globalknowledge.org/worldbank/ikd/current.

Dewey, John. 1936. Theory of Valuation. International Encyclopedia of United Science. 2 vols. Foundations of the United Sciences 2(4). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Drucker, Peter F. 1993. The Rise of the Knowledge Society. Wilson Quarterly 17(2):52-69.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Green, Andy. 1997. Education, Globalization, and the Nation State. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Greene, J. C., and V. J. Caracelli, eds. 1997. Advances in Mixed-Method Evaluation: The Challenges and Benefits of Integrating Diverse Paradigms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Greider, William. 1997. One World, Ready or Not. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hallen, Barry. 1995. Some Observations about Philosophy, Postmodernism and Art in Contemporary African Studies. African Studies Review 38(1):69-80.

Heyd, Thomas. 1995. Indigenous Knowledge, Emancipation and Alienation. Knowledge and Policy 8(1):63-73.

Legum, Colin. 1962. Pan-Africanism. New York: Praeger.

Lumsden, Charles J., and Edward O. Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge: The Harvard University Press.

Mbeki, Thabo. 1999. Speech at the Opening of the 1999–Biennial of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), 5-9 December, Johannesburg.

Meadows, Donella, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. 1972. Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Obanya, Pai. 1999. The Dilemma of Education in Africa. Dakar, Senegal: The UNESCO Regional Office (BREDA).

Owomoyela, Oyekan. 1994. With Friends Like These: A Critique of Pervasive Anti-Africanism in Current African Studies Epistemology and Methodology. African Studies Review 37(3):77-101.

Pfeifer, Kimberly. 1996. Modernization and Indigenous Knowledge. Peace & Change 21(1):41-67.

Riley, Bryan. 1998. You Are Now Entering the Age of the Mind: Thought on the Knowledge Society. Australian Library Journal 47(2):145-56.

Rodrik, Dani. 1997. Has Globalization Gone Too Far? Washington, D.C.: Institute of International Economics.

Tessler, Mark A., William M. O'Barr, and David H. Spain. 1973. Tradition and Identity in Changing Africa. New York: Harper and Row.

Todd, Emmanuel. 1987. The Causes of Progress: Culture, Authority and Change. Translated by Richard Boulind. Oxford: Basil Books.

UNDP (United Nations Development Program). 1999. Human Development Report 1999. Globalization with a Human Face. New York: United Nations Development Program.

Wiredu, Kwasi. 1992. On Defining African Philosophy. In Postkoloniale Philosophieren: Afrika, edited by H. Nagl-Docekal and F. M. Wimmer. Vienna and Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag.

IU Press Journals
Home Page
More about Africa Today
Library
Recommendation
Tables of
Contents
Advance
Information
Submission
Guidelines