Mind

Táíwò, Olúfémi O

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzab097pmid: N/A

Adeshina Afolayan, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, and Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba have edited a stellar collection of essays in Pathways to Alternative Epistemologies in Africa. The book marks a set of important contributions and advances in Africana philosophy, social philosophy, and epistemology. The book is divided into two parts. The first part takes up theoretical challenges: what to do about potentially problematic universal knowledge claims and what methodological responses are called for by African theoreticians. The second part shifts to practice: there, eight authors try out what the editors consider ‘alternative frameworks for rethinking Africa and its knowledge production dynamics (p. 14, emphasis in original)’. In Chapter 2, Mikael Janvid takes a slightly different tack than the other authors in Part I. Janvid attempts to articulate an ‘epistemic contextualism’ in African epistemology. In general, universalists take it that conditions for knowledge and other epistemic states hold universally while particularists oppose them (on this picture, relativism is a subset of particularism). Janvid notes that this debate has taken a particular shape in African epistemology given the colonial history that serves as the field’s backdrop: colonial powers denigrated African societies for failing to match up to their own putatively universal but actually parochial cultural standards, which philosopher Kwasi Wiredu famously derided as a ‘facile universalism’. The elision mentioned by Janvid widens the field’s view of the important political issues around universalism, which are also the subject of Serene Khader’s ‘Decolonizing Universalism’ and its discussion of the ethnocentrism latent in ‘justice monism’ (p. 21; Khader 2018). Appealing to famous fieldwork on Yoruba epistemology by Hallen and Sodipo, Janvid argues that a contextualist theory can accommodate Yoruba epistemic practices without assuming epistemic relativism (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, chap. 2). The remaining chapters of Part I focus on the methodology of researchers and research institutions, rather than entering object-level debates in academic fields as Janvid’s offering does. In the third chapter, Evelyn Namakula Mayanja considers methodological innovations that would respond to the history of Eurocentrism and its ‘facile universalism’. The chapter arises from philosophical reflections spurred on by qualitative research conducted with those affected by war in Eastern Congo. Key to the account is the role of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), described as communal and ‘spiral’ in contrast to Western ‘individualistic and linear’ approaches to knowledge (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 44). After a section considering the historicity of research in and on Africa, Mayanja argues for three propositions: that AIKS should be acknowledged both as a body of knowledge and a source for reliable methodologies; that AIKS should be integrated into research processes; and that we should ‘Africanize’ qualitative research. This would involve making lasting personal relationships, relating scholarship to the land, and acquiring relevant linguistic competence rather than relying on translators (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, chap. 3). Mayanja’s description of the Eurocentricity of the academy focuses on ideologies and norms, including Hegel’s famous description of Africa as a place without history in his Philosophy of History (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 37-38). This is a similar approach to the one presented by Saheedat Adetayo in Chapter 5. Adetayo charges Eurocentrism with the ‘de-education, miseducation, and deculturation’ of ‘the minds of the Africans’ who underwent Western education (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 77). In response, Adetayo champions Afrocentricity, the ‘theoretical nemesis of Eurocentrism’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 79). Adetayo conceives of Afrocentricity ‘essentially as a theoretical methodology’, one that seeks to offer an ‘alternative modality for understanding and investigating social realities’ that avoids Western exclusionism and treats Africans as subjects rather than objects (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 80-81). Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, one of the book’s editors, takes a more structural tack in the fourth chapter. Oloruntoba relates the problems in African scholarship to the ‘impoverished, authoritarian, and beggarly’ states that resulted from European colonialism and the national independence movements against it (p. 62). Their ongoing vulnerability to foreign organizations like the World Bank have proven difficult to resist, even for previously flourishing intellectual hubs like Uganda’s Makerere University, Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam School, and Nigeria’s University of Ibadan (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 62, 66). The book’s focus shifts in Part II from theoretical frameworks to specific epistemic and political practices. In Chapter 7, Krzysztof Trzcinski tries out a way of thinking of a local African community as a social structure ensuring the security of its members and analyses the potential consequences for the prospects of democratic culture. Citing prominent philosophers Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwasi Wiredu, Trzcinski takes communal life to be a thicker thing than does much Western thought: an ‘absolute political whole’ which confers personhood, in contrast to a Western view where communities are comprised of isolable individuals (p. 114). Trzcinski cites Nigerian political thinker Claude Ake as an early critic of the way that communal ties and the patron-client networks they enable have allowed the well positioned to weaponize communitarianism against democracy. Based on reports that local chiefs in Malawi and Senegal extract concessions from state politicians (for example, new wells and electricity provision), Trzcinski proposes to view ‘traditional authority’ as a potential short run complement to democratization (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 121). In Chapter 8, Tunde M. Akinwumi investigates a case of fraud. Vlisco, a Dutch textile manufacturing firm, tried alongside many other European firms to study indigenous African prints and mass-produce similar ones. Instead, they adopted a mélange of Javanese, Indian, Chinese, Arab, and European artistic traditions and branded them as ‘African prints’. Akinwumi surveys a number of responses from scholars. Akinwumi is dissatisfied with Delhaye and Woets, who use the fact that the Dutch fabrics were given African names by African consumers to view their consumption as an ‘appropriation of the Dutch fabrics’, and an ‘aspect of incorporating African aesthetics’ on the fabrics (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 130). Instead, Akinwumi describes the Vlisco firm as executing the ‘civilizing mission’ of European colonial administration and propagating ‘European aesthetics’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 137). Chapters 6 and 10 take up themes in cultural criticism. In the former, Saeedat Bolajoko Aliyu analyses two plays: Wale Ogunyemi’s Langbodo (1979) and Femi Osofisan’s Many Colours Make the Thunder King (2015). For Aliyu, these plays demonstrate alternative conceptualizations of the relationship between human and environment, though the playwrights do not attend to the consequences for the natural world of the characters’ decisions. Nevertheless, the Yoruba cultural traditions are compatible with a kind of environmentalism in which the natural world is considered deeply linked with humankind, which in turns supports an emphasis on sustainability. In Chapter 10, Akin Olaniyi criticizes Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2013). Olaniyi alleges that Shoneyin’s is an ‘uncritical critique of polygamy in a typical Yoruba culture, (p. 62)’. While conceding that a feminist reading of Shoneyin’s work is possible, and that such a reading ‘would yield an enlightening analysis … of gender and politics in a typical community’, Olaniyi alleges that even such a reading would ‘fail to excavate those subtle cultural variables that often animate the social realities of an average polygamous home’ and thus fail to do enough to unsettle uncritical Western discourses about such realities (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 173-74). In Chapter 11, Victoria Openif’Oluwa Akoleowo follows up on Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí famous and much-debated book The Invention of Women, in which she argues that the Oyo Yoruba did not have a system of gender organization prior to colonization (Oyěwùmí 1997). Akoleowo’s focus on scriptural texts and their interpretations distinguishes this chapter’s offering from many of the respondents to Oyěwùmí’s arguments. Through engagement with these, Akoleowo sustains Oyěwùmí’s argument that biological differences did not determine Yoruba personhood or social roles, while maintaining that religiously inflected aspects of Yoruba culture nevertheless sustained complementary but gendered constructs (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 183-84). Akoleowo makes similar claims about the two other populous ethnic groups in Nigeria, the Igbo and Hausa. Akoleowo attributes cultural changes in the latter group to the influence of Islam and the trans-Saharan trade, rather than Christianity and the trans-Atlantic trade. In Chapter 12, Olupemi E. Oludare revisits the book’s earlier emphasis on ‘Indigenous Knowledge systems’ through a discussion of Yoruba traditional instrumental ensembles. Both the practice and performance of Yoruba vocal and instrumental musical forms transmit cultural wisdom and traditions. The Yoruba instrumental ensemble and music structure even reflect the broader social structure: there are ensembles unique to particular deities and cultures, which can represent families led by the mother instrument (for example, Iya-ilu), which typically plays the combined melo-rhythmic patterns, and is supported by daughter and son instruments, which typically play the melodic and rhythmic patterns respectively (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 208, 211). Oludare transcribes music from different ensembles and relates the broad lessons of the music to the larger project of musical education: traditional musicians are trained both on their musical instruments and their ‘expected functionality within the community’: on the cultural philosophy of communal spirit, the importance of the music to traditional heritage, and the holistic nature of the indigenous knowledge and ‘societal sustainability’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 214-15). In the thirteenth and final chapter, Sani Yakubu Adam responds to British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s infamous claim: ‘there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness … ’(Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 221). Though Adam holds that ‘the development of African historiography has addressed, over the years, the onslaught of the European and Eurocentric scholars against veritable dynamics of African history’, Adam nevertheless maintains that ‘there is still the need for more studies on … the intellectual history of Africa, (p. 221)’. To this end, Adam provides an overview of intellectual developments in Islamic scholarship in Kano (in what is now northern Nigeria) over the last six centuries. Adam’s work details Kano’s participation in large regional networks of politics and scholarship, serving as a hub for scholars from far away Mali and Tunisia and hosting thriving educational centres like the Gwauron Fagachi. Adam shows that the effect of Sheikh Usman dan Fodio’s nineteenth-century revolution, which reverberated throughout the world, also introduced new educational leadership in Kano, since many of the leading jihadists were themselves Islamic scholars (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 225; Salau 2018). These include Sarki Sulaiman, who was the first Fulani emir of Kano post-revolution. Adam gives particular attention to the educational reforms of twentieth-century Shaykh Tijani Usman Zango Bare-Bari: while most other schools specialized in particular subjects like Islamic Jurisprudence, Tijani Usman’s school also offered multidisciplinary education including instruction in grammar, Sufism, and Qur’anic interpretation (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 227). In the 1950s and 60s, he organized well-attended public tafsir sessions and other public lectures on ‘pressing issues that were critical to public life’ for ‘public enlightenment’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 229-31). Taken together, Pathways to Alternative Epistemologies in Africa is an important and worthwhile contribution to Africana philosophy and thought—the kind I wish I’d had in front of me as a graduate student. The two-part structure of the edited volume helps the reader see the stakes of the theoretical discussions about African indigenous knowledge in Part I in the object-level debates that the authors of Part II are engaged in. The breadth of the discussion in Part I, combined with the variety of discussions in Part II, make the book an ideal entry point for students or researchers attempting to begin building familiarity with African philosophy, and so selections from the volume would serve advanced students in either philosophy or African studies equally well. Our colleagues in a number of other disciplines, from sociology and performance studies to religious studies and Islamic studies, should also take note of the contributions of several of the book’s chapters: Adam’s chapter on Islamic thought in Kano, Oludare and Akeolowo on Yoruba social organization, and Aliyu and Olaniyi’s artistic criticisms. On the whole, then, the book is a resounding success. There is nevertheless a question worth raising about the general thrust of the book, its virtues aside: what, if anything, justifies the preoccupation with responding to Eurocentrism and European ignorance strewn throughout the book? Many of the broad statements throughout the book’s chapters about the need for resistance to Eurocentrism and racism will be familiar to scholars of Africana thought. A recent debate on ethics, for example, between Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Ajume Wingo rests on similar themes: the contrast between a ‘communal school’ stressing the need to ground ethics in a particular social tradition with and a ‘transcendental’ school that addresses human individuals as such, often via some form of (hopefully not facile) universalism (Wingo 2010; Diagne 2009; Ochieng 2017). This itself echoes earlier debates between philosophers like Paulin Hountondji and Olúfémi Táíwò and those producing work labelled ‘ethnophilosophy’ and ‘ethnoscience’ (Hountondji 1983; Masolo 2017; Taiwo 1993). To the book’s credit, the theoretical work advanced by contributors in its first part seems genuinely responsive to the kinds of criticisms that emerged from these debates. Adetayo opts for a view of Afrocentricity that rejects the ‘epistemic arrogance’ of the assumed centrality of Eurocentric thought, but also the ‘binary terms’ of a simple choice between Afrocentric and Eurocentric epistemologies. Mayanja’s offering discusses both differences and similarities between Western and African knowledge systems, aiming to promote hybrid methods and methodologies. Oloruntoba’s article criticizes both colonial impositions of epistemic injustice and the failures of postcolonial African elites, complicating simple prescriptions of African responses to defective Western epistemic ideas and practices. Nevertheless, much of the book, particularly the contributions in Part II, still treats Eurocentric thought as a point of departure for their investigations. For instance, in the final chapter, Adam summarizes decades of scholarship on the history of Islam in Africa as a response to ‘the Eurocentric claim that Africa was not capable of civilization and that African history only began with the advent of the imperialists’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 222). Akinwumi’s discussion of African textiles begins by recounting various insults levelled at Africa by European and American travellers, including President Donald Trump’s famous ‘unprintable words’, and goes on to describe the African purchases (the consumers are Africans) of Dutch-manufactured prints as ‘global cultural textile imperialism’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 123, 128). Olaniyi’s criticism of Shoneyin hinges on a characterization of her criticism of polygamy as ‘Afropolitan’, and thereby involving a Western-inflected feminist paradigm of analysis (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, pp. 172-73). The preface of the book, like four of its thirteen chapters, contends with Hegel’s infamous statement that Africa did not have a history. I should acknowledge that expressing scepticism about this focus is very, is unfairly easy for me. I was born and raised in the US and am comfortably ensconced in one of its richest academic institutions. But these very facts also situate me in a way that is epistemically relevant, for all its privileges: it is because I am where I am that I am so keenly aware how little these institutions and the knowledge producers that inhabit them are listening to the kinds of criticisms of their Eurocentrism that we produce in scholarship like this. With a few notable exceptions, scholarship of this kind is typically ignored by the powers that be, and shallowly read when engaged with at all. Nevertheless, I press on: the constant invocation of Eurocentrism and racism, particularly in Part II of the book, presents epistemic risks for African theorists and theories. I follow the book’s editors in taking colonialism to involve ‘an epistemic onslaught against the colonized’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 1). But I also follow African-American novelist and thinker Toni Morrison’s characterization of the nature of that onslaught: one rooted, fundamentally, in dishonesty and delusion. ‘You don’t give your children over to the care of people whom you believe to be inhuman’, she said in a speech in the 1970s—the proliferation of racially dehumanizing language and ideologies had little to do with genuine epistemic commitments. On her view, the motivations of those atop the global racial order were the age old drives of accumulation and maintenance of wealth and power: ‘They were only and simply and now interested in acquisition of wealth and the status quo of the poor’ (Morrison 1975). Preoccupation with debunking racist ideologies, then, can lead us into traps of wasted effort. She continues: ‘It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary’ (Morrison 1975, emphasis in original). This dishonesty is made even more stark by the very intellectual contributions made by the various chapters of the book. Recall one of the racist quotations responded to in the collection: British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s infamous claim that ‘there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness …’ (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 221). Adam’s analysis in the book’s final chapter is pitched as a response to this claim of Trevor-Roper’s. But Adam’s very analysis shows not only that there was a written political history of Kano, the Kano Chronicle, but that a British colonial officer even went as far as to translate it from Hausa into English, which would have made it available to countrymen like Trevor-Roper (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 222). Perhaps there is some innocuous reason that Trevor-Roper could neither access this sort of document nor know that any of its kind existed. But it’s also possible that he didn’t bother to look, because he wasn’t genuinely interested in whether or not the things he was saying were true. It is similarly possible that Trevor-Roper simply did not want to talk about Africans and was exploiting the thick, racist architecture of academic conversation to hide this lack of curiosity behind the thinnest of justificatory veneers. Why should such people direct the use of the time and resources that we have? Why shouldn’t we just leave the Trevor-Ropers and Hegels of the world to their ignorance? After all, just as with the Kano Chronicle, they are likelier to insist that scholarship doesn’t exist than to take its lessons to heart. Africa does and always did have ‘history’, ‘civilization’, and culture—regardless of who is willing to acknowledge this in academic discussion. One could object that I’m misconstruing the audience of the book. The point of advocating resistance Eurocentrism is not to convince the person genuinely committed to nonsensical claims like Hegel or Trevor-Roper to meet us on the terrain of reason. Another interpretation of the invocation of these claims and ideologies: the point is to reach the person who is perhaps unreflectively or subconsciously influenced by these kinds of claims, or the systems of miseducation built around them. After all, Hegel's and Trevor-Roper’s claims are not the idle biases of a bygone era, but reflect ongoing, present-day distortions caused by Western hegemony over knowledge production. This is a clearly laudable goal, but it’s worth asking if this is the right approach. Identifying claims like Hegel’s and Trevor-Roper’s as requiring a programmatic response from entire fields of African scholarship affords them an intellectual significance that they manifestly do not deserve. Moreover, focusing on producing scholarship that answers such perspectives risks allowing racism to subtly crowd out alternative research programs or alter the ones taken up in exactly the way that Morrison describes: replacing our actual questions about what did or didn’t happen in African history or what is or isn’t present in African cultures with insincere questions from the past and present alike. Letting racists and racism set the agenda seems fundamentally at odds with a move towards self-determination. Finally, there is the question of affective culture: whether the shame and humiliation built into the constant repetition of outsider insults is the right affective fuel for the kind of intellectual culture that would serve African theorists and theories and the African peoples that produce them. There are manifold problems in the social and political context that confronts African studies, and winning intellectual battles with Eurocentric types is in an uncertain relationship with to moving forward on these. Various aspects of this point are made masterfully, if implicitly, by several of the contributors in Part I of the book. In Chapter 4, editor Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba identifies agenda setting in the education system as a key aspect of the colonial control of African education (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 65). But, crucially, Oloruntoba ties this current crisis of African higher education to the neoliberal austerity imposed by the World Bank that transformed higher education on the continent, incentivizing scholarship that responds to international theories and journals (like this one) and worked to the detriment of the many sites of alternative knowledge production like Makerere University and the University of Ibadan (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 66). These problems, as Oloruntoba argues, require comprehensive and structural solutions. This would involve changing the curricula, but also the insufficient funding structures confronting students, faculty, and staff at African universities. It is possible to overcorrect and be excessively financially focused: for Oloruntoba, Nigeria’s Academic Staff Union of Universities has successfully used the strike to increase education funding, but has not pressed for broader epistemic decolonization. South Africa’s ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Fees Must Fall’ movements give are an example of the goals of increased funding and deepened epistemic self-determination moving in tandem, and arguably doing so successfully (Afolayan, Yacob-Haliso, and Oloruntoba 2021, p. 70). Speaking in response to the epistemic and political vulnerabilities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers Caesar A. Atuire and Olivia U. Rutazibwa call for ‘pluriversality’, a radical transformation involving epistemic and political changes at ‘macro, micro, and meso’ levels of political scale (Atuire and Rutazibwa 2021). At the macro scale, they call for ‘deimperialization’, which would involve greater South-South collaboration and solidarity at the level of states and supranational entities like the African Union: their ruling example in the case of COVID is the ongoing push by an alliance headed by India and South Africa for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights over COVID-19 vaccines. At the ‘meso’ scale, African countries ought to rebalance their spending, putting more investment dollars in research and development and changing legal and institutional frameworks that encourage excessive catering to the research needs and questions of high-income countries. This should include reaching out to practitioners of traditional medicine on the continent and guaranteeing protection and benefit-sharing for participation in public health initiatives. Finally, the ‘micro’ scale would involve dismantling the curricula and norms of ‘cognitive empire’: those that delegitimize indigenous knowledge and establish European ways of knowing and acting as patterns to be thoughtlessly replicated rather than examples to be learned from. This is just one example of a set of thoughts on African epistemic practices and institutions that seems to meet the ethos of the challenge laid by the book. Western delusions about what history Africa has relevant—insofar as they contribute to the ‘cognitive empire’ at the micro scale—but primarily figure as contributions to more general practical problems, rather than as a set of views to be rebutted on intellectual grounds. The point of the changes proposed by Atuire and Rutazibwa would be is to give African people more control over their public health and lives generally. It acknowledges Eurocentrism and its consequences as a threat to that self-determination, without making a negation of or response to such racism its reason for existence. Of the many pathways illuminated by Pathways to Alternative Epistemologies in Africa, the kind sketched by Oloruntoba, Atuire, and Rutazibwa seems most promising.* Footnotes * I am grateful to the editors Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba and Adeshina Afolayan for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this review. 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