The African Metascience of Knowledge: Decolonizing the Knowledge System

By Zulumathabo Zulu © 2015

This lecture presented as a keynote address on September, 23, 2016 at Central University of Technology, Bloemfontein, Free State Province, South Africa.

Abstract

The African native commands an erudite capital in terms of the African origin and contribution with respect to civilization, symbolic behaviour, cosmic knowledge, metascience, medicine, engineering, technology, mathematics, writing systems and inventions. This plethora of uncontested knowledge domains by the African should be adequate to embolden the African to be the master of his/her destiny but that is not the case because the African feels like his/her knowledge does not count as real knowledge.

The ECC (Euro-Christian Colonial) system has proven to be the most powerful institution in South Africa with the result that it foregrounds the Eurocentric worldview while it marginalizes the African worldview. As a consequence of the ECC environment, the African has internalized the fact that African knowledge, culture or language is not relevant to the natural ability to enhance the survival experience.

The implication here is that the institutionalization of Eurocentricity in the curricula of schools, universities, churches and the workplace necessitates that the African can only exist as a tangent in the circle of the mainstay of the economy and thus to be treated as less than.

Moreover, the African scholar who graduates from these institutions of ECC, devoid of curriculum relevance with respect to the African dialectics, is academically trained to use methods of inquiry which are foreign and thus lack relevant efficacy in solving the African problem domain. This case of being eclipsed by the ECC system does not have to be. In this paper, we show that it is possible to decolonize the methods of knowledge inquiry and production in order to look at the natural phenomenon in a way that is holistic and relevant to the African problem domain by building on the intellectual achievements of the erudite ancestors who have gone before us.