“Decolonising knowledge does not necessarily involve abandoning the notion of universal knowledge for humanity. It is a horizontal strategy for openness to dialogue among epistemic traditions. Yes, we have poverty, we have hunger, we have disease, but we must recapture the agency to interrogate African concepts, ideas, values, and ways of being and systems of knowledge. We cannot afford to deploy decoloniality as just a buzzword.” Unmasking and unpacking decoloniality, Prof Josephine Ahikire, Principal of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Makerere University in Uganda, delivered the opening address at the biennial Indigenous Knowledge Systems seminar held in Clarens on 26 October 2023.

The call for the promotion of indigenous knowledge systems, decolonisation, and social justice have been burning issues towards Africa’s quest for epistemic knowledge reclaim.

Themed Navigating Decoloniality and Indigenous Knowledge for Sustainable Development in Africa, the seminar encompassed critical discussions of the two topical themes and their intersections with sustainable development in Africa. 

Prof Ahikire was joined by Dr Lwazi Lushaba, Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town, who together fragmented what Africa needs to break away from, that is, the ingrained Western knowledge systems that have imposed themselves as the only legitimate knowledge to the exclusion of any other forms of knowledge.

Dr Lushaba said the problem with modern Western scientific knowledge was that it is incapable of existing alongside any other thought as equals. “Indigenous knowledge systems continue to be marginalised, perhaps not because of colonialism and its aftermath, but rather because the ontology of the very being of categories of enlightenment bequeath modern rational scientific thought. These categories preclude from ab initio the possibility of Western thought, which declares itself as the normative standard of all knowledge and forms of knowing, existing alongside any other form of thought,” he argued.

Click here to watch the thought-provoking debate on the legitimacy of universal knowledge.