African Cultural Knowledge

"Based on field research data collected and analyzed over the past seventeen years, the Maryknoll Institute of African Studies has categorized cultural knowledge into fifteen themes and thirty-five domains. The themes are the major values, symbols and ideas that bring wholeness and coherence to a culture. The themes explain the nature of life, the nature of creation, the nature of evil, etc. Underneath and within these themes are thirty-five cultural domains, that is, specific activities, rituals, attitudes and happenings that make up the ordinary events in the lives of human beings, from birth to death and beyond ... The book is divided into fifteen chapters, one for each foundational theme"--Intro., p. [1].

The continent of Africa is richly endowed with diverse cultures, a body of indigenous knowledge and technologies. These bodies of knowledge and technologies that are indeed embodied in the diverse African cultures are as old as humankind. From time immemorial, they have been used to solve socio-economic, political, health, and environmental problems, and to respond to the development needs of Africans. Yet with the advent of colonialism and Western scientism, these African cultures, knowledges, and technologies have been despised and relegated to the periphery, to the detriment of the self-reliant development of Africans. It is out of this observation and realisation that this book was born. The book is an exploration of the practical problems resulting from Africa's encounter with Euro-colonialism, a reflection of the nexus between indigenous knowledge, culture, and development, and indeed a call for the revival and reinstitution of indigenous knowledge, not as a challenge to Western science, but a complementary form of knowledge necessary to steer and promote sustainable development in Africa and beyond. This is a valuable book for policy makers, institutional planners, practitioners and students of social anthropology, education, political and social ecology, and development, African and heritage studies.

This book is an intellectual journey into epistemology, pedagogy, physics, architecture, medicine and metallurgy. The focus is on various dimensions of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) with an emphasis on the sciences, an area that has been neglected in AIK discourse. The authors provide diverse views and perspectives on African indigenous scientific and technological knowledge that can benefit a wide spectrum of academics, scholars, students, development agents, and policy makers, in both governmental and non-governmental organizations, and enable critical and alternative analyses and possibilities for understanding science and technology in an African historical and contemporary context.

The advent and implementation of European colonialism have disrupted innumerable epistemological geographies around the globe. Countless cultural ways of knowing and local educational practices have in some way been displaced and dislocated within the universalizing project of the Euro-Colonial Empire. This book revisits the colonial relations of culture and education, questions various embedded imperial procedures and extricates the strategic offerings of local ways of knowing which resisted colonial imposition. The contributors of this collection are concerned with the ways in which colonial education forms the governing edict for local peoples. In The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, the authors offer an alternative reading of conventional discussions of culture and what counts as knowledge concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, identity, and difference in the context of the Diaspora.

This volume compares the western ideas of knowledge with the African. It aims at creating a mirror through which the western knowledge culture can look at itself through an unusual and interesting angle. The culture of Sub-Saharan Africa is the substance from which we, in this book, have tried to construe an epistemological mirror.

This handbook explores the evolution of African education in historical perspectives as well as the development within its three systems–Indigenous, Islamic, and Western education models—and how African societies have maintained and changed their approaches to education within and across these systems. African education continues to find itself at once preserving its knowledge, while integrating Islamic and Western aspects in order to compete within this global reality. Contributors take up issues and themes of the positioning, resistance, accommodation, and transformations of indigenous education in relationship to the introduction of Islamic and later Western education. Issues and themes raised acknowledge the contemporary development and positioning of indigenous education within African societies and provide understanding of how indigenous education works within individual societies and national frameworks as an essential part of African contemporary society.

Moving beyond the content integration approach of multicultural education, this text powerfully advocates for the importance of curriculum built upon authentic knowledge construction informed by the Black intellectual tradition and an African episteme. By retrieving, examining, and reconnecting the continuity of African Diasporan heritage with school knowledge, this volume aims to repair the rupture that has silenced this cultural memory in standard historiography in general and in PK-12 curriculum content and pedagogy in particular. This ethically informed curriculum approach not only allows students of African ancestry to understand where they fit in the world but also makes the accomplishments and teachings of our collective ancestors available for the benefit of all. King and Swartz provide readers with a process for making overt and explicit the values, actions, thoughts, and behaviors reflected in an African episteme that serves as the foundation for African Diasporan sociohistorical phenomenon/events. With such knowledge, teachers can conceptualize curriculum and shape instruction that locates people in all cultures as subjects with agency whose actions embody their ongoing cultural legacy.

European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of promoting Africa’s indigenous knowledge, and seeks to recover some of the sites where Africans continue to elaborate conflicting politics of self-affirmations. It both acknowledges and steps outside the protocols of analysis informed by nationalism, differentiating the forms that postcolonial theories have taken, and arguing for a selective appropriation of theory that emerges from Africa’s lived experiences.