African colonial experience bequeathed a culture of epistemological silencing of African indigenous epistemology with its monochrome logic of Western epistemology. It system atically devalued African indigenous knowledge systems by presenting African intellectual enterprise as alogical and sometimes primitive. Immediately after the colonial experience, the attempts by some African scholars to establish the depth of African scholarship frac tured the African knowledge systems. This is because they attempted to use Western logic and models as paradigms in investigating, interrogating, and evaluating our knowledge practice. In this paper, I argue for the need to reconstruct fractured African indigenous epistemology. I shall present how African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS), otherwise referred to in the paper as African indigenous epistemology, are distorted and fractured. After that, I shall propose its reconstruction by articulating how we acquire and validate knowledge in African indigenous epistemology. By African indigenous epistemology, I mean a system of investigating, understanding, assimilating, and attributing African conception of reality that is distinctively African and philosophical. To this end, I shall adopt the philo sophical methodology of critical analysis, evaluation, and reconstruction to delineate the notions of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), African indigenous epistemology, the frac turing effect of colonialism, globalisation, and Western framework on African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS). I conclude that to reconstruct African indigenous epistemology, we have to free it from the grip of Western evaluative paradigms. In this way, it would re flect an authentic African thought pattern that describes a way of knowing that is true to African experience, both the past and present, without necessarily disparaging other ways of knowing.
This chapter discusses the epistemology of African sociological knowledge. It emphasizes the legitimacy of alternative sociological knowledge practices and discusses the possibility of their global character. African sociological knowledge deals with the epistemic import of the relationship between individuals and social practices in African cultures, the ideas that are generated, and how these ideas inform the beliefs and understanding of reality among Africans. As an aspect of African communitarian epistemology, African sociological knowledge is understood as the product of socially situated activities and practices, community social organization, and social institutions. In light of the universalization of Western epistemic practices as evaluative paradigms for knowledge and truth, the chapter discusses the epistemicide of African indigenous knowledge systems. It argues that the pluralistic nature of our world allows for fluid authenticity in knowledge inquiry and advocates a knowledge democracy that involves a polycentric epistemology.
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