In this article, I seek to explore the prospects of ending epistemicide in Africa. The literature that challenges epistemicide in Africa largely addresses epistemicide’s impact on the indigenous people of Africa’s knowledge paradigm and call for its reversal. I argue that not much has been written in regard to the prospects of ending epistemicide in Africa. I regard this task as necessary given that the dominance of one epistemological paradigm in the educational curriculum continues to prevail. The position that I am defending here is that the quest for epistemic liberation ought to shift from the theoretical level to consideration of how this noble idea can be put into practice.
In this article, I argue that individuals could be entitled to
rights, outside those that are communally conferred, as part of the primary
requirement of being ‘persons’ in the African communitarian
set-up if the terms ‘person’ and ‘personhood’ are understood differently
from the way they are currently deployed in the communitarian
discourse. The distinction between these two terms is the basis of my
thesis where clarity on their meanings could be helpful in establishing
the possibility of ascribing rights outside those that are communally
conferred. I argue that ontologically, a ‘person’ is prior to ‘personhood’
(understood in the normative sense) which is considered to find its fuller
expression in a community and by virtue of this, I think that he or she is
entitled to some rights outside those that are defined and conferred by
the community. This is my point of departure in this article.
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