Chapurukha M. Kusimba holds that integrating Africa’s deep histories and contributions into global scholarship cannot simply be left to African scholars alone. Photo: COURTESY OF CHAPURUKHA M. KUSIMBA

From the pyramids of Giza to the mudbrick temple of Western Deffufa in Kerma, from the ancient Yoruba city of Ile-Ife to the towering granite walls of Great Zimbabwe, Africa’s millennia-old archaeological sites collectively attest to the continent’s deep traditions of knowledge transmission and technological ingenuity.

Yet, successive generations of Western scholarship have long regarded African knowledge systems and histories as peripheral, leaving the continent undervalued in the global intellectual landscape. What epistemic and institutional forces sustain this omission? To seek answers, CSST recently interviewed Kenyan-American archaeologist Chapurukha M. Kusimba, a professor of anthropology from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment at the University of South Florida in the United States.

Africa’s knowledge production began10 millennia ago

CSST: In pre-colonial African societies, how was knowledge created, transmitted, and preserved?

Kusimba: Africa is the birthplace of the modern human lineage and was the only home known to our ancestors until about a million years ago. When ancient Africans immigrated to other continents, they carried a good deal of culture and knowledge with them. For example, the greatest of known African contributions was its advanced stone tool technologies. Most innovations in the making of stone knives and spears first occurred in Africa and spread to Eurasia.

After 10,000 BCE, when humans began to experiment with raising food plants and animals, and hence with settled village life and everything that followed from that, the technological links between Africa and Eurasia continued to be close. This was especially true in the realm of agriculture. While the Egyptians and other North Africans were taming a wide range of animals and borrowing food plants from West Asia, Africans further south were domesticating numerous crops, including sorghum, one kind of rice, two kinds of millet, several legumes, several kinds of yams, coffee, oil palm, and possibly watermelon. They sent several of these, including sorghum and both Eleusine and Pennisetum millet, to Eurasia, and in turn received domesticated animals, wheat, barley, bananas, and more kinds of yams. The movement of food species into and out of Africa, even before the development of cities or metallurgy, testifies to the great antiquity of economic links between Africa and the rest of the world.

Of course, Egypt was involved in knowledge production with many famous achievements of the ancient world including such key “inventions” as writing, monumental architecture, kings, written laws, and bureaucrats. But like other societies in the ancient world, knowledge and its transmission in much of Africa was held by the elite. Priests, priestesses, master crafts people, etc. held sway over much of the knowledge and jealously managed its circulation. But that said, much of the knowledge was learned and passed orally within households. Sages, griots, poets, then and now still play a significant role in the lives of many African societies and continue to preserve indigenous knowledge systems through songs, folk tales, dance, masquerades etc.

Academic colonialism marginalized African epistemologies

CSST: How do African and Western knowledge systems differ in terms of worldview, epistemology, and methodology, and how has Western academia treated African knowledge systems?

Kusimba: The difference is the creation of the artificial divide in Western scholarship of the two polar ends or binary opposites, modernity and traditionalism, where non-Western experiences, including those in Africa, represent the traditional order. Talcott Parsons’ paradigm of modernity and traditionalism and Max Weber’s ideal-type analysis and comparative cultural analysis have unconsciously influenced global scholarship, including subaltern epistemologies.

Human evolution measured along a progressive scale of modernity also implied a unilineal model of development. Anthropologist Robert Redfield in The Primitive World and Its Transformation and Oscar Lewis in The Children of Sanchez explicitly associated traditional/primitive society with “low culture”/ “little tradition,” as against the “high culture”/“great tradition” of modern industrial society.

Marvin Harris, George M. Foster Jr., Kobi K. K. Kambon, Robert A. Manners, Elman Rogers Service, and others have divided social values into ceremonial and instrumental categories. Traditional societies were characterized by the predominance of “ceremonial” values which militate against experimentation, whereas modern societies were characterized by instrumental values which encouraged experimentation and reward technological innovation. The technological evolutionists saw technology as a prime mover, a liberating force from retrograde “ceremonial” values. In this sense, Africa became a victim of intellectual and cultural imperialism because it was viewed as a place without history, innovation, and modernity.

How have Africans countered this view? African scholarship—history, philosophy, literature, and anthropology, focuses primarily on the essence of human existence and investigates the characteristics of culture, ethics, and human interaction. These qualities of human existence are essential elements to how a people conceptualize who they are in the world.

A major limitation in our understanding about Africa is our inability to perceive Africa outside of the historical experiences of foreign interaction. We are creatures of our holistic experiences—which include class, national backgrounds, educational preparation etc. Long before the adoption of foreign epistemes, African people had developed their own worldviews. These worldviews are culturally structured, informed by the oral traditions informally passed down intergenerationally as songs, folktales, proverbs, sayings etc. A critical restudy of these informal oral histories can provide valuable insights into how people comprehended who they were, and the world around them.

Reclaiming Africa’s rightful place in global scholarship

CSST: How is the ongoing debate over endogenous versus exogenous knowledge systems in Africa framed?

Kusimba: First, we should underscore the inequal positionality of African scholarship versus the rest. Because of the epistemological divide between modernity and primitivity, African contributions to civilization have not readily been incorporated into global knowledge reservoirs or databases. As such, original inventions and innovations have not been associated with African people—they only receive inventions and innovations from other places, usually Europe and Asia. Second, because traditional African cultures are thought of as archaic, modern African identities are formulated by the influence of foreign people. Therefore, by intrinsically linking the future of African people to the epistemologies and political guidance of foreigners, this line of thought robs African people of their agency.

For example, in East Africa, where I have carried out most of my research, the characterization of Swahili people as an outgrowth of Asian imperialism in Africa reinforced the mischaracterization of not just key groups on the coast, but the entire Swahili culture as not being authentically African. Yet in reality, the Swahili coast represents a parallel case to Great Zimbabwe, the Great Malian States of Songhay, Timbuktu, and the Yoruba States in Western Africa. Today, because of overwhelming evidence from historical linguistics, archaeology, and genetics that show major innovations in Africa, few scholars openly subscribe to the diffusionist versus internal origins theories.

CSST: How is African knowledge positioned within global academia? To what extent are African perspectives recognized in international exchanges?

Kusimba: At the moment, the positionality of African knowledge systems is in peril. As Africans say, those who lack the ability to feed themselves cannot demand respect. As a victim first of slavery and colonization, African ideas are ascribed low status on a global scale. That 500-year history resulted in Africa having a negative image that it has struggled to overcome. Today, the image of Africa is first as a supplier only of raw materials: a continent of mines and exploitable forests and plains that yield much of the world’s gold, platinum, diamonds, chromium, manganese, bauxite, uranium, and so forth. Exported in raw, unprocessed form, the profits and prestige of manufacturing go to the peoples of other continents. Second, Africa has no prestige because it manufactures nothing from its own resources. Third, neither the colonial nor post-colonial systems have allowed Africans to set up plants for converting raw materials into consumer products. The persistence of these negative perceptions of Africa has had serious consequences, and in my humble opinion, will continue to militate against the global acceptance of African ideas in fields other than literature and peace building.

A concerted and continued investment in technical and higher education in Africa and building strong collaborations with institutions, especially in Asia, and the strengthening of direct Global South collaborations will steer Africa to greatness and independence. Africans have proven many times that when the playing field is level and there is fairness in the distribution of resources, they rise and sometimes prevail. Consider for example the many cultural impacts made by Africans in the Diaspora in music, sports, the sciences, medicine, and architecture.

Indigenous knowledge offers new insights for human advancement

CSST: How might African epistemologies enrich global scholarship, particularly in addressing shared challenges like climate change?

Kusimba: There are many instances where African epistemologies can enrich global scholarship. First, global scholarship needs to abandon its irrational disinterest in traditional African knowledge systems and incorporate them fully in the teaching of global history. Both STEM and the humanities should explore contributions from Africa by acknowledging that Egypt is part and parcel of Africa. In agriculture for example, African farmers along the Nile, in the Ethiopian Highlands, in the Sahel, and the forests zones of West and East Africa have been growing food for over 10,000 and stockbreeding for 7000 years.

Yet Western agricultural experts have spent more than a century trying to persuade Africans to raise European and American breeds of cattle, even though these tend to do poorly under African conditions. African cattle is a product of hundreds of generations of carefully controlled, patient, and intelligent selection for desirable qualities. The meat quality of the Tuli breed, originally from Zimbabwe, is as good as Angus steers. The exceptionally docile nature and the ability of the Tuli to thrive in extreme heat and drought makes it one of the few breeds that that is likely to cope with global climate change.

Beautiful and elegant traditional houses constructed of indigenous materials with sensitivity to the ecological and climatic setting have been abandoned in favor of modern structures constructed with imported materials. Seen as modernizing tendencies, the modern African city is now dominated by filthy walls, poor designs, bad sewage systems, overgrown grounds, leaking roofs, and other appalling facilities which contribute to the overall impression that mega-slums are the African way and everything fantastic, including all forms of knowledge and innovation, must be imported from outside Africa. As a consequence, African architects must adapt to new, foreign architecture ill-suited for the current infrastructure.

The onus therefore lies on global scholarship to integrate African deep histories and contributions into their curriculum. That responsibility cannot simply be left to African scholars alone. Africa’s six million years of heritage contains solutions to global problems including climate change—we continue to disparage them at our own peril.