10 - False Western Epistemological Dominance

Summary

Epistemological Footprints of Gloom (The African Experience)

Knowledge acquisition in Africa has been a double-edged sword. The dispensers and learners have all been smeared in the wrestling match for a victory that must be non-Africanized at best. It is filled with a teaspoon of foreign experiences. The system of imbibing and imparting knowledge to African people in Africa and in the Diaspora has been laced with cyanide poison. Africa's knowledge systems were seen as non-existent, and even if they existed, they were barbaric and needed to be tamed. Mudimbe and Appiah (1993, p. 118) expose this epistemological Western hypocrisy by stating that “Western experience … [actualized] … history, reason, and civilization.” According to them, coercing Western philosophical modes of inquiry and civilization into the minds of Africans was the sole barometer in indoctrinating Africans into absorbing Westernization and “modernization” (Fanon 1963; Rodney 1982; Cesaire 1972; Mamdani 2001; La Branche 2005; Scott 2007; Bharvad 2014). In fact, it is Reiland Rabaka who has aptly stated that Africans were incarcerated by Westernization (Rabaka 2010). This was the paved route to gaining access to the tea leaves of “wisdom.” James (2017) has zeroed in on this African knowledge rupture by capturing the sentiments of Ziller's introduction into the history of philosophy:

After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, and the seizure and looting of the Royal Library in Alexandria, Aristotle's plan to usurp Egyptian philosophy, was subsequently carried out by members of his school: Theophrastus, Andronicus of Rhodes and Eudemus, who soon found themselves confronted with the problem of a chronology for a history of philosophy. (p. 14)

The machinery to usurp and deracinate African knowledge systems began with the looting and annexing of the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt. That is precisely the reason why George James has termed this act thievery in his book Stolen Legacy. The Greek philosophy and history are incomplete without a tribute to Egyptian thinking. But that is not what has been planted in the minds of students in the world by historians and philosophers.