Towards a new paradigm for pan‐African knowledge production and application in the context of the African renaissance

Abstract

The article argues that the primary purpose of education, both formal and nonformal, is the development of interrelated and interdependent sets of human capacity to think, to know and to act by honing social consciousness or awareness, values and skills. Investing in education is therefore viewed as investment in the development of social capital that combines with material resources and other non-material phenomena to produce goods and services, as well as a favourable spiritual environment for human sustenance and development.Education in Africa needs a fundamental paradigm change which entails, among other things, focusing on confronting, with a view to correcting and departing from, hegemonic knowledge and knowledge systems that are predicated on racist paradigms that have deliberately and otherwise distorted, and continue to distort, the reality of who Africans really are. The article visits some of the terrains most in need of this change: contestations about the roles Africans and Africa have played in human civilisation during the four main historical periods to date: Africa's leadership as the cradle of humankind or the Naissance of Humanity; Africa's leadership in all fields of knowledge and human achievements at the beginning of modern civilisation up to about the fourteenth century AD; the fifteenth century AD to the present which marks the only period in human development when Africa and Africans have been dominated and marginalised by mainly European civilisation and its global projections; and, the emerging era of the renaissance of Africa and other marginalised peoples.A model curriculum that requires supplementation by the specific characteristics of each country that adopts it is suggested as a step towards this paradigm change. This modest effort at constructing a model curriculum is informed by the understanding that all Africans and peoples of African descent need to possess some basic, shared common knowledge about Africa, the Diaspora and the world -and to acquire critical approaches to contextualised learning.

Repositioning of Africa in knowledge production: shaking off historical stigmas � introduction

“…In this supplementary issue, we join other scholars (e.g., Gutto 2006) in critically engaging with the question, 'how could this happen to the same Africa, recognised as the cradle of humankind (Beyin 2015), featuring great empires and kingdoms of artistic, technological, scientific, cultural, and material sophistication?' We postulate that Africa's renaissance and its industrialisation and modernisation lie in its ability to upscale its intellectual capital and reposition its knowledge systems to provide home-grown solutions guided by the pan-Africanism philosophy.…”

Return to the Source: Cabral, Fanon, the Dialectic of Revolutionary Decolonization/Revolutionary Re-Africanization, and the African Renaissance

“…Powerfully speaking to this issue, African Renaissance radicals Sedibe and Tondi (2005) stated: “European imperialism interrupted and disorganized scientific and technological development of the colonized. With its sophisticated philosophies and structures European cultural imperialism made it impossible for the colonized to build upon indigenous traditions of invention and innovation that it found existing and continues to exist within some communities of the colonized” (p. 136; see also Gutto, 2006; Mungwini, 2014; Nabudere, 2006).…”

The continuing relevance of late Dr W.E.B. Du Bois to African scholarship

“…"The Knowledge about Africa and Africans that most have been taught or consume in other ways is constructed from the perspectives of those who have made it their historical mission-driven by material interests, racism, and a quest for power-to distort, confuse, disorientate, fragment and subordinate and exploit Africa and Africans wherever they may be. Even where Africans have contributed some knowledge about Africans and Africa in human civilization, such contributions have largely been inescapably tainted and constrained by the paradigms learned from slavers, colonisers and neo-colonisers" [29].…”