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Technology and Culture in a Developing Country

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Kwame Gyekye
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Extract

Even though the subject of my paper is ‘Technology and Culture in a Developing Country’, it seems appropriate to preface it by examining science itself in the cultural traditions of a developing country, such as Ghana, in view of the fact that the lack of technological advancement, or the ossified state in which the techniques of production found themselves, in the traditional setting of Africa and, in many ways, even in modern Africa, is certainly attributable to the incomprehensible inattention to the search for scientific principles by the traditional technologists. I begin therefore with observations on how science and knowledge fared in the traditional culture of a developing country.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 38 , March 1995 , pp. 121 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1995

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References

1 Gyekye, Kwame, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 16–18 and 106–107Google Scholar.

2 It is instructive to note that the Ewe word for ‘knowledge’ is nuny., a word which actually means ‘thing observed’. This clearly means that observation or experience was regarded as the source of knowledge in Ewe thought: see Dzobo, N. K., ‘Knowledge and truth: Ewe and Akan Conceptions’, in Gyekye, Kwame and Wiredu, Kwasi (eds), Person and Community: Ghanaian Philosophical Studies (Washington D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992), pp. 74ffGoogle Scholar. The empirical character of African thought generally can most probably not be doubted.

3 Mbiti, John S., African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1970), p. 1Google Scholar.

4 Ibid. p. 38.

5 Busia, K.A., Africa in Search of Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 1Google Scholar.

6 Ibid. p. 7.

7 Parrinder, G., African Traditional Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 9Google Scholar.

8 Mbiti, African Religions and Philosoph., p. 74.

9 The Akan version is: we feefee efun.'aniwa ase a, wohu saman.

10 Laing, E., Science and Society in Ghana, The J. B. Danquah Memorial Lectures (Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1990), p. 21Google Scholar.

11 Ibid. p. 21.

12 Kofi Asare Opoku of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon.

13 July, Robert W., for example, says: ‘Art for art's sake had no place in traditional African society’ and that it was ‘essentially functional’. See his An African Voice: The Role of The Humanities in African Independence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Wauthier, Claude, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa (London: Heinemann, 1978), pp. 173–174Google Scholar.

14 White, Lynn, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 127Google Scholar.

15 Todd, Lord, Problems of the Technological Society, The Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures (Published for the University of Ghana by the Ghana Publishing Corporation, Accra, 1973), p. 8Google Scholar.

16 Pacey, Arnold, The Culture of Technology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 145Google Scholar.

17 Wiredu, Kwasi, Philosophy and an African Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 15Google Scholar.

18 Sefa-Dede, S., ‘Traditional Food Technology’, in Macrae, R., Robinson, R. and Sadler, M. (eds), Encyclopedia of Food Science, Food Technology and Nutrition, (New York: Academy Press, 1993), p. 4600Google Scholar.

19 S. Sefa-Dede, ibid., also, ‘Harnessing food technology for development’, in Sefa-Dede, S. and Orraca-Tetteh, R. (eds) Harnessing Traditional Food Technology for Development (Department of Nutrition and Food Science, University of Ghana, Legon, 1989)Google Scholar; Colecraft, Esi, ‘Traditional food preservation: an overview’, African Technology Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1, (Feb./March, 1993), pp. 15–17Google Scholar.

20 The encounter was between this traditional woman food technologist and research scientists and students from the Department of Nutrition and Food Science of the University of Ghana headed by Professor S. Sefa-Dede. The account of the encounter presented here was given to me by Sefa-Dede both orally and in writing, and I am greatly indebted to him.

21 Mazrui, Ali A., ‘Africa between ideology and technology: two frustrated forces of change’, in Carter, Gwendolen M. and O'Meara, Patrick (eds), African Independence: The First Twenty-Five Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 281–282Google Scholar.

22 Kaunda, Kenneth, A Humanist in Africa (New York, 1966), p. 28Google Scholar.

23 Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Though., pp. 143–146.