The knowledge focus

In this book we question how knowledge is made in African contexts, as a way of exploring the nature of what we term Africa-centred knowledges. Africa-centred knowledges are predicated on the recognition that Africa is highly diverse but, at the same time, there is a geopolitical and historical unity that continues to underpin it. This requires that we acknowledge the multiplicity of understandings on the continent, which come forward as forms of knowledge, needs and questions. Moving away then from the idea of universal truths and realities, we focus instead on the process by which knowledge is made. In so doing, it becomes clear that we need to understand ‘knowledge’ as plural. Instead of one knowledge, there are knowledges, and this is a necessary complement to the recognition that Africa is not homogenous or monolithic. Our contexts are political, historical and ontological; our starting point is knowledge itself, and the epistemological question of how we know what we know. In this collection, we aim to raise different aspects of this complex question, rather than bring it to closure with definitive answers.

This brings us to what it is that unifies a book that includes chapters by, among other contributors, literary critics, marine biologists and city planners. It is the focus on knowledge production that enables us to scrutinize concepts, such as those of indigenous knowledge and modernity, alongside issues such as the success rates of pupils living in poverty in a Zimbabwean high school and the fiction of Ben Okri or Helen Oyeyemi. Our authors consciously contribute to what Raewyn Connell has called ‘Southern theory’, which emphasizes ‘relations – authority, exclusion, inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation – between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery’ (Connell 2007: viii–ix).

All of the chapters are organized around the question of the nature of the knowledge that is produced about their chosen angle on Africa. We say ‘chosen angle’ advisedly as the book works within a familiar paradox: we cannot generalize about Africa, and yet we must do so. Albeit that African knowledge cannot be generalized, it has been filtered predominantly through the lens of its colonial and postcolonial (including apartheid) pasts, and this makes some continental unities real.