Indigenous knowledge is much more than a philosophy, worldview

One of the greatest motifs in African literature is the return to a people’s roots. You see it in writings on the continent and in diaspora African literature.

A powerful example is Alex Haley’s Roots, an account of his search for his African ancestry and the recovery of identity and ancestral knowledge. There is also Return to My Native Land by Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet and co-founder of the Negritude movement, whose long poem confronts slavery and colonialism while reclaiming Black identity and connection to homeland.

In Jamaica, especially, the theme of returning to autochthonous roots is strongly associated with roots reggae, which I classify under Caribbean or West Indian poetry, though many literature classes often prefer discussing poets such as Jamaican poet Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, Derek Walcott and others rather than artistes such as Bob Marley, Israel Vibration, Peter Tosh and others, perhaps because of the stigma associated with rituals espoused by reggae artistes which colonial and Christian classrooms have frowned upon.

My view of poetry, however, is that music performed on a stage or recorded as a sound fits the definition of poetry more than lines in a book grouped in stanzas. I was not surprised when, in 2016, the Nobel Prize for Literature went to Bob Dylan, the American singer-songwriter, for creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. This piece is however, not about the definition of poetry.

Rather, I wanted to focus today on why it is important to study, return to and preserve traditional knowledge not just in Africa but other postcolonial societies as well. Or to borrow one of the most powerful lines ever written to underscore this theme, I want us to reflect on the words of Okot p’Bitek in Song of Lawino, where he symbolically says the pumpkin in the old homestead must never be uprooted.

Now, we live in a society that seems to hate everything authentic about our roots. Children who cannot speak a word of their ancestral tongues are admired as smart and progressive if they can speak English or French. I think this colonial hangover has to do with the kind of societies we grew up in.

We were punished severely if we were caught speaking our ancestors’ languages in school, including being forced to wear a sash fashioned from old ugly gunny sacks emblazoned with the shaming words “I am an idiot”.

Yet all around us were trees, birds, plants, weeds, toys and animals that the English language had no words for. In linguistics, the principle of linguistic relativity holds, more cautiously, that the language we speak can influence how we perceive, organise and discuss the world around us.

Thus, if you speak a language that describes only a small fraction of the reality you see around you, you are worse than a prisoner, shackled and put on a leash, where you see a lot but cannot meaningfully discuss your world.

Language aside, when the colonial project was launched after the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, European authorities that colonised Africa reckoned that the best way to align their spheres of influence with interests back home was to make the colonies a subset of their home countries.

Britain thus embarked on using missionaries and colonial schools to spread English among the colonised societies. France came up with the infamous assimilation project, where some Africans in Francophone countries were to be turned into culturally French subjects, though many African writers scoffed at this.

Some, like Ferdinand Oyono of Cameroon, satirised the assimilation policy through Toundi in his Houseboy, who leaves his village and enters the colonisers household, only to discover that the colonial world offers neither equality nor belonging. By the time we meet Toundi, he has been abused so much that he is rotting before he dies.

Another indirect criticism of the French policy in Francophone literature is seen in movements such as Negritude, a movement that sought to reclaim Black identity, African culture and the dignity of colonised peoples. It was developed prominently by writers such as Senegalese president and poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and French Guianese poet Léon-Gontran Damas. The movement, however, faced criticism for romanticising Africa and essentialising Black identity. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka famously and satirically quipped, in allusion to Negritude, that “a tiger” does not claim its tigritude, it pounces.

The reason I find the return to one’s roots motif powerful is that you cannot really be what you are not.  Put another way you should be yourself because everyone else is taken.

Over the years, the psychological trauma of colonialism has bred untold shame, where even top government officers in postcolonial Africa try to affect exotic airs and use comical accents to assert their foreignness. Others have imported their drinks and suits from abroad. Where you see sophistication, however, I see trauma and a complex that only embodiment of who we really are can cure.

True, we cannot go back to our world before contact with others. True, we have gained a lot from contact with others, but we should first understand the positive things that brought us thus far. Which herbs cured which diseases?

Let us subject these herbs to modern tests before dismissing them and traditional healers as witches and wizards. If nothing else, this will save us the blushes of falling for fads such as the one where, after claims that quail eggs and meat had medicinal value, we went round buying quails bred in city backyard coops.

We forgot that the quails of yore went into the bushes, fed on wild fruits and leaves that had medicinal value and our people accessed that medicine, as it were, from the quails they hunted.

The fad was a comical metaphor of the folly of dismissing one’s people’s ways offhand, only to find that after uprooting the pumpkin in the old homestead, we had lost direction and ended up in a land of unknown diseases. All because, in our modern thinking, we had thrown the cultural baby out with the bathwater of traditional knowledge.

As Ngugi taught us, cultures grow when they meet. They meet at the river between what is new and good and what is old and good. They also meet at the river between what is new but not good and what in our old world must be discarded going forward.

So, as we learn from others, let us also examine and preserve what is good from where we came from. For traditional or indigenous knowledge goes beyond a worldview.