On 25 October 2024, much acclaimed Senegalese academic Professor Felwine Sarr was awarded the 13th Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture Laureate at Wereldmuseum Leiden in the Nederlands. Professor Sarr is a humanist, economist, musician, and writer. He is currently the Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Duke University.

Professor Sarr’s work on the restitution of African cultural heritage has been fundamental for the conversation on how museums and other institutions around the world present and/or return material collected through colonialism’s legacy. Sarr laid out Afrotopia as a poetic call for African philosophy, knowledges, and self-invention for African futures. In his book, Afrotopia, Professor Sarr creates a contextualized utopia by relinking Africa’s philosophies to the current challenges of climate change, economic inequality, and green technologies.
During the event, Professor Sarr delivered his keynote speech on Knowledge on/in African societies: re-opening the paths. In his speech, Sarr reflected on three key takeaways moving forward: (I) the essentiality of the geopolitics of knowledge in African countries, (II) the required epistemic shift from an African perspective, and (III) the need for building an African Ecology of Knowledge.
The Contrapuntal publishes below the full keynote speech of Professor Felwine Sarr during his Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture at Wereldmuseum Leiden.
Knowledge on/in African societies: re-opening the paths
In the context of the necessity of the elaboration of new forms of political, economic, and social life in African countries, the issue of knowledge production is crucial. Not only because the African continent has challenges to face in terms of education, health, and well-being in this era of economies based on innovation and knowledge. But more fundamentally, because knowledge production, sustains and reproduces political, economic, and social orders.
The epistemological questions of what type of knowledge? How are they produced? For which purposes? are fundamentals for Africans in their struggle for emancipation? In order to imagine and construct different present and future, it is necessary to interrogate the enunciation of knowledge paradigms.
In the recent history of the African continent, the ethnologic knowledge produced on African societies, played a critical role in its domination by European countries during the colonial period. In the contemporary era, knowledge allows a control (or a regulation) of the understanding of the world; in that sense, it’s a space of power and can be an instrument of coloniality.
To think properly about the challenges that are facing African societies, it is necessary to interrogate the geopolitics of knowledge within the African continent. I will start by doing a quick genealogy of what Mudimbe named the colonial library and emphasize the African contemporary positionality. In a second moment, I will discuss the necessity for Africans to engage in an epistemic shift by widening the vision of what knowledge is and by reactivating resources of knowing embodied in their cultures; but more specifically by producing news knowledges that will be useful for Africans societies and for the world in general. I will finish by drawing the main paths of what I call an African ecology of knowledges.
- Geopolitics of knowledge in African countries
The corpus of knowledge about Africa is largely marked by colonial ethnology and anthropology. Valentin Mudimbe named this corpus: the Colonial Library. Since the fifteenth century, the landscape of Africa has been structured by discourses whose objective was to physically dominate the lands, to reeducate the mentalities of native inhabitants, and to integrate the local economic histories into a Western perspective.[1]
These various forms of knowledge, principally motivated by the objective of governmentality and whose goal was the justification and the establishment of the colonial enterprise, viewed non-Western countries through the prism of cultural superiority and racial prejudice.
In fact, maintaining an economic asymmetry between the colonies and the Metropole implied that the latter exerted an absolute political control over the colonies. And yet, this control would have been impossible, without largely shared beliefs in the cultural dominance of the colonizers. It was of vital importance, for the colonizers to establish this sense of superiority, to not simply conquer the lands and the resources, but also the hearts and the minds. As a result, the economic and political injustice that is inherent in colonization, adds one more layer of cultural injustice. This process is called by Rajeev Bhargava, epistemic injustice. It took place in the same way in India and in African countries. It starts, when concepts and categories thanks to which a people understand itself, as well as its universe, are replaced by the concepts and categories of the colonizers.
Therefore, the system of meaning and categories allowing for the individual and collective orientation of dominated peoples has been replaced by the meaning and categories of the colonists, and this has been done by a denigration of the values of the local communities, as well as their production of knowledge.
This process of inferiorizing the cultural and epistemic frameworks belonging to colonized peoples is first deployed within the discourse of colonizers, and then becomes crystallized within theoretical works (ethnologist and anthropologist) carried out by the colonizers.
For Valentin Mudimbe, Kwasi Wiredu, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, for Africans to deeply recover their fecundity, it’s urgent to address the question of the liberation of African philosophical and scientific discourse to establish African social sciences. For these thinkers, it is important to become the subject of one’s own scientific discourse and to determine its practice according to one’s own norms and criteria.
For Mudimbe and Kwasi Wiredu there is a necessity of performing a radical transformation of the social and human sciences as they are currently taught in African universities. This reconstruction project requires re-working the social sciences, starting with the epistemological interrogation concerning the objects, methods, and status of knowledge produced by the human and social sciences as they are applied to African realities.
Deconstructing the colonial-ethnological reason starts with a radical critique of the produced discourses, their theoretical frameworks, and their ideological underpinnings.
For these thinkers in order to finally escape from a scientific alienation that is constantly lying in wait, African researchers must take on the responsibility of a thought by establishing a scientific discourse, that would be the expression of material life within their own socio-political contexts.
This activity of thinking must root itself within the present, placing careful attention on its own specific archeological environment and the real tendencies of Africa’s various societies and their most complete and concrete expressions.
It is a question of integrating the true complexity of African social formations, and no longer considering them as carbon copies of Western history, but as having their own cultural and historical specificity.
The question is what to do with the colonial library. Do we have to burn it?
Some African scholars (Antoine Tshitungu Kongolo, Mamadou Diouf) think that for this enterprise, a critical re-reading of the colonial library is an accurate option for several reasons. (1) The colonial library is a coproduction, and a part of the knowledges produced by African societies is intertwined in that library and those knowledges could be rediscovered. (2) A critical reading of this library helps to understand how the Western world produces knowledge about others.
In the Scent of the Father, Mudimbe shows how scientific productions can be dependent on categories of thought that are both their own and those of others, that speak from specific geographical, but also philosophical and epistemological places.
How then, does one get rid of the persistent scent (smell) of the father while avoiding the pitfall of challenging his discourse with words inspired by him? The father is now absent but remains present through his scent. The father refers here to a certain epistemological paternalism that has been established and that has infantilized Africa. How can this filiation be broken to produce an African order of scientific discourse in line with African realities?
For Africa, says Mudimbe, “to escape from the West supposes to appreciate exactly what it costs to detach oneself from it; it supposes to know up to which point the West insidiously approached us; it makes it possible to know in what allows us to think against the West, what is still Western”. All the ambiguity and the difficulty of epistemic decolonization is summarized in this quote. It is that of the implementation of a fertile gap, which will have elucidated the current modalities of the integration of Africans into the myths of the West while avoiding the need to prove its humanity in the face of the ideological, political, and symbolic violence that is opposed to it.
Mudimbe advocates to freely assume that responsibility for a thought that relates to its destiny and its environment. In his view, the constitution of an African scientific practice does not only suppose a strategy of decolonization of established knowledge, but to define the framework and the conditions of a true scientific practice that Africa needs most urgently today. What would be the tools, concepts and categories as well as the methodology of such a reconstruction-rehabilitation?
The strategy and the method he proposes is one of an epistemological indiscipline. It is necessary to think from the African experience. For this, all knowledge must be reopened. The re-opening of Mudimbe is not a return to a pre-colonial state of civilization or knowledge production. It is rather a question of developing a critical point of view on philosophical traditions and endogenous knowledge to raise what is relevant to preserve or transform.
The question I want to address below is how to rewrite the so-called humanities from an African perspective.
- Humanities from an African perspective, the epistemic shift
The epistemic shift, I am calling for, is not just a better application of Western human and social sciences (the so-called humanities) to African realities or a better inculturation of the latter. My point is that we must acknowledge the diversity of approaches to reality depending on civilizations and eras, a plurality of ways of knowing, as well as a gnoseological and epistemological plurality.
I propose to rethink the plurality of journeys of human thinking, starting from the idea of equality in the principle of the different traditions of thought or discursive practices, while acknowledging their incommensurability. This leads us to consider these different traditions of thought, from their horizons, and the configurations of the thinkable which they propose; as unique journeys of the mind which have developed concurrently, shaped by the cultures from which they originate. This does not mean that there is not circulation of ideas and thought across regions and eras.
Thinking about these questions in an African context calls for an epistemic shift. Incorporating the complexity of African social structures and embracing them in their cultural and historical distinctiveness in knowledge production, requires a change of position within the fields of constituted knowledge; an act of thinking which pays particular attention to the current trends in the societies being examined.
This project of restructuration requires us to completely reconsider the social sciences, and necessitate an epistemological questioning of the objects, methods, and status of the knowledge produced by the humanities and social sciences, as applied to African realities. The major obstacle of such an approach remains the difficulty of determining an epistemological field, in other words, the specific objects to be studied, but also the methods needed to do so.
But more fundamentally, it is a question of acquiring more in-depth knowledge of African societies and cultures, which are also based on their own gnoseological criteria. To achieve this, it is necessary to adopt other modes of understanding reality, besides scientific knowledge as it is currently constituted. The exploration of the relatively unfamiliar territories of African epistemogonies allows a more open-minded approach to various types of knowledge, that have helped and safeguarded African societies in their long history. These constitute ways of knowing that have demonstrated their long-term operational attributes in different areas of human life: therapeutic and environmental knowledge, technical know-how, social, historical, psychological, economic and agronomical knowledge, etc. These knowledges had ensured the survival, growth and sustainability of African societies. In order to mobilize them, it is necessary to explore African multiple cultural expressions and linguistic resources.
I also engage in a debate around a theory of knowledge limited by the boundaries of the Western vision of knowledge, by questioning the exclusivity of the logocentric episteme, and the enframing of modes of comprehensibility by the single mode of written thought. It’s about reconsidering the question of knowledge at its very roots.
- Building an African Ecology of Knowledge
Re-building knowledge in Africa could be pursued by setting up an ecology of knowledge, where disciplines, approaches, and methodologies are considered in their own integrity, but put in an ecology where they can interact and produce new knowledges.
I borrow from Margarita Bowen and Boaventoura De Sousa Santos the notion of ecology of knowledge. While accepting that knowledge is derived from experience, the notion of an ecology of knowledge looks to a much broader concept of experience, consonant with a more dynamic ecosystemic understanding of the world. Margarita Bowen, the Australian historian of science who suggested in 1985 the term ecology of knowledge, emphasizes that all ideas or actions that are issued from observation, are themselves incorporated and part of the global ecosystem. This evidence suggests a radical break from the established and positivist model of the exact scientific method, in which, the scientist was regarded as being detached, intellectually at least, from the objects of observation, and so able to collect reliable data (objective facts) by sense-perception analysis, to ensure accuracy. David Lowenthal (1961) argues that perception is not a matter of sense alone, “sensing, thinking, feeling and believing are simultaneous and interdependent processes’’.
Questions that we might ask ourselves could be these ones: Can we enlarge the notion of perception? Can we envisage an epistemology of the senses? Can we consider arts, dance, theater, and bodies as sites of knowledge? Can we also consider an epistemology of the complexity consonant with the late understanding brought by Einstein and the quantum physics of the reality of the universe, breaking with the Newtonian paradigm.
The idea is to recognize an epistemological pluralism, which acknowledges the particularity of science and its efficiency in some domains while contesting its pretension to the monopoly of truth, and its aim to disqualify other forms of knowledge. My point is to contest the scientific pretensions of being the only legitimate and true knowledge on the one hand, but also the postmodern relativism according to which, all knowledges are equal, on the other hand. The idea is not to attribute the same ability (capacity) to all types of knowledges, but to allow a pragmatic discussion between alternative ways of knowing. A discussion that does not immediately disqualify knowledge that are outside of the scientific canon. Rebuilding knowledge in Africa is being able to rely on all types of knowledges produced by African societies through times, and re-activate those that still operate in various domains of life.
This means ending with a monoculture of knowing by allowing a constellation of various knowledges that interact and that are complementary, and also knowledges that can be translated one into another, by avoiding the fragmentation and the non-communicability of various types of knowledges. Also, going beyond the idea that knowledges are situated and exclusively depends on the conditions of their production. Knowledge is at the same time situated and trans-situated.
Human intelligence lies in our ability to go beyond the various possibilities of thinking, to understand them and generate dialogue between them.
An ecology of knowledge will not be systematic research for the ultimate truth, but rather an attempt to present these possibilities in order to produce something intelligible and useful from the encounters of a plurality of ways of knowing and discursive practices.
The ultimate objective of this epistemological shift is the construction of a library that encompasses all the libraries (libraries of the logos and libraries of the non-logos epistemologies, ante-colonial, colonial, postcolonial, decolonial libraries articulating various archives, thoughts and knowledge that are disseminated in societies). This library enables the production of new knowledges and new ways of knowing, as well as an integral recognition of ignorance. Ignorance embodies what is ignored (not considered as knowledge), but also what we don’t yet know. It is, therefore, a space of creativity and innovation. The ambition of such an ecology of knowledge could be in synchrony and diachrony, to study the life of ideas (their present and their future); and historical variations in the response to fundamental human questions, expressed in the collective thinking of large groups of individuals.
Therefore, reflecting on social transformations and cultural production of a linguistic era, necessitates and understanding of the global environment that produces meanings. This is justified by the fact that philosophical statements, scholarly conjectures, literary processes, or recurrent poetic images, only really take meaning connected to each other, in the interactive topography of the entire social discourse.
In that perspective, an African ecology of knowledge could become a multidisciplinary enterprise that explores both literature, as well as the arts, the practical solutions and collective beliefs, the material production, and theoretical knowledges in their refined and simplistic versions, literate or not. This African ecology of knowledge must go beyond the analysis of specific discursive fields and genres – philosophical, religious, scientific, literary…
Such an undertaking in the context of African countries raises the question of the sources and in particular the question of the oral sources, carriers of an important part of the collective memory and the knowledge production of African societies.
It should be just remembered that African societies have experienced writing systems that have played differentiated roles in archiving and transmitting their cultural heritage. But for us, it is more a matter of moving away from the hegemony of the scriptural paradigm, which sees writing as the exclusive means of transmitting the collective memory. Many human groups did not need writing to transmit their cultural heritage.
There is no human group without a language, and therefore without a codified means of perpetuating its collective memory. It’s about questioning these cultures through the processes they have mainly used to transmit their knowledge and their collective memory. In the African context, in addition to exploring written and oral sources, artifacts and objects can also play a significant role in an archeology of knowledges. They can help the rewriting of history; they also encompass knowledge and indicates alternative epistemological universes.
Every society (culture or civilization) transmits a heritage and perpetuates a cultural matrix that conveys its identity through time while transforming it as the world evolves.
The question is how to characterize this transformation? If we open the methodological scope and shift the geography of our Reason, an ecology of knowledge can be a field of studying major questions of our time, based on more plural archives and ways of knowing.
In conclusion
To face the challenges that the African continent is dealing with, it is urgent to improve and better appropriate modern scientific knowledge and its technical applications. This creative assimilation is a trend that is already observed in many African countries, in which new technologies are used to provide solutions in education and health… Furthermore, it’s a question of widening the range of knowledges on which the social organization is based, by incorporating in the repertoire of useful tools, the knowledge produced by African societies and embodied in their cultural matrix and their DNA. An additional task that is devoted to the African researchers is to produce the knowledge that will be needed by African societies in the upcoming decades, in order to better respond to their needs and answer their challenges.
Reopening the future for African countries is a task that takes place firstly in the space of thought and imaginaries. The African continent is experiencing a cultural mutation. The continent can become a Laboratory and reinvent its site, economic, political, and social life. To give forms to this re-invention is to rebuild knowledges and imaginaries. Rebuilding knowledge in Africa could open up to an infinite universe.
[1] Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).