History, knowledge and science in Africa

This universal is enveloped by Western culture. That’s why they say: we need to decouple the universal from Western culture.

My name is Mamadou Diouf. I am a historian and I teach at Columbia University in New York. My main interests revolve around Africa in what is called the modern period, from the 15th century to the present. I focus on intellectual history and the ways in which history is produced in Africa, as well as the relationship between this historical production and the forms of knowledge that are mobilized—that is, how Africans seek to enter a historical space from which they had been excluded.

As historians, we are confronted not only with the discipline in which we were trained—Western history—but also with the challenge of engaging this Western history with the ways in which history is conceived by African societies. In particular, Western history is built on a fundamental principle: the principle of archiving. There is no history without archives. One of the major issues, then, is the trace of history—the way in which history is recorded by Africans, which is primarily oral. And orality, by its nature, is unstable. This instability creates an open space where there is no single narrative, no absolute truth. Instead, historical accounts are constantly adapted to their audience and take into account the surrounding environment and ongoing transformations, meaning that imagination plays a crucial role. But this approach also acknowledges difference and diversity. What interests me is understanding how this form of historical discourse, in adapting to circumstances and audiences, produces knowledge that is never absolute. However, colonialism confronted this way of producing knowledge in a brutal and violent manner—by marginalizing it. The logic of Western expansion, what I call Western reason, is a logic that either subjugates or eradicates all other forms of reason.

A new generation of African historians, specializing in the history of science and technology, is now examining both the development of Western sciences and technologies in Africa and the impact this development has had on what might be called “indigenous” sciences. They are exploring how, in these encounters and exchanges, we can understand what might be termed the African scientific mindset. One such scholar, Clapperton Mavhunga from Zimbabwe, works on Southern Africa and has written a book on the tsetse fly and medical knowledge related to sleeping sickness. He demonstrates that Europeans learned everything they knew about the insect and the disease by listening to Africans, particularly through hunting practices. They then translated this knowledge into what became recognized as scientific knowledge. His key argument is that African science is rooted in practice—what he calls the “problem-solving process.” Africans identify problems and seek ways to resolve them. According to Mavhunga, the African laboratory is not a closed space; it is an open laboratory. This open laboratory is life itself, and science and technology are deeply connected to it. But this approach has been challenged, and perhaps this challenge creates difficulties in adaptation.

The big question is: Can Western science truly be universalized, as Westerners claim? And what are the consequences of this process for a science that operates differently? There is an interesting contrast to explore—what some anthropologists call the “genius of paganism.” This is a form of reasoning entirely different from the unitary logic of Western thought. It represents a scientific and philosophical approach that fundamentally challenges the principle of a single truth and instead values diversity. In this perspective, there is no absolute truth, which creates a major dilemma: When a scientific and philosophical tradition is based on provisional truths, how can it interact with a science that is always seeking a fixed rule or principle?