Science Education, Indigenous Knowledge and Community Engagement

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Series Editors: Femi S. Otulaja and Meshach B. Ogunniyi

 

The clarion call for decolonizing education (curriculum, teaching (pedagogy) and learning), research and scholarship in Africa (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) has reached such a critical level that can no longer be ignored or discounted as no more than an aberration or merely as the clamoring of agitators. The call is not just to decolonize per se but to indigenize education from early childhood through higher education. It is to contextualize the curriculum, the teaching and the learning of the various disciplines so as to produce individuals with authentic sense of being Africans. Incidentally, this call coincides with the aspirations of all previously colonized peoples (indigenous or otherwise) around the world. The books in this series will address these issues in order to lay bare the road, which we believe, would emancipate the African mindset from the throes of Western culture imposed on them in the last 500 years.

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Each book in this Africans@Homeseries is intended to highlight experiences at re-thinking and re-claiming African narratives, philosophies, theories, epistemologies, methodologies, axiology and possibilities for mainstreaming indigenous knowledge (IK) and overcoming the lethargies, anxieties and doubts so much spread abroad in Africa today. Furthermore, each book is meant to contribute to efforts aimed at enacting African indigeneity in education fora, particularly in reviving and using as much as possible African indigenous languages and associated symbolic representations as bona fide academic languages for sharing knowledge as it was before the colonial era. 

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It is well known that the history of the Western world’s interactions with the indigenous peoples around the world has largely been abusive in the sense that the latter have suffered all forms oppression and cultural bastardization to the point of losing their sociocultural identity. To obviate these abusive relationships implies the inclusion of diverse local means of communication, exemplars of place- and context-based learning and culturally embedded practices in the proposed indigenized curriculum. In the same vein, we believe that a truly decolonized curriculum cannot be achieved in the absence of opportunities for a sustained self-conversation, dialogue, equivocation and reflection which this series is meant to provide.  To exemplify the focus of this series, each book will have parts written in indigenous local languages of the authors. 

 

It is also apposite to state that while many scholars have become aware of the scientific and economic value of indigenous knowledge (IK) the focus of this series is to bring that knowledge on par with westernized science as well as counteract the erroneous notion that IK is primitive knowledge arising from a primitive culture. Another focus of the series is not just to highlight the importance of IK to socioeconomic development of Africa but also show its intrinsic value and meaning for African peoples.  Unless our Western friends understand this as equal partners, we would both be working at cross-purposes.