LAST week I promised you a treat on the role that colonial education played and continues to play in creating African zombies, mimics and intellectual barrens.
I promised to unpack epistemological imperialism.
This is what I am doing right away for your own benefit, sons and daughters of Africa’s metaphysical blood.
The mere fact of using English Language to do this would be tantamount to advancing the very idea we wish to puncture, but it is not because we are painfully conscious of using English to serve our purposes; we refuse to be used by English. As Chinua Achebe says, “now that English has come, let’s use it.”
We will begin by simplifying ‘epistemology’ as the branch of philosophy that investigates the ‘origin’, ‘nature’, ‘methods’, and ‘limits of human knowledge’.
Epistemology answers the question ‘How do we know’?
It is concerned with how our minds are related to reality, and whether these relationships are valid or invalid.
It is needed in order to obtain knowledge of the world around us.
Epistemology can be explained through rationalism and imperialism.
Rationalists explain the world through the mind.
Rationalism can be defined as the theory of knowledge which holds that the ultimate source of knowledge is ‘reason’.
This categorisation of how knowledge is arrived at is influenced by Western knowledge system deriving authority from the Westerner’s worship of positivism (the belief that true knowledge is arrived at through scientific and systematic means that can be repeated and proved).
An African using African indigenous knowledge system does not subscribe to this level of cognitive rigidity.
If you find yourself accepting this because it is printed, you are a complete victim of the Western intellectual brainwashing.
The West made sure that to conquer you they had to remove an African operating system and replace it with theirs.
That way you became an automaton or a human robot.
For your own information the fetishism of print was the charm used to mesmerise you to a point of believing everything printed.
Let me illustrate the fetishism of print as a major aspect of Western ideological imperialism further.
Please do not take offence, but if you do, still that helps to clarify this better.
The first book to receive printing boost is the Bible.
The earliest version of the Bible is Hebrew.
And because Western epistemology found it risky to tell the world the truth that the ancient Hebrews were Africans, they made sure that any such books were burnt or hidden.
Instead they popularised the Greek version of the Bible which had been revised in the process of translation to suit the interests of the then ruling Greek empire. When this empire collapsed and gave way to the Roman empire, the same book was reworked into Latin, then the official language of the Roman empire.
And when the Roman empire gave way to the British empire, the same book was reworked into King James Version, again after King James, then the Monarch of the British empire; and of course the new Revised Standard Version which is the standard text for schools to date.
All this fulfils the truism that Marx coined about the power of ideas that: the ruling class ideas are the ruling ideas.
Because colonial knowledge system still controls the many agents of socialisation we are baptised in, in succession (Western-educated family institutions, Western religions, colonial institutions of governance structures, Western-designed school syllabi, Western media programmes and Western lifestyles in general); we still believe the naked lie that the Bible in its current form was handwritten by Mwari to the last punctuation.
Notwithstanding the self-confession of last two versions of the Bible!
King James’ Version! Revised? Standardised Version?
Even persuasion by Western rationalism would convince everyone of the deliberate blasphemous representation of Almighty’s capabilities.
What God would pen such highly personalised material such as Paul’s epistles (letters) to specific communities of Thessalonica?
Rome?
Ephesus?
Galatia?
Including to such personal friends/students of his such as Timothy?
I have pointed out some of the pillars/institutions of ideological imperialism above.
These are the same conduits that are used to remove indigenous operating/epistemological systems.
To understand how such a system works just think of the computer.
When you buy the gadget it is blank.
You then take it to a specialist who installs an operating system.
This is the software or substance that enables it to perform tasks.
It is a box full of formulas.
You use these to command it to perform certain operations.
And take note the operating system can perform only those functions programmed. Outside its epistemological capability it ceases to function.
Let me illustrate this further.
If you type the word dura (granary), it shows ignorance because it is not part of the epistemological repertoire in it.
If I type my first name ‘Maruva’ (flowers), see the range of options it gives me: mauve, marina, marvel, etc.
Try yours and find out the range of displacing possibilities.
In short my name does not exist in the Western epistemological vocabulary.
Can you see the danger of your excitement about using google as the place of all answers?
The systematic marginalisation of your people’s knowledge system is the sum-total of Western epistemological imperialism.
Western epistemological imperialism works in subtle ways, but serving the same purpose.
For instance, there is a view that imperialism, as a historical practice, constitutes a deviation from Western civilisation and its conception of the universe, and that the adoption of the imperialist solution, which involves exporting problems to the rest of the world and hegemony over other nations, is inconsistent with being a ‘liberal’, ‘humane’, and ‘enlightened civilisation’ that has accepted ‘democracy’ as philosophy of government, ‘laissez-faire as its economic order’, and rationalism and humanism as universal philosophy.
Look closely at what I have underlined and you will see the lies they mask.
In fact these varied philosophies do not stand in contradiction to the imperialist epistemological vision.
Rather, there is a close link between these philosophies and the imperialist vision.
In order to be aware of such a link, it has to be recognised that all of these philosophies are secular in nature, in the sense that they do not admit of any philosophical system outside the domain of the materialistic order.
They all work for capitalism, the western capitalism.
Secularism is not a separation between ‘religion’ and the ‘state’, as propagated in Western writings.
Rather, it is the removal of absolute values-epistemological and ethical-from the world so that the entire world-humanity and nature- alike-becomes merely a utilitarian object to be utilised and subjugated.
From this standpoint, we can see the structural similarity between the Western epistemological vision and the imperialist epistemological vision.
We can also realise that imperialism is no more than the exporting of a secular epistemological and ethical paradigm from the Western world, where it first emerged, to the rest of the world.
This cumulative increase in the hegemony of materialist philosophies has been accompanied by a disregard of unhu/ubuntu, the African ethical philosophy and also the ‘beleaguered’ indigenous epistemological operating system.
Western epistemological structures have made sure that unhu/ubuntu has lost all absoluteness to materialistic toots.
There is no question that a capitalist economy, founded as it is on production, increasing production, and dominating markets, has contributed to entrenching this vision and rendering it an integral part of the acquisitive European’s conception of human nature.