Orature as an appropriate communal-based data-collection method in an Indigenous Science context: “Whose sciences are we talking about?”

Abstract

The paper seeks to locate the place of an Africa-centred epistemology from a post-postmodernism view in intellectual enquiry. This innovation emerged through exploring current methodologies used in the National Research foundation and Department of Science and Innovation funded project in South Africa; namely the Seboka research team, as a case study for engagement with the knowledge economy through collaborative work with the indigenous rural communities in Africa. Against the backdrop of Africa’s paradigm shift from orality to canonicity in the creation and preservation of indigenous knowledge sciences, the paper taps into the resourcefulness of verbal arts and African heritage passed down orally over the years as an age-old data collection method. The nuanced projectile between ‘calabash’ and ‘cyberspace’ notwithstanding, the paper makes a case around the need to honour and recognize African society’s old retainers (the hands-on repositories and transmitters of African society’s philosophies and applied existential wisdom) into the mainstream of the continent’s ever-evolving research work. This ground-breaking submission that ‘Western medicine is broken’ occasions a platform for Africa to seek recourse to home-grown solutions – tapping into the core of African ontology – in order to provide suitable remedies, therapies, antidotes and immunity boosters best-fitted for the children of mother Africa. By extension, the paper contends that an Africa-centred approach to intellectual enquiry is not limited to health sciences only, but it encompasses all aspects of African culture, lifestyle, heritage, history, arts, dreams and aspirations. Such an acknowledgement is needful if African philosophies are to amicably co-exist with other differently constituted philosophical moorings as necessitated by dynamic imperatives of the global village. The research particularly illuminates the application of orature as a data-collection method in a communal context. This method showcases the merits of community partnership that proves its worth as key custodians and stakeholders in the generation and preservation of a priceless heritage. The latter respectfully speaks to the limitations of conventional research methods ordinarily adopted in the claustrophobic confines of university red-brick walls and ivory towers. This study notably adopts a philosophical acceptance of African culture as a rewarding entry point into the mother continent’s self-contained body of knowledge.