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Afroepistemology & Cimmaron Pedagogy

by Jesús Chucho García

from the book Afrodescendencias: Voces en Resistencia

EUROPEAN NEGATION OF THE AFROSUBSAHARIAN PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE 

When Eurocentrism emerges it’s as a hegemonic political-ideological axis of domination, it does so on the basis of depreciation for the “others” peoples of the world, for totally economic purposes. And behind that, the disqualification of religious, intellectual and biological arguments. Institutions such as the Catholic Church, with blood and fire, impose on that “other world” the “Catholic” god, and for their part, the scientific communities of the time would see others – African beings – as the missing links among the monkeys or gorillas and the “humans.” Together, the religious and the scientific, become complicit in the emergence of a perspective of Eurocentric knowledge that would lead to a philosophy of contempt.

That philosophy of contempt became “Eurocentrism” and from there it developed into “universalism.” The “classic” Eurocentric arises as a result of geo-euro-narcissism. In short, the world began to revolve around Western Eurocentric hegemony.

In the 18th century with the most advanced intellectuals of Western Euro-geo-narcissism that philosophical essays appeared to justify thoughts that are unique, universal and vertical and to impose their Eurocentric knowledge and philosophy as an absolute truth that continues to endure to this day.

The time of the industrial revolution is the time of the consolidation of capitalism, the rise of the great European powers, where a discussion scenario will be created that will include the existence or not of God, the questioning of feudalism and its different modalities and the concept of the power of the reigns prolonged in the transfer of power to their descendants.

From that century, the prevailing vertical government models and their economic models for intensive exploitation purposes would arise not only for human beings but also for the sensitive planetary ecosystem. Reviewing the bibliography of that century is extremely important since it is from there that a form of thought would be built that will come to dominate the different European philosophical currents and its projection into conquered and colonized countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the so-called “Latin” America and the Caribbean which stripped them of the different ways of thinking and knowing the world.

In his extraordinary book Laurente Estéve (2002), criticizes these avant-garde thinkers of the 18th century. Estéve tells us that Montesquieu in his book “The spirit of the laws”, among other things, affirmed that: “most of the peoples of the Coast of Africa are wild or barbaric. They don’t have industries, they don’t have a point for art, they have precious metals in abundance that they get from the hands of nature. (Laurent, 2002: 162)

This vision about the “others” kind of the men would influenced the thinking of the independence heroes of the Americas, who spoke of the “lights”, failed to illuminate the Africans way of thinking and instead simplified it via obscurantism as “savagery”

This idea remained in Europe until the end of the 18th century, supported by Jean Jaques Rousseau, who believed in the improvement of human races through climate and education, believing that savages and orangutans could learn to speak and were able to reach the intelligence and science only with which they were granted. (Harris, 1982: 70-71)

The great philosophers like Kant (1982), Hegel, Hume and Voltaire would add to the construction of the philosophy of contempt. Immanuel Kant refers in his theoretical classics the following:

In the torrid countries man matures before in all aspects, but does not reach the perfection of temperate zones. The human race in its most perfect expression manifests itself in the white race. Indians and yellows have a meager talent. Blacks have an even lower level, and the lowest of all is that of a part of the American population. The inhabitants of the temperate zones are more beautiful physically, more workers, more cheerful, more moderate in their passions and more intelligent than any other human race in the world. (Kant, 1982: 78-79)

This expression by Kant about the cult of Western beauty is justification what I have called “euro/geonarcicism”. In his eagerness to disqualify aesthetics and the link with some scientific knowledge of Africans and their diaspora, Kant attacks, relying on another racist philosopher, the German David Hume (1711-1776), who argued that knowledge came from a high sensitivity, and according to him the Africans did not have enough sensitivity to achieve some kind of knowledge:

The blacks of Africa by nature lack a sensitivity that rises above the insignificant. Mr. Hume challenges to be presented with an example that a black man has shown talent, and states that among the hundreds of thousands transported to foreign lands, and although many of them have obtained freedom, not one has been found that has I have imagined something great art in art, in science or in any other honorable quality, while whites frequently present the case of those who, due to their superior conditions, rise from a humble state and conquer an advantageous reputation. (Kant, 1982)

Not content to denigrate the Afro-epistemological development that already existed in sub-Saharan Africa, they ignored that, for example, in what is now Mali, there were universities such as Sankore, a large Afro-epistemic training center located in Toumbuctu or commented on the journey of Abubaraki II to the lands of what is now called America.

Before the emergence of historical Eurocentrism there were already historians such as Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who systematized not only the history of the Middle East, but also built bridges with Africa:

Its monumental history of the Berbers is the most complete socio-historical study ever written about the Maghreb, in one of the volumes of this history it dedicates famous pages to the Mali empire. We owe him the list of the sovereigns of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries until the year 1390. The prolegomena constitute the basis of sociology and highlight the principles of a scientific and objective history, based on the criticism of the sources. (Niane, 1985: 25)

Eurocentric executioners also kill with silence, silencing the great historical contributions that are not in their circles and that is an evil that remains in a strong Eurocentric academic trend and reproduced with the assimilated academics of the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Two other fourteenth-century Arab researchers “Ibn Battuta and Al-’UMari in essence, show how many fruitful observations belied the stereotyped ideas of bookish culture” (Devise, 1985: 689).

Following the philosophy of contempt, embodied in Mr. Hume, let’s read how he attacks the Afrosubsaharan spiritual concept:

So essential is the difference between these two human races; It seems as great in spiritual faculties as color. The religion of the Fetithes, among them extended, is perhaps a kind of idolatrous cult that falls into the insignificant as deep as it seems possible in human nature. A bird’s feather, a cow horn, a shell or any other vulgar thing, once consecrated with some words, becomes the object of reverence and invocation in oaths. (Kant, 1982)

Once again, ignorance is expressed in this quotation for the domination of Europeans about African spirituality. It was not a fetish, as the European slave traders disparagingly placed the orishas, ​​voodoo or nkisis. It was not about idolatrous cults but about the three-dimensional relationship of the world of the living, the dead and those who will come in the future. Spirituality was and is part of the power of knowledge in the African tradition. What for Africa was already great knowledge settled at the beginning of the 10th century, for these social scientists of the 18th century, it was not knowledge, nor spirituality.

Long before the French declaration of the French revolution in the 18th century, the Kurukan Fuga letter, the first letter on rights and respect for the human being, was written in the former Mandinga empire in 1236. That letter also reflects respect for nature as part of spirituality. The Europeans of the “Enlightenment” never understood that the basis of African spirituality has to do with nature, the cosmos, as well as the relationship between physical death and continuity of life in a spiritual dimension. That these Eurocentric philosophers could not understand. They never understood what we call today as an afroepistemology.

For his part, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) said: “What we understand as Africa is the segregated and lacking history, that is, what is still wrapped in extremely primitive forms, which we have analyzed as a previous step before of venturing into universal history ”(Hegel, 1976: 9).

In that sense, the Russian researcher Dmitri A Olderogge, before this Hegel trial, argues that this conception greatly influenced linguists and historians, since that division of historical and non-historical peoples placed the former as engines of history “while that the passivity of the seconds would have kept them out of the spiritual development of humanity. According to Hegel there is no real historical evolution in Africa itself (Olderoge, 1979: 24).

The three essential aspects of Afroepistemology: knowledge, spirituality and human rights – which already existed in subsaharan Africa – were despised by Westerners to impose the philosophy of exclusion, racism and violence, and ignorance of the knowledge of others.

As it is expressed to us by the sage of Burkina Fasso, Joseph Ki-Zerbo (1922-2006):

The history of Africa, as of all mankind, is, in effect, the story of an awareness. The history of Africa must be rewritten because until now it has been frequently masked, camouflaged, disfigured and mutilated. By “the force of things”, that is to say by ignorance and interest. This continent that traumatized centuries of oppression has seen as generations of travelers, blacksmiths, explorers, missionaries, proconsuls and scholars from all over the world petrified the image of misery, barbarism, irresponsibility and chaos in their image. (Ki-Zerbo 1979: 7)

This rosary of contempt was imposed over the centuries, and even managed to permeate many African and Afro-descendant assimilated intellectuals who now despised their own history, hence the need to reconstruct memory and rewrite history as Ki-Zerbo poses.

Most European chroniclers in contact with sub-Saharan Africa described with their conceptual arsenal what for them was diabolical, bestial and that did not correspond to their “civilizational” model. Like the chroniclers of “Indians” or America, they described, within their respective ignorances, the unknown as fantastic, abnormal and monstrous expressing this in their drawings by placing their heads on the belly of men and women from “those lands.” But another aspect to note is that this philosophy of Eurocentric contempt desperately racialized, for economic purposes, the relationship between human beings as expressed by the former general director of UNESCO, Senegalese Amadou Mbo:

There is also another phenomenon that has significantly impaired the objective study of the African past. I refer to the appearance, with the trafficking of blacks and colonization, of racial clichés that generate contempt and misunderstanding and so deeply rooted that they even corrupted the very concepts of historiography. From the moment in which the nations of “whites” and “blacks” were resorted to generically designate masters and subjugated peoples, Africans had to fight against a double economic and psychological servitude. Recognizable by the pigmentation of the skin, destined for work in mines and on plantations, turned into a commodity like any other, the African came to embody, in the conscience of his oppressors, a racial essence. Imaginary and illusory inferior, black. (Mbo, 1979: 5)

The long process of structuring the psychological inferiority of the African being and his descendants – with the objective of economic exploitation by Europe – definitely marked the history of the peoples of Africa and their diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean space. The dominant Catholic religion, both in Africa and in the Americas, contributed greatly to the psychological introjection of the inferiority of a white, superior God, before the Afro-sub-Saharan gods and turned into demons.

Westerners were sure that spirituality constituted a form of resistance, hence the dominant religion became a coercive instrument to erase the African worldview, since this was a danger to break these underestimation stereotypes.

Eliminating the languages ​​of the Africans to impose that of the communicationist, since language is a factor of unity and permanent struggle, was an instrument of cultural degradation fiercely used by the West to achieve its goal of psycholinguistic domination.

In Africa they imposed the colonial languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, today Portuguese, French and English are dominant in most Afro-Sub-Saharan countries. They tried to make the different ethnic groups feel ethnolinguistic shame in order to better assimilate, colonize and recolonize them.

In the diaspora, colonialism did not accept ethnolinguistic communication, hence they mixed men and women of one ethnic origin with another so that they could only communicate with the language of the master. In the diaspora the essential aspects of languages ​​of African origin were only reduced in religious spaces, especially the Yoruba, Kikongo, Efik-Efok and Fon languages.

The person’s name, as it is known in Africasubsahariana, represents a story, a symbol, a tradition. That was very clear to the colonialists as a factor of domination, hence in Africa and in the diaspora they tried to erase the name of ethnic origin. In the Kongo Dia Ntotela (today Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Brazzaville), the kings or Ntotelas assimilated to Catholicism assumed Catholic names like Joao I, whose original name was Nzinga Nkuwu.

In the diaspora, few names were preserved of African origin. However, many ethnonyms were preserved mainly in Afro-Colombian, Afro-Ecuadorian, Afro-Basel communities, such as Arara, Matamba, Luango, Mina, Lucumi, among others. The names of places (place-names) of African origin were also preserved to be preserved in memory, such as Birongo, Mandinga, Yanga, among other towns and places in the Americas.

African spirituality is the basis of his philosophy, it is what gives him understanding and perception of the world, hence the slave trade and slavery tried both in African territories and in the diaspora to combat symbols, oracles and worldview , which they did not achieve. As the Yoruba philosophy says “Bí Olórun oba mi idá mi nì mò nse”, that is to say “I am as my God has created me”.

APPROXIMATION TO AFROEPISTEMOLOGY

Afroepistemology is the knowledge and perception that we Africans and their descendants have of our own worlds, our worldview, our ways of being, gesturing, walking, loving, being, sharing. That vision is the basis of the social construction of knowledge without it being mediated by others. Our world is our world, which we can share with others on equal terms. Thus we have built our philosophy of African dignity, as opposed to the philosophy of contempt elaborated by the Eurocentric vision.

African and Afro-descendant philosophy, at a time being questioned by some African academic scholars “assimilated” to the European philosophical pattern, does not emerge or emerge as a response to Eurocentrism. It exists and period. As the Nigerian, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Wole Soyinka, said, “the tiger does not say his tigritud … jumps.”

The Encyclopedists and intellectuals of the Enlightenment never gave a thought to the idea that there could be an African philosophy, or at least an African worldview different from that of Europeans, made invisible, denied, ignored within their own ignorance the African philosophical and historical currents as result, first of their own developments as a result of the civilizations existing in that continent and secondly by the contact with Islam in an ebb and flow, exchanges, adaptation and retraining, taking as an example the dialogic relationship between the former Mali Empire structured by the leader Bambara (Mandinga) Sundjata Keita at the end of the 13th century and the visit Kanku Musa, Keita’s nephew, to Mecca and his stay in Cairo in 1336. Subsequently, “the successor of Sundjata, who was his son Mansa Uli, made a pilgrimage to Mecca during the time of Mamluk Sultan Baybars. The Islamic concept of the empire (Mali) took shape under the power of Mansa Musa and his brother Mansa Sulayman (1341-1360), who favored the construction of mosques and the development of Islamic knowledge” (Herbek, 1992: 99).

This connection between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, through Islam, came to strengthen Afro-epistemology, long before the arrival of the West.

Mali had become an important reference for the world at that time with the creation of Sankore University and became the most important reference in sub-Saharan Africa for the spread of Islam.

CONCEPTUALIZING AFROPHILOSOPHY

For a long time the West was defined by a monopoly of knowledge, arbitrarily defining what is and is not science, or what is and is not philosophy, of course they tried to castrate the diversity of thought. However, as some African authors say the Africanity of our philosophy resides, as Hountondji said, above all in the geographical belonging of those who produce it and in the intellectual relationship. As a consequence, to speak of African philosophy is to designate the authors of this philosophy and the recipients and affirm that they are all African natives or African cultural heirs of an African nature and descent (Kinyongo, 1983: 414).

If we believe AJ Smet’s claims that the problem of the existence of an African philosophy has been raised for the first time by P. Tempels in 1944, his predecessors had not used the term philosophy only in the sense psychology and wisdom (Kinongo, 1983).

That the Reverend Tempels was raised in the context of philosophical contempt on the part of Europe the existence of another way of thinking, especially in Africa, was undoubtedly a heresy.

But philosophy without historical knowledge has little foundation. That is why the binomial philosophy and historical knowledge go hand in hand, one justifies the other.

Hence this extraordinary reflection of Amadou Mbo, when, UNESCO, begins the process of writing the general history of Africa.

For a long time, myths and prejudices of all kinds have hidden the real history of Africa from the world. African societies were held by societies that could not have history. Despite the important work carried out, since the first decades of this century (20th century), by pioneers such as Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse, Arturo Labriola, a good number of non-African specialists linked to certain postulates held that these societies did not they could be subject to scientific study, mainly due to lack of sources and written documents. (Mbo, 1985: 13)

These North African specialists had an approach to sub-Saharan Africa based on the works of the chroniclers, logbooks of the captains of the slave ships, report of the colonial administrators, colonizing Catholic priests and travelers. On the other hand, if some of them were physically in “those remote corners” of the planet or as the novelist Joseph Conrad said “in the heart of darkness”, the perception they had was prejudiced perception. Very few, such as the French ethnographer Marcel Grileau, took into account the “word of the elders” or the connoisseurs of African cultures, the case of the Dogon in Mali, as well as the segmented spiritualities in a story that gave and gives sense of town

Returning to Amathar Mbo, it reminds us:

Although The Iliad and the Odyssey could rightly be considered essential sources of ancient Greece, however, all value to the African oral tradition was denied, that memory of the peoples that provides the plot of so many events that have marked their lives. When writing the history of a part of Africa, they were limited to outside sources of this continent, to give a vision not of what the march of the African peoples could be, but of what was believed to be. Frequently, as the European average age, production systems and social relations, as well as political institutions, were taken as a point of reference, they were only understood by reference to Europe’s past. (Mbo, 1985)

Today we are facing an other reality. It is a long process of demystifying the epistemic contribution of sub-Saharan Africa to humanity. Already the works of intellectuals such as Cheikh Anta Diop made these contributions very clear. Subsequently, the successive meetings organized by UNESCO since 1966 between Africa and America have left an important mark to rebuild it. These Eurocentric approaches today are questioned both from the emergence of new academic practices and from the spiritual practices of Afro-Saharan and diaspora carriers.

THE CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC POLICIES IN EDUCATION

It is pedagogy, understanding how the daily practices of transmission of the substrate of the knowledge of civilizations, is one of the fundamental tools to resume our Afro-epistemology. The West tried to impose, and still continues to do, two types of pedagogy. The first was the pedagogy of submission, where the church played a fundamental role through forced religious practices. That pedagogy was expressed in a rosary of recommendations to cleanse the soul of sin to our ancestors and ancestors, erase spiritual practices, changing names, eliminating tongues until kneeling before the cross and before God on earth represented by the Catholic / Apostolic and Roman ecclesiastical power and formerly the master and today the power of wild capitalism. Evangelization was the masterpiece of the pedagogy of submission, then it became in the words of Pablo Freire, the pedagogy of the oppressed (1970). That is, the introjection of oppression as hopelessness. The other pedagogy was that of reproduction, understanding it as the process of assimilating the contemptuous knowledge of the other towards us, reproduced in the formal educational system with a well structured and castrating curriculum about our ancestral knowledge.

Preserving the cultural codes which originated in Africa, having gone through long traumatic processes of slavery, racism and discrimination, is not simply an act of heroism, it is an act of resilience, that is, having had a high coefficient of struggle against adversity. But to preserve those cultural codes expressed in the touches of the different rhythmic cells of the drums, in the codes of ethics (human values), cuisine, hair styles, among others, a technique, a methodical one was needed to transmit all those codes. That is what we call Maroon pedagogy, and we say Maroon for having traversed the times and obstacles that the dominant sectors placed on the road.

These pedagogical practices, recognized or not by the academy and the formal education system, have managed to overcome denigration and substation. Transmitting, conserving and resizing Cimarroan Pedagogy was, is and will continue to be a permanent fight against adversity. The pedagogical practices of the cimarronaje are in open and permanent struggle against the practices of the pedagogy of reproduction. Both coexist in the formal and non-formal education system, it is a totally antagonistic contradiction that is in us and ourselves.

The pedagogical practices of reproduction are all those vertical attitudes of the facilitator or teacher in the educational system in the transmission of Eurocentric knowledge. They express the centrality of power and knowledge. They are practical, castrating and totally contemptuous towards diversity, difference and rejection of possible complementarities between academically legitimated knowledge and socially and culturally produced knowledge.

Cimarron pedagogies have the purpose of fostering our knowledge of both Africa and the diaspora. It is a challenge that we, the Afro-descendant teachers in alliance with those who have conserved, recreated and innovated the original cultures of Africa in all their diversity, have to accept. It is pedagogy of the cimarronaje, the forms from the musical perspectives expressed in the development of more than one hundred and sixty rhythms of the Batas drums in the Ocha rule, as well as their different dances. The practices of maroon pedagogies in food patterns of Afrosubsaharan origin, as well as in the field of aesthetics and ethical contributions for the construction of fairer and more humane societies. Afroepistemology and Pedagogy of Cimarronaje is a proposal that should invite us to break the molds of folkloric or fetish reductionism to which we have been subjected by Western sciences denying all diversity. It is the search for our own paradigms in the framework of the Decade of Afro-descendant peoples that add to the incessant process of reconstruction and reconstruction of our history full of pain and hope.

It is urgent to implement in the educational systems of Latin America and the Caribbean the contributions of Africa and its descendants to our societies in two fundamental aspects: First modify the laws that govern our educational systems, for example in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela after a process In the struggle with Afro-descendant teachers and traditionalists, we achieved that in our new Education Law (2009), our African was recognized. Second, review the curricula and incorporate in them the historical, cultural, technological, spiritual aspects among others of the Africans and their descendants. 

Former president Lula did this in Brazil with the compulsory teaching of specific texts on the history of Africans and their descendants and the translation of the eight volumes of the General History of Africa into Portuguese. At the meeting of the creation of CELAC in Caracas in 2011, agreement No. 17 states, “the participation of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the independence struggles and recognizing their moral, political, economic, spiritual and cultural contributions in the conformation of our identities and in the construction of our nations and democratic processes ”(CELAC, 2011).

This recognition, together with the recognition that our governments must make to the Decade of Afro-descendant Peoples, serves as an anchor to support us as academics and activists to press the educational public policies of our countries.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA 

CELAC 2011 Declaración de la Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (Caracas: CELAC). 

Devisse, J. 1985 “África en las relaciones intercontinentales” en Historia General de África (Madrid: Unesco). 

Freire, P. 1970 Pedagogía del Oprimido (Montevideo: Tierra Nueva) 

Hegel, G. F. W. 1976 Filosofía de la Historia (Buenos Aires: Claridad). 

Herbek, I. 1992 “La expansión del islam en África hacia el sur del Sahara” en Historia General de África. (Madrid: Unesco). 

Hernández, A. et. al. s/f Las ideas Racista y búsqueda de la identidad 

Mexicana. (Zaragoza: Facultad de Estudios Superiores, UNAM). Kant, I. 1982 Lo bello y lo sublime (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe) séptima edición.

Kinyongo, J. 1982 La philosophie africaine et son histoire en Les etudes philosophiques (París: Presses Universitaires de France). Ki-Zerbo, J. 1979 Un continente en busca de su pasado (París: El correo de la Unesco) agosto-septiembre.

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Olderogge, D. A. 1979 Los homínidos africanos contra una teoría errónea (París: Correo de la Unesco) agosto-septiembre.