Africa’s Knowledge and the Quest for Epistemic Liberation in a COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The emergence of COVID-19 since the end of 2019, its spread across the whole world, and the subsequent search for possible ways of stop** its spread like medicines and vaccines has reignited the questions around the status of African knowledge and the need for its epistemic liberation. The appeal to, and potential of African indigenous medicines in a time of crisis like the one caused by COVID-19 might have serious implications to human health that may be examined elsewhere. However, such a quest for African indigenous knowledge could be taken as a harbinger to some of the most fundamental questions of African knowledge production and epistemic liberation. In this chapter, I argue that the responses to the pandemic have shown that there is serious need for genuine epistemic liberation with regard to African knowledge. In my discussion, I consider some philosophical arguments around the perceptions and status of African knowledge in the fight against COVID-19. These philosophical arguments are mainly informed by the discourse on the potential and status of African indigenous knowledge and African indigenous medicine. Ultimately, I seek to expose the nature of epistemic injustice facing Africa’s knowledge paradigm emanating from the influences of the Euro-American knowledge paradigms. Despite its potential towards the fight against the pandemic and how it could contribute to knowledge production in general, African knowledge continues to face epistemic injustice, thus reminding us of the need for its epistemic liberation as I will show.