“Indigenous knowledge” : Conceptions and misconceptions

‘Indigenous knowledge’ is a relatively recent buzz phrase that, amongst other things, constitutes part of a challenge to ‘western’ education. Apologists of indigenous knowledge not only maintain that its study has a profound effect on education and educational curricula but emphasise its significance in antiracist, antisexist and postcolonialist discourse, in general, and in terms of the ‘African Renaissance’, in particular. In this paper, I argue the following: (1) ‘indigenous knowledge’ involves at best an incomplete, partial or, at worst, a questionable understanding or conception of knowledge; (2) as a tool in antidiscrimination and anti-repression discourse (e.g. driving discussions around literacy, numeracy, poverty alleviation and development strategies in Africa), ‘indigenous knowledge’ is largely inappropriate. I show, further, that in the development of ‘knowledge’, following some necessary conceptual readjustments in our understanding of this term, there is considerably greater common ground than admitted by theorists. It is this acknowledgement, not lip service to a popular concept of debatable relevance, that has profound educational and ethical consequences