Rethinking the future of Humanities in Africa and the question of epistemological agency

Abstract

Using Bergson’s theory of history and Foucault’s concept of knowledge as power, among others, the paper argues that the field of Humanities in Africa should be reconceptualised into African Humanities in order to effect what Deleuze and Guattari have defined as conceptual self-semiotisation. The discipline must undertake, as in the past, a continual critique of the concept of the human subject, but without dethroning it as proposed by some Post-structuralists. It must focus on how globalisation, science and technology impinge on the formation of subjectivity in Africa, including Malawi. Moreover, it must enact a strategic epistemological self-determination by appropriating, adapting and reconstituting received dominant theories and practices, which entails being both counter-hegemonic and consciously, but selectively, part of the dominant formation. It offers other strategies for implementing that shift, such as the deployment of the historical traditions of epistemological resistance as well as cultural and political decolonisation, as those advanced by Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka, Chimombo, Oruka and Wiredu, among others.

Keywords: African, Malawi, Epistemology, Human, Humanities, Subject