- by Onah Gideon Owogeka
I think that the most sensible explanation we can give to the philosophical and scientific condition of Sub Saharan Africa at the point of western invasion, that is consistent with history and the glaring fact that race is an arbitrary construct; that colour doesn’t have any necessary connection with one’s cognitive competence is indeed very simple. It is the inclusion of an unfettered epistemic gerontocracy in it’s system of values or culture.
The place of unfettered epistemic gerontocracy in pre-colonial African culture is very strategic; it was the enforcement agency of the values of the time, it ensured the preservation of other values in the culture as well as itself. Bringing up children to believe that the elders and their traditions are sacrosanct, given the absence of encounters with different paradigms as has been made possible today by globalization, creates an epistemic dependence on elders and their traditions which ultimately translate into mental docility and inept. By this standard, your curiosity must be kept to yourself. The strategic situation of epistemic gerontocracy ensures cyclicity- the permanence of an order through a single reoccurring pattern of defence. So the elders/parents would convey the body of knowledge it has been able to discover to the offspring while also instructing the absolute epistemic superiority of the elders, the offspring turned elders sends the same message to the next generation; implicit in this process is the establishment of mental docility/inept as curiosity that leads to questioning beyond those issues whose answers are obvious is discouraged. This continues on and on… This was the systematic inhibitor of intellectual development in Africa.
The question of why such a draconian value was developed at any point of the lives of our ancestors isn’t of significant concern to me because it doesn’t prove nor disprove anything about the condition of the brain of a black person, what is important to me is that I have found a rational and true explanation.
Ignorance of the above led to a shared misconception by both our ancestors and the colonial masters that the black person was genetically inferior, especially in regards to the mental faculty.
The internalized racial profiling of the cognitive competence of a black person by academics and other stakeholder in our society, which evokes a consistent dependence on western and sometimes oriental scholars and theorist for answers to questions in Africa and for validation is indeed a bane to Africa.
Sadly, the validation of the inferiority complex is reinforced as the day goes by, by the epistemic gerontocracy because the critical skills and imaginative virtues of most members of our society are not allowed to flourish especially in the periods when they have been proven to work at optimum level- I mean the youth and childhood stage of life. Thus the culture of its docility is formed and even when these persons get to the age of epistemic relevance- when they become elders too- the manifestation of critical thinking and imagination is scarcely found.
The only intellectual virtue that thrives considerably well in our society is retention; you should know why.
Due to all this, contextualizing the copied theories can be very hard, because even maximizing the utility from what is being copied requires ingenuity and no doubt, ingenuity is most often than not a product of critical thinking and imagination- both of which are product of curiosity and questioning- habits that thrives in non epistemically gerontocratic environment.
These sums up to stifle substantive academic or intellectual development from our institutions, especially our universities. By this I mean revolutionary development, what we can refer to as breakthroughs.
Critics might want to say the basic problem lies in inadequate funding. In response to this I will like potential critics to take give me a statistics of the revolutionary breakthroughs that occurred in our universities in the periods when there were much better funded, especially in the humanities and social sciences and especially also their effect on the community. Funding is very important but we must think about our educational ills beyond factors that are quantifiable and also consider those non quantifiable factors important, not doing this is a function of what Tiang Wang calls the quantificational bias- thinking quantifiable variables are the only relevant variables.
Realizing the cause of the low level of technological, philosophical and scientific development in Sub-Saharan Africa takes away racial profiling of our cognitive competence and the annihilation of epistemic gerontocracy in Nigeria in all spheres of our lives, especially education institutions is the way to liberate our minds towards intellectual/academic breakthroughs from our institutions of learning. Another issue I intend to address in the future is the pedagogic component of primary education because I feel a loot has to be done there in order to ensure maximum productivity.
If you are looking for something to fight, ageism is available.What we ought to do as individuals and groups in response to the above is implicit in our understanding of what has been said. It is our onus to think it out.