African Indigenous Knowledge and the Sciences: Journeys into the Past and Present (Anti-Colonial Educational Perspectives for Transformative Change, 4)

This book is an intellectual journey into epistemology, pedagogy, physics, architecture, medicine and metallurgy. The focus is on various dimensions of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) with an emphasis on the sciences, an area that has been neglected in AIK discourse. The authors provide diverse views and perspectives on African Indigenous scientific and technological knowledge that can benefit a wide spectrum of academics, scholars, students, development agents, and policy makers, in both governmental and non-governmental organizations, and enable critical and alternative analyses and possibilities for understanding science and technology in and African historical and contemporary context. This text explores the multidisciplinary context of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems from scholars and scholar activists committed to the interrogation, production, articulation, dissemination and general development of endogenous and indigenous modes of intellectual activity and praxis. The work reinforces the demand for the decolonization of the academy and makes the case for a paradigmatic shift in content, subject matter and curriculum in institutions in Africa and elsewhere - with a view to challenging and rejecting disinformation and intellectual servitude. Indigenous intellectual discourses related to diverse disciplines take center stage in this volume with a focus on education, mathematics, medicine, chemistry and engineering in their historical and contemporary context