Indigenous Knowledge and Its Expression in the Folklore of Africa

Abstract

Knowledge has often been racialized by Europeans who want to claim it as only theirs. From the time the West started to see Africans and their descendants as the “Other,” Africa has been depicted as a tabula rasa, which connotes that Africans have no civilization or imagination that carries any knowledge. The concept of the “Other” was perpetrated in imperialist and colonial discourses. In the binaries created by Westerners, they (Westerners) had knowledge and Africans were ignorant; the West was superior and Africa was inferior (Jarosz 1992; Bhabha 1994).