Science | The imposition of the Eurocentric paradigm still restrains Western acknowledgement of African worldview
*By Simone Dias Marques
*First published in August 1st, 2024
*Photo: Gustavo Diehl/JU-Arquivo
Historically, scientific knowledge has diminished Africa and its descendants, often depicting them as primitive people who have contributed little to humanity. This viewpoint was sustained by allegedly superior European perspectives, disqualifying Africans as thinkers and disregarding the history of science in Africa.
Science is essentially an extensive and diverse field. Different cultures and perspectives enhance the understanding of the world around us. However, in the face of the traditional scientific method, which tends to fragment knowledge, favoring some views at the expense of others, the debate on African endogenous knowledge becomes imperative – not only as a valid field of study, but also as a cornerstone for cultural and epistemic emancipation.
Western scientific knowledge, whose grounds date back to the Modern Age, is a result of Eurocentric imperialism, and, as such, it was historically driven by capital accumulation and colonial policies. In a colonial conception, societies shaped by European colonialism are framed in dualities, such as colonizer and colonized, dominant and subordinate groups, white and black people. Coloniality of knowledge therefore refers to the hierarchization and marginalization of some epistemologies in relation to Eurocentric knowledge.
According to Kabengele Munanga, anthropologist and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo (USP), the concept of colonial situation suggests “power relations between the several social actors within the colony, a globalized society divided into two antagonistic and unequal spheres: the colonial society and the colonized society”.
Due to colonialist views, any other knowledge system was considered primitive and thus marginalized and erased. Eurocentrism sees Western reality as ‘universal’, and promotes white rationalism as the standard model for science and the human condition. However, Africa holds distinct worldviews and ancient knowledge that have endured for centuries, despite ongoing efforts of erasure and historicide.
Ancient endogenous knowledge: an interconnected whole
“There is a colonialist viewpoint that assumes all Africans think alike and share the same opinions. The colonialist view disregards the plurality of opinions of an oral civilization”, told Paulin Hountondji in a 2022 interview to Radio France Internationale. Born in Benin, Hountondji was one of Africa’s most important philosophers, being a critic of the way African science and philosophy were portrayed in the West. His critique of the European worldview helped to unfold African intellectual life. He passed away at the age of 81, in February, 2024.
In the 1980s, Hountondji wrote L’ancien et le Nouveau: La production du savoir dans l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui (Ancient and Modern: Knowledge Production in Africa Today, in a free translation). This work proposed an analysis and comparison between modern Western science and ancient African knowledge, while also compiling studies on endogenous knowledge. José Rivair Macedo, professor at UFRGS’ Graduate Program in History and researcher of History of Ancient African Societies, explains that “Africans prefer to use the term endogenous knowledge to distinguish it from scientific knowledge, as the former is acquired through a connection with nature and the cosmos”.
Endogenous knowledge is acquired in rituals that demonstrate this connection to the environment. Therefore, in African societies – as well as in Amerindian and Indigenous societies –, the assumption of distance and separation between the individual and other objects does not exist: “Everything is interconnected, the energy is interconnected to nature, to humans and to what we call spiritual dimension”, adds Macedo.
Professor Macedo also emphasizes that our perception of science is a product of the Western culture we are immersed in, which is why it is so difficult to visualize and understand non-exclusive worldviews, especially those that do not conform to the norms of modern rationalism. This challenge exists “regardless of our skin color, as even a black Western person’s way of thinking is entrenched in a white culture and shaped by this notion of science”.
As Macedo explains, the keyword to an exclusive scientific process is secularization, which, combined with the notion of individual, separates men from nature and the sacred in a process called anthropocentrization. This process was well illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which, as a portrait of Renaissance ideals, reflects the transition from the medieval focus on God and the divine to a perspective that placed man at the center of the universe. It also represents rational thinking, as it uses mathematical proportions to frame an universal order and emphasize the value of logical thinking and scientific understanding.
The man placed at the center of the circle is detached from nature. “Gaston Bachelard and other Western epistemologists report that this process of detachment between subject and object is what defines the scientific method, allowing for the object’s analysis, classification, and interpretation through inspection”, Macedo claims.
Within the Eurocentric scientific perspective, this procedure is what validates produced knowledge. “Only the West considers the atomic individual a thinking being who, shaped by modern rationalism, is capable of functioning and interacting with others and with different realities. African, Indigenous, and Eastern societies have not followed this path”, he points out.
This reasoning was introduced to the world by Europeans, especially from the 19th century onward, as the values of Industrial and Scientific Revolutions were part of civilizing processes within colonization. Therefore, Africa holds more than traditional knowledge alone, since many territories within the continent were former Western countries’ colonies. “Africans assimilated Western scientific knowledge, and, because of that, they have both traditional and non-traditional knowledge”, Macedo mentions.
So far, the world still seems to be split between Western and African countries, black and white people. For Márcio Luis da Silva Paim, who holds a Master’s degree in Ethnic and African Studies from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), in order to understand these societies’ scientific contributions, it is first necessary to look at the geographic spread of ancient melanodermic populations from Africa to the Middle East. He points out that, in Brazil, the history of African peoples is addressed closely to enslavement when it should, in fact, look back to the origins and evolution of the human species that took place in Africa 7 million years ago.
“What does this illustrate? It is how distant we are from comprehending Africa’s history, just to slightly demonstrate the gulf between the contributions of the African continent and our understanding of it.”
Márcio Luis da Silva Paim
Paim, who is also a PhD student in History at UFRGS, explains that the first population movement in Africa occurred approximately 2.5 to 1 million years ago; the second one happened around 300 thousand years ago – by that time, Homo sapiens sapiens had already emerged. For Paim, the very concept of diaspora has to be reconsidered, as people have left the African continent a few times throughout history.
“If you search for the concept of diaspora in a dictionary, you will realize it means dispersion, spreading. It is impossible to understand the significance of African scientific contribution if you do not take human evolution – which took place in Africa – as the starting point. One of the main reasons for the lack of comprehension of its scientific legacy is this colonial approach”, Paim highlights.
As a result of these population movements, the human species began to inhabit different areas in the African continent, leading to the emergence of melanodermic civilizations in the period from 5000 BCE to 1500 BCE. “Black and white are very recent concepts. Ancient history is utterly melanodermic. According to the genetics and molecular biology fields, those peoples were dark-skinned. There were no leucodermic, depigmented populations prior to that. That is why I prefer to talk about scientific contributions of melanodermic populations instead”, Paim explains. He reinforces the need for a broader perspective, as those peoples have left Africa to occupy other continents, adapting to its geography and building their own knowledge. “African scientific contribution cannot be limited to the African continent.”
According to Paim, broadening this perspective requires looking at places beyond Egypt as well. Because of dispersions, there were melanodermic populations in Turkey, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, and even in countries within the Iberian Peninsula, such as Portugal and Spain – that is, the whole world was occupied by melanodermic peoples who had left Africa, the birthplace of humankind. The human depigmentation process began only around 4500 BCE.
Although recent research has challenged the idea of Africa as the locus of humanity, this theory remains widely accepted in the scientific community. “The hominization process starts there with Homo erectus, and Africa has proven contribution in the humanization process, especially regarding basic human knowledge, such as our relation with nature, body, and sensations – it all emerged there”, argues Macedo.
Sky and Earth in African cosmology: an archive of stories
Formed by 54 countries, the African continent has an endless amount of regions, cultures, and languages. Angola alone is home to nearly 20 African languages, many of which belong to the Bantu language family. However, the colonial process has exploited, plundered, and enslaved the continent, twisting its imaginary and history. This was a mechanism known as epistemicide, which aimed at eradicating African knowledge and culture as a means to ensure its peoples’ subordination. Africa has long been portrayed as primitive by the West as a way to erase its scientific contributions and reinforce stereotypes of primitivism and exoticism – Hollywood movies are an example of that.
What is certain is that the economic, political, and cultural domination by the West resulted in the establishment of a hierarchy of knowledge and epistemological perspectives, in which the oppressor’s view is the prevailing one. “It is not possible to speak of African culture as something homogeneous. There are manifold experiences and different notions of space and time that need to be contextualized, discussed, and introduced as legitimate knowledge in education programs from a young age”, argues Alan Alves Brito, astrophysicist and doctor in Science from USP. Professor at UFRGS’s Institute of Physics, he carries out research activities at the Center for Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous, and African Studies of the university, working primarily with the culture of Yoruba, Kongo-Angola (Bantu), Fon, Dogon, Akan, and Egyptian peoples.
According to Brito, for these peoples the Sky-Earth relationships are intrinsic to life’s dynamic: “Sky and Earth are seen as dualistic concepts instead of binary and exclusive. That is why we also refer to cosmoperception alongside worldview: these other cosmological perspectives encompass all senses, not only the Western ‘vision’.”
Orality is also an important part of this process. “Sky and Earth are a library, an archive of stories, memories, and oral traditions that were subjugated, subordinated, and diminished by the particular way in which European people – and groups originated in Europe – thought of and felt the Universe. These people established themselves in a privileged position of describing, interpreting, and ruling nature”, Brito claims.
In this perspective, the Sky-Earth relationships experienced and cultivated by African peoples help to demonstrate the dynamism and continuous change of the very concept of science.
“Moreover, it highlights that Sky and Earth work as a continuum, and, in this regard, humans and non-humans are connected with nature. Thus, there are entirely different cosmoperceptions, which is why these other Sky-Earth relationships are crucial to defy historical, philosophical, epistemological, and ontological views of science, technology, space, time, progress, innovation, and knowledge building.”
Alan Alves Brito
As everything is interconnected in African worldview, it becomes hard to explain African science according to Western standards – in a positivist, rational, exogenous, and binary way –, which aggravates its obliteration or, at least, its lack of acknowledgement by European epistemology and ontology. “I do not use astronomy as a term to describe the relationship of ancient African peoples, since it is Eurocentric. Astronomy based on an European perspective is currently being developed in Africa. I have reservations, as most of the astrophysicists at their observatories now are white. This also explains why talking about ‘scientific findings’ is complicated, since the very concept of astronomy appears in the 17th century; so I prefer to use the term Sky-Earth”, Brito remarks.
However, that is not to say that African scientists and thinkers have not tried to adapt to these standards – which is still a subject of philosophical debate to this day. In any case, “recently, many African countries have begun carrying out research activities in astronomy and space science, focusing first on institutional development, human capacity building, scientific research, and network. There are astrophysics projects in the optical, radio, and high energy bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as projects for building satellites”, says Brito.
He also recalls the historical debate, along with its controversies, on cosmological models, calendars, and explanations of the world developed by the Dogon peoples. Brito mentions their knowledge of the Milky Way’s structure and of bright stars, which were associated with their celebrations, as well as their understanding of solar system bodies, Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings – all long before Galileo.
Muniz Sodré: force, strength, and joy in the African worldview
For Muniz Sodré, sociologist and professor emeritus at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), “African wisdom” simply does not exist: “The word wisdom seems prejudiced to me. Would you speak of ‘European’ or ‘North-American wisdom’? It is the same with Africa. There is also no ‘African wisdom’ as a single whole”. Sodré explains that, although African and Eastern perspectives share certain similarities, some African and European worldviews differ significantly from each other.
Sodré’s book Pensar Nagô (Nagô Thinking, in a free translation) was, according to him, an attempt to address the terreiro thought: “I tried to show how this perspective constitutes, in my opinion, an African rooted way of thinking that focuses on community thought instead of on certain philosophers. A few singularities of the terreiro worldview oppose the European worldview.” Sodré classifies these singularities into three categories: force, strength, and joy, neither of which separates subject from object.
“European epistemic and scientific reasoning leads to trade, technology, and deep subject-object detachment. The subject perceives the object, which, in turn, makes itself perceived; the division is necessary to understand the object that is, in theory, lifeless. It is similar to mathematical knowledge: it is precise because its objects are lifeless idealities, and, as such, can be considered universal. You can only perceive an inert object. In medical science, as well, the body was understood only through cadaver dissection”, compares Sodré.
The African thought is the opposite. “Nature is alive. But what does this mean? It means that all of its entities have the same force, a power of fulfillment that at Bahia’s terreiros is called axé: axé of the blood (the red axé), axé of the plants (the green axé), and axé of the earth – the wealth earth provides us with and which is, therefore, a source of force.”
Force is life. As an example, Sodré addresses the 2024 Porto Alegre floods, demonstrating that “the river cannot stand nonporous cement, it cannot stand being suffocated; even dams are not the best way to restrain the water flow, because it is suffocating. Thus plants, fish, water, everything is interconnected to the subject – the human being.”
The relativization of subject-object division is a defining feature of African thought. “This is the matter of the Anthropocene: the Earth as Gaia, a living entity, in which we are in constant relation with all the objects around us, rather than separated from them. It is the division that brings climate and ecological disasters and diseases. In African thought, we might be different, but we cannot be separated. This is the ‘ubuntu’, a concept which, either as a noun or a verb, means ‘I am because we are’ – that is, that we are in the same logic of existence.” Sodré explains that this concept involves both human and non-human beings.
The second category of African thought is strength. Yet, this is not physical strength (Agbara). Sodré illustrates: “Let’s say someone pushes me, and I push them back. This is physical. However, in axé concepts, strength is symbolic and it relates to the power of fulfillment. If someone pushes me, I will not push them back because I did not stagger. I get stronger somehow, weakening whoever pushed me. It is a power, an inherent capacity”.
The power of fulfillment comprises several aspects. In comparison to Western culture, it is possible to say that money fills this role as an instrument of power. “In an African perspective, this endless power is to feed the family; having kids is part of the power of fulfillment, it is axé. This force comprises financial, physical, moral, sexual, and libidinous aspects of the individual. In a Western viewpoint, the libidinous power is to dominate others. There is, then, an important philosophical distinction between power and force”, Sodré highlights.
In addition, the sociologist mentions another dissimilarity relating to the sacred relationship with the divine. There are countless African and Eastern mythologies, some even in parts of Egypt and Iraq. However, what exists is integration, not omnipotence: in African cult, although there is a supreme deity (Olodumare, in Yoruba language), he is not absolute as is the Christian God.
“He is a ruler who centers and splits his capacities and powers among orishas, which are the principles of the relationship between nature and humans. Oshun, for example, represents femininity and it is linked to beauty, pregnancy, and the power of conceiving a child. In fact, although the man is part of this equation, the woman is the one with more axé, as she carries the baby in her womb”, Sodré explains. In nagô philosophy, the element of force is so significant that having children is considered more valuable than possessing material goods, as it guarantees the mother’s love, care, and survival.
Lastly, the final category of African worldview is joy. This is neither a simple expression of delight nor an emotion. As Sodré remarked in As estratégias sensíveis: afeto, mídia e política (Sensitive strategies: affection, media, and politics, in a free translation), “it is joy, singular and concrete (rather than an abstract universal love), that guides liturgical practices of black Arkhé. […] Joy exists without sin, without forgiveness, without submission”.
For the African nagô, joy is the most important matter. Joy is in the relationship with God and the orishas, and it manifests itself through dancing, singing, words, and interpellations, as well as through sexuality, obligations and rituals, and the connection with earth, nature and community. In this context, liturgy refers to a world perspective, to an ethic and a philosophy, rather than to religiosity.
Challenging Western science, acknowledging African epistemology
Before the ancestral contributions of African peoples, the way in which their thoughts and perspectives have been disregarded and disqualified by science is, at the very least, controversial. Due to the Western view, knowledge is only acknowledged as such if explained and proven within a specific system. Any insight that falls out of these criteria is rejected.
Brito addresses this issue in an essay about the history of science and scientific education through Amerindian and Amefrican perspectives. Drawing on the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, he points out how Western science, which aims at universality and is grounded on rationalism, invalidates phenomena explanations from non-Western cultures, preventing the recognition of their contributions to human development.
“To speak of Africa’s contribution to mankind implies the acknowledgement of an African anteriority, a structuring presence of Africa in human cultural traditions as a whole, which were then spread elsewhere”, Macedo emphasizes. “It is evident that there were adaptations throughout the world, but the whole technology matter, all of these elements we refer to as the process of human evolution happened in Africa. By that I do not mean they are African, but they happened there”.
A strategy to overcome the long-lasting effects of the colonization process is education, an essential tool to discuss, reflect, and search for changing solutions. Brito highlights that the way science is taught and promoted, especially physical science, and the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological choices made are not neutral. “Historically, in Brazil, science has overlooked the contributions of peoples who are important to our formation as a nation, such as indigenous and black peoples. In this context, it is evident the epistemic racism – and the injustice linked to it –, the erasure, and the silencing of other types of being, knowing, learning, and doing, all of which is fostered by institutions dedicated to science, education, and promotion of scientific culture”, Brito adds.
The subject-object division of the Western systematized philosophical knowledge does not exist in the African worldview. In fact, the African perspective is inclusive, collective, and meaningful, and its contributions have played a fundamental role in science worldwide. Its episteme demonstrates how science, human and non-human beings, and even the magical realm are part of a complex whole that is interconnected with the world – or rather the world is contained within human beings, as explains Muniz Sodré in Pensar Nagô. All of the world’s pluriverse is an integral part of African philosophy.
Translated into English by Flavia Cornely Rocha, undergraduate student enrolled in the course “Supervised Translation Training I (English)” of the Undergraduate Program in Language and Literature, under the supervision and translation revision of Professor Rozane Rebechi (P.h.D.) – IL/UFRGS.
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Perspectivas científicas africanas resistem à desvalorização e ao apagamento