Displaced Academies and the Quest for a New World Academic Order

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Periodical article

Title:	Displaced Academies and the Quest for a New World Academic Order
Author:	Yankah, Kwesi
Year:	1995
Periodical:	Africa Today
Volume:	42
Issue:	3
Pages:	7-25
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Africa
Subjects:	philosophy African identity attitudes Bibliography/Research Education and Oral Traditions
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/4187047
Abstract:	The theories and concepts used to explain African reality are often borrowed from other regions and may do more to distort than illuminate. A common approach is to analyse Africa as deficient when compared to the Western experience, which is abstracted as an ideal type. The present paper is a compelling call for a new world academic order in which Africa's oral tradition and indigenous systems of knowledge serve as the epistemological bases for establishing relevant theoretical paradigms. Amongst others, it provides an important critique of how the aversion of journals and publishers to African texts perpetuates and imposes Western models and denigrates the 'indigenous African academy'. It views the study of African languages and oral traditions as the foundation of alternative paradigms that serve African people. Ref.