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MMG Working Paper 15-06 ● ISSN 2192-2357
Peter KanKonde-BuKasa
A Reection on the Necessity for an
‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies with
Reference to the Ecologies of Knowledge
Production
Max Planck Institute for the Study of
Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser
und multiethnischer Gesellschaften
Peter Kankonde-Bukasa
A Reection on the Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies with Reference to the
Ecologies of Knowledge Production
MMG Working Paper 15-06
Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften,
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Göttingen
© 2015 by the author
ISSN 2192-2357 (MMG Working Papers Print)
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analyses and opinions presented in the papers do not reect those of the Institute but are those
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Abstract
We are currently witnessing the increased diversication of the eld of academic
knowledge production, where more and more forms of knowledge that were kept at
the periphery for centuries are claiming recognition at centre stage. This reality has
pushed scholars to question the impact and lasting legacies of historical processes
of racism and colonialism still embedded in mainstream academic knowledge pro-
duction. This translates today into a major critic of social science methodologies,
which may be seen as “master’s tools” serving to reproduce contested coloniality
of academic knowledge in most non-Western regions today. In Africa this debate is
framed as the knowledge decolonial option and looks particularly at what forms and
whose knowledge is legitimised, reproduced, and for what purpose through the cur-
rent education structure and what socio-political and cultural functions it plays. This
is the debate that this paper contributes to. It suggests an ontological turn in order
to move from an emphasis on the identities of the producers to focus instead on
the knowledge production process itself. The main argument is that there is indeed
a timely necessity to advance an ontologically relevant Africanist scholarship that
gives a sympathetic theological reading of the African lived experience. As a meth-
odology and scholarly language, ontology constitutes a neutral ground in knowledge
production, validation and consumption debates that needs to be taken seriously as
it allows scholars to take into account the lived worlds that people inhabit and the
correlating ways of being and knowing. The paper highlights particularly the current
issues of misreading and misrepresentation as well as the need to avoid reading Afri-
can realities with external interpretative and explanative lenses.
Keywords: Ontological Turn, coloniality, African, Cosmology
Author
Peter KanKonde-BuKasa is a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for
the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He is doing a joint PhD with the Georg
August University in Göttingen and the African Centre for Migration and Society
(ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannisburg. He currently coordi-
nates the Religion and Migration Research Initiative at the ACMS.
Peter can be contacted at: kankonde@mmg.mpg.de
Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................... 7
I. On the Necessity for an Ontological Reading of Ethnographic Data ........ 9
II. African Cosmology, Lived Realities and Existing Academic
Misconceptions and Misrepresentations ................................................... 14
a. Indigenous African Cosmology and Philosophical Ontology .................... 15
b. African Etiology of Evil and the Academic “Witchcraft Fetish” .............. 20
III. Power, Ontological Insensitivity, and the Mass Production of
Intellectual Hybrids in African Academic Institutions .............................. 25
IV. Is There Any Possible Way Out? ................................................................ 29
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 32
References .......................................................................................................... 33
Introduction
As evidenced by the different versions of academic talks and scholarship on knowl-
edge decolonisation taking place across Africa, the debate on how to deal with the
legacy of racism and colonialism still embedded in much of Africanist scholarship
has reached a new momentum. This debate concerns particularly the issues of what
and whose knowledge is legitimised and reproduced through the current education
structure and what socio-political and cultural functions it plays. By listening to the
ongoing debates on knowledge decolonialonisation held at different African Univer-
sities, it appears clearly that the youth are opposing the structure as well as the agents
behind the status quo. Even prominent African scholars are not spared this, as the
youth accuse them of being part of and having largely contributed to the valorisa-
tion, maintenance and reproduction of the colonial structure that is characteristic
of knowledge production today. Hence one often hears comments from students
such as “he is a sell-out” or “a docile coco-nut” in reference to some African schol-
ars. As the new “Rhodes Must Fall Conversations” at the University of Cape Town
illustrates, African youth are pushing for a kind of academic revolution in terms of
education curricula contents. This is to say, rather than simply being critical as most
“postcolony” scholars have been doing, these youth are demanding that something
concrete be done to change the current state of affairs. How long it will take for such
reforms to unfold is more an issue linked to current structures and balances of power
in academia, than to the question of whether or not the reforms will take place at all.
This is the broader debate this article speaks to. Currently, the debate on knowledge
decolonisation has remained focussed on the issues of what should be done about
the situation and why as well as the legitimate identity of the producer of African
knowledge. The question this debate raises is what do people mean by “African” or
“relevant” knowledge and how can we ensure its production? My point is that we
need, instead, to rethink the current knowledge production process that has made
researchers produce and reproduce contested output. After critically reviewing the
current dominant analytical frames characterising Africanist academic knowledge
production to put in perspective what should change and why, I draw on the new
“ontological turn” in anthropological scholarship to move the knowledge decolonisa-
tion debates to the issue of how the shift can be achieved.
‘Ontological turn’ has become the predominating anthropological theme, nding,
and issue since the French philosophical anthropology was introduced at the 2013
Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago (Kelly,
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
8
2014a). However, while social explanations of cultural phenomena and clarication
of the ‘epistemological turn’ have a much longer history and clarity in anthropology,
the current ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology is more a critical event characterised
by, among other things, the fact that, although a signicant number of anthropolo-
gists seem to agree about its importance, they themselves are not yet clear about what
this new “turn” means (Kelly, 2014a). As such, the analysis below intends to con-
tribute to the broader discussions on the production of “proper” and relevant Afri-
canist knowledge for the future through a critical reection on some of the broader
issues concerning knowledge production more generally, with special reference to
religion and migration in Africanist scholarship. In fact, ethnographic descriptions,
like all cultural translations, necessarily involve a certain amount of transformation
or, sometimes, even plain disguration (Viveiros de Castro et al, 2014: 1).
My main argument is that there is indeed a timely necessity to advance an onto-
logically relevant Africanist scholarship that gives a sympathetic theological reading
of the African lived experience. I do so by drawing on new discussions on the need
to avoid reading African realities with external interpretative and explanative lenses.
In fact, as I elaborate on below, besides the pitfalls of the dominant interpretative
and explanative frameworks that characterise much of social science inquiry, avoid-
ing interpreting or explaining everything using one’s own conceptual frames has the
potential of allowing scholars to focus more on the proper business of understand-
ing social processes and their contextually dened meanings. To achieve this, we need
to rst problematise some of the existing dominant ontological and epistemological
presuppositions in general.
As I show below, with debates on the diversity of knowledge production in Post-
Apartheid South African context, the knowledge decolonisation debate is framed
around reied categories. This makes it almost impossible for scholars to discuss the
issues of diversity in knowledge production, validation, and consumption outside
of identity politics or outside a politics of ontology that itself reinforces the binary
divisions of ‘us’ vs ‘them’ and ‘ours’ versus ‘theirs’. This is so primarily because this
debate is currently formulated according to a politics of decolonisation of knowl-
edge that distinguishes between friends and foes. As I argue below, the ontological
language and methodology that I am discussing here needs to be taken beyond the
postcolonial “afrmative action” binary logic of identity politics that still divides
Africanist scholarship into two camps of insiders and outsiders. Instead, an ontologi-
cal approach should be adopted that reduces researchers’ personal biases to a mini-
mum, whether they are of African descent or not. My argument is that, as a meth-
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 9
odology and scholarly language, ontology constitutes a neutral ground in knowledge
production, validation and consumption debates that needs to be taken seriously as
it allows scholars to take into account the lived worlds people inhabit and the corre-
lating ways of being and knowing. By “neutral ground” I do not presume the reality
of a particular ontological status in and of itself, as such a thing as “neutral ground”
does not actually exist. However, I conceptualise an ontological approach as a meth-
odological, analytical and sociotechnical device capable of “neutralizing” scholars’
ontological distinctions and epistemological privileges, which often interfere and dis-
tort much of the existing Africanist scholarship.
In the remainder of this paper, I rst elaborate on the necessity for the ontological
reading of peoples’ different “modes of worlding” (See Descola, 2014). In the second
section, I touch on some of the misconceptions that often arise in Africanist scholar-
ship when we approach our data and ignore, misread, or dismiss the deeply religious
dimensions that fundamentally shape respondents’ perceptions of their lived experi-
ences. In the third section, drawing on the South African examples, I discuss some of
the institutional problems that may result due to the lack of ontological insensitivity
in African contexts. In the fourth and nal section I give an overview of scholarly
suggestions and discussion platforms that attempt to remedy to the problem of onto-
logical insensitivity. This is followed by the conclusion.
I. On the Necessity for an Ontological Reading of Ethnographic
Data
Notions such as nature, culture, society, sovereignty, the state, production, and,
yes, even class, race, and gender. All of this patiently constructed grid will have
to be, if not wholly discarded—for it expresses a specic anthropology which
deserves to be taken into account alongside others—at least demoted from its
imperial position. It is time, then, that we take stock of the fact that worlds are
differently composed; it is time that we endeavour to understand how they are
composed without automatic recourse to our own mode of composition; it is
time that we set out to recompose them so as to make them more amenable to a
wider variety of inhabitants, human and nonhuman (Descola, 2014: 279).
While most Africanist ethnographic studies are indeed concerned with human dif-
ferences and the uniqueness of perspectives, I argue that there is a justied necessity
to bring ontological sensitivity to the centre of the analytical framing that currently
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
10
inform this scholarship. The current Africanist scholarship is largely inuenced by
the interpretative and cognitive traditions of modern social science inquiry. However,
for reasons given below, I argue that while analysing ethnographic data, our social
scientic problem cannot be that of accounting for why respondents might think
differently or get wrong, what we know to be true (explaining, interpreting, plac-
ing respondents statements into perspective) (See also Paleček and Risjord, undated:
1 for similar point). But, as Martin Holbraad (2010) argues, rather than attempting
to “make sense” of a given ethnography, with all that it entails, in terms of the risk
of misrepresenting the Other, we should instead aim to use ethnographic data to
rethink our own analytical concepts (p184). By placing ourselves in opposition to
interpretive or cognitive social science, the ontologist scholarship seeks to avoid the
limiting or reductionist academic attitude that claims to be able “to make sense” of
everything simply through imposing conceptual and analytical frameworks on what
respondents know of their own lived realities (See Holbraad 2010: 184; Paleček and
Risjord, undated: 1).
In fact, most research conducted in Africa or with Africans in Diaspora continue to
adopt culturalist interpretative or cognitive perspectives. According to the culturalist
interpretative way of thinking, cultures are simply clusters of different beliefs about,
or ways of conceptualizing, a single material world (Paleček and Risjord, undated:
3). And from the cognitive culturalist perspective, human conceptual differences are
conceptualised to be simply alternative belief sets. Hence scholars are expected to use
representations as the vehicle for explaining away why is it that people see the world
differently, and why, sometimes, they get the world wrong – the so-called Cartesian
worry (See Holbraad, 2010: 182). As Holbraad (2010) argues, the danger in adopt-
ing an explanative or interpretative approach to ethnography lies in the fact that it
presupposes that we know what our respondents are talking about and just do not
know what they are saying. The ontological approach does not privilege epistemol-
ogy or the study of other people’s representations of what we know to be the one
and real world, acknowledging rather the existence of multiple worlds (Venkatesan,
2010: 154). To reject interpretation as well as representationalism, is to acknowledge
the fact that, as researchers, when we do not understand what people are saying, it
might not because they get wrong what we know. We should instead admit that we
might not know what people are talking about altogether (See Holbraad, 2010: 184;
Paleček and Risjord,undated).
Drawing for example, again on Holbraad’s (2010) work, when the Nuer people of
Sudan say that they believe that twins are birds, the ethnographic challenge has been
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 11
(and still is) to link such a proposition to other beliefs and provide a translational
gloss, and eventually, explain how such an obvious falsehood could be maintained
in the face of contrary evidence (Paleček and Risjord, undated: 9). Hence, every
time the problem of alterity takes the form of a disagreement – a cross-cultural disa-
greement, if you like – its anthropological or sociological solution has consisted in
explaining the grounds of such a divergence of views (Holbraad, 2010). Scholars are
thus expected to explain why should the Nuer (or any natives for that matter) think
that twins are birds (or whatever)? The answer to this question is always ready: Is
it because thinking in this way serves some purpose for them (functionalism)? Is it
because of the way their brains work (cognitivism)? Is it maybe because such a view
makes sense in the context of other views that they hold (interpretivism)? Or are they
just being metaphorical in some way (symbolism)? (See Holbraad, 2010: 183). The
radical character of the ontological approach is due to the fact that it undermines
the dominant premise of all such questions. It denies us the assumption that when
the Nuer say that twins are birds we even know what they are talking about in the
rst place (Holbraad, 2010: 183). If we remove the epistemological privilege that the
dominant premise provides, one can imagine the multiple relevant questions that we
can come up with in relation to the Nuer proposition.
This is why, in their push for an ontological anthropology (or social science more
broadly), Henare et al. (2006) invite us to take the cultural differences or disagree-
ments we encounter in our eld ‘seriously’ and avoid seeking to explain or contex-
tualize everything according to our own conceptual repertoires (Venkatesan, 2010:
154). As Holbraad (2010) adds, to entertain such a possibility requires a degree of
humility because to admit the possibility that our respondents might have been talk-
ing or acting in ways that we might have been unable to understand presupposes
admitting that our repertoire of concepts might be in some way inadequate to the
task at hand. However, not adopting an ontological approach, the researcher locks
themselves into ‘a culturalist perspective whose take on alterity seems downright pre-
sumptuous. In fact, by casting all difference as disagreement, culturalists imagine
for themselves unlimited powers of comprehension’ (Holbraad, 2010). As a result,
however new, unusual and analytically challenging in terms of explanation, inter-
pretation, ethnographic data must by some miracle always be at least amenable to a
straightforward description in terms that the scholar understands (Holbraad, 2010:
184). In line with the above point, the ontologist’s task cannot be that of ‘account-
ing for why ethnographic data are as they are, but rather to understand what they
are – instead of explanation or interpretation, what is called for is conceptualization’
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
12
(Holbraad, 2010: 184). It is in this sense that ontology methodology can open wide
for us the entry and lead to ‘insight into the enigmatic nature of social life’ (Sykes,
2010: 171). What makes the ontological approach to alterity not only quite different
from the culturalist one, but also rather better, is that it gets us out of the absurd posi-
tion of thinking that what makes ethnographic subjects most interesting and worthy
of quoting is when “they get stuff wrong” (Holbraad, 2010). Rather, the fact that
the people we study may say or do things that to us appear as “wrong” should just
indicate that we have reached the limits of our own conceptual repertoire (Holbraad,
2010; Paleček and Risjord, undated). This applies even when our best descriptions of
what others think is something as blatantly “absurd” or “wrong” as ‘twins are birds’.
We instead need to take the ‘twins are birds’ as a reason to suspect that there might
be something wrong with our ability to describe what others are saying, rather than
with what they are actually saying, about which we a fortiori would know nothing
other than the certainty of our own misunderstanding (Holbraad, 2010; Venkatesan,
2010; Paleček and Risjord, undated).
From an African perspective, I use the concept of ‘ontology’ in the sense used by
Robert Thornton to mean:
‘the sense of what is real and what is empirically knowable or given to the technologies of
healing, including trance, dreams, divination, intuition, smell, ‘feeling’, and direct empiri-
cal experience, for instance, of textures, colours, ‘heats’, ‘coldness’ and other properties
of physical substances.
As Thornton explains
In the Western ontology, trance, dreams and intuition, would not be classied together
with smell and other ‘physical’ sensations. The knowledge of the senses, of course, was
the guarantee of ‘reality’ for philosophers from Aristotle to René Descartes and Ernst
Mach, and such sensory knowledge, however much extended by microscopes, cyclotrons,
or photography, is still the basis for empirical knowledge. For sangomas, however, what is
smelt, or dreamed, or encountered in trance is also real, and therefore empirically know-
able. In this sense, they possess a different ontology’ (Thornton, forthcoming: 9).
In Africanist scholarship, an ontological approach is particularly important because
of the “enlightened” silent dehumanising undertone description contained in much
of the “established” big narratives. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro observes, “the
language of ontology is important for one specic and, let’s say, tactical reason. It
acts as a counter- measure to a derealizing trick frequently played against the native’s
thinking, which turns this thought into a kind of sustained phantasy, by reducing it
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 13
to the dimensions of a form of knowledge or representation, that is to an ‘epistemol-
ogy’ or a ‘worldview’” (Viveiros de Castro, 2003: 18 in Candea, 2010: 177). This is a
de-centering practice that has cast and kept African forms of knowledge and knowl-
edge production at the periphery. As I stated above, the problematic consequence
of such a critical attitude is that rather than concluding that any contradiction to
our pre-conceived “scientic truths” encountered in the eld necessitates a special
localised theorising to be fully comprehended, we go the usual easy way by trying
to explain drawing on the main theoretical frameworks such social stress, colonial-
ism, or capitalism that often lead to total misreadings (See Thornton’s forthcoming
pertinent critic of missionaries and the Commaroff’s misreading of Tswana). In this
sense, an ontological approach, as Karen Sykes (2010) puts it, ‘promises to help us
not to mistakenly use scientic project as a creative process for the search for the soul
of the researcher’s own society, when seeking to understand how others invent a cul-
tural response to lived phenomena’ (p171). This is to say, if the new ‘ontological turn’
is not seriously considered in African studies more generally, not only will people’s
lived realities continue to be described as anomalous or ‘absurdity’ (Holbraad, 2010)
as is often the case, but also different misconceptions characterising African scholar-
ship will persist (See also Thornton, forthcoming).
As Candea (2010) argues, the ‘ontological turn’ is ‘the way out of the epistemolog-
ical angst of the 1980s, of those who would ‘write culture’ and thereby, it is claimed,
reduce it to mere signication’ (p173). In summary, the French philosophical anthro-
pologists advocating the ontological approach, problematize the fundamentals of
dualist thinking and particularly the set of dominant assumptions about what kinds
of things exist. As I showed earlier, for the dualists, there exists one world, whose
main property is to be single and uniform. But there exist just many different repre-
sentations of that unique world. The main character of representations is to be plural
and multifarious depending on the group of individuals holding them. According
to ontologists, thinking that way is of course a ‘dualist’ position, related to a whole
eld of interlinking dualities: body and mind, practice and theory, experience and
reection, signied and signier, structure and agency, and so on (Holbraad, 2010:
181-182). While the dualist position often claims to leave room for “disagreement”
and may sound at rst comfortably liberal, it is in reality far from that when we look
at the existing state of the art of academic knowledge production (Holbraad, 2010:
184). In fact, as Holbraad (2010) contends in relation to anthropology,
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
14
Though anthropologists have made a name for themselves by arguing against the a priori
validity of particular versions of such dualities, I for one know of no theoretical position
in anthropology that departs from the basic assumption that the differences in which
anthropologists are interested (‘alterity’) are differences in the way people ‘see the world’
– no position, that is, other than the ontological one (p181-182).
Adding that:
The formidable power of the ‘one nature many cultures’ formula is, like a road-roller’s
wheel, owed partly to its circular shape. Much as for the psychoanalyst, patients’ attacks
on psychoanalysis merely demonstrate the purchase of ideas like ‘transference’ or
‘repression’, so for the culturalist, any suggestion that alterity might be something other
than a function of cultural representations is itself just another cultural representation’
(Holbraad, 2010: 182).
The “cultural representation” argument plays essentially the function of dismissing
any critic that invites us to seek to understand and explain alterity outside or beyond
scholars’ analytical frameworks. The alternative, as a number of anthropologists and
philosophers have been arguing for some time, must be instead to reckon with the
possibility that alterity is a function of the existence of different worlds per se (See
Descola, 2014; Holbraad, 2010). On this view, when the Nuer say that twins are birds,
the problem is not that they see twins differently from those of us who think twins
are human siblings, but rather admit the possibility that the Nuer may in fact be
talking about different dimensions or ontology of twins. The interesting difference,
in other words, is not representational (read ‘cultural’) but ontological: what counts
as a twin when the Nuer talk about twins as being birds? This may be different from
what for a twin is when one talks about a twin as being human, that is, having a cer-
tain kind of DNA and so on (Holbraad, 2010: 183).
Parting ways with interpretation and representationalism is thus the fundamental
step towards Africanist knowledge production for its own sake.
II. African Cosmology, Lived Realities and Existing Academic
Misconceptions and Misrepresentations
To grasp how African ontologies shape people’s perceptions and lived experiences,
we need to understand the dominant cosmological frame that shapes the conception
of what exists and the different possible of existence.
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 15
a. Indigenous African Cosmology and Philosophical Ontology
Cosmology is a conception of the nature of the universe and its operations, and of
the place of human beings and other creatures within that universe (Bowie, 2006;
Tempels, 1959; Bourdillon, 1990). All world communities have cosmologies, that is,
stories, myths, or theories that explain the origin and nature of the universe, as well
as the ways in which different peoples in different cultures understand the world of
their experience (Matthews cited in Bowie, 2006). These cosmologies have the special
function of orientating human beings to their universe. They serve to orient a com-
munity to its world, in the sense that they dene, for the communities in question, the
place of humankind in the cosmic scheme of things and such cosmic orientation tells
members of the community, in the broadest possible terms, who they are and where
they stand in relation to the rest of creation (Bowie, 2006; Masaka and Chemhuru,
2011).
Looking at the spiritual and religious inclinations on the African continent, one
can say that African people have remained fundamentally Homo Religiosus (Eliade,
1959). This is only so, I argue, due to the resilience of the primal African cosmo-
logical worldview that has infused and appropriated, over centuries, not only Chris-
tianity, Islam, and other forms of religious expression, but also produced multiple
forms of syncretic religious manifestations on the continent. In fact, in reference to
the variety in the nature of different localised indigenous knowledge systems, what
the large majority of Africans have in common, whatever their externally confessed
religious beliefs and life style, is their cosmological worldview (See Mbiti, 1975 for
a similar point). Contrary to the Western philosophical and religious conceptual
paradigms that distinguish Durkeimian sacred and profane domains of cultural and
religious belief and practice, the African primal cosmological view that continues to
varying degrees to infuse the understanding of life realities on the continent, does not
hold a dualist (material and spiritual) worldview. Instead, it holds a unity of cosmos
(Motshekga, 2007; Thornton, forthcoming; Tempels, 1959). This is to say God, the
ancestors and other spiritual beings, although invisible to the common of the unini-
tiated, are not believed to inhabit a separate universe, but the same universe as the
humans, but simply exist in a different ontological state. These ontologically “imma-
terial” beings are believed to exist in a spiritually and physically imbricated world. As
John Mbiti (1990 [1969]) observes,
… for African people, this is a religious universe. Nature in the broadest sense of the word
is not an empty impersonal object or phenomenon: it is lled with religious signicance
– God is seen in and behind these objects and phenomena: they are His creation, they
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
16
manifest Him; they symbolize His being and presence…. The invisible world presses hard
upon the visible: one speaks to the other, and Africans ‘see’ that invisible universe when
they look at, hear or feel the visible and tangible world (p56-57).
To understand the essence of this African cosmology and how it orients people
today, one needs to rst grasp the mythical essence of the name “Africa” itself. The
indigenous name of Afuraitkait, meaning “higher” or “celestial” land (See Akhan,
undated) that the Greeks turned into Afuraka and which was later translated to the
English Africa, originally meant ‘The land of my God’ (Motshekga, 2007: 5). Thus,
etymologically, to say that a person was an “African” meant that they were a son
or daughter of God (Motshekga, 2007: 5). This is what explains the fact that for
millennia, before experiencing the slave trade and colonialism and through these
historical and contemporary processes, coming into contact with other cultural and
religious belief systems, Africans considered themselves to be divine people by birth
(Motshekga, 2007: 5). The continental sharing of this primal mythical cosmological
understanding is why in local dialects “Africans” are also known as: Velanga (Nguni),
Bakaranga (Shona), Vhakalanga (Shona), Ba Kara (Uganda/Tanzania), BaKhalaka
(Sotho), etc. (See Motshekga, 2007).
This belief in the earthly divine nature and ontological being is, I argue, at the root
of why Africans did not develop congregational ways of worshipping God; a fact
which the missionaries and scholars later instrumentally used to justify that Afri-
cans had no religion for racist and political reasons. In the indigenous context, the
‘congregation’ ‘consists only of interested observers, and is in no way considered to
be a sacred mass of worshippers with a common sacred focus or object, and recipi-
ent of blessings deriving from their joint participation in a ‘religious’ act’ (Thornton,
forthcoming: 8). This primal indigenous religious belief system is what most African
still subscribe to and use to frame their understanding of lived realities in general.
As I argue below, for any social science enquiry to overlook or actively dismiss the
fundamental religious character and socio-cultural determinant meanings that shape
individuals as well as communities in how they conceive, perceive and live their lives
across the continent is highly problematic. It involves not only removing any ethno-
graphic data from their original contextual and explanatory frameworks, but also
submitting the accounts to a purely culturalist-materialist analysis, which becomes
simply arbitrary – researchers take decisions that serve their own purposes. These
decisions, which constitute the mainstream practice in academia today, can however
lead to a total misreading of what people say (See also Nyamjoh, 2012; Thornton,
forthcoming).
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 17
One needs to notice that for Africans a great part of what is generally called
African Religion, is actually amenable to basic empirical knowledge (See Tempels,
1959). The early missionary decision to cast any form of indigenous knowledge in
the domain of “superstition” and later “religion”, has had the consequence of rel-
egating sets of complex empirical knowledge to simple issues of metaphysics. As a
result, in contemporary Africanist scholarship we again see indigenous knowledge
being reduced to issues of ‘beliefs’, of simple ‘epistemology’ due to the persistence
of culturalist perspectives. In religious studies, scholars studying indigenous knowl-
edge systems under the rubric of “African Religion” continue to debate whether or
not Africans have knowledge of God. One example of detractive misconception and
denialism about whether Africans have knowledge of a Supreme God or not has just
been the object of James Cox (2014) new book entitled ‘The Invention of God in
Indigenous Societies’. In this volume James Cox resurrects an old Western miscon-
ception that certainly most Africanist scholars considered long put to rest. The book
seems to give credit to a scholarship that exemplied just how much the value of
African perspectives was denied and destroyed by purpose or ignorance. Cox negates
the existence of a conception of God as a Supreme Being in Africa (and many other
non-Western contexts) prior to the introduction of this notion by missionaries. For
Cox, even eminent African scholars such as John Mbiti and others, who argued
against the derogatory misconceptions and misrepresentations of early colonialists
and anthropologists, did so only as a result of the inuence of the Christian mission-
ary education that they had received. No need to recall here the early Western schol-
ars entering Africa, who were preoccupied by the necessity to categorise whatever
they saw, put themselves at the top of human existence, and denied people humanity
depending on whether they were considered to have written religion (civilisation) or
not. The racist claim that natives did not worship God needs to be understood in line
with the exclusive moral order and utilitarian colonial political consequences that
such a thesis sought to justify. Missionaries themselves did not have one position on
this issue. In some cases, such as Zimbabwe, it even brought disagreement on whether
to use Mwari instead of Yave as the name of God in order not to confuse the natives
(Cox, 2014: 67). Even the moment of admitting that the Shona name Mwari for God
could be used as the name of the Supreme Being differed between the Protestant
missionaries who started using it as early as 1898 and Catholics missionaries who
adopted it in 1960 (Cox, 2014: 67). But it is misleading to suggest that while Catho-
lics and Protestant missionaries were struggling on how to name God for the natives
for Christian evangelical purposes, the natives had no clear knowledge of their world,
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18
and it was the external “missionary saviours” that came to educate them about their
own indigenous cosmology.
Inuenced by work of Placid Tempels’ ‘Bantu Philosophy’ (1952[1959]) and other
religious scholars such as Eliade (1959), scholars started timidly suspecting that they
could have just misunderstood the forms of religious expressions on the continent.
However, in the broader contemporary business of political colonialism and intel-
lectual coloniality, scholars went on inventing, for Western audiences’ consumption,
typologies. In the process, they created new ethnic and “tribal” indigenous groups
that, in some cases, Africans themselves did not even suspect were being established
for them. In this context and with colonial efforts, every Africanist scholar strived
to become a “discoverer” of something new. The word ‘Muntu’ which simply means
‘human’ whatever their origin or skin colour, became limited only to people hav-
ing that word in their vernacular language. In this “tribalisation project”, scholars
endeavoured to also tribalise African indigenous religious beliefs and knowledge sys-
tems. Every scholar studying a particular people was thus, curiously, able to discover
a “religion” and a “god” unique to that people. The fact that in the large majority of
cases people across the continent could have been talking about the same spiritual
realities but just in different languages and socio-political spaces and time was rarely
questioned. What scholars in fact should have done is to study processes of diffu-
sion of a single religion as it is differently expressed based on local socio-cultural
specicities. Instead, they invented “religions” and “gods” everywhere. The extreme
of this scholarly aberration is the attempt of claiming that there is ‘Luba Religion’,
‘Shona Religion”, “Sotho Religion”, “Xhosa Religion”, etc. Unfortunately this has
now consecrated in academia. Everyone, who has interviewed traditional healers in
Southern Africa knows that they are a highly mobile group of people; some are initi-
ated by people belonging to other ethnic groups and countries. To argue, for exam-
ple, that the custodians of indigenous religion (Sangomas or healers) from Southern
Africa who travel up to Uganda and other parts of the African continent in search
of knowledge to improve their healing crafts, believe that they are dealing not just
with different local ancestral spirits but equally with different local Gods would be a
gross misconception. This misconception turns into ridiculous aberration when even
the people who split as lately as the Zulu of South Africa and the Ndebele of Zim-
babwe in late 19th century are somehow given each their separate “religions”. Thus
we have books on the ‘Zulu religion’ and on the ‘Ndebele Religion’. We are not even
told why we cannot maybe have, let’s say, just the “Nguni Religion”, which would
include numerous ethnic groups from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Swaziland. If a
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 19
signicant number of Southern African people (Zulu, Ndebele, Xhosa, Swazi, etc.)
are in fact Ngunis, why is there not a “Nguni Religion”?
The problem lies in the fact that the ethnologist or anthropologist is still trained to
develop much localised knowledge often called “specialisation”. They are required
to learn the language and study a particular people “inside out” and escape to give
account. Contrasting such localised knowledge with the broader context is rarely
part of the exercise. While scholars are allowed to overlook the ramications of their
“discoveries” and contrast them with other forms of knowledge from elsewhere on
the continent, they are expected to interpret them and explain them according to
what their audience understands. In this sense, the academic community is not in a
different position than that of the 16th to late 19th Europeans who were waiting and
consuming imaginative accounts from anthropologists and explorers.
However, what we often overlook are the remnants of colonial provincialisation
efforts that are hidden behind these multiple “religions”, and tied not to strands of
thought and their evolution and theological currents based on their custodians, but
to ethnicity. To make my point clear, if any scholar would venture to go to parts of
Africa and start placating localised diffused strands of Abrahamic religions to eth-
nicity as, let’s say, ‘Zulu Pentecostalism’, ‘Yoruba Christianity’, ‘Bashi Islam’, etc.,
they would sound ridiculous. However, when scholars do the same thing in rela-
tion to African indigenous religion, they create standards but also the hyperination
of localised “religions”, which James Cox now again endeavours to restore to their
“local Gods”. This is so only because, as other religious studies scholars before him,
James Cox continues to distinguish “major” religion with written traditions in terms
of theological developments that they can follow and those with oral tradition in
terms of ethnic and linguistic groups practicing them (See Ter Haar, 2000 for a simi-
lar point). This is very problematic at best. This same “tribalisation project” is also
evident in the language scholars use to refer to cases of Africans, who, either based
on cultural heritage or scientic evidence, claim to be Black Jews (e.g. the Igbos in
Nigeria; the Luba in DRC, the Lemba in Zimbabwe, etc.). Their religious expressions
are treated in academia not as versions of Judaism as the people themselves would
contend, but again attached to ethnicity in the use of the non-religious category of
“Hebrewism” in referring to these people.
To be sure, if ‘African Studies’ was simply concerned with understanding how cos-
mology informs ontology as a way of being and knowing on the continent, “African
Studies” should include all disciplines of science and endeavour to understand these
scientic disciplines as theories of an imbricated whole. But instead even in Africa,
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20
African Studies departments only include disciplines from the social sciences and
humanities.
b. African Etiology of Evil and the Academic “Witchcraft Fetish”
The other misconception that continues to distort African studies concerns theories
on the African etiology of evil in contemporary scholarship. In this section I illus-
trate the use, misuse and conation of the notion of “witchcraft” by mainstream
Africanist scholarship as a canon for interpreting and explaining most beliefs and
narratives. I term this reductionist practice the “Evans-Prichard’s fetish” not just
because Evans-Pritchard is the most cited authority on “witchcraft” in Africa (See
Parkin, 1985; Pocock, 1985), but as an invitation to think about “witchcraft” in the
sense Bruno Latour uses – Marx’s concept of fetish. Karl Marx describes the fetish
as an illusion that has not yet been exposed for what it is: a mask that graces power
(White, 2013).
In fact, one of the pervasive aspects of the African fundamental belief system is
its etiology of evil, particularly the belief that certain people, due to their spiritual
positioning, have the ability to domesticate and can, through spiritual malpractice,
harness and direct “evil” at will (Parkin, 1985; Pocock, 1985). This implies that the
occurrence of evil or misfortune is not generally believed to be something that just
happens, and is intead something that has a ‘direction’ and a ‘director’ (Shoko and
Burk, 2010: 112). In some circumstances however, it is the non-observance of tradi-
tions or the non-performance of appropriate religious rituals that are believed to
trigger evil in unruly ways and thus rack havoc (Pocock, 1985; Parkin, 1985). Hence,
learning how to negotiate evil becomes a prominent concern. This is the common
sense pattern of thinking that most Africans of indigenous extractions subscribe to,
especially on matters that relate to the bad, but also pertains to good events (Shoko
and Burk, 2010: 112). Naturally, Africans prefer to predict, prevent and avert evil,
and if that is not possible they like to explain and understand it and place it within a
certain order and manageable context (Shoko and Burk, 2010: 112). The resilience of
this fundamental and pervasive belief system continues to structure not just people’s
perception of themselves, and their behaviour towards others, but also their relations
to the state and all other phenomena. This experiential ontological reality explains
that it is only by situating behaviour and discourse within this broader cosmological
framework that we can grasp the meaning attached to different phenomena locally,
including urbanization and migration processes.
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 21
However, there is a recurrent misconception or reductionist consensus of African
fundamental religious belief. Any account of African lived realities alluding to the
etiology of evil, or that is different to what scholars dene as clearly Christian or
religious, is often qualied and explained, not according to African cosmology and
indigenous religion in their varied and broadest sense, but as being shaped by perva-
sive “witchcraft” beliefs . I would like to illustrate my point with an interview account
drawn from one of my projects on ritual practices of eco-spiritualism among Zimba-
bwean migrants in South Africa:
…What I can say is that people believe Muhacha is our passport from God… I think
Muhacha is naturally holy because we know that even our ancestors used to go under that
tree to ask for rain or food during drought times. But one can also travel with the Muha-
cha tree leaf! The prophets can give you the leaf to cross the border if you don’t have a
passport. They can just pray for you and tell you that: ‘this is your passport. With this leaf
no one touches you or ask you anything.’ And if you believe it that is what will happen!
Many people in my country will tell you that ‘if I want to go to South Africa I can just go
through without a passport with this leaf.’[…] No, I don’t think anyone can go overseas
with the leaf without a passport, to England for example (big laugh)… People use it to
go to nearby countries where one can get just… we are here talking about boarding an
airplane, not just walking, unless maybe you are using a ship, maybe… maybe you can use
it to talk to those people who do the shipping, maybe your prayers can be heard and help
you to reach that country. ..Yes, there are a lot of people using it. They will tell you that I
went to this church and they gave me this leaf and that is what I used to cross the border.
Some are saying that ‘the prophets told me that I must drop one at the Zimbabwean side
and the other one at the South African side. Then I just passed. If I see the police I just
put my hand in the pocket and hold it.’ And another one will tell you that if you go to
this church they will make a cross with Muhacha tree for you and make you wear it, then
you are holy and you can go and you will succeed abroad… The prophets know that you
are coming here to look for a job. So they will give you one for crossing the border and
another one for looking for a job… A friend of mine even told me that one day the police
stopped her at the border as she was passing and asked: ‘where is your passport?’ She just
showed them the leaf and said: ‘Here it is!’… They all started laughing and they let her
go (big laugh). I can’t say how common it is because I know that most of the people come
here with passports. It is only the few who can’t manage a passport so they end up looking
for the prophets or other people to help them get the leaves… (Interview with Rosy, 16
January 2013, cited in Kankonde, in progress).
To a Cartesian dualist thinking according to a Straussian ‘logic of the concrete’,1 the
above interview account will likely be just one perfect illustrative example of absurd
1 Lévi-Strauss calls “logique du concret,” a person’s ‘ability of the mind to establish relations
of correspondence and opposition between salient features of our perceived environment’
(See Descola, 2014: 272).
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
22
phantasy thinking developed by ‘savage minds’ living under intensive social stress.
The ontologist who does not know what Rosy is talking about will not only admit
the possibility of inhabiting differently the world (Descola, 2014) as well as that liv-
ing in a different world, but also abstain from any external conceptual imposition
and seek instead to conceptualise what the respondent is saying according to their
own cultural system. The existing academic standard position thus operates just as
a censorship mechanism of respondents’ accounts and assumes that the researcher
and their “target audience” are in a position to understand what such account is all
about. This, the researcher and the audience imagine to know what takes place even
before even the interview occurs – thanks to major “social theory” meta narratives.
Hence the “all-knowing” and “all-understanding” scholar continues to look down on
the people studied. This is the process through which alternative Africanist knowl-
edge has emerged; created and sustained by the colonialist image of the “expert”
whose account was to be legitimated even when the people he studied contested
his/her knowledge. The fact that the above interview account may seem fantastic
to the researcher simply due to the limit of their conceptions would thus be treated
as inconsequential. How much has actually changed in the “postcolonial” knowl-
edge production and validation process? Not very much. It is this state of affairs
that is explained by the religion and migration scholar Gerda Heck, in an academic
exchange with Philip de Boeck on the theme of ‘de-colonizing Research’ (available
on Youtube). She reexively questions why, when a respondent has told her that they
have experienced a miracle, she is expected to write about it as if the miracle did not
happen and it was just an illusion? The issues of how a non-dualist account can be
translated into a dualist logic and what the analytical and representational implica-
tions of such a transposition are, is not part of discussions. Hence even the thinking
frameworks of respondents are never discussed. Scholars seem instead more eager to
unreexively reproduce a kind of academic exotic sensationalism. In this line, even
phenomena that fall into the category of the most basic empirical reality are con-
strued and described as belonging to explanation from the domain of magic or fear
of the occult.
Early anthropological and colonial theories on “witchcraft” have been critiqued
for equating the African cosmological worldview and etiology of evil with “tradi-
tional” thought and “irrational” behaviour (Sabar, 2010). But still, to the disagree-
ment of many from the African continent, the early derogatory associations of all
that is African with irrationality have been supplanted in academia by the shared
“modernist” view that “witchcraft” signs and practices crystallize the experiences of
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 23
the “modern” African world (Sabar, 2010; Ashforth, 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff,
1993). The argument often advanced is that ‘modernity has injected African post-
colonial “witchcraft” discourses with a new dynamic, which reects the ability of
“witchcraft” beliefs to adapt to the modern nation-state and to new types of entre-
preneurship’ (Sabar, 2010: 111). In line with this, Diana Ciekawy and Peter Geschiere
claim that ‘Understanding witchcraft is an essential element in any attempt to com-
prehend people’s mundane realities and thoughts…. In everyday life in Africa and
elsewhere it is a discourse about action and the urgent necessity to handle these dan-
gerous but hidden forces’ (1988: 3, cited in Sabar, 2010: 130). In the work of Adam
Ashforth, while obviously concerned with explaining people’s existential anxieties, it
is, in the nal analysis, the entire African etiology of evil and theology, reduced to the
simple issue of “spiritual insecurity” (See Ashforth, 2011, 2010, 2005, 2002, 2001).
Because of the distinguished status of many modernist Africanist scholars, it is today
an academic trendy to use “witchcraft” even when it is not a framework one other-
wise uses. The complex set of primal indigenous religious beliefs is thus over sim-
plifyed. As a result, young Africanist scholars seem to see “witchcraft” everywhere
and they try to explain everything in terms of beliefs in “witchcraft”. In many cases,
even when scholars acknowledge that “witchcraft” was neither the object nor the
analytical framework of their study, they use the “witchcraft fetish” to do the job and
go on (thinking analogically and assuming we all know what they mean when they
refer to “witchcraft”) to talk about totally disconnected things and submit cultur-
ally informed accounts to essentially culturalist-materialist analysis. Bruno Latour’s
critic of anti-fetishists’ scholarly practice and belief in the exclusive scientic nature
and status of their own forms of knowing becomes particularly relevant here. As he
puts it:
You are always right! When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claim-
ing that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished
objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the
believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone,
can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inated by some belief in their own impor-
tance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humili-
ate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely
determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t
see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn’t this fabulous? Isn’t
it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? (In White, 2013: 670).
But as Louise White (2000, 2002) reminds us, we need to ‘be subtle and specic …
about Africans’ concepts of evil and the invisible world’ and try to nd ‘subtle and
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
24
crucial distinctions between witches and others’ (2002). The persisting misunder-
standing here is due to the assumption of a pervasive consensus amongst scholars
about what we mean when we talk about or use the term “witchcraft” while actually
often talking pass each other. What is often clear in the literature is the confusion by
foreign academics as well as natives (who have appropriated the use of the concept of
‘witchcraft’ – whatever that means) in speaking about the instrumental deployment
of a politics of demonization in African urban contexts, which often leads to the
false accusation and victimisation of children and the elderly. But as the anthropolo-
gist Robert Thornton (forthcoming) stresses, what Westerners call “witchcraft” is
different from what the Africans understand by that concept. The point Thornton is
making is not new. The Africans have always said it. But the fact that Thornton feels
the need to emphasise that point today and call for what he terms a sociologically
relevant theorising of “witchcraft” shows just how mainstream Africanist scholars
have been disregarding what the Africans have to say against the “witchcraft fetish”.
In fact, reducing or explaining complex indigenous beliefs with “witchcraft” has
simply become an easy way-out that allows scholars to avoid getting into the difcult
endeavour of understanding the intricacies and consequences of the people’s modes
of knowing (Descola, 2014); the concept of “witchcraft” thereby becomes amenable
to serving any conceptual purpose one wants to use it for. It thus becomes a simple
tool of strategic ‘orientalisation’ (See Said, 1978). There are serious works that seek
to understand the basic “anthropology of evil” by or from the perspective of Afri-
cans themselves. I am here referring precisely to a certain strand of scholarly work
that misuses “witchcraft beliefs” and suggests that they explain most of the contem-
porary urban and political phenomena on the continent. To paraphrase Shaheed
Tayob’s comment, this self-indulging caricaturist twisting and misuse of the concept
of “witchcraft”, ignoring its local African meaning to serve a denigrating purpose
under the pretext that “Africans themselves use it also”, turns this scholarship itself,
in the nal analysis, into a form of “witchcraft” (Shaheed Tayob, personal commu-
nication, 6 February 2015).
Academic knowledge production on a people or individuals cannot consist of sets
of researchers’ ways of reading the beliefs and people we study, or conclusions drawn
from our own pre-conceived analytical frames and sold as “authoritative” scientic
knowledge. By adopting an ontological approach, I join others (Nyamjoh, 2012;
Mbembe, 2007; Thornton, forthcoming) to formally reject the representationalism
that characterises contemporary African studies. In other words, I argue, one has to
approach and study African lived realities as social facts from an African ontological
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 25
standpoint. Furthermore, this perspective should be expanded to social science disci-
plines concerned with African studies. This is important because, as Achille Mbembe
(2007) argues, “in order to enter the ‘living space’ of Africans and to understand it,
one has to use their own terms, explanations, dreams, and images, and avoid falling
into the trap of interpreting these according to Western concepts using an external
judgmental view.” This is to say, if the new ‘ontological turn’ is not seriously consid-
ered, not only African ways of seeing and living their life will continue being some-
times described as an ‘absurdity’ to be explained according to what scholars believe
and claim to know to be the right way of Being, knowing and thinking. The danger
also lies in turning Africanist scholarship itself, into a set of westernised ways of read-
ing African beliefs and lived realities rather than a scholarship that gives accounts
of people’s realities for what they are and mean according to the people studied in
local contexts. And if we admit that not just anthropology, but also social science in
general, with its analytical constructs and concepts, is embedded in the Euro-Amer-
ican tradition of which the current dominant academic “perspectivism” (See Latour,
2009) is a product. Due to the fact that no value-free social science exists (Baumann,
2006), we can appreciate the Cartesian dualist “cosmological totalitarianism” (See
Carrithers, 2010: 159) at play when an ontological perspective is not adopted.
III. Power, Ontological Insensitivity, and the Mass Production of
Intellectual Hybrids in African Academic Institutions
In this section I largely borrow from the work by the University of Cape Town
anthropology professor Francis Nyamjoh. In the previous section, drawing on the
new ‘ontological turn’ discussions, I have attempted to bring into Africanist scholar-
ship concerned more generally with the “Other”, some of the misconception issues
that explain today not only why particularly ‘anthropology remains unpopular
among many African intellectuals’ (Nyamnjoh, 2012: 63), but also the symbolic vio-
lence embedded in contemporary academic praxis. In line with this observation and
in reference to the situation of African anthropologists and the condition for their
admission and recognition to what he calls the global “Anthropology tribe”, Francis
Nyamjoh’s metaphorical point deserves a lengthy citation:
‘Ethnographic representations of Africa are often blindly crafted and served as delica-
cies without rigorous, systematic dialogue with the Africans in question. Even as we are
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26
interested in knowledge as co-production (Schumaker, 2001; Tilley, 2011), our reex is to
minimise that co-production with key local intermediaries (be these informants, research
assistants, “native” anthropologists, scholars from other disciplines, or ethnographers
who are not perceived as anthropologists) by either completely ignoring their voices (even
as we claim that only those directly concerned with the beliefs and practices we seek to
understand can speak in a practical way on their own behalf), contributions and perspec-
tives (especially when these are counter to our representations as trained and professional
anthropologists from the “outside”), or reducing these to a footnote or a list of names
and chance occurrences in the “Acknowledgements” section (Bank, 2008; Collins and
Gallinat, 2010a: 4 and Englund, 2011a) (p67) […] A thorough and elaborate regime of
domestication is set in place to ensure acceptability and predictability of research and
opinions that guarantees that few, if any, elephants (read indigenous Africans) are admit-
ted who have not demonstrated their capacity to conform to and reproduce the status
quo, even as they might from time to time appear to be critical. If the boundary police
and inhabitants of the anthropological mainland opt to keep the elephant outside of their
conference rooms, editorial boards and classrooms, or to simply ignore the elephant’s
own self-denition and self-articulation, it is not so much that they are able to debate
whether the elephant is what they individually claim it is – rather, the exclusion depends
on whose claim of what the elephant is carries the day, depending on the competing hier-
archies of credibility at play’.(2012: 77)
And reecting on his own international academic recognition and positionality he
adds:
If and when I attend conferences, my presence is a challenge to members of the tribe
who refuse to embrace difference even as they have made the study of difference their
stock in trade. Some hope to adopt and adapt me (the only language of relationship they
understand), domesticate me to embrace their perspectives so they can show me off as a
trophy, as a “Hottentot Venus” or “El Negro” (Parsons, 2002; Crais and Scully, 2009) of
anthropology, with aspirations or ambitions of using me as a clearing agent for import-
ing and legitimating their thinking in and on Africa […] I am schooled to be critical of
fellow black elephants, while endorsing the mediocrity or glossing over the excesses of
the anthropology tribe. In my zeal and determination to prove that I am not inferior to
those who study and classify the elephants of the world, I must betray whatever achieve-
ments I grew up acknowledging in Africa and by Africans […] Why does the dominant
understanding of cosmopolitanism almost always entail me taking up the ways of the
anthropology tribe, and hardly the outsider anthropologist embracing the ways of Afri-
cans? What use is visibility or recognition that comes at the expense of my dignity and
relevance to those with whom I share a common ancestry and humanity? Even if more
African elephants were to assume a presence, what legitimacy would be accorded their
version of who, what, how and why they are, given the overt or muted hostility to “native”,
“self”, “auto” and “home” ethnography?’ (Nyamjoh, 2012: 78).
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 27
In South Africa, in academia as well as in mainstream media, the debate on the pro-
duction and validation of ontologically relevant knowledge is often tied and framed
according to the local historical context. In fact, the transformation of universities
is one of the recurrent topics in the media (See e.g. City Press, 3 August 2014 and
6 January 2015). The UCT’s sociology scholar Xolela Mangcu, recently denounced
what he calls “academic whitewash,”:
‘Our departments of history, politics, philosophy, arts and anthropology do not have full black
professors, which raises the question of whose historical, political, philosophical or artistic per-
spectives are offered, and in whose cultural and linguistic idioms. It is one thing to have a graduat-
ing class that looks diverse, and quite another to make sure that class has had exposure to the full
range of experiences and perspectives that comprise our social world […] It is important for all our
students to know that Europeans are not the only people who have thought and written about the
social world’ (City Press, 6 January 2015).
Beyond South Africa, Africanist academics in general are also not isolated, and are
instead part of the global academic political economy system that sustains itself
through publication peer review systems, academic associative membership, recog-
nition and respectability. Coming from non-dualist cultural systems, Africans often
feel the pressure to conform to the dominant dualist ontological thinking stream
(Nyamjoh, 2012). In this context, and mainly as a consequence of the power dynam-
ics at play in the global as well as Africanist academic fora in order, Africans across
the continent and even beyond try to gain peer acceptance and respectability; they
often feel pressure to write and speak in ways that they sometimes experience as a
violent denial of themselves, their beliefs and the communities to which they belong.
This is experienced as a form of subservient cultural betrayal (See Nyamjoh, 2012). In
African studies Institutes, across the continent and beyond, critical materials written
by Africans rarely make it up to the “reading lists” (See e.g. Xolela Mangcu’s com-
ment in City Press article cited above). As Gurminder Bhambra (2015) has shown in
her recent blogpost, the politics of side-lining critical scholarship by Africans on the
continent or the Diaspora is not only a globally normalised practice, but there are
also academics who are, for various reasons, ready to defend the status quo. While
some people can disagree with Francis Nyanjoh’s and Gurminder Bhambra points,
we should suspect the fact that many Africans in different branches of the social
sciences and humanities, may only be passively learning “theories” that they do not
necessarily agree with, simply because they need to have a degree certicate to move
on with their lives. Academic training thus becomes just something to do, because
society expects one to have a degree. In this sense much of the time spent learning
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28
becomes a waste because people learn things that they know, they will never apply in
real life. We should thus not expect much of social science academic “knowledge” to
ever have transformative effects in the sense of contributing to the development of
the Continent. The structural power issues and the absence of ontological sensitiv-
ity in African scholarship, resulting from the global institutional context (and many
other factors obviously), are having very negative intellectual hybridisation and self-
segregating impacts locally as a result of current academic training. Hence Kharnita
Mohamed, in commenting on the South African situation (in a comment that is valid
for the entire continent), observed that:
‘Black and coloured students tend to study horizontally, usually within their natal com-
munities (which is fascinating as something strange seems to happen, they start to disas-
sociate from their natal communities, what are universities doing to produce this kind of
effect? (Kharnita Mohamed, comments, 2 September 2012, quoted in Nyamjoh, 2012:
72).
Researchers writing on an ‘ontological turn’ from the African or other postcolonial
contexts and stand point need to be aware of the inherent potential and possibility of
their scholarship being misread or misinterpreted as though they were also reproduc-
ing and essentialising the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy. As I stated earlier, the issue of
ontological perspective and methodology need not to be tied to ratios of ‘us’ versus
‘them’ binary discourse. The truth is, that within any cultural system, people have dif-
ferent ontologies that are shaped by the intersection of the subjective and the social
with the lived experience at a particular time and place. However, although ontologi-
cal language and methodology promise to provide us with a more neutral ground,
ontology sensitive Africanist researchers should remain aware of the fact that they
too run the constant risk of simply trying to replace the criticised misrepresenting
categories and concepts with other equally essentialising native ones. This would
also be problematic. There is indeed a signicant meta-contrast between a Western
or Euro-American ontology and the plurality of non-Western ontologies out there
(Candea, 2010: 178). However, even what is meant by terms such as “modern” or
“western” may, in the nal analysis, prove to be simply rhetorical in substance. As
Tim Ingold notes on the terms ‘Western’ and ‘modern’:
Every time I nd myself using them, I bite my lip in frustration, and wish that I could
avoid it. The objections to the concepts are well known: that in most anthropological
accounts, they serve as a largely implicit foil against which to contrast a ‘native point of
view’; that much of the philosophical ammunition for the critique of so-called Western
or modern thought comes straight out of the Western tradition itself . . . that once we
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 29
get to know people well – even the inhabitants of nominally western countries – not one
of them turns out to be a full-blooded westerner . . . and that the Western tradition of
thought, closely examined, is as various, multivocal, historically changeable and contest-
riven as any other (2000: 63 in Candea, 2010: 178).
Tim Ingold’s anxiety shows just how much the distinction between the ‘Western’ and
the ‘modern’ should not be taken literally. This observation shows us also that we
need to keep interrogating as what we mean by “African” and “Western”, without
again essentialising “African ontology”. My point is that we need to avoid reducing
the debate to issues of the identities of those producing knowledge. The ‘ontologi-
cal turn’ in this sense liberates us in actual fact from thinking in terms of a ‘people’
or a group, but the ontology of our specic research subjects as shaped by the fact
of their being and experiencing their lived world at the time of the research. This is
what Latour calls the study of “actants” (See also Kelly, 2014b). What I try to show
here is that the issue of ontological sensitivity in our research actually touches the
core of academic knowledge production integrity. As such, this paper is a contribu-
tion to earlier calls that academic knowledge production be ontologically rethought
everywhere.
IV. Is There Any Possible Way Out?
After thinking about all the pitfalls of the interpretative and explanative social scien-
tic inquiry tradition, the question that comes to mind is this: is there a possible way
out? In other words, what is then the solution that would guarantee the production
of proper or relevant ‘knowledge for the future’ in Africanist scholarship? This is still
an open eld to think about. Currently, there are mainly two ways through which
scholars are attempting to remedy the situation by thinking through the structure
of the knowledge production process. On the structural level there are currently dif-
ferent academic organisations and platforms that discuss the necessity to take oth-
ers and their real differences seriously. These organisations seek almost to give, in
academia, the fundamental basic accommodation of diversity of knowledge systems
and knowledge production processes, almost the kind of status that would invoke
similar attitudes and responses that notions such as those of ‘bio-diversity’ or “world
heritage protection” invoke.
In Africa, one of the active platforms, the Africa Decolonial Research Network
(ADERN), which is based in the Department of Development Studies at the Uni-
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
30
versity of South Africa in Pretoria focuses on the decolonialisation of knowledge
and power in Africa and the global South. To members of this project, ‘decolonizing
knowledge and power is a task and a process of liberation from assumed principles
of knowledge and understanding of how the world is and should be, as well as from
forms of organizing the economy and political authority.’ We can add new platforms
such as the “Rhodes Must Fall Conversation” as well as initiative such as the Univer-
sity Decolonisation debates at Wits, to name a few.
In Europe there are research projects and academic reection platforms such as
the ‘De-colonizing Research’ initiative, organised by the Global Prayers Congress at
the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where academics, artists, and practition-
ers are regularly invited to talk about their production of knowledge and insights,
shedding light on questions of representation, points of view, approaches, and meth-
odologies of research. The most prolic platform dedicated to training scholars
from around the world on issues of coloniality is the “Decolonizing Knowledge and
Power: Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Horizons”, which is part of a larger intel-
lectual and political initiative generally referred to as the “modernity/(de)coloniality
research project.” The project questions basic assumptions engrained in the idea of
modernity, progress, and development in order to encourage thinking and living in
search of non-Eurocentric and non-corporate social and human values (www.dial-
ogoglobal.com/barcelona/index.php.). As their website information shows, there is
a direct correlation between knowledge and coloniality and subjectivity formation
(the ideology of truth, the gure of the expert, identity formation, and the role of the
media bringing together the dominant philosophy of knowledge in the formations
of subjectivity). The international Summer School that the group organised in May
2015 in Madrid, Spain, for example, aimed at enlarging the analysis and investigation
of the hidden agenda of modernity (that is, coloniality) to the sphere of knowledge,
power and being. Scholars were invited to examine: who is producing knowledge?
What institutions and disciplines legitimize it? What is knowledge for and who ben-
ets from it? How is our social existence colonized and how can we think about
the decolonization of being? What power hierarchies constitute the cartography of
power of the global political-economy we live in, and how can we go about decolo-
nizing the world? This “knowledge coloniality awareness” needs to be situated within
the broader legacy of “postcolony” critical scholarship tradition.
One of the possible avenues is suggested by Francis Nyamjoh (2012) is reexivity.
But as Nyamjoh cautions us, reexivity should be understood as a process and as
something deserving more than simple token mention in the prefaces, introductions
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 31
and methodology sections of books and journal articles. Researchers are not expected
to take leave for reexivity once they have taken leave of their eld (Nyamjoh, 2012:
66). The understanding and practice of reexivity Francis Nyamjoh is talking about,
in fact embodies Pierre Bourdieu’s point that ‘Reexivity takes on its full efcacy
only when it is embodied in collectives which have so much incorporated it that they
practise it as a reex’ (Bourdieu, 2004: 114, cited in Nyamjoh, 2012: 67). Although in
making this point Nyamjoh is addressing particularly anthropologists, I believe his
suggestion is valid for Africanist scholarship in general. As he puts it:
Knowing is a lifelong commitment to reexivity, dialogue and accommodation. This calls
for a renegotiation of the eld, the game and the rules – not by whims and caprices, but by
reective. In recognition of creative diversity, therefore, anthropologists studying Africa
should seek to reect it in the conceptualisation and implementation of their research
projects, as well as in how they provide for co-production, à la René Devisch (2011), and
collaboration with “native” and “at-home” anthropologists and across disciplines. Such
co-production calls for team work over and above professional collaboration, along with
multi- and transdisciplinary endeavours, to include the very people we study in the con-
ceptualisation and implementation of the research process. It is not to be conned to or
conated with co-publication (Nyamjoh, 2012: 81).
In addition to Nyamjoh’s suggestion, I argue that in order to change the current Afri-
canist institutional mind-set and academic habitus on the Continent, what is needed
is a proper education policy designed to advance an ontologically sensitive knowl-
edge production process, and to give scholars who would like to do so, the basis from
which to argue their case. This is important given the power differential I alluded to
earlier. And for education policy purpose, we need to keep in mind James Ferguson’s
comment on Nyamjoh’s (2012) work when he says:
It’s a suggestion we made back in Locations, but we didn’t do much to follow it up, and
I think it’s especially important in southern Africa, where the call to have more engage-
ment between a still mostly white anthropology and “African voices” tends to be coun-
tered with the view that there just aren’t very many Africans with sufciently high-level
anthropological training. But as you point out, the people with the most interesting and
sophisticated interpretations of their own societies may very well not have Ph.D.s in
anthropology (imagine that!). The solution is surely to broaden the pool of people who
count as social and cultural analysts (James Ferguson, comments, 31 August 2012, cited
in Nyamjoh, 2012: 85).
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06
32
Conclusion
In this paper, I drew from mainly recent anthropology scholarship to discuss the impli-
cations of ontologically relevant analytical thinking frames on Africanist knowledge
production. While the interpretative and explanatory academic traditions still have
defenders, as researchers we need to seriously think about what is it that we are actu-
ally doing to the accounts people give us and the socio-political implications of our
academic outputs when our analysis is done without regarding the ontological refer-
ential frames of the people we study. When we apply an interpretative or explanatory
frame of reference from outside of the socio-cultural and religious context we study,
we need to be clear and distinguish such produced knowledge from the knowledge
produced by studies that simply seek to understand the different ways that other peo-
ple, including those that might seem to belong to our own ontological thinking, think
about the research questions we are trying to answer. This nal point makes me ask,
for example, the question of what would “African” “Congolese” or “Zulu” studies be
if the thrust of conceptual frames used to elucidate them are simply external imposi-
tions on the original conceptual frames of reference? In distinguishing and valorising
the many answers people from different cultures have, as individuals or as collectives,
to our research questions, we (not just anthropologists as Karen Sykes (2010: 171)
argues, but social scientists in general) will ‘make academia a world safe for differ-
ence’. To conclude with Holbraad (2010), I want to argue that ‘the key tenet of an
ontological approach in anthropology, as opposed to a culturalist one in the broad-
est sense, is that in it anthropological analysis becomes a question not of applying
analytical concepts to ethnographic data, but rather of allowing ethnographic data
to act as levers – big Archimedean ones!’ (p180). This is the new frontier in African
academic diversity debates.
Kankonde-Bukasa: The Necessity for an ‘Ontological Turn’ in African Studies / MMG WP 15-06 33
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