The Struggle to Restore African Epistemology – Imhotep vs. Socrates

A frog does not jump backwards. – Zambian Proverb.

By the turn of the new century in 1700, the theory of African knowledge, especially with regard to the scientific method, its validity, and the scope of its wisdom had suffered a major blow. A setback that, until now, seems to have almost resulted in the complete obliteration of the intellectual fabric of African scholarship, traditions, culture and customs.

In the twenty-first century, the tools for the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief in Africa from public or traditional opinion have virtually become non-existent. The attempt to restore African Epistemology has been met with a notorious push-back, however.

This impediment has heretofore, broiled at the doorsteps of our traditions and our culture for over a century and counting.

The demolition of Africa Epistemology has had contiguous consequences. Between the interstices, European paradigms of thought and reasoning – the Socratic Ideal especially – have come to dominate the interpretation of African wisdom.

This foreign way of looking into African matter, space and time have seeped into every facet of analysis even in regarding new forms of knowledge.

The African way of questioning and establishing the validity and scope of existing and new knowledge has become invariably muffled or lost.

Strongly stifling the search for truth within the scope of the African context, it has become intractable to honestly retrace the tenets of the methods used in African epistemology, prior to the advent of the Mission School, Christianity, Islam and Colonial Occupation.

By the turn of the 1700s, West Africa had nearly and especially abandoned perhaps all written text in favor of an Oral Tradition that predates Nubia herself. West Africa moved heavily towards a spoken-word culture abandoning much of the 7,000 year traditions of Scripts they had inherited through generations.

Virtually all written forms were forgotten. The Nsibidi Script (std. 5000 BCE) is a recent example. The Medu Neter (std. 4000 BCE – 600 AD) and the Kemetic Scripts (std. 3200 BCE – 600 AD) became absolutely unrecognizable to a people whose ancestors studied and wrote several ancient books with them. And although the Vai and the Tifanagh were both still present in West Africa in the 1900s, their usage had all but dwindled.

This transformation, nonetheless, coincided with a painful event in African history – the arrival of Europeans – a backward distribution of tribes in Europe, who had become acquainted with the intellectual traditions of Kemet through its importation into Greece.

By the time the Portuguese had set sail for the West African coast, some of the most important ancient Egyptian traditions that had been adopted by Europeans had metamorphosed into newfound ideas in Financial Capitalism and Material Greed – Neanderthalization. When these tribes set foot on the Gold Coast, their rendition of intellectualism and epistemology had grown into monstrous proportions.

The humidity of this European paradigm of thought would quickly come to wet, dampen and commit much of the written culture of Africa to the bottomless abyss of decay.

That material greed, concomitant with its penchant to use tribalism – newly transcribed and morphed into racism – as a means to achieving disproportionate heights of capital gluttony through slavery, will come to shroud the essence of African intellectual underpinnings and African epistemology in the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries.

Our new oral culture – elaborated through elegant rhythm – had come to dominate African culture, albeit, the artistry of the continent never withered. It thrived. However the fact that the oral culture began to dominate every aspect of African culture, making its way into the intellectual abode of the African genius, confined our written culture to only the Cults and Temples of Vodu.

The rise of the Griots or the Jali, and the elaborate developments in Talking Drums, hence, marked a bold step in a direction that Africa may not have necessarily come to regret, if not for the arrival of the savages from Europe.

Without the written form to support the intellectualism of Africa, the various forms of systematized knowledge that our Ancestors had accumulated through the ages of observation, experimentation and reason, stood at a horrid impasse.

That aporia was influenced profoundly by European Missionary work. Prior, Islamic Missionary work had wrecked its own havoc on the Ghana, Mali and Songhai Empires.

The flawed scientific ring of Socrate’s logic hence, although initially learned from ancient Egypt through students of Imhotep, echoed its devastating noise through African epistemology of natural knowledge. African traditionalists who reacted against the innatism of the new cartesian epistemology could not spar with the new Africans who had been educated in the Mission School, Churches and Mosques.

By the time this intellectual transformation of Africa had reached its peak, the new generation of Africans had become students of Socrates, and not Imhotep.

What is the difference and why does it matter? In order to appreciate the nuances, let us take for example a single assertion, “A River is a God” which was largely accepted across the African continent as traditional wisdom. To examine it, we can assess the Socratic Method vis-à-vis the Imhotepic Tradition.

The Socratic Method is illustrated thus:

Socrates’ interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example “A River is a God”, which Socrates considers false and targets for refutation.

Socrates secures his interlocutor’s agreement to further premises, for example “A River is a fine thing” and “A genocidal God, is not a fine thing.”

Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor might agree, that these further premises imply the contrary of the original thesis, in this case it leads to: “A River is not a God”.

Socrates then claims that he has shown that his interlocutor’s thesis is false and that its negation is true. The European imagination claims that this kind of elenchus – argument of disproof or refutation; cross-examining, testing, scrutiny esp. for purposes of refutation – can lead to a new, more refined, examination of the concept being considered, in this case it invites an examination of the claim: “A River is a fine God”.

Most Socratic inquiries consist of a series of elenchi and typically end in puzzlement known as aporia. Even further the modern European paradigm would regard the last reformulation as nonsense of the aporetic nature of the Socratic Method.

It requires much more. Having shown that a proposed thesis is false is insufficient to conclude that some other competing thesis must be true. Rather, the interlocutors have reached aporia, an improved state of still not knowing what to say about the subject under discussion, in this case, a River.

“We don’t know what a River is.”

Both conclusions, whether respecting of the ensuing aporia or not do not regard a River as a God, unless it is a fine God perhaps.

Of course.

These conclusions from the Socratic Method have insidious consequences when taken in the African context. Now, the river can be used for transporting material goods – sugar and cotton – around the clock to feed the ever thirsty guts of gluttonous Europe. Fishing in this river can also be done at all times without an uproar from the River God.

One can thus imagine how the River will be treated hence – polluted and overfished!

However, when we examine the same assertion under the Imhotepic Method, we arrive at a curious derivation:

Imhotep’s interlocutor affirms a thesis, for example “A River is a God”, which Imhotep considers false and targets for refutation.

Imhotep secures his interlocutor’s agreement to questioning, for example “What is God?” and “What is a River?”

The interlocutor can then supply answers to make his point, “God is the sustainer of life” and “The Hand that sustains us, is our God” and/or “The River sustains us”.

Imhotep secures his interlocutor’s agreement to further premises, for example “A River is a sustainer of life” and “God is a sustainer of life”.

Imhotep then agrees, and the interlocutor has proven, that these further premises imply the veracity of the original thesis, in this case it leads to: “A River is indeed a God”.

Imhotep then claims that he has shown that his interlocutor’s thesis is true and that its negation is hence not necessary since it would not disprove the original thesis.

For example: “A genocidal God, like Yahweh, does not sustain life. It destroys it.” Therefore, “A River is a God” and “A River is not a genocidal God, like Yahweh”.

Here is but one illustration of the superiority of the Imhotepic Method over the Socratic Ideal. It seems that when the Greeks came to attend college in Kemet, they rushed their classes and did not fully grasp the tenets of the Scientific Method before returning to Europe.

The same exercise helps explain why it is impossible to examine African knowledge from the perspective of a European paradigm of thought. African rhythms, for example, are impossible to interpret, using the Base-Treble Clef paradigms of western musicology.

This is why many African music communities are now developing and inventing new ways to capture, explain and teach the rhythms of Africa. In a way, it is impossible to capture the essence of a superior event with an inferior paradigm of thought. The inverse is not impossible however. Africa’s superior paradigms of investigation can securely be extended to explaining away the inferior events of western epistemology.

Therefore, if Africans themselves were to judge their own culture by the western based ideologies of examination, the interpretation of African culture will always come to an impasse – aporia. However, African culture, brilliant in her own way, can only make sense of her culture from an Imhotepic interpretative tradition.

African culture thus, including but not limited to the study of ancient Egypt – Egyptology – will never make sense to the European. He is savage! Neither would the sophisticated rhythms of Africa and the African diaspora open the European eye.

The twenty-first century hence represents a new paradigm shift in African epistemological deliberations. The candid effort to go back to the foundations of the Imhotepic Method represents a willingness to restore the written culture of a continent that has been torched and exploited by a group of tribesmen who, perhaps by sheer misfortune, had very little mental capacity to understand the African genius.