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Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture 2024: Ancestral Knowledge for Contemporary Transformation

Author: Toyin Fayola

MIASA CC-BY-4.0: Prof. Toyin Fayola speaking at Amo Lecture 2024

The 2024 MIASA Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture explores the significant impact of ancestral knowledge and how it can guide development in contemporary African nations. By examining traditional practices in areas such as ecology, culture, and community governance, the lecture shows how these age-old insights or ideas might address contemporary challenges like social inequities, environmental degradation, and financial crises. Through extensive research, the study investigates the methods by which this unique information can be transmitted throughout generations and further investigates the twin or dual effects of globalization, which both threaten and support its preservation and dissemination.

The lecture highlights the links between traditional knowledge and current issues, demonstrating how ancestral practices could offer lasting solutions to modern problems. Finally, this study offers or provides strategic recommendations for legislators, educators, and community leaders on integrating this knowledge into development projects while addressing sociopolitical, economic, and cultural challenges. Emphasizing its capacity to support sustainable and inclusive African development, this study concludes by making a call to action for all actors and stakeholders to increase awareness and execute ancestral knowledge. It argues that ancestral knowledge should be preserved and revitalized not only as a cultural heritage but also as a practical tool for addressing contemporary developmental challenges.

MIASA CC-BY-4.0: Prof. Grace Diabah, Dr. Chika Mba & Prof. Toyin Fayola at Amo Lecture 2024

Professor Toyin Falola uses the occasion of the Amo Lecture to inaugurate a new field, African Ancestral Studies. African Ancestral Studies (AAS) seeks to orient students to the foundational values, ethics, history, and philosophy of African life through a reflective examination of indigenous African epistemic knowledge and cosmological and historic codings. It will critically interrogate how African ancestry continues to shape prevailing self-understandings, values, and worldviews and correct and augment colonially erased or distorted national historical genealogies. Its core is an Indigenous, holistic, and diaspora-centered approach with an emphasis on studying Africa’s past, present, and future from the position of ancestry via knowledge and alter-modes of being that disrupt hegemonic global narratives. In the broader sense, the core purposes of AAS include:

 i. Recovering Indigenous Knowledge and Histories: African ancestral studies, rooted in traditions of African epistemological and metaphysical conceptions and paradigms for knowing, being, and becoming, and thus framed by explorations into African cosmologies, transitions and citizenship, lineages, geographies, geologies, geo-histories, politics, medicine, therapeutics, artistic practices and poetics, cultivate and foster black learners’ ability to know and understand how Africans described, theorized, and studied their selves and their worlds and their gods, in ways long before and beyond colonial interventions.

 ii.  Decolonizing Lenses of History: Correcting this distortion would then center African voices and perspectives. There are silenced voices in the history of Africa’s contribution to the global history of science, art, and philosophy.

 iii. Claiming Heritage and Culture: For many in Africa, as well as widely scattered throughout the diaspora, genealogy serves as a way to fulfill the powerful psychological need to ‘go back,’ ‘find out where I came from,’ or ‘re-establish my African identity.’

 iv. Handling the Spiritual and Moral Aspects: This course can also address the spiritual and moral aspects of these religious systems and then become part of the development of the appreciation of the philosophy and values of Africa – community, interdependence, and respect for nature – as alternative ethical paradigms to the challenges of the contemporary environmental crisis. 

 v. Promoting Pan-Africanism and Global Connections: Indeed, stressing their connections and showing how ancestral traditions shared routes, changed and reinvented themselves, and were taken up in the cultural traditions of societies well beyond Africa, the course helpfully promotes a Pan-Africanism that empowers and uplifts a diverse set of histories of cultural production and experience, between the continental and the diasporic. After all, it shows just how robust and versatile African traditions have proven in their movement from place to place across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean.

MIASA CC-BY-4.0: Prof. Mamadou Diawara, Prof. Grace Diabah, Prof. Joseph Yaro & Dr. Susann Baller at Amo Lecture 2024

Falola compares African Ancestral Studies with current ones. Related courses include Anthropology, History, Sociology, and Archaeology. Traditional courses in the West on either traditional African history or traditional African cultural studies often focus on the political, social, or economic life of African societies, either in relation to the struggle of colonization or post-colonization or developmental agendas. In contrast, African Ancestral Studies places the ‘ancestral’ in the middle and makes central a spiritual-philosophical and cosmological dimension, including the centrality of the veneration and reverence for the ancestors (that is, the spiritual life of the ancestors) and the importance of orality (tradition) and its linkage with spiritual practices and influence on contemporary African life and the African Diaspora. One of the ambitious avenues to studying the world from an African vantage point characterizes the centrality of the ancestral as a threshold to understanding the self, the communities and society, and their cosmological or divine relations.

African Ancestral Studies could also fill an important intellectual gap of people inside and outside the continent of Africa. While the main goal of an AAS course is to serve as a cultural intellectual medium for both continents, it would also serve an important academic purpose of filling the gaps left by courses like Empires of the Mind or How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, both of which are seen as vital critical tools for personal, cultural, and intellectual empowerment. AAS will serve, among other purposes, including the following:

i.     Lack of Depth in Mainstream Curricula: Mainstream education, following a colonial or post-colonial emphasis, has restricted its engagement with Africa to areas such as slavery, colonization, or contemporary underdevelopment. This course would offer all learners a much richer, less skewed, and more nuanced perspective on Africa’s pre-colonial civilizations, wisdom traditions, African political thought, and Africa’s pivotal role as the cradle of humanity and as a source of the world’s most advanced cultures in the past 100,000 years.

ii.   Erasure of Indigenous Practices and Beliefs: This course also helps to balance the current way that Western education tends to marginalize or trivialize African spirituality (or epistemology or moral systems).

Iii  Reconciling Identity in the African Diaspora: Historically, the transatlantic slave trade and other forms of historic displacements have cut several in the African diaspora off from ties of belonging and identity. Therefore, a prime aim of the course is to provide tools that can serve as bridges for those desiring to reconnect with, explore, and define their African heritage, identity, and legacy.

iii.  Limited African-centered Philosophical Studies: It would give predominantly Western-centric scholarly communities the underexposed opportunity to engage philosophical questions from African-centred frameworks and fissures, which, as my examples illustrate, can challenge Western notions of individuality, time, morality, and society, leading to alternative, but sometimes commensurable, answers to quintessentially ‘universal’ human questions. 

v. Underserved Focus on African Contributions to Global Knowledge: AAS will help showcase its contributions to, among other subjects, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and forms of government and governance and demonstrate the logical conclusions of its intellectual traditions, which are too often overlooked within the global academy.

 

Link to Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture 2024 on MIASA website: https://miasa.ug.edu.gh/event/amo-lecture-2024/

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
teammiasa (February 27, 2025). Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture 2024: Ancestral Knowledge for Contemporary Transformation. Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa - Blog. Retrieved March 26, 2025 from https://miasa.hypotheses.org/4204


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