Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies by Toyin Falola (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies by Toyin Falola Bernard Nwosu Falola, Toyin. 2022. Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 536 pp. $39.99 (hardback), $39.99 (ebook). In this book, Toyin Falola challenges the search for African history exclusively in nonexistent or scanty alphabetic records. He draws attention to different forms of nonalphabetic text, such as sculptures, hairstyling, painting, cultural norms, and other such sources that provide copious historical records and insights. Outsiders who lack a connection with the symbolism of these texts and their cultural media end up with a limited understanding of Africa and its history. The book introduces a novel form of historical archive, which the author views as a broad knowledge-scape, encompassing experiences, material artifacts, cultural practices, and even insiders' narratives of their own cultural epistemologies. This archive, an embodiment of unconventional history, is a system for connecting culture, self, and dimensions of sociocultural existence. Drawing materials from it, Falola undertakes an intellectual freedom struggle against the dominant knowledge form, which disparages non-Western cultural standards by obscuring their presence in scholarly narratives. Falola designs a decolonial project and undertakes it with an autoethnographic method, drawing from his experiential encounters, from which his appreciation of the context of research enables him to extract deeper meanings to counter hegemonic projects of Eurocentric scholarship and assert the value of African epistemologies. Yoruba culture is his case study, but his account of it mirrors several sub-Saharan African contexts that share striking similarities. The book is divided into fourteen chapters. In the first two, Falola conceptualizes the novel archive as a sort of cultural "signage … [a] systemic collection of signs and referents" (2). These chapters present a justification for using an autoethnographic method. On the side of justification, autoethnography lends voice to subaltern cultures that have different codes of record and interpretations unknown to mainstream epistemology. Chapter 3 deals with narrative politics and cultural ideologies. In it, Falola contests that African histories are embedded in manifestations of orality, including proverbs, riddles, myths, and legends. It presents the concepts of time and memory tracing, the cultural norm of long discursive greetings, naming as a circumstantial practice, taboos, and superstition. It illuminates the practices of collectivism and cultural spirituality, especially [End Page 101] the Yoruba cosmic belief in the interdependence of the worlds of the living, the dead, and the spirit or unborn (64). The salient issues in chapter 4 include narratives of magic and myth and their comparison with miracles. Chapter 5 illuminates the importance of poetry as part of cultural narratives and an active political agent, which bears cultural virtues. Chapter 6 continues with the role of poetry in the narratives of self and its development as part of a social whole. Chapter 7 discusses the role of literature in sustaining culture and documenting history by revealing the good and bad in society. Chapter 8 treats intricacies of the connection between politics and narrative, and it demonstrates that being in charge of narrative is a tool for controlling the people for whom narratives define reality and meanings. Chapter 9 begins the unveiling of the nonalphabetic historical texts found in Yoruba visual arts. Culture is posed as a form of symbolic aesthetics, in which artists reflect social contexts and portray themselves as entities that form part of one cultural whole. Thus, Yoruba sculptors' works are an archive of history into which artisans infuse their acquired knowledge, the history of their nation, couched in myths, morals, spirituality, craft, industry, gender-role differentiation, and sense of beauty. Chapter 10 continues by exploring the unique historical texts woven into Yoruba textiles, whose use of colors, threads, designs, and imprinted images are intelligible signs (283) of the process, economics, and history of their making. These textiles, when used as dress, express gender, sociopolitical status, and group affiliation (298). Chapter 11 presents other dimensions of Yoruba arts and culture, especially painting, which, being culturally bounded, expresses the people's lifeworld, spirituality, and mysticism. Chapter 12 discusses Yoruba hair art, an important text, from which the bearer's age and social category can be read. Hairstyle reveals married, unmarried, and eminent persons (381). As an entry...