Towards the Empowerment of the Vanquished

Abstract

Against the background of the 19th century British domination of Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Healers (1978) depicts the restorative activities of a group of traditional health practitioners. The paper seeks to place African Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the heart of the resistance to colonialism and imperialism. The paper resorts to a close reading of the narrative guided by perspectives on recuperation provided by Armah, Amilcar Cabral, and Christel N. Temple. Traditional medicinal expertise, ecological awareness, cultural memory, and anthroponymy, as bearers of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, coalesce to discredit the metropolitan miscomception of Africa as a tabula rasa, thereby infusing confidence into subalternized Blacks towards the dream of a reunified continent. The paper concludes that resistance to the empire entails politics and ethics of healing, empowerment, continuous mental decolonization, and commitment to African reunification.