“How can indigenous knowledge and science co-exist better in South Africa?”
Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, challenged the 2016 Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) Interface Conference, currently under way at the University of Venda in Limpopo, to discuss the question.
Taking place under the theme, “Towards science and technology of humility inSouth Africa”, the four-day conference, which started yesterday (3 December), looks at how technological development should take into account the many different viewpoints on science and collective learning.
“A technology of humility approach is similar to a sustainable development approach to emerging technologies. It’s an approach to take to indigenous knowledge,” said Minister Pandor.
Indigenous knowledge refers to local knowledge that has been passed on orally from generation to generation.
Minister Pandor explained that a “technology of humility” approach asked who would benefit and who might be hurt. This approach is opposed to technologies of hubris, the current dominant mode of scientific thinking, a command-and-control approach to scientific innovation.
The Minister told the gathering that South Africa’s policy on IKS adopted in 2004, after which an office (NIKSO) was established to protect, develop and manage indigenous knowledge systems, has been challenged as Western and in need of decolonisation.
“The main challenge is that we focus on the commercialisation of indigenous knowledge rather than on a better understanding of indigenous knowledge itself,” she said.
While wealth creation was essential to redressing historical injustices, the Minister said indigenous knowledge was not only useful in creating value, but was also a way of being, thinking and feeling.
“There are those who criticise our IKS policy as simply an offshoot of our pursuit of a knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is Western knowledge: indigenous knowledge is African knowledge. And that replicates the subordination of the rest to the west, the oppression of African societies by the West,” said Minister Pandor.
The conference is an opportunity for a critical engagement with the current policy on indigenous knowledge in South Africa.
“How can we bring indigenous knows and science together better?” asked Minister Pandor.
Delivering an address in line with the conference’s theme, Prof. Shiv Visvanathan, an Indian social scientist best known for his contributions to developing the field of science and technology studies, said that, as South Africa had fought apartheid, the country now needed to fight the more insidious apartheid of knowledges.
“As a people, we know that no community is complete without the other. No society is complete in itself. The other opens us, enlarges us; without the otherness of the other, the self is incomplete and even vulnerable. What is true of society is true of knowledge,” said the professor from OP Jindal Global University in New Delhi.
He said there were no lesser forms of knowledge, only a commons in which each kind of knowledge had its place. There was no failed society or failed knowledge which deserved to be eliminated.
He called for society to draw together all areas of knowledge, so that all existing kinds of knowledge could be used for the benefit of humanity. He invited everyone to join in “a festival of humble knowledges”, with ethics a part of science, no culture “museumised”, and technology not subject to cost-benefit analyses.
The University of Venda’s Vice Chancellor, Dr Peter Mbati, said there was an increasing realisation among researchers, developmental agencies, policy makers and academics, among others, that African indigenous knowledge was an under-used resource in Africa’s developmental process.
Dr Mbati said learning from what local communities already knew created an understanding of local conditions, and provided an important context for activities designed to help them. He added that the university was looking forward to seeing the first cohort of students with a bachelors’ degree in IKS graduate next year.
Speaking on behalf of the Premier, Limpopo’s MEC for Economic Development and Tourism, Seaparo Sekoati, said the provincial government believed that the conference would have tangible outcomes to improve the socio-economic conditions of people in the province, especially those in very rural areas.
Over the next four days, researchers, students and knowledge holders will present their work, discuss the challenges they have experienced and, most importantly, share best practices with others in IKS fields.
Topics will include the development of herbal formulations to treat diseases such as HIV, sexually transmitted infections, cancers and hypertension. There will also be presentations on the use of medicinal plants in healthcare and beauty among Xhosa people, and the use of IKS to conserve soil and water, and improve crop yields in spite of the current erratic rainfall.
Source: Department of Science and Technology