Orality, literacy and knowledge traditions in Africa

Abstract

Debate on orality-literacy contrast has lingered for a long time, especially in modern knowledge traditions. Generated by the question of whether orality and literacy synchronically co-exist, or literacy diachronically began with writing, the knowledge of orality-literacy contrast has privileged the assumption that literacy began with writing. Against this backdrop, this article argues (despite that literature to the contrary is vast), that the knowledge of orality-literacy contrast does not exist in the Yorùbá knowledge tradition. Premised on the Yorùbá concepts of ìtàn (i.e., a living framework of knowledge production as a narrative enterprise) and àrọ́bá (i.e., a living framework of knowledge production as a critical enterprise and as a communal enterprise) and the Yorùbá philosophical conception of orí, this article speaks to the problem of Euro-monolithic domination on education, knowledge traditions, human development and nation-building in Africa and beyond. It speaks to how colonial writing, through the formulation of orality-literacy contrast, displaces rationality in the oral philosophical tradition of the Yorùbá, like elsewhere in the continent. It discusses how orality-literacy contrast, until the present, has reproduced the cultural and scientific dependence of Africa on the West. It deconstructs the Euro-monolithic domination to show the problem of knowledge production and consumption in colonial education, and clarifies the contributions of the Yorùbá to world philosophies, knowledge traditions and decolonial epistemologies. This article thus shows the importance of ìtàn, àrọ́bá and orí to de-Westernising traditions of knowledge production and education as a way of decolonising the Yorùbá knowledge tradition, self-development, nation-building and the collective destiny of postcolonial Africa.