Epistemology and literature

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the possibility to use African-language literature, with a focus on the Swahili novel, as a source of insight into epistemologies operative in African societies. Examining Swahili novels from the 1950s to date, the chapter identifies four prominent epistemological orientations present in these novels. Having analysed these, the chapter links them back to debates about epistemology conducted by African philosophers. The four epistemological frameworks are positivist epistemology, favouring objectivism and scientific knowledge; epistemology of indeterminacy, found in magical realist writings, which merges incompatible ontologies and epistemologies as complementary conceptualizations of reality and of knowledge; holistic epistemology, which seeks to reconnect the divisions of reality, such as the epistemological opposition of subject and object, in a unity of being; and finally the epistemology of relativism, which culminates in radical scepticism with respect to the possibility of human knowledge of reality and preserves the space for the mystery of the unknowable.