Global Multiculturalism: Africa and the Recasting of the Philosophical and Epistemological Plateaus

Abstract

This article focuses on the problematic relation between African worldviews and their attendant educational and epistemological systems, on the one hand, and the dominant European discourses that have attempted to negate the validity of those, both in historical and contemporary Africa, on the other hand. The article first deals with its subtitle (i.e., it critically problematizes and interrogates the way African knowledge systems and cultures have been portrayed mainly in the writings that emanated from the European metropolis) and how this has facilitated not only false and untenable perceptions about the continent and its people but, as well, the continuing psychocultural colonization of Africans. In its domain of analyzing culture and its conceptualizations and practices, the article minimizes the fixed categories of the case and assumes a more active and multidirectional intersection of culture, society, and overall social being. Via its concluding remarks, the article proposes the possibility of more equitable spaces of critical global multiculturalism as the sine qua non for the achievement of a transformationalist and non-exclusionist trend of human emancipation and development.