‘I am of Popper’, ‘I am of Asante’: The Polemics of Scholarship in South Africa

Abstract

In this article, I examine the state of knowledge construction within the South African academe. This, I do by looking at how issues of epistemology and ontology are prioritised or negated in the social construction of knowledge. Focusing on what I have called ‘the problem of perspectives’, I show how ‘epistemological narcissism’ has often limited the scope of methodological and theoretical innovativeness. I argue that by relying on a set of certain theories that scholars have known and used over the years, and dismissing those that are considered ‘foreign’ (or non-African), the exercise of knowledge construction has become largely polemical.