Subverting, Disenchanting and Rationalizing STI Systems: A Strategy for Revealing Modernity in Africa
Jacques L. Hamel
technology and innovation systems (STI) for revealing some distinctive
style of modernity in Africa.
The modernization of these systems, as the backbones of any mode of
modernity, also requires the modernization of our mental or
intellectual costumes. This process is essentially the passage from
closed, self-confirming, faith-based, customary, totalizing or
terrorizing knowledge systems to essentially falsifiable, evidence-
based, scientifically-established and technically-proven innovative
knowledge systems. In these systems scientific knowledge can be
construed as a theory of the real and as a technology of truth and
understood as the epistemological foundation of any form of Afro-
modernity. It is also the passage from the ‘Book of Scripture’ to the
‘Book of Nature’ or from the submission to the white man’s colonizing
gods to the more authentic and genuine African identities, beliefs and
values, such as those embodied in the concept of ubuntu. In this
perspective rejuvenating knowledge systems can purge Abrahamic and
Shamanic worldviews of non-scientific constituents and open a path
from the mostly totemic, enchanted, mystified, supernatural,
patriarchal / phallocratic and over-religious worldviews and mindsets
of pre-modern Africa to the more desacralized, secular, rational,
liberal, enlightened and autonomous worldviews and mindsets of
modernity. This paradigmatic shift toward modern ways of knowing and
understanding requires championing the scientific method, the rule of
technique and innovation as well as promoting decisive scientific
arbitrations, increased technical mediations and a redefinition of
STI’s relationships with religious, cultural, social and economic
life. For this shift to occur there is a need to better appreciate
modern science as a method of both calculative and subversive
thinking, as a means of achieving the systematic renovation of
conventional / medieval / pre-modern realities and as a way to
reconstruct and re-order African realities from fresh fundamentals and
from the latest scientific insights. This may require strengthening
various capacities to probe, undermine and rationalize oppressive
systems (religious, cultural, social, economic, political). It may
also require re-cosmologizing, re-mythologizing, ‘re-prophetizing’, re-
charlatanizing and re-directing the evolution of the African reality
toward a region free of wishful thinking, fallacies, lies,
superstitions, prejudices, magic and witchcraft and toward an Islam-
free and Christian-free scientifically-informed free-thinking
innovative post-colony. The necessary capacities for achieving this
shift toward more innovative scientific and technical orders and
systems are grouped into eight areas.
Full reflection here: http://sites.google.com/site/revealingmodernityinafrica/newpaper