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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E29-05. To panel E29.

Title of paper:

Author:

Albert Roca (University of Lleida).

Long abstract paper:
The communication explores the uses and conceptions of local knowledge that Covid19 has activated in different fields, preventive, therapeutic and socioeconomic. This local knowledge has been practically forgotten by international recommendations, despite the WHO strategy on TCM, and despite the fact that some recognized voices (Paul Richards, Mats Utas) have advocated activating the 'local science' accumulated after the Ebola outbreak of 2014.

One of the potentials and challenges at the same time of African local knowledge is that it affects all fields of human activity, without establishing borders. This is due to the strong holistic component of African societies, which in turn determines the frequently religious and embodied (initiation) nature of knowledge. Therefore, as it is useless trying to produce something like recipes for customary hygienic practices, based on concrete scenarios (in Madagascar, Senegal, Mali ...), the aim of the communication is rather to survey how effective interaction spaces could be generated among very different epistemological systems (including a health component, specialist and community agency), allowing them to complement each other, and see how this knowledge could be incorporated into university studies.

The finding that most experts in the field, neither African nor European, do not know how to manage or even how to articulate with this type of knowledge, was the wishbone of the CUDA, Cultures and Development in Africa master, which was taught in different African (UCAD, Yaoundé I, Antananarivo) and Catalan (Barcelona, Lleida, URV, UPF, URL) universities between 2010 and 2014. The communication will try to connect with this experience, as well as with the joint work accumulated by the SACUDA network of researchers (Salus, Culture and Development in Africa).

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