Colonialism and Its Aftermath: The Crisis of Knowledge Production

In the discourse about the myriad crises afflicting African countries, it is customary to castigate colonialism and its consequences. It is claimed that colonialism and its aftermath distorted the processes of socio-historical development in the continent and that the current crises are the results of the colonial exploitation of the continent. This manner of reasoning is not limited to critics of colonialism alone. Even its apologists point to the transformations that colonialism effected in the lives and times of the colonized as well as in the topographies of their colonies. Both opponents and antagonists alike have focused too much on the economic dimensions of the crises. I do not want to suggest that this emphasis is misplaced. I think, though, that there has been too little effort to examine the manifestations of the crises in the area of knowledge and of its production. Very few thinkers have sought to understand the cultural dimensions. When they do, such thinkers have looked more at the visual and performing arts generally. Those who have looked beyond the arts have often espoused a recurrent reductionism that transforms the cultural crisis into an epiphenomenon of the economico-political crises. Reductionist analysis fails to see that cultural processes may not always be amenable to economico-political explanations. Their dynamics force us to examine them in some relative isolation as constituted regions of inquiry before inserting them into a general theoretical matrix. This paper focuses on the Nigerian experience. It argues that a better understanding of the crises of life and thought pervading the Nigerian nation can be obtained from a close examination of the stunted development of the mode of knowledge production prevailing therein. The paper describes the concept of the mode of knowledge production and its determinants. It asks and answers the following questions: Did we have modes of knowledge production in our indigenous communities? What were they like? What was the impact of the various historical which have impinged on these indigenous modes? By alien historical movements I mean Islam, Slavery, Christianity, Colonialism, and Capitalism. It will be argued that whatever modes of knowledge production (MOKPs, for short) were present in our indigenous communities were in many cases profoundly altered for the worse, and, in some others, utterly destroyed by these historical movements. The roots of the contemporary limited development of the MOKP in Nigeria can be traced to the impact of these processes.