Negotiating Knowledge: Epistemological Pluralism in Ghanaian Postcolonial Detective Fiction

The African whodunit is a haven for revealing the continent’s critical social issues and exploring the tensions between competing ways of knowing. Yet there is a limited focus on how detective figures renegotiate scientific rationality and indigenous epistemology in their quest to unravel a crime. This paper explores this dialectic by examining how Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009) and Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods (2009) reimagine crime-solving as an epistemological negotiation and a complementary interplay between plural ways of knowing rather than a purely scientific process. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive border-crossing to describe how these texts resist rigid binaries between tradition and modernity, rural and urban, and science and spirituality. The paper contributes to debates on epistemic decolonisation by advancing the need for context-responsive frameworks for supporting an understanding of knowledges in the postcolonial African state.