Restoring the Broken Tongue: Decolonising Knowledge through African Indigenous Epistemologies

The reclamation of African indigenous epistemologies is key to the broader formation of decolonial knowledge. Colonization not only profited off African resources but also invaded knowledge systems of the indigenous people in delegitimizing indigenous languages, logics and cosmologies. This epistemic violence caused a split as it were a broken tongue that separated African peoples from authoritative access to their own intellectual heritage. The paper considers how modes of African knowing grounded in orality, community memory, and the linguistic legacy were subjected to Western epistemic frameworks. Working with a qualitative, multidisciplinary methodology, the paper looks back to traditions such as Ifá divination, Ubuntu ethics, and oríkì praise poetry as concrete examples of such case studies. These systems are approached not as relics of a long-lost age but as living epistemologies with the potential to influence education, governance, and social values in the Africa of today. The central argument is that the rehabilitation of indigenous African ways of thinking must be an act of intellectual restitution, during which hitherto silenced voices—marginalized narratives—must be rehabilitated as a source of knowledge. The paper draws on the politics of postcoloniality to argue that in the absence of such restoration, attempts to decolonize risk reinscribing the very hierarchies toward which they are directed. Re-attaching that broken tongue is thus as much a philosophical as it is a political imperative.