There is no shortage of indigenous knowledge in Africa. It resides in many sources within any given country including its historical, economic, social, political, ecological, cultural, and technological contexts. Any meaningful effort to incorporate IK in environmental education must utilise these sources.
Traditionally, Africans used oral history to pass knowledge about nature from one generation to the next. Through frequent storytelling, they taught children about their community, its mores, beliefs, and behaviours. They did this during late-evening hours under the moonlight or around fireplaces. The storytellers were usually family elders, who became griots: experts profoundly knowledgeable on African tradition, culture and history.
There were folktales and myths that held that the Earth, including bodies of water, hills and mountains were the home of ancestral spirits. There were also folktales that told of ancestral spirits causing agricultural and human fertility as well as protecting the living from illnesses and other dangers. If nothing else, this gave people reason to be good environmental stewards. Within this frame of thinking, doing otherwise would provoke the wrath of ancestral spirits.
Many African folktales conveyed lessons on environmental stewardship. A common folktale in Anglophone West Africa tells of Mammy Water, the water goddess causing anyone who defecates or dumps in a river or other body of water to drown. Such folktales were meant to discourage people from excreting or dumping in rivers, streams and lakes. Folktales about locusts, droughts, floods, and other devastating natural disasters are also commonplace. Some of these are tales about how communities managed to survive these disasters and became more resilient.
A well-known folktale about disaster survival and resilience is culled from ancient Egypt and mentioned in the Bible (see Genesis 41: 25-36). The tale tells of how Egyptians of the Bronze Age managed to avoid starvation during seven years of droughts thanks to the foresight of their king, who had arranged to save much food during seasons of bountiful harvests. Knowledge of these facts is not only of historical importance. It can constitute valuable input for contemporary disaster mitigation and relief initiatives.
In the name of modernisation and the pursuit of economic growth, the colonial and post-colonial governments in Cameroon have aggressively promoted cash crop farming and commensurate mono-cropping techniques. In doing so, they effectively discourage mixed-crop farming that is indigenous to the country. African IK holds that planting different types of crops, for instance, maize and beans, on the same plot of land increases soil fertility and combats weeds. This tends to increase crop yield. IK also contains information on how to produce insecticides from plant derivatives.
A meticulous comparison of so-called modern farming methods and traditional alternatives provides an opportunity to showcase the advantages of IK over Western knowledge. To be sure, mono-cropping may guarantee higher yields over shorter durations. However, in contrast to mixed-crop farming, it causes the rapid depletion of soil nutrients, soil weakness, and overall soil damage especially because it requires the use of fertilisers.
Incorporating IK into environmental education may involve as little as drawing students’ attention to environmental activities around them. It may require no more than showing students of environmentalism how African norms, folktales, and beliefs relate to what they are taught in class.
Alternatively, it may be more encompassing, including IK as part of the environmental education curriculum and mandating specific activities to be covered. In this case, it can be prescriptive in specifying exactly what activity has to be done. The activity may include taking students on field trips to peasant farming villages. It may also entail inviting local farmers to come and talk about their activities to students in formal environmental studies classes.
However it is done, it is clear that IK will once again play an important role in environmental education.
Photo credit: Global Partnership for Education used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
