Discernible in the literature is the delineation of African epistemology as a discourse of the relation of knowledge to being, i.e. ‘what is’, such that knowledge is taken to derive from how being is conceived. Here are some characteristic expressions of this position:
… it is important that we understand the African cultural and ontological conceptions of reality to enable us to understand the African approach to knowledge.
African epistemology is a discourse of the knowledge attitudes of Africans in terms of their cognitive relations with the world around them, which is influenced by their broader understanding or conception of reality.
Notwithstanding this well-documented view of African epistemology, which includes discussions of its nature and characteristics, there has however not been an extensive elaboration of the nature of knowledge in African epistemology.2 Put differently, an account of knowledge that may derive from the view of African epistemology as the relation between being and knowledge remains under-examined. An attempt at this is the focus of this chapter. The question that therefore drives the analysis of the chapter could be stated thus: what account of knowledge results from an epistemological system that is grounded on the relation of knowledge to being (understood as ‘what is’)? To address this question, and similar ones, I attempt a portrayal of the nature of knowledge in African epistemology, which, for want of better designation, I dub ‘Ontologised knowledge’.3 In taking this approach to elaborate on knowledge in African epistemology, I countenance the idea that the philosophical understanding of knowledge about African belief system(s) cannot be fully understood without reference to views about reality that are widely held by members of the given society in Africa (see Ellis and Haar 2007). And since the prevalent view of reality in Africa assumes a structural wholeness of the visible or material world and the invisible or immaterial world, the distinctive mode of acquiring knowledge about the world is characteristically a holistic approach, in which the sacred and non-sacred, the material and the immaterial are held to con stitute one organic reality (Ilesanmi 1995: 54; Ellis and Haar 2007: 386).
To achieve my aim in this chapter, I begin, in the section following the present one, with a presentation of the assumptions that I consider central to my analysis. The first of these concerns the conception of being (i.e. ‘what is’) that is taken to be the foundational belief about ‘what is’, and to which knowledge is seen to bear relation in ‘Ontologised knowledge’. The section examines the senses of ‘Africa’ that drives how African epistemology is understood in the chapter. After examining these assumptions, I turn attention, in the section following the one clarifying these assumptions, to examining what I refer to as the universe-of-harmony belief. For clarity, it is this belief that I take to be foundational to the conception of being dominant among Africans. In examining the universe-of-harmony belief, aside from expounding on the nature of the belief, I also examine the ontological commitment arising from taking to such beliefs about ‘what is’. Having examined these concerns and the ones in the section on the assumptions of the chapter, I turn attention to developing the Ontologised epistemology account of knowledge.