In concluding this chapter, I would like to make a few remarks regarding the dis tinctiveness in the approach to knowledge in African epistemology that this chapter has attempted to portray. The distinctive feature of the relation of knowledge to being (‘what is’) in the context of African epistemology emphasises rather different concerns from that in, say, the traditional account of knowledge, if, in any case, the traditional account is read to imply this relation. Whereas, ‘what is’ from the African perspective includes a belief in immaterial realities as deities, spirits, and the relation and interaction of these with the material world, the understanding and delimitations regarding ‘what is’ in the traditional account implies what is materially observable. This, to a significant degree, inflects the sort of justification that is usually accepted to render a claim in the traditional account justified. So, in brief, while a discourse of knowledge in African epistemology assumes ‘what is’ to straddle the immaterial and the material aspects of ‘what is’ (being), mainstream (Western) epis temology takes ‘what is’ to denote that which is empirically discernible.
The above distinction made may not be said to provide African epistemology – a distillation of the way Africans cognise the world – with a unique mode of knowing. This is because the assumptions of organic wholeness about ‘what is’ that is said to undergird the way of knowing that is dominant among African cultures south of the Sahara is available to others of non-African extraction. The distinctiveness about African epistemology and its conception of knowledge derives from the emphasis regarding knowledge and knowing as against the emphasis in other contexts, such as in the Western approach to knowledge and knowing. While in the African approach knowledge is conceived in the context of an ontology that does not separate the immaterial from the material, in the traditional account, knowledge derives from a view of ontology that is largely materialistic. What this means is that no one account of knowledge is the comprehensive view about knowledge; rather, the various views about knowledge are grounded on certain preferences about the nature of what can be known and how it can be known.