12 - Indigenous African Knowledge and the Challenge of Epistemic Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Keynote Address: African Fellowships for Research in Indigenous and Alternative Knowledges (AFRIAK), Conference organised by CODESRIA, King Fahd Palace Hotel – Dakar, Senegal, 25–27 November 2024 Prologue Allow me to start by recalling an encounter at another CODESRIA meeting in Dakar, in January 2013. In collaboration with Point Sud (Centre for Research on Local Knowledge), based in Bamako, Mali, CODESRIA had co-organised a conference, ‘Africa N‘ko: Debating the Colonial Library’. The conference had brought together some of Afri- ca’s finest intellectuals to consider the implications of what Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe designated a ‘colonial library’ on knowledge production and gnostic practices on and about Africa, as well as imagine the continent beyond the epistemic regions, structuring violence and contaminating vectors of this library. Coinciding with the conference was Operation Serval, a French military intervention in Mali os- tensibly to oust Al-Qaeda-linked Islamists who had seized control of the north of Mali and were pushing into the centre of the country. Like every other ‘savage war for peace’, Operation Serval was justified in the name of a higher ethical purpose: namely, to prevent the Mali- an state from collapse and rescue it from the savagery of Islamists harkening to irrational and premodern beliefs. Among those attending the conference, however, the concerns were especially over the protection of historical and cultural artefacts – specifically, the manuscripts and knowledge troves of medieval West Africa housed in a library in Timbuktu, central Mali.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".