Ukuzwa ngenkaba: connecting with African ways of knowing through the umbilical cord

ABSTRACT

The Nguni term inkaba refers both to the umbilical cord and the navel. In this paper, we use the idea of the umbilical cord to explain an enduring intellectual connection that many African scholars feel towards African epistemes. By drawing on the term inkaba, the paper explores the idea of “umbilical sense” as an intellectual instinct that one develops in relation to a range of knowledges that have been marginalised. This sense speaks to the intellectual orientation drawn from growing and developing as persons within indigenous communities. We argue that the desire and ability to respond to the conceptual shortcomings in Western academe stems from an umbilical sense, or a navel sense – ukuzwa ngenkaba in Nguni languages. Drawing on African writers such as Mazisi Kunene and Ifeanyi Menkiti, we propose that the acquisition of knowledge forms part of an African conception of personhood that links one to many corpuses of historical knowledges. Knowledge thus forms part of how we emerge as persons and, in turn, make other persons. We explore the implications of our concept for current debates on the decolonisation of knowledge and the meaning of post-human knowledge with the emergence of artificial intelligence.

KEYWORDS:

• Inkaba
• umbilical cord
• indigenous knowledge
• decolonisation
• personhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This quote is transcribed from a publicly available interview by Prof Cherif Keita with Fatima Meer, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0iXfjM67n4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nomalanga Mkhize

Nomalanga Mkhize is a historian in the Department of History and Political Studies at Nelson Mandela University. Her research interest is in nineteenth-century African language historical literatures.

Mathe Ntšekhe

Mathe Ntšekhe is a computer science scholar in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the National University of Lesotho. Her research focuses on the digital collection of Indigenous Knowledges.