ABSTRACT
Interest in indigenous knowledge systems particularly developed during the 1980s, primarily in response to dissatisfaction with modernisation as a means of improving living standards for the majority of the population of the global South. Modernisation, through the diffusion of formal scientific and technical knowledges from the North to the global South, has been seen to be an effective way of eradicating poverty. Consequently, development has frequently been conceptualised as a fundamentally technical issue, driven by the dominant science discourses from Europe and North America. By the 1980s, however, it had become clear that this transfer had not been wholly successful in transforming the lives of many, and especially so in Africa.
