ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I show that if it is reasonable that knowledge and knowledge claims emerge from conditions of being – understood here to mean the condition of existence of human beings – then this should put to question the legitimacy of denials of subaltern cultures’ capacity to produce knowledge. By extension, contestations of the idea that there are diverse knowledges that correspond to diverse peoples and their respective conditions of existence will disperse. With this in mind, the African, from within peculiar experiences of the conditions of being, could be better positioned to produce knowledge about the African existential situations than what ‘outsiders’ suppose they can produce. The substance of this reasoning is that the African ought to be a preferred producer of knowledge about the African existential situations. This is an invitation to assert the capacity of the African to produce knowledge from long before contacts with the West, contrary to problematic contestations of the capacity to do so. As I see it, this effort towards assuring that the African should be first in the reference concerning knowledge production about the African experiential situations is necessary in nurturing conditions that would allow the flourishing of authentic African epistemologies.
