Over centuries, colonial education employed a pedagogy that deliberately omitted, distorted, or diluted the role that Africa and Africans played in sustainable development and world civilisation. It is through such an oppressive intervention that modern African scholars have come to identify with European models of development whilst they remain ambivalent or indifferent to their own.

By its nature, Indigenous knowledge is lived experience. Through cultural beliefs that prohibit destruction of sacred places to use of totems as a way of protecting the environment as well as rituals, taboos, myths and ceremonies, Indigenous knowledge has been effective in protecting and preserving all forms of creation. By being embedded in people’s beliefs and day to day practices, Indigenous knowledge is not an outward intervention that one seeks to protect the environment but one that reinforces interdependence between people and the planet.

This course introduces the concept of Indigenous knowledge and its link to sustainable development. Using an African lens, the course seeks to review and revive the role that Indigenous knowledge can play in sustainable development. Overall, the course will inspire participants to counter historical erasure of African knowledges by engaging in an unearthing of, and acknowledgement of repressed and suppressed knowledges and practices.