Epistemicide: A conceptual analysis in African epistemology

Abstract

Many social scientists, philosophers and theorists have applied Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s conceptual neologism, ‘Epistemicide’, in various fields, in singular reference to a set of mutually distinct phenomena. This raises an immediate philosophical and epistemic question of conceptual plausibility and the validity of the inferences drawn. In this case, a single philosophical term is applied as an explanation for a set of diverse phenomena that have been claimed to occur, not only in the history of ideas but also in the contemporary moment, which is also the context of current debates on African epistemology.