By Zulumathabo Zulu © 2018

The Preamble

My dear followers. This is to notify you that I will be presenting a ground-breaking scholarly paper Africography: Metaphysics, Historiography and Decolonisation at the College of Human Sciences’ Decolonisation Conference at Unisa (University of South Africa) in Pretoria on Tuesday August 7, 2018 (see Decoloniality Conference Prog V02 university programme of the conference). Let me give you an analytical sense of appreciation about Africography.

About Africography

Africography is a revolutionary methodology of knowledge production and validation that I began developing at the laboratories of the School of Computer Science of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. This is a metascientific knowledge producing and analytical system based on the value systems of ancient African cosmology which infused me with endless effervescence as a logical negation of the Canadian WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) and Eurocentric ontic (ontology) and epistemic (epistemology) systems of conceptualisation of knowledge wherein African knowledge does not count as a legitimate form of knowledge.

The methodological principles encapsulated in Africography, known as methmodalism (methmodal for short), were inspired by a novel approach wherein the erudite African cosmologists conceptualised about the knowledge of the cosmos without the use of technological instruments of any kind. The specific example of this uncontested fact is the metaphysical case of cosmology wherein the Basotho of the erudite village of Matamong in the Eastern Free State venerated the invocation of the cosmic axiom “Tosa le madinyana a yona” hereby conceptualising about Jupiter as a female god known as Tosa and her beautiful baby moons as Madinyana.

Zulumathabo Zulu at Toronto, Canada.

Madinyana conceptualises about the moons of Jupiter as extremely small babies who need a perpetual protection under the powerful wings of their beloved mother Tosa. When the formidable Tosa traverses the vast expanse of the cosmic space like an Amazon giant of the cosmos, Madinyana moons are forever protected under her impregnable wings like the great Phiri Ya Manka who tenaciously defends the members of the clan. These Madinyana moons are not visible to a naked eye. The cosmic knowledge about the esoteric internals of Jupiter without the use of scientific instruments cannot be explained using the ontology of Western science. We need a new ontology to do this hence the genesis of Africography. This uncontested fact of African cosmology is attested for in the book The Sacred Knowledge of the Desert: African Philosophical Transcendence (Madisebo University College Press), written by this author.

From a historiographical analysis vantage point, the knowledge about the moons of Jupiter came to Western science via the telescope of the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei in 1610 when he trained his newly invented telescope on Jupiter and discovered the four large moons. Notwithstanding, Galileo did not see the Madinyana moons with his telescope. He only saw 5% of the existing moons. The small moons were previously known to the Basotho ancients as “Madinyana a Tosa” meaning the jealously guarded baby moons of Jupiter. At the time, our European brothers and sisters remained in the aquifer of intellectual darkness about Jupiter’s deep cosmology through no fault of their own.

Reasons For Scientific Failure To Find Madinyana Moons

There are (1) temporal and (2) technological reasons for failure by Western science to discover the baby moons of Jupiter which account for the overwhelming majority of the moons of the venerated planet.

The Temporal Reasons

The Dark Ages in Europe was a periodic ethos of intellectual regression crossfading with other important historical epochs like the Rennaissance (the 1300s to the 1600s); the Christian crusades against the African Moors and the destruction of their books (11th century to the 16th century) and the Age of Discovery (the 1400s to the 1700s).

These crossfades of intellectual darkness meant that it would take a long time before Europe gains an epistemic access to the deeper cosmology of Jupiter. Moreover, the Christian crusades whose purpose it was to expell the African Moors from Europe and burn thousands of their books added to the existing aggravation of arrested intellectual development.

We pay deserved tribute to a venerated country of intellectual giants Timbuktu Mali wherein thousands of ancient books still survive thanks to the erudite former President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki who played a pivotal role to ensure the preservation of those manuscripts for the survival benefit of posterity into the distant future.

Technological Reasons

The baby moons of Jupiter are buried deep into space at spectacular distances of 10 to 20 million kilometers wherein Galileo’s primitive telescope could not reach. It took more than four hundred years with the advent of more sophisticated technological innovations to eventually turn a page on intellectual darkness and thus discover Madinyana moons by Western science. Some of the discoveries were made as recently as last year in 2017 as confirmed by an impressive discovery of two more Jovian moons made by the celebrated scientist and astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America. A scientific analysis of the historiography of the timelime of events with respect to the observational studies of Jupiter goes into hundreds of years long after Galileo had departed.

In the meanwhile, the Basotho cosmologists of South Africa possessed this coveted cosmic knowledge hundreds of years long before the invention of the telescope. One of the Basotho astronomical axioms further says: “Madinyana a Tosa a pitika kgahla” meaning many of the baby moons of Jupiter rotate in an opposite direction with respect to the rotation of their beloved Jupiter mother. The word Kgahla is defined in the Sesotho Dictionary of Mathematics (Madisebo University College Press) written by this author as an opposite position or infinitesimal changes in the opposite direction.

Pitika is in interesting concept because it is based on spatial numerical logic. I devote a scholarly article about numerical logic in Numerical Logic of the Basotho published on this platform (the reader should find this article by a simple Google search).

If the great Professor Pitika Ntuli of South Africa is reading these sacred pages of the erudite ancestors who have gone before us, he must be truly blessed to know that the cosmic name Pitika is part of the knowledge of the cosmos thanks to the Basotho ancients. This also confirms that it was the knowledge of the cosmos that gave birth to the mathematical knowledge of the Basotho. Badimo ke bao! Thokoza Makhosi!

Africography is born out of Basotho cosmology. Badimo ke bao! Thokoza Makhosi! The research conceptualisation of Africography uses the principles of a methmodal as previously mentioned. The powerful construct of a methmodal is about a methodology that necessitates a good synthesis of cosmic and modal systems of logic as a metaphysical case with respect to the production and description of new knowledge about the natural phenomenon vis-a-vis the operational logic embedded in Western methodology since the main purpose of methodology is to operationalise the process of knowledge production. The research methodology, as conceptualised in Western universities, describes a phenomenon in terms of an epistemic case based on the analysis of observational data whereas the methmodal of Africography describes a phenomenon as a metaphysical case in accordance with the cosmology of the African erudite ancients. To learn more about African metaphysics, the reader should consult the scholarly paper African Metaphysical Science and Decolonisation which was presented at North West University – Potchestroom at a Decolonisation Conference in the Faculty of Education in January 2018.

Historicity of Africography

The School of Computer Science laboratories wherein Africography was first developed in the early 1990s, are the same laboratories where I also engineered a mood altering system Thekwini Visual Canvass (along with other technological artifacts i.e. mood assessment instrument Emofeel; Cryptography and Digital Forensics) which was later supported by the Industrial Research Assistance Programme of the National Research Council of Canada; Canada’s largest public research organization and one of the largest World class research institutions on the planet.

A Google search should assist the reader to learn more about the National Research Council of Canada. The intellectual property certificates of my inventions are registered in the official Federal Government of Canada database at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in the French speaking province of Quebec.

The Incredible Fact

Notwithstanding my intellectual achievements, a truly incredible fact is that the South African government has never made approaches to Zulumathabo Zulu to say “Zulumathabo Zulu, we value your scientific; engineering; innovation and cosmic knowledge and we would love to support you to make a stellar contribution to the land of your birth so that your strategic knowledge of science can be passed on to the futuristic generations for their survival benefit hereafter to make South Africa a better country”. Why not? Maybe they will pay tribute to Zulumathabo Zulu in his death bed. What will be the use of that? I hope not! Badimo ke bao! Thokoza Makhosi!

Without further ado, I am hereby sharing the abstract of my scholarly paper Africography: Metaphysics, Historiography and Decolonisation. Badimo ke bao! Thokoza Makhosi!

Abstract

Western paradigms of knowledge exist to displace the local paradigms in the African terrain of knowledge production and pedagogy. Consequently, the official curriculum is characterised by knowledge segregation as opposed to knowledge aggregation resulting in the African students getting frustrated; traumatised and demoralised by the taxonomy of colonial constructs that subject them to a teaching and learning situation that is devoid of African dialectics as attested for by the advent of the #FeesMustFall movement that is calling for the decolonisation of the curriculum and the foregrounding of the pre-colonial knowledge of the African ancestors.

The current metaphysical case of academia marginalises the African origin of knowledge in spite of the fact that academia is premised on a scientific method as a gold standard canon for producing true and justified knowledge while at the same time the scientific method is increasingly being perceived by some as a code word for promoting the superiority of Western ideas while indigenous knowledges languish on the sidelines or in the underground schools.

Increasing Western historiography or Western linguistics as part of the research methodologies or pedagogy does not solve the problem. As a new-fangled prototype in the invocation of the knowledge of the erudite African ancestors, this scholarly paper introduces the new paradigm of Africography as a novel approach that foregrounds the ontological primacy of indigenous knowledge systems and produces new knowledge to enhance the survival experience of the future generations with respect to metaphysics; historiography and decolonisation.