Abstract:
In this article, we argue that language-based techniques have the
capacity to generate original ideas and thus account for progress in any
discipline. We claim that language-based techniques used by some
African scholars such as hermeneutics (critical interpretation of cultural
corpus) and related ones such as transliteration (adaptation of alien
intellectual legacy) are creatively inadequate to inspire progress because
they do not lead to the creation of new concepts and original ideas in
African thought. We claim also that the technique of intellectual
decolonisation with its foremost expression in Kwasi Wiredu’s
‘conceptual decolonisation’ and Kwesi Tsri’s ‘conceptual liberation’,
are two recent language-based strategies aimed at overcoming the
creative problem inherent in the techniques of hermeneutics and
transliteration. We argue that these two techniques are equally
inadequate because they are tantamount to what can be called
‘conceptual manipulation’, which is not a creative strategy for progress
in African thought. The goal of this paper therefore is to expose the
creative weaknesses in these techniques in order to show that there is a
dearth of creative language-based techniques in African studies and
make a call for the formulation of one.
