Professor Dani Wadada Nabudere
Chancellor, Marcus Garvey Pan African University
Mbale, Uganda
18 March 2011
An organisation called ECT Group has recently written a monograph entitled: The New Biomassters: Synthetic Biology and the Next Assault on Biodiversity and Livelihoods [2010] in which the group describes how ‘synthetic biology’ has ballooned itself into an important ‘new science,’ from a ‘fringe’ science it had been, into a hybrid ‘science’ combining engineering and computer programming. What marked its rise to prominence in a short five year period into an area of intense industrial interest and investment was the quest by capital to find new avenues for quick investment in new areas, which this ‘science’ could be of help.
That is why it can be called a contrived technique claiming to be a ‘science’ but in fact it is a reductionist mechanism that is not based on a holistic understanding of nature, but on ‘assumptions’ drawn from a failed molecular biology. Its central thesis is that a DNA drawn from a sugar-based molecule consisting of four types of chemical compounds can be organised in a unique sequence to form a code that can instruct a living organism how to grow, function, and behave. The new ‘science’ in fact is directed at monopolising biomass to address the needs of the combined industrial, energy, health and agricultural needs of the twenty-first century. According to the ECT Group, although the word ‘biomass’ has been known for some time, the new use of the term ‘biomass’ marks a specific industrial shift in humanity’s relationship with nature.
Unlike the term ‘plants’, which opens to a diverse taxonomic world of various species and multiple varieties, the new term ‘biomass’ treats all organic matter as though it is the same undifferentiated ‘plant-stuff’ which is rather crude modern understanding of natural life. Recast as biomass, in the new usage, plants are simply reduced to their common denominators so that, for example, grasslands and forests are redefined commercially as simply sources of cellulose and carbon. In this way, biomass operates as a profoundly reductionist and anti-ecological concept treating plant matter as though it were a homogenous bulk commodity, which is available for exploitation as a ‘commodity’ or a ‘resource.’ The use of the new concept ‘biomass’ to describe natural substances and living organic matter is therefore going to push nature to new demands and limits that we may not be able to sustain anymore.
Contrived as it is, ‘synthetic biology’ is being used to ‘repurposing’ simple cells such as yeast or bacteria “to behave like factories.” It is used to design and construct ‘new’ biological parts, devices, and systems as well as re-designing existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. This will include designing photosynthetic systems to produce energy. ‘Synthetic biology’ will therefore be used as an engineering device for synthesising complex biologically-based or biologically-inspired systems which display functions that do not exist in nature. This engineering device may be applied at all levels of the hierarchy of biological structures – from individual molecules to whole cells, tissues and organisms. In essence, ‘synthetic biology’ as a device enables the designing of ‘biological systems’ in a ‘rational’ and systematic way.
There are other reasons that have led to the rapid emergence of ‘synthetic biology’ as a new paradigm for industry. In fact it is a transdisciplinary response to a fragmented knowledge field intended to lead capitalism in the 21st century. It has undermined many previous boundaries that existed between the different sciences and between the natural sciences and social sciences. This has resulted in a narrower specialisation within this area of science but which has at the same time captured the imaginations of scientists from other scientific disciplines in related fields which apply methods used in non-biological fields like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science to configure biological systems to achieve important practical purposes. This development has been referred to as “genetic engineering on steroids,” which now dominates discussions of “synthetic biology” and, according to the ECT group, constitutes a new sensu stricto definition of the term.
This is perhaps the reason why ‘synthetic biology’ is also being referred to as a set of ‘extreme genetic engineering’ devices and techniques. These techniques involve constructing novel genetic systems by applying engineering principles and synthetic DNA to achieve certain results. In that way ‘synthetic biology’ techniques differ from ‘transgenic’ techniques that ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ naturally-occurring DNA sequences from one organism into another in order to change an organism’s behaviour such as putting bacterial genes into corn or human genes into rice. Synthetic organisms so created are machine-made life forms or living organisms such as yeast or bacteria to which strands of DNA are added. These organisms are constructed by a machine called “DNA Synthesiser” using the techniques of synthetic biology. Synthetic biologists can thus build their DNA from scratch using this machine, which can ‘print’ the DNA ‘to order.’ In this way, they are able to radically alter the information encoded in the DNA, creating entirely new genetic instructions and jumpstarting a series of complex chemical reactions inside the cell, known as metabolic pathway. In effect the new, synthetic DNA strands can ‘hijack’ the cell’s machinery to produce substances which are not produced naturally.
But a more broad-based holistic scientific research in genetic science, especially in the field of ‘development systems theory’ and ‘epigenetics,’ has questioned the prominence being attached to synthetic biology’s DNA code. These scientists have pointed out that all manner of complex elements both within and outside a living cell influences the way a living organism develops and this cannot be determined a priori by focussing solely on the DNA code. They also point out that even environmental factors such as stress and the weather can influence their development. Accepting this critique, some synthetic biologists have admitted that their carefully designed DNA codes that work perfectly well on a computer do not work in living synthetically engineered organisms or that they may have unexpected side effects on an organism’s behaviour.
It follows that the likelihood of unexpected behaviours is responsible for the fact that ‘synthetic biology’ has developed no methodology for testing the health and environmental safety implications of a new synthetic organism, a part from its recourse to the ‘substantial equivalence’ dogma, which enables the synthetic biologists to make “a best guess’ on how the mixture of inserted genes and recipient organisms may behave. This poses threats to human life since all this is based on analogy and guess-work. This is because lack of empirical evidence, the synthetic biologist who invents a synthetic microorganism cannot predict the effects of the release of such organism on human health and the environment with any degree of accuracy. There are greater ecological risks which are posed if such synthetic organisms are released or accidentally escaping from biorefineries since they can outcross with natural species and contaminate microbial communities in soil, seas and animals, including human beings.
ARE WE MOVING TOWARDS A NEW INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY?
Be that as it may, this has been the basis on which ‘synthetic biology’ has been crafted to contribute to a ‘new industrial revolution’ based on a new ‘bio-economy.’ This revolution will depend on a mix of biomass feedstocks and new technologies, which are supposed to provide solutions to the current world’s energy needs as well as solving the global food and environmental crises. The ‘bio-economy’ that is being touted describes the idea of an industrial order that relies on biological materials, processes and services. Since many existing parts of the global economy are already biologically-based (agriculture, fishing, forestry), proponents of the new concept often talk of a ‘new bio-economy’ to describe their particular re-invention of the global economy merely to clothe the current neoliberal economic and financial policies with new biological technologies and modes of production, without attempting to fundamentally problematise their basic economic assumptions and ideological claims.
Thanks to these emerging technological changes, especially in the fields of nanotechnology and ‘synthetic biology,’ biomass is being targeted by old industry as a source of living ‘green’ carbon to supplement or partially replace the ‘black’ fossil carbons of oil, coal and gas, which currently underpin the industrial economy. “Swifts’ are under way to claim biomass as components of the global industrial economy that draws its resources from the countries that have been subjected to imperial rule for hundreds of years. The new corporate drivers in this direction comprise forestry and agribusiness monopolies; high tech companies promoting biotech, nanotech and software; pharmaceutical, chemical and energy giants; financial institutions and investment banks; and consumer products and food companies.
There are four broad technological platforms that are being lined up to transform biomass into the new industry. These are, first, combustion techniques, which can burn extracts from biomass to the highest energy yield, open combustion with or without oxygen. This technique also includes biomass gasification, which entail burning extracts at very high temperatures with controlled amounts of oxygen as well as plasma arc gasification, which entail heating biomass with a high voltage of electric current. Secondly, there is the use of chemistry, which can be used to break down carbohydrates in biomass transformation into finer chemicals, polymers and other materials. For instance, thermochemical techniques can transform lignocellulosic material into hydrocarbons. Also the extraction of proteins and amino acids yields valuable compounds as well as fermentation techniques, which are sometimes combined with genetic engineering and synthetic biology. These can produce proteins that can be refined further into plastics, fuels and chemicals.
The third platform is biotechnology and genetic engineering which has been carried forward and is being used for both fermentation of plant sugars and traditional plant breeding, which has been its speciality up to now and which have been used for thousands of years in a more organic manner. In ancient Egypt, a form of biotechnology was used which involved the use of living organisms in producing food and medicines. This was the case until we discovered inadvertently the usefulness of one-celled organisms like yeast and bacteria. Yeast then was used for brewing beer in ancient Egypt as well as baking bread as well as converting yeast to brew beer.
The scientific study of the bio-chemical processes is less than 200 years old, but current biotechnology has taken us to levels where life forms can be artificially created, which as we have seen has reached a stage where it can be a threat to human life itself. Now new genetic engineering technologies have been introduced, which are being used to drive much of the industrial excitement around biomass. These include new approaches to genetic engineering (recombinant DNA) to modify plants to express more cellulose or to more readily break down for fermentation or to grow in less favourable soils and climatic conditions.
‘Synthetic biology’ has recently been added to the above techniques and become the forth platform for the development of novel organism that are either more efficient at harvesting sunlight or nitrogen or that can generate entirely new enzymes (or biologically active proteins). These enzymes are used to carry chemical reactions or to produce new compounds from plant material. But ‘synthetic biology’ has come into its own as “the game changer” for biomass. It promises in the longer term to expand from the low-tech burning of biomass for electric production to the expansion of the chemical possibilities of turning biomass production into a global biomass grab for the new industrial bio-economy. In this ‘revolutionary’ role ‘synthetic biology’ will produce organisms with multiple traits from multiple organisms. For instance, natural yeast has been routinely used by industry for years to behave like tin bio-refineries in say transforming cane sugar into ethanol or wheat into beer. But by altering the yeast (or other microbes), the same sugar feedstock under synthetic biology can be flexibly turned into novel products depending on how the yeast’s genetic information has been ‘programmed.’
This new ‘synthetic biological’ technique can ingest sugar feedstocks and used to excrete (or ‘produce’) hydrocarbon fuels with the properties of gasoline (instead of the usual ethanol) from billions of synthetic microbes contained in a single industrial vat. The same microbes if differently programmes can excrete a polymer, a chemical to make synthetic rubber or a pharmaceutical product. In effect, the microbe has become with synthetic biology, a production platform for different chemical compounds to make large chemical plants for industrial production. This indeed is the new biological engineering where by taking little genetic pieces of organism and ‘programming’ them, they can be put together into a whole industrial system. In so doing, a cell can be designed to become a chemical factory for the future. This is the dream.
The above new technological production platforms can be reinforced with nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has its well known suite of techniques that use and manipulate the usual properties that all substances exhibit at the scale of atoms and molecules. Recently, there has developed an increasing industrial interest in transforming nano-scale structures found in biomass for industrial use. These include nanocellulose as a new ‘commodity,’ which will take advantage of the long fibrous structure of cellulose to build new polymers, ‘smarter’ materials, nanosensors or even electronics. Research in nanobiotechnology will aim at modifying the nano-scale properties of living wood and other biomass feedstocks to later their material or energy-producing properties into new industrial products.
This will lead to the production and markets for new markets for nanomaterials, energy and pharmaceuticals as well as to body armour, medical devices and food products. This transformation will also led to the production of new forms of batteries, which have already been tried by nanoscientists from the University of Uppsala in Sweden who have developed high quality paper batteries from coated cellulose fibres from hairy algae called cladophora. It is said that these batteries could hold 50 to 200 per cent more charge and be recharged many hundreds of times faster than the conventional rechargeable batteries. One of the scientists has remarked: “Try to imagine what we you can create when a battery can be integrated into wallpapers, textiles, consumer packaging, diagnostic devices, etc.” [Etc groups: 42].
The proponents of the bio-economy are however faced with a strategic dilemma, which makes their claims contradictory and unachievable short of annihilating the universe. On the one hand, they claim that the mix of biomass feedstocks and new technologies will provide solution to energy, food and environmental crises afflicting the global capitalist economy. However, the crises arise not out of a shortage of any of these commodities, but the accumulated crises of the system caused by capitalist greed in search of private profit which has turned into a speculative activity against food production, as we saw above. This is especially because the overwhelming and uncritical support for the ‘new’ bio-economy is coming from the same monopolies that brought about the earlier crises.
The predictions of these old monopolies is that by 2050, the world population would have increased by 50 per cent and food demand by almost 100 per cent does not ipso facto mean that the new strategies they are proposing are the only ones that can solve these and related problems since the same approaches to the population and food issue through GMO production has never addressed the current food requirements. Their warning that climatic change will make, at the very worst, the situation worse is correct but the solution they propose is incorrect. This is because they prescribe the same kind of solutions they have recommended in the past for agriculture that more and more chemicals will be required to rescue marginal lands and endangered habitats from crop production. Yet the same policy makers argue that the experimental technologies they are recommending will not only make everything alright, but instead will mean imposing more demands on the soils and water supplies in the name of replacing the fossil carbons with living biomass. They are not able to provide a solution to this dilemma. According to the ECT group:
“If contained in biorefineries-despite the proliferation of production sites and the quantitative involved-we are told there is little danger of environmental contamination and that these new biofactories can be fed sustainably. Those with similar hubris told that nuclear power would be safe and too cheap to monitor; that the chemical age would end hunger and disease; that biotechnology would end hunger and disease, too – and not contaminate; and – only recently – that climate change is probably a figment of our imagination. In other words, gamble with Gaia … using experimental life forms on the back of contested hypotheses. More than a biomass grab or a Land Grab, this is an Earth Grab” [Ibid: 55].
This Earth grab will be a culmination of the activities of the transnational corporations that have for two centuries been working feverishly to own and control the entire earth for private profit of a few capitalist against the majority of humankind. They have advocated ‘conservation’ of resources only when they served to enhance their future access to those resources for profit and not because they regard such resources as a common heritage of human kind.
THE CHALLENGES FOR AFRICA
As pointed out above, Africa is being faced with a new drive to marginalise its people through hastened combination of the ‘Green and the ‘Gene Revolutions’. This is because the land grabs that are under way are aimed at offloading the effects of the global capitalist crisis on the backs of the African people.
According to a report from GRAIN, a civil society organisation monitoring land grabs, those driving the land grabs are in a large part “investors seeking a safe haven for their money amidst crashing financial markets” by buying land cheaply and make it economically productive in a short period of time, “allowing them to make as much as 400% return on investment within a few as 10 years.”
There have been three major reports, which have appeared over the last two years which have reported the increasing land grabs in Africa. The first authored by GRAIN appeared in 2008. This report entitled: Land Grab or Development Opportunity: Agricultural Investment and International Land Deals in Africa, was the outcome of collaboration between four international organisations: Food and Agricultural organisation-FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development-IFAD, International Institute for Environment and Development-IIED, and the World Bank. The report revealed that over the past 12 months alone, “large-scale acquisition of farmland” in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia “had made headlines in a flurry of media reports across the world.” It reported that lands which “a short while ago seemed of little outside interest (were) now sought by international investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of hectares.”
The report added that governments concerned about the stability of food supplies in their countries, were promoting acquisitions of farmland in foreign countries “as an alternative to purchasing food from international markets,” which as we have seen were highly volatile and speculative. The report warned that these developments would have local and global impacts, especially for food security in the poor countries were the lands were being grabbed.
The second report by the World Bank, which relied on the GRAIN report counted 464 projects, which had been involved in the land grabs covering an area of at least 46.6 million hectares of land in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report entitled: Rising Global Interests in Farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equitable results, estimated that 21% of these land grab projects were biofuel-driven. The report explicitly acknowledged that policies of the Northern governments promoting biofuel mandates had played a key role in these developments. It pointed out that: “Biofuel mandates may have large indirect effects on land use change, particularly (in) converting pasture and forest land,” with global land conversion for biofuel feedstocks expected to range between 18 and 44 million hectares by 2030.”
The third report was issued by Friends of the Earth movement in August 2010 looked at 11 countries in Africa found that close to five million hectares of land-the size of Denmark-had already acquired by foreign companies to produce biofuels mainly for Northern markets. This report entitled: Africa-Up for Grabs: The impact and scale of land grabbing for biofuels, was focused on the impact of biofuel demand on land acquisitions in Africa. The report looked at the extent of these land acquisition deals for agrofuels and raised questions about the impacts on local communities and the environment. It found that although information was limited, there was nevertheless growing evidence that significant amounts of farmland were being acquired for fuel crops, in some cases without the consent of local communities and often without a full assessment of the impact on the local environment.
The report further pointed out that whilst many of these land acquisition deals were for food cultivation, there was a growing interest in growing crops for fuel – agrofuels – particularly to supply the growing EU market. The report also pointed out that these land grabs had been taking place against a backdrop of rising food prices which led to the food crisis in 2008. There were, as a result, food riots in some developing countries and in Haiti and Madagascar the governments were overthrown as a result of the crisis. The report pointed out that the crops being used for agrofuels were a major factor in the rising price of food. It added that as scientists and international institutions were beginning to challenge the climate benefits of this alternative fuel source, local communities and in some cases national governments, were waking up to the impact of land grabs on the environment and on local livelihoods.
CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITY FOR AFRICA
The global capitalist crisis under way, although it affects Africa more than other continents, still offers opportunities for Africa to get out of the crisis. For one thing, the crisis has undermined the very rationale of the capitalist economy. As the Chinese maxim tells us “Every crisis is at the same time an opportunity” and this opportunity should be seized upon.
(i) Link with Emerging Economies
Economic globalisation that engulfed the world especially with the neo-liberal phase of the global economy is beginning to wane. Indeed, the crisis under way now is the crisis of globalisation, which is leading to the strengthening of Emerging Powers and local powers, which include China, Brazil and South Africa. South Africa should lead African states to link with these Economies to help Africa disentangle itself from the aprons of the imperialist powers.
Thus the capitalist meltdown offers Africa and the rest of humankind the opportunity to overcome capitalism. The crisis offers opportunities of disengagement from the Old Boys Networks and imperialist entanglements. China today is moving to enter into different kinds of arrangements with African countries promising large investments to promote its own development. But Africa can take advantage of these opportunities to reduce its dependence on the former colonial powers as well as the United States. Indeed, continent-wide projects and institutions such as NEPAD were created for this purpose-to create continent-wide economic and infrastructural projects that many small post-colonial states cannot embark on.
(ii) Strengthen Local Economies
In the third article that I wrote for the Sunday Morning referred to above, I hypothesised the following ‘Way Forward’ for Africa: First, for the first time, the poor communities and their leaders should wake to the reality that they need a food security policy as a matter of urgency about which they can no longer dilly-dally. That means they have first to focus on the home market to ensure that food and other consumer products are available for their local consumption.
Secondly, the regional markets have to be developed to ensure that commodities that suit local tastes are promoted. This will ensure cross-exchanges between these countries as a source of immediate trade with neighbours. This means we should stress the reinvigoration of indigenous food crops as well as medicinal plants. This is because we cannot develop a food security and pharmaceutical industries based on food crops and plants of which we have very little knowledge. This will also promote horizontal development as opposed to multinational ‘vertical integration.’ Only then can we think of producing for global markets. The focus on local and regional markets means developing a local approach to economic management and this will have implications for the way in which we look at the world. There can be no single ‘centre’ that will determine the existence of all human beings everywhere because ‘one-size fits all’ will no longer be allowed to dictate global development. All human beings have to assume responsibility for their own survival and abandon the unilinear epistemology of looking at complex and diverse realities in a one-dimensional manner.
Thirdly, we have to consider the strategy of encouraging cooperative production among the farmers because with the increasing populations driven by poverty and the great fragmentation of land holdings, it will not be possible for poor farmers to sustain families on the basis of small farm-holdings. The poor families must be encouraged to discuss the issue of land use and the environment seriously for other issues such as global warming is already affecting their capacity to grow crops that can sustain them in periods of climatic change. This is a matter upon which leaders can any longer dilly-dally. They have to abandon failed policies of the World Bank that disregarded farmers’ capacity to innovate and embrace a home-grown approach that builds on what the people know and on local capacities.
New kinds of initiatives are emerging at a grassroots level aimed at developing new ways of managing economic relationships all over the world. These initiatives which Professor Howard Richard is encouraging in Chile include the urban-based ‘layered job-creation’ such as: for-profit businesses; the peoples’ economy; government work; non-profit businesses; and community services offered free of charge. All these experiments presuppose cooperative organisation. There are also positive experiences from the local economic responses to the crash in Argentina in 2001. Many ‘informal sector’ activities abound in Africa, Asia and Latin-America that point the way to new discourses about local-based economies, which have potential to develop into regional and global economies.
Fourthly, a cooperative policy presupposes a sound credit policy that can enable farmers to borrow for their production and hence the needs to hasten the creation of a new currency that can inform the creation of new credit systems locally. Already informal sector activities are based on local credit arrangements that enable small traders to lend each other money free of interest based on trust. This framework can be expanded into a regional credit system drawing on peoples’ own experiences. We should learn from what the people of Somaliland have done in this respect because they have a very strong local currency that is not pegged to any global currency.
The global financial crisis has and will continue to undermine the dollar as an international reserve currency. This means that in order to promote regional markets, we shall have to develop regional currencies and credit systems linked to local-regional economic activities, including ‘informal markets’ and mainstream economic activities, which will provide baskets of commodities that can be the basis of the regional currencies. Asia and Latin America are already developing these ideas and Africa should though the African Union and the regional economic groupings embark on this task with urgency.
Finally, the workers and the unemployed middle classes in the developed capitalist countries who are increasingly falling by the wayside, must organise themselves politically and put forward their own ‘packages’ for the taking over of the collapsing industries from the hands of the financial oligarchies who have laid to waste the economies on which they, the workers, have also been dependent. They should not sit silently while they allow the financial oligarchies to ‘reorganise’ and put forward ‘plans’ for their ‘bail outs’ from their governments at their expense. Instead, they should work out their own plans for taking over the industries and managing them on a new cooperative basis, while they also assume responsibility to take over the States whose power structures based on the exploitation of labour can no longer be accepted. In so doing, they should attempt to link up with the poor communities in the South and establish a new glocal civil society on the basis of which a new federated system of states can emerge and on the basis of which a new global economy and market can be erected.
TOWARDS THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
In a recent monograph: From Agriculture to Agricology: towards a Glocal Circular Economy, I have proposed for a new circular green economy called “agricology” as the new mode through which human, crop, plant, and animal reproduction can take place by drawing lessons from the negative experiences of industrial agriculture by promoting agro-ecological methods of production. Agricology is so named not merely as a play of words and semantics, but to remind us that while we must pursue agro-ecological, organic farming and other forms of restorative agriculture on anew basis, we must also recognise that agro-ecology must be underpinned by a new epistemology that grounds the new economy on the knowledge of the population who are the real producers, practitioners and restorers of nature.
We have called this epistemology Afrikology [Nabudere, 2010A, 2010B] and this epistemology must combine with agro-ecology and other restorative circular systems to form a coherent, holistic philosophy that can underpin the new system instead of the reductionist contrived ‘sciences’ such as ‘synthetic biology’ and other ‘sciences’ . Therefore we argue that agro-ecology in all its forms must be integrated with the epistemology of Afrikology into a synthetic system of ever-reproducing knowledge through ‘the Word” as peoples’ living languages, through which they produce, communicate and utilise knowledge. Hence, agricology in its dual sense-is a restoration of agriculture in its latest form of agro-ecology with its knowledge base-Afrikology. We have already seen that agro-ecology in the form of organic farming is based on the strength of the small farmer through replication tries to restore nature by the act of the wisdom that has been perpetuated from generation to generation through the ‘living word’ from ancestry, which believed in a circular reproduction of nature and the seed.
It is not science or university colleges of agriculture that have ensured such a perpetuation but the ‘living word’ of the languages and the continuous memories of every generation of what they learnt from their heritage. This is why the epistemology of Afrikology holds that for humanity to restore a holistic life that is not fragmented by the modern ‘scientific epistemology’ which separates the body and the mind, we must move towards a holistic, combined and transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production that has a moral and ethical dimension, which only Afrikology can deliver. We have in fact noted that in their activities, organic farmers try to restore a moral and ethical basis to the restoration of nature, which they believe is sacred.
Afrikology is not an African ethnic epistemology. It is ‘Afrik’ because it is from the Cradle of Humankind located on the African continent. It is ‘logy’ because it is a re-assertion of the divine origin of the word (which the Greeks called logos) from which was derived the language and the written script from which all meanings emanate. The epistemology of the origin of the word as documented in the Memphite Theology of Ancient Egypt is that the naming of things by the Heart. This is the original epistemology of the ancient humans as they emerged from the Homo sapiens. This epistemology recognises the central role played by the senses-the eyes, the noses, the ears, the tongue, feeling and the heart. According to this original epistemology, it is the heart that named what the senses had experienced and the tongue that uttered what the heart had named. Hence, it is through the concepts that the heart creates perpetually from these human experiences of the senses that empirical knowledge is established. Thus the Word as originally conceived and preserved through human languages everywhere has perpetually been reproducing itself through dialogue and conversation. It is the basis on which we are able to communicate with one another and it is on this basis that we perpetually create all human knowledge.
But this original epistemology was contradicted by the modern ‘scientific’ epistemology established by the European Enlightenment which separated the heart and mind from the body in order to create a logico-mathematical language. It is this artificial language through which the ‘disciplines’ including the ‘natural sciences’ were created and developed. Hence, it was through this logico-mathematical language that ‘science’ was able to arrive at the conclusion that it is only by ‘science’ that can ‘improving’ the nature by making profits for private ends that ‘progress’ is possible. This has proved to be false as we have seen and this has been proven by small organic farmers through their indigenous knowledge. Their knowledge is perpetually created through their languages linked to the original ‘living word’ which has been preserved and perpetuated through their living language.
Therefore we must restore the integral unity of the mind and body by recreating a holistic epistemology that is caring to nature on which we depend.
The concepts of Afrikology and agricology have therefore universal implications that apply to all communities and their capacities to create local capacities for their survival through their knowledge created through their languages. The new approach has therefore GLO-CAL implications in that the future of the global economy will have to be locally based everywhere hence we must be moving towards a GLOCAL economy and a GLOCAL citizenship. That in my view is what the future for Africa holds.
http://blog.mistra.org.za/speakers/key-note-address-professor-dani-nabudere/
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