An afrocentric exploration of the Western Knowledge Systems over the African Indigenous Knowledge Systems: the case study of the African community in Edendale.

Abstract

This study examines the historical and ongoing influence of Western Knowledge Systems (WKS) on African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) in Edendale, a peri-urban community in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. While Edendale’s land was collectively purchased in 1851 by African Christian converts (amakholwa) under missionary guidance, this research demonstrates that Edendale's enduring epistemic resilience derives not from these settlers, whose prior missionary enculturation had already ruptured direct intergenerational transmission of precolonial knowledge, but from Indigenous inhabitants whose families occupied the Msunduzi valley before colonial settlement and who moved to Edendale subsequently, maintaining AIKS continuity alongside mission control through oral transmission, ritual practice, and communal memory. Framed within an Afrocentric paradigm, the research employs an exploratory case study design that combines archival analysis with participatory methods, including oral history interviews, a transect walk, and a River of Life workshop, with ten knowledge holders from Edendale, all rooted in these Indigenous lineages.The study introduces the Learning–Unlearning–Relearning Analytical Model as an Afrocentric learning theory to interpret how communities navigate epistemic disruption. Findings reveal that Edendale was a site of precolonial African sovereignty, later reshaped but never erased by colonial education and land dispossession. Despite socio-cultural fragmentation and internalised epistemic alienation, AIKS persist through adaptive re-centring of African cosmologies rather than cultural purity. Crucially, the research distinguishes between agency within rupture (the amakholwa's constrained negotiation within already-transformed frameworks) and continuity despite displacement (Indigenous inhabitants' preservation of precolonial epistemic traditions). The study contributes theoretically by advancing the Learning–Unlearning–Relearning triad as an Afrocentric framework for analysing epistemic transformation. tracing temporal transformation across these simultaneously operating dimensions, avoiding the category error of conflating spatial layers with temporal sequence.