Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture 2024: Ancestral Knowledge for Contemporary Transformation

Invited Speaker: Toyin Falola (University of Texas at Austin) October 15 , 2024 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm Venue: Great Hall, University of Ghana This lecture focuses on the important role of ancestral knowledge in transformation in contemporary Africa. Drawing on traditional ecological knowledge, cultural knowledge, and community governance structures, the lecture discusses how traditional knowledge developed over the centuries could be useful in dealing with contemporary challenges such as environmental degradation, social inequalities, and economic instability. The lecture discusses how traditional knowledge is transmitted through generations and how the twin forces of globalization threaten and support the preservation and diffusion of ancestral knowledge. This lecture focuses on the interfaces of traditional knowledge, new emerging issues, and modern impasse while also addressing the perennial blocking factors that hinder the assimilating of such knowledge in modern development layouts and strategies in Africa. It packages, in strategic recommendations, an evident and workable intersection between ancestral knowledge and modem developmental impasse and encourages progressive policymakers, educators and community leaders to institute the necessary holistic approach for deeper understanding and application of ancestral knowledge towards sustainable and equitable development in Africa. The lecture encourages policymakers and scholars of African development efforts to connect the dots – think deeply and not shun from explicitly and considerably deploying ancestral knowledge in aurant durable solutions to our modern developmental dilemma in Africa. Toyin Falola, Ph.D., is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. A recipient of over 20 honorary doctorates, an annual conference has been named after him: TOFAC (Toyin Falola Annual Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora). A combination of associations has created a literary award, the Toyin Falola Prize. He has contributed to various academic associations, once serving as the President of the African Studies Association. He has substantially contributed to decolonization and decolonial studies, including his book Autoethnography and African Knowledge System, which won the 2023 Amaury Talbot Award for the best book in African Anthropology. He is working on two trilogies: three books on Understanding Nigeria by Cambridge University Press and three books on Daily Life in Africa by Bloomsbury. The Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture is organized annually by MIASA at the University of Ghana in collaboration with the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Ghana. It is named after the 18th century philosopher from present-day Ghana who taught at the universities of Halle and Jena. The lecture series promotes MIASA’s overarching commitment of making African thinking increasingly relevant in global academia, and it addresses questions of how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge production and epistemic justice.