Introduction

One of Aesop’s fables tells the story of Herakles whose journey took him over a distant mountain pass. At the point where the road narrowed between two great walls of rock, he came across an object in his path that looked like an apple. Why Herakles thought the object was an apple, or why an apple should have been quite so offensive to him, Aesop does not say. Perhaps, as the son of Zeus and the champion of the Olympian order over underworld monsters, he thought that it was the apple from Hades, who had given Persephone a fruit to keep her a prisoner. Perhaps the apple was the harbinger of another Mediterranean story with shades of the serpent of Eden. Perhaps Herakles just developed a blind road rage, or suffered the low oxygen of the moral high ground. Whatever the reason, our hero stamped on the hapless apple, to crush it. Instead it doubled in size. So he stamped on it again, and hammered it with his club for good measure. The apple swelled up so much that it blocked the road. At that moment Athena appeared. “Stop!” she called, “this is the thing about disputes and quarrels. If you fight, do you see how it blows up?” Herakles dropped his club and stepped back, agape. His way was blocked. All he could do was to turn around and go back home.

Like Herakles, our scholarly pathways take us on long journeys in search of many things: fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes, and the fellowship of new ideas. One of many such journeys in our time is scholarship that seeks a route away from familiar intellectual regimes, a journey that looks for ways to question the dominance of the modernist vision, and the legacy of coloniality in scholarship of all kinds, in the fields of science, engineering, health, law, the humanities and the social sciences.

In South African critical scholarship, the journey toward the terrain of indigenous knowledge has been overwhelmingly focused on former president Thabo Mbeki’s view that HIV and AIDS would one day be cured by a locally-made pharmaceutical – ideally one home-grown from a traditional medicine, and patentable so that it could be a source of (rather than a drain on) state revenues (Fassin 2007; Green 2012; Levine 2012; Nattrass 2007). The consequences have been devastating. Millions of graves have been dug earlier than they should have been, and the science war that ensued has been shattering. So determined were scholars to stamp out the post-apartheid state’s traditionalist ideas that anything that looked as if it might be linked to ‘AIDS denialism’ had to be struck from academic debates. Like the apple that defeated Herakles, any topic that looked even vaguely like a questioning of science caused many a scholar to retreat. Such questions, went prevailing scholarly wisdom, had no right to be on the scholarly road.

Like Herakles, South African scholars who were grappling with AIDS denialism were left with little option but to retreat into the fold of scientific objectivity, and into public debates that returned to the grand old South African narrative about defeating the alleged anarchy of traditionalism. In this chapter, I question that retreat, asking whether a scholarly engagement with debates in the indigenous knowledge movement necessarily has to hammer all things that smack of apples. Could we heed the counsel of Athena, the goddess of war, who brings to difficult situations the ability to reflect before acting, and find the courage to walk past a debate that, notwithstanding its importance, tends so quickly to engulf further discussion? Might it be possible to hold on to the importance of truth and evidence, as well as the accountability of publically funded scholars, yet hold back on hammering out home truths, thereby enabling us to find path home from a different direction?

Paradigm shifts and the idea of ‘IK’

The language of objective modernist scholarship, as it appears in various forms across the globe, is deeply invested in the idea that in order to know, ‘one’ must be objective rather than subjective. In other words, ‘one’ must distance ‘oneself’ from what ‘one’ knows. Such a theory of knowing is based on the absence, rather than the presence, of the ‘person who knows’.

Post-modern scholars take the contrary view. Demythologizing illusions of objectivity, they ask scholars to recognize and theorize their presence. Post-modern anthropology asks questions such as: How am I looking? Whose perspective do I occupy? How am I representing reality?