WHEREAS imported Western methods of collecting data focus on scientific questionnaires, in African communities and mass markets, conversations and stories are the highest form of data.
While the formal education system in most African countries continues to promote the view that to be objective, researchers must be detached from what they are studying, in African communities and mass markets that thrive on indigenous communities, researcher must cultivate a relationship with the communities s/he is studying.
Otherwise, suspicion will become a barrier to the research process and final product. Knowledge about seed, livestock and markets is shared through conversation, commerce and stories, not detached questionnaires and digital tools like KobolCollect.
Learning emerges through dialogue and interaction
In most African communities, people learn through fluid conversations with peers about their own work, reflecting on real issues, sharing experiences and thinking together.
Farmers, traders and other market actors are assisted to make better sense of what they already know, face and practise day to day.
That is also how conversations shape leadership, including how to listen, question, disagree, make sense of issues and take responsibility for the conversations that matter to everyone, not just to the individual. The market has proved that knowledge is not just information but a critical resource that people enact through conversation, judgement, interpretation and collective action.
That is why every community or market study must be contextualised by community participation as part of getting local voices right from the start. It becomes easy to make local indigenous knowledge part of development interventions.
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Development ceases to be seen as something coming entirely from outside to the people.
Any form of development should consider local knowledge or indigenous knowledge systems as a critical local resource, not just material things from outside. If properly articulated, indigenous knowledge systems can be more valuable than formal employment. The highest form of knowledge decolonisation will be visible when the development sector is guided by indigenous knowledge systems.
How can researchers ensure research findings are not diluted by external informants?
Responses from indigenous people should not be diluted by formal key informants like extension officers, nurses and teachers working in the community.
Key themes in community dialogues can include farming and other household practices, leadership roles and structures, decision-making patterns (from household all the way to high leaders), health practices and delivery systems, traditional medicines, labour sharing arrangements, local indicators of poverty and socio-economic standing (how communities define a poor person).
Communities and territorial markets have their own ways of defining poverty, which are very different from how government institutions and development agencies define poverty and wealth. If you don’t have relationships, you are poorer.
Researchers can also generate key insights from observing how the community or market is behaving.
For instance, traders can assess buying power in the market by the number of women vendors with baskets on their heads or in their hands.
A formal researcher using a questionnaire may miss this critical signal. More useful conversational questions can also be generated from features in the community or the behaviour of market actors.
This is how observing and questioning can be valuable in surfacing salient issues like invisible labour structures in the market, like push cart traders that move a lot of food but whose role may go unnoticed.
Some IKS can be about bad practices, good practices or what the community or market has lost but desperately wants back badly.
Harnessing the power of community mapping
This can be done together with community members to identify certain key features in the community, like mountains, forests, rivers, households, villages, roads, irrigation schemes, health centres, schools and other key resources that can be used as references for discussion.
Elders with a strong memory can even identify where rain-making ceremonies were done before new structures like dams and roads were built.
Indigenous health practitioners, areas within common diseases like mosquitoes and ritual sites can all be identified through community participation. Community dialogues can also identify different sets of practices or technologies that the community is using or has used in the past.
These can be ranked based on the IKS that was used, lost or being lost. For example, around seed, food systems and consumption patterns. Which do you think is losing IKS faster than others? What do you think can be done? Some community members can say we are fast losing IKS around food and indigenous medicine.
Community dialogue can also immerse local people in a historical timeline comparison and seasonal patterns. This process can describe conditions and techniques between different time periods, showing changes in processes and practices, for instance, between the 1970s and now. Since baseline data may be absent, this approach can provide the baseline by taking community members’ memories as far back as they can remember. What practices were used in farming, harvesting methods, storing food and marketing in the 1970s? A seasonal pattern chat can also show community activities during different times of the season, revealing the extent to which they are aligned with IKS. For instance, in August, they do rain-making and in November, marriage ceremonies are outlawed. Ultimately, this process can show how westernisation is taking over or infiltrating traditional practices. Going through the activities can reveal that there is nothing that shows local people are still Africans. Revealing what is now done in winter and types of crops grown, as well as kinds of foods in local markets, can show how indigenous food and cultures are losing their space, time, and knowledge in local communities. Signalling the need for aggressive restoration efforts.
Knowledge is a resource that must be shared
This is a fundamental indigenous knowledge principle often ignored by formal researchers. In most cases, after conducting a baseline survey or crop assessment, government departments and development agencies don’t go back to the communities to validate the findings. Instead, validation is often done by a different audience in city hotels without the communities that provided valuable knowledge. Such extractive knowledge-gathering models are frowned upon by farmers and mass market traders. They usually express their displeasure by either refusing to entertain the next researcher or providing sketchy details about particular issues, not the detailed knowledge they provide when research is anchored on honest dialogue, trust and willingness to give back to the community.
