By David Maillu
Published September 1, 2023
It is wrong to judge African traditional knowledge by empirical science. By natural law, the coin of science must have two opposing sides, just like it is with any other thing in life. There is seeing and feeling, good and bad, guilt and innocence, love and hate, light and darkness, far and near, positive and negative as it is in the atom. Science has got two sides; PHYSICS and METAPHYSICS.
Western civilization is primarily founded on physical grounds or empiricism. In that world what does not comply with the five senses of perception is excluded out of the mathematics of life. For example, the biggest drama in that world regarding God demands, “If you want to convince me God exists, prove God’s existence scientifically.”
If a cyclist falls off the bicycle somewhere, the African observer is likely to stop and ask, “Wait a minute; why did that happen to the cyclist at that particular place and time?” This is because he walks aware that, besides mere accidents, there are other forces which could be responsible for the happening. However, a westerner would look at the cyclist’s issue as sheer accident because he doesn’t believe there could be other mysterious forces behind the accident.
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The sixth sense falls under metaphysics. Metaphysics brings on board the whole package of mysteries – prophesies, ancestral spirits, dreams, predestination, psyche and the other sisters to those. Metaphysics is the law of natural forces. The physical and metaphysical worlds balance in strength. The African thought is founded on natural laws, which have been traditionally his commonest available material for the development of his survival. In the African traditional world you learn every available secret of the unknown or metaphysical world. You discover potent voices in the wind and flying ancestral spirits. You keep your psyche ear open for natural diversity of information. You get your soul tuned to universal frequencies in order for you to receive important information from the cosmos. You realize there is much more than what your five senses reach.
To understand the world you must rely on both the physical and the metaphysical sides because both are complementary.
