SCIENTIFIC

REVOLUTION
SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
ACTIVITY NO.3
BSHM1A CASTILLO,ALDRIANA JOY.
INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION IN
AFRICA
The discipline of academic African intellectual history traces its beginnings to the late 1950s and
early 1960s, during a period when states throughout the continent were securing their
independence.
Intellectual historians of Africa are principally concerned with how Africans have understood and
contested the contexts that they inhabited in the past, and how ideas and vernacular discourses
change over time. As a particular approach in historical methodology it is closely associated with
cultural history, and its evolution followed the emergence of political history writing during the
1960s and social history during the 1980s.
The first innovative works in African intellectual history were concerned with pan-Africanism and Négritude.
These studies were followed by histories of religious ideas and social dissent. Historians have since offered varying
descriptions of Africa’s “intellectuals.” For some, Africa’s colonial intellectuals were mostly missionary-educated
literati, while others emphasize Africa’s rural intellectual histories and the importance of studying “homespun,” or
vernacular historiographies.

African epistemologies and knowledge production have also remained a central concern in the study of African
intellectual history. To illuminate Africa’s intellectual registers, historians interrogate different topics, regions, and
temporalities. Historians of precolonial Africa use historical linguistics to understand the intersection of ideas
about public healing and social organization. Scholars of the colonial period challenge many of the earlier
assumptions held by colonial researchers and policy makers, who had cast African communities as primordial,
conquered peoples. Intellectual historians, by contrast, explore the constantly changing arenas of ideational
disputation and political contestation within African societies.

Intellectual historians of gender have shown how ideas about production, masculinity, and femininity have
informed competing nodes of authority. By the early 21st century, global intellectual historians began
demonstrating how Africans reworked European political ideas into local vernacular debates about the past, and
how Africans have shaped the making of the modern world. To write Africa’s intellectuals histories, scholars draw
from a range of sources, which are often maintained in institutional archives, public libraries, and private homes.
These sources—textual, oral, and material—include letters, diaries, annotated libraries, vernacular newspapers,
grammars, novels, oral histories, linguistic etymologies, sculptures, clothing, paintings, photography, film, and music.
 KEY FIGURES

Chris Hani Félix Moumié

the leader of the South African Communist Party and an anti-colonialist Cameroonian leader, assassinated in
chief of staff of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of Geneva on 3 November 1960 by an agent of the
the African National Congress. SDECE with thallium, following official independence
from France earlier that year.

Walter Rodney
John Garang
a prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and
a Sudanese politician and revolutionary leader. From academic.
1983 to 2005, he led the Sudan People's Liberation
Army during the Second Sudanese Civil War, and
following a peace agreement
HOW DID THE REVOLUTION ADVANCE
MODERN SCIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC
THINKING AT THE TIME?

African governments have pledged to promote the study of science and technology.
African leaders have pledged to devote more resources to the development of science and
technology, an area deemed vital for economic development, yet long neglected and poorly
funded in many countries.
WHAT CONTROVERSIES MET THE
REVOLUTION?
In many countries, national policies to promote science and technology are outdated, notes Mr.
Abdoulaye Janneh, executive secretary of the Addis Ababa-based UN Economic Commission for
Africa (ECA). The quality of science and engineering education is also declining, in part due to a
lack of money and of infrastructure such as state-of-the-art labs and technology centres. Nearly
30 years ago, in 1980, African leaders’ Lagos Plan of Action called for countries to allocate at least
1 per cent of gross domestic product to R&D, to help to spur the continent’s development.