Survival of the Fittest Protection of Indigenous Knowledge

Introduction

Lately, the world has seen the unrelentless ability and scramble of unscrupulous individuals and corporate entities to gain virtually unregulated access to African indigenous knowledge for personal aggrandizement (Bettig, 2018). In other words, indispensable and sacred knowledge related to the African customs and practices derived from bioresources have fallen prey to unregulated appropriation. In an era of digitisation where knowledge management has become popularised, very little and/or nothing has been done in Africa to restrict the flow of knowledge from the indigenous communities and continent at large.

Despite the standing mandate contained in the Cultural Charter for Africa, which many countries are signatories to, that calls and advocates for the legal and practical protection of African cultural heritage, the misappropriation of the knowledge goes unabated (Zhang, Gu, Jang, Wu, Stoecklin, Huang, & Molloy, 2018). The latter is ascribed to two reasons: the neglect of indigenous systems that protect the knowledge and the dominance of western systems in the governance of African issues. Regarding the latter, the outward siphoning of African indigenous knowledge is vehemently argued and attributed to the dominance of the western world in the sphere of technological innovation and the ability to usurp intellectual capacity. Within the African indigenous worldview, almost all African indigenous societies view this sacred knowledge as a communal entity, to be meticulously placed in the public domain to usher palliatives and not necessarily as a profit-spinning commodity. On the contrary, outsiders do not share this generous view but manipulate acquiring this knowledge to obtain biodiversity-related knowledge and profit from it to the exclusion of others, including the original holders of the knowledge (Kihwelo, 2009). Consequently, a regulatory vacuum (either African or Western) exists thereby leaving African indigenous knowledge largely unprotected and vulnerable to annexation by mainly outsiders who at times collaborate with some greedy insiders.

The chapter outline is as follows:

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  The first part of this chapter provides a general outlook of African indigenous knowledge.

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  Secondly, the chapter appraises the introduction of a digital library.

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  Thirdly, it gives the African ways used to protect indigenous knowledge from misappropriation.

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  Fourthly, the chapter examines the current state of protection of African indigenous knowledge and the associated shortcomings.

Theoretical Base And Methodology

This chapter was premised upon the Afrocentricity and Sankofa theories. A socio-legal methodology was adopted to ground the work to enable students studying Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKSs) to have a foundation and be able to follow the interdisciplinarity in the writing. As such, a doctrinal approach and qualitative design were engaged to buttress the philosophical reasoning and capture the rich and unrecorded knowledge of inorganic intellectuals.