Aftertaste - A Conversation on African Knowledge, Pride, and Possibility

It started like any casual conversation between colleagues, intellectual but not too academic. A friend pursuing his PhD asked if I had heard of regenerative agriculture (RegenAg). I said yes, of course, with a smirk that said, I'm ready to engage. He summarised. True to my nature, what followed wasn't a back-and-forth about soil and farming; it was a slow unveiling of how deeply colonised the frameworks around African knowledge still are.

As is common in the RegenAg space, his project is funded by a development agency and a partnership between a European and an African university. You'll understand why this detail matters in a bit. Following the summary, I made a bold claim that can be substantiated: "Regenerative agriculture is essentially a rebranding of traditional African and other indigenous agricultural practices." Against this, there is no argument save for academic discourse on the application of the scientific method, which my grandmother did not need. Excuse my commentary, which may sound harsh, but is necessary given the gravity of the matter we're exploring. Anyway, it didn't take harsh commentary for my humble and soft-spoken colleague to see the point in my claim. Still, the moment lingered.

I then asked, "What happens to knowledge ownership in all this? Shouldn't findings from such research explicitly state that the knowledge originates in African traditions?" He wasn't convinced it was necessary, and at this, I wasn't surprised. As you may come to know, I'm both liberal and generous with my explanations. So, I explained the importance, trying not to turn it into a bar argument, because for me, this is a matter of the heart. Sometimes it's not persuasion you need, it's planting the seed.

The conversation moved toward the common narrative that "Africa won't feed itself without going commercial." another of the topics I do not quite agree with. My counter to this is the African homestead. I speak (present tense because this is a story unfolding) of the African homestead not as a relic of the past, but as a resilient micro-economy. Properly supported, it could reduce national food insecurity and ease budgetary strain. This view resonated with my colleague, though he noted that such models rarely get funding. A fair and revealing observation. The issue isn't that indigenous systems don't work; it's that they aren't fundable under frameworks designed to favour industrial-scale development.

If you're tracking with me, you can see how this conversation stretched itself together like Joseph's coat of many colours, yet there was a deep logic and flow in it. Those around us paused to pay attention as we moved to discussing carbon credits. I expressed my opposition with what could be easily misinterpreted as outrage. That's because to me, these schemes function like a husband who insists his wife stay home because "I make enough for both of us." The money might seem generous, but what are the long-term implications for her skill development, her independence, her confidence? Catch my drift?

That metaphor shifted the energy. But the counterargument to this was: "Africa should just take the money."

And there it was, the quiet exhaustion of a continent too often told that it must trade dignity for survival.

The "taking the money argument" triggered another thread in me, a story from years ago when the "sugar" industry was not happy with publications advocating for the reduction of dietary sugar. This got us to talk about scholars who go abroad on scholarships and never return to the motherland. And in that instance, I got a punch to the ribs, almost cracked one:

"What's there to stay for? Wouldn't you go if you had the chance?"

To lighten the mood, I joked: "I'm too proud an African to even consider leaving."

Little did I know I was opening myself up for a jab right in the face:

"What's there to be proud of, the sweet mangoes?"

At that point, all I could do was point at the two female colleagues who were sitting with us, intellectuals in their own right, and said: "Them", to which everyone laughed, after which I muttered, "I'm sure you don't want to go down that road."

But maybe we should.

Maybe we should go down that road and name the pride that still lives in our languages, our rain-fed fields, our moonlit stories, our old people's wisdom, our communal ways, our unrecorded sciences. Pride not as boastfulness, but as rootedness. Pride as refusal to be erased.

What lingered after that conversation wasn't disagreement; in fact, we did agree that we had different world views, each valid from a particular vantage point. But then, when I sat alone, I fell into a silence. It was the quiet grief of seeing how deeply this mental dispossession runs, and how easily it gets normalised, even among the educated. Especially among the educated.

It reminded me that the real work isn't only in challenging colonial systems. It's in healing the colonial reflexes within ourselves, the reflex to defer to foreign funding before trusting local knowledge, the reflex to relocate our dreams before we've rooted them in our own soil, the reflex to ask "What's there to be proud of?" as if our worth needs global validation to be real.

These are the conversations that don't end when the words stop. They leave an aftertaste. Not bitter, but sobering. A reminder of how much there is left to restore.

And perhaps, that's the point of The Thinking Savannah. To sit with the aftertaste long enough to let it become insight.

To defend our memory.

To remember our worth.

To replant our pride.