"As Zora Neale Hurston has argued, Africans have always theorized but in hieroglyphics which is why many people have not got it. And most of the people you have seen today are using hieroglyphics, but it is very deep intellectual work they are doing..." (13:47)
"Artists are not here just to entertain you. They are here to make you think. But we make you think in hieroglyphics because we pay you the ultimate compliment of assuming you are more intelligent than you actually think. We know you will get it. So we are not going to read you propaganda; we will encode it in a way that you can remember. My job is to figure out what are the epistemologies we are using? How many come from the past and how do we bring them into the future?" (15:08)
TEDx Talks, "Mshai Mwangola on African epistemologies", contributed by Angela Okune, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 7 May 2018, accessed 21 November 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/mshai-mwangola-african-epistemologies
Critical Commentary
This excerpt is from a 2012 Tedx talk that Mshai delivered in Nairobi.