Navigating epistemic disarticulations

Abstract

This research note reflects on the challenges of conducting research on issues framed by multiple epistemic regimes. Using insights drawn from my work on the 1988 murder of 28-year old British tourist Julie Ann Ward in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya, I discuss the problem of opacities created by a combination of uncritical embrace of received knowledge about Africa/ns and cultural illiteracy in competing knowledge systems around which Africa/ns frame their worlds. I also examine rumour as an influential genre of knowledge production, contestation and critique in African societies—what has been termed a form of ‘community intelligence’—that challenges single-lens conceptions of credible knowledge. The research note argues for a more attentive grasp of Africans’ fluid self-conceptions as both ethno-cultural citizens of particular epistemic communities and as citizens of the modern state with its attendant institutions. Serious engagement with Africans’ shifting senses of themselves and the epistemic and ethical protocols they deem themselves subject to, under different circumstances, can have productive implications for our understanding of Africans’ lives, options and choices.