Theory of Knowledge in Selected African Languages and Proverbs

In this chapter, theory of knowledge is taken to mean the perception of the origin, nature, reliability, or unreliability of what constitutes a relationship between the knowing subject and the known object. African societies had their own ways of understanding this relationship. African ontological existential perception makes their perspective unique. To explain how the Africans understood this relationship in their language and selected proverbs, we found out that they commonly accept sensitive and intellective knowledge like in Western epistemology, besides mystical knowledge. The African and the Eastern philosophy acknowledge the importance of mystical knowledge, though the method of deriving them varies. Meditation is the best way of deriving mystical knowledge in the East, while divination is the best way of deriving mystical knowledge in Africa. In both cases, mystical knowledge is at times taken as a gift from divine beings. In distinguishing between sensitive and intellective knowledge, African perspective takes these theories of knowledge as supplementary to each other. However, hierarchically, these two forms of knowledge have differences. For more practical actions, the sensitive knowledge is always considered to be more important than intellective knowledge, but hierarchically, intellective knowledge is always considered to be higher.