APQ - APPON PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

Prior to Western colonization of Africa, indigenous intelligence was the means of ordering African societies. African Indigenous Intelligence (AII) displayed in traditional wisdom, knowledge, skills, crafts and innovative practices, were developed, utilized, and transmitted by Africans from generation to generation. These reflections of indigenous intelligence and their ultimate foundation were unfortunately displaced and replaced through Western intelligence and its resultant technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the innovative robots and Self Service Technologies (SST) which has replaced human functions in ingenious ways. AI, especially as built from Western intelligence and or episteme, fosters Western coloniality and neo-colonialism that is portending developmental retrogression, African 'unfreedom' and dependence. These consequences call for a complementary synthesis of AII and AI towards a more indigenous AI that is capable of advancing African freedom, technological independence, and answering African indigenous questions, needs, and authentic development. But how did indigenous intelligence sustain African continent prior to colonialism and AI era? How did the displacement of AII by Western intelligence affect the African mind, hence the need for its decolonization via the synthesis of AII and AI? How would All and AI be complementarily synthesized towards decolonization of the African mind? This treatise interrogates these critical questions and argues for the synthesis of AII and AI towards complementary decolonization of the African mind.

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