IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

Miranda Fricker's account of epistemic injustice names two distinct wrongs, testimonial and hermeneutical, but her proposed remedy stays almost entirely at the level of the individual hearer: a cultivated, reflexive virtue she calls testimonial justice. Critics have long pointed out the awkward fit here. Fricker's own diagnosis is structural: a credibility deficit that tracks gender, ethnicity, or region across countless separate encounters looks less like a string of private misjudgments than a feature baked into how a society is organised, and it is not obvious how one hearer's improved character, however genuine, is supposed to unravel that. This article takes the critique at face value and asks what an actually structural remedy would have to look like, working through Nigeria as a test case. My argument is that Igwebuike, the Igbo-African philosophy of complementarity most fully worked out by Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu, gives us exactly the register Fricker's framework is missing: an ontology, and a corresponding way of knowing, built around the community rather than the isolated hearer as the basic unit of credibility and interpretation. Fricker's virtue works one encounter at a time; Igwebuike's communal practices, consensus-building, collective witness, shared stewardship over how experience gets interpreted, work at the level of the group, which is precisely the level at which the kind of structural persistence Fricker diagnoses actually lives. I am not arguing Igwebuike should replace Fricker's remedy. The claim is that they need each other: in a communally organised society like Nigeria, a genuinely adequate response to epistemic injustice has to hold individual virtue and communal epistemic practice together, rather than assuming the first quietly does the work of the second.

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