Akan Views About Knowledge

[Ɔkyeame Kwame]

Akan Views About Knowledge

The Akan word for knowledge is nimdeɛ, and a knowledgeable or learned person is know as nimdeɛfoɔ. Education is termed adesua. Education embraces all aspects of education: formal and informal, institutionalized and non-institutionalized educational processes.
The Akan believe that knowledge comes from various sources including intuition, revelation, authority, experience, logical reasoning, and experiments. The Akan view reality as having as having both a spiritual and non-spiritual dimensions, and thus to understand and know reality requires the reliance on multiple sources of knowledge. The various sources of knowledge, as the Akan believe, are complementary and not antagonistic in one’s attempt to discover and comprehend reality.

Attitudes towards Knowledge
Dzobo (1992) distinguishes the following as examples of specific indigenous Akan attitudes to knowledge. One attitude towards knowledge is a limit to what any one individual can know, even though there is no limit to what can be known in principle. From this perspective, any one person who claims to know everything is viewed as knowing nothing. Such a person is said to be egocentric and boastful of the little knowledge the person has. The Akan say: nea ɔyɛ ne ho sɛ menim menim, nnim hwee (he who claims to know all, knows nothing).

Another attitude, according to Dzobo (1992), is that the individual has an active role to play in the acquisition of knowledge. Even though nyansa (wisdom) is inborn and everyone has the potential to be wise, one has to develop one’s mental capacity. Man is not born with knowledge; whatever he knows is acquired through experience and through a deliberate effort on his part to know. One Akan proverb therefore says: obisafo nto kwan - the one who keeps asking never loses his way. Another proverb says: "The child who goes about asking to know what is happening will never be a fool." Lack of knowledge, ignorance, on the other hand is said to make a fool of a person. This attitude to knowledge even though it does not completely rule out a priori and revealed knowledge; it nevertheless indicates a bias towards a posteriori or empirical knowledge. The Akan believe that the search for knowledge is a lifelong process as expressed in the aphorism: nea onnim sua a, ohu (he who does not know can become knowledgeable from learning.
The Akan regard the elderly as wise and believe that experience comes with age. This expressed by the maxim: kyɛmferɛ se ɔdaa hɔ akyɛ, na onipa a ɔwenee no nso nyɛ dɛn? –the potsherd claims it is old, what about the potter who molded it? However, the Akan does not necessarily consider knowledge as the preserve of a particular age. The expression: akyin akyin sen anyin anyin (the well traveled is more knowledgeable and experienced the elederly who has stayed in one place all his/her life) captures this view about knowledge. In this regard the Akan view the “stay-at-one-place” elderly person as being insular as compared with the well traveled person who is said to be cosmopolitan in outlook and ideas.
That knowledge is not necessarily the preserve of the elderly is also illustrated by the Ananse story in which Ananse tries to have monopoly custody of all the wisdom and knowledge in the world. He collected what he believed was all the wisdom and knowledge in the world and put it into a big pot. He hung the pot in front of him and tried to climb the largest and tallest tree with the pot between him and the tree. After several futile attempts to climb tree, his son Ntikuma suggested that his father should tie the pot behind his (Ananse’s) back to allow him reach his hand around the tree and thus make the climbing easy. Ananse realized his son’s suggestion made a lot of sense. Ananse got frustrated in knowing that there was some wisdom left in his child’s head. Ananse at that point threw down and smashed the pot of wisdom into pieces.
The Akan believe that knowledge knows no boundaries. All humans are born with an innate and unique capacity: the capacity to think, learn and relate – the basic ingredient to the creation of knowledge. Thus an individual with the capacity to think, learn and relate, in a conducive environment which recognizes knowledge as a product and facilitates its value-addition through education and training, is the foundation for a dynamic and progressive society.

Another Akan attitude about knowledge is that knowledge is a liberator. The one source that liberates people from poverty and empowers them is knowledge. Possessing knowledge is empowering while the lack of knowledge is debilitating. The Akan is urged to be aware that the colonizer did not effect control over the colonized because the colonizer wanted to promote the welfare of the colonized. This is illustrated by the maxim: wogye di sɛ oburoni pɛ w’asɛm a, hwɛ kwantenten a watwa de aduru ha – if you think the white man (the colonizer) came to promote your welfare, see the long journey he has taken to get here. This awareness ought to serve as the spark to seek knowledge and skills needed to end the rule of the colonizer. Knowledge when combined with other factors of production (capital, labor, existing knowledge and other inputs) produces goods and services to satisfy one’s wants and needs and thus serve liberate one. This liberating knowledge is attained through insightful understanding of situations and the relations between things. An enlightened and insightful individual is free and creative. The Akan believe that knowledge must have practical bearing on the conduct of life. This is portrayed by the aphorism: nyansaa nyɛ sika na woakyekyere asie – wisdom is not like money which may be kept in a safe; or, one does not collect wisdom in a bag, lock it up in a box and then goes to say to a friend, “teach me something.”
Excerpted from Chapter 10. G. F. Kojo Arthur (2001). Cloth As Metaphor, Accra: CEFIKS.
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