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Article ID: CBB760577508

John Augustus Abayomi Cole and the Search for an African Science, 1885–1898 (2022)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 113
Issue: 1
Pages: 63-84

DOI: 10.1086/718388

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/718388

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Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence Africa, civilization and culture Traditional knowledge Epistemology Science 19th century Sierra Leone John Augustus Abayomi-Cole

How did “science,” once a term used to refer to universal knowledge, come to be applied to the epistemic practices of particular civilizational and racial groups? This essay approaches this question by examining the life and writings of John Augustus Abayomi Cole, a Sierra Leonean medical practitioner and public intellectual who in the late nineteenth century used the term “science” to describe African knowledge systems. Cole’s writing on science in Africa was explicitly anti-imperial and grounded in a critique of the “materialism” of European society. While reminding Africa’s European conquerors of the folly of their civilizing mission, Cole at the same time urged the “Europized” elite of Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown to adapt themselves to African spiritual and scientific life. The essay argues that marginal intellectuals like Cole, whose thought was shaped by several interlocking local and intercontinental forces, were instrumental in generating the concept of civilization-specific science.

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