170 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
In the context of countries like China, IKS provides the bedrock of
its scientific and technological advancement, witnessed in the clothing
and textile, food, medicine, architecture, construction from which base it
can choose which aspect of foreign knowledge or technology it needs or
wishes to incorporate into its development strategy.
However, in parts of the world such as Africa and in most of the so-
called Third World where colonialism not only went deeper, but was
accompanied by European nationalism, all the knowledge systems that
people had used for generations were unilaterally declared unfit,
irrelevant, primitive, or even evil. The religious ideology posited the
belief in the Christian god as the only god and forced people to laugh at
their own gods, and even to denigrate it. Not infrequently, science was
used ideologically within the framework of colonialism to demonstrate
not only the superiority of the Caucasian race, impose the developmental
trajectory of the west onto those colonized societies, but also to imbue
the knowledge generation process with a mechanistic, dualistic,
materialistic, instrumentalist and linear way of seeing and doing (Ani
1994).
Most of these violated key precepts that under-girded the systems in
Africa, Asia, and non-western societies, and led to the alienation and
objectification of nature, a fundamental de-spiritualization of human
development, and the privileging of an extractive and exploitative
relationship with nature and non-European peoples in general. It not
only created fundamental cognitive deficiencies in billions of people,
generated insecurity and self-doubt within dominated groups, but also
denied them the right to ontological experience and a sense of being
(Ani, 1994). More seriously, it pre-empted or even stunted the natural
development path that these systems of knowledge would have
undergone had they been allowed their natural evolutionary and
development path in what may, in IKS terms, correctly be referred to as
“the lost years”. On the other hand, the world also lost its opportunity to