Nigerian university allocates ₦25m to indigenous knowledge amid extractive research dominance: systemic shift or performative gesture?
Original framing: “Baze University spotlights indigenous knowledge as chancellor offers ₦25m research support” — bing news
Indigenous knowledge is deeply tied to artistic and spiritual practices, such as the Yoruba Ifá divination system or the Igbo 'Omenala' (customs and traditions), which encode ecological and social wisdom. These systems are not merely 'data' but living traditions that require relational reciprocity to thrive. Institutional funding risks sterilizing this dynamism, reducing it to static artifacts for academic consumption.
The ₦25m pledge at Baze University reflects a growing institutional interest in indigenous knowledge, but its impact hinges on whether it disrupts or reinforces colonial research paradigms.
Historically, such initiatives have often been performative, with universities like the University of Ibadan in the 1960s claiming to 'Africanize' education while maintaining Western epistemological dominance. The power knowledge audit reveals that the narrative serves the university’s image more than indigenous communities, whose knowledge is framed as a resource to be 'spotlighted' rather than a living tradition to be respected. Cross-culturally, this mirrors global patterns where indigenous knowledge is co-opted by institutions—from Māori scholars in New Zealand to Native American tribes fighting biopiracy—without ceding control. The solution pathways must therefore center indigenous agency, ensuring that funding, curricula, and intellectual property protections are designed by and for the communities whose knowledge is being celebrated. Without this, the initiative risks becoming another layer in the 'extractive gaze' of academia, where the university remains the gatekeeper of what counts as valid knowledge. The trickster’s role, here, is to expose this absurdity: why should an institution that has long erased indigenous knowledge now claim to 'spotlight' it, unless it is willing to dismantle the structures that made such erasure possible?