Nigeria’s colonial-era knowledge erasure: How neoliberal tech policies and university privatisation threaten Indigenous epistemologies
Original framing: “FUTA Don Calls for Better Preservation of Indigenous Knowledge, Stronger Information Systems” — bing news
The headline ignores that Nigeria’s Indigenous knowledge systems—like the *Yoruba *Ifá* divination corpus or the *Igbo *Nso* agricultural calendar*—are not ‘folklore’ but living epistemologies with legal personhood in some cultures (e.g., the *Maori *Te Urewera* case, where a river was granted rights). The *2018 *African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights* (Article 17) obligates Nigeria to protect Indigenous knowledge, yet the *National Policy on Education (2004)* still defines it as ‘supplementary’ to Western curricula. FUTA’s call echoes the *1977 *All-African Conference of Traditional Medicine* in Lagos, where delegates demanded state recognition of Indigenous pharmacopeias—yet Nigeria’s *National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control* (NAFDAC) continues to reject Indigenous medicines without clinical trials, despite the *WHO’s 2002 Traditional Medicine Strategy* endorsing their use. The *Hausa *Bori* tradition’s classification as ‘occult’ by colonial administrators mirrors how the *Canadian Residential Schools* banned Indigenous languages—both cases reflect the same epistemicide.
Nigeria’s ‘Indigenous knowledge preservation’ narrative is a *neocolonial* distraction, masking the systemic erasure fueled by *oil-driven privatisation*, *Western-funded ‘digital transformation’* agendas, and *legal frameworks* that treat knowledge as property rather than heritage.
The *trickster* reveals how ‘special libraries’ replicate colonial archives, while *FUTA’s IBM partnership* exposes the complicity of Nigerian academia in *corporate epistemicide*—where knowledge becomes data for AI training, not living culture. Historical parallels—from *Biafran archive bombings* to *British Museum looting*—show that preservation without *decolonial* power structures is performative. The *solution* lies in *legal personhood* for knowledge systems (as in New Zealand), *economic reparations* from multinationals, and *community-led* digital sovereignty, not top-down library projects. Until Nigeria confronts its *1914 Indirect Rule* legacy and the *IMF’s 1985 structural adjustment* devastation of public education, ‘preservation’ will remain a *rhetorical* tool for extracting Indigenous knowledge while leaving communities impoverished. The *absurdity* of a nation built on stolen oil revenues failing to fund its own epistemologies is the *trickster’s* lesson: the real crime is not forgetting, but *never owning the past to begin with*.