Among the rural Embu people of Eastern Kenya, teaching and learning are not purely institutional activities. Instead, knowledge is passed from generation to generation alongside the most mundane activities. In Indigenous African Knowledge Production, Njoki Nathani Wane uses food-processing practices – preparing, preserving, cooking, and serving – as an entry point into the indigenous knowledge of the Embu and the role that rural Embu women play in creating and transmitting it.

Using personal narratives collected during several years of field research in Kenya, Wane demonstrates how Embu women use proverbs, fables, and folktales to preserve and communicate their world-view, knowledge, and cultural norms. She shows how this process preserves Indigenous knowledge devalued by the colonial and post-colonial educational systems, as well as the gendered dimension of the transmission process.

Wane’s book will be useful not just to those studying development and education in Africa, but also to all those interested in questions of how to preserve and recover local cultural knowledge.

Njoki Nathani Wane is a professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Science, and Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Njoki Nathani-Wane's profile page