17 Worldview s and Integra tion RCE Makana and Rural Eastern Cape: Recovering and Expanding Bio-cultural Diversity Rob O’Donoghue The Makana and Rural Eastern Cape RCE The secretariat of the Makana and Rural Eastern Cape RCE is hosted in the Education Faculty of Rhodes University. It operates out of the Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC) that was established as a communityengaged 114 partnership with Makana Municipality. The centre has a sustainability commons that embodies the isiXhosa metaphorical ideal of idlelo lencubeko lesendalo nabantu, which most closely translates into commonage where people share right of access and benefit. The RCE commons is beginning to operate as a small-scale ‘incubator’ where diverse community-engaged ‘learning to change’ programmes have been initiated. Achievements Two of the RCE’s small-scale initiatives – agriculture and biodiversity – that draw on indigenous knowledge are reflected in this chapter. These involve the recovery of traditional knowledge practices as valued doings, beings and knowings, for learning that juxtaposes the re-valued heritage with what is now known and the issues of the day. The RCE sustainability commons incubator is primarily centred on local water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity, which can be initiated without external funding. Background A legacy of colonial conquest and apartheid exclusion has represented the indigenous peoples of South Africa as inferior. Modern scientific knowledge has thus predominated as the basis for reorientation through education for sustainable development (ESD). A continuing pattern of exclusion is found in ESD programmes without adequate care being taken to note what knowledge practices, both indigenous and institutional, have high levels of congruence with reality. One finds, for example, that: • Kitchen gardening is being taught as a modern process of organic compost gardening (permaculture) without reference to ethuthwini, the traditional practice of composting homestead organic waste; and • Restoring biodiversity is being approached as a conservation science reintroduction of indigenous trees without noting the indigenous practice of including a portion of forest leaf litter. Given these continuing anomalies and a failure of most indigenous knowledge discourses to transcend oppositional posturing over probing for reality congruence in bio-cultural practices, RCE Makana set out to focus on congruence in critical processes of emancipatory learning to change. This chapter gives an account of the emerging process and some of the tools used to probe for synergies across histories of alienating exclusion. A ‘Growing from Within’ Approach in RCE Activities Although reference is commonly made to Indigenous Knowledge Systems today, the intellectual narratives are developing as narrowing appropriations that most often represent indigenous as a heritage of wisdom that is seen as opposing and having been oppressed and excluded by the Western Knowledge of the colonial regimes. Intellectual dialectic and systems narratives in response to historical exclusions seldom work with the reality congruence of indigenous heritage practices as an endogenous capital in the language (mother tongue) and practices1 of local people. This limits the practical recovery of indigenous knowledge as an often forgotten lineage of sustainable practices that have benefitted people and the environment over many generations. Much of the discourse on indigenous knowledge thus exemplifies spiritual dimensions of identity over a recovery of common sense intergenerational practices that are more congruent with natural systems than many of the practices of late modernity. A congruence-seeking approach has found synergies towards better practices in urban food production, the restoration of plants of bio-cultural significance, health producing ways of preparing food and the provision of an improved water supply to households in Makana. The congruence-seeking approach draws on an endogenous (growing from within) view of knowledge as a symbolic capital steering sustaining practices that have been shown to be sustainable prior to the ways of the modern day. 1 Here ‘indigenous knowledge practices’ is used over indigenous knowledge and indigenous knowledge systems. A primacy of practice situates the indigenous narrative signifying a real world activity that allows a post colonial juxtaposing of indigenous and modern in the production of new mediating knowledge that is reality congruent in a changing world.
Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity
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