Thinking about research in Africa through the lens of pluralism and the scientific divide

The history of scientific knowledge production is often presented as an insular and highly Eurocentric process. The defense by the historian of science Hendrik Floris Cohen of what he calls the “fact of Western priority” is a case in point. This paper challenges this tendency, which can be considered a historiographical myth. To address this topic, we ground our analysis in what we consider the multicultural dimension of scientific pluralism and in epistemic diversity, understood as the diversity of systems of meaning. The second major point of this paper relates to the disparities among the entities constituting the world of research, disparities that we examine here through the notion of the “scientific divide,” borrowed from the Gabonese philosopher Bonaventure Mvé-Ondo. The analysis calls for bridging this scientific divide through national, regional, and international scientific collaborations that can truly enable us to build “knowledge societies,” to borrow the wording of the 2005 UNESCO World Report.