The Need for an Authentic African Voice in a Scholarly Sea of Hyperconnectivity and Artificial Intelligence

An African voice is not prominent in most areas of scholarship, including the study of language, despite the richness of the linguistic heritage of Africa. Several factors contribute to this situation, including the way formal education came into being during and after the colonial era, but also resource constraints since then. While ostensibly enabling developments, the movement towards open access publishing and writing assistance from artificial intelligence have consequences that will prevent the development of an authentic African voice. Open access publishing alleviates access to scholarship but does not amplify African voices in equal measure because of the cost of open access publishing for authors and African universities. Artificial intelligence is modelled on training data that contains many biases, not least of which the absence of African voices in the training data, which will supply authors using such tools with the voice of somebody else. In order to overcome the challenges to the development and amplification of an African voice, this article reviews the decolonisation debate and the fleeting literary and cultural movement called “rediscovery of the ordinary” during the final years of apartheid South Africa for inspiration to forge a new path. It emerges that a focus on authentic intellectual and real-world problems from the African context has to be the point of departure, rather than the attempt to seek alignment with currently favoured research concerns from the Global North. Furthermore, much existing scholarship is not favourable to an African voice but may nevertheless contain some elements of value, forcing African scholars to assess scholarship critically without rejecting outright what has been published within other scholarly traditions. A dedicated attempt to read and engage with African scholarship is required as part of this endeavour, amplifying other African voices as one cultivates and strengthens one’s own African voice.