TOK situations from Africa
Where a case comes from changes what it can show. These are the situations in the library drawn from africa.
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- Africa
Two names for one ancestor
The fossil skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974 is Lucy to the world, after a Beatles song playing in the researchers' camp, and Dinkinesh, meaning you are…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Africa
A song as a political argument
Fela Kuti's long-form Afrobeat pieces named institutions, described mechanisms and accused specific powers, and the Nigerian state responded with raids and…
Enduring · The arts
- Power
- Justification
- Africa
The ruins colonialism refused to attribute
Colonial administrations in Rhodesia promoted foreign builders, Phoenicians, Arabs, anyone but Africans, for Great Zimbabwe, and at times pressured…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Perspective
- Power
- Africa
Historians without paper
West African griots have carried genealogies, epics and political history across centuries through trained recitation, with lineages of transmitters…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- Africa
The appetite plant and the patent
South African researchers patented an appetite-suppressing compound from hoodia, a plant the San had long used on hunts, without initial benefit-sharing;…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Africa
Cloth you can read
Akan kente patterns carry names, proverbs and histories, so a cloth worn to a funeral says something specific to those who can read it. Sold internationally as…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Africa
The economy that grew 89 percent overnight
In 2014 Nigeria rebased its GDP calculation to include sectors like Nollywood and telecoms that the old 1990 framework barely saw, and the economy became…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Certainty
- Objectivity
- Africa
A film industry the textbooks missed
Nollywood grew into one of the world's most prolific film industries through straight-to-video economics, informal distribution and stories tuned to local…
Enduring · The arts
- Truth
- Values
- Culture
- Africa
Smuggling a library to safety
When militants occupied Timbuktu in 2012, families and archivists smuggled hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out in trunks and boats, hiding a…
Enduring · History
- Culture
- Responsibility
- Africa
Truth commission, plural truths
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission explicitly distinguished kinds of truth, factual, personal, social, restorative, and accepted survivor…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Africa
A person is a person through other persons
Ubuntu, articulated across southern African thought, treats personhood and understanding as constituted through relations with others rather than achieved…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Perspective
- Culture
- Africa
The bronzes and the museums
Thousands of Benin bronzes, seized in the 1897 British expedition, sit in Western museums that long defended holding them as universal stewardship, while…
Current · The arts
- Power
- Values