African Indigenous Knowledge on the Cloud

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge is knowledge that people have of their local environment acquired through the accumulation of experiences, informal experiments, and observation rooted in particular places and practised as culture. This kind of knowledge is not documented as it is tacit and transferred though oral tradition. Being largely uncodified, it is constantly changing and forgotten as people adapt to changing circumstances due to beliefs, intercultural settings, and colonisation. Therefore, it faces a danger of fading. Libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) should be proactive in their approach and should ensure that indigenous knowledge, although based on orality and oral traditions, should be managed and preserved just like other documentary materials that are grounded in western codified knowledge schemes and create sustainable strategies to preserve it for future use.