Metaphor as Epistemological Reconfiguration in Amina Mama's Work — Epoche C1
The conventionalist picture of metaphor Begin with the picture of metaphor this essay means to unsettle. In the truth-conditional tradition of semantics — the view on which the meaning of a sentence consists in the conditions under which it would be true — metaphor has always been an embarrassment, because a metaphorical sentence taken literally is usually false, and yet saying it plainly accomplishes something. Donald Davidson's famous response, in 'What Metaphors Mean' (1978), was austere: metaphors have no special 'metaphorical meaning' at all. The words in 'Man is a wolf' mean exactly what they always mean; what the metaphor does is not to assert a hidden content but to cause the hearer to notice similarities, rather as a picture or a joke might. A caution is owed here, and it corrects a compression in the way this position is often summarised (including in earlier versions of this essay): Davidson is not, strictly, a conventionalist about metaphorical meaning — his point is that there is no such meaning for conventions to fix. What he shares with conventionalist accounts, and what matters for the present argument, is the shape of the background picture: literal meanings are settled by existing linguistic convention; a context of interpretation stands ready-made; and the metaphorical utterance is dropped into that container, producing its effects within parameters it does not itself alter. Interpretation flows in one direction, from established framework to figurative utterance, never back. This unidirectional picture is what an examination of decolonial scholarly practice — here, the work of the Nigerian-British feminist scholar Amina Mama — puts under strain. The claim to be defended is that metaphors drawn from African traditional knowledge systems can function not as decoration inside an existing analytical frame but as instruments that reconfigure the frame : they alter which questions are askable, which explanations count as serious, and whose knowledge sits where in the hierarchy. If that is right, then context is not a pre-existing container but something figurative language can remake — and the conventionalist picture, whatever its merits for stock metaphors, fails for precisely the metaphors that matter most. The counter-tradition: interaction and framing The theoretical resources for this claim are not exotic; they belong to the mainstream of metaphor theory, and it is worth setting them out because they supply the mechanism the argument needs. Max Black's 'interaction view', developed in Models and Metaphors (1962), analyses a metaphor into a focus (the metaphorical word) and a frame (the literal sentence around it), and argues that the focus works through what he called the 'system of associated commonplaces' — the stock of beliefs, half-beliefs and clichés a community attaches to a term. Calling man a wolf projects the wolf-commonplaces (predatory, ruthless, pack-bound) onto man, and — this is Black's crucial move — the projection works like a filter or a screen: it organises our view of the primary subject, making some features salient and suppressing others. The metaphor does not report a pre-existing similarity; it institutes a way of seeing . Black even insisted that the interaction runs both ways — talking of man as a wolf also makes the wolf seem more human — which is already a small-scale version of context being altered by the figure placed within it. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) radicalised the point with linguistic evidence. They catalogued families of ordinary expressions — one attacks a position, defends a claim, wins or loses an argument — and argued that such families are surface traces of a single underlying conceptual mapping (in this case, 'argument is war') which structures not just how English speakers talk about arguing but how they conduct and experience it: whom they treat as an opponent, what they count as success. Their well-known thought experiment asks what arguing would be in a culture whose governing metaphor was dance rather than war — different moves would be possible, different outcomes valuable. The lesson, whatever one makes of their stronger cognitive claims, is that metaphors at this depth do not sit inside a fixed practice; they partly constitute the practice. Change the governing metaphor and you change what the activity is. Epistemic hierarchies and the decolonial stake Now bring this machinery to the postcolonial setting, where the 'context' in question is not a single conversation but the entire apparatus through which knowledge about African societies is produced. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge — of what counts as knowing, and on whose authority; an epistemic hierarchy is a de facto ranking of knowledge sources, in which, say, peer-reviewed social science produced in Northern universities counts as 'theory' while African oral tradition counts at best as 'data' for that theory to explain. That such a ranking exists is not a speculative accusation; it is documented from several directions. The Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind (1986) traced how colonial schooling installed European languages as the sole vehicles of serious thought, demoting African languages — and the conceptual worlds carried in their proverbs and narratives — to the domestic and the folkloric. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, in Cultural Universals and Particulars (1996), made 'conceptual decolonisation' a programme: African philosophers, he argued, routinely think through categories sedimented in European languages and should test them against the categories of their own languages. And Kwame Gyekye's An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (1987) demonstrated in detail that Akan proverbs — the Akan being the ethnolinguistic group of southern Ghana whose language carries one of West Africa's richest proverb traditions — function as condensed philosophical arguments: compressed, general, cont