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In this chapter, we highlight the much-lauded Igba-Boi apprenticeship scheme that underpins the Igbo Traditional Business School. We explore the operational modalities of the scheme and its philosophical roots in the Igbo ontology. Acknowledging the effect of colonialism on the current trajectory of African ways of being, we compare the Igba-Boi scheme to the prototypical German apprenticeship system to highlight areas of potential improvement around levels of education, gender inclusivity and trade specificity. Based on this comparative evaluation, we recommend changes to the Igba-Boi model that will strengthen its utility for the educational needs of the formal and informal sectors of the Nigerian, and by extension, African economy.

This study explored an alternative understanding of heritage through the lens of the Igbo cultural group in Nigeria. It used the Igbo concept of “Ihe Nketa” or “Oke” to examine the complex relationship between indigeneity, attachment and sustainability in the context of heritage management and conservation.

A qualitative approach was used, and ethnographic methods of data collection that include interviews and focus-group discussions (FGD) applied. The interview participants included village chiefs and the elderly (men and women), and the FGD comprised village elders (men and women) and youths. The interview guide contained demographic questions to determine age and occupation, followed by interactive open-ended questions stemming from the study's objectives. The interviews were conducted in the language most preferred by the respondents such as the Igbo language, Nigerian Pidgin English and the English language. The evidence generated was thematically analysed in a descriptive and interpretive manner.

The study found that while the Igbo understanding of heritage have related meaning with the definitions offered by the United Nations, their approach to heritage conservation takes a different turn through the concepts of “Ihe Nketa” or “Oke,” which recognises the ephemerality of tangible heritage resources with particular focus on the preservation of intangible heritage–knowledge over objects. The Igbo approach describes the framework for the acquisition, use and transfer of heritage resources in the Igbo society.

This study contributes to the understanding of the concept of heritage through the lens of the Igbo of Nigeria. Against the centralised national management approach to heritage, this paper argues that achieving sustainable heritage management in a multi-ethnic country like Nigeria requires the recognition of the principles that conserve(d) and manage(d) heritage among the indigenous/local peoples.

Africa is a vast, immensely diverse continent with hundreds of local languages, traditions, values, and cultures that shape the lives of its people. The vast resources available on the continent present numerous opportunities for economic development and prosperity. The preceding chapters in this volume have explored many of these resources, highlighting the importance of indigenous knowledge in driving sustainable business structures across Africa. This chapter concludes with practical recommendations for implementing and sustaining indigenous knowledge on the continent and building a more equitable and sustainable future for Africa. We anticipate that these observations and recommendations will aid African researchers, government and non-governmental organisations, educators, business actors and leaders, legislators, and the general public in thinking globally but acting locally to advance indigenous knowledge in Africa.

The overall aim of this research is to interpret Ikenga and Ofo creativity as it is revered in Igbo societies. Igbo creativity, especially interpreted through material culture, suffers the threat of extinction resulting from the forces of modernity. Forces of modernisation, which appear in the personae of Christianity, education, urbanisation and industrialisation, denigrated indigenous creativity, brandishing them as devious, fetish and primitive. Ironically, in most cases, the drivers of such narratives keep these “fetish” items in their museums and will give a lot to preserve them.

This study centred mostly on several communities in the Nsukka area of Igboland, Nigeria. It relied on both primary and secondary sources of historical enquiry. This qualitative research discussed the nuances of the subject matter as it relates to Igbo cosmos. These approaches involved visiting the study area and conducting personal interviews.

Archaeologists do often rely on material culture to study, periodise and date past human societies. In this study, it is found that material culture, an expression of indigenous creativity, best interprets how society survived or related with their environment. This paper examined two Igbo sculpted artefacts – Ikenga and Ofo – while unearthing the intricacies in Igbo cosmology as regards creativity, spirituality and society.

The shapes, motifs, patterns and designs depict an imaginary history, the intellectualism of the past and even the present. This serves as an objective alternative to the twisted colonial narrative on Igbo material culture and consequently contribute to ongoing efforts to preserve, protect and promote cultural heritage resources in this part of the world.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with the discourse on the assumed existence of an distinct “African management” model. It critically deconstructs the concepts and submits an alternative strategy to address the need to understand what is happening in management of business in Africa.

Qualitative critical text analysis is used to understand the discourse on the nature of “African management” from the extant literature. The identity theory informs the understanding of the references to “African” as fundamental to identify a distinct management model. This analysis is supplemented by empirical case study research into successful African business.

Scholars failed to conceptualise what is “African”, and subsequently also what constitutes “African management”. This conceptual void undermines the critical reconstruction of a single African management model. Empirical research into actual management practices emerge as fundamental to systematic progress in this discourse. This research points to diverse management traditions converging into pragmatic practices.

Only a limited number of case studies were conducted into management history in Africa. This paper argues for an extended research programme, but this is future work.

It suggests a research strategy for scholars in African business studies, business history and management history to collaborate towards making a solid contribution to the economic development of our continent.

This research has the potential of forging collaboration in business among all of the people in Africa.

A critical text analysis is used to expose the conceptual lacunae that undermines progress in the discourse. This paper contributes to the literature on “African management” by systematically deconstructing the concept of “African identity” as a prerequisite to the management discourse. By signalling ethnic nostalgia, the critical reconceptualisation of Africanness offers an intellectually creative strategy out of the stalled discourse.

This chapter reviews the nuances of colonialism, exploring the role of Arab expansion, the inter-African slave trade system, the Christianity position on slavery, similar slavery systems in Asia and Europe, and the impact of colonization after 1400. Using the historical examples of African colonization and its growth into international trade through time, I will examine the scars of colonialism.

Three distinctive domains of inquiry in comparative and international education (CIE) point to epistemic fault lines that simultaneously enable and disable the possibilities for social transformation in the cultural ecologies that demarcate, but also entangle, the so-called Global South and the North. Historically, these domains of inquiry – language/multilingualism, education, and development – engage arenas in which ideas about wellbeing, social arrangements, and the politics of knowledge (and of power) are constantly constructed, contested, and renegotiated. This analysis pinpoints some of the discursive technologies, which guarantee that active scholarly innovations and differentiation proceed in ways that ultimately leave intact the territorialized regionalizations of development differences. It reflects on ongoing fieldwork from the South to highlight three spheres of social control, and struggle, illustrative of the coloniality of difference and the expanding institutionalization of learning (as schooling) in an era of global interventionism. These loci – the sources of knowledge traditions, the sites of its enactment, and the power of knowledge transactions – represent overlapping activation points through which education interventions both stimulate and stultify social transformations. Specifically, the sources, sites, and power of knowledge offer empirical and discursive tools for historiographic reconsideration of the role of linguistic diversity and education in social change processes, and, crucially, for shifting critical focus from merely the occidentality of contemporary education traditions to the universalism of its social imaginaries. In this critical reading of new understandings of language(s) as invention, therefore, lies analytic opportunities for rethinking epistemic dilemmas in linking education and “development” in CIE scholarship.