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The great South African intellectual and anti-apartheid activist Archie Mafeje asked: “What forms of accumulated knowledge do Africans have and how do we get at it?” This question, or a variation of it, has always animated our research and informs the project Naming Africans: On the Epistemic Value of African Names. Indeed, one of the issues that bedevil scholars of Africa is how to identify the sources of knowledge about original African institutions, cosmologies and epistemologies against the background of the oft-repeated but erroneous idea that African communities did not have indigenous writing traditions until “the Europeans came,” as is often cryptically stated. This error is often compounded by the almost exclusive use of written sources to access ancient or accumulated knowledge anywhere in the world. Although archeology, paleontology and ancient art have been recruited to shed light on the human …