Anthony Asekhauno

Truth and knowledge are essentially the dictates of some rationality or metaphysical ordainment. By sense experience man is capable of accounting for his past, contemplate his life and predict his future and all of reality, for traditional Africa, however (as is the case with most native societies), there is another mode of knowing beyond man’s immediate capacity in search of truth and reality. An analysis of this perception indicates that there is some metaphysical tinge to epistemology or knowledge claims—whether in the spheres of justice, morality/ethics, religion, political authority, prosperity, law, or ontology/world-view. Put on a plain pedestal: Isn’t there an African mode of knowing? By the study among the Afemai-Etsako of Southern Nigeria, this article tersely adumbrates the scope and nature of knowledge and discovers that, beside the common routes to it (experience and reason), the gamut of knowledge among the traditional Africans also have several metaphysical strands reducible to creative determinism, reactive interference, and representativeness in timing and naming.

.It is apt and usual to cogitate and ratiocinate man and human rights; it is less so about or with (other) animal rights; and much more less and lesser so with/about “plant rights” and (possibly) the rights of cloned/the artificially intelligent agents’. This condition is unfair and not ideal because man, other animals, plants, and other human manipulations (AI) from nature constitute varying levels of being; therefore, they possess varying levels of rights. Hence there is need to espouse the nature/levels of being, on the one hand, and to adumbrate the nature/types of rights and as related to being as such—which is the imperative of this article. Dwelling on the cornucopia of literature/and common biological (and other) features in nature as basis for analysis, this article, first, seeks to establish that man, other animals, plants, and other human manipulations from nature constitute varying levels of being; and second, argues that each level of being as such possesses some rights associated with it. It argues further that either all beings have rights, or they don’t. The work concludes that if one accepts that all the levels of being possess rights (accordingly including plant, cloned and AI agents), then one has certain obligation to all levels of being; but accepting either poses the most existential and ontological threat to humanity and all of nature.