Like other parts of the world, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is rich in community-based traditional knowledge and practice systems that are passed across generations. Here, this Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is expected to influence local culture, norms, attitudes, lifestyles, livelihoods, and development. The IK also informs disciplines such as education, medicine, technology, innovation, mining, environmental protection, and politics globally. It is hence contextual and scalar, differing slightly from cluster to cluster, subject to subject, but building on its variants to become holistic as a development planning tool. Using selected cases, this descriptive-qualitative study furthers an ongoing scholarly discourse on the need to harness IK to advance SSA’s sustainable development. Its data were obtained from purposively selected secondary academic publications to augment longstanding observations by the authors, whose inhabitation, lived experiences, professional knowledge, and vast research on the theme and the region informed discourses. The study reports that historical and modern manipulations of local knowledge systems exist in SSA, starting with colonial distortions. The deliberately ill-curated IK continually shapes opinion, crafts a dominant Western cultural, political, and administrative philosophy, and originally enforced cooperation from colonial subjects, with long-term ramifications now visible. It fuels SSA’s development obstacles, such as a lowered sense of self-worth, indolence, excuse-making, stodginess, unoriginality, poverty, overdependence, consumerism, conflicts, and brain drain. These limit local investment in development and encourage the North-detested and protested cross-generational South-North Migration, which inhibits sustainable development planning. The study contextualizes the need to redefine and integrate SSA’s IK as a facilitator of homegrown sustainable development. Tools for achieving this are provided.
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