Conversations on the injustices of the Eurocentric nature of the global intellectual property (IP) system andits effect on African indigenous knowledge have long been had in disciplinary silos. IP law scholars, notably Ruth Okediji, have critiqued the categorization of Indigenous knowledge systems as public domain knowledge thus exposing it to entitlement claims, while Chidi Oguamanam has argued that the crisis of legitimacy that indigenous knowledge poses for the intellectual property system compels a re-thinking ofthe concept of IP itself. Similarly, Africanist historians, including Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Abena Osseo-Asare, and Gloria Emeagwali, have critiqued enduring colonial legacies on African knowledge systems, researched scientific knowledge and technological artifacts that originated in Africa, and continuously called for a return to Indigenous modes of African knowledge creation and dissemination. We believe it is time for the emergence of a critical interdisciplinary conversation of legal and historical scholars on African Indigenous knowledge systems, the IP injustices embedded around them, and carving a path forward. Our paper reflects on the similarities and differences in legal and historiographical approaches to Indigenous knowledge research. We offer new proposals for a merger of the activism of humanities scholars with the policy work of IP lawyers and legal scholars. Lastly, we propose new ways to integrate the decolonial perspectives of humanities scholars with the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)movement among legal scholars as both groups seek to expand the corpus of Indigenous knowledge research. This integration opens new avenues for innovative analysis in Indigenous knowledge scholarship, making it possible to apply legal research methodologies to historical questions and historiographical approaches to legal research questions.

This paper explores the controversy around mumie, an organic mineral substance used in traditional medicine across Asia, during the late Soviet period (1960s-1980s). Local physicians and medical administrators in Soviet Central Asia actively promoted mumie’s efficacy, which contributed to its widespread popularity throughout the country. At the same time, the officials at the Ministry of Health in Moscow often remained skeptical and decried the “mumie craze” that they saw as motivated by irresponsible marketing and facilitated by illegal black-market sales. As Alexey Golubev has recently observed, in the period under discussion the southern Soviet Union was often seen as an Orientalized space which can produce no credible scientific knowledge.  However, Soviet bureaucrats also had to adhere to the party line that stressed the "friendship of the peoples" and encouraged grassroots inventiveness (izobretatel'stvo).Building on archival collections of the Pharmacological Committee, the main Soviet drug regulator, at the State Archive of the Russian Federation, as well as medical publications of the period and ego documents such as letters and diaries that reflect the consumption side, I explore broader themes of indigenous knowledge versus state-sanctioned science, highlighting the clash between local practices and central authority and analyzing how differing epistemic models shape perceptions of reliability and efficacy in medicine. Additionally, the paper provides a different angle on the history of consumption and the history of the self in the USSR, tracing the practices of neoliberal subjectification and pharmaceutical self-optimization back to the 1960s and situating the Soviet experience within the global framework.

The evident contraction of the world into a ‘global village’, and the realities that come with this global contraction in 21st century have made discourses on globalisation and its counter-discourse on glocalisation inevitable. While globalisation comes with its challenges of cultural imperialism, it comes with opportunities for local intellectuals to leverage as producers of local and global knowledge. Against this backdrop, my study asks: How do indigenous Yorùbá popular musicians act as producers of local-global knowledge through musicking traditional oral histories and concepts? My study examines the attributes of the Yorùbá Ọmọlúàbí philosophy as a psycho-cultural underpinning of value, moral and ethics in the Yorùbá cultural worldview in the music of Segun Akinlolu (Beautiful Nubia) and Bisade Ologunde (Lagbaja). Within the framework of Roland Robertson’s theory of glocalisation and a qualitative design, my study reveals how their creative products interact with local-global realities of knowledge production. My study establishes that, through indigenous Yorùbá popular music, the oral historical attributes of Yorùbá Ọmọlúàbí philosophy which is foregrounded in the attributes of Olódùmarè, the idealised centre of human existence and purpose is creatively documented, produced, and commodified in a glocal context. My study concludes that folk-derived Yorùbá popular music as an oral art is a potent tool in harnessing local knowledge for local-global relevance.