Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 1 | Scholarship Emerges in Africa, page 4 (low-bandwidth)

Madu sees a growing body of research that suggests many methods used by traditional healers “can be categorized under psychotherapy. They are similar to typical psychological methods we use for treatment. They also use herbs and concoctions.”

The recently deceased Dr. Thomas Adeoye Lambo is widely regarded as the founder of African psychotherapy. The British-trained Lambo rejected notions of European superiority by hiring regional traditional healers at the Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Aro, Nigeria to assist Western-trained psychiatrists in the treatment and interpretation of mental illness. They work side by side. The programs have been so successful that the UN produced a film about the hospital, which has served as a model for other African mental health systems.

The continent-wide reaffirmation of traditional medicine represents a strong underlying current in much scholarship and research in Africa. Many researchers insist their work is informed by the need to reclaim and emphasize indigenous knowledge.

Professor Jacob Songsore, dean of research and graduate studies at the University of Ghana, believes that Africans “must reject the notion that we are the oldest humans on the planet, yet we know nothing. The resilience of Africa is something we have to build on. If you bring Western technologies to Africa’s subsistence farmers, they can’t use most of the techniques because they are too expensive. If you bring Western medicine here, without accounting for local beliefs and traditions, and for poverty, it also won’t work. Even Western methods of construction are problematic because sometimes materials used are not available or not cost effective because they have to be transported great distances and to places where there may be no roads. This requires that we take what we have—what we know works—and then use whatever we can from the outside to improve it.”

Professor William Rugumamu, the associate dean of research and publications for the University of Dar es Salaam, agrees. “There is a battle between indigenous ways and Western knowledge. We have to directly address the way resources are used by the majority of the people. In the area of law, people have to go back to traditional institutions, the way they are in Rwanda, in order to maintain peace. Most people can’t afford access to Western courts and lawyers. Traditional leaders have an important role to play.”

Dr. Bagele Chilisa, the head of the Department of Education Foundations at the University of Botswana, says many African researchers who were trained in the West are beginning to challenge Western assumptions. He says, “Western philosophies…tend to dominate the way we carry out research. The way we formulate questions, and the way we analyze and report. These Western methodologies are taught as if they are universal and apply across all cultures. They don’t. The consequence is that we misrepresent the people we are researching.”

Emerging African Definitions
Nowhere is this drive to reclaim African memory more intense then in the research of history.

Much Western history of Africa, says Bertram Mapunda, who heads the archeology unit in the history department at the University of Dar es Salaam, “would like to paint a picture of denying the responsibility of colonialism in the lack of development in Africa. They insist that Africa had been culturally, economically and socially weak, even before whites came here. Some go even further and suggest that imperialism actually did improve Africa. Most Africans find that argument ridiculous.”

Mapunda believes that African historians and researchers face the challenge “of rewriting this crooked history.” In Tanzania, Mapunda’s department is spearheading a research project on the early 19th century war of the Maji Maji—a campaign of resistance by Tanzanians against German occupation.

“The Germans would like us to believe,” Mapunda says, “that there were a bunch of savages committing barbaric acts against gentle white people. We need to investigate the savage, barbaric acts the Germans committed against Africans. We are focusing on the African perspective. I see this trend as reclaiming our history and heritage.”

Something like Tanzania’s research of the Maji Maji war is occurring in most African countries, as researchers seek to redefine themselves, not least in many school textbooks that retain the Western point of view.

Literary scholarship in Africa is also struggling with African definitions. John Conteh-Morgan of Sierra Leone is the editor of Research in African Literatures, a journal published by Indiana University Press. Conteh-Morgan and others challenge Western perceptions that, prior to colonization, Africa had no literature—no written tradition.

“In both East and West Africa,” he says, “there were written traditions dating back centuries before colonization. Ethiopia’s Amharic is one of the world’s most ancient written languages.”

Still, until relatively recently, Conteh-Morgan acknowledges, literature in Africa was an interest of only a handful of people. “Certainly since colonization, literary scholars tend to be Westernized elites who mainly were writing for one another, or for critics in the West,” he asserts. African literature after colonization also had a political bent, Morgan adds. “When African nations were struggling for independence, the writers postulated a homogenous people. All Africans were one. They were constructing identities in opposition to and in contrast with the identities of the imperial powers.”

Writer Helon Habila recently stated that, “Most African writers will readily confess to not having written for a mass domestic audience, because there was none. These authors were the first to go to university, the first to travel abroad, the first to get government jobs. Because they were part of the elite, in many ways, this limited their contact with and understanding of African people, most of whom were peasants.”

Next page: Western methodologies are taught as if they are universal and apply across all cultures. They don’t. The consequence is that we misrepresent the people we are researching.

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