Journal of Critical Methodological Studies

Abdul Karim Bangura


Introduction

Realizing the need for state-of-the-art research methods that address the growing methods-theory gap within Public Policy Analysis, a number of research methodologists have embarked upon the task of developing new methodologies. I will describe in alphabetical order these emergent and cutting-edge qualitative, quantitative and triangulative research methods. After that, I will make the case for similar developments for African-centered methodologies. But first of all, let me briefly state the nature of these emergent methodologies, which can be summarized as follows:

(a) they combine theoretical and empirical approaches;

(b) they focus on methodological issues within the Public Policy field and between the field and other disciplines;

(c) they offer very broad perspectives of the possible uses and issues surrounding research techniques and methods; and

(d) they challenge researchers to build bridges that link new research questions with innovative methods that can address issues of power, authority, and representation in the research process.


Applied Multivariate Research

Multivariate designs were once the province of the very few exalted researchers who understood the underlying advanced mathematics. Today, through the sophistication of statistical software packages such as Statistical Analysis System (SAS) and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), virtually all researchers across the social and behavioral sciences are exposed to the complex multivariate statistical techniques without having to learn the mathematical computations needed to acquire the data output. Many researchers—in psychology, education, political science, etc.—will never be statisticians; and appropriately so, their work reflects less of an emphasis on the mathematical complexities of multivariate statistics and more on the analysis and the interpretation of the methods themselves and the actual data output.
Applied Multivariate Research (AMR) provides a wide range of multivariate techniques that can be employed in a conceptual rather than mathematical way. It is geared toward the needs, level of sophistication, and interest in multivariate methodology of users in these applied programs who need to focus on design and interpretation rather than the intricacies of specific computations.


Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a change-focused research methodology. Today, students and researchers seek to do more than report on what they see following a research study or project; instead, they engage the research environment (participants, stakeholders) to promote change. Put differently, their studies are as much research-based as they are meant to initiate or sustain social or organizational change. Very often, the nature of this dual purpose—research and change—requires the researcher to use nontraditional approaches that bridge the theory-practice gap.
Key features of AI include the following:

(a) the range of debates that AI can generate for a researcher or professional used to employing otherwise traditional research models;

(b) examples from recent published and unpublished projects in which AI was used, with an emphasis on those that shaped policy, planning, and future practices;

(c) discussion and guidance on how to make the connections between AI and various research paradigms and approaches to research, including positivist versus naturalistic research, social constructionist concepts, action research, ethnography, narrative inquiry, and case studies;

(d) an assessment of the strengths and limitations of AI in research environments;

(e) practical guidance and ideas for generating different research questions, managing, organizing, and analyzing data, and communicating and disseminating the final results; and

(f) individual and group exercises that draw on organizational development techniques as a way to bring AI concepts to life through practice.


Art Practice Research

Art Practice Research (APR) is based on the premise that the creative and cultural inquiry undertaken by artists is a form of research. The approach allows the researcher to explore themes, practices, and contexts of artistic inquiry and positions them within the discourse of research. The basic argument is that legitimate research goals can be achieved by choosing different methods than those offered by the social sciences. The common denominator in both approaches is the attention given to rigor and systematic inquiry. Artists emphasize the role of the imaginative intellect in creating, criticizing, and constructing knowledge that is not only new but also has the capacity to transform human understanding.


Cognitive Interviewing

Taking into consideration that the design and evaluation of questionnaires—and of other written and oral materials—is a challenging endeavor, fraught with potential pitfalls, Cognitive Interviewing (CI) is a technique for systematically developing survey questions through investigations that intensively probe the thought processes of individuals who are presented with those inquiries. It provides a researcher the general guidance about questionnaire design, development, and pre-testing sequence, with an emphasis on the use of verbal probing techniques and how one can elicit additional information from subjects about their thinking and about the manner in which they react to tested questions. These tools help researchers discover how well their questions are working, where they are failing, and determine what they can do to rectify the wide variety of problems that may surface while working with questionnaires.


Concept Mapping

Concept Mapping (CM) is a methodology for mapping ideas that integrates input from multiple sources with differing expertise or interest, creates maps with multivariate data analyses that depict the composite thinking of the group, and yields data that allow for comparisons across rating criteria, stakeholder groups, different points in time, etc. to aid in targeted planning, implementation strategies, and evaluation. Group CM is related to the growing interest in the role that theory plays in planning and evaluation.


Constructing Grounded Theory

Constructing Grounded Theory (CGT) maps out an alternative vision of grounded theory to that put forward by its founding thinkers, Barney G. Glaser and Anselm Strauss. The major premise of CGT is that grounded theory must move on from its positivist origins and must incorporate many of the methods and questions posed by constructivists over the past 20 years to become a more nuanced and reflexive practice.


Experience Sampling Method

Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is a research procedure for studying what people do, feel, and think during their everyday lives. It consists of asking individuals to provide systematic self-reports at random occasions during the waking hours of their lives.


Feminist Research Practice

Feminist Research Practice (FRP) explores the range of feminist perspectives, including feminist empiricist, feminist standpoint, and postmodern perspectives in order to bridge the division between theory and research methods. It is a “hands-on” approach to research that facilitates “behind the scenes” glimpses. FRP calls for in-depth inquiry that covers the range of research questions with which feminists are engaged, including issues of gender inequality, violence against women, body image issues, and the discrimination of “other/ed” marginalized groups.


Fuzzy Set Theory

Fuzzy sets are categories with blurred boundaries. With classical sets, objects are either in the set or not, but objects can belong partially to more than one fuzzy set at a time. Many concepts in the social sciences have this characteristic. Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) provides methods for systematically dealing with them. A primary reason for not going beyond programmatic statements and rather unsophisticated uses of fuzzy set theory has been the lack of practical methods for combining fuzzy set concepts with statistical methods. This new approach makes it possible for one to take FST as his/her major focus and employ its explicit guidelines to harness fuzzy set concepts while being able to make statistical inferences and test his/her models.


Geographic Information Systems

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is an approach to integrating spatial concepts into the social sciences. The method requires practitioners to use real-world examples and actual program exercises, so that they can become comfortable incorporating this research tool into their repertoire and scope of interest.


Hypermedia Research

Hypermedia Research (HR) allows users to examine how digital culture and digital technologies have rapidly become unavoidable and essential forms of social experience and communication in the globalized society. It hinges on the notion that if researchers want to attempt to analyze and understand the technology-saturated society, with its new media, then they must also employ research methods and forms of analysis that can accommodate and exploit digital culture and digital technologies.
HR is a qualitative approach that provides researchers with the tools necessary to conduct ethnography in the age of E-mail and the Internet. It helps them to investigate how digital technologies potentially transform the ways in which they do research.


Inside Interviewing

Traditional interview techniques typically stress the need for establishing rapport with respondents and asking questions that do not influence the responses. Inside Interviewing (II) allows a researcher to capture the fluctuating and diverse moral worlds put into place during interview research when gender, race, culture, age, and other subject positions are brought narratively to the foreground. It allows one to explore the communicative contexts of respondents’ thoughts, feelings, and actions, and how meaning is not merely elicited by apt questioning nor transported through clear respondent replies, but actively and socially assembled in the interview encounter, along with changing understandings of what it means to be a particular subject.

II makes it possible for the researcher to explore the following issues:

(a) the varied roles that interview participants play, alerting one to the theoretical dimensions of subjectivity, and how this awareness can affect the interview process;

(b) the interpretive challenges researchers face in analyzing data collected from interview respondents and their representational positions concerning the subject matter in question; and

(c) methods for describing lives that incorporate the representational sensibilities of both interviewees and interview researchers.

In short, II helps a researcher to explore the representational complexities that emerge when research participation is scrutinized, as well as the technical concerns and analytic options that derive from new lenses for viewing the interview process. These new lenses provide users with theoretically informed direction for figuring how interview participants relate to each other, how to elicit interview data, and how to select alternative ways of representing interview material.


Interactive Qualitative Analysis

Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) aims to help researchers unscramble the mysteries of qualitative data collection, coding, and analysis by showing how to use a systematic, qualitative technique: i.e. interactive qualitative analysis. The approach allows users to synthesize ideas from grounded theory, path and factor analysis, quality management theory, Foucauldian concepts of power and knowledge, and systems theory. A dialectical revision of Guba and Lincoln’s theory of rigor is to be employed which, combined with systems theory, offers new insights into the meaning of reliability and validity in qualitative research.
Unlike many theoretical works, IQA develops the theory into a complete and transparent set of protocols for research design, observation, analysis, and interpretation. The construction, interpretation, and comparison of recursive systems of meaning, or mindmaps, are to be articulated in detail.


Measurement Error and Research Design

Previous methods on measurement present a statistical orientation or an orientation toward measurement theory. Although these approaches are valuable, Measurement Error and Research Design (MERD) is motivated by the lack of techniques that enhance understanding of measurement error, its sources, and its effects on responses. This method’s purpose is to enhance the design of research, both of measures and of methods.
MERD is organized around the meaning of measurement error. It allows a researcher to begin with measurement principles supplemented with many cases to provide necessary background to the targeted audience. It helps the researcher to analyze the various causes of different types of measurement error, the nature of responses that would characterize each type of error, and the pattern of empirical outcomes that would be observed. This approach provides guidance in developing and editing items and measures and in designing methods before the fact. It is also perfect for using empirical results to redesign items, measures, and methods.


Methods of Family Research

As people’s lives become increasingly impacted by research studies, it becomes ever more important to become critical consumers of that research, with the ability to sort out and evaluate sometimes conflicting findings. Methods of Family Research (MFR) differ from traditional family research methods in a significant way: while traditional methods focus on producing results, MFR emphasize consumption of research.
Employing a combination of qualitative, quantitative and triangulative techniques, MFR address every-day family issues. The methods as a whole focus on conceptual understanding aimed at helping users become intelligent and critical consumers of research on families, equipping them to more critically analyze what they find.


Multilevel Modeling

Context is very important when modeling human behavior. Individual action may be determined by independent variables operating at different levels, from the micro to the macro. Given the possible effects from different levels, a researcher might estimate an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model by using Contextual Analysis (CA). But, in the presence of multilevel effects, it can be difficult for OLS to meet the classical regression assumptions. In particular, having individuals in the same group will likely violate the assumption of uncorrected errors. This circumstance calls for Multilevel Modeling (MM) with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE).
MM takes into consideration the fact that certain characteristics or processes occurring at a higher level of analysis also influence characteristics or processes at a lower level. In essence, constructs are defined at different levels, and the hypothesized relations between these constructs operate across different levels. These type of multilevel theoretical constructs require specialized analytic tools provided by MM to properly evaluate.


Multiple Imputations for Nonresponse in Surveys

Until recently, it was a widely accepted practice to toss out surveys with missing responses. Multiple Imputations for Nonresponse in Surveys (MINS) offers a solution that allows the researcher to replace each missing value in a survey with two or multiple imputations. MINS focuses, therefore, on frame imperfections and coverage errors. The method makes if possible for its user to do the following:

(1)build in the nonresponse feature of survey data collection as an integral part of the theory, both for point estimation and variance estimation;

(2)promote weighing through calibration as a new and powerful technique for surveys with nonresponse;

(3)highlight the analysis of non-response bias in estimates and methods to minimize this bias; and

(4)include computational tools to help identify the best variable for calibration.


Multiple Time Series Models

Many analyses of time series data involve multiple, related variables. Multiple Time Series Models (MTSM) address many specification choices and special challenges. They deal with the main challenges for modeling multiple time series: simultaneous equations, ARIMA, error correction models, and vector autoregression—i.e. a generalization of the other approaches mentioned. Specification, estimation, and inference using these models are also addressed.


Polytomous Item Response Theory Models

When students take aptitude tests or when respondents answer attitudinal survey questions, the test or the questionnaire seeks to illicit certain aptitude or attitude via the questions. In reality, the test or observed scores are recorded with measurement error--i.e. the Classical Test Theory (CTT). One limitation of CTT applications is their test dependency for both test difficulty and test discrimination. Higher aptitude scores are equated with test comprised of easier items, and vice versa.
Polytomous Item Response Theory Models (PIRTM) have several advantages over CTT models. For example, whereas CTT item statistics depend basically on the subset of items and persons examined, PIRTM item and person parameters are invariant, thereby allowing the researcher to assess the contribution of individual items as they are added or omitted from a test or questionnaire. In addition, PIRTM can distinguish item bias from true differences on the attribute or aptitude measured, whereas CTT models cannot. This facilitates the employment of rigorous tests of measurement equivalence across experimental groups, which is particularly necessary when conducting research in cross-cultural settings where mean differences on the attribute or aptitude being measured are expected.


Postmodern Interviewing

Interview roles are less clear today than they once were; and in some cases, the roles are even exchanged to promote new opportunities for understanding the shape and evolution of selves and experience. Postmodern Interviewing (PI) offers researchers a tool for exploring a conversation with diverse purposes in which the communicative format is constructed as much within the interview conversation as it stems from pre-designated research interests. It makes it possible to explore emerging horizons, featuring reflexivity, poetics, and power, along with new ways of gathering experiential knowledge.
Employing concepts from anthropology, family studies, history, and sociology, a researcher can present ambitious new directions in which the interview has gone, such as:

(a) how the interview process is refracted through the lens of language, knowledge, culture, and difference;

(b) how the dividing line between fact and fiction is blurred to promote richer understanding; and

(c) how standardized representation has given way to representational invention.


Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry

In our times, evaluators must be flexible and responsive in order to best deal with the ever shifting environmental conditions that they face on the job. While the deficit-based approaches which have shaped evaluation practice over the years are important to master, a newer technique called Appreciative Inquiry (AI), as noted earlier, offers evaluators an additional, viable lens through which to view their work. AI is the search for what aspects of an organization are effective and hold the key to innovation and growth. Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry (REAI) allows researchers to employ the theory and practice of AI within the prism of evaluation.


Reliability and Risk Models

Reliability and Risk Models (RRM) are practical, probabilistic models, statistical and numerical procedures, applications and case studies for settling reliability requirements. They provide the researcher the tools to quantify risk and construct probability in conjunction with real-world decision-making problems, including a host of institutional, organizational, political and cultural considerations.


Research Methods for Community Change

That everyone is a member of a community, and that every community is continually changing is hardly a matter of dispute. To successfully manage that change, community members need information. Research Methods for Community Change (RMCC) comprise a model that allows a researcher to engage in an in-depth review of all of the research methods that communities use to solve problems, develop their resources, and protect their identities. The four features of the model are as follows:

(1) diagnosing a community condition,

(2) prescribing an intervention,

(3) implementing the prescription, and

(4) evaluating its impact

At every stage of this model, there are research tasks, from needs and assets assessments at the diagnosis stage to process and outcome studies at the evaluation stage. Users will also grasp the importance of involving community members at every stage of a project and in every aspect of the research, making the research part of the community-building process.


Situational Analysis

Situational Analysis (SA) is a variation of grounded theory that seeks to extend Anselm Strauss’s ecological social worlds/arenas/discourses framework. It offers researchers three kinds of maps that place emphasis on the range of differences rather than commonalities, as found via the traditional grounded theory approach:

(1) situational maps lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive, and material elements in the research situation of concern and provoke analysis of relations among them; and

(2) social worlds/arenas maps lay out the collective actors and their arenas of commitment, framing mezzo/meso-level interpretations of the situation.

Thus, SA can be used in a wide array of research projects that draw on interview, ethnographic, historical, visual, and other discursive materials including multi-site research.


Spectral Analysis of Time-Series Data

When we encounter time series, most of us often try to fit trends (linear, quadratic, cubic, etc.). We fail to note that trends imply that the long-range forecast is a very extreme response: i.e. trend models inevitably predict very extreme responses in the future. Today, however, which is usually not all that extreme, is yesterday's future. Trends very often are insufficient in modeling over-time processes. Cycles often offer a much more reasonable approach to comprehend variation over time than do trends.
Spectral Analysis of Time-Series Data (SATSD) is useful for describing cyclic patterns in time-series data. It is ideal for researchers who have many different kinds of time-series data such as social indicator data (e.g., number of divorces per annum), systematically coded observational data (e.g., level of effective involvement of each person in a mother-infant dyad), physiological data (e.g., measures of blood pressure), or measures of perceptual sensitivity or threshold. SATSD, thus, provides some relatively simple ways to characterize any cycle tendencies that are present: the proportion of variance in the time series that is accounted for by the cycle, the length of the cycle, and the amplitude of the cycle.


Synergic Inquiry

Synergic Inquiry (SI) is a particular take on action research. It is distinguished from other collaborative methodologies in its process orientation, which seeks first to differentiate and only then to integrate. This way, issues which are considered to be impediments to understanding cultural differences, examples of hierarchical thinking, etc. are treated as an organic part of the solution.
The method stresses a strong theory/practice mix. In essence, it is a refreshing attempt to forge behavioral theory and praxis to expand human capacities for problem-solving.


The Need for Authentic Afrikan-centered Research Methodologies

After almost three centuries of employing Western methodologies, many African communities in the continent and the Diaspora remain marginalized. It is obvious that these Western methodologies, which are not indigenous to Africans, have done relatively little good for Africans. Thus, I argue here that the salvation for Africans in both the continent and the Diaspora hinges upon developing and employing authentic African methodologies. Many great African minds, realizing the debilitating effects of the Western methodologies that have been forced upon Africans, have called for different approaches. The following is a sample of excerpts from some of these great Africans.

Sékou Touré:
We must Africanize our education and get rid of the negative features and misconceptions inherited from an educational system designed to serve colonial purposes. We should also promote an education that will acquaint children with real life—not only by giving them a vocational training, but by closely relating school with life. Life, indeed, is the true school, and our schools, whether of general education or vocational training, should be auxiliaries of life (Cowan et al. 1965:129).

Emperor Haile Selassie:
A fundamental objective of the university (i.e. Haile Selassie I University) must be to safeguarding and the developing of the culture of the people it serves. This university is a product of that culture; it is a community of those capable of understanding and using the accumulated heritage of the Ethiopian people. In this university men and women will work together to study the wellsprings of our culture, trace its development, and mold its future. What enables us today to open a university of such a standard is the wealth of literature and learning now extinct elsewhere in the world which through hard work and perseverance our forefathers have preserved for us (Cowan et al. 1965:303 4).

Julius K. Nyere:
Our first step, therefore, must be to re educate ourselves; to regain our former attitude of mind. In our traditional African society we are individuals within a community. We took care of the community, and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men (Hord and Lee 1995:68).

Kwame Nkrumah:
Intelligentsia and intellectuals, if they are to play a part in the African Revolution, must become conscious of the class struggle in Africa, and align themselves with the oppressed masses. This involves the difficult, but not impossible, task of cutting themselves free from bourgeois attitudes and ideologies imbibed as a result of colonialist education and propaganda (Nkrumah 1970:40).

Amilcar Cabral:
On the level of education and culture (three of the seven points): 3. Total elimination of the complexes created by colonialism, and of the consequences of colonialist culture and exploitation. 4. In Guinea development of autochthonous languages and of the Creole dialect, creation of a written form for these languages. In Cabo Verde development of the cultures of the various ethnic groups and of the Cabo Verde people. Protection and development of national literature and arts. 5. Utilisation of all the values and advances of human and universal culture in the service of the progress of the peoples of Guinea and Cabo Verde. Contribution by the culture of these peoples to the progress of humanity in general (Cabral 1969:173 4).

Ngugi wa Thiong’o:
As you know, the colonial system of education in addition to its apartheid racial demarcation had the structure of a pyramid: a broad primary base, a narrowing secondary middle, and an even narrower university apex....Language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds....The call for the rediscovery and the resumption of our language is a call for a regenerative re-connection with the millions of revolutionary tongues in Africa and the world over demanding liberation. It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being (Thiong’o 1986:12, 108).

Marcus Garvey:
But when we come to consider the history of man, was not the Negro a power, was he not great once? Yes, honest students of history can recall the day when Egypt, Ethiopia, and Timbuktu towered in their civilizations, towered above Europe, towered above Asia. When Europe was inhabited by a race of cannibals, a race of savaged, naked men, heathens, and pagans, Africa was peopled with a race of cultured black men, who were masters in art, science, and literature; men who were cultured and refined; men who, it was said, were like the gods. Even the great poets of old sang in beautiful sonnets of the delight it afforded the gods to be in companionship with the Ethiopians. Why, then, should we lose hope? Black men, you were once great; you shall be great again. Lose not courage, lose not faith, go forward. The thing to do is to get organized; keep separated and you will be exploited, you will be robbed, you will be killed. Get organized, and you will compel the world to respect you (Hord and Lee 1995:143).

Jean Price Mars:
Since our evolution as a people occurred in divergent directions, such that a small number among us has acquired an intellectual and social culture which makes it a world apart—very proud and vain in its ivory tower and having only a distant and formal contact with the rest of the population lost in misery and ignorance—it is among the multitude that we will have the best chance of again finding the thread of oral traditions derived from overseas. When one submits these traditions to a comparative examination, they immediately reveal that Africa, for the most part, is their land of origin (Hord and Lee 1995:147).

C. L. R. James:
The middle classes in the West Indies, colored peoples, constitute one of the most peculiar classes in the world, peculiar in the sense of their historical development and the awkward and difficult situation they occupy in what constitutes the West Indian nation, or, nowadays, some section of it. Let me get one thing out of the way. They are not a defective set of people. In intellectual capacity, i.e., ability to learn, to familiarize themselves with the general scholastic requirements of Western civilization, they are and for some time have been unequaled in the colonial world. If you take percentages of scholastic achievement in relation to population among underdeveloped, formerly colonial, colored countries, West Indians would probably be at the head and, I believe, not by a small margin either. What they lack, and they lack plenty, is not due to any inherent West Indian deficiency. If that were so we would be in a bad way indeed. I set out to show that the blunders and deficiencies of which we are guilty are historically caused and therefore can be historically corrected (Hord and Lee 1995:152).

Frantz Fanon:
Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country=s cultural standards (Fanon 1952/1967:18).

Specialists in basic health education should give careful thought to the new situations that develop in the course of a struggle for national liberation on the part of an underdeveloped people. Once the body of the nation begins to live again in a coherent and dynamic way, everything becomes possible (Fanon 1959/1965:144 5).

W. E. B. Du Bois:
Teach workers to work, a wise saying; wise when applied to German boys and American girls; wiser when said to Negro boys, for they have less knowledge of working and none to teach them. Teach thinkers to think, a needed knowledge in a day of loose and careless logic; and they whose lot is gravest must have the carefulest training to think aright. If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven or sixty million souls! Shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for money; the thinkers must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth; by founding the common school on the university, and the industrial school on the common school; and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion (Du Bois 1995:88 9).

Carter G. Woodson:
It seems only a reasonable proposition, then, that, if under the present system which produced our leadership in religion, politics, and business we have gone backward toward serfdom or have at least been kept from advancing to real freedom, it is high time to develop another sort of leadership with a different educational system. In the first place we must bear in mind that the Negro has never been educated. He has merely been informed about other things which he has not been permitted to do. The Negroes have been shoved out of the regular schools through the rear door into the obscurity of the backyard and told to imitate others whom they see from afar, or they have been permitted in some places to come into the public schools to see how others educate themselves. The program for the uplift of the Negro in this country must be based upon a scientific study of the Negro from within to develop in him the power to do for himself what his oppressors will never do to elevate him to the level of others (Woodson 1933:144).

Malcolm X:
The textbooks tell our children nothing about the great contributions of Afro Americans to the growth and development of this country. And they don=t. When we send our children to school in this country they learn nothing about us other than that we used to be cotton pickers. Every little child going to school thinks his grandfather was a cotton picker. Why, your grandfather was Nat Turner; your grandfather was Toussaint L=Ouverture; your grandfather was Hannibal. Your grandfather was some of the greatest Black people who walked on this earth. It was your grandfather=s hands who forged civilization and it was your grandmother=s hands who rocked the cradle of civilization. But the textbooks tell our children nothing about the great contributions of Afro Americans to the growth and development of this country (Malcolm X 1967:76 7).

Each one teach one!! (Gallen 1992:41).

Molefi Kete Asante:
When it comes to educating African American children, the American educational system does not need a tune up, it needs an overhaul. Black children have been maligned by this system. Black teachers have been maligned. Black history has been maligned. Africa has been maligned. Nonetheless, two truisms can be stated about education in America. First, some teachers can and do effectively teach African American children; secondly, if some teachers can do it, others can, too. We must learn all we can about what makes these teachers= attitudes and approaches successful, and then work diligently to see that their successes are replicated on a broad scale. By raising the same question that (Carter G.) Woodson posed more than fifty years ago, Afrocentric education, along with a significant reorientation of the American educational enterprise, seeks to respond to the African person=s psychological and cultural dislocation. By providing philosophical and theoretical guidelines and criteria that are centered in an African perception of reality and by placing the African American child in his or her proper historical context and setting, Afrocentricity may be just the escape hatch African Americans so desperately need to facilitate academic success and Asteal away@ from the cycle of miseducation and dislocation (Hord and Lee 1995:348 9).

In light of the preceding excerpts, at least two major questions emerge here: (1) Why have Western methodologies not yielded much benefit for Africans? (2) Did Western methodologies infiltrate African societies because Africans lacked their own? The following paragraphs attempt to answer these questions.
In response to the first question, as Awoonor (1990) has pointed out about African political systems and I (Bangura 2002) have done similarly about African educational systems, Western systems are incompatible with African systems because the former (i.e. Western) are based on a concept that fragments African life derived from a Eurocentric division of labor theory which separates education from politics, religion, economics, and the social institutions of family, or group, or people. This fragmentation theory emanates from Eurocentric epistemology and a fundamental approach to existence which has its genesis in Greco Roman and subsequently Judeo Christian thought.
Thus, one of the major tenets that guide my suggestion for authentic Afrikan-centered methodologies is that before we attempt any description of the thought process of Africans, it will be necessary to locate its total personality within the boundaries of its own self perception; this means delineating African philosophy and its view of the world, both visible and invisible, its fundamental habits of thought, and its attitude towards its physical and spiritual existence.
As Awoonor (1990) and I (Bangura 2002) have also pointed out, the African life concept is holistic—i.e. it is based on an integrative world view. All life to the African is total; all human activities are closely interrelated. This has as its underlying principle the sanctity of the person, her/his spirituality and essentiality. This essentialist view of the person confers value to her/his personhood. All else—her/his labor and achievements—flow from this value system. Even personal shortcomings cannot invalidate it.
In addition, for Africans, politics defines duties and responsibilities alongside obligations and rights. All these relate to the various activities that have to do with survival. The survival concept is continuing, dynamic and dialectical. The fundamental principle that is at the basis of this conception is a moral one. Moreover, the African moral order never defined rigid frontiers of good and evil. Good and evil exist in the same continuum. Whatever is good, by the very nature of its goodness, harbors a grain of evil. This is a guarantee against any exaggerated sense of moral superiority which goodness by itself may entail. The notion of perfection, therefore, is alien to African thought. Perfection in itself constitutes a temptation to danger, an invitation to arrogance and self glorification. The principle of balance defines the relationship between good and evil. As life operates in a dialectics of struggle, so also does good balance evil and vice versa.
In response to the second question, as Davidson Nicol has pointed out, the University of Sankore in Timbuktu, which flourished in the 16th Century, is very important to Africans. To most people in Europe and America, the history of Africa begins with the slave trade; but increasingly, Africans feel that the latter was simply an incident in a long history of the continent and that one must look beyond that. Sankore was a Muslim institution, or a series of institutions, where law, philosophy, and theology were taught, and it bore the same similarity to the present Al Azar University in Cairo—another Muslim university—which medieval Oxford does to present day Oxford (Cowan 1965:281).
Nicol further revealed that Al Azar University would in fact be a convenient point from which to start from a point of view of African nationalism. It is one of the focal points which have been used to unite Muslims all over the continent. Scholarships are given to attend it, and students there are taught Arabic, Islamic theology, and law. Upon graduation, they go back to spread their knowledge and Islamic culture in the various African countries (Cowan 1965:281).
But even before the advent of the universities in Timbuktu and Egypt, as Tiberondwa (1978), among others, has argued, the absence of Western education in pre colonial Africa does not presuppose that education was lacking on the continent. As long as humans have been on earth, each community has evolved its own forms of education based on the religious, social, political, economic and cultural values of that community.
Traditional forms of education existed all over Africa, based on ethnic and clan units and covered both the theoretical and practical fields. Education was part of living, but not everyone had to go to a Aschool building@ to be educated. The whole process of living was a process of learning. As reported by Tiberondwa, in an interview he conducted, a traditional ruler (the wanyasi) of Lango District in Northern Uganda stated that

There are people who have claimed the honour of having been the first teachers in many parts of this country. This is only true if it refers to the first teachers who introduced European education here, but it is not true if it refers to teachers in general because we have had teachers in this area for many centuries. We had our own education long before the Europeans came here, and we had teachers who used to conduct traditional education wherever man lived. Even animals, both domestic and wild, have education and have teachers among themselves (Toberondwa 1978:1)]

The wanyasi=s response is reminiscent of views on traditional education throughout Africa. Education was not introduced in Africa by Europeans. What they introduced was European or Western education. This is not the same as introducing education, since not all education is European.
Indigenous African education was never a process of unconscious imitation. It was deliberate, in many cases conducted by teachers in a particular manner aimed at achieving definite goals. Children were taught different things at different ages. The teachers included parents, brothers, sisters, relatives, neighbors, and members of the age group. The period of active participation can begin at the age of eight and continued throughout life. Quite a lot was learned through clan traditions and through contact between young boys and young girls of the same age groups. However, parents, especially mothers, were the most important teachers. For example, the Karamojong, a semi nomadic people of Northern Uganda, have a well known walk song recited by mothers to encourage crawling babies to walk. The literal translation of the song reads as follows:

If the chickens can teach
Their children to peck,
And the birds can teach
Their children to fly
Then why can't you
My lovely baby walk.

If the dog can teach
Its children to bark
And the lion can teach
Its children to kill,
Then why can't you
My lovely baby walk.

If the winds can teach (force)
The trees to move (swing)
And the mountains
Can answer (echo) back
Then why can't you
My lovely baby walk, walk, walk (Tiberondwa 1978:3).

Each ethnic group had its own customs and traditions and, depending on the environment of the group, young boys and girls were expected to have sound knowledge of the essential skills. Good manners were emphasized. Members of each ethnic group or society had some accepted core values, and the elders would condemn strongly any action or behavior that tended to undermine the promotion of the accepted values. It was not uncommon for any elder in the community to discipline any child s/he found doing anything that was regarded as wrong. It mattered not whether the child was his/her own, a neighbor=s or just any child.
Respect for elders, good eating manners, virginity before marriage, courage among boys and girls are some of the examples of what clans or ethnic groups tended to protect as accepted values. Parents were usually held accountable if their children were found lacking in good manners. Consequently, parents as well as the community at large formed a group of traditional teachers whose duty was to guide the children so that they could develop the values, beliefs and manners accepted in their society. As such, every member of the community was expected to play a role in promoting the values of his/her society.
There were some people who had acquired certain professional skills and who acted as professional teachers. There were some herbalists and medicine men and women who knew a lot about local medicine. Some of them were believed to have powers to cure the sick without using any medicine. These specialists used to train young people who were sent to them to learn these skills.
Other specialist teachers included bark-cloth makers, blacksmiths, carpenters, military instructors, makers of canoes and boats, potters, tobacco pipe makers, specialists in making bows and arrows, basket weavers, mat weavers, makers of fishing hooks, makers of fishing baskets, etc. There also were people who specialized in administration, diplomacy and public relations. To some of these and to many other professional teachers, children were sent to learn various specialized skills. This was a form of apprenticeship and was a formalized type of teaching that followed a definite pattern, beginning with simple skills and progressing steadily to complex ones. It was conducted by specialists in specially prepared places or workshops. For example, herbalists taught their students the names and characteristics of important herbs and how to use them to cure diseases. Upon completion of their courses, the graduates went through certain graduation ceremonies before they were passed out and allowed to practice their medicine.
Whether formally or informally, traditional education prepared the youths of a community for specific responsibilities they were going to shoulder as adults. It was education for life with all its complexities, aimed at satisfying personal needs, promoting the growth of personal talents and serving the community in which the students lived. This facilitated the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next.
Traditional education resulted in changes in attitudes and values. Such changes were the result of learning processes and not merely from mere imitation and conformity. The traditional teacher was not simply teaching his students to imitate what their forefathers did. Rather, s/he was engaged in a more complex task which involved imparting to his/her students such ideas as would lead to intellectual growth, constructive thinking, conceptualization and creativity. Graduates from traditional institutions of learning were capable of composing new songs, riddles and proverbs, etc. They could make new models of tools and military weapons. They could treat new diseases and handle effectively calamities such as earthquakes, famine, floods and other unexpected developments. Conformist education could not have trained the traditional scholars to deal effectively with new and sometimes very challenging situations.
Although the form of education varied from one ethnic group or society to the next, depending on the environment and customs, many of its aspects were common to all ethnic groups or societies. The curricula interwove religion, politics, economics, and social relations. History, Geography and Nature Study or Biology were invariably interwoven. Religion, dancing, warfare and marriages were interlinked in such a way that a child could gain knowledge in all these fields in a single activity or ceremony.
The dead were regarded as full members of the family, and their spirits were given food at harvest time and meat each time an animal was slaughtered, so that they would not feel left out. The spirits were believed to have the ability to communicate with the living, and this belief still persists even among some Christians and Muslims. The art of communicating with the dead was taught to the young especially after their initiation ceremonies which used to take place after they had reached puberty.
Students learnt about their own rulers and those of the neighboring ethnic groups. This allowed them to know their history, so that they can protect it. Knowledge of their ethnic groups= social, political and economic relationships with others was essential for peaceful co existence. They learnt the traditional laws of the land as well as the range of punishments administered on those who broke them.
Students were taught the names of plants and animals, about births, deaths, diseases and how to cure or prevent them. They had Religious Education—i.e. they learnt about different gods, about good and bad spirits, life after death and the methods of worshiping their gods individually and collectively. They also had Physical Education—i.e. they were taught wrestling, running, aiming at rings, singing and dancing, and engaging in many other extra curricular activities.
There was some form of testing or examination in traditional education. A mother would pretend to be sick and leave the responsibility of managing the home, cooking, cleaning and looking after the visitors to her young daughter to see how she performed these duties without assistance. In most cases, testing was done through the actual performance of a required task such as building a hut or fighting an animal that had attacked a cattle. Riddles and proverbs constituted an informal method of testing memory and intelligence.
In sum, traditional African education through its examinations emphasized that students should be able to learn skills and responsibilities, and to use common sense, initiative and new concepts in dealing with new situations. Indeed, for the African, education was a process of human survival.


The Debilitating Effects of Western Education and African Cultural Resilience

Western education has made many Africans selfish. It has transformed their families from extended ones to nuclear ones—i.e. husband, wife and their own children only. Children born out of the nuclear families and members of the extended family are all regarded as outsiders. In pre colonial Africa, divisions into cousins, nephews, nieces, half brothers, half sisters, uncles and aunts were absent. Uncles and aunts were called fathers and mothers, respectively; cousins were simply called brothers or sisters, as they were all members of one family. In some areas, families went beyond biological relationships. There were relationships known as blood brothers or blood sisters acquired through special traditional ceremonies. These and their own relatives also became members of the extended families. All these and any other beliefs connected with kindness, reliability and respectability were meant to promote goodness and good manners among the people, especially members of the extended family or close family friends.
Western education tended to be discriminatory. Particular attention was given to the education of the children of people of influence. Promising youths were prepared for responsible positions.
When European missionaries arrived in Africa, they converted some Africans, particularly the rulers and other influential people, to their new religion, condemned the medicine men and the herbalists who they often oxymoronically referred to as Awitch doctors,” and sometimes imprisoned them. They regarded the worshiping of traditional gods as primitive and superstitious, and discouraged the wearing of certain ornaments which were believed to be curative. Dancing at wedding ceremonies was regarded as sinful. Local drinks were replaced with imported ones, and the Africans who continued to drink the local brew were labeled drunkards. On the whole, African culture was regarded as having little value. The traditional teacher was replaced by the new teacher who was either a European missionary himself or an African convert, indoctrinated in the church and made to believe that the indigenous people had to change their ways of life if they were to get to heaven.
However, many traditional customs and beliefs proved resilient. The traditional teacher, the traditional medicine man and the traditional prophet continued to be very active in many parts of Africa. When society became hostile to them upon the advent of Christianity and colonialism, many of them went underground. They practiced their professions at night or in locked rooms because the governments, the Christian church and society were all against them.
To this day, there are still many people who call themselves Christians that continue to believe in magic, the supernatural and the spirits. The belief that certain diseases cannot be cured by European medicine is commonly held in many parts of Africa and the Diaspora. Many people (including Christian priests, teachers, medical doctors, hospital nurses, students, lawyers, government officials, etc.) who condemn magic and traditional medicine publicly in fact practice it privately.
In many communities, some unmarried girls still consult magic doctors for charms to consolidate their arrangements, housewives to strengthen their marriages, workers to seek promotion or favors from their bosses, students to pass examinations, footballers/soccer players to confuse their opponents with juju, businessmen and businesswomen to expand their businesses, fighters to conquer their enemies, unblessed wives to ask for children, etc. Rain makers are still very powerful people in some African communities. And there are people who live in great fear of the spirits, witchcraft and the unknown.
Many Africans, including the educated ones, continue to live in two worlds: the traditional and the modern scientific. When modern hospitals fail to cure a disease, the patient goes to the traditional doctor. In fact, some people know which disease to refer to which doctor.
In sum, Christianity, colonialism and Western education have failed to completely uproot the African from his/her cultural world. The people who live in these two worlds are often confused, because both worlds seem to yield appropriate fruits. Consequently, a new culture has emerged; it is a mixture of the African culture and the European culture. It is to this new culture that an African-centered paradigm can respond to positively.


Presuppositions and Requirements for Authentic African-centered Research
Methodologies

We can begin by acknowledging that a True Afrikan-centered paradigm must first and foremost be built on a sound spiritual basis that highlights those aspects of African spiritual life that have enabled African people all over the world to survive as a human community throughout the centuries. It should go beyond European classical humanism with its class, socio economic and geographical limitations based on Greece and the Athenian City State, which was based on a system of slavery. Afrikan-centered methodologies must lead to “enlarged humanities” and recapture that original meaning of humanity which Western scholars, beginning with Plato, in their hollow and lopsided search for material progress, abandoned. By privileging “reason” above everything else and abandoning the spiritual aspects of life, including the idea of the immortal soul, Western scholarship embarked on a path that is increasingly bringing humanity to the brink of destruction through violence and ecological destruction.
The task of Afrikan-centered methodologies is to critique the Eurocentric “idea” and “general philosophy” in their metaphysical belief that European humanism is superior to that of the African people. This falsehood, which Europe and America perpetuated and still do, in so many ways, is based on the idea that the rest of humanity has to be forced to believe like Europe and America in order to be “humanized” into a singular humanity. This, in the words of Tsenay Serequeberhan, implies the Asingularisation of human diversity by being forced onto a singular track of historical ‘progress’ grounded on an emulation and/or mimicry of European historicity” (Serequeberhan 2002:67). According to Serequeberhan, this “pretext” that flattens all difference has to be critically Ade structured@ by contemporary African philosophy if “our shared humanity” is to be realized and critically appropriated. Indeed, for him, “the task of contemporary African philosophy—its critical negative project—is the critique of Eurocentrism and recognition and de structuring of its speculative metaphysical underpinnings, which still holds us in bondage” (Serequeberhan 2002: 75).
The African Renaissance, which should inform our thought process must, therefore, recapture those basic elements of African humanism (ubuntu, eternal life, and immanent moral justice) as the opening of the way to a new humanistic universalism. This, according to Chancellor Williams, Ais the spiritual and moral element, actualized in good will among men (and women), which Africa itself has preserved and can give to the world” (Serequeberhan 2002:208, 213).
As stated earlier, the University as an institution of learning and knowledge reproduction has its origin in Africa. The Sankore University founded in the City of Timbuktu in the Songhay Empire was the latest and best of its kind anywhere in the world. The University was the intellectual capital of the Western Sudan and provided a vibrant learning environment for the learners and the teachers. Felix DuBois, in his book, Timbuctoo the Mysterious, described the scholars at this University in the following words:

They astounded the most learned men of Islam by their erudition. That these Negroes were at a level with the Arab savants (men of exceptional learning) is proved by the fact that they were installed as professors in Morocco and Egypt. In contrast to this, we find that the Arabs were not always equal to the requirements of Sankore (quoted by Mzamane 1999:179).

Thus, before colonization and the Arab and European enslavement of Africans, Africa provided the best institutions of learning that existed at the time. It is recorded that when the Moroccans invaded Timbuktu in 1552, Professor Ahmad Baba, the last Chancellor of the University, was the author of some 40 books on different subjects. He had a collection of some 1,600 books in his library. He was exiled, and this treasure was destroyed in the hands of the Arab invaders (Mzamane 1999:180). The basis of African civilization was weakened and efforts were made to destroy it. But although weakened, it neither died nor was it destroyed.
The physical structures were destroyed but not the soul of the Africans who believed in eternal life and immanent moral justice of humanity. It is this soul of humanity that survived and that seeks to rebuild what was lost of the institutions Africans created in the past, but which have relevance in their lives of today’s world.
Indeed, as George James pointed out in his Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy, much of the 1,000 books credited to Aristotle were not his products. Most of them were copied from Egyptian texts, which Alexander The Great had looted from the libraries of Egypt during Greek conquest and occupation of that African civilization. From his research, James was able to observe that Certainly he could not have obtained them from the Greeks, for that vast body of knowledge, which bears his name and which was presented as new, would really have been the traditional common possession of all who were members of the Greek Schools of philosophy for they would have been the only persons inside Greece permitted to own such books; for knowledge was protected as secret. Under these circumstances it is evident that the vast body of scientific knowledge ascribed to Aristotle was neither in possession of the Greeks of his time, nor was there any one in Greece competent to teach him Science and, least of all, on so vast a scale (James 1992:129).
James concluded that the Greeks, among the surrounding nations, were the most anxious to obtain the valuable secrets of the Egyptians, in the Ancient Sciences, and this opportunity came when Alexander The Great invaded Egypt. According to Strabo and Plutarch, who James quoted, Alexander entrusted these books in the hands of Aristotle; and upon Aristotle=s death, the looted books fell in the hands of Theophrastus who succeeded him as head of his School. Later, the Roman Army looted these books in style when Greece fell to Rome in 84 BC. They were carried by Sulla to Rome, where Tyrannio, a grammarian, secured copies and enabled Andronicus of Rhodes to publish them.
Cheikh Anta Diop had pointed out that until Africa is able to reclaim this historical and Promethean consciousness that is embodied in the achievements of ancient Egypt, the history of Black Afrikans and that of humanity in general will Aremain suspended in air.” According to him, such a history can never be written correctly Auntil African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt” (Diop 1974:xiv vi). In his view, even the study of languages, institutions, etc. cannot be treated properly until this is done: Ain a word, it will be impossible to build an African humanities, a body of African human sciences, so long as the relationship does not appear legitimate” (1974:xiv).
For us to respond to this historic challenge and be part of the correction of the historical distortion and theft of our African heritages, we must provide deeply thought out and well conceived vision and mission, with a well articulated strategy to achieve our objectives. To succeed, our effort must be part of the creation of a counter hegemonic discourse which can enable, as Odora Hoppers and colleagues characterized it, the “triple agenda of deconstruction, reconstruction and regeneration” to be undertaken at the same time (2002:236). To achieve this counter discourse, we must engage in work that can help and contribute to reshaping the direction of education on the continent and in the Diaspora towards a more culture specific and culturally relevant curriculum of liberation.
We must carry out theoretical formulations and reflections in an interdisciplinary, pluridisciplinary and comparative manner. We must provide conditions for the acquisition of knowledge not only for “its own sake” but for the sake of humanity and African recovery and rebirth. We must develop new methodologies and techniques for accessing, utilizing, and storing all knowledge based on an African epistemology and cosmology. This would imply, according to Dani Nabudere (2002), the development of an all inclusive approach, which recognizes all sources of human knowledge as valid within their own contexts. This requires the adoption of hermeneutic philosophy in its African essence.
Our methodological approaches should be hermeneutical. They should be open ended to permit cross cultural communication and exchange of ideas and opinions to promote understanding between all knowledge systems in their diversities (Habermas 1984). This is an African philosophical approach based on acceptance of pluralism and cultural diversity. The name of Hans Georg Gadamer is associated with this line of argument in hermeneutics, in which he stressed the need for the “fusion of historical horizons” as the best way of transmitting understanding between the different lived histories or experiences of different communities as the basis of their existence. Hermeneutics insists on both the cultural context as well as the historical contingencies of events as necessary in bringing about a true understanding of the different lived experiences. Furthermore, hermeneutics has its roots in the African/Egyptian mythical figure of Herms, the messenger of knowledge from the gods to mortals, and that is why “hermeneutics is without reason, named after Herms, the interpreter of the divine message to mankind” (Gadamer 1975:98 100).
This philosophic approach should be based on premises that encourage learning and teaching, which encompasses knowledge, interests, and real life situations that the learners and teachers can bring to learning situations. This notion of site specific knowledge tries to correct the Eurocentric tendency to universalize knowledge around Occidental centers and sites of knowledge which are privileged to the disadvantage of others, claiming to be the only sites of “rationality” and “scientific knowledge.” The recognition of these other sites and centers creates a truly multipolar world of global knowledge drawn from all sources of human endeavor.
As Professor Hubert Vilakazi has argued,

The peculiar situation here is that knowledge of the principles and patterns of African civilisation remained with ordinary, uncertificated men and women, especially of those in rural areas. The tragedy of African civilisation is that Western educated Africans became lost and irrelevant as intellectuals who could develop African civilisation further. Historically, intellectuals of any civilisation are the voices of that civilisation to the rest of the world; they are the instruments of the development of the higher culture of that civilisation. The tragedy of Africa, after conquest by the West, is that her intellectuals, by and large, absconded and abdicated their role as developers, minstrels and trumpeters of African civilisation. African civilisation then stagnated; what remained alive in the minds and languages of the overwhelming majority of Africans remained undeveloped. Uncertificated Africans are denied respect and opportunities for development; they could not sing out, articulate and develop the unique patterns of African civilisation (Vilakazi 2002:203).

Professor Vilakazi added that Africa, therefore, finds itself in an awkward situation. Africans need to develop educational systems founded upon and building on the civilization of the overwhelming majority, yet their intellectuals are strangers to that civilization. They have no spiritual or intellectual sympathetic relationship with the culture and civilization embracing the masses of African people: AThe biggest spiritual and mental challenge to African intellectuals is that in this massive re education process (which is necessary), the only teachers they have are ordinary African men and women who are uncertificated, and who live largely in rural areas. He concluded by stating that

We are talking here about a massive cultural revolution consisting, first, of our intellectuals going back to ordinary African men and women to receive education of African culture and civilisation. Second, it shall break new ground in that un certificated men and women shall be incorporated as full participants in the construction of the high culture of Africa. This shall be the first instance in history where certificated intellectuals alone shall not be the sole builders and determinants of high culture, but shall be working side by side with ordinary men and women in rural and urban life. Intellectuals must become anthropologists doing fieldwork, like Frobenius. But unlike academic Western anthropologists, African intellectuals shall be doing field work among their own people as part of a truly great effort aimed at reconstructing Africa and preparing all of humanity for conquering the world for humanism (2002:204).

Professor Vilakazi challenged all of us to wake up to this clarion call and create a new University that will resurrect the deep values of African humanism (ubuntu) that is so badly needed in today's gadgetized and digitized world without the human touch and spirit. Indeed, we must work diligently to bridge that gap.
This approach would be one which departs from the one sided Western “Africanist” who, in his/her search for the “authentic” African and the depository of genuine African discourse, seeks to locate the Areal” African and to establish an iron wall between “the man in the bush” vis à vis the Westernized educated African. Y. V. Mudimbe, too, would like to see the emergence of a “wider authority” of a “critical library” of the Westernised African intellectual’s discourses developed together with “the experience of rejected forms of wisdom, which are not part of the structures of political power and scientific knowledge” (1988:x xi). This is a useful reminder, despite the fact that Mudimbe himself, as Masolo correctly pointed out, Alamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance” of how this “usable past” should be used by African “experts” to construct an “authentic” African episteme (Masolo 1994:179).
African languages shall, therefore, be at the center of developing our knowledge sites. Language, as Amilcar Cabral rightly pointed out, is at the center of articulating a people=s culture. He also noted that the Afrikan Revolution would have been impossible without African people resorting to their cultures to resist domination. Culture is, therefore, a revolutionary force in society. It is because language has remained an Aunresolved issue@ in Africa=s development that present day education has remained an alien system. Mucere Mugo quoted Franz Fanon who wrote: Ato speak a language is to assume its world and carry the weight of its civilisation@ (Mugo 2002:218). We must, therefore, be diligent in making sure that, as Mualimu Carter G. Woodson once urged us in The Mis-education of the Negro, our students are no longer made to scoff at our African languages. Indeed, Professor Kwesi K. Prah has argued consistently over many years that the absence of African languages has been the Akey missing link@ in African development (see, for example, Prah 1998).
The Afrikan-centered methodological approaches should also be ones that use open and resource based learning techniques available in the actual learning situations. They have, therefore, to draw on the indigenous knowledge materials available in the localities and make the maximum use of them.
One of the fundamental problems facing African economies and African scholarship is the dependency syndrome. This condition has replaced colonialism in the form of neo colonialism. According to eminent philosopher Paulin Hountondji, research in Africa has been extroverted (externally oriented) just like African economies because knowledge production is a specific form of production “akin to the production of goods” (2002:26, 28).
What all this suggests is that we must revisit African thought processes that take these epistemological, cosmological and methodological challenges into account. Hence, we should be culture specific and knowledge source specific in our orientation. As such, we must work very hard

(1) to increase African knowledge in the general body of global human knowledge;

(2) to create linkages between the sources of African knowledge and the centers of learning on the continent and in the Diaspora;

(3) to establish centers of learning in the communities and ensure that these communities become “learning societies;”

(4) to link knowledge to the production needs of African communities;

(5) to ensure that science and technology are generated in relevant ways to address problems of the rural communities where the majority of African people live and that this is done in African languages; and

(6) to reduce the gap between the African elites and the communities from which they come by ensuring that education is available to all Africans and that such knowledge is drawn from the communities.

Free exploration and discourse that give every human being a right to an education is the very expression of human freedom and will help to debunk one sided theories such as those advanced by Darwin’s Origin of the Species and their advocacy of “survival of the fittest”—theories that have given license to particular power groups to exterminate the weak ones. Instead, the enlarged humanities and the science of humanity should explore cooperative ways of survival of the entire humanity in the spirit of ubuntu or humanness, which holds: I am because We Are.
Thus, a process of redefining the boundaries between the different disciplines in our thought process is the same as that of reclaiming, reordering and, in some cases, reconnecting “those ways of knowing,” which were submerged, subverted, hidden or driven underground by colonialism and slavery. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith has correctly noted of native Australian knowledge systems, which were colonized,

In terms of the way knowledge was used to discipline the colonised, it worked in a variety of ways. The most obvious forms of discipline were through exclusion, marginalisation and denial. Indigenous ways of knowing were excluded and marginalised....Discipline is also partitioned (like land DWN), (where) individuals (were) separated and space compartmentalised....This form of discipline worked at the curriculum level, for example, as a mechanism for selecting our >native= children and girls for domestic and manual work. It worked also at the assessment level, with normative tests designed around the language and cultural capital of white middle classes (Smith1999:68).

Creating holistically defined Afrikan-centered research methodologies will, therefore, of necessity, mean reasserting African ways of knowing and ordering of knowledge. Such a process of reclaiming our own ways of knowing is in fact a liberation process, which must be reflected in our academic curricula by participatory research in which the masses of the African people must participate.
The study and research will reflect the daily dealings of society and the challenges of daily life of the people. Therefore, as Sémon Pathé Guéye pointed out, the problematic of the African Renaissance must be tackled through a fruitful dialectic between theory and practice, intellectual elaboration and practical experience. He added:

This dialectic will be based on, and underlined by, a permanent and constructive dialogue between the scientists and politicians who are committed to the same objective of renewing our continent, but also between the masses and the elite, who pretend to think and act in their name but sometimes confine themselves to intellectual speculation that has nothing to do with the daily life of the common people. The concept which will result from our discussions would be able to meet the needs and demands of the masses and to become, in their hands, a powerful instrument for positively transforming their current situation and opening the prospect of a better future (Guéye 1999:244).

Professor Taban lo Liyong, Head of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Venda, South Africa, who has been involved in elaborating an Afrikan centered curriculum for teaching at the Centre, has argued that each discipline must elaborate and extend its curriculum to embrace the African indigenous world view, or social practices, or scientific and technological usages and developments. According to Professor Liyong, past technological developments and achievements of Africans, their techniques, arts and artistry, the products and processes of production must be studied with a view to Amodernizing them.@ At the same time, he argued that technological innovations from Europe and Asia Ashould be married to the native ones to produce a third new and appropriate technology.@ In whatever event, he advocated that the AAfrican rhythm should control the speed of adoption or adaptation; African ethos of communal care and spiritual life should determine what we get from outside or keep from our past@ (Liyong 1999). This is the correct approach because besides recognizing other systems of knowledge, it leaves open the need for African systems of knowledge to acknowledge and learn from others in a discourse of cross cultural understanding.
Fatnowna and Pickett are also correct when they said that to achieve such a synthesis would, in one sense, be a Areturn@ but also a Aa re integrative process of recovering wholeness.@ In this sense, according to them, such integration Agoes beyond itself because the same process engages us in transformation.@ It is a dialectical transformation of the different parts that existed before, but which now exist in new form and with a new content. It is a transformation that involves the liberating of knowledge at both ends of the sites of knowledge as well as Abeing intimately bound up with the transformation of values and a sense of belonging to a whole earth, a perspective that privileges the local within commitment to the global.@ This, essentially, is a transformation of human consciousness “both driven by and necessary for those changes in knowledge systems” creating a “relational nature of things” (Fatnowna and Pickett 1999:222 3).
As we recall, during the establishment of the Medieval University in Europe, the first University in Southern Italy utilized the African practice of palaver and to teach law students rhetoric, speechifying and oratory. This is today=s legal art called advocacy, which has encompassed other areas of human communication.
Professor Mucere Mugo of Kenya has perfected the combination of literal and oral techniques of learning and transmitting knowledge and messages in her acidic work. She has used oratory interludes as a methodological approach in critical analysis as a way of developing an emancipation and liberation education and culture. The interludes Apunctuate@ the literal discourse and the discussion. She continues to do this because she has argued that literacy should not be privileged over orate traditions, consumed by the majority of African people (Mugo 1999: 211, 225). The approach is tenable.
Life Long Learning (L-3) has recently become a vogue in many countries of the developed world as well as international organizations as a new approach to learning in the 21st Century. Yet this educational approach is deeply embedded within African cultures and epistemology. According to Professor Mucere Mugo, learning and culturalization in African societies were considered continuing processes Athat took place from birth until death with the family unit, extended family, the village and the entire community participating. She added that

This extended, collective participation in educating children and inculcating cultural ethos, however, did not replace the efforts of the professionals who taught very specialised knowledge and skills, especially at given milestones of the journey of life. The education was also very practical in conception and methodology. It was oriented towards problem posing and problem solving at individual and communal levels (Mugo 1999:213).

Professor Mugo referred to Mualimu Jomo Kenyatta=s anthropological work about the Gikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya, and Julius Mualimu Nyerere=s Arusha Declaration and Tanzania Ten Years After Independence as approving this method of learning and as justifying them on the basis of the long African cultural experience.


Conclusion

The preceding discourse has been edging towards the proposition that in order for Africans in the continent and the Diaspora to combat their marginalization, Afrikan-centered public policy analysis would add a distinctly African flavor and momentum to the endeavor. Such an approach is both a given and a task or desideratum for solving our problems. It is undoubtedly part and parcel of the cultural heritage of Africans. However, it clearly needs to be revitalized in the hearts and minds of some Africans in the continent and the Diaspora.
Although compassion, warmth, understanding, caring, sharing, humanness, etc. are underscored by all the major world orientations, ubuntu (i.e. communalism) serves as a distinctly African rationale for these ways of relating to others. The concept of ubuntu gives a distinctly African meaning to, and a reason or motivation for, a positive attitude towards the other. In light of the calls for an African Renaissance, Afrikan-centered research methodologies urge Africans to be true to their promotion of peaceful relations and conflict resolution, educational and other developmental aspirations.
We ought never to falsify the cultural reality (life, art, literature) which is the goal of the student=s study. Thus, we would have to oppose all sorts of simplified, or supposedly simplified, approaches and stress instead the methods which will achieve the best possible access to real life, language and philosophy.


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Web Sites
http://www.wordreference.com/english/definition.asp?en=ubuntu
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http://www.worldsummit2002.org/summit/ubuntu.htm
http://www.vukani.co.za/
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