African Psychology or Psychology in Africa: Conceptualising Education and African Cultural Imperialism, Implications for Emerging African Psychologists

Abstract

The debates and anguish expressed by emerging Africentric thoughts such as (Tani, 2015), indicates the continuous negligence of culturally relevant curriculum which meets and fits the contextual needs of Africans. The spat in this conceptual yet analytical paper is that the advent of modern type western education has resulted in the drought of the importance of indigenous forms of knowledge in Cameroon in particular and Africa in general. The paper unfolds by highlighting some of the areas in which the modern Eurocentric philosophy of education has alienated and affected some of Africa’s indigenous education systems. Using the modernization paradigm as the framework, the paper’s contention is that following missionary excursions in Africa and the subsequent colonisation, modern forms of schooling were introduced and expanded phenomenally and with it came notions of cultural imperialism, which tended to denigrate many if not all forms of indigenous knowledge education systems. Some indigenous knowledge systems were regarded as primitive, pagan and heathenish. Some forms of such indigenous knowledge were even de-campaigned as non-knowledge. The research question the paper seeks to address is how can indigenous knowledge education systems be used to foster an Afro centric philosophy of Education? Pursuant to this question, the modernization theory is examined, unpacked and critiqued for equating modernisation with Westernization culminating in the promotion of cultural imperialist sentiments that had an alienating effect on some African institutions and practices. This article Situates views of European enlightenment and epistemic solipsism, ignite and sustained debates of globalizing African thoughts into mainstream psychological inquiry, negotiate the incompatible murky particularism of some African psychologists, and also disabuse modernist psychology of its false spectra.