Feature Article of Saturday, 11 January 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

To a certain extent, in the first installment of this series, we touched on various subjects, including such sensitive ideas as skin bleaching, cultural amnesia, politics of language in preserving cultural memory, internalization of inferiority complex, cultural appropriation, and, more generally, sociology of knowledge. Principally, though, we broached some of these topics in the generalized context of white standards of beauty, in other words, as part of the social framework of cultural critique that has become normative aesthetics in the African world. What is more, anorexia and bulimia are two other key Western cultural imports, invisible and invisible, which are greatly impacting, if negatively, the architectonics of female anatomy. We do also know how modernized diet narrows the hips of growing females and makes childbirth an obstetric nightmare.

Why should a public figure, Apostle Kojo Safo, founding evangelist-entrepreneur of Kristo Asafo (Christ Reformed Church), come across as Michael Jackson, 50 Cents, and Rev. Al Sharpton, in one complete package, bearing the conked hair of Al Sharpton, the blanched skin of Michael Jackson, and the chains of 50 Cents? What are our music and movie industries doing to reverse these stiflingly negative trends? What has become of the directorial and production adroitness of Spike Lee, Kwaw Ansah, Ousmane Sembene, Manthia Diawara, Haile Gerima, Molefi Kete Asante, Jr., and Safi Faye in the global African community? Anyway, lets briefly shift the focus of our discourse to another equally important matter: Mr. Barack Obamas epochal election to the executive office may not have signaled the advent of post-racial America yet, as Tim Wise forcefully argues in Colorblind and Between Barack and a Hard Place, nevertheless, the knowledge of Mr. Barack Obamas as part African, specifically, a Luo, alone, may eliminate, by all odds, his being considered a hopeful presidential material in Kenya.

Thats how far America has come after the emotionally-long journey of slavery and of the Doll Experiments, the latter to which we devoted some considerable analytic and explanatory space in the prequel. Therefore, in general, Kenya and Africa should learn from the American precedent, because our invoked exemplars on political equalitarianism and social justice, both of which we have explored elsewhere, directly work into the political economy of national development. That said, lets set our digression aside and quickly proceed to matters of topical relevancy as well as of contextual immediacy: What makes it so easy for the African-born child in America to reject his culture timorously while the American child accepts his or hers courageously? For instance, why does Michael Kofi Tenkorang refuse to answer to Kofi in the presence of his American friends, preferring to be called Michael instead? Otherwise, why does he dutifully answer to Kofi in his friends absence? Could cultural disorientation or shock be the explanation?

Barring any comprehensive response of a satisfactory nature, lets proceed to look at the questions another way: What has the biracial presidency of Mr. Obama, for instance, got to do with Afrocentric psychosocialization, health of African psychology, reinforcement or elevation of confidence in the African soul, or cultural conscientization of the youth? Actually, we invoke these examples to illustrate how a triangle of relationship, defined by three apical variables, the impressionable minds of children, of culture, and of ethnicity/race, thats, multiculturalism, should function within the analytic locale of theoretical constraints. This is not only a pragmatic recourse, but a developmentally-appropriate query, an essential fact, as well. So, now, failing inclusion of additional sociocultural variables, for reasons of analytic simplicity, we may necessarily have to agree, going by the standards of our earlier arguments, that unfamiliar cultural and linguistic conventions may induce a potentialization of investigational disinterest as far as a Childs growing curiosity of a certain subject, mathematics or science, say, is concerned.

Consequently, in the best interest of national and personal development, what do we do, as a nation, in terms of bettering the mind of the African child through Afrocentric pedagogization? Elsewhere, we have alluded to some social variables, namely political elitism, leadership crisis, intellectual inertia, and political incompetence (corruption), as four notable retrogressive spokes embedded in the wheel of national development. Again, in a way, we believe, as elsewhere, that these four constitutive parameters sever the umbilical fluidity shared between the head of society, leadership, and the moral conscience of society, the people. In other words, we are quick to dismiss the political economy of grassroots participation in the social equation of national development. It is no news that this kind of arrogance and of elitist intellectualism is typical of a segment of our intelligentsia. In fact, no nation has had lasting success with development without populist, if active, involution of its citizens.

Structural functionalism holds that every human being is important in the social matrix of national development. A criminal, for instance, has a positive role, direct or indirect, to play in society. That is to say, debriefing a criminal, say, may yield useful information for combating crime in society. Alternatively, a law-abiding citizen may serve as a positive model for the criminal in society. In fact, the theorizing of Ama Mazama, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Maulana Karenga, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and Molefi Kete Asante, to name but seven, on the affirmative allocation of grassroots conscientization in a labyrinth of national forwardism cannot replace political convenience and ethnic trivialities, granted that grassroots conscientization, a political exchange rate, is itself manifestly powereconomic, political, and socialand respect.

The activist politics of the Dalai Lama, Gabriel Prosser, Gustavo Gutierrez, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, Paul Bogle, Javier Sicilia, Harriet Tubman, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jeremiah Wright, Camilo Torres Restrepo, Dedan Kimathi, Toussaint LOuverture, Denmark Vessey, Walter Sisulu, Malcolm X, Nat Turner, and Julius Malema underscores our point. Obviously, these analytic trajectories should naturally lead us to the social relevance of Afrocentric theory in pedagogy. Lest we be misunderstood, Afrocentricity does not necessarily connote a rejection of the non-African world, as its ill-informed detractors are wont to imply. Fundamentally, it means centering or rooting African Personality in the fertile soil of African historical, spiritual, material, and cultural consciousness. This is not Senghorian Negritude, however. Afrocentricity is a theory firmly grounded in scientific objectivity. Among other useful observations, cultural critics note that contradictions in African societies are typical of non-African societies, too. Dambisa Moyos How the West Lost, Amartye Sens Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, and Yasheng Huangs The China Growth Fantasy instantiates this view.

Moreover, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have demonstrated how poverty constitutes a major problem for the American republic (See The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto). That aside, superstitious systems like witchcraft are not exclusively African, either. One of the most serious problems in the late-sixthteen-century country-side was the increase in witch-hunting, which was l
argely a phenomenon of the villages and small towns, not the citiesand most of the victims were from the lower classes, but most lower-class people were quick to cooperate with the judges and denounce others as witches, Prof. Frederic J. Baumgartner writes in France in the Sixteenth Century, p.269, adding: The extensive use of torture in witch trials intensified the witch craze by producing long lists of alleged accomplices, but there were other powerful elements as well. One was the bitter religious strife, in which each side denounced the other as doing the work of the devil.

The rest is here:
The Best Educational Formula(ll)