Possibly, we can all agree on one thing, that science, mathematics, and engineering, to mention just three disciplines, are universal in their theoretical formulations. Gravity, atomic theory, Boolean algebra, homoeostasis, electromagnetism, control and kinetic theories, hydrolysis, spectroscopy, etc., are good examples. Yet, how they are delivered, taught, and applied may require culture-specific situational inputs. For instance, the average six-year-old American child is likelier to appreciate a mathematics or science concept, where slices of pizza and cups of Coca Cola, rather than morsels of kokonte and ladles of ground-nut soup, are used.
That’s to say, processing foreign linguistic and cultural symbols may constitute a formidable task for the unassimilated mind of a child, any child, in any culture, for that matter. What are the bases for our contention? First, since “kokonte” may come across as a new concept to the six-year-old American child, the average American teacher, consistently or sporadically, may have to keep reminding or explaining to the child what the new concept means. This, granted that the American teacher, in question, is, visually, conceptually, and vocally familiar with the word. Technically, this is what Universal Design for Learning (UDL) hopes to achieve. Reading comprehension and language skills are important to the personality formation of a school child.
What precisely do we mean? We are saying that teaching the child about the alphabet; phonetic, phonological, and print awareness; phonics; vocabulary; fluency; oral language; text comprehension; and work-recognition is very important (See Brand $ Dalton, “Universal Design for Learning: Cognitive Theory into Practice for Facilitating Comprehension in Early Literacy,” Forum on Public Policy, 2012). Yet this makes practical sense if such concepts are implemented within their proper cultural contexts. Alternatively, what if the American teacher is visually, vocally, and conceptually unfamiliar with a word and suddenly comes upon it in a typical Ghanaian classroom context? What are the teacher and the Ghanaian school child to do?
We may have to remember that articulation is as much cultural as visual interpretation of experience is. We are not talking about extra-sensory perception, however. A good example of what we are saying, perhaps, may be lallation, which East Asians are quite noted for. Another good example may be malapropism. Let’s consider the enunciative possibilities of “kokonte.” The vowel “o” sounds much like the vowel “a” in certain regional dialects of American English. Therefore, how the word “kokonte” is vocalized by the American teacher can extinguish, depress, or pique the six-year-old Ghanaian child’s interest in mathematics, for instance. The relativistic nature of culture should thus be of paramount concern to educators and training colleges.
Second, simply telling the Ghanaian school child that “kokonte” is merely a kind of food, when, in actuality, the only food he/she is most familiar with is “tuo zafi” may not just be enough for the child who loves “tuo zafi” to appreciate the particular mathematics concept being studied. A simpler and more familiar substitute may have to be found. Could spelling out the word on a blackboard make aural compatibility and assimilation any less of a problem for the six-year-old Ghanaian child where an American is his/her teacher? Such questions are useful to pedagogical success. Multiculturalism in the Ghanaian classroom should critically absorb these theoretical questions.
Thus, associating basic numeration concepts with unfamiliar cultural and linguistic symbols may appear hugely problematic for the child in any context, be it African, Asian, or Western. Already, mathematics, at any level, is a complicated subject, and, for that reason, alone, teachers must always ensure that diversionary symbols of a complicated cultural and linguistic nature, should, if possible, be avoided at all costs. However, we are not implying it’s impossible to get around the problem or that our views, thus far, are set in theoretical concrete. We are only saying that the problematic of culture and linguistics should not constitute an artifact of Afrocentric pedagogy where the African child is the primary subject.
Third, in the American context, again, associating “kokonte” with Africa or blackness may be counterintuitive, thus further compounding the six-year-old child’s aural assimilation of unfamiliar cultural and linguistic symbols, as we said before, including, by extension, possible adulteration of the child’s intact self-perception. There are ample historical and sociological reasons for this. Kenneth Clark’s and Mamie Clark’s sensational Doll Experiments immediately come to mind. Yet, while these race experiments may have been carried out around 1940 to determine the racial preferences of American children of both races, black and white, mostly, the statistical consensus reached by these children indicated that white dolls generally exuded beauty and intelligence than their dark counterparts.
Moreover, according to the children, the white dolls also had nicer hair and complexion than brown dolls with black hair. Is this unique to the American racial experience? No. Isn’t it true that our women bleach their beautiful dark skins, gorgeous girls and women, whom, among other derogatory labels, Kofi Sammy, of Okukuseku, Cardinal Rex Lawson, of Mayors Dance Band, and, finally, Orlando Owoh, of African Kenneries Beats International, called “Yellow Sisi”? Didn’t Rhonda Lee, an African America TV meteorologist, lose her job because of hair-related controversies? She tweeted after being fired: “I am very proud of my African-American ancestry which includes my hair…I’m very proud of who I am and the standard of beauty I display. Women come in all shapes, sizes, nationalities, and levels of beauty. Showing little girls that being comfortable in the skin and HAIR God gave me is my contribution to society.”
Clearly, we see an internalized inferiorization of racial complexes in our adult females, both in Africa and in the West. Some of our males, even, like Daddy Lumba, bleach their skin. Jamaican mothers of African ancestry bleach their children as young as one. What does Chris Rock’s “Good Hair,” a documentary film, say about societal (mis)perceptions about African hair or about societal pressure exerted on the African woman to make her beautiful God-given hair look unAfrican? Ironically, James Brown conked his hair, Mami Wata–like, but left his conspicuous African features entire, while, Michael Jackson, the world’s finest pop star, Caucasianized the whole architectural anatomy of his person citing an overplus of justifications, such as needing a new framework of an aquiline nose to enhance musical vocalization, this, despite Quincy Jone’s and others’ objections. Contrarily, Malcolm X’s full baptism in Afrocentric conscientization led to his radical rejection of Eurocentric re-definition of the African self.
The question is: What is wrong with the African hair and African complexion? Now, more than sixty years later, precisely in the mid-2000s, a Ghanaian friend of ours who taught American children in a New Jersey public school had to give up teaching because his students regularly interrupted his classes with stereotypical African remarks. Some asked him whether he had chimpanzee and monkey friends, whether he slept with monkeys and chimpanzees, etc., in Africa. We do also know a few instances where African-born American children refuse to eat traditional African dishes in the presence of their mostly non-African, American-born schoolmates, who, occasionally, accompany them home after school. Instead, they directed their edacious preferences toward pizza, McDonald’s, the usual outdoor American staples, in their friends’ presence.
Ironically, once their American friends are gone, they rush to the kitchen scrambling for banku, fufu, gari, ampesi, kontomire stew, etc. Meanwhile, they will also not engage their siblings and parents in native African languages even outside the earshot of their American friends. What is wrong with traditional African recipes? What is wrong with native African tongues? Why don’t we, for instance, rather than using our movie industries to make it seem every aspect of Western culture is better than ours, use these same media to promote the positive aspects of our culture? Moreover, language is very important in preserving the cultural geography and psychological artifacts of a people. Namely, the political economy of language is power, pride, identity, economics, and respect. It partly explains why the French government tasked its language researchers and computer scientists to rid its national computer data bases completely of English.
It partly explains the French government’s detestation of Paul Kagame when he moved to officialize English in addition to Kinyarwanda and French. Therefore, language is survival itself, for, as some of us may have already known, its importance to theories of political ecology, cultural hegemony, behavioral geography, and cultural ecology cannot be overstated. A people die if their language dies. And this is no lazy understatement. In fact, it is one important area in which the African world probably lags behind the rest of the world in terms of creative research. Thiongo’s “Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing,” “Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language In African Literature,” and “Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom,” to name just three, add to the value of linguistic politics in a people’s cultural library, particularly of Africa.
More pointedly, Thiong’o’s “Moving the Center” is a firm philosophical and cultural argumentation advanced in favor of the Afrocentric paradigm as an alternative epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological prism for looking at the world, among other competing worldviews. Language is one of the primary cultural variables to absorb his intellectual attention. Actually, this Thiong’oian view assumes a more analytically ossified, critical, and particularistic tone, as far as the social utility of Afrocentric theory is concerned, in his “Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance.” Similarly, Ayi Kwei Armah’s novelistic project, “Osiris Rising,” for one, attempts a critical theoretical understanding of African political ecology, diasporic and continental, via the Afrocentric lens. This is the way, we believe, our literature should go.
Moreover, Panini’s influential work on Sanskrit grammar, completed in 4 B.C., Noam Chomsky’s theoretical explorations of “generative grammar” and “the autonomy of syntax,” Cheikh Anta Diop’s “Parenté Génétique De L’Egyptien Pharaonique Et Dés Langues Negro-Africaines,” and Theophile Obenga’s work on African languages (ancient Egyptian and the rest of Africa), all, to some degree, challenge the linguistic orthodoxies of giants like Joseph Greenberg. On the contrary, Chomsky’s controversial view, “the autonomy of syntax,” that grammatical cognition is somehow disconnected, organically, from other compartmentalized architecture of the human brain, or mind, if you will, has not sat well with some of his important critics. In fact, Chomsky has since revised his views after new contrarian evidence became available (See Gary Marcus’ “Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky,” The New Yorker, 2012).
Yet the philosophical contestation between either biology (organic) or culture as the primary determinant of human faculty for language continues. Again, Chomsky’s well-known theory on “universal grammar,” specifically the concept of “recursion,” has come under attack. The questions for us to answer are: Is language an acquired skill, as, indeed, Sapir once put it? Contrarily, is the faculty for language programmed in the human brain at birth, as, indeed, a Chomskyan hypothesis says? Dr. Dan Everett’s meticulous study of the Pirahã, a Native American ethnic group in the Amazon, as well as of their culture and language, Pirahã, so-called, punch serious scientific holes in the acknowledged generality of Chomskyan linguistics (See Everett’s doctoral thesis “The Pirahã Language and the Theory of Syntax” and his essay “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã”; see also John Colapinto’s “The Interpreter: Has A Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our Understanding of Language?”, The New Yorker, 2007).
The latter essay, Colapinto’s, critically reviews the gamut of works represented by B.F. Skinner (“Verbal Behavior”), Herbert Simon (“The Architecture of Complexity”), Edward Sapir (“Language”), Noam Chomsky (“Reflections on Language”), Benjamin Lee Whorf (“Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), etc. Nonetheless, Chomsky and his colleagues had simply refused to accept the scientific legitimacy of the new evidence, by Everett, which, among other things, incontrovertibly calls the universalized claims of his theory, “universal grammar,” into question. Once again, this intellectual recalcitrance on the part of Chomsky indirectly leads to the archeologization of the ideological friction between Eurocentric universalism and Afrocentric particularism, as elsewhere. In other words, are there linguistic universals? On the contrary, which of the two variables, culture or biology, plays a greater role in language aqcuistion?
Again, the ideological strain between Afrocentricity and Eurocentrism is of paramount indispensability to the discourse on Afrocentric pedagogy. Indeed, Ben Okri has established conceptual possibilities of schizophrenic cultural existences, of distinct cosmologies, between Western and African worldviews, through the magical realism of his classic and powerful novels, much like Salman Rushdie does for India and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Colombia. Sporadically, Wole Soyinka, on the other hand, uses the critical brush of postmodernist poetic imagism to plumb the depths of African cultural psychology. For instance, Western science says sickle cell anemia more than accounts for the cultural causation of “ogbanje,” a character in Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Moreover, the word “ogbanje,” according to Odinani, a systemized portmanteau of Igbo cultural practices and beliefs, roughly means “a child who dies, leaves the world, and comes back to the world again.”
Could “ogbanje” be a direct cultural descendant of one of the central features of Egyptian religious belief, the Osiris Myth, a cultural soil from which, though controversially, some scholars believe the mythological seed of Christological personhood had arisen to become the Trinitarian tree of another Christological system, “life, death, and resurrection”? Yet, some claim to see important parallels between “ogbanje” and the “changelings” of Celtic (European) fairy tales, like the putative parallels between Okomfo Anokye and the legendary Arthurian Merlin. However, in strict Okrian novelistic conventions, Merlin being a “wizard” in Western cultural psychology takes a sharp cultural detour from the Ghanaian universal understanding of Okomfo Anokye as a lawgiver, priest, politician, and political advisor.
In other words, the average Ghanaian does not see Okomfo Anokye as a “wizard,” which, to the freethinking psychology of the Westerner, means someone who merely practices magic. In contrast, the concept “wizard,” a word whose articulation conjures deadening fear in the collective psychology of traditional and modern Ghana, of the African world, in general, is generally believed to carry a cumulus of supernatural powers far exceeding those ascribed to a given magician, even to the most powerful of magicians. We know now that magic is synonymously illusionism, a portmanteau of science (physics), special effects, public speech (communication), psychology, and what have you. Summarily, this is what Okri means, we think, when he says the cultural schizophrenia of the African worldview and the Western worldview do not necessarily always share a space of phenomenological commonality.
Also, it would, therefore, mean that the black ink of his pen makes convenient compromises between Eurocentrism and Afrocentricity on the white pages of his powerful novels. Indeed his is a rarity in the creative field of African literature. Moreover, this belief, “ogbanje,” an entrenched cultural artifact, is not unique to the Igbos. It’s a common belief system in many parts of the African world, including our own Ghana. Generally, witchcraft is another, so are doppelganger, Mami Wata, spirit possession, ancestral spirits, dwarfism, etc. Ironically, Icelanders, an ethnic and cultural group of German ethnicity, believe in the existence of elves so much so that construction of roads and other engineering activities are closed down pending their passage through these designated construction sites!
But is science necessarily always right? Does science have all the answers? Let’s look at the questions this way: If science indeed has all the answers, why have the inexplicable challenges posed by oncology to medical science forced some accomplished medical scientists to accommodate holistic medicine in their private practices, in which case, spirituality, for instance, assumes the same degree of evaluative importance as the physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing of a patient? Simply, our current view is that pedagogy in the African context must factor in the cultural and historical differences between the West and Africa. Individual Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, China, to name just three, rely on the concept of mutual antagonism, if employed less proactively, along the pathways of culture and history, to shape their internal and international policies. Respect for authority, an internal cultural variable, is one good example. Unfortunately, this part of our culture is fast being eroded by Westernization, Eurocentrism, and globalization.
Finally, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Schopenhauer, Spir, Kierkegaard, for example, all wrote from the exclusivist perspectives of their continental, cultural, and personal experiences. As a good illustration, let’s take Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil,” which, though it is of enormous importance to critical theory and moral philosophy, does not incorporate the African worldview in the epistemological evaluation of continental philosophy. Then again, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a onetime critic of Afrocentricity and J.F. Kennedy’s biographer, selectively quoted WEB Du Bois as being intellectually comfortable in the midst of Balzac, Dumas, Aristotle, Aurelius, and Shakespeare. Further, he applied the same logic to Ralph Ellison, writing: “In Macon County, Alabama, I read Marx, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hemmingway. Books which seldom, if ever, mentioned Negroes were to release me from whatever ‘segregated’ idea I might have had of my human possibilities (“The Disuniting of America,” p. 91).
Thus, Schlesinger, Jr., an admirer of Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., will conclude: “He was freed, Ellison continued, not by the example of Richard Wright and other black writers but by artists who offered a broader sense of life and possibilities. ‘It requires real poverty of the imagination to think that this can come to a Negro only through the example of other Negroes.’” Yet, alternative arguments advanced by Gates in the book, “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism,” and by Asante in his brilliant essay, “Ralph Ellison and Cultural Knowledge,” seriously question this Schlesingerian reading!
We shall return…
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