The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone Africa

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Forum members may find these Facebook posts and dialogue interesting, especially if they read my interventions on the topic of theoretical framework requirements in Nigerian academic writing/research and the discussion it generated on this list a few years ago.

Since that conversation, I've come to learn that this is not only a problem in Nigeria but also in Ghana and Kenya, leading me to conclude that this may be a neocolonial epistemic disease afflicting Anglophone Africa.

Moses Ochonu

September 18 at 5:51 PM  · 

Shared with Public

 

Years after making my two Facebook posts on the subject of theory/theoretical framework as practiced in Nigerian humanities and humanistic social science scholarship and stirring controversy on what ought not to be controversial, the controversy continues to ripple in Nigerian academia.

 

Now, it has crossed the border to Ghana. Several weeks ago, I received an email from a Ghanaian professor in Ghana asking about my "publication" on theoretical framework.

 

I ignored the email because I didn't recall publishing anything on the subject.

Undeterred, he emailed me again last week, reminding me that he still needed the "publication."

 

I wrote him back saying I had not published on the topic and that I only made two Facebook posts that went viral and caused unnecessary controversy in Nigeria.

 

I then distilled and outlined for him the points I made in my two posts.

 

He responded that he and I were on the same page on the issue, and that he recently gave a seminar on the subject. A few days before the seminar, however, he said the abstract went viral in Nigeria and some Nigerian academics sent him my Facebook posts and told him to "stop the madness."

 

Here, below, I reproduce my response to my Ghanaian interlocutor.

 

The points of my intervention, as you’ll see, are simple:

 

1. A scholarly work does not have to have a theoretical component or make a theoretical intervention to have merit.

 

2. Requiring ALL works in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, regardless of research questions and focus, to have a section titled “theoretical framework” is mechanistic and intellectually tyrannical, since some scholarly works do not lend themselves to theorization or theoretical engagement and can make sound arguments and even iconoclastic interventions which are backed by rigorous, compelling analysis without engaging with any theories and without being informed by any theoretical formulations. The topic and issue in the research should dictate whether the author engages with existing theoretical formulations, not the whimsical decision of academic bureaucrats, mentors, and regulators.

 

3. When theory is invoked, it should not simply be used to spruce up or glamorize a work. Rather, the theory should be relevant to the work, and the author of the work should not simply hide approvingly behind the theory but should critically engage the theory, showing the ways in which his work instantiates the theory and/or challenges or enriches/extends it.

 

4. Instead of arbitrarily and instinctively reaching for theories within which to insert a work, authors should, depending on their research and its insights, dare to theorize themselves, formulating their own original theories from the insights, findings, and implications of their work.

 

5. If the work truly needs theoretical engagement and has obvious theoretical implications, our African scholars should not instinctively advance or borrow the theories of dead white, often male, scholars who theorized from a Euro-American perspective. They should instead invoke the theories of African and Africa-centered scholars and theorists whose scholarly, experiential, and theoretical explorations are grounded in African realities and epistemologies and are thus more relevant to the works of Nigerian/African scholars researching and writing on Nigerian/African topics and issues.

I am not sure how these points of mine became controversial, but there was a lot of discussion (both pro and against) among Nigerian academics around these fairly obvious and commonsensical observations. 

 

Perhaps it is because people have a difficult time hearing that what they’ve been doing for so long has little or no intellectual logic.

 

The most egregious of the reactions to the two posts is the misleading claim, perhaps a deliberately mischievous mischaracterization, that I was saying that historians and other humanists and social scientists should not use theory in their work or should discard theory.

Anyway, now you know the full story.

 

 

 

Usman Isyaku

September 19 at 10:25 AM  · 

 

A reply to Moses Ochonu on theoretical frameworks 

What you said here is correct, but it can easily be misconstrued as a strong position against the use of theoretical frameworks in social sciences and humanities research. A call for critical engagement with theories is good. This is partly because many African scholars lack sufficient grasp of what theories are and their functions in research, and partly because there are not enough theories to explain emerging problems that have local peculiarities.

 

It is important to note that applied research, which is most commonly practiced by African scholars, doesn't lend itself to theoretical formulations by design. On the other hand, basic research that aims at knowledge abstraction at a philosophical level to establish higher order cause and effect relationships, requires theorising. This is useful to note because theories help in piecing a set of ideas that work together to explain and or predict social phenomena. It helps to avoid fragmentation of knowledge through the production of isolated empirical works that do not have generalizable ideas. Such works are mostly contextual in nature. 

 

Researchers following these arguments should be careful about taking exclusionary position for or against the use of theories in research. Theories are useful, can be created, critiqued, extended, or discarded depending on the design type or strength of arguments. Theories are mostly misunderstood, and it is easy for African scholars to critique them as racist and irrelevant instead of taking time to understand why they exist in the first place.

 

 

 

Moses Ochonu

 

I totally agree with you here, Usman. The problem is that our people are not very good with nuance. Once you criticize a practice on certain intellectual grounds, no matter how nuanced and qualified your critique may be, our people will simply understand you to be saying that everything associated with that practice is bad and should be discarded. So, your post above is important to further clarify my point. 

 

There is a place and venue for theory, and there's a place for work that's empirically and analytically sound and compelling without theoretical engagement. Scholars should not be forced into or out of each category, and their work should never be arbitrarily devalued or rejected on account of their failure to be theoretical or non-theoretical. Theory and theoretical engagement should depend on the kind of research, the topic, approach, questions, and goals of the research, etc. It should never be mechanically and tyrannically imposed on all research by mentors, peers, and gatekeepers. Which is the problem we have in our country. 

 

While some research can stand on their merit and make real contributions to knowledge without theoretical engagement and without theorizing their findings, certain types of research demand or lend themselves to abstraction and philosophical reflection and formulation. This is why I encourage our young African scholars to dare to theorize originally, since, from my experience, most existing Euro-American theories don't speak to the empirical realities of African research topics and to the peculiarities of our experiences. 

 

I also encourage them to use the insights and epistemological abstractions from their works to critique the existing theories rather than simply uncritically adopt the existing theories. I have externally examined several doctoral and Masters' theses in Nigerian universities, and the problem that I see is that their mentors, supervisors, and regulators force the authors to do theory for theory’s sake, to mechanically impose ill-fitting and unrelated theories on their works to mollify the "where is your theoretical framework?" people or get them off their backs. In 90 percent of the theses, I've encountered and in 80 percent of the conference papers, journal articles, chapters, and other works I've read from Nigeria-based colleagues, the theoretical framework chosen has no bearing on and has little or no relevance to the work at hand and was awkwardly forced on the work to satisfy the mechanistic requirement to have a "theoretical framework." 

 

As you rightly stated, the root of the problem is our people's lack of understanding of what theory is and what it does for and to scholarship. We have not learned the meaning and work of theory, but we rush to borrow theory with which to drape our work. We have not properly learned to analyze rigorously and draw out clear arguments and through lines in our work, but we want to rush to theorize what we have not demonstrated through analysis and clear argumentation and evidence. 

 

Personally, I want our colleagues and regulators to prioritize the teaching of analytical skills, so that works of young scholars would have rigor and compelling arguments and analyses. Once you're successful in doing that, the scholars themselves, depending on the nature of their research, will see and highlight the theoretical dimensions and insights of their work and the way the works dialogue with and challenge existing theories. You do not have to mandate it as a requirement. 

 

If I have a small quibble with you here, it is that 1) it is important that African scholars understand the racism--yes--racism and Eurocentricism that inhere in many influential theories, and 2) it is also important that African scholars, where possible, privilege the theories of African and Africa-centered scholars/theorists because not only do those theories approximate our realities and experience better than the ones originating from Euro-American experiences and realities, but also because privileging them over Euro-American ones helps in decentering global epistemologies and in giving visibility to marginalized and devalued African theoretical perspectives in the global knowledge marketplace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wandia Njoya

September 21 at 1:44 PM  · 

 

I have never used theoretical frameworks in my academic publishing. When I was writing my dissertation, post-colonial theory was the fad and I wasn't having it. In my view, it was terrible, and I said so. The short version of my beef with postcolonial theory can be found on Al Jazeera. 

 

For the first chapter of my dissertation, where I discussed what others had written on my topic, I said I was using decolonization of Fanon. It wasn't a theory then, but I said it's what I'm gonna do. And then I added tragedy as a philosophical concept based on Wole Soyinka's book "Myth, literature and the African world." I also used some work on narratology and argument. And a lot, I mean a lot, of Lewis Gordon's work. One of my committee members, explained it to me very simply: what we need to understand is what Ideas are guiding your analysis and how you are going to carry out the analysis. Is that a theoretical framework? I danna. 

 

For me, it was stories and realities that guided my work. I opened my dissertation with my personal experience. Yes I did. That's a no no in Kenya. In fact, I later published a conference paper in a Kenyan journal where I talked of mourning my friend Adam Hussein Adam, and the editors were pleasantly surprised that such personal experiences of Adam and my friendship with him could produce an academic reflection.

 

In my dissertation, I was also very committed to using African thinkers to guide my work, and in fact one of the people I cited, Ambroise Kom from Cameroon, said at my defense that the one thing that struck him about my dissertation was the many African thinkers I had cited. 

 

I get theory because it's the work people do of drawing patterns through different things. But having a theoretical framework? I see students saying "I'm going to use theory X and Y" and honestly, I don't get it. Neither do they, and I can tell from the very bland and uninteresting way in which they write their literature review. You can tell they were ticking a box. 

 

When theory is imposed like that, it inevitably becomes gatekeeping into Western empire. It reduces African scholarship to the application of Western theories to African raw data. Lewis Gordon has mentioned this problem in his book "Existentia Africana." He calls it a formula of "whites do theory, Africans do experience." 

 

What this is really about is that we Kenyans are not allowed to interpret our own experiences according to African ideas, as Mordecai Ogada has just commented. That suppression of interpretation leads to a crisis of meaning, which Joe Kobuthi mentioned in our Maisha Kazini conversation, because meaning is the product of interpretation. Without interpretation, we have no meaning. 

 

We Kenyans don't know how to interpret our lives. We look for meaning from either our ethnic group or the government, or 'the white man stole our culture." Those are the only interpretations we are allowed in Kenya. And the police are academics and those Kenyans who demand solutions when you share an experience. What they are really asking is "what will the government say about it?" I hear some Kenyan universities have even graduated to demanding that students link their thesis to Vision 2030 or current government initiatives.

 

What I've since understood is that in Africa, thesis and dissertations are about hazing for entry into an imperial club. We're getting thesis to join an elite; not to think. What's ironical is that Anglo-American empire is collapsing, but we're not reducing this gatekeeping. We're increasing it. It's like the corruption of Kenya Kwanza. Now the theft is starting to look more like a desperate awareness that they can’t believe they made it to government and that they may never get the same position again, so they need to grab as much as they can before the opportunity disappears. 

 

Same thing with universities. Because Kenya has no avenues for self-expression outside the church and the academy, people come to the university desperate for a voice, ready to follow whatever hazing ritual we scholars throw at them. It will remain this way until we detach ourselves from Anglo-America, or when we decide that we don't need permission, not for our experiences to be valid, as Lupita said, but for our INTERPRETATIONS of those experiences to be valid, and for that validity to come from our African peoples, wherever in the world they may be.

 

[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

Where a central body controls all the institutions, as in the NUC, it imposes a rigid control. Even at the undergraduate level in Nigeria, a university’s control over what it teaches and how it is structured is now 30 percent. Thus, the issue of theory is not a Nigerian phenomenon. Your thesis will not be examined if you don’t even follow formatting instructions. These are regulations. Our colleagues cannot do anything about this. Where a regulation demands a literature review or hypothesis, neither the student nor the supervisor can change it.

 

I think the challenge has now shifted to “relevance.” The AU has revamped its funding side, asking for research relevance. Rwanda is revising its PhD criteria to focus on “relevance.” By relevance, it means “What is your contribution to nation-building?” Many topics we approve for Ph.D. in the West will not stand in many African countries.

 

I think your argument is on education for specific field competence. Sure, but systems can also focus on needs, deficiencies, etc. They may even say that humanities are useless, as many countries say concerning History. They recently asked me in Lesotho why they should not abolish degrees in History. It is their right if their elite and planners think it is unnecessary, but I won't agree with that decision. I have also advised state governors to convert the universities to trade centers as they need the most competent crafts workers and artisans, but they told me that parents and students need boasting rights even if the quality is insignificant.

TF

 

 

 

 

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[Moses Ochonu]

Technical requirements such as formatting are a separate matter, having to do with archiving and dissemination. That happens and should happen everywhere. I have no quarrel with that.

The mechanical, blanket imposition of “theoretical framework” on every academic work as a standard of valuation is my issue and that of a joys and others who have weighed in.

Where you and I teach, those issues are worked out on a case by case and discipline by discipline basis. They’re also worked out with flexibility to allow the authorial voice to come through and for the original contribution to be highlighted unencumbered by rigid impositions. 

On relevance, I agree with you, but I argue in a piece I’m working on that relevance and theory are actually part of the same crisis of Nigerian social science and humanities scholarship: the struggle for identity under the pressure of instrumentalist expectations from the state, parents, and even students.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 24, 2023, at 8:58 AM, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:



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[Toyin Falola]

Moses:

The US does not have the equivalent of the NUC or the powerful agency in Rwanda that also probits words and language you are not allowed to use, as in referring to a person as Igbo or Hausa. Thus, as you always argue, comparison is a wahala!

Same thing is with the promotion system. The point system is imposed, and those in History cannot change it. An essay is 3 points, and a book is 5 points. If you breakdown a book into 5 essays, you collect 15 points. Thus, why blame someone who refuses to write a book?

Thus, perhaps, the focus is on what to do with the regulation agencies. Our colleagues in Uganda and Nigeria know all these things, but they are so powerless.

 

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[Moses Ochonu]

Oga,

They are not entirely powerless. Yes, regulators impose draconian rules and requirements that stifle institutional flexibility and constrain, in some cases, what individual academic advisers and mentors can do, but not all meaningless and intellectually unproductive practices are imposed or required by regulators.

A good example: I know for a fact that the NUC does not require all Masters and PhD theses to have a theoretical framework or whatever name it’s called. Yet it is now vigorously enforced by humanities and social science colleagues. 

You hardly read a work emanating from Nigeria without it and it is usually jarringly irrelevant to the work and makes an awkward cameo appearance only because it’s a tradition to have a “theoretical framework.”

One colleague in the natural sciences in Nigeria even told me recently that they have started seeing it in their field, so it has become a fad and a hazing ritual.

Of course, the problem is not theory or theoretical framework, which in some cases are not only useful but imperative. However, it’s blanket gatekeeping enforcement and the fact that in 90 percent of cases the theory adopted is ill-fitting, arbitrary, irrelevant, and is not justified or critically engaged. It is rather simply used to spruce up the work and add “glamor” to it, and, of course, to mollify the gatekeepers and peer reviewers within the system.

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[Toyin Falola]

This is not what I was told, unfortunately.

I was told that a thesis must follow a prescribed structure.

I think our colleagues in Africa have to talk so that it does not become the regular trope: diasporan scholars--- which is a way of shutting down a debate.

 

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[Moses Ochonu]

Professor Wandia Njoya is not a diasporan. She is Kenyan and is based in Kenya.

Also, the Ghanaian professor who reignited this conversation by contacting me about his own campaign against “theoretical framework” is based in Ghana and is in a Ghanaian university.

Even more important, more than 90 percent of those who commented on the posts by me, Njoya, and Usman are African academics based in Africa.

Usman, by the way, was based in ABU Zaria before he resigned and left academia.

This is not a diaspora versus home issue. On the contrary, I was delighted to see that home-based scholars, including senior colleagues, in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya are taking up the issue.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 24, 2023, at 10:38 AM, Toyin Falola <toyin.f...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Biko Agozino]

Theories are systematic ideas about the nature of phenomena and Africana Theories (AT) represent critical ideas about the world of people of African descent with a centered focus on Africana peoples and for their own interests rather than against them, to end oppression and  exploitation. This is what Terry Kershaw defined as the Africana Paradigm – critical, centered, scholar-activism. Molefi Asante defines it as Afrocentricity. The field of Africana Studies is vast and theory is only a part of it. But as in every field, theory is the defining subject and theorists tend to be the most influential in every field. If you want to make your name in any discipline, then you must pay attention to theory in order to understand the subject better and to make your own original contribution to knowledge. Because theory is so important in higher education, dead white men tend to monopolize it and they are called the founding fathers of this or that.

Have you ever wondered why theory books are so white in a world where white people are a minority? The answer is that white people had been trying to stop us from learning, they have been stealing our ideas, and they want us to believe that we cannot do theory, we should only be native informants for the benefit of white theorists. We resist that with the knowledge that we invented writing long before there was any European in history and we have our theorists to study. We have also studied white theorists and white students are welcome to study AT for the benefit of all.

 

Some may say that we may be playing into the traps of white men if we seek to develop interest in theory while our people suffer indignities afflicted by capitalism, sexism and racism. Do you think that theory is a waste of time? Are you excited to learn about the AT you may not have been familiar with before?

Biko

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Thoroughly stimulating discussion.

Please forgive my sharing here  reflections the discussion brings to my mind, helping me better map than I have done before now aspects of my experience and knowledge.

Love of Theory 

I love theory. I delight in the elevations they enable, akin to flying at a great height across a landscape of possibilities, grasping their significance in terms of ideational patterns. Making me feel like a wizard traversing the time stream unifying the present with the past and the future.

I also thoroughly enjoy phenomenonigical enquiry, which I understand as lived experience and it's interpretive potential.

I would be pleased to be better educated about that term  since I'm still trying to better understand such terms as "phenomenology" and "hermeneutics".

I identify with Moses on using theory with integrity, on using theory creatively, on  theory construction as a skill a researcher so inclined  should cultivate, on being sensitive to negativities of theory and on centring Africa inspired theory although I also enjoy learning about and using theory from anywhere as part of my participation in the  kaleidoscope of human creativity.

My Adventures with Theory

My adventures with theory range across my various academic programs and continue today.

         Kent and SOAS MAs

We studied theory in my Nigerian BA and MA and I tried  to develop myself as a theorist there, but my explorations in studying and constructing theory began in earnest at the University of Kent and at SOAS.

This was represented by the  cosmogeographic conception, the correlation of geography and cosmology, I developed for one of my Kent courses in   comparing Susanne Wenger and her team's' reshaping of the Oshun forest in Nigeria into a map of Yoruba Orisha cosmology through sculpture and architecture and Katherine Maltwood's interpretation of the Glastonbury landscape in England in terms of astrological symbolism.

 For the Kent MA thesis,  I discussed the Yoruba cosmology deity Eshu in relation to spatial navigation, Eshu being associated with the intersections of physical and spiritual space, ideas I used in exploring the interpretive possibilities of the London Underground in relation to the intersections represented by its train stations, in comparison with the motif of spatial intersections and intersections of life's possibilities in Italian writer Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities.

In the SOAS MA thesis, I used the Ifa divination process from Yoruba thought and practice, in relation to Western autobiographical theory, in exploring the art and letters of the Dutch/French artist Vincent van Gogh in their autobiographical and philosophical range.

My vision was that of demonstrating the intercultural power of theory, of  philosophical perspectives developed from classical African thought in dialogue with other bodies of knowledge, a synergy valid for interpreting phenomena across space and time.

       SOAS/UCL PhD

For the SOAS/UCL PhD, I wanted to do something more ambitious than I had done before, to transpose the Ifa divination process to the interpretation of space, particularly sacred space represented by the cosmological vision represented the work of Wenger and her team at the Oshun forest.

The Oshun forest/Ifa theorization, however,took me years to arrive at, as different from the mechanical, initial efforts I had tried to fit  my on-site exploration of the forest and interpretation of its symbolism into. 

I eventually arrived at the symbolism of the chameleon, as developed from Yoruba thought and that of the Malian Africanist Ahamadou Hampate Ba,  moving through the forest as it seems to change it's colour in blending with it's environment, as the most fitting means of integrating the physical and interpretive exploration of the Oshun forest and the relationship of this spatial and interpretive navigation  to the more abstract nature of  Ifa divination as a  means of navigating spaces of possiblity at the intersection of material and spiritual space.

By that time, fatigue had set in on the part of myself and my supervisors and I could not find the interpretive power or interest to bring all the work done together, particularly as mentally and emotionally,my energies were no longer as focused as before and the supervisors were no longer interested.

      Moving Forward 

That theory was the perhaps the most African centred of all those I developed in those programs.

With time, I understand it better and hopefully will take it up again and complete the project, particularly since I'm increasingly exposed to theorizing on Ifa, including from Facebook posts and discussions, some  of which I've  used in a recent essay, self published online and others I shall be compiling and publishing in the sane way.

Nimi Wariboko as Theorist 

An Africa centred scholar who loves theorizing and does it very well, describing himself on his faculty page as a person who folds, unfolds and refolds theory, if I recall that clearly enough, is Nimi Wariboko,  as demonstrated even by his book reviews, along with his books.

His imagistic interpretation of the relationship between human body and spatial form, between the Ooni of Ife and the City of Ife, between the ruler and the cosmological values of the city, in his review of Jacob Olupona's City of 201 Gods: Ile Ife in Time, Space and Imagination, adds an extra dimension to the book, rather than simply summing up and assessing it.

His description of the nature of Ifa in his review of Olupona and Rowland Abiodun's edited book on Ifa is one of the best short summations of Ifa known to me, along with that by Karen Barber.

In The Pentecostal Principle, he develops a Pentecostal version of Paul Tillich's Protestant Principle of the dialectic between institutional and ideational consolidation  and dynamism, enriched by Wariboko's intimate, lived understanding of the Pentecostal drive towards spiritual dynamism, but which, ironically, may be seen as another version of the struggle between Catholicism and Pentecostalism, which itself may be seen as a version of the struggle between Jesus and the Pharisees, a fundamental dynamic in religious history the Pentecostal movement in Nigeria is also struggling with.

His Nigerian Pentecostalism, in it's trenchant exploration of Pentecostal epistemology and metaphysics, in dialogue with those of the Kalabari, is wonderful in explicating what one would understand as rhythms between Yoruba, Igbo, Kalabari and perhaps all others in Nigeria's South and certainly evident, in different ways across cultures of embodied yet expansive vision, in which the human being is understood as capable of perceiving  both physical and spiritual universes in their entwining, a discussion on embodied expanded epistemologies in relation to multiverse metaphysics, if one may put it that way, which Wariboko pursues across various books.

thanks

Toyin

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[Toyin Falola]

This is good, if it is coming from them. I am not aware of this information.

TF

 

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[Toyin Falola]

I am not sure that Moses is saying no theory; he is saying that the structure needs not mandate it if it is not necessary.

What I have been told, each time I ask why the structure is all the same, is that it is mandated. If mandated, both students and supervisors cannot make their own rules.

TF

 

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[Moses Ochonu]

Biko, I don’t think Professor Njoya or any other critic of the “theoretical framework” tyranny in Anglophone African academies will say Africans embracing theory are embracing the traps of disciplined White knowledge bromides.

I think the problem lies in our people mandating and enforcing “theoretical framework” as a basis for validating a work of scholarship and, in the process, creating a situation in which our scholars, in order to fulfill the mandate and mollify gatekeepers and peers alike, are uncritically borrowing largely unrelated, Eurocentric, and even racist theories from Euro-America and, in doing so, neglecting to 1) theorize from their own Africa-inflected work, and/or 2) drawing on a rich wellspring of African theoretical knowledge and thought.

What Njoya and others are saying is that when theory is mandated in such a mechanical, draconian, and unintellectual way, it wittingly or unwittingly validates the offensively racist notion that the West is the site of theory and Africa is a land of raw or empirical data, so for Africa-originated knowledge to enter the global epistemological marketplace, it must be dressed up, however awkwardly, in Western theory.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 24, 2023, at 2:56 PM, 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[Biko Agozino]

Mo,

You may be speaking specifically for your discipline, History, where theories are few and far between. Yet, theoretical historians tend to be more influential just like theorists in every field of study. The African university authorities may have a good reason for requiring familiarity with existing theories even when departing from them. Students should put on their critical thinking caps instead of shying away or crying uncle with the false allegation that it is a form of 'hazing' or violent initiation to require theoretical awareness in scholarly degree research. Have you asked the administrators why they require it? Have you come across any student who benefitted from it?

There is no real choice between theoretically sound and a-theoretical scholarly work as compared with other kinds of publications that are not considered scholarly. It all depends on the logic of the scholarly research design. If the literature review shows that there is not an extant theory or literature that addresses a rare new event in nature, then there will be no theoretical framework to be tested. In such a case, grounded theory is recommend to build a theory up from the ground, from specific observations, towards a theoretical conclusion in an inductive logic. 

The deductive logic approach goes from the general to the specific, from theoretical frameworks to the testing of hypothesis and rejectionist, revisionist, or affirmative conclusions on the theoretical adequacy of the chosen framework. 

Whether deductive or inductive, scholarly research that ignores or demonstrates lack of familiarity with theory is considered inadequate. Theory matters in every discipline and it is misleading to dismiss theory as a western fad. Implicitly or explicitly, theory is not optional in the training of graduate students worldwide.

All Africans should endeavor to master theoretical thinking and make efforts to offer original theoretical contributions of their own to their fields. Theoretical work is recognized more than descriptive empiricist or positivist ones in every field. To the forumites, tell us what contributions you have made to your field and if none, why not?

The Nobel Prize Committee may have encouraged the prioritization of theory in every field by rewarding theoretical works much more frequently if not exclusively than applied research, patents, or copyrights. But, maybe, it is vice versa influences - theory was always recognized and rewarded long before the birth of Mr Nobel.

So, Mo, here is a practical question for you as a mentor to many: How does your critique of the requirement of theoretical awareness  as a form of "hazing" help to empower students in Africa or anywhere else? This is one area where they do not need to rely on huge grants to conduct empirical research. They can also use the computers between their ears to discover new knowledge just like scholars from other regions of the world. Do you encourage your mentees to see it as an enabling requirement to be theoretically sound in their graduate school work?

Biko

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

Dear friends, 

I suppose those who share the view that white theorists are to be shunned should shun my contribution. Why not, you can make these discriminations if you want. I agree with moses’s 5 points, generally, except not point 5 where he states that it is preferable to find an african theorist when possible. I don’t totally agree that there is a meaningful difference between african or non-african, in many if not most cases. We read the same texts, we argue the same theoretical points, regardless whether they are foucault or mbembe, and force a philosophical discussion that is either fruitful or ends.

The theorists i have turned to most in recent decades happened to be african—gikandi, mbembe. Prior to that i learned to love the work of an algerian jew named derrida; and indian deconstructionist named spivak, and another indian theorist named bhabha. None of these people picked their “theory” regionally, ie as western or indian or african.

When i hosted my first african literature assn conference at msu around 40 years ago i had as the goal to bring as many strong theorists together as i could. Some came from africa, some from europe or america. Edward Said gave a talk in which he stated african scholars should begin their work using conrad (which he himself did). I was profoundly disappointed that he, the great scholar on orientalism, would want us to speak from the ground of speaking back to, rather than affirming positively. I felt achebe was a much stronger place to begin. Skip gates spoke at that conference, as did appiah, spivak, palmer,  and others. Gates spoke to the question of using “white” theorists, or europeans or not, and he answered in a manner that i think moses would appreciate: use whatever strengthens your argument.

That has always been the truest answer to the claim that you should choose a theorist based on race.

We should not have to use theory in our writings; i agree completely with those who criticize it as a pointless mechanical requirement. But if we can use any writing from any author from anyplace, it would be cutting off our own noses to spite our faces to pick the theorists based on race.

There is one caveat i’d make to this. I agree that any writing about african texts should come from a perspective or location that is centered in african realities, thought, tastes, creative spaces, lived experiences.  If these imbue our thought, they are grounded and make sense. But i would not want a judge to decide on the appropriateness of the theorist based on other criteria besides the one major rule: does this thought enrich my argument. 

Ken

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Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 4:11:14 PM

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

There is no real choice between theoretically sound and a-theoretical scholarly work as compared with other kinds of publications that are not considered scholarly. It all depends on the logic of the scholarly research design. If the literature review shows that there is not an extant theory or literature that addresses a rare new event in nature, then there will be no theoretical framework to be tested. In such a case, grounded theory is recommend to build a theory up from the ground, from specific observations, towards a theoretical conclusion in an inductive logic. 

--Biko

Biko,

But this is precisely the point I've been making. Let the topic and research questions and objectives determine. Do not make every scholar and every research work adopt a theory or theoretical framework as a requirement or standard of valuation.  

And instead of forcing students to uncritically adopt irrelevant Euro-American theories they neither understand nor can critically engage, why not encourage them to draw upon Africa-centered theories that speak better to their topics and realities and/or to engage in grounded theory or abstractions emanating from the insights and findings of their research? 

 It appears you didn't read my interventions and Facebook posts.

You asked me a question. My answer is that I have not seen a Nigerian scholar, in my years of being external examiner for Masters and doctoral theses for African universities and evaluating many manuscripts from Nigeria, where the scholar demonstrates intimate familiarity with the theory they're adopting for the work, let alone demonstrating the capacity to critically engage the theory in the context of their work. If they're just uncritically and cosmetically adopting the theory because without it their work would be disqualified or shot down by peers, why would they find it useful. So no, I have not met a Nigerian student who benefited from the imposition. Many of them, in their own words, don't know the importance or relevance and only arbitrarily adopt theories to get by the "where is your theoretical framework?" police.

I wish I could copy and post the comments of doctoral students and junior scholars on the Facebook discussion--Nigerians, Ghanians, and Kenyans. You need to read their lamentations and cathartic commentary. It is simply a form of tyranny, a hazing ritual. Why not let topics and research design dictate? Why impose a theoretical framework on everyone ab initio?

By the way, I don't know about Ghana and Kenya, but in Nigeria "theoretical framework" is not an administrative requirement or an imposition by regulators. It is our colleagues who are enforcing it on every and all works as individuals and as groups, clusters, and departments. And they cannot justify such a blanket imposition and requirement on intellectual grounds. In the way they enforce it, it makes no intellectual sense. It's just a tradition they're happy to enforce because, in their minds, it presents a challenge to the author and makes the work more serious. It's also because many of them were initiated into the practice, so why make things "easier" for others?

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[Toyin Falola]

1.  Should students learn theories? Absolutely yes.
2. Should they know about the provenance? Absolutely yes
3. Should they use theories? If it works for them.
4. Should it be mandated? This is where the disagreement is

TF

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[Oyinlola Longe]

Theo and Moses have been at it since Genesis...

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i have a few other points to add.

first, "theory" often encompasses or refers to what has come to be known as "high theory," which, as a friend of mine who does high theory stated, died maybe 20 years ago.

"theory" has shifted radically. what i most loved—poststructuralism, deconstruction, and their usages in postcolonial theory—is no longer current. instead material approaches, approaches that study eco-topics, environmental, or material feminist, or material anything, all have taken the place of what used to be called theory. theories about race have shifted in similar ways, although the best current theorists still incorporate elements of older theory. i think of high theory as philosophy, and it has marked its successors.

my second point is that "theory" is an approach that attempts to make sense of the material by positing a way of seeing and thus constructing the world. there is no such thing as a text or analysis that isn't grounded in a set of assumptions that guide the reading. those assumptions are the "theory."

sometimes it is explicitly evoked; sometimes it remains implicit. the latter is what people mistakenly take for untheorized.

lastly, by this claim, any given text, be it a novel or a philosophical exegesis, is characterized by theoretical assumptions, is theorized. the notion that african works are "raw material" for theory is the mistaken notion that such works don't have a governing set of principles that guide how it is constructing its world, its characters, etc.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 9:15 PM

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[Toyin Falola]

Ken:

You are talking about epistemologies as well: ways of knowing.

How do we know what we know?

TF

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Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 8:27:16 PM

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

Thanks for your thoughtful contribution. As you guessed, I appreciate Skip Gates' answer of using what strengthens your argument. My only caveat would be that if it comes down to a choice between an African and a Euro-American theory, the African scholar in Africa should gravitate towards the former.

The problem we have in Nigeria (and now I'm hearing Ghana and Kenya) is that our scholars there default to Euro-American theorists. So, in a rather perverse and reversed sense, they're choosing their theorists based on race--on the Whiteness of the thinker/theorist. And that choice is predicated on the age-old phenomenon of colonial mentality: anything produced by the white man is superior, foundational, and universal and would give a credibility and prestige to my work that the formulation of a black or African theorist would not.

This is a xenophilic reversal of the discrimination you speak of, which you, as a Jewish white male scholar may not be familiar with. For me as an African, I think this is a serious problem and needs to be addressed. One way to address it is to encourage African scholars on the continent to seek out theories and philosophical thought formations from Africa and African thinkers where possible and not default to the thinking that the white man owns the world of theory and should supply the theoretical formulation for their work by default.

There's an additional point: there's an experiential component to theorizing, philosophizing, and knowledge production. I am convinced that, just as Euro-American theorists and South Asian ones theorized from their experiences and the social milieus that produced and shaped them, African thinkers and theorists' thoughts and theoretical formulations are inflected by their African socializations and experiences. 

It seems logical therefore that African scholars on the continent looking for theoretical instruments to strengthen their arguments on African topics and issues would, in most cases, benefit more from the thoughts and theories of theorists grounded in an African or Africa-centered experience than they would from Euro-American or even South Asian theorists whose thoughts were informed by their own non-African experiences and worlds.

There is yet another point: All theories and knowledges are not equal and do not enter the global epistemic marketplace with equal power. African knowledges and theories being marginalized and devalued relative to those of other regions, it seems to me that African scholars based in Africa should see and execute their work as part of an insurgent epistemological project of disrupting the dominant Euro-American system of knowledge and forcing Western thinkers and scholars to reckon with Africa-centered theories and thoughts. That project can only be carried out by privileging Africa-centered philosophies and theories, not by centering Western theories and ways of knowing and seeing.

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

1.  Should students learn theories? Absolutely yes.
2. Should they know about the provenance? Absolutely yes
3. Should they use theories? If it works for them.
4. Should it be mandated? This is where the disagreement is

Oga,

As Nigerians would say, this is the koko of the matter. The first three points ought not to even elicit a debate and are not in dispute. The last point is the problem.

[Toyin Falola]

Moses and Ken:

I have argued that African universities should create new disciplines. This is one way to go.

TF

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 8:30:57 PM

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[Toyin Falola]

Any form of rigidity is the enemy of creativity.

The zones where African youth flourish the best is outside of state and institutional control: music, films, performances, fashion, ganja, colos, cultism, etc.

 What rigid regulations do is to reward mediocrity. 

TF

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 8:34:40 PM

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Moses and Ken:

I have argued that African universities should create new disciplines. This is one way to go.

TF

Honestly, I am totally in favor of it. Perhaps with that, we won't have all this rigidity and we'll have disciplines that are capacious, flexible, fluid, interdisciplinary from their founding, and responsive to new, dynamic needs and imperatives, instead of being stuck in old, outmoded practices and traditions. Obviously, a higher education establishment that resists small changes would not be receptive to such a radically disruptive idea.

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

i agree completely. my next to last book Space and Time in African Cinema and Cine-Scapes was an attempt to open up spaces for new models, ones inspired by physics and cosmology as developed into relativity and quantum mechanics.

i would hope that this work will revolutionize the epistemologies that have severely limited us by the absolute divide between the arts and sciences, with art being subordinated to scientific knowledge.

very few seem ready to break with that model. michelle wright, in her Physics of Blackness is one; Timothy Morton is another; and karen barad, a quantum physicist, breaks with feminist models using quantum.

i have not managed to ask the hard question of how african formulations of time might be considered using physics models. that work HAS to be done. it is crucial. especially if we can avoid reverting to old metaphysical models, that won't get us anywhere. i have tried to analyze african films using relativity and quantum, and hope to be able to continue with that work....

inshallah.

so toyin, yes, let the new epistemologies begin, let them flow from african universities where thinkers aren't afraid to cite anyone, from einstein to heisenberg to wright, alongside mbembe! i know toyin adepoju would jump at the chance!

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 9:44 PM

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

sometimes it is explicitly evoked; sometimes it remains implicit. the latter is what people mistakenly take for untheorized.

lastly, by this claim, any given text, be it a novel or a philosophical exegesis, is characterized by theoretical assumptions, is theorized. the notion that african works are "raw material" for theory is the mistaken notion that such works don't have a governing set of principles that guide how it is constructing its world, its characters, etc. 

Exactly, Ken. All works are implicitly and potentially theoretical and theory-laden, including all works produced by African scholars on the continent. Why not encourage young African scholars  (and even senior ones) there to distill and highlight the theoretical underpinnings and implications of their works instead of mandating the adoption of some (often Euro-American) theories, regardless of whether the theories fit or are critically engaged by the current works?

[Harrow, Kenneth]

moses, thanks so much for engaging me with your points.

i generally agree with everything you said. when Said, who was the greatest figure of his time, told us, africanists, to begin with Conrad, that was horrible, but expectable because, like spivak, had not spent any real time in africa, did not know it, and barely knew its literature. they were important for us to move on to what we came to know as postcolonial theory.

but when i cited mbembe and gikandi, or i should have added mudimbe—as is the case when i  cite you or falola—these are thinkers formed by a ecumenical library of texts. if i were to cite friends in senegal or cameroon whose work had not led them to living abroad, they still would have been drawing upon a library that included european as well as african thinkers.

my experience at the universities in africa was unfortunately often as you painted it: the prestige was applied too often to european thinkers, even to very old-fashioned works as with structuralism.  structuralism which should have gone out of fashion 50 years ago.

but if i were to characterize your thinking, or that of the others i cite above, how can we say it is not marked by a plethora of african and western texts. how can we cite, for instance, the incredibly wonderful glissant, without seeing that amalgam; or fanon; or more recently michelle wright or you  name them.

can you draw a line between the euro-american and african thought so neatly?

you know my work is primarily focused on african film. it is impossible to cite african filmmakers whose work was not marked by collaboration that ultimately enjoined european or american workers. even the great tunde kelani, with his own studios, began in the old days where brits were involved in the cinema studios inherited from colonial days.

the same is largely true of african literature. how much of the early classics were penned by young africans living in europe, from senghor to diop to beti to oyono to ouolaguem to soyinka to kenyatta, etc etc.

now as we look at african authors, like chiminanda adichie, or teju cole, like mati diop and tons of young filmmakers, they are first generation immigrants who went to school abroad and carry their parents' africanness into their european/american framed works.

lastly, how could people like myself, ensconced in 50 years of work with african texts and peoples, not be marked by that experience and see the world differently from those living around us with their notions of africa limited by safaris at best?

we are mentally and culturally mixed, as bhabha really said it best.  or, as appiah said, repeatedly, brilliantly.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2023 9:30 PM

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

What happened with African thought and it's global influence after the great achievement of people like St. Augustine in North Africa? 

On Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:59 AM Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wonderful -

" There is yet another point: All theories and knowledges are not equal and do not enter the global epistemic marketplace with equal power. African knowledges and theories being marginalized and devalued relative to those of other regions, it seems to me that African scholars based in Africa should see and execute their work as part of an insurgent epistemological project of disrupting the dominant Euro-American system of knowledge and forcing Western thinkers and scholars to reckon with Africa-centered theories and thoughts. That project can only be carried out by privileging Africa-centered philosophies and theories, not by centering Western theories and ways of knowing and seeing"

Moses Ochonu

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAAHJfPp4%2BGuN%3D2t4i9bfKhsbYJux%2B3%3DVtpSBmAwhL9SffYFm7g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Wonderful -

" There is yet another point: All theories and knowledges are not equal and do not enter the global epistemic marketplace with equal power. African knowledges and theories being marginalized and devalued relative to those of other regions, it seems to me that African scholars based in Africa should see and execute their work as part of an insurgent epistemological project of disrupting the dominant Euro-American system of knowledge and forcing Western thinkers and scholars to reckon with Africa-centered theories and thoughts. That project can only be carried out by privileging Africa-centered philosophies and theories, not by centering Western theories and ways of knowing and seeing"

Moses Ochonu

On Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 2:32 AM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Jaye Gaskia]

My only contribution here will be to that, in my opinion, knowledge is useless if it is not derived from the more or less immediate reality and existence of the producer and or utiliser of knowledge. Knowledge is about solving problems, increasing and improving our understanding of our existence and its continuous evolution, as well as about projecting into the foreseeable future.We must proceed from the standpoint that although frameworks are useful, but that they come imbued with biases derived from the context of their developers. To be effectively universalised, such frameworks and theories must have adequately taken into account, and incorporated the frames of reference and the knowledge generated by the constituents of that universal audience and or canvass.

Jaye Gaskia

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

To speak to moses’s point about how african centered thinkers might attempt to be presenting their work so as to “disrupt the dominant euro-american system of knowledge.”

The dominant euro-american system of knowledge in our field is dominated largely by africans or african-americans. The three thinkers i mentioned earlier as dominating african theory were all african: gikandi, mbembe, and mudimbe. Their influence has been enormous. For anyone to advance their thinking nowadays—and i am thinking about african based scholars—they have to seek publishing venues that are important to our field. I don’t know them all, but what springs to mind is the African Studies Review, whose editor in chief is cajetan iheka, a nigerian with university degrees in the u.s. a second is JALA, whose previous editor was tejumola olaneyan and present editor is Moredewun Adejunmobi; RAL’s editor is kwaku korang. I could go on. These are serious figures. In our field who are not in any way superficially subordinated to dominant western euro-americanthought. Instead they are forging major innovations in theorizing about african culture, with iheka a founder of african-ecological thought, moradewin in nollywood, and so on. The same is true for the major journals on african culture and cinema coming out of south africa. 

The broader question, however, that moses's thought poses is how we are to bring african based scholarship into the mainstream, of whatever field. That is really a difficult question when the money that controls education and resources is skewed against african scholars. Many of the really brilliant thinkers i've encountered work in the u.s., like olabode ibironke.  toyin falola has done  than any 10 people together to enable young african scholars to break into the field. I see their manuscripts submitted to msu press at times, and some pass the readers' threshhold and get published; others don't. The competition for journal publication can be fierce, and resources figure prominently into who succeeds or doesn't. In my mind it is not a question of pandering to some dominant euro-american paradigm, but being able to access the valuable materials, whatever their origin. And getting published or produced on a world stage can be impossibly difficult. I still believe that the hybrid african-euopean models are dominant.

Ken

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2023 1:08:37 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

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[Moses Ochonu]

Ken,

I guarantee you that when Africa-based students and colleagues are casting about for a “theoretical framework” to anchor or support their work, those African theorists and philosophers you mentioned, Gikandi, Mudimbe, Iheka, Adejumobi and others, will not be their preferred or default references. 

They’d rather go with White theorists, some of them intellectual inferiors of those you mentioned, no matter how irrelevant and passé their thoughts and formulations might be. 

They don’t even give a serious look at Africa-based thinkers or even vernacular theorists, not to mention citing or engaging them. This is the problem.

 It is, by the way, no longer a problem of access. Even undergraduates in Nigerian universities can now easily access the works of African and Africa-centered theorists and thinkers on their phone if they want to.

 It is the residual epistemic power of Whiteness that’s at work and pushing them to privilege the theories of White thinkers over those of Black and African thinkers.

 It is an aspect of the enduring life of Whiteness in Africa that the vibrant and growing literature on Whiteness in postcolonial Africa has yet to account for. I published a piece on Whiteness in postcolonial Africa but I, too, didn’t do enough on the epistemic dimension of the problem.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 25, 2023, at 2:18 PM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



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[cornelius...@gmail.com]

Re -” when Said, who was the greatest figure of his time, told us, africanists, to begin with Conrad, that was horrible,” ( according to one Kenneth Harrow who would have much preferred that “ us africanits” should have begun with Achebe instead, by which I suppose he means that it’s better to begin with the devil that you know, the one you love….black man, critical race theory, standing ovation etc talking shop, where is Wofa Akwasi when I need him? “Restless intelligence” indeed, like Karl Marx…

With Tarzan in the picture (at the cinema) when elephants rumble and tumble in the jungle, we know that it's the grass that suffers and all that; but this juicy bit of literary gossip preceding and following the line that begins “ A subliminal awareness that his visions of social transformation might be deceptive may explain Russell's friendship with Conrad” has contributed to my still not being able to figure out why a literary icon of the stature of Joseph Conrad should be singled out or assigned as an unlikely recommendation from  Edward Said

Yes, in this forum, Conrad has occasionally been lumped together with the man some people here love to despise and hate, namely V.S.Naipaul: but let us not forget what the not so unaware or unwary Edward Said did singlehandedly did with his Orientalism which since then has impacted mightily on African Studies with new insightful approaches which have been transposed to critical receptions/ studies of African Literature, so called.

Afrocentric :Jimmy Dludlu : Inyoni Iya phapha

[Harrow, Kenneth]

Hi cornelius,conrad played an important role in Said’s own work. He saw conrad as subverting the rationality of colonial discourse, and did it brilliantly in Heart of Darkness. Said and Achebe debated the question of conrad, conrad’s racism. Maybe achebe won that debate in explaining how conrad manifested that racism, but since he wrote around 1900, he had to be placed in the perspective of that period. I thought said’s interpretation of Heart of Drkness was stronger than Achebe, and Achebe was stronger in attacking conrad’s racism.

But said wanted us to view african literature through the optic of resistance to european thought, i.e., the critique of orientalism.

As i taught more and more african literature i came resent the view that held that the only or best way to convey to students how to undo western conventional/racist/colonialist views of africa was to begin with tarzan (or heart of darkness). Eventually i decided that instead of losing a week ormore to such an approach, i’d devote it to african texts which implicitly or explicitly laid before the students the real values of african culture and peoples, and they would come to be able to forge arguments that could counter the dumb tv images they had been fed on.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or Arrow of God, presented igbo (Ibo, he’d say), unapologetically accomplished this,, and many other works of the 50s, like L’enfant noir or une vie de boy or le pauvre christ de bomba or birago diop's wonderful contes, or negritude poetry; or soyinka's early plays, etc did the same, without my having to lose a week. And i think it became more convincing to the students, approaching it that way. I.e., i avoided the defensiveness implicit in beginning with graham greene etc. or other colonial authors, and showing their faults. Another example is the film, Sanders of the River!!!!! Paul robeson ultimately had to apologize for having made it.

Ken

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

Moses, that’s really sad to hear.

It is unconscionable, really. 

I must be too out of touch, although i wonder which white theorists are popular? Is it possible to hazard a guess at a few names, just to give me an idea of who is garnering the interest of students. Is it a question of old-fashioned views? Who who who?

Ken

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Beautiful insights Ken.

Thanks

Toyin

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

I can't remember how many times I scratched my head in disappointment that an Africa-based scholar is mechanically, jarringly, and uncritically invoking some White man's outmoded theory, which has been transcended, as the "theoretical framework" of their work.

You asked for specific names, so off the top of my head I can recall encountering these names in works that I have externally examined or evaluated or read for conferences, but there are many more names, many of them passe, obscure, and unhelpful in the current scholarly age:

Terry Eagleton

Levi Strauss 

 

Louis Althusser

 

Max Weber

Emile Durkeim 

John Rawls

 

John Locke 

 

Samuel Huttington

 

Karl Marx

 

Lenin

 

Hegel

 

Heidegger 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Emmanuel Kant

Side note: I have encountered John Rawls so many times in the works of our colleagues in Nigeria that I have developed a mental allergy to his theories.

What's even more frustrating is a twofold problem. First, Foucault, Lacan, Deridda, and other more current and relevant theories from Euro-America are hardly invoked. Second, regardless of which White man's theory they're invoking, the authors rarely demonstrate how their works instantiate, deepen, extend, or critique the theory being invoked. The connection between their work and the theory is never demonstrated. The theoretical invocation is a perfunctory gesture and ritual for cosmetic purposes. It is like putting an ill-fitting gown on a person in the hope that the gown will shape how the person is perceived and engaged. So you can tell that this is merely an exercise in checking boxes, getting the "where is your theoretical framework?" peer and mentor police off their backs, and, more disturbingly, pandering to the perceived prestige of White epistemological primacy and superiority. 

The other thing is the provenance, which Falola alluded to. That's very important. Our people in Africa are not even being taught the histories and provenance of these theories and circumstances of their production or emergence. If you're going to invoke theory--any theory--you have to be intimately familiar not just with the semiotic properties and claims of the theory but also with its limitations and, crucially, its provenance. All knowledge and all theory is ultimately autobiographical. The idea that there is a zone of neutral, universal knowledge production or theorizing is false.

All the White theorists, including the already transcended ones, being given preference and elevated by our Africa-based colleagues theorized, by and large, from their experiential repertoires, from their socialization, and from the political and cultural circumstances of their intellectual evolution. The obvious one is Marx and Engels, whose frame of experiential reference was industrial England and France and to a lesser extent Germany. Hegel's point of theoretical departure was even more provincial, given that he was responding and contributing to the rise of German nationalism and the search for a German nationalist historiography starting from the mid 19th century.

Gabrielle Spiegel has a brilliant piece in the AHA, an expanded version of her AHA presidential lecture, in which she contends that deconstruction, poststructuralism, postmodernist, and similar theories emanated from the trauma of the holocaust, which rendered truth unknowable, fragmentary, and elusive (aporia, in the language of Derrida). In particular, the White Jewish theorists and thinkers of the post-holocaust period saw and experienced a world through the lens of their and their parents' suffering and came to question the nature of truth, the stability of reality, and, more crucially, the ability of language to convey and reflect reality and all of its horrors. This psychic legacy of the holocaust ultimately produced these theories that seek to deconstruct the relationship between language and its referent, the singularity and knowability of truth, and the stability of linearity of experience, identity, and culture. The American faces of this theoretical genealogy of the holocaust's enduring psychic legacy include Dominick La Capra and George Steiner.

The takeaway here, as it relates to my earlier point about Africa-based scholars privileging the thoughts and theoretical formulations of African and Africa-centered thinkers, is that theories grounded in the specific experiences of other regions and in the experiences of the theorists cannot in most cases be relevant to or illuminate the conditions and realities of African peoples, cultures, events, and societies--the subjects of inquiry for African scholars. To the extent that the question of theory connects to the question of relevant knowledge, which Falola also raises, you cannot be uncritically invoking theories with foreign experiential foundations and cultural provenance and neglect those that are more experientially proximate to you and the subject matter of your scholarly inquiry.

If the White theorists we give prominence to in our works theorized exclusively from their own experiences and the realities of their societies, with some of them even disdainfully dismissing Africa as a place of civilization and rationality, then why can't our scholars on the continent theorize their lives, their cultures, their realities, and their societies? This is why I encourage our colleagues on the continent to do more grounded theorizing, to theorize from their works and not always feel that they have to reach out and pluck some Euro-American theory for their works to have credibility and be taken seriously.

As you rightly stated, all scholarly works are either potentially theoretical or have unannounced or subtle theoretical underpinnings and dimensions that could be distilled and highlighted as insightful theoretical formulations.

 

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

Ken,

Even the Said/Achebe debate on Conrad had to do with provenance. For Said, it did not and should not matter that Conrad was a racist when judged by post-colonial standards and that his writing on the situation in the Congo carried the stock textual and discursive racisms and supremacist assumptions of his time. For Achebe, the racism mars the text, is a disqualifier, and dilutes the merit of the work as a critique of the rapacious colonial brigandage of the so-called Congo Free State of Leopold II. For Achebe, the racism of Conrad renders his text irrelevant and potentially injurious to African decolonial and emancipatory literary and intellectual projects. Said, not being experientially grounded in the sensitivities of anti-Black racism, could not see the gravity of Conrad's racism and was able, as a result, to transcend it to appreciate the work as an incipient, if not a foundational, work of anticolonial critique. Said was reading Conrad from a place of experiential absence/remove; Achebe from a place of experiential intimacy.

[cornelius...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the explanations

Just a short aside: 

Dear Professor Kenneth Harrow,

Convener and host of that wonderful 12th Annual African Literature Association conference at Michigan State University in April, 1986, at which, among many others, this paper was presented.

Given the diversities in background it should be good that all suggestions/ recommendations ought to be on the table, yours, Edward Said’s , Bernth Lindfors’ - a  united/disunited/disparate composite approach. Back in Sierra Leone Michael Brunson made a difference to bringing Eliot and Shakespeare back to life, as you too must have done for your students with some of the literary icons at the various venues of Higher education where you have taught at the Cheikh Anta Diop and Mongo Beti and Albert Camus Countries.

 Back in the Ghana of 1970 , in very unctuous tones friend Cyprian Lamar Rowe proclaimed to me personally, at some length, the glories of Chinua Achebe, who he venerated as a genuine African pioneer holding African traditions high  - this was at a time when I had hardly read any Achebe, friend James Ngugi as he was called then, was writer in residence, and Ayi Kwei Armah was the man of the moment,  the new kid on the block with his then much celebrated  “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born” and “Fragments”. Cyprian thought that Armah seemed to be looking in , into Africa and African society, as an outsider.To this day, it would seem that the African-American prefers the pristine , idyllic picture of pastoral Africa as things were before the White Man came, started kidnapping people, and mucked up everything; prefer that to the other complex realities of post colonial modernities.

 When asked  to comment on corruption in Nigeria, Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan was furious 

I presume that the African Literature under purview has been mostly authored in English and French, , is mostly read by English and French-speaking readers, and of course various translations of the originals into Hausa, Xhosa, Zulu, Yoruba, Igbo etc,  perhaps even into some of the other languages that Abdul Bangura speaks (a good reason for learning other languages of course being to be able to read some of the great works written in those languages  - thinking of the ancient world’s Greek and Latin and Sanskrit, and that in modern times Sweden’s Gunnar Ekelöf learnt Persian in order to read Hafez, whilst Finland’s Georg Henrik Von Wright acquired the English Language so that he could inherit Ludwig Wittgenstein’s chair of philosophy at Cambridge 

Another presumption is the various backgrounds/ lack of background of the teachers,  readers, students and authors of the distinct category that’s referred to as “ African Literature” - the literary output of Africans,  by which definition, at this stage even if Mo Yan were to have written ”Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” in the Kalabari Language , he would still remain Chinese , just as Conrad remains “Polish British” , V.S. Naipaul, “a Trinidadian-born British writer”,  Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah  “a British American philosopher and writer “,  and ours truly,  Toyin Omoyeni Falola of course, Pure Yoruba Nigeria. Somebody wants to make a theory out of that? As Einstein famously quipped, “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew”  

Right on !  Other assumptions, this and that writer’s alleged racism , Conrad, Joyce Cary making fun and having a good time at someone  else's expense in Mister Johnson, the itinerant  Naipaul’s non-fiction ( some of it Islamophobia too) some of Paul Theroux ( Fong and the Indians,  as inevitably what happens in anybody’s travelogues - the perspectives of one civilizational background entering the time zones of another kind of civilizations, be it Marco Polo,  Sir Richard Burton's pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and I assume that what Marx said about his friend Lassalle fits nicely into the categories known as racism and antisemitism.

And, what if - God forbid Lord Lugard and Achebe, and his lot had never existed, how would you have planned introducing African Literature to your blue-eyed American students? How, for example would you set about teaching African literature to Joe Biden ( I assume that the only “African Literature”  that he has ever read would be “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” written by his former boss, Barack Obama, the Kenyan-American.

What about Donald J. Trump ( I watched him, same blonde shock of hair, cheerful & upbeat  delivering a speech in South Carolina yesterday) how would you go about teaching him Great African Literature , if he were your student, you must admit, a no ordinary run of the mill American student ?  In both cases, I’d cut out Said and all that jazz about Joseph Conrad in his Orientalism , and I’d dispense with Chinua Achebe and Okonkwo altogether, I’d start with some down to earth poetry, request that he read to me and the class, aloud, The Tragedy of White Injustice by Marcus Garvey  , that he  sing some of Mzwakhe Mbuli, and round him off with some James Baldwin; and I’m sure that he would have become  very interested in Black Literature after those three,  Garvey, Mbuli, and Baldwin , especially Trump on his way to making America Great Forevermore. 

This excerpt from pages 190 -191 of Edward Said’s Orientalism  sounds like what's happening in Nigeria the African Diaspora right now with the Africanisation of knowledge etc .

“It was certainly true that by the middle  of the nineteenth century France ,no less than England and the rest of Europe , had a flourishing knowledge industry of the sort that Flaubert feared, Great numbers of texts were being produced, and more important, the agencies and institutions for their dissemination and propagation were everywhere to be found. As historians of science and knowledge have observed, the organisation of scientific and learned fields that took place in the nineteenth century was both rigorous and all encompassing. Research became a regular activity; there was a regulated exchange of information, and agreement on what the problems were as well as consensus  on the appropriate paradigms for research and its results.” and then it gets even more interesting further down the page fast forward to 2053 and we would be reading about people at post -Cornel West’s Harvard clutching their laptops and demonstrating “ Africa for African scholars y’all…

“

[Harrow, Kenneth]

I’d love to respond to moses’s two postings and cornelius’s recollections and posting. No one on this list can go back to the 70s or before and tell us about what it was like to have studied african literature, then at its inception. He forces us to return to that question, what is african literature, and a little bit, what might “inception” mean.

Of course it dates back much earlier than the 50s, when people like achebe or laye were writing, or the even earlier south african authors who predated them.

And of course the still earlier oral performances and traditions go back a while, with the griots, and then back further and further, with a dash of sundiata and other epics that go back hundreds of years.

There is no “beginning” to african literature, in a meaningful sense, any more than there is to any other literature since the genres and languages in which they were composed always, always, had predecessors who influenced the creators. 

So maybe we can talk about some kind of preliminary moment, not entirely arbitrary, when this movement back in search of the origins of meaning is temporarily halted, as in putting a tack into a piece of fabric. This is the figure used by derrida, coming from lacan, to stop the movement of signifiers coming from previous signifiers, differentiated from others into order to establish, temporarily, meaning.

I don’t mind referring to lacan or derrida or soyinka or anyone else whose notions might help me figure out some literary issue.

That said, i have to say i agree with moses that the usefulness of the theory needs to somehow work, somehow be relevant to the immediate context in which meaning or affect is being produced by the book or art or film. Nothing nothing nothing is so awfully tedious is reading papers about african works that are, somehow, artificially evoked in some play of meaning that just is not part of the world of experience and history that gave meaning to the images and words used. Africa is real, no matter how hybrid, and only feet on the red soil can really give a place from which to view its world.

To make moses’s point more meaningful to me, as he cited a bunch of marxist thinkers, it would make little sense to attempt a class based classical marxist reading on african social structures. On the other hand, it makes little sense to try to read sembene ousmane’s novels stories and films without understanding precisely his intellectual formation in marseilles, working as a union man, ensconced in an intellectual milieu driven largely by the marxist of the 1950s in france. He returned with ideas of revolution, of class conscious thinking, of religion as the opiate of thepeople, etc etc., that blatantly marked his early and middle works—along with his evocations of race and racism, and his attacks on neocolonialism, not least of which included senghor.

Too much to say here: the theoretical apparatus used to explore sembene’s work could betray it if applied mechanically, as althusser might well be; or as hegel might be, with the dialectuic,etc. but if a useful dialogue might result, let’s give it a chance.

The african voices i hear in my ears—let’s say the inimitable, the most wonderful of wonderful, birago diop or hampate ba,—might well serve moses’s program of fostering african grounded thought; even as approaching diop’s “contes” always benefits from harold scheub and other experts in oral literature; and hampate ba’s islam was profoundly marked by sufism, with its african roots reaching far and wide, so that echoes of what cornelius cites, the classic Conference of Birds, helps us to understand his masterworks of Islamic masters, notably Thierno Bokar, or Kaidara , and much more. 

But i need more to understand the overriding concepts at play in constructing genres, in working around past connections without being lost in originary thought; so i reread glissant again to help get me there; and as we know, glissant was himself influenced by 

Deleuze and guattari. 

I read moses's piece, alongside cornelius's radically different approach, and try to talk with them in writing this. This is how theory is developed, by a dialogue, not a monologue. A dialogue with past writers, with fellow thinkers, and with texts. Moses's dialogue insists, rightly, that we find a way to bring into the discussion, and into those who hear it, the relevant language formed by the relevance to the location. 

Ken

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Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 4:34:17 PM

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

I meant to complete the opening sentences by saying no one like cornelius can take us back to the 60s and 70s when we began to study african literature. He was there w the founding scholars and authors, and i find his memories truly invaluable.

Ken

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Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 7:43:12 PM

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[cornelius...@gmail.com]

Most Gracious Kenneth,

This very interesting scholarly discussion matter started by Moses Ochonu is all about academic theses by graduate/ post-graduate researchers etc. Not that I’m planning his trajectory or his next move, but as Ojogbon’s crown prince he does have all my best wishes. Who knows, with such ideas, at sometime in the near future he might be setting up his own degree-awarding African history research department - “The Moses Ochonu Research Centre” at Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton - better still at Obafemi Awolowo University or Ahmadu Bello, Bayero, Nsukka , since charity begins at home, and because of the ongoing brain-drain, home is always the place most in need of further development. But, Mark 6: 4 and there are history departments in Ghana, South Africa, Kenya waiting to be discovered and developed.

Re “no one like cornelius can take us back to the 60s and 70s when we began to study african literature. He was there w the founding scholars and authors”

The founding fathers etc well you have taken care of the claim that “Chinua Achebe is the father of African Literature”  in which case I have always wanted to know, who is the mother, and who is the grandfather, and what tribe are they?

Re - “ founding scholars and authors”,  well, I can name some of them, emphasis on African Literature, during the short period 1966-1971) 

 Professor Eldred Jones, 

Professor Eustace Palmer,

Professor Jack B Moore

Professor Gerald Moore

Professor Abiola Irele  

And of course, also within that period the company of quite a few actors, poets, authors writers movers and shakers such as Yulisa Pat Amadu Maddy (I translated his play “Obasai” for Professor Jack B. Moore) Ngugi Wa Thiong’o to name just two….

In 1969, I was all set to arrive for graduate studies at Tampa, Florida, but having got married ( long story) and being late in applying for Ife where Soyinka was, Better Half & I decided to go to Legon - she  African History, me, Drama ( better a poet, writer, actor,  theatre or movie director, philosopher, musician, politician, foreign minister, president, than an armchair  professor of music, literature, political science , revolution or religion….

I’m very surprised about what's been said so far about useless cosmetic and decorative appendages / name-dropping to beautify theses. In Sweden there’s a pre-doctoral  : förskarutbildning ( research education) of the type that should have eliminated that kind of unproductive tendency. Circa 1975 they were still dribbling with structuralism ( I remember a good friend (now an authority -a Papa Doc in his area and a long since tenured professor at Sweden's premier universities) that he started his thesis with “At the beginning of the end of the last century” and footnoted it…

My brief aside was aimed at the much discussed “African Literature” I suppose in the same manner there are distinct categories known as English Literature, American Literature, Indian, Arabic, Swedish, South American, Caribbean, French, German, Russian, Persian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, European, and World Literature, and within African Literature, all the sub-categories such as “South African poetry”  “Limba Short Stories” etc 

On the theory and polemic side of things, as seminal as always, there’s Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism

On my side of things, in the spirit of tigritude, to directly engage with the text, such as Mo Yan’s unputdownable Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out - first and foremost and not all the PHD theses written about the book….

By the way, Swedish Literature and available in translation, Torgny Lindgren’s Bathsheba is worth a shot  

[Harrow, Kenneth]

Footnote. Include irele among those who bridged francophone and anglophone literatures. His annotated version of cesaire’s CCahier d’un retour is probably his chef d’oeuvre. In any event it is brilliant scholarship, an annotated version with comments and footnotes that do more for cesaire than anything else i’ve seen. Cornelius cites my old buddy george lang, another brilliant scholar who crossed lines between franco and anglo worlds. And he generated much amazing linguistic scholarship living in exile in canada to where he had fled in protest against the vietnam war, along with steve arnold, another scholar who championed cameroonian pidgin literature. Another bridge.

Ken

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From: Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 11:03:24 AM

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Menace of "Theoretical Framework" Hazing in Anglophone Africa

 

If i might add a footnote to cornelius’s recollections and detailing of early african literary studies, please note the omission of francophone authors. In my long career as africanist, i’ve seen from the start the huge gap between the anglo and franco literary worlds. Some tried to bridge that gap: i did so in my earliest work when i was still engaged in north african literature and gave a paper/panel called Hands Across the Desert; my efforts were seconded by tcheho (of blessed memory) who was one of the very few scholars who made similar efforts. I was young and amazed at the real animosity that erupted in the panel when the slave dealing of north africans was evoked as expressions of those from sub-saharan africa (also called, in french, l’afrique noire, in those days).

As time went on, our colleagues in the african literature assn pushed very hard to include oral literature (thank you, again, dan kunene, also of blessed memory); and portuguese literature, that was represented by a few people, as was poetry. And we had at least one scholar who introduced the study of spanish language literatures. And then of environmental studies.

The ALA, strongly influenced by Dennis Brutus (poet, scholar, buddy), the strongest antiApartheid voice imaginable, was very much politically engaged, in contrast to the African Studies Association, with its disdain for the committed values we were grounded in (our statement of values was that we were for the liberation of african peoples).

Sorry, memories of an old geezer

Ken

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of cornelius...@gmail.com <cornelius...@gmail.com>

Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 9:13:54 AM

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

If i might add a footnote to cornelius’s recollections and detailing of early african literary studies, please note the omission of francophone authors. In my long career as africanist, i’ve seen from the start the huge gap between the anglo and franco literary worlds. Some tried to bridge that gap: i did so in my earliest work when i was still engaged in north african literature and gave a paper/panel called Hands Across the Desert; my efforts were seconded by tcheho (of blessed memory) who was one of the very few scholars who made similar efforts. I was young and amazed at the real animosity that erupted in the panel when the slave dealing of north africans was evoked as expressions of those from sub-saharan africa (also called, in french, l’afrique noire, in those days).

As time went on, our colleagues in the african literature assn pushed very hard to include oral literature (thank you, again, dan kunene, also of blessed memory); and portuguese literature, that was represented by a few people, as was poetry. And we had at least one scholar who introduced the study of spanish language literatures. And then of environmental studies.

The ALA, strongly influenced by Dennis Brutus (poet, scholar, buddy), the strongest antiApartheid voice imaginable, was very much politically engaged, in contrast to the African Studies Association, with its disdain for the committed values we were grounded in (our statement of values was that we were for the liberation of african peoples).

Sorry, memories of an old geezer

Ken

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of cornelius...@gmail.com <cornelius...@gmail.com>

Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 9:13:54 AM

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

A beautiful discussion.

Needs to be compiled and archived online.

This discussion, synthesizing diverse views expressed here, helps me clarify my orientations- 

Theory as Cognitive Instrument and Cognitive Skill

Theory may be understood as approaches to understanding the nature of phenomena in their individual characteristics and their relationships with other phenomena at a level requiring a degree of abstraction from the immediately accessible understanding of those phenomena.

Theory could relate to understanding aspects of reality constructed by nature or constructed by human beings or the convergence of both.

Theories are tools to be studied, critiqued, adapted and employed at the informed discretion of the user, working with those tools in terms of a dialogical relationship with their creative and negative possibilities, their strengths and limitations.

A theory is relevant only to the degree that it enables expanded insight, and such expansion could differ for various people at various degrees of significance beyond the sciences, into the more subjective zones of the social sciences and humanities.

Theory exploration, of existing theories, theory construction, of new theories, is a skill that should be cultivated and used as necessary.

Theory construction is a skill for exploring the intrinsic and extrinsic character of aspects of reality or of reality as a whole.

This skill should be grounded in understanding the various ways people explore or have explored theory construction across time and space in terms of the intersection between individual and group creativities and the influence of social contexts on  theory and of theory on social contexts.

A Journey in Intercultural Theory Construction 

      Epistemologies at the Intersection

      of Body and Mind 

One of my interests is epistemology, which I understand as the critical explorations of ways of knowing, their procesess of arriving at insights about particular phenomena, their methods of self assessment and of assessment of the  knowledge claims of other approaches and how this complex of knowing and evaluation of its own knowledge claims and those of other procedures may itself be assessed.

Within this context, I'm interested in the scope of human perception in the relationship between body and mind, between senses and thought, as these continuities are developed in various cultures, interests I pursue through theory and practice, through action and thought.

          Holistic Epistemologies           

          Conjuncting Nature and 

           the Human Being 

English occultist Dion Fortune on the capacity of the human being, through their embodied faculties,  to perceive various aspects of nature, visible and invisible, led to my exploring that claim,   through application of approaches derived, among other sources, from European Romanticism and Symbolism, which is central to developing such ideas in Western thought.

I explored that idea through  working on sacred natural spaces of Benin-City.

The Benin landscape, until the expanding urbanization of the last ten to twenty years, was deeply conducive to such explorations on account of the presence of sacred trees and groves within the city and it's environs, climaxed by the Ogba forest marked by a numinous atmosphere, an arboreal space that has been decimated in creating a housing estate.

Incidentally,  Benin sacred natural spaces and  European Western and Symbolist thought on nature and the nature spirituality of Western magic are defined by  similar premises correlating human cognitive possibilities and the character of nature.

These metaphysical views and their correlative epistemic values operate in terms of holistic epistemologies.

Such metaphysical and epistemic constructs understand human embodiment as an aspect of the multivalent constitution of the universe in its union of matter, mind and spirit.

Underscoring the significance of trans-cultural study, I am able to make these formulations only after reflecting on the outcomes of my practical explorations and their relationships to perspectives from various cultures.

           From Western Esotericism to

           African Epistemologies

I was able to better understand my experiences in validating Fortune's inspirational account, as well as the similarities of my experiences to, as well as difference from those of the Western Romantics and Symbolists through reading Babatunde Lawal's summation of classical Yoruba epistemology in "Representing the Self and it's Metaphysical Other In Yoruba Art".

In explaining the Yoruba concept "oju ona" the ordinary eye or basic perception, and "oju inu" the inward eye or inward or penetrative perception, he lists what may be understood as a perceptual continuum from sensory  perception to perception building on or going beyond the senses, from memory, to critical thinking  to dreams to extra-sensory perception, moving from conventional to  unconventional, extra-sensory perception.

Did the English Romantic thinker William Blake not declare in the 18th to 19th centuries, " I see  through my eyes, not with them?", even though what I'm describing had more to do with seeing further with the eyes than is conventional. 

Anene Chukwu Umeh's After God is Dibia" describes a similar idea in Igbo thought, in terms of the eye with which one sees the physical world and the eye with which one perceives both the physical and the spiritual worlds.

Umeh adds to his own formulation the possibility of moving beyond discrete  perceptions  to cosmic perception.

Umeh thereby adds to the African range of similar ideas a cosmic and mystical dimension, which I did not encounter in Yoruba thought, a mystical dimension which I had first discovered in Western occult and Romantic and Symbolist thought,  motivating  my exploratory journey in the first place, seeking to discover through exploring  nature in Benin-City the cosmic sweep the English poet William Wordsworth so beautifully describes, that the European theologian Bonaventure references in Journey of the Mind to God, that Plotinus references in the Enneads, an orientation central to Western aesthetic history generally.

       From Nature Animism to Nature

       Mysticism 

I pursued this goal through the animistic orientations of Western magic, resonating with the sacred landscape of Benin-City, constructed in terms of animism as a central feature of classical African thought.

This environment engagement enabled me appreciate animism as capable of being borne out of experience of reality, along perhaps with other possibilities, experiences I have undergone.

             The Holistic Epistemology of

             Hindu Srividya 

The Hindu Sri Vidya school provides a powerful imagistic expression of similar perceptual continuities in terms of the picture of the Goddess Tripura Sundari.

She is depicted holding her five flowery arrows of kama, pleasure, understood as sensory potential and a primary principle of existence grounded in cosmological reality.

Pleasure is understood, in this context, as an epistemological potential grounded in or related to the senses but going beyond them.

The Goddesses' arrows represent the pleasures enabled by the five senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell, and her bow of desire, if I recall correctly.

The senses are understood as both instruments of pleasure, enabling fixation on basic sense perception as defining reality.

Those perceptions, however, are  also understood as capable of acting as bridges or windows into realities beyond conventional perception.

This scope of awareness is subsumed in the cosmic unity the Goddess embodies as the constellation and enabler of all possibilities, as summed up by the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram ritual. 

Journeys like the one I have described above make me hungry to learn across cultural and geographical boundaries, seeking to understand how homo sapiens understands itself and the cosmos in which it finds itself, navigating between my embodied experience and African and non-African bodies of thought within the context of the question of how cognitive structures may emanate from as well as transcend their originative contexts.

Nimi Wariboko's Cognitive Nexus 

"I...acknowledge all my teachers, past and present, in formal and informal settings, who helped to form and inspire me to work at the uncomfortable intersectionality of disciplines. 

I am a scholar on the 

boundary. I work on the boundaries of economics and ethics, economics 

and religion, economics and philosophy, ethics and theology, philosophy 

and theology, social history and ethics, social sciences and theology, and 

present and not-yet-present knowledges.

 My thinking always functions at 

an interstitial site, wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/

nor. This is a site that opposes binary opposition, oscillating between 

spheres of knowledge. It is the fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site of 

erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights.

I am talking of the uncanny 

non-place that promises to birth the underivably new in history. 

My soul finds deep peace at this frontier, the edge of knowledge that is always 

approaching and withdrawing approach.

 This book reflects this orientation 

of my scholarship. And I thank you, the reader, for your forbearance in 

walking and working with me in this unhomely space".

Nimi Wariboko, The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory, 20

[Harrow, Kenneth]

So much to mull over, toyin. Thanks so much for this series of reflections. A few reactions: in science, these days, one of the critical tests of any claim is that it must stand the test of oppositional claims, that it can be tested by negating its premises. Your leaning on various claims of pleasure might be put to those tests?

I love the wariboko statement (or is it yours too?) about operating on the border or boundary. I was taken by deconstruction very early, and on the cover of my first book placed an image of the threshhold of a thatched hut used to illustrate the hut used by circumcised boys, in Laye’s L'enfant noir; and i used the moebius strip to mark the space/border between the inside of the hut and the outside. Just as camara laye came to occupy the space between two worlds.

It takes daring for you to evoke hindu texts, hegel, wariboko, william blake, etc. it is the same daring that marks cajetan ikeha's work, breaking the assumed boundaries between the human, vegetative, animal, spiritual universes. But our literature has had the daring: look at ben okri's early stories and then all those works centering on the obanji.

How to change our epistemologies, especially in a world where the production of knowledge obeys laws of neoliberal capitalism, as moses rightly pointed out?? We just have to keep talking. So keep it up, toyin!

Ken

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Great thanks Ken.

Will look into Ikeha's work which you reference so glowingly.

The quote is Wariboko's, as I indicated  in giving his name and the books page. 

The Hindu pleasure theory is not a scientific theory so I'm puzzled you are thinking in terms of it's being assessed using scientific criteria 

[cornelius...@gmail.com]

Among South Africa's Anti-apartheid poets ,you mention Dennis Brutus as “buddy”. I’m impressed that you knew him in the flesh. We could expand the field a little beyond poetry,  to embrace all of South Africa’s  anti-apartheid writers within that period, extend the field to include all that jazz against apartheid among whom I must also mention a few buddies, during his sojourn in Sweden, Johnny Mbizo Dyani ( he gave me the name  “Themba Feza” which means “Hope to complete” after his late trumpet player Mongezi Feza),South African jazz pianist Bheki Mseleku( I Introduced him to Siddha Meditation) and the great gentleman Dudu Pukwana - mostly in London, 53 Pryor Road, Marble Arch) well, I mention some of them in this thread….also Winston "Wana" Makoba a declamatory poet -studied piano in Russia, and, of course, Lefifi Tladi 

There was also all that anti-apartheid reggae vibration pulsating  24/ 7/365

Whilst we are at it, we ought not to forget Wole Soyinka’s extraordinary input in the war, his theatre war against apartheid and his favourite word by which to describe apartheid: obscenity…

I should also like to observe that some of the Francophone states, such as Côte d'Ivoire under Félix Houphouët-Boigny (I was in Nigeria at the time) were all to conciliatory in tone, advocating “ dialogue” with Apartheid South Africa - in contrast with the likes of Patrick Wilmot who in 1981 had to go underground in Nigeria 

And ,last but not least, the best thing that he has ever done in this life ,a big plus:

Joe Biden vs Apartheid 

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Ken,

I'm reading Cajetan's Naturalizing Africa.

I see you were his PhD supervisor. 

Thanks

Toyin

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

P.S. And Molefe Pheto ( Stockholm, London)

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

Hi toyin,

I don’t think we can assess theories that are metaphysical with physical science criteria. My goal now is not to leave it to the scientists to define how we are to assess truth or value or knowledge. You want knowledge to be viewed across borders—which i applaud. For me that can mean testing ways of understanding, and i simply borrowed one of the ways that intrigued me from the physicists who claim a theory that cannot be tested by negation is not valid. What does that mean? Perhaps in some sense it is a way to enable us to get past the limits of faith in determining how people accept beliefs?

Ken

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[cornelius...@gmail.com]

P.S. Wole Soyinka vs Apartheid 

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

P.S. Gilbert Matthews ( Sweden