Introduction to the special section by the guest editor

Bame Nsamenang’s contributions to scholarship on human development in Africa were grounded in the epistemological insight that psychology is a reflexive enterprise, and that its application in Africa demands according priority to a cultural heritage deeply embedded in the social circumstances in which children are raised. While those circumstances change over time and are powerfully impacted by encounters with people of other sociocultural origins, to understand how African children develop into African adults demands an Africentric focus. His own “theorisation of human development [was] grounded in primary local research, enriched by reflection on personal experience, critical reading of contemporary Western psychology, and wide-ranging review of African culture, philosophy, history and politics” (Serpell, in press). The social ontogenetic perspective elaborated in Nsamenang’s (1992) seminal book “Human development in cultural context” informed several processes over the course of his vibrant international career. These continue to thrive in the scholarly literature, inspiring new research questions and research methods, as well as challenging policy proposals and practices by applied scientists and policymakers regarding appropriate ways of designing educational, health, and social services for children in Africa. This commemorative section of the Journal of Psychology in Africa illustrates these various ways in which Nsamenang’s enduring influence is felt and will continue to be manifested in years to come.

Seth Oppong’s article builds on Nsamenang’s (2007) critique of most psychology in Africa as having been narrowly constrained by its connection with colonialism. He reviews several different formulations of the paradoxically self-defeating tendency of African scholarship to deny African cultural beliefs and practices a respected place in the interpretation of African behaviour and experience. He further argues that the exogenous influence of epistemological violence is overlain with current institutional practices within the continent that sustain the hegemonic marginalisation of indigenous cultural resources by Western traditions under the guise of globalisation. Oppong challenges indigenous African scholars to critically examine their own practices for symptoms of the condition termed negromarchy by the African-American scholar Thomas (1971): “a form of confusion and doubt of self-worth in an African … due to dependency on or the use of standards and definitions from White American culture” (cited in Jackson 1976, p. 25). He proposes several complementary, strategic ways in which African scholarship can promote a “healing process”:

• the inclusion of more African content in psychology syllabi implemented at African universities;

• greater emphasis by African journals on accuracy relative to methodological rigour as a criterion for accepting manuscripts for publication;

• less emphasis by African university administrators on international citation indicators as a measure of research output quality when assessing African scholars for faculty promotion; and

• more nuanced reference by African moderators of public opinion to global university rankings that rely on publication counts in international databases.

Through these strategic interventions, Oppong calls for the systematic promotion of African “epistemic authenticity with the view to ensuring that the conceptions of reality … reflect authentic African socio-cultural realities but not an imposed or self-imposed contrived reality borrowed or derived from the West” (p. 298).

In the second article, Therese Tchombe, a long-term collaborator with Nsamenang, presents a complement to Nsamenang’s social ontogenetic perspective on African children’s development, in the form of her theoretical construct of mediated mutual reciprocity. Drawing on focus group discussions with young people and their parents in widely dispersed communities across the diverse nation of Cameroon, Tchombe notes a wide consensus “that despite the challenges and adversities faced by these children, their ingenuity, resilience and cultural assets play an important role in mediating positive outcomes” (p. 301). Given the prevalence in African contexts of participatory rather than explicitly instructional learning, she argues that major Western theories that recognise the active role of the learner fall short of acknowledging “the fact that the child is the main driver of his/her own development and learning” (p. 301). Building on Nsamenang’s theme of indigenous African socialisation as priming children for the emergence of the next phase of their development, Tchombe’s construct of mediated mutual reciprocity (MMR) articulates a theoretical account of how “African parenting values and practices foster children’s self- education in participative learning processes in their families and communities, especially in the peer cultures of early childhood” (p. 306). Rather than construing adults as shaping the development of the child, “MMR rather views the child as the one who initiates his or her own development and then actively stimulates the adult in mutual mediation and reciprocity” (p. 306).

The third article (by Sheina Lew-Levy, Alyssa Crittenden, Adam Boyette, Ibrahim Mabulla, Barry Hewlett, and Michael Lamb) is focused on learning- through-participation in economic work by children and adolescents in two widely geographically separated African hunter-gatherer societies. It presents detailed, quantitative observational data, supplemented with qualitative interviews. The predominant form of socioeconomic organisation in sub-Saharan Africa, including the Bamenda grasslands of Cameroon – where Nsamenang grew up and conducted his initial field research published in collaboration with Lamb (Nsamenang & Lamb 1993) – is sedentary agriculture or animal husbandry. However, the forager societies that hosted the present study:

… primarily rely on non-domesticated resources; are fiercely egalitarian in the sense that there is no inherited hierarchy according to age, and little differentiation of status according to sex … [and] value autonomy in the sense that individuals rarely direct each other or impose their will on one another. (pp. 309–310)

While ecological variations between the two settings were predictably matched by differences in particular patterns of child participation in economic activity, the study found that in both sites:

… children were rarely assigned chores. Children decided whether to forage, and with whom. Adults respected children’s decisions to forage with or without adults, even if these decisions countered normative foraging group compositions … Taken together, these findings demonstrated that the cultural value of autonomy shared by many foragers is evident in the childrearing practices of Hadza and BaYaka parents … Whereas Nsamenang noted the indigenous African social ontogenetic paradigm “is premised not on an independent or autonomous frame; its foundational principle is an interdependent or relational script”, [this study’s] data instead suggested that for Hadza and BaYaka foragers, individual autonomy precedes interdependence, even as foragers cooperate in all aspects of life. (p. 315)

However, while respecting their autonomy:

… adults were attuned to children’s skills, and provided opportunities for learning through intent participation rather than explicit instruction … While learning was primarily in the domain of subsistence, children also developed an understanding of cultural values and norms of behaviour, such as the sexual division of labour and autonomy. (p. 315)

The authors conclude with the recommendation that “[f]uture studies should consider differences in subsistence and environment when investigating learning cross- culturally” (p. 316).

Widespread opportunities for the participative learning processes highlighted by Nsamenang as characteristic of African childhood settings are afforded by indigenous games and songs. As Serpell & Nsamenang (2014) noted, they represent a somewhat neglected fund of knowledge for enriching the quality of Early Childhood Development Care and Education (ECDCE) programming. The article by Godfrey Ejuu, set in Uganda, takes up the challenge of documenting such games and articulating their affordances for psychomotor, cognitive, and socioemotional learning. Despite the absence of formal instructional guides or adult supervision, the games that he describes are clearly constituted by rules, adherence to which is mediated by consensus among participants. Drawing on Nsamenang’s Africentric philosophy, Ejuu reflects on how indigenous games represent a significant element of African cultural tradition, worthy of international recognition as a distinctive regional contribution to world heritage. Moreover, if local traditional games were incorporated in the curriculum of Early Childhood Education programmes as a pedagogical resource, their familiarity to elders in the children’s home community might enhance the depth of mutual understanding between parents and teachers.

Nsamenang’s Africentric commitment extended beyond theory into application through

… a critical engagement with policy proposals and practices by applied social scientists, policymakers and educators regarding appropriate ways of designing ECDCE services in Africa, and a sustained and productive commitment to nurturing endogenous African scholarship on child development and education. (Serpell, in press)

The article by Alan Pence, another long-term collaborator with Nsamenang, documents the context and impact of their well-known contributions to applied developmental psychology over an extended time period across the African continent, notably in ECDCE policy development and in tertiary education’s engagement with the field of child development. Noting the remarkable cumulative impact of the Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU) initiative over the first two decades of the 21st century, Pence also illustrates regional progress on a number of other indicators; including the number of African tertiary colleges and universities offering programmes on ECD/ECE, and the number of African-led ECD publications appearing in the scholarly literature. Regarding the content of that literature, he touches on a topic close to concerns expressed in the article by Oppong, noting a dynamic tension around the insider-outsider axis, between universalistic generalisation and local validation, expressed in policy, curriculum and practice as a still enduring tension between, on the one hand search for and promotion of single “best practices” and on the other hand support for diversification and local relevance. Nsamenang, as Pence notes, was a resolutely persistent advocate of endogenously generated curriculum and local accountability. In both theory and practice his work served as a buttress against the power of invasive intervention, and manifested its own power to endure and expand through advocacy and professional education.

The last contribution to this commemorative section is a review by Dabie Nabuzoka of the Handbook of Applied Developmental Science in Sub-Saharan Africa published in 2017, and edited by Amina Abubakar and the late Fons van de Vijver. In addition to a chapter by Nsamenang on “Doing human development scholarship in Africa within the crosscurrents of Euro-Western intellectual cascade”, the handbook includes 19 chapters by other authors, and as the editors observe:

… there is a good representation of African- based scholars and of scholars who have actively engaged in research in Africa over a prolonged period. The authors of the different chapters bring a wealth of experience from field work in Africa, thus providing an in-depth understanding of the developmental issues from an African perspective. (p. 4)

Nabuzoka provides a concise summary of individual chapters and concludes that the book:

… contributes to the development of African Psychology by illustrating the link between various aspects of the African context and general and psychological development, and covering a wide range of African-based research. Methodological considerations in making such links between context and psychological functioning, and state-of- the-art strategies for maximising the developmental potential of children in Sub-Saharan Africa are carefully illustrated and discussed, together with some policy and practical implications. (p. 336)

Collectively, the various contributions to this section illustrate the multiple implications for research and practice of the publications by Bame Nsamenang, whose creative energy has inspired a movement that seems poised to endure and grow, affirming the value of African indigenous ideas and practices for understanding and supporting child development both in Africa and elsewhere around the world.

Although Nsamenang had a fluent oral command of French, almost all of his publications were in English. The recent publication of the long-awaited French translation of the 2011 Handbook (Nsamenang, Tchombe & Sabatier 2019) adds a welcome layer of accessibility of writings about his Africentric perspective for a francophone readership in Africa.

ORCID

Robert Serpell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6902-1780