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"Decolonization Africa, Sub-Saharan."
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Rethinking bilingual education in postcolonial contexts
Taking an ethnographic study of the purpose and value of bilingual education in Mozambique as a starting point, this book calls for critical adaptations when theories of bilingual education, based on practices in the North, are applied to the countries of the global South.
eBook
Methodological Decolonisation and Local Epistemologies in Business Ethics Research
This paper contributes to the discussion on methodological decolonisation in business ethics research by illustrating how local epistemologies can shape methodology. Historically, business ethics research has been dominated by Western methodologies, which have been argued to be restrictive and limit contextually relevant theorising in non-Western contexts. Over the past decade, scholarship has called for more diversity in research methods and epistemologies. This paper regards arguments founded along neatly divided universalist versus contextualised methodologies as a false dilemma. Instead, we explore how ubuntu, a sub-Saharan African epistemology, can contribute as a complementary epistemology and methodology to interpretivism when conducting business ethics research in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper discusses four aspects—research agenda, access, power relations, and context-sensitive methods—that highlight practical ways in which ubuntu epistemology, with its communitarian and relational underpinnings, can enhance business ethics research. We illustrate that methodological decolonisation can be achieved by fusing relevant elements of local epistemologies and methodologies and conventional methodologies to generate context-relevant research approaches.
Journal Article
COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa: impacts on vulnerable populations and sustaining home-grown solutions
This commentary draws on sub-Saharan African health researchers’ accounts of their countries’ responses to control the spread of COVID-19, including social and health impacts, home-grown solutions, and gaps in knowledge. Limited human and material resources for infection control and lack of understanding or appreciation by the government of the realities of vulnerable populations have contributed to failed interventions to curb transmission, and further deepened inequalities. Some governments have adapted or limited lockdowns due to the negative impacts on livelihoods and taken specific measures to minimize the impact on the most vulnerable citizens. However, these measures may not reach the majority of the poor. Yet, African countries’ responses to COVID-19 have also included a range of innovations, including diversification of local businesses to produce personal protective equipment, disinfectants, test kits, etc., which may expand domestic manufacturing capabilities and deepen self-reliance. African and high-income governments, donors, non-governmental organizations, and businesses should work to strengthen existing health system capacity and back African-led business. Social scientific understandings of public perceptions, their interactions with COVID-19 control measures, and studies on promising clinical interventions are needed. However, a decolonizing response to COVID-19 must include explicit and meaningful commitments to sharing the power—the authority and resources—to study and endorse solutions.
Journal Article
The UTH-UMB Global Health Education Collaboration: Building a Bidirectional Exchange Based on Equity and Reciprocity
The global health exchange program between the University Teaching Hospitals (UTH) of Lusaka, Zambia and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) has been operating since 2015. As trainees and facilitators of this exchange program, we describe our experiences working in Lusaka and Baltimore, and strengths and challenges of the partnership. Since 2015, we have facilitated rotations for 71 UMB trainees, who spent four weeks on the Infectious Disease (ID) team at UTH. Since 2019 with funding from UMB, nine UTH ID trainee physicians spent up to six weeks each rotating on various ID consult services at University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). Challenges in global health rotations can include inadequate preparation or inappropriate expectations among high-income country trainees, low-value experiences for low- and middle-income country trainees, lack of appropriate mentorship at sites, and power imbalances in research collaborations. We try to mitigate these issues by ensuring pre-departure and on-site orientation for UMB trainees, cross-cultural mentored experiences for all trainees, and intentional sharing of authorship and credit on scientific collaborations. We present a description of our medical education collaboration as a successful model for building equitable and reciprocal collaborations between low- and middle-income countries and high-income countries, and offer suggestions for future program initiatives to enhance global health education equity among participants and organizations.
Journal Article
From a Neglected to a Crowded Field—The Academic Study of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
An estimated five hundred million Muslims—close to a third of the global Muslim population and half of the African population—live on the African continent [...]
Journal Article
Farmer resistance to agriculture commercialisation in northern Ghana
Drawing on postcolonial literature and theories of farmer resistance, this article provides an empirically based alternative explanation of African farmer behaviours to narratives that blame them for their lack of technology adoption. Based on six months of ethnographic immersion in one district in the Northern Region of Ghana
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, we identify the ways that farmers defy commercial agriculture investment, government services and non-governmental organisation (NGO) project interventions aimed at intensification, and describe their reasons for doing so. This study interprets farmers' acts of defiance, such as side-selling or falsely weighting their products, as insights into everyday acts of resistance. We find that throughout Ghana's postcolonial period, agriculture intensification policy and practice have produced an environment where various development actors and farmers have both a sense of entitlement and mistrust of each other. Farmers' acts of sabotage may be spaces where they make rational choices based on experiences of historical antecedence, including decades of failed development projects, elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony.
Journal Article
\How Little Progress\? A Political Economy of Postcolonial Nutrition
As an important determinant of population health and a significant development in the history of twentieth-century medicine, nutritional science has received considerable critical attention in recent years. In sub-Saharan Africa, where food insecurity and nutritional deficiency weigh heavily on individual populations and the polities that govern them, the prevention and treatment of malnutrition has often reflected the relationship between health provisioning and dominant forms of political economy. The relationship between imperial politics and colonial-era biomedicine, inclusive of nutritional science, has received considerable attention. Western involvement in African health has, however, hardly diminished since the end of imperial rule. Despite this, historians have not adequately explored the role of Western politics in the development of postcolonial science. Through an exploration of prevailing discourses regarding nutrition in independent Africa, this article offers broad insights into the relationship between postcolonial anxieties and foreign policy objectives regarding Africa and the development of medical consensus.
Journal Article
Western Intellectual Hegemony and Academic Research in Sub-Saharan Africa
In this study, the narrative literature review methodology was assigned to interrogate the western intellectual hegemony and the challenges in academic research in sub-Saharan Africa. The Marxist dependency theory of knowledge was commissioned as the lens for analysis. Despite the presence of vast literature indicating that sub-Saharan Africa is submerged in chronic challenges ranging from poverty and hunger to poor health services, this study found that the region continuously lags behind in knowledge production. The factors that facilitate western intellectual hegemony and stunted knowledge production are linked to knowledge imperialism and the digital divide. The study proffered strategies to reduce Western intellectual hegemony, such as investment in infrastructure and training that focus on decolonisation and empowerment of chronically disadvantaged African academics, such as women and early-career researchers.
Journal Article
South African science teachers' strategies for integrating indigenous and Western knowledges in their classes: Practical lessons in decolonisation
Framed within the broader discourse on decolonising African education, this article aims to contribute to the project of integrating indigenous and Western knowledges in southern African education. Following a participatory action research (PAR) cycle, a team of five South African science teachers and one German researcher explored whether and how indigenous knowledges (IK) could be integrated into the teachers' regular classes. The article focuses on the first two phases of the PAR cycle and discusses how challenges impeding knowledge integration were solved and how science lessons that integrated aspects of Western and indigenous knowledges were planned. While the South African science curriculum explicitly invites knowledge integration, it hardly contains any IK and there are no generally available teaching materials. Moreover, some of the participating teachers did not have IK. Yet, integration was possible, for example, through using the learners' communities as resources, a strategy that worked well in both primary and secondary grades. The article suggests that the very practice-oriented research process was also a process of intellectual empowerment and decolonisation. Calling on the agency of teachers, parents, community elders, traditional healers, and academics, the article argues for a bottom-up approach to knowledge integration and to decolonising education.
Journal Article