When she joined the Roman Catholic Church as a young girl, Professor Bagele Chilisa recalls being requested to ask her parents to give her an English Christian name. Her father would not allow any such thing.
“My father made it clear that my name, Bagele, had a meaning to which the family and the community could connect and relate. He could not authorise any new name. He explained that he was TaBagele and my mother was MmaBagele and they were known in the community through the names that connected them to their daughter. My change of name would start a chain of other changes of names and would require the community to figure out new relationships with him and me,” Chilisa writes in the preface of “Indigenous Research Methodologies.”
Radical in tone and perspective, this academic textbook is both a scholarly amplification of the Africanist perspective bequeathed to Chilisa by her father and an important addition to the body of knowledge thus far produced by post-indigenous research scholarship.
Over decades the author has observed with keen intellectual interest the nature of research scholarship as it relates to the Third World and satisfied that a defensible theory had matured in her mind, she blended her observations, thoughts, conclusions and recommendations into a 344-page book that is currently selling like the latest gadget from Apple on amazon.com. Perhaps what confers a dramatic quality on the book is when she reaches into her cache of memories to recount personal experiences. Once she cringed with shock when she read a report of an HIV/AIDS research study she was collaborating in with westerners that told plain lies about Batswana.
With an outsized oeuvre of research scholarship and plying her trade at the University of Botswana, Chilisa puts western scholarship operating in the Third World under hard, honest scrutiny and reaches the conclusion that it has, by wilful design, turned the ship of academic research into the Titanic.
In a masterfully researched and exhaustively documented work, she shows how the findings of western scholars are notoriously poisoned by personal prejudices and become not a reflection of reality but knockabout portraits cobbled together with the intent of sneering, jeering and leering at Third World communities. She argues that this is not valid scholarship but deliberate and ritualised effort to rearticulate racial hostility that echoes through centuries of an asymmetric relationship between the first and third worlds.
Naturally, an academic research tradition founded on the culture, history and philosophies of the Euro-western thought could only produce knowledge that dehumanised and degraded people in the Third World. Surveying the path of destruction wrought by the tornado that is western-oriented research, Chilisa finds debris of indigenous knowledge either shattered, bent out of shape or battered beyond recognition. Using the tools of indigenous research methodologies, she salvages this wreckage and attempts to put it back together and back in the marketplace of human knowledge.
The one most curious thing about Euro-western research is that although first world researchers often collaborate with those from the third world, the former always dominate the latter. For example, Mexicans researchers have had no luck trying to persuade American counterparts that they are their equal intellectual partners. The book also notes instances when third worlders will automatically and excessively defer to first worlders. In a collaborative project between United Kingdom and Ghanaian researchers, the latter looked to their British counterparts to impart relevant knowledge and skills “which in most cases refer to the banked knowledge on research methodologies.”
To correct this injustice, Chilisa’s book explores in depth and at length, the various ways that indigenous practices and values could be validated in research. She argues that there is need to co-opt the power of research to unlock indigenous knowledge and goes on propose a package of research tools to retrofit post-colonial indigenous scholarship.
Chilisa is part of a tiny brave chorus of like-minded scholar associates energised around the idea that the Third World has a lot to offer to the global body of knowledge in terms of knowledge. Through an infusion of intelligence and guts, this cadre has blended its skills and brains on an enterprise that seeks to expand knowledge on indigenous research as a first step towards restoring people in the Third World to full humanity. The textbook brings together postcolonial indigenous epistemologies and methodologies from across the world to show how that can be done. It theorises postcolonial indigenous ways of doing research and explores the application of these methodologies through case studies. Apparently, there has been excellent cross-pollination of ideas among post-colonial indigenous scholars for them to produce a respectable body of knowledge into which has obviously gone millions of hours of incisive human thought.
An African-American scholar called Molefi Asante has identified two principles of Ma’at and Nommo taken from the Nile Valley civilisation as intrinsic to all African cultures. Wedged somewhere between those two is Botswana’s fifth principle of botho. The book illustrates how botho can be used to carry out research that can “facilitate a rebirth of a people relegated to the lowest position in the Euro-western scale of human hierarchy and to the fourth world in the global market economy.” The book further asserts that a research approach informed by the botho principle would require researchers “to contextualise conventional research methods and ethical principles, taking into consideration the history of colonialism and its effects on the formerly colonised.”
The western media has overexposed the haka to the world and resultantly that is about all it knows about the Maori. What that media takes absolutely no interest in is a research methodology called Kaupapa Maori which is about research that is culturally safe, sensitive and relevant in the Maori community. The main aim of this methodology is to restore the Maori to their pre-colonization indigenous systems.
Upon concern that Euro-American instruments that detect and measure common mental disorders (CMD) were not adequately validated for use in diverse settings in Africa, a group of researchers in Zimbabwe undertook a study to develop an indigenous measure of CMD in a primary care setting and examine the psychometric properties of the measure. Through an exhaustive process that involved interviews with primary caregivers and patients themselves, generation and collation of Shona idioms on mental disorder, the researchers produced what is now known as the Shona Symptom Questionnaire. This was the first indigenous measure of mental disorder to be developed in sub-Saharan Africa.
Setswana culture’s contribution to post-indigenous research is a method called Mmogo which is Setswana for “togetherness.” The book says that this method is best applied in explorative and descriptive research designs and is particularly suitable for research in which visual images are key to meaning-making through the process of objectification. The book raps western researchers on the knuckles for a tendency to look down upon the researched and notes that conversely, and in line with the principles of community psychology and social constructionism, a researcher using the Mmogo method does not go into the community as an expert “but as someone who, together with the members of the community, co-constructs reality.”
The one important lesson from the history of the struggle between the coloniser and colonised is that a project as ambitious and as revolutionary as that of Chilisa and her associates was always going to be resisted by the coloniser because it threatens to upset the apple-cart. Collectively, these researchers lay out a catholicity of vision that holds full promise of emancipating the long-suffering masses in the Third World and what they advocate is well primed to result in a net improvement for human rights and social justice. In the United States, one very brilliant black scholar called Cornel West, who practically grew up in Ivy League universities and rotates among them as a lecturer, has been dismissed by establishment figures as a not ‘serious scholar’ because of the radical, anti-establishment positions he takes on a host of issues. It therefore comes as no surprise that the research paradigm that post-colonial indigenous scholars advocate is being resisted by some in the west.
Oblivious to the fact that their own of scholarship is fraudulent, a resentment gang in the west sees post-indigenous research as little more than a Fifth Column amid the well-manicured groves of academe. It seems reasonable to make the supposition that this gang would naturally be worried that the sort of paradigm that Chilisa et al advocate has potential to sluice out the entire stock of knowledge about the Third World that has been deposited in the First World granary over centuries.
The audiences that the author identifies for the book are advanced undergraduate, master’s and beginning doctoral students taking research methods courses in education and the social and behavioural sciences. In the same year it saw the light of print, this textbook has been prescribed as required for students at some universities in the United States, Australia and Canada.
However, the book will thrill non-specialised mass readers because its language is mostly accessible. For this feat of putting extraordinary scholarship within the grasp of ordinary people, the author deserves praise. The book should also animate those who take an interest in African Renaissance. Idle talk about restoring Africa to its former glory and not taking proactive steps to fulfill that aim is day-dreaming; on the other hand, producing a step-by-step guide of how that can be done is both a recipe for action and action itself. Precious little has changed because while it keeps acquiring new names with the march of time, imperialism has not changed its basic noxious features. In an age when it calls itself globalisation, the fundamental power structure that holds other nations back remains intact. The book dispenses practical advice – that can be profitably heeded, on battle strategies that can be used to change this order and what foot soldiers like Chilisa do is a virtuous act of third world citizenship.
In the book, Chilisa makes the point that a good starting point towards reclaiming that which the Third World has lost through being analysed and processed by the west is to emphasise the use of indigenous languages as part of its cultural heritage. That is an excellent point but why is her book written in English? Ngugi wa Thiong’o found himself in similar situation when he advocated for decolonising the mind by writing a book that gave guidance on how to do that in a coloniser’s language. One understands the practicality that compels indigenous scholars to manage this crisis within the existing structures and norms but for the indigenous language argument to be anything close to persuasive, those advocating it (ironically enough) have to convince us with not with words but deeds. The late Michael Jackson sang about ‘starting with the man in mirror.’ For any piece of advice they want to dispense, researchers must start with the person in the mirror.
That aside, the book is a standout effort in the enterprise of African Renaissance. Its insights are valuable as a lens on how (in the form of misguided development programmes, policies and legislation) western scholarship extends into multiple dimensions of life in neo-colonised geopolitical entities of the Third World. Beyond bringing these points out and posing tough questions, the book also posits answers. Through this book the dispossessed of the Third World should embrace the opportunity and necessity of cognitive restructuring because for too long they have wedded their fate to a civilisation that only seeks to destroy them.
