Situated understanding of human development in Africa: Systematic inquiries at the nexus of psychology,social science and history

Multiple landscapes of Jahoda’s exploration

Human experience seems to be an open field for every one of us to interpret. Yet philosophers (devotees of a search for wisdom) have struggled across many societies and periods of history to guide our interpretations, generating principles, theories and methods of inquiry. In the wake of Western culture’s so-called Age of Enlightenment and accompanying applications of natural science and technology in the industrial revolution, philosophy gave way to a proliferation of specialized academic disciplines, including the biological sciences of anatomy, physiology and genetics, the social sciences of anthropology and sociology, the humanities disciplines of history, linguistics and the arts, and loosely wedged among them psychology.

Gustav Jahoda’s writings explored variations of human thought and development across three complementary landscapes (each of them in a sense cultural ¹ ): ethnolinguistic, disciplinary and historical. The landscapes intersect in complex ways, and each can be adopted as a framework within which to interpret the others. Over the course of his long series of publications, Jahoda provided the international community of academic scholarship with a dazzling array of insights into how different disciplines within which human development has been investigated in Africa have informed the practices of different research communities, and how particular concepts, theories and methods have emerged within and beyond the boundaries of those disciplines. One recurrent theme of his works is that socio-cultural and politico-economic contexts have influenced the formulation of theories and the dissemination of ideas.

Two social institutions were exported during the 19th and 20th centuries from Western Europe and the USA to the rest of the world: the factory and the school. The history of that export is laden with processes of political domination and economic exploitation, as well as religious proselytization, some of which have been more or less successfully resisted or repelled. But its overwhelming legacy remains a pattern of cultural hegemony that legitimizes and prioritizes concepts, theories and methods that originally gained prominence in Europe in the period of the so-called Enlightenment, accompanied revolutionary advances in the natural sciences and informed many aspects of the growth of modern technology. The institutionalized practices of industrial production and formal education represented by the modern factory and school evolved in response primarily to the eco-cultural demands of Western European societies, expanding to include what I shall term the NoWeMics (More Industrialized Countries of the 21st-century, most of which are located in the Northern part of the Western hemisphere).

Because of their economic and military might, the NoWeMics (comprising less than one fifth of the world’s population) wield disproportionate influence in many international affairs, including formulation of purportedly benevolent programmes of economic and technical aid to nations of the Majority World. Under the guise of promoting “development” in those nations, the physical and social sciences are routinely deployed as key intellectual resources for the optimal design of public policies, professional practices and education to modernize the cultures of the recipients of aid. But since the application of the concepts, theories and methods of modern science has been guided by the eco-cultural demands of NoWeMics, some aspects of the resulting institutions and practices of industry and education require significant adaptation in order to respond appropriately to the very different demands of societies in the Majority World (Serpell & Nsamenang, 2014).

The importance of language and culture

Child development can be construed as a process of “acquiring culture” (Jahoda & Lewis, 1988), also known as enculturation or socialization. Of course, as biological organisms, children can also be construed as growing in size, becoming physically stronger and capable of reproduction. Concurrently, the child’s brain develops in ways that correspond to (underlie, make possible) increasingly complex cognitive and emotional competencies for intelligence, wisdom, love, friendship, leadership and all the other virtues that human societies cherish. But to qualify for such attributes, a person must develop a set of social relationships with others that are only interpretable in terms of culture, that is a system of meanings shared among them.

In the formative years of his youth, Gustav Jahoda migrated within troubled Europe in the 1930s–40s from Austria through France to Britain, and eventually settled into a niche in Scotland. His multicultural sophistication was enriched by linguistic fluency in German, French and English, a resource that positioned him to contribute to the 1960s elaboration of a European vision of social psychology independent of its American counterpart, and later enabled him to delve into the archives of 19th-century scholars for whose French and German publications no English translations were yet available.

One manifestation of Jahoda’s deep sensitivity to language was his subtle attention to the limitations of translatability. For instance, in his account of Herbart’s 19th-century theoretical system which was highly influential internationally in the field of pedagogy, he noted that

the key concept … was the … term Vorstellung, which is often glossed as Idea. This is not accurate, since for him a Vorstellung could be a thought, an idea or an imagined object; furthermore Herbart also applied it to emotional states. It will therefore be safest to retain the German term. (Jahoda, 2007, 50)

Perhaps the most profoundly formative cultural experience in Jahoda’s career was a four-year sojourn in the 1950s in the African country soon to be renamed Ghana. He became fascinated by how differently people behaved in different societies, and how differently they interpreted the human condition. I first met Jahoda in the early 1970s, when he visited the fledgling Psychology Department at the University of Zambia as External Examiner. He was already established at the University of Strathclyde as Professor of Psychology, and seemed very supportive of the curriculum he found in place. Founded by Alastair Heron (1969) as a bio-social science grounded in experimental methodology, it was taught by myself, Douglas Bethlehem and Ogbolu Okonji (1971), all of whom had recently completed doctoral degrees within that paradigm. During that period, Jahoda (1971, 1978) conducted tightly focused studies using systematic experimentation to capture the character of cross-cultural differences in perception and to explain their origins, building on and extending work by Deregowski (1968) and Serpell (1971) at the University of Zambia’s Human Development Research Unit (e.g. Jahoda, Deregowski, & Sinha, 1974; Jahoda & McGurk, 1974). We all shared the assumption, I think, that for psychology to become more relevant to Africa, all that was needed was for studies using the mainstream paradigm to be conducted among the local population so as to generate a body of scientific knowledge about African people’s behavior.

However, by the late 1970s, Jahoda’s publications manifest a growing concern that the science of psychology was limited in multiple ways, some methodological, some theoretical and some conceptual. Jahoda (1977) foreshadowed the theme of his (1982) book “Psychology and Anthropology”: while the founders of the two disciplines in Western academia at the end of the 19th-century had shared a number of interests, by the late 20th-century they had drifted so far apart that (as amusingly symbolized in the cover illustration of the book) they had quite forgotten their common roots and now confronted one another as apparent strangers. This drifting apart of the disciplines incurred serious intellectual costs on both sides and they stood to benefit from acknowledging the complementarity of their concerns, becoming reacquainted and seeking to collaborate. Jahoda suggested that “there are probably two main reasons why anthropologists resorted less to psychology than they might have done: one is that they have perhaps not always been fully aware of what psychology has to offer; the other is that on many issues central to their aims psychology appears somewhat sterile to them. I believe the second of these reasons to be largely justified, but at the same time feel that something could be done about it” (1977, p. 15). In the 1982 book, he set out to educate psychologists about anthropology.

Reflecting on whether humanity had made progress over the past few centuries in self-understanding, Jahoda (1993, pp. 189–190) observed that the zeitgeist of biologization in late 20th-century American psychology, inspired by dramatic advances in genetic engineering and technology for observation of brain activity, may have distracted the discipline from what is most highly valued in all societies about human experience. The cognitive revolution in Western psychology of the 1960s put paid to the illusion that we can escape the endless uncertainty of undisciplined speculation by eschewing introspection and relying solely on direct observation. As Western philosophers had long maintained and Chomsky (1968) reaffirmed, language affords humans reciprocal access to one another’s minds. But with this quantum shift of attention comes another methodological challenge that was somewhat underplayed by transformational linguistics: how to access the system of meanings that is socially sustained by, and informs a set of cultural practices with which an investigator is unfamiliar.

A seminal insight of anthropology has been that the most effective route to such access is extended social participation by the investigator in the activities of the cultural group. For it is only by acquiring the status of group membership that humans (children and visitors alike) can become owners of the system of meanings that inform that group’s communication. Middleton ³ (1970) describes how the Lugbara community of northern Uganda, in which he was a participant observer, treated him much as a child, explaining the connections among phenomena he found initially incomprehensible. His preliminary interpretation of the behavior of exuberant dancing at Lugbara funerals as “joyful” was eventually reconfigured in the light of his introduction to the society’s complex, dynamic system of social relationships. He learned how these were affected by the death of an individual, and recognized that the group activity of dancing served to acknowledge a reordering of social relationships. Thus, he concluded “that the Lugbara term <that he had first taken to mean ‘joyful’> refers not so much to joy in our sense, as to satisfaction at recognizing and reordering a social relationship that had been broken by death” (Middleton, 1970, 49, cited by Jahoda 1982, 67).

Situating methods and theory in history

Jahoda attributed his interest in history to multiple influences, including close contact in the 1980s with a group of professional historians at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, as well as discussions with several anthropologists about the history of their discipline. Among psychologists, the most notable influence came from Michael Cole to whom he attributed his own “conversion from ‘merely cross-cultural’ to a wider ‘cultural’ psychology” (1993, p. x).

Just how much of the armamentarium of mainstream psychology needs to be discarded in order to conduct research appropriately for the understanding of human development in Africa remains a contested topic. Many social scientists and lay observers have criticized experimental psychology for generating a narrow, unrepresentative account of human behavior by studying it in artificial contexts. But Scribner (1976) argued compellingly that experiments are open to adaptation to make them more reflective of non-Western environments, and advocated that researchers seek “through an interweaving of experimental and ethnographic research” (p. 317) to explore, for each sociohistorically specific eco-cultural niche, “how situations vary in their cognitive demands and how the particular experimental paradigm we are using fits into this spectrum” (p. 319). An example of this approach is my comparative study of the cognitive function of pattern reproduction by children in Zambia and England (Serpell, 1979). The same figures were presented for copying in three different media to children of the same age in two urban eco-cultural settings and the children’s models were rated on quantitative scales of accuracy. As predicted from the naturalistically observed affordances of their respective ecocultural niches, Zambian children performed much better on the wire-modelling task, English children performed much better on the drawing task, and there was no group difference on the clay-modelling task.

Part of the inspiration for that study came from the disquieting observation by Wober (1969) that too much of the research in Africa by Western visitors seemed to be addressed to questions of the form “how well can they do our tricks?” The wire-modelling task in my experiment was designed as a proxy for the very popular play activity in central and southern Africa in which pre-adolescent boys construct model cars from strips of scrap wire. Adopting a similar rationale, Retschitzki conducted an extended series of studies of cognitive strategies by players of a board game widespread in Africa, known as awele in Cote d’Ivoire and as nsolo in Zambia. The stated objective of this research has been “to make conspicuous the ‘culture’ of awele players, i.e. the expressions and concepts used by the players as well as their knowledge and way of thinking about the game” (Retschitzki, 2000, p. 11). The author’s analysis deploys various theoretical constructs derived from Western psychology, such as hypothetico-deductive reasoning, rule assessment, and computer simulation, and he concludes from an overview of more than 10 years of research ⁴ that “results indicate mainly the similarity of the reasoning observed in Baoule players (illiterate as well as schooled) with the reasoning of western players of different board games and thus tend to support the hypothesis of the universality of thinking and decision making processes” (Retschitzki, 2000, p. 11). A more thorough interweaving of experimental and ethnographic research was achieved by Scribner and Cole (1981) in their landmark study of the psychology of literacy in Liberia, demonstrating that the cognitive correlates of individual literacy depend in predictable ways on the cultural practices within which particular scripts are embedded.

After his formal “retirement” from the University of Strathclyde in 1985, Jahoda announced to family and friends that he was switching his research efforts from geographical excursions to historical fieldwork in the library. Building on an interest apparent in some of his earliest publications, Jahoda (2007) set out in his “History of Social Psychology” to situate the ideas of major European philosophers and social scientists within a broad historical landscape. His account eschews historical determinism, but searches retrospectively for the intellectual origins of themes that have become definitive of social psychology as a field of inquiry in the late 20th-century. Each theorist is introduced in a sociological manner as a product of his ⁵ time, but also credited with originality, unless there is evidence of overt or covert influence by the ideas of a particular other thinker known to the character under consideration. The question of whether, and if so how, one thinker in the history was influenced by another is a recurrent theme throughout the book, but several individuals are described as being ahead of their time in believing in the mental equality of men and women of all races long before that principle was established as a cultural consensus.

Jahoda gives special credit to several authors better known in other fields of knowledge than for their contributions to psychology. David Hume (1711–1776), best known for his epistemological skepticism, “regarded sympathy as one of the most salient characteristics of humans, which makes us respond to the feelings of others and forms the basis of our attachment to society” (Jahoda, 2007, p. 31). George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) shared much of his adult life as a partner with George Eliot, the female author of now classic novels, renowned for their psychological insight. Lewes’ final publication (1879, p. 71) articulated the key insight that “the social medium … is a factor that permeates the whole composition of the mind”. The implications of this insight, ⁶ Jahoda (2007, p. 98) points out, “were slow to be fully realized” in formal theories of how social and mental phenomena are connected.

One theory that did highlight the connection and has since received wide international recognition in systematic research on child development and culture is that of Vygotsky (1978). The omission of Vygotsky (1896–1934) from Jahoda’s “History of Social Psychology” may perhaps be excused on the grounds that the impact of his writings beyond the Russian language was delayed until after the Second World War (which marks the end of the scope of Jahoda’s survey). But the ramifications of his own cultural-historical niche, the period of the Russian Revolution, and the deliberate political interpretation of his ideas, as well as those of his famous contemporary Pavlov have stimulated a substantial and provocative literature, which I have not attempted to survey here. Cole (2005) and others have elaborated a broad framework known as cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) linking Vygotsky’s sometimes opaque writings to those of his contemporary Leontiev, while Wertsch (1991) has focused more explicitly on social characteristics of the mind, linking Vygotsky’s theory to the ideas of Bakhtin. Scribner (1985, p. 139), offered a critical analysis of “Vygotsky’s uses of history”, arguing that “individual societal histories are not independent of the world process, but neither are they reducible to it. To take account of this plurality, the Vygotskian framework needs to be expanded to incorporate a ‘fourth-level’ of history – the history of individual societies”.

The historical legacy of cultural hegemony

Still more complex is the challenge of understanding the consequences of international transfer of cultural ideas and practices. The modes of such transfer have varied over secular time as a function of macrosocial factors. The theory of pedagogy formulated by Herbart and his followers in Germany was deliberately imported and adapted for use in Japan’s educational system during the late 19th-century period of the Meiji Restoration. By contrast, the transfer of Western schooling practices to Africa was characterized by hegemonic imposition under the twin influences of Christian evangelization and colonial oppression (Serpell & Hatano, 1997). The notion of cultural hegemony, first developed by Gramsci in Marxist terms, has been invoked in educational curriculum studies as a warning that current practices and the “official knowledge” that informs them are sociohistorically specific and tend to serve some interests more than others (Apple, 2000). Teo (2008, p. 47) has proposed the term epistemological violence “to identify interpretations that construct the ‘Other’ as problematic or inferior, with implicit or explicit negative consequences for the ‘Other,’ even when empirical results allow for meaningful, equally compelling, alternative interpretations. These interpretations of data are presented as ‘knowledge’ when, in fact, harm is inflicted through them.”

Teo provides examples of such harmful interpretations emanating from research in the USA where there is a long history of pseudo-scientific rationalization of racism. Racism was a conspicuous feature of colonial oppression in Africa, and remains an enduring legacy of the apartheid era in South Africa. Current debates in the South African academy have invoked the writings of Fanon (1952) and Biko (1973) to propose “decolonization” as a strategic approach to resisting such epistemological violence (e.g. Simango & Segalo, 2017). Historical accounts have debated the extent to which the motives of missionary and colonial educators in the first half of the 20th-century were emancipatory or oppressive, humanitarian or exploitative. ⁷ “In a longer term perspective, it may be less important to interpret the intentions of those actors than the nature of the ideas they left behind. Since the independence movement gained momentum in Africa through the 1960s and 1970s, these ideas have been appropriated by an indigenous leadership, and they have continued to evolve, while the provision of formal education has expanded far beyond the scope of what was established or indeed probably ever envisaged by its missionary and colonial pioneers” (Serpell, 1995, p. 25).

Examples of such interpretations that have become institutionalized in national systems of education in Africa, are what I have termed the “extractive definition of success,” and the “stigmatization of the unschooled as incomplete” (Serpell, 1999). Young people who are demonstrably intellectually competent by indigenous cultural criteria but did not meet the official selection criteria for progression up the narrowing staircase of formal schooling, when asked to explain, typically attribute their educational “failure” to personal shortcomings (Serpell, 1993). And parents with limited schooling sometimes express doubts as to their own competence to contribute to discussions with teachers about the curriculum of even early childhood education for their young children (Ngwaru, 2014). The systemic nature of the “harm inflicted through” these hegemonic interpretations is apparent in the way they seem to delegitimize attempts to promote co-constructive communication between teachers and parents about the substantive goals and practices of child socialization and education.

Transformative resistance to epistemological violence

What, if anything can researchers do to break out of this self-defeating conspiracy? One strategy proposed by Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez (2005) is to make visible within the curriculum of formal schooling the funds of knowledge endogenous to the local community of which children and their families are members. A worked example of this approach to early childhood education in Kenya is provided by Ng’asike (2014). Turkana pastoralist society uses an elaborate indigenous calendar to monitor seasonal changes in weather and nurtures early development of refined visual skills for tracking animals in the context of animal husbandry. Ng’asike shows how each of these local cultural funds of knowledge could be integrated into the curriculum of preschool programmes to make them more relevant to the learners’ everyday lives and build stronger connections between the national educational system and the economy of a social group that currently tends to perceive such programmes as alien.

Many African societies have a rich indigenous cultural heritage of music and dance in which children are encouraged to participate from an early age. Blacking (1988, p. 107) reported in his anthropological study among the Venda of South Africa in the 1950s that to a Western observer “there was surprisingly little direct adult-child interaction involving music and dance, and comparatively little mother-child interaction except in the early pre-verbal stages….in most cases children acquired the skills of music and dance indirectly by attending a wide variety of performance, and directly by learning from their peers and immediate seniors.” Acknowledging that the same was true of children’s developmental opportunities in Zambia, Mtonga (2012) conducted naturalistic observations of Chewa and Tumbuka children’s songs, dances and games in rural and urban communities. His subtle interpretations of their lyrics’ symbolic and affective features articulate their educational potential as children “learn to become expert composers, choreographers, dramatists, and poets at an early age”, and provide an aesthetically laden account of “how the performing arts in general, and games in particular, are related to children’s cognitive development” (Mtonga, 2012, p. 178). Another Zambian scholar, Mukela (2013) went on to explore the role of indigenous music and games in the promotion of Lozi children’s development, mapping the rules of their games onto Western developmental theory in terms of specific cognitive and social affordances (Gibson, 2000).

Nsamenang (1992, 2006) has theorized a distinctively African, lifespan social ontogeny, delineating seven phases in the development of social selfhood, each characterized by a distinctive set of developmental tasks defined within the culture’s primarily socio-affective developmental agenda. Like the work of Ng’asike, Mtonga and Mukela, Nsamenang’s theory is grounded in systematic research among his own ethnic community of origin, the Bamenda of Cameroon. His interpretation resonates with many ethnographic studies of subsistence agricultural societies in Africa, combining direct behavioral observation with reflective analysis of abstract indigenous concepts. And he selectively deploys Western theoretical concepts such as “priming” and “apprenticeship” to generate a framework that is broad enough to be applicable beyond the specific context of Bamenda socialization.

One of Nsamenang’s propositions is that families deliberately promote the development of social responsibility by entrusting the care of younger siblings to pre-adolescent children. This practice, which is widespread across many non-Western cultures (Weisner et al, 1977), was a primary inspiration for the health education initiative launched in the 1970s under the theme of Child-to-Child (Hawes & Scotchmer, 1993). A case study of how the Child-to-Child approach was applied in a rural Zambian primary school in the 1990s found that it was generally well-received by the learners’ parents, resonating with their own childhood socialization and their current practices at home (Serpell, Mumba, & Chansa-Kabali, 2011). However, the introduction of explicit infant care activities into the curriculum was regarded as highly innovative, as was the inclusion of boys as well as girls as providers of nurturant care. Long-term follow-up revealed that the experience was recalled by young adults as having made a lasting impact on them, including a positive disposition towards social cooperation, gender equality and helping others.

Developmental research by African investigators

Frijda and Jahoda (1966) recognized as a crucial limitation of cross-cultural studies of psychology in the 1960s the absence of “fully-fledged researchers within the various cultures, able to conduct a complete project from the planning stage onwards”. With the expansion of higher education opportunities for indigenous Africans both within the African continent and beyond, the African child development field (Marfo, 2011) is no longer dominated by foreign visitors. Over the course of the late 20th-century, a new generation of experts and researchers has emerged, who are indigenous members of the societies and cultures neglected by NoWeMic science. Some anthropologists might argue that, as insiders, this new cohort of researchers are ill-equipped to detect and problematize features of their culture that they have been raised to take for granted. However, it can also be argued that indigenous culture-bearers bring distinctive advantages over outsiders in tracing connections among behavioral events and apprehending the underlying meanings of those connections. Moreover, they have acquired growing legitimacy for channeling their expertise into public policy development and providing education to professional practitioners whose efforts can directly benefit African children’s quality of life.

I have argued in this paper for the importance of situating systematic inquiries into the nature of human development in Africa on the ethnolinguistic, disciplinary and historical landscapes explored by Jahoda. One theoretical hazard that accompanies this agenda is the deterministic notion that every investigator is ineluctably bound by the cultural premises (language, social structure) of his or her situation. Counter-evidence includes the various theorists in Jahoda’s “History of Social Psychology” whose views were “ahead of their time” with respect to racial and gender stereotypes. Moreover, many exogenous anthropologists gradually became convinced that their hosts knew better than they how to interpret local behavior. Still more important is the willingness of some indigenous psychologists to challenge the scientific orthodoxy favoured by their national governments and their international advisors when it seems grounded in an outdated cultural hegemony (e.g. Ejuu, 2015; Oppong, 2015).

Another deterministic notion remains theoretically hazardous even for indigenous scholarship, namely that the developmental niche constrains children’s options in a homogenizing way, so that every adolescent emerges as a predictable version of an idealized prototype. Against this, Jahoda and Lewis (1988, p. 25) noted in their introduction to a collection of ethnographic studies that several of them “gently questions the routine assumption in socialization studies that the ‘traditional’ context forms a perfectly integrated, self-perpetuating system where child-rearing practices harmoniously (and mechanically) inculcate the appropriate perennial parental values and expectations.” The open-endedness of children’s responses to cultural context is especially conspicuous in research that seeks to connect educational policies and practices with the growing mobility and interconnectedness of ethno-linguistic groups in Africa (Banda & Mwanza, 2017).

Reflecting on ways forward in African child development research, Serpell and Marfo (2014) embraced Jahoda’s themes of multidisciplinarity and historical situatedness, and advocated for including the dimensions of agency and reflexivity in research design. By grounding their theoretical analyses in lived experience, and in systems of meaning distinctive to cultures of which they are members and owners, African researchers are uniquely well positioned to contribute to international understanding of human development in Africa.