Reclaiming the Philosophical, Educational, and Psychological in African Initiation Schools through Afrocentric Education

Abstract

European colonialists not only physically dislocated Africans from their land but, also, dislocated them philosophically, educationally, psychologically, and epistemologically by displacing Afrocentric education, and replacing it with Eurocentric education. They projected initiation schools as centres promoting violence against young women and men, fully cognisant that initiation schools were aimed at transforming playful girls and boys into responsible adults expected to serve their communities. Initiation schools’ existence belied colonialists’ claims that Africans were ‘adult children’ needing colonialists’ ‘civilisational’ guidance. While Africans successfully resisted attempts to wipe out initiation schools, colonialists’ relentless campaigns succeeded in projecting them as violent ‘circumcision’ centres. Consequently, Africans themselves elevated the ‘physical’ above the ‘philosophical’, thus reducing ‘human beings’ to mere ‘biological bodies’. This reduction resulted in the loss of appreciation of ‘initiation schools’ as African ‘schools of philosophy’, thus losing the philosophical in initiation. I argue that African scholars should, through Afrocentric education, lead the reclamation of the philosophical, the educational, and the psychological in initiation for a massdriven African Renaissance for building humane and responsible African women and men.