Deborah J. Johnson, DeBrenna LaFa Agbényiga and Robert K. Hitchcock (eds.)Vulnerable Children2013Global Challenges in Education, Health, Well-Being, and Child Rights10.1007/978-1-4614-6780-9_2© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
2. Dilemmas of Rights-Based Approaches to Child Well-Being in an African Cultural Context
(1)
University Cooperation Division, University of Bamenda (UBa), 39, Bamenda, North West Region, Cameroon
(2)
Human Development Resource Centre (HDRC), 270, Bamenda, North West Region, Cameroon
Abstract
Childhood varies across time and cultural space. Yet, current policy instruments and programming guides are not only Eurocentric acts of imperious “imprint” but also acts of “erasure”; they homogenize assimilation and circumvention of African childhoods. Given that all cultures define and assign diverse developmental tasks to the same biological processes (Day care in context: Socio-cultural perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992a; Human development in cultural context: A third world perspective. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992b), dilemmas are inherent in proselytizing a Western-driven global image of child well-being. This chapter focuses on the dilemmas and conflicts inherent therein as well as those embedded in and incidental to constructing childhood knowledge that is exclusive of other knowledges (Paper presented to the early childhood care and education policy seminar on “A Decade of Reflection from the Introduction of the Childcare Regulations 1996 Through to Today.” Dublin, Ireland, 2006) and that silences African narratives. Should child well-being research interrogate or inform policy development and programming? How do we interpret the CRC and mount rights-based programming in and for Africa on Eurocentric developmental indicators in the face of provision for children’s rights to a cultural heritage, which in much of Africa includes child work, as against child labor that should be proscribed and punished? Who is best placed to judge the receptivity and efficacy of such services? How would we react if we juxtaposed equity and rights-based considerations against the charge that the CRC was developed far from the lived experiences of most children (From innocents to agents: Children and children’s rights in New Zealand. Auckland, New Zealand: Maxim Institute, 2006)?
The title of a recent early childhood development book, Africa’s Children, Africa’s Challenge (Garcia, Pence, & Evans, 2008), captures the interest and concern for Africa’s difficulties with its huge child populations. The child and adolescent cohorts exceed 60 % in many African countries (Nsamenang, 2002). Fourteen of the eighteen countries in the world whose population of children ages 0–14 years is 45 % or more are African (CIA, 2007). About 20 % of sub-Saharan Africa’s total population of children below 6 years of age is seriously at risk. While Africa’s mortality rates are declining, they are still the highest in the world. The children who survive are not thriving optimally. Of those who survive through age 6, nearly one-third are chronically malnourished, weighing only three-fourths of the weight standard for their age (Britto, Engle, & Alderman, 2007). About 35 % of the children are stunted in growth from persistent malnutrition before their third birthday. The worst case scenario in most sub-Saharan African communities is even more disquieting than the overview of the state of Africa’s children depicted above.
The appalling condition of the African child is obvious and undeniable, and it seems odd to think that extreme life circumstances only partially explain the hardship of Africa’s children. If we could apply a truly fair cross-cultural, context-sensitive happiness index, we might discover Africa’s children to be among the world’s happiest sample of children, perhaps oblivious to their adversities. One significant but usually unthinkable source of Africa’s difficulty with its next generations is the “intervention factor.” This is a multilayered state of affairs that has seldom been mentioned, much less scrutinized. By “intervention factor,” I mean all or any effort, act, idea, and practice such as policies, research, education, child rights convention, and services development that are extraneous to the child’s status quo and introduced by individuals, governments, interest groups, and communities, including the local, national, and international development communities, to bring Africa out of its quagmire of underdevelopment and poverty. The intent of such interventions is to launch Africa on a sustainable path to measurable development in terms of quality of life, resources transformation, and societal progress, typically against indicators external to African cultural circumstances and sociohistorical experiences. This statement is not tantamount to a rejection that Africa and Africans should not compare on league tables of nations and human development. Instead, it is a plea that the signals for such comparisons ought to be culture-fair and context-valid and have not been, hitherto.
This chapter takes a glimpse at the intervention factor in Africa’s difficulties with giving its children—the future hope of their families and nations—“a good start in life involving nurturing, care, and a safe environment” (African Ministers and Representatives of Ministers, 2005). However, it seems rational to first examine the African childhood context and key issues underlying such interventions. For example, why should we critique goodwill interventions intended to uplift Africa? Are Africa’s prolife values really adversarial to proper care and effective guidance of development, or is it that the moral imperatives and existential realities within which Africans value and socialize children differ from those that frame interventions based on child rights approaches? Why can’t Africa garner the means to optimize the care and development of its children? If Africa were to work out suitable policies and programs and build effective capacity for enhanced productivity and networking (Pence & Marfo, 2004), in whose “image will those programs take shape? Will they emerge from within Africa or from outside” or is their origin a mute point (Nsamenang, 2008, p. 135)?
Overview of Childhood in an African Cultural Setting
Parental values organize daily parenting routines for child and family life (Harkness & Super, 1996). Parents’ cultural belief systems channel elements of the larger culture to children. Accordingly, childhood in Africa is best visualized within an African theory of the universe, which envisions a circular path to human ontogenesis in three phases, identifiable more by cultural imperatives than by the biological markers that trigger them (Nsamenang, 2008). Social selfhood is an experiential reality, the physically existing human being that begins with conception and connects the two metaphysical phases of spiritual and ancestral selfhood (Nsamenang, 1992b, 2005). The existential self or social selfhood, the primary subject content of developmental science, develops through seven stages—namely, prebirth/neonatal, social priming, social apprenticing, social entrée, social internment, adulthood, and old age/death (Nsamenang, 1992b, pp. 144–148). The ontogenetic phases I discuss in this chapter cover social apprenticing, social entrée, and the early period of social internment. These phases correspond to the conventional developmental stages from the toddler years to pubescence.
An African theory draws from life journeys in African cultural settings (Serpell, 1993) to recognize the transformation of the human newborn from a biological entity into a viable cultural agent of a particular community en route to adulthood. As children develop, they gradually and systematically enter into and assume different levels of personhood, identity, and being (Nsamenang, 2005). Children are not born with the knowledge and cognitive skills with which to make sense of and to engage the world; they learn or grow into them as they develop (Nsamenang, 2004). Based on perceived child states and milestones of human ontogenesis, Africans assign sequential cultural tasks to the stages of development they recognize. In this way, they organize child development as a sociogenic process, with cultural beliefs and practices that guide systematic socialization, education, and the expectations required for each ontogenetic stage. Accordingly, we can interpret child development as the acquisition and growth of competencies in the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional domains and the moral maturity required to competently engage in the world, implying the family, community, and the society at large.
With the lens of availability to and the amount of awake-time spent with children, we qualify the African peer group as the most handy companion, socializer, and caregiver during the toddler and childhood years (Nsamenang, 1992b). This is possible because African participative pedagogies embed educational ideas and caregiving practices into family traditions, children’s daily routines, and interactive processes (Nsamenang, 2004) in a manner that rapidly and systematically transforms the child into a cultural “agent” of his or her own developmental learning from an early age (Nsamenang et al., 2008). Children “extract” the social, emotional, practical, cognitive, relational, and other situated intelligences from the activity settings of the home, society, and peer culture through contextual embedment and active participation and less through explicit instruction. In so doing, they “graduate” from one activity setting and participative sector of the peer culture to another, steadily maturing toward adulthood. The “extractive” processes they employ are similar to the interactional-extractive learning process described by Piaget (1952) but differ in being entirely child-to-child interstimulation and mentorship. That is, the mentors in the children’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) are not adults but peers, who initiate and promote significant self-education and developmental influences.
African parents, caregivers, and peer mentors use tacit cultural techniques and strategies that provoke the cognitive faculties to induce behavioral and affective changes and adjustment to knowledge and skills acquisition and social situations. They trigger and prime children’s agency, such as that incited by not providing direct answers to children’s queries or curiosities (Nsamenang, 2004). If a child asks for an explanation of how a parent or mentor performed a specific skilled activity or procedure, the characteristic query would refer to whether the child does not “see” or “hear.” This translates literally into anticipation that “You are expected to observe, notice, learn, and understand what and how to do what I did. You don’t have to ask me. Learn!” Accordingly, most African parents “responsibilize” children from an early age by teasing and assigning livelihood duties and engaging them in real-life interactions. In African family traditions, instances in which children engage in nonsense or pretend play are rare indeed. Instead, they undertake productive play, often within the peer groups of neighborhood and school, but these ubiquitous developmental spaces have not been researched. The participative pedagogies and interpersonal processes of child-to-child interactions and encounters preclude lonesome sovereignty but embrace and support relational individuation and social integration through “child work” in familial and social life (Nsamenang, 2008).
Social and intellectual transformation in the individual is brought about by participation in family and societal life (Rogoff, 2003). African families guide the social and cognitive transformation of children through child work, which is a pivotal mode of preparing the next generation in African cultures. The family and the child understand it as useful to the family and necessary for the child’s developmental learning (Nsamenang et al., 2008). It is graduated on the culture’s perceived developmental trajectory and the child’s level of developmental competence (Nsamenang, 2005, 2008). The showpiece of participation is agency or personal responsibility and commitment to mature into and make progress toward one’s prompted, desired, or imagined endpoint(s) of development (Nsamenang et al., 2008). Africa’s enduring traditions of child work encourage children “to become independent at a [very] early age, and this independence is fostered and enforced by letting a child do even difficult things on his own” (Munday, 1979, p. 165). African families do not traditionally tolerate child abuse that is not synonymous to child work, the participative mode of education, and civic sensitization (Nsamenang, 2008). Participatory learning is open to abuse and, indeed, has been abused by individuals and families. The confusion between child work and child abuse is only one of several issues that “problematize” the intervention of childhood in Africa, however.
Intervention of Africa’s Childhood at Issue
The hub of Africa’s difficulties is the dilemmas that derive from the tensions intrinsic in the mélange of local and global imperatives that now live together in the same individuals and communities (Nsamenang & Dawes, 1998). The hybridism inheres in the interfaces of Africa’s heritage of three significant world civilizations from Eastern, Western, and indigenous sources (Mazrui, 1986). Most analyses of Africa’s undesirable condition tend to position the African source of this heritage as inimical to development and progress and Western legacies as unproblematic, emancipatory solutions to the continent’s multiple challenges. The non-fit of some Western models is often not considered. For instance, in its classical form, the inclusive fitness paradigm does not seem to fluently explain why sub-Saharan Africa sustains the highest fertility of any world region (Smith, 2004) when the continent is said to lack the mettle and depends on foreign aid to cater to its offspring. It is not quite evident what justifies intervention on behalf of African children—the adversities they suffer or the high fertility rates of most African communities?
Should Africa “stand against” the maxims and spirit of “the current of received wisdom” or continue uncritically to receive “those things that are given to” its “present experience as if they were timeless, natural, unquestionable” (Rose, 1999, p. 20)? Of course, Africans have benefited enormously and continue to gain from values, lifestyles, and technologies imported into Africa, especially from the West. However, we also need to gain from Foucault’s (1980) insight that everything is not bad, but everything is potentially dangerous. This wisdom obliges critical appraisal of even the “best” of intentions or the most benevolent attitudes and behaviors. After all, scientific evidence alerts us to the possibility of unanticipated outcomes from research procedures, given that every study is a kind of intervention. Even the legitimate duties of researchers, nation states, charities, and organizations, including the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, ought to be critiqued (Nsamenang, 2007). The huge variety of childhoods reinforces such a critical spirit in order to avoid or at least reduce the “construction of a knowledge which is exclusive of many other knowledges” (Urban, 2006). “Questioning the expectation that academic research can provide knowledge as base for political decision and, in consequence, administrative and managerial action does not mean, of course, to deny the importance and possibilities of research in this field in general” (Urban, 2006, p. 1). To be useful, research ought to be context-responsive!
Discourse on child development and the “quality” of childhood care and services inspired by and framed within the dominant mainstream narratives generally pathologize African forms of childrearing and child guidance. LeVine’s (2004, p. 163) research in Africa revealed that African reproductive ideologies and parenting practices were built on “alternative patterns of care based on different moral and practical considerations” that constituted “normal patterns of development that had not been imagined in developmental theories.” Similarly, Zeitlin (1996) explained how the feeding habits of Nigerian parents that non-Africans regard as counterproductive are useful. By contrast, Weisner, Matheson, and Bernheimer (1996) thought that American parental beliefs on the importance of early “stimulation” for optimal child development could lead to an unnecessary concern about the earliest possible interventions for children with developmental delays. Serpell (1994) concluded from a review of Human development in cultural context: a third world perspective (Nsamenang, 1992b) that it espoused a theory of the universe that diverges from that which informs contemporary Western developmental science. Thus, the huge diversity in parenting practices results in differentiation in desirable child outcomes. Moreover, Africa’s sociogenic developmental trajectory “differs in theoretical focus from the more individualistic accounts by Freud, Erikson, & Piaget” (Serpell, 1994, p. 18). Ngaujah (2003) felt that Africa’s peculiar theories and the developmental processes and practices that follow from them cogently posit the impetus to look at Africa from a different perspective in the field of psychology and human development. The most appropriate framework would be a learning posture (Agar, 1986) framed by the scientific method, as a generic approach that could “discover” new methodologies, new ways of understanding, and new concepts about development and situated intelligences, for example, in any culture and context.
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