Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles.
Since its inception, social work has been plagued with its dual claims to legitimacy as a discipline and a profession. In seeking to promote its knowledge claims, social work research has increasingly relied heavily on positivism, where objectivity is defined as ‘. . . detached, unbiased, impersonal, and invested in no particular point of view’ (Lloyd, 1995: 352).
Africa Spectrum, first published in 1966 by the GIGA-Institute of African Affairs in Hamburg, is an inter-disciplinary fully refereed journal, indexed by ISI, focusing on social science dealing with Africa. In 2009 it has become an open access journal and is published in cooperation with the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
This paper draws on Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally.
This commentary is based on a general concern regarding the low level of self-criticism (-evaluation) in the interpretation of molecular pharmacological data published in ethnopharmacology-related journals. Reports on potentially new lead structures or pharmacological effects of medicinal plant extracts are mushrooming.