**3. African upbring: the ideal that was**

Upbring in many African societies was characterized by, a communitarian ethic. The communitarian ethic calls upon the individual to look after the well-being of others as others are required to look after the wellbeing of the individual [10]. Mbiti's popular cliché of "I am because you are and you are because I am" best captures this scenario. Analysts of the popular African "Ubuntu" philosophy have also revealed dimensions in which African life is generally communal. What interpreters of Mbiti and analysts of ubuntu have not extensively done is to break up these philosophies and show how they are directly anchored on upbringing. If they would have done so, it would be revealed that in Africa, being human is not enough; it is the being among beings and this emanates from parenting. To be or not to be is judged by being or not being in community. It is this aspect of "being in community" that was guided and redirected according to the ethics of the community.

<sup>3</sup> [5], pp.14–20.

<sup>4</sup> [7], p.108.

<sup>5</sup> [8], p.8.

The family as the foundation of society and was tasked primarily with this communitarian. The concept of family was far broader than the western nuclear family. There was no nucleus family in the Eurocentric sense or mathematical sense. In so far as upbringing was concerned, primary or biological parents were just agents of the community which was per se the nucleus family. Among the Meru people of Kenya as it for many African contexts, for example, as long as children were within the community, they were at "home". Children could spend the night in any home, they could have meals in any home and perform duties in any home. The primary parents could be rest assured that wherever the children were, the eyes of the community (superior than the modern CCTV) were watching over their behavior. Family chores could be performed by any member of the community and in any homestead. Basic family units were only necessary in so far as they acted as agents of the community. Chiroma admits that the family embraced the extended family and sometimes even neighbors [11]. The influence of community roles in upbringing can be evidenced in proverbs like, "it takes a whole village to raise a child", and "the child belongs to the clan". This means that moral and other values were seen as shared and not private. They were passed on through intergenerational socializations in folk tales, songs, proverbs etc. and what resulted was a morally stable Africa. This chapter alone cannot recapture all that Africa was. But the picture of the climate painted here stands to show that Africa was all sufficient in her upbringing methodologies and through them she attained a morally stable society that lived a wholesome life.

Many African writers nostalgically write a relish of these memories and in their writing almost wish for a return. However, when Mazrui argues that "the present world culture is Eurocentric, the next world culture is unlikely to be Afrocentric, even if that were desirable" he means that the best solution is therefore in "a more culturally balanced world civilization;" [12] rather, a return to the tradition and indigene Africa is not progressive even if it were possible. In this chapter, a similar tour or romanticization of the indigene African upbringing is not meant to champion a pure return, but a burden principle that tasks the precent and next generations not to provide an alternative hegemony, but to provide a new balance. Highlighting important aspects of African upbringing rather than nostalgically plunging into the former therefore, suffices. A retrieval of African methods of transmitting upbringing e.g., metaphors, sayings and proverbs, as also of visual symbols from oral tradition, is meant to prove that upbringing does not have to take only a backward drift form to convey deep truths arrived at by a people.

#### **4. Contemporary realities**

There are many contemporary realities which like winds of change have bombarded Africa and changed much of her transactions and especially those that involve upbringing. A full portrait of the contemporary upbringing scene cannot be sculptured here. A few facets will suffice. First, it can be observed that when African native culture gave way to European cultural imperialism, it considered European culture as the norm of society. Through many influences Africans quickly adopted a manufactured sense of being civilized with "whiteness" becoming an object of "black" consumption. Europeanism was equated with being godly/religious/moral and civilized/cultured. In abandoning their Africanity, Africans forgot that whiteness was not the measure of being human. To date postindependence Africa has continued to wrestle with the question of what it means to be African. Either by design or accident, Africans continue to consume whiteness and to imbibe the Western culture and have appropriated it so much that it

now becomes almost part and parcel of their lives [13]. Although not entirely to be blamed, colonial and imperial cultural structures contribute to erosion of African values including those parenting.

Second, contemporary Africa finds herself in an increasingly globalized space. Part of the package that comes with globalization is the renewed interests in the child. Recent decades have witnessed a new shift towards the 'derivatization' of childhood and parenthood. The fact that issues concerning childhood and child upbringing in both national and international settings are now progressively dealt with in legal terms is a manifestation of this development. Africa has not been left behind or spared in this race. Africa is submerged in the new global interest in childhood and what has been termed the 'globalization of childhood.' Since the West globalizes and Africa is the globalized, in the name of global, particular Western concepts of what childhood is and what a 'good' and 'proper' childhood should be, have been pushed to Africans. This also comes with the garbage of what parenting ought to be and from a global perspective. Critiques of the globalized child have pointed out that global engrossment on raising a 'globalized child' have tended to overshadow notions of parenting in globalized communities [14].

As Tatjana and Haukanes have pointed out, ideologies and parenting trends have traveled in the global arena which now threaten particular cultures ideal of the proper child and the proper parent leading to the proper community. As has been alluded to, dominant ideas are translated through various channels, including social and mass media, national legislations and educational or child protection policies, to name but a few. There is a growing politicization of childhood in the world arena and Africa has not been spared. Contemporary African parents have therefore to grapple with a protected "child space" without an equally protected "parent space." As Tatjan and Haukanes observe, delinking childhood even in studies as a separate field from parenting leads to foregrounding of child rights space without parallel parenting conceptualizations. This concept is alien to African upbring and the African value of communality. Owing to this compartmentalization of the "child', many emerging African parents have resigned from the communal motif with the result that every child for him/herself and every home with its own children. Zoning off generations has been witnessed and the consequent competition by parents to save their children from a perceptibly sinking society. In African upbringing, the reverse is true where children are directed into the ship that is the healthy society. Therefore, the current scene is characterized by parents outdoing each other in this fencing of children with the result that we have all lost it.

Third, it is agreeable is that Africa has changed over the years and so also have her goals and values especially those that concern upbringing. Africanity in communality, though still scantily in existence has been transformed [sometimes for worse] by many global waves. Communality is no longer the fabric that holds together the African society. Writers<sup>6</sup> who continue to write on African value of communality more often than not paint a wrong picture of the contemporary African scene. The fact is that the African value of communality has not been spared by the modern waves of change orchestrated by the waves of globalization and has irreversibly been eroded. The family unit too has experienced irreversible change imbibing more the values of Western individualism that have ushered each family into the arena of bring up its own children. This ripple has not stopped at the family unit for, the family too has remained powerless in the face of individual rights. Viewed in such a manner for example, democracy, a Western value, is not merely a political category, or a championing of the rule of the people or the voice of the majority. Primarily, it is the rule of the individual who has ruled him/herself.

<sup>6</sup> Especially the theorists of Ubuntu philosophy.

Democracy viewed against an African communality perspective is the principle of those who have defied any communalistic pool of influence and created a pool 'somebodies' who defy the pool of the community. This strong force that shifts from community to family and from family to the individual can be termed as an ingredient that has negatively impinged on African upbringing. African children are being brought up as democratic children. On the surface, a democratic child is one who is free to be if being constitutes extreme individuality. The being is an individual protected by imperialized laws which have been couched without cultural sensibilities or contextual considerations. For this reason, many a such have become free from institutions like church, schools, etc. which still remain important institutions for socialization whether African or otherwise. However, for the "free" individual, if the church is found to be a stumbling block to the envisaged freedom, they not only abandon it but also oppose it from the platforms of their professions in media houses, political arenas etc. Equally, if schools have become a stumbling block, they riot and cause destruction as has been experienced in the recent past in Kenya and many other African contexts [15].

On account of the issues outlined above, the contemporary African scene is faced with many moral dilemmas. There is a thin line between what is considered moral or immoral and greater still, who has the defining power. Talk of sexual morality for example – a world advocating for individual rights is a power to reckon with. Such a world is accessible through the virtual spaces in social and other media. The globalized scene is inescapable and Africa has to deal with it from an individual and a communal perspective. Among the moral issues that Africa has to grapple with is reproductive rights and with them permission of many practices that were unheard of in Africa including pegging unacceptable abortion to these rights. Is it possible to mainstream a purely African morality for reproductive health? This too could be lost as Africa is increasingly being bombarded by alien sexual moralities and it has also to grapple with minority groups including sexual minorities and their individual or group rights. Though increasingly penetrating the African spaces, advocacy for the LGBTQ in Africa has had its own challenges; some of the challenges are intergenerational, some religious and others ideological. In brief, the African moral scene is complicated by all these plays and with them the turns and twists of their plots – and with all these, the question of upbringing and raising a counter-generation rests.

### **5. African church and available upbringing options**

It was imagined that the alternative world introduced by colonialists and missionaries would bring the much-prescribed moral "light" to the dark African continent. However, introduction of the Christian church did not help much in this scenario. Initial missionaries introduced church as an institution that came to condemn all that was African; both good and seemingly eccentric African cultural values. It is not an understatement to say that the bulk of the values that were affected were those that had to do with upbringing. Among the Ameru people of Kenya for example, young initiates into manhood were taught never to say sorry. The Christian church came teaching that "sorry" was part of the daily Christian vocabulary. Taken at face value, this meant that the Ameru culture and the Christian culture were at collision courses. A deeper understanding, which the early missionaries did not take time to understand reveals that the Ameru and the church were advocating the same values. What the Ameru taught in the "non-sorry" statements was that a Meru man should be very upright. They should so guard their behavior such that nothing out of commission or omission should bring them to

#### *Decolonizing Imperialized Upbringing Styles in the African Context DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100256*

the point of weakness. Guarding against that moment was the concern of every initiate because it portrayed a character weakness and immaturity for the rank that they had achieved through circumcision. Transgressing Meru men were liable to say sorry and with that came fines and punishments imposed upon by the community. All these acted to promote a flawless community, a community of minimized transgressors. Apart from this example, many African communities had many such cultural values that could be used to promote level upbringing. Unfortunately, due to early contact with the church as introduced by initial missionaries and its then pedagogies, Africans who became Christians were stripped of their cultural tools for upbringing and their experience. This loss included African conceptualizations of family and upbringing. The African family was more patterned after the European missionaries dictates that biblical Christianity demands. Church upbringing therefore, raised a generation that was increasingly against everything African not because of biblical reasons but because of secondary missionary reasons. This produced Africans who were christened and those that were not and definitely dividing members of the same kinship systems in many ways.

The emerging posture, it can be noted, was not adequate for sustaining Christianity in Africa and for sustaining African lifestyles. For an African Christian culture to be sustained therefore, there needs a synthesis of the two. Enemies of African religion and life will call it syncretism and in a derogatory way, but in a postcolonial framework it can be termed hybridity. In postcolonial conceptualizations, hybridity [16] stands for an "in-between space" in which the colonialized translate or undo the binaries imposed by the colonial project: "From the perspective of the 'in-between', claims to cultural authenticity and sovereignty – supremacy, autonomy, hierarchy – are less significant 'values' than an awareness of the hybrid conditions of inter-cultural exchange"7 . The African Christian church has the option of mediating a hybrid generation – one that looks back and forth even as it articulates its own identity.

The contemporary church has done much in its programs to aid African parents in parenting and raising up a responsible moral generation. There are Sunday schools, vocational Bible schools, youth camps and many program that act as fora for encouraging a moral generation. Definitely, the approach of the contemporary African church is more advanced than that of the missionary enterprise. However, it is still gripped by colonial shadows and hangovers that curtail its full potential for raising a truly African generation. Although the contemporary African church has done much to rectify the shortcomings of initial missionaries, it remains to be seen how much the African Christian church can foster its programs to advocate for bringing up a generation that not only revives renaissance of African values for upbringing but also makes a huge tide turn for the moral laxity that is currently being experienced in Africa.

The contemporary Africa scene is replete with mushrooming voices in institutions and other spaces calling for a renaissance of Africa cultural values. Although Caws and Jones8 have accused the church of religious indoctrination that interferes with a child's discovery of freedom, the church still remains the best space for mediating on African cultural values renaissance transaction. Although the church was largely responsible for indoctrinating Africans "out of" their African values, it still retains the mechanism and religious theories that gives Africans an opportunity to deconstruct these systems and then to reconstruct them in ways they can call

<sup>7</sup> [17], p.139.

<sup>8</sup> The indoctrination project Peter Caws and Stefani Jones [18]. Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom: Personal and Philosophical Essays, edited by Peter Caws, and Stefani Jones, Penn State University Press, 2010.

their own. Since children are always born into specific situations, into particular social and cultural contexts with already established moral and value systems, within which they become adults, it is paramount that the church postures itself as a worthy institution for mediating a truly African Christian renaissance.
