**1. Introduction**

Parenting is the basic foundation of every stable society. Each generation longs for the time it can confidently boast of bringing up a stable generation. Upbring is about socialization. The content of socialization is information concerning what a society approves as right and what it denounces as wrong. African people treasure a communal ordering within their societies. Their parenting systems are hence geared towards protecting and enhancing the values that uphold oneness in community. The pedagogy of upbringing can involve apprenticeship, telling, church programs or religious gatherings, mass media – television, radio talk shows and social media among others. The most impactful methods raising up reliable youth is where these methods involve ideological images in legacies,

personalities who are authorities and role models in the society… or equally when unfit people that have made their way into mainstream popularity use these platforms to negatively impact a generation.

In the contemporary African1 scene, upbringing has become a complicated field. Parenting which used to be communal in the African society has been compounded by many factors especially those that concern a society that is spiraling towards self. The securities that involved an African upbring space have all been eroded by pursuits for modernity. The "modern" family and society that is the crave of many Africans is characterized by aping, mimicry and resulting in hybridity. The hybrid African is a distorted being who is "same but not the same" to use Said's words. Many forces have contributed to complicate this picture. An upbringing vacuum therefore plays out and since nature entertains no vacuums, various ways of coping and growing up together have emerged. The objectives of this chapter are to present the intersections between postcolonialism and African parenting, to assess the values that informed African upbringing before encounter with colonial missionaries, to highlight imperialized contemporary realities that African parents have to grapple with, to discuss the role of the church in shaping the future of African upbringing and to propose a superlative imperative model for African upbringing. The postcolonial theoretical stance under which this chapter is developed has two aspects: first, to analyze the diverse strategies by which the colonizers construct images of the colonized; and second, to study how the colonized themselves make use of and go beyond many of those strategies in order to articulate their identity, self-worth, and empowerment. The chapter therefore goes back and forth as a way of looking at both old and new forms of domination. In the long run and through subtopics that follow, the chapter proposes ways of enhancing contemporary African parenting so as to remain truly communalistic African in upbringing. Probably, the proposals made in this chapter will be resourceful for family therapists, pastors and all actors who desire a stable Africa in the future.

## **2. Decolonizing parenting models and upbringing in Africa**

A postcolonial approach has been employed in many disciplines and in a considerable manner but not so much in decolonizing the parenting scene in former colonies especially in Africa. A postcolonial perspective alerts to imperial socialization of contexts and articulates ways in which the margins can rework their emancipation. In parenting, a postcolonial perspective helps to examine parental aspects that fall prey to imperial standards by effacing subaltern styles while at the same time offering alternatives for the subalternity to articulate their emancipation. The usefulness of such an approach is in the way it helps re-articulate importance of the indigene and creative methods of retaining aspects of a subaltern society that can be helpful and most meaningful in informing contemporary parenting models.

Core to the existence and continuance of any society is its method of socialization. Many African writers2 though not overtly employing the postcolonial perspective, have attested to the fact that the African parenting model was among the things that colonialism replaced with other worlds models of existence. Arguing

<sup>1</sup> Africa is vast and its subcultures are many. In as much as this is true and may lead questions of the credibility of generalizations about it, however, there are many commonalities in African cultures that permit for reasonable generalizations. Although particular examples are given from Kenya, Africanity in this chapter is meant to endorse the view of a probability of unity of African cultures. For a sustained discourse on Africanity/Africanism, see the article [1].

<sup>2</sup> See for example, Mbiti [2], Kwasi Wiredu [3] and Nwadiokwu [4] to mention but a few.

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

from a point of education, Lucy Wairimu Kibera3 has argued that decolonization of now independent former colonies from colonial cultural heritage has been a very slow process. For this reason, African continues to be subtly authored and re-authored by imperialization to suit colonizers interests and values. To date alien models continue to author African upbringing and parenting much to her detriment. If Africa is notoriously religious [6], then it can be said in the same breath that she is also inescapably colonial in her outlook. Colonialism was so ingrained in the African lifestyle that it became another religion, in deed another opiate for the African. She is so fossilized in that state that a new horizon is almost unimaginable. The result is rearing masses of colonized generations even after the aftermath of colonialism. However, with the emergence of a postcolonial thinking, there is a possibility of decolonizing upbringing through "the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization."4 According to Sugirtharajah5 , postcolonialism is a discipline in which everything is contested, everything is contestable, from the use of terms to the defining of chronological boundaries. It signifies a reactive resistance discourse of the colonized who critically interrogate dominant knowledge systems in order to recover the past from the Western slander and misinformation of the colonial period, and who also continue to interrogate neo-colonizing tendencies after the declaration of independence.

Postcolonial criticism is employed in this chapter as a an instrument or method of analyzing the cultural heritage that is today's culture which is the result of subtly imposed imperial ethos that continue to dominate and author the African space and especially as related to upbringing. Although a critical look at the Western influence on African culture reveals both good and bad influences, it is necessary to point out that loss of African cultural tenets as mediated by colonialism also lost good and bad aspects. This made much of African native culture give way to European worlding. Either by design or accident, Africans imbibed the Western culture and continue to appropriate it so much that it now becomes almost part and parcel of their lives [9]. This re-worlding has infiltrated all spheres of the African life including upbringing and with it the current dissonance in the contemporary African generations. It is this space that needs decolonization. Before delving into decolonized upbring models, let us consider where Africa has come in terms of parenting as the ideal model.
