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Years after making my two Facebook posts on the subject of theory/theoretical framework as practiced in Nigerian humanities and humanistic social science scholarship and stirring controversy on what ought not to be controversial, the controversy continues to ripple in Nigerian academia.
Now, it has crossed the border to Ghana. Several weeks ago, I received an email from a Ghanaian professor in Ghana asking about my "publication" on theoretical framework.
I ignored the email because I didn't recall publishing anything on the subject.
Undeterred, he emailed me again last week, reminding me that he still needed the "publication."
I wrote him back saying I had not published on the topic and that I only made two Facebook posts that went viral and caused unnecessary controversy in Nigeria.
I then distilled and outlined for him the points I made in my two posts.
He responded that he and I were on the same page on the issue, and that he recently gave a seminar on the subject. A few days before the seminar, however, he said the abstract went viral in Nigeria and some Nigerian academics sent him my Facebook posts and told him to "stop the madness."
Here, below, I reproduce my response to my Ghanaian interlocutor.
The points of my intervention, as you'll see, are simple:
1. A scholarly work does not have to have a theoretical component or make a theoretical intervention to have merit.
2. Requiring ALL works in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, regardless of research questions and focus, to have a section titled "theoretical framework" is mechanistic and intellectually tyrannical, since some scholarly works do not lend themselves to theorization or theoretical engagement and can make sound arguments and even iconoclastic interventions which are backed by rigorous, compelling analysis without engaging with any theories and without being informed by any theoretical formulations. The topic and issue in the research should dictate whether the author engages with existing theoretical formulations, not the whimsical decision of academic bureaucrats, mentors, and regulators.
3. When theory is invoked, it should not simply be used to spruce up or glamorize a work. Rather, the theory should be relevant to the work, and the author of the work should not simply hide approvingly behind the theory but should critically engage the theory, showing the ways in which his work instantiates the theory and/or challenges or enriches/extends it.
4. Instead of arbitrarily and instinctively reaching for theories within which to insert a work, authors should, depending on their research and its insights, dare to theorize themselves, formulating their own original theories from the insights, findings, and implications of their work.
5. If the work truly needs theoretical engagement and has obvious theoretical implications, our African scholars should not instinctively advance or borrow the theories of dead white, often male, scholars who theorized from a Euro-American perspective. They should instead invoke the theories of African and Africa-centered scholars and theorists whose scholarly, experiential, and theoretical explorations are grounded in African realities and epistemologies and are thus more relevant to the works of Nigerian/African scholars researching and writing on Nigerian/African topics and issues.
I am not sure how these points of mine became controversial, but there was a lot of discussion (both pro and against) among Nigerian academics around these fairly obvious and commonsensical observations.
Perhaps it is because people have a difficult time hearing that what they've been doing for so long has little or no intellectual logic.
The most egregious of the reactions to the two posts is the misleading claim, perhaps a deliberately mischievous mischaracterization, that I was saying that historians and other humanists and social scientists should not use theory in their work or should discard theory.
Anyway, now you know the full story.
A reply to Moses Ochonu on theoretical frameworks
What you said here is correct, but it can easily be misconstrued as a strong position against the use of theoretical frameworks in social sciences and humanities research. A call for critical engagement with theories is good. This is partly because many African scholars lack sufficient grasp of what theories are and their functions in research, and partly because there are not enough theories to explain emerging problems that have local peculiarities.
It is important to note that applied research, which is most commonly practiced by African scholars, doesn't lend itself to theoretical formulations by design. On the other hand, basic research that aims at knowledge abstraction at a philosophical level to establish higher order cause and effect relationships, requires theorising. This is useful to note because theories help in piecing a set of ideas that work together to explain and or predict social phenomena. It helps to avoid fragmentation of knowledge through the production of isolated empirical works that do not have generalizable ideas. Such works are mostly contextual in nature.
Researchers following these arguments should be careful about taking exclusionary position for or against the use of theories in research. Theories are useful, can be created, critiqued, extended, or discarded depending on the design type or strength of arguments. Theories are mostly misunderstood, and it is easy for African scholars to critique them as racist and irrelevant instead of taking time to understand why they exist in the first place.
I totally agree with you here, Usman. The problem is that our people are not very good with nuance. Once you criticize a practice on certain intellectual grounds, no matter how nuanced and qualified your critique may be, our people will simply understand you to be saying that everything associated with that practice is bad and should be discarded. So, your post above is important to further clarify my point.
There is a place and venue for theory, and there's a place for work that's empirically and analytically sound and compelling without theoretical engagement. Scholars should not be forced into or out of each category, and their work should never be arbitrarily devalued or rejected on account of their failure to be theoretical or non-theoretical. Theory and theoretical engagement should depend on the kind of research, the topic, approach, questions, and goals of the research, etc. It should never be mechanically and tyrannically imposed on all research by mentors, peers, and gatekeepers. Which is the problem we have in our country.
While some research can stand on their merit and make real contributions to knowledge without theoretical engagement and without theorizing their findings, certain types of research demand or lend themselves to abstraction and philosophical reflection and formulation. This is why I encourage our young African scholars to dare to theorize originally, since, from my experience, most existing Euro-American theories don't speak to the empirical realities of African research topics and to the peculiarities of our experiences.
I also encourage them to use the insights and epistemological abstractions from their works to critique the existing theories rather than simply uncritically adopt the existing theories. I have externally examined several doctoral and Masters' theses in Nigerian universities, and the problem that I see is that their mentors, supervisors, and regulators force the authors to do theory for theory's sake, to mechanically impose ill-fitting and unrelated theories on their works to mollify the "where is your theoretical framework?" people or get them off their backs. In 90 percent of the theses, I've encountered and in 80 percent of the conference papers, journal articles, chapters, and other works I've read from Nigeria-based colleagues, the theoretical framework chosen has no bearing on and has little or no relevance to the work at hand and was awkwardly forced on the work to satisfy the mechanistic requirement to have a "theoretical framework."
As you rightly stated, the root of the problem is our people's lack of understanding of what theory is and what it does for and to scholarship. We have not learned the meaning and work of theory, but we rush to borrow theory with which to drape our work. We have not properly learned to analyze rigorously and draw out clear arguments and through lines in our work, but we want to rush to theorize what we have not demonstrated through analysis and clear argumentation and evidence.
Personally, I want our colleagues and regulators to prioritize the teaching of analytical skills, so that works of young scholars would have rigor and compelling arguments and analyses. Once you're successful in doing that, the scholars themselves, depending on the nature of their research, will see and highlight the theoretical dimensions and insights of their work and the way the works dialogue with and challenge existing theories. You do not have to mandate it as a requirement.
If I have a small quibble with you here, it is that 1) it is important that African scholars understand the racism--yes--racism and Eurocentricism that inhere in many influential theories, and 2) it is also important that African scholars, where possible, privilege the theories of African and Africa-centered scholars/theorists because not only do those theories approximate our realities and experience better than the ones originating from Euro-American experiences and realities, but also because privileging them over Euro-American ones helps in decentering global epistemologies and in giving visibility to marginalized and devalued African theoretical perspectives in the global knowledge marketplace.
I have never used theoretical frameworks in my academic publishing. When I was writing my dissertation, post-colonial theory was the fad and I wasn't having it. In my view, it was terrible, and I said so. The short version of my beef with postcolonial theory can be found on Al Jazeera.
For the first chapter of my dissertation, where I discussed what others had written on my topic, I said I was using decolonization of Fanon. It wasn't a theory then, but I said it's what I'm gonna do. And then I added tragedy as a philosophical concept based on Wole Soyinka's book "Myth, literature and the African world." I also used some work on narratology and argument. And a lot, I mean a lot, of Lewis Gordon's work. One of my committee members, explained it to me very simply: what we need to understand is what Ideas are guiding your analysis and how you are going to carry out the analysis. Is that a theoretical framework? I danna.
For me, it was stories and realities that guided my work. I opened my dissertation with my personal experience. Yes I did. That's a no no in Kenya. In fact, I later published a conference paper in a Kenyan journal where I talked of mourning my friend Adam Hussein Adam, and the editors were pleasantly surprised that such personal experiences of Adam and my friendship with him could produce an academic reflection.
In my dissertation, I was also very committed to using African thinkers to guide my work, and in fact one of the people I cited, Ambroise Kom from Cameroon, said at my defense that the one thing that struck him about my dissertation was the many African thinkers I had cited.
I get theory because it's the work people do of drawing patterns through different things. But having a theoretical framework? I see students saying "I'm going to use theory X and Y" and honestly, I don't get it. Neither do they, and I can tell from the very bland and uninteresting way in which they write their literature review. You can tell they were ticking a box.
When theory is imposed like that, it inevitably becomes gatekeeping into Western empire. It reduces African scholarship to the application of Western theories to African raw data. Lewis Gordon has mentioned this problem in his book "Existentia Africana." He calls it a formula of "whites do theory, Africans do experience."
What this is really about is that we Kenyans are not allowed to interpret our own experiences according to African ideas, as Mordecai Ogada has just commented. That suppression of interpretation leads to a crisis of meaning, which Joe Kobuthi mentioned in our Maisha Kazini conversation, because meaning is the product of interpretation. Without interpretation, we have no meaning.
We Kenyans don't know how to interpret our lives. We look for meaning from either our ethnic group or the government, or 'the white man stole our culture." Those are the only interpretations we are allowed in Kenya. And the police are academics and those Kenyans who demand solutions when you share an experience. What they are really asking is "what will the government say about it?" I hear some Kenyan universities have even graduated to demanding that students link their thesis to Vision 2030 or current government initiatives.
What I've since understood is that in Africa, thesis and dissertations are about hazing for entry into an imperial club. We're getting thesis to join an elite; not to think. What's ironical is that Anglo-American empire is collapsing, but we're not reducing this gatekeeping. We're increasing it. It's like the corruption of Kenya Kwanza. Now the theft is starting to look more like a desperate awareness that they can't believe they made it to government and that they may never get the same position again, so they need to grab as much as they can before the opportunity disappears.
Same thing with universities. Because Kenya has no avenues for self-expression outside the church and the academy, people come to the university desperate for a voice, ready to follow whatever hazing ritual we scholars throw at them. It will remain this way until we detach ourselves from Anglo-America, or when we decide that we don't need permission, not for our experiences to be valid, as Lupita said, but for our INTERPRETATIONS of those experiences to be valid, and for that validity to come from our African peoples, wherever in the world they may be.
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