Serpell - Child Development in Africa: Views from Inside: New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Number 146

CHILD DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA: VIEWS FROM INSIDE
Robert Serpell, Kofi Marfo (eds.)
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, no. 146
Lene Arnett Jensen, Reed W. Larson, EditorsinChief

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Serpell, R., & Marfo, K. (2014). Some longstanding and emerging research lines in Africa. In R. Serpell & K. Marfo (Eds.), Child development in Africa: Views from inside. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 146, 122.

Early research on child development in Africa was dominated by expatriates and was primarily addressed to the topics of testing the cross-cultural validity of theories developed in the West, and the search for universals. After a brief review of the outcome of that research, we propose two additional types of motivation that seem important to us as African researchers begin to take the lead in articulating research agendas for the study of child development in Africa: articulating the contextual relevance and practical usefulness of developmental psychology in Africa; and making developmental psychology intelligible to local audiences. We highlight two major challenges for African societies in this era that call for attention by the emerging field of African child development research: linguistic hegemony and its effects on research and schooling; and the process of indigenization. We end with a preview of chapters in the rest of the volume. 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This volume is dedicated to showcasing research on child development in Africa by African scholars based on the continent. Researchers on child development in Africa have often originated from outside the continent, and previous commentaries have highlighted various ways in which this has colored their approach to the topic. Douglas Price-Williams (1975), Gustav Jahoda (1980), and Pierre Dasen (1977b), each of whom conducted pioneering research on aspects of child development in Africa, have all acknowledged two major types of motivation for cross-cultural research in the region: testing the cross-cultural validity of theories developed in the West, and searching for universals. These formulations have persisted in slightly modified form in more recent reviews of the field of cross-cultural psychology (e.g., Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 2002; Segall, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga, 1999). On the other hand, the discipline of anthropology, which informed somewhat earlier studies of African childhood (e.g., Erny, 1972; Fortes, 1938), was often motivated by a search for cross-cultural contrasts, seeking through interpretation to make the strange familiar, and thus reflexively to make the familiar strange (Shweder, 1990). As Jahoda (1982) and Cole (1996) have shown, these disciplines of the Western academy emerged from common roots in the 19th century, only gradually diverged, and have since begun to converge again in the fields of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, as well as spawning the field of indigenous psychology (Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006; Sinha, 1994, 1997).

Without contesting the relevance, nor indeed the legitimacy of any of those motivations, we propose here two additional types of motivation that seem to us important as African researchers begin to take the lead in articulating research agendas for the study of child development in Africa: (a) contextual relevance and practical usefulness, and (b) intelligibility to local audiences. We shall argue that there is a strong connection between these two goals, in that a major factor influencing the usefulness of research findings in developmental psychology is whether their interpretation connects with preoccupations of the consumers to whom it is addressed (Serpell, 1990a, 2006).

In the conclusion to his overview volume on Psychology in Africa, Wober (1975) urged the next generation of African social scientists to consider the possibility that they might become more modern by not being just Western (p. 215). The globalization of international communication has been interpreted in various ways. Some scholars see it as giving rise to increasingly egalitarian relations between nations and cultures in opportunities to define the way forward in progressive social change, due to the relatively open access to world audiences afforded by the Internet. Others, however, construe it as intensifying inequalities between powerful and less powerful sections of the world's population under the guise of universal adoption of an agenda of modernization, whose goals have been hegemonically defined by cultures originating from the former imperial and colonial powers. Depending on one's position on this continuum, responding to Wober's challenge may appear to have become more or less feasible in the four decades since it was published.

Within the field of child development, Marfo, Pence, LeVine, and LeVine (2011) reflected on why the field of African child development has been so slow to emerge. African scholarship has been constrained by the relatively late establishment of universities in most countries, by the low priority attached by the newer African universities to research, and by the tendency of many scholars to rely for their teaching on literature published outside the continent. The Marfo et al. paper arose from a meeting convened in 2009 on the theme of strengthening Africa's contributions to child development research.