Prologue

In July 2007, I presented at an International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) international symposium in Toronto, Canada. It was a one-day conference with participants from Africa, Asia, North America, and the Caribbean as well as students from the social work program at York University. I wanted to articulate some of the basic questions I have been asking about social work in Africa since my beginning days teaching at the University of Ghana, Legon. I asked participants to close their eyes, rid themselves of present thoughts and concerns, and open their minds to the following scenario.

You are head of the only school of social work in a fictitious non-western medium-sized country. Your country was colonized but has been independent now for thirty years. You have been trained in a western country in social work and finished your training five years ago and have been head of this school of social work since then. You were recently told by your government that the social work curriculum and training does not meet the needs of your country. A new approach is needed as far as training people to help citizens of your country who are struggling with life circumstances. You are told to start fresh and get rid of western social work methods, theories, and knowledge altogether. You are challenged by this task as it goes against your western social work training but you are up to the challenge.

I then asked three questions: 1) How did it feel to be asked to delete all of your western social work training, including beliefs and values from your mind and start fresh; 2) Where would you begin? Who would you ask to help you in this task; and 3) what curriculum and training would you consider being appropriate and why?

For some there was a feeling of liberation, for others a feeling of fear and others realized how, even though they have lived in Africa all of their lives, western curriculum continues to dominate. Is the above task impossible? Other schools of social work have radically shifted their curriculua and training to meet the needs of their own country. Latin American countries are an example (Wilson, 1992). Why has this been slow to occur in Africa?

What would that curriculum look like? What knowledge, theories and practices would emerge from a fresh start? Would it even look like social work training and practice we have today? I also did this exercise in Durban, South Africa, at the 2008 IASSW workshop. In the short amount of time we had as a group, many of the ideas in this book were independently brought forward at the workshop as ways to make social work curriculum more African.

Doing an exercise like this highlights the complexity of social work education and practice. The reality is that countries today are living with many different worldwide influences, at the local, national, and international levels. These different influences challenge citizens concerning the cultural practices, values, and beliefs and challenges nations to work within the more powerful political and economic forces governing their world. Africans are embracing aspects of western culture as well as preserving their own traditional ways. For countries with a colonial history, Little Bear (2000) states: “No one has a pure worldview that is 100% Indigenous or Eurocentric; rather everyone has an integral mind … a pre-colonized consciousness that flows into a colonized consciousness and back again … colonization left a heritage of jagged worldviews” (p. 85). A country’s or a people’s cultural identity is affected by this push/pull factor and is strengthened and weakened by its own view of itself in relation to the past, present, and future world order (Sultany, Lavie, & Haimov, 2008).

Social work, throughout the developing world, is also challenged by this balancing act. In Africa, common themes surrounding social work keep re-emerging, through the years, as African social workers and academics try to promote the profession of social work as an important player in national development, including social development. The Association for Social Work Education in Africa (ASWEA) reflects this pattern of struggle in their twenty volumes of seminar documentation produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Mumeka (ASWEA, 1974c), speaking about rural development at one of these seminars, challenges African social workers and academics to this task of changing African social work and in particular using a more interdisciplinary approach to assessment and intervention.

In my opinion the time has come for serious and critical re-examination of social work training in Africa.… Twentieth century Africa expects social work to be creative and revolutionary. In the context of the inter-disciplinary approach I see the profession of social work as a catalyst for the polarization of all shades of opinion relating to rural development. By virtue of their training, social workers should be able to make a positive contribution as members of inter-disciplinary development teams.… However, it is again necessary to reiterate my earlier concern that unless the profession of social work is prepared to take a new path, social workers will for a long time to come remain ineffective in developing countries . (p. 32)

Dr. Murapa (1977) speaking at a similar seminar four years later makes the strong and similar remark.

African instructors, being from the most part products of Western education, have proved either incapable or unwilling to engage in extensive and creative revision of the existing textbooks, curricula and approaches to make them relevant to the social and other developmental problems and aspirations in Africa. (p. 32)

Since the 1980s, other African scholars have highlighted these same themes (Asamoah & Beverly, 1988; Bernstein & Gray, 1991; Brown, 1971; Drower, 2000; Gray, 1998; Gulati, 1974; Haug, 2005; Jacques, 1993; Kaseke, 2001; Midgley, 1981; Mupedziswa, 1996; Nagpaul, 1993; Nimmagadda & Cowger, 1999; Noyoo, 2000; Osei-Hwedie, 1990; Osei-Hwedie, 1993; Osei-Hwedie & Jacques, 2007; Rodenborg, 1986; Sewpaul, 2006; Shawky, 1972; van Hook, 1994; Venkataraman, 1996; Walton & Abo El Nasr, 1988). In 2003, similar themes were highlighted and questions asked through my research project in Ghana and when attending African social work conferences these themes are repeated.

Why has it been so difficult to cut the umbilical cord of western social work training and practice for a more culturally relevant social work education program for Africans? Why, after sixty years of social work in many countries in Africa is the profession still struggling and still on the periphery? Why has the re-examination of social work education in Africa, completed through the ASWEA conferences, been slow to take hold? Africa is re-emerging as an important force in the world order. Social work can play an important role in this re-identification process. However, in order to do this it first has to cleanse its own self from past indoctrination by others. Critical analysis of the curriculum in light of colonization and modernization and globalization is a possible next working step. Through these processes, the social work profession can create culturally relevant social work training and practice that fits its own needs as a continent. A new and creative curriculum will emerge when African social workers and academics question and take charge of their own training and practice, without the arbitrary constraints of western social work knowledge and practice. The time has come for Africans to have partners and not masters. This calls for a relationship of solidarity (Kreitzer & Wilson, 2010).

Social work academics and practitioners from around the world, in encouraging the development of a more culturally relevant social work curriculum in Africa, need to critically exam the approaches they have taken in the past when western curricula had been conveniently imported and used with little or no understanding of how this act supported colonization and an unhealthy dependency relationship. Sending western social work textbooks creates a climate of dependency whereby students have to adapt their learning to an African setting. Unfortunately, this exportation of western social work curricula continues today (Ife, 2007; Midgley, 2008). Western social work has to understand the complex interrelationship of history and present realities so that it can become more culturally sensitive to countries, particularly ones that have been colonized, when creating partnerships which may involve curriculum development. Therefore, an understanding of the past influences on African social work is worth an examination. Chapter I gives an historical account of influences affecting education in Africa and in particular social work education and practice in Sub-Saharan Africa.