Addiction in the Light of African Values: Undermining Vitality and Community

In this article I address the question of what makes addiction morally problematic, and seek to answer it by drawing on values salient in the sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. Specifically, I appeal to life-force and communal relationship, each of which African philosophers have at times advanced as a foundational value, and spell out how addiction, or at least salient instances of it, could be viewed as unethical for flouting them. I do not seek to defend either vitality or community as the best explanation of when and why addiction is immoral, instead arguing that each of these characteristically African values grounds an independent and plausible account of that. I conclude that both vitalism and communalism merit consideration as rivals to accounts that Western ethicists would typically make, according to which addiction is immoral insofar as it degrades rationality or autonomy, as per Kantianism, or causes pain or dissatisfaction, à la utilitarianism

Academic Freedom Discourse in Post-Colonial Africa: A Quest for Transformation and Appropriation of Relevant Knowledge in Higher Education

This article argues that in post-apartheid South Africa, the discourse on academic freedom is conjoined with the African experiences of apartheid and colonialism. The majority of black academics see academic freedom as an opportunity for the total emancipation of the African university from the vestiges of colonialism and apartheid. A symbiotic relationship exists between colonialism and Eurocentric knowledge. The main argument is that it is imperative that transformation is on the basis of the quality of knowledge that is disseminated at African universities. However, it is also argued that those who are against transformation at African universities have appealed to academic freedom to imply that their inherited colonial privileges should never be tampered with. Africa Insight Vol. 38 (2) 2008: pp. 101-11

The dominance of the spirit of neo-Liberal caplitalism in contemporary higher educaiton practices in Post-Colonial Afrca: A reconstruction of an African ethic of indigenization

No Abstract. Africa Insight Vol. 37 (2) 2007: pp. 215-22

Animal rights and environmental ethics in Africa : From anthropocentrism to non-speciesism?

The claim is frequently made on behalf of African moral beliefs and customs that African cultures do not objectify and exploit nature and natural organisms, unlike Western (or Northern) moral attitudes and practices. Through exploration of what kind of moral status is reserved for other-than-human animals in African ethics, I argued in my recent book Animals and African Ethics that moral perceptions, attitudes and practices on the African continent have tended to be resolutely anthropocentric, or human-centred. Although values like ubuntu (humanness) and ukama (relationality) have, in recent years, been expanded to include non-human nature, animals characteristically have no rights, and human duties to them are almost exclusively ‘indirect‘. Taking into account the brutal and dehumanizing ravages of colonialism, racism and political, cultural and moral apartheid that Africans have historically been subjected to, it does not seem to be wholly off the mark to invite people in sub-Sahara Africa, especially, to reflect on an even longer, more deeply-entrenched historical process of discrimination, oppression and exploitation, namely that of species apartheid. Yet, adoption of a more enlightened stance vis-à-vis the non-human world and animals in particular would almost certainly involve giving up the moral anthropocentrism that characterizes many attitudes and practices on the African continent. This need not entail surrendering what is arguably at the core of sub-Saharan morality – the emphasis on community and harmonious communal relationships. ‘I am because we are’ could reasonably be interpreted as not being confined to the human realm, as transcending the species barrier. I have in mind here something like a relational approach to animal rights and environmental ethics that is neither anthropocentric nor speciesist. The multifarious historical and geographical relationships we have with other-than-human animals give rise to a multitude of moral obligations that differ according to the kinds of relationships we find ourselves in. There is an increasing awareness among African scholars of the untenability of a rigidly species-governed ‘us-against-them’ thinking, that anthropocentrism shares many relevant features with ethnocentrism, and that speciesism is relevantly like racism. It is my aim in the proposed contribution to explore these ideas and conceptual tools in more detail

Onsite training of doctors, midwives and nurses in obstetric emergencies, Zimbabwe

PROBLEM: In Zimbabwe, many health facilities are not able to manage serious obstetric complications. Staff most commonly identified inadequate training as the greatest barrier to preventing avoidable maternal deaths. APPROACH: We established an onsite obstetric emergencies training programme for maternity staff in the Mpilo Central Hospital. We trained 12 local staff to become trainers and provided them with the equipment and resources needed for the course. The trainers held one-day courses for 299 staff at the hospital. LOCAL SETTING: Maternal mortality in Zimbabwe has increased from 555 to 960 per 100 000 pregnant women from 2006 to 2011 and 47% of the deaths are believed to be avoidable. Most obstetric emergencies trainings are held off-site, away from the clinical area, for a limited number of staff. RELEVANT CHANGES: Following an in-hospital train-the-trainers course, 90% (138/153) of maternity staff were trained locally within the first year, with 299 hospital staff trained to date. Local system changes included: the introduction of a labour ward board, emergency boxes, colour-coded early warning observation charts and a maternity dashboard. In this hospital, these changes have been associated with a 34% reduction in hospital maternal mortality from 67 maternal deaths per 9078 births (0.74%) in 2011 compared with 48 maternal deaths per 9884 births (0.49%) in 2014. LESSONS LEARNT: Introducing obstetric emergencies training and tools was feasible onsite, improved clinical practice, was sustained by local staff and associated with improved clinical outcomes. Further work to study the implementation and effect of this intervention at scale is required