The 29th Inaugural Lecturer of the 2023/2024 academic session and Professor of Sociology of Development & Industrial Relations, Ndukaeze Nwabueze, has urged all disciplines to adopt Afrocentricity principles, indigenize their knowledge and prioritize local problem-solving. This, he claims, have been tested and found to support much-desired African Renaissance.
He made this recommendation while delivering his Inaugural Lecture titled: Afrocentricity: The Power of Weakness on Wednesday, October 16, 2024 at the J. F. Ade Ajayi Auditorium, UNILAG.
In order to situate the topic in its special neo-colonial context, Prof. Nwabueze opened the lecture by addressing the meaning of the title. The Lecturer recaptured the reality that fear, lack of confidence, indecisiveness, lack of courage, and dependent mindset are built into the sub-consciousness of colonized peoples through received education. He noted that the more colonized people grow in received education, the more everything stagnates or retrogresses. The beacon of hope is that sections of colonized people who see beyond the surface assume the providential duty to continuously search for how to break away from dependency. In the course of this search, he discovered the concept, theory, method, and analytical astuteness of Afrocentricity and acknowledged the salutary potentials of its knowledge and education components.
According to Prof. Nwabueze, afrocentricity is anchored on values opposite to the values of Western education. It is autochthonous, endogenous in orientation, it is indigenous, original, empathic, creative, sceptical, inquisitive and stirs up critical consciousness in the populace. Upon applying the fundamental principles and ethos of Afrocentric education to Nigeria’s (and Africa’s) persisting underdevelopment, it opens up the hidden strength in weakness embedded in its “we can do it” spirit. That discovery unmasked the inherent weakness of colonial education. It delivers strength and confidence where there was weakness, despondency, dependency, hopelessness, helplessness and mass resignation.
The Lecture was anchored on the premise that underdevelopment persists in Nigeria (and Africa) because the fundamental changes in the principles and structures of education laid down by the colonial government were not critically interrogated or tested to determine its fitness for purpose, let alone changing it at independence.
Professor Nwabueze declared that the colonial principles of education are ill-suited for the transformation of the colony because they were originally programmed to subjugate the colony perpetually to metropolitan whims and caprices.
He deployed Western Sociology, the discipline in which he earned his professorship, to illustrate the pitfalls of received education. He criticized received sociology of obscurantism, elitism, atavism and conservatism. In its place, he originates Afrocentric Sociology by ‘cross-breeding’ orthodox sociology and afrocentricity, thereby birthing a new discipline.
As a further contribution to knowledge, he mentioned his collaboration with two Sociology Departments in Nigeria. One of the universities is putting together an introductory textbook on Afrocentric sociology under his supervision. This book will contain the basic assumptions, underlying principles, concepts, theories and methods of research in the new discipline. The other university is integrating practical Afrocentric sociology into its curriculum by assembling the knowledge components, training programs, regulatory guidelines, and institutional changes needed to transform Afrocentric sociology into a pure and applied discipline. He asserted that this new discipline can become a profession if the conservative baggage of traditional sociology is discarded.
The Inaugural Lecturer explained that Afrocentric sociology, like Afrocentric education overall, emphasizes ‘disobedient thinking,’ social change, dismantling conservative structures, and ending cultures that legitimize Western supremacist ideology. He condemned this supremacist ideology as vile, ethnocentric, racist, prejudicial, and counterproductive to the African cause.
He concluded the lecture by stressing the need to overhaul the entire education system of the country, while also emphasizing the equally urgent need to reform the State. He acknowledged that fixing education is an essential function of the State.
Born on Saturday, March 26, 1955, Prof. Ndukaeze Nwabueze bagged a B.Sc. in Sociology from University of Ibadan in 1976 and an M.Sc. in Sociology (1981), LL.B. (1999) and Ph.D. in Sociology (2009). He joined the services of the University of Lagos as a Graduate Assistant at the Department of Sociology in 1981 and rose to become a Professor in 2017.
Report: Ndidi J. Odinikaeze
Photographs: Ayo Oloyede
