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3.8 The theoretical framework for the present study: The Afrocentric paradigm
The technique here is to do things or say words and tell stories, sing songs, give testimonies and offer donations and gifts that reassure and cognitively challenge such negative questions. Such collective efforts send a message to the bereaved that the community is available for instrumental and moral support. The mourning practices and the funeral ceremony rituals that are successfully conducted tend to create a new and lasting impression on the bereaved‘s cognition as opposed to the initial negative internal dialogue they held. The bereaved is therefore faced with messages that contradict their initial belief post the death. This helps them to assimilate the positive support and solidarity which assists in the healing process.
The main effort of AGT is to ensure that, the initial negative translation the bereaved has framed on the meaning of the loss is not allowed to persist (Nwoye 2000.
3.8 The theoretical framework for the present study: The Afrocentric paradigm
highly technically managed and structured society where all knowledge flows upward to more efficiently control and dominate society (Asante, 1980). The emphasis made was that the ruling ideologies of the time continued to abuse positions of power on questions of knowledge and its production. It is in this context that Asante maintained that there was an urgent need to free Africans‘ epistemologies from the constraints of Eurocentrism in connection with critical theory (Mkabela, 2005).
Accordingly, Afrocentricity put forth the knowledge of this "place" perspective and saw it as a fundamental rule of intellectual inquiry (Asante, 1990) or so to say Afrocentricity locates research from an African viewpoint and creates Africa‘s own intellectual perspective. It focuses on Africa as the cultural centre for the study of African experiences and interprets research data from an African perspective (Mkabela, 2005, p. 180).
In essence, when traced back historically, the aim of Afrocentric scholarship has always been and still is to shift, construct, critique, and challenge the way of knowing or discerning knowledge from an epistemology engendered within a European cultural construct to one which is engendered or centered within an African or probably more correctly an African American cultural construct (Baker, 1991).
Mkabela (2005) sums up the historical origins of this paradigm in the following excerpt:
Afrocentricity is a philosophical and theoretical paradigm which its origin is attributed to Asante‘s works Afrocentricity (1988), The Afrocentric Idea (1987), and Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990). These books form the essential core of the idea that interpretation and explanation based on the role of Africans as subjects, is more consistent with reality. It became a growing intellectual idea in the 1980s as scores of African American and African scholars adopted an Afrocentric orientation to data. Afrocentricity is generally opposed to theories that "dislocate" Africans in the periphery of human thought and experience. (p. 179)
As a philosophy and theoretical paradigm Afrocentricity advocate for pluriversal perspective in research (Mkabela, 2005). Kaboub (2008) lends support by highlighting that the lack of internal consistency of positivism in the social sciences commanded its abandonment and acceptance of critical multiplism.
3.8.2 Basic propositions of the Afrocentric paradigm
Afrocentricity is undergird by the notion that our main problem as African people is our usually unconscious adoption of the Western worldview and perspective and their attendant conceptual frameworks (Mazama, 2001). The unintended outcome of this tendency or attitude is that African people are de-centred, essentially meaning that we have lost our cultural footing or identity and have become dis-located and dis-oriented (Asante, 1980). In response to this, the Afrocentric scholars, Asante in particular, systematically advanced the Afrocentric paradigm to explain the African human condition.
Afrocentricity can be easily understood as using the African worldview to understand all manner of phenomena (Carr as cited in Conyers, 2011, p 39). It deals with the question of African identity from the perspective of African people as centered, located, oriented and grounded (Mkabela, 2005). Therefore, Afrocentricity is placing African ideals, values and philosophies at the centre of an analysis that involves African culture and behaviour (Alkebulan, 2007). Ontologically, Afrocentricity argues that cultural location takes precedence over the topic or the data under consideration. As an enterprise it is framed by cosmological, epistemological, axiological, and aesthetic issues that reflect African centeredness and experiences (Asante, 1990; Mazama, 2001). Afrocentricity is pan-African in scope and runs as a visible thread across various fields that specialises in African studies, including communicative, social, cultural, political, economic and psychological, while recognizing three possible approaches: functional, categorical and etymological (Mazama, 2001). Afrocentricity therefore, foster scholarly collective agency and open-discourse in favour of multiculturalism, which becomes imperative for the preservation of African culture and society (Asante, 2007). The paradigm has been labelled pseudoscience by scholars such as D‘Souza and Lefkowitz, and merely an ideology that lacks rigour to be accepted as an empirically based theory of practice
(Appiah, 1993). Despite the criticisms, Alkebulan (2007) has argued that the Afrocentric idea is valid and need to be defended and vigorously pursued.
3.8.3 The implications of the Afrocentric paradigm for the present study
The fundamental proposition that our main problem as African people is our usually unconscious adoption of the Western worldview and perspective and their attendant conceptual frameworks speaks volume to the present study. This study was a response to challenges met by the researcher with bereaved black African clients in therapy. Amongst others were clinical presentations embedded with African cultural beliefs, ideas and ideals. Unfortunately, the orthodox bereavement conceptual models and grief intervention strategies available to the researcher at the time were mostly ineffective and unresponsive when applied to some of the cases. The unintended consequence of the clinician‘s lack of the African ways of interpreting and dealing with such lived experiences was that some of the cases were prematurely terminated, while some patients abandoned therapy. This resonate with Sodi and Bojuwoye‘s (2011) sentiment that Western-oriented health care models have limited success when applied to the health conditions of non-Western cultures.
It therefore became imperative for the researcher to consider a different orientation to conceptualising and conducting the present study. It is for this reason that Afrocentricity became the guiding framework for the present study. Death and dying, bereavement and mourning are universal human experiences shaped primarily by people‘s worldviews and cultural practices (Laurie & Neimeyer, 2008; Breen &
O‘Connor, 2007; Eyetsemitan, 2002). These experiences have a profound impact on the bereaved persons‘ morbidity and mortality. It is important for bereavement, and grief conceptual and intervention related strategies to be culturally located, sensitive and relevant. Similarly, the researcher in the present study adopted the Afrocentric paradigm which enabled him to understand and describe the bereavement and its related rituals in the context of the Northern Sotho community taking into account their belief systems and cultural practices. The psychological themes that emerged from this study added a new dimension towards the understanding and management of bereavement in a clinical context and at a communal level.