Open research questions in African cultural and philosophical studies

What the literature leaves open

• understanding of genetics. South Africa's evolutionary biology in the 70s and 80s evolved uniquely through research in mammalian paleontology, largely due to various progressive institutions. The development is credited by S. D. Johnson (2009) to the country's rich biodiversity and hominid fossil remains. This foundation underscores the importance of teachers acknowledging Darwin’s view that Africa is the "cradle of mankind," as highlighted by Raymond Dart (as cited in Johnson, 2009, p. 404). Teachers should aim to harmonize the coexistence of evolution and faith. Teacher training programs lack sufficient resources for evolution-focused courses (Long, 2012). Volunteering in research offers biology teachers opportunities to support archaeologists and paleontologists, addressing ignorance and creationism.

  Teachers’ Acceptance and Understanding of Evolution: A Mixed-Methods Study of Life Sciences Educators in Tshwane North, South Africa · 2026 · DOI

• This article set out to demonstrate the significance of Afrocentric perspectives to social work with group education and practice. Three key recommendations are made. 1. There is a need to integrate Afrocentric discourses with contemporary social work with group education and practice in the South African and African context. This integration could ensure that the practice of social work with groups in the African context is culturally and contextually relevant. The integration of an Afrocentric discourse also contributes to indigenising social work education and practice so that the profession can embrace diverse cultures and contexts (Bent-Goodley et al., 2017; Mathebane & Sekudu, 2018). Additionally, the integration of Afrocentric discourses should also target other key methods of social work intervention, such as community work and casework, so that there can be an alignment between education and practice. This implies that the intentional transformation of the contemporary social work curriculum should be more sensitive to African realities and context. 2. More empirical research is needed on the incorporation of Afrocentric discourses into social work with groups into student learning and practice. Through extensive empirical and evidence-based research, Afrocentric theories, models and approaches can be developed for the practice and education in social work with groups. The research on Afrocentric discourse in social work with groups should prioritise amplifying participants' voices, recognising the uniqueness of their experiences and the importance of their stories in knowledge generation, while at the same time showing respect to individuals and communities. This could promote healing while advancing transformation through the incorporation of indigenous knowledge systems. 3. The establishment of strategic partnerships with social work centres, institutes and organisations such as the Ma’at Institute that needs to be grounded in African indigenous knowledge. These strategic partnerships are crucial for social work practice and education in terms of the co-creation of knowledge. These strategic partnerships can be instrumental in providing opportunities for research centres instrumental in advancing academic and evidence-based social work literature. Furthermore, the collaboration offers students and Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk, 2026: 62(1) 32 academics first-hand knowledge from practitioners who specialise in the application of Afrocentric methods, thereby improving their learning experience and encouraging the integration of Afrocentric practices into fieldwork placement.

  Groupwork and Afrocentric perspectives in social work education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: A transformative autoethnographic journey · 2026 · DOI

• The section below proposes strategic levers to strengthen community engagement in higher education, focusing on the need for greater institutionalisation, collaboration and methodological innovation. Furthermore, it points to major study limitations and recalls future research lines that can reinforce how community engagement contributes to positively changing academic and social systems. The first lever is the institutionalisation of community engagement for ecosystem sustainability The journey to sustainable community engagement (CE) requires meaningful institutionalisation into formal policies, strategic plans and governance frameworks, underpinned by adequate funding and aligned mechanisms for reward. Legitimising CE as a core academic function, rather than an optional activity, also requires its integration into promotion and performance criteria. Institutional commitment: Integration could allow engagement efforts of the campus to be sustained (and enhanced) long after institutional sponsorship ends by ensuring continuity, providing a staff umbrella that enables greater participation in outreach (as described before), and alignment more effectively with teaching and research, ultimately demanding stronger overall sustainability for the ecosystem for such engagements. A second lever is building multidisciplinary and cross-institutional networks for innovation and social impact. There is already too much fragmentation and concentration that call for more collaboration across disciplines and universities. Through inclusive networks, institutions should exchange expertise, share resources and co-produce knowledge that is more attuned to societal challenges. This not only amplifies innovation but also enables aligned, sector-wide responses to enhance the community value of CE efforts. The third strategic lever is promoting methodological innovation through participatory and decolonial lenses. By employing anti-colonial research methods which highlight local knowledge systems as well as following consideration for marginal voices, universities must be mindful of how to carry out ethical engagements. By ensuring that knowledge production is contextually anchored and socially responsive, thereby adding legitimacy, relevance and transformative validity to CE. Despite these strengths, this paper does have several limitations. However, this dependence on bibliometric analysis inherently prioritises indexed and peer-reviewed resources, which risks marginalising potentially valuable insights from non-indexed publications. This carries the risk of Anglo-centric bias, as global databases have been argued to underrepresent scholarship from the Global South. The exclusion of grey literature, for example, policy reports, and community-based research outputs or even institutional documents, is another limitation in the comprehensiveness of this analysis; particularly relevant in a relatively new but effective field like community engagement, where practice-based knowledge is substantial. These limitations indicate that the results ought to be viewed as an incomplete but significant snapshot of the CE knowledge landscape. Future studies should build upon these findings and conduct longitudinal impact studies, assessing the real-world outcomes of community engagement initiatives over time, particularly regarding justice and institutionalisation. There is also a need for studies comparing African contexts to better explain how various socio-political and institutional environments influence CE practices and 388 Makhanya, International Journal of Business Ecosystem & Strategy, 8(2), (2026) 380-391 scholarship. Making methodological approaches broader than bibliometrics, by including qualitative, participative and mixed methods research, would yield a more complete picture of the field.

  Community engagement ecosystems in South African higher education: A bibliometric analysis of scholarship advancing social justice, inclusion, and institutional strategy · 2026 · DOI

• Second, while the results demonstrate a contrast between the questionnaire results and those from the interviews concerning participants’ perceptions of their and other teachers’ preparedness, further research is needed to expand on what this preparedness entails in practice and how such practice evolves across different school contexts.

  Decolonisation of Education in Public Primary Schools in South Africa: Challenges of Integration and Adaptation for the Way Forward · 2026 · DOI

• It addresses an intersection of comparative and international higher education that has not been explored before: the mobility and relevance of a Critical Thinking curriculum in TNHE in West Africa, thus contributing to critical internationalisation studies and supporting broader educational development efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa.

  Critically Examining the Mobilities of a Critical Thinking Curriculum in Transnational Higher Education: A Case Study in West Africa · 2025 · DOI

• These include: The entrenched legacy of colonialism and the persistent influence of Eurocentrism within the education system; Insufficient resources to effectively implement indigenisation and decolonisation strategies; Resistance and limited enthusiasm from some stakeholders within academia; The continued dominance of colonial languages in African education policies; and a lack of consensus regarding the definition and scope of “decolonisation.

  The prospects and challenges of indigenising Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)' curriculum in South Africa · 2025 · DOI

• Abstract Underscoring recurrent calls for the decolonization of university curricula in South Africa are underexplored presumptions that by only disrupting theoretical content, universities might release themselves from a colonialist grasp, that continues to dominate and distort higher education discourse.

  Decolonization in South African universities: storytelling as subversion and reclamation · 2024 · DOI

• Imperialism and AfricaIt is an irony of history that coercion, which is so effective that it can afford to be silent, is scarcely recognised as such; it is only on occasions when its effectiveness is diminished to a point where it has to come out in the ugliest of colours that its reality begins to strike us.

  Imperialism and Africa · 2024 · DOI

• An appropriate analysis of the nature and role of African middle classes must consider four aspects: the specific class formations of African societies; the link between socioeconomic stratification and sociopolitical orientations; the limited knowledge and theorisation of African societies; and the need to apply a multidimensional and new research including diverse sociocultural elements and their contextual embeddedness.

  African middle classness, politics and protest: on the context of this issue · 2023 · DOI

• Additionally, it was found that four first-hand African themes have not found in the CAS categorization, and significantly limited research was conducted into post-graduate programmes and services (hereafter referred to as PGP's, despite the demands for increased enrolments.

  Mapping African Student Affairs Research during the Past Interlude (2008-2019) through Bronfenbrenner’s Lens · 2022 · DOI

• However, while essential, collaboration is often exploitative in the African context as "Africa is often mined for resources of interest to the international community, and African scientists become the under-recognized workers who collect those resources" (195–96).

  Science, Policy, and Development in Africa: Challenges and Prospects by R. Sooryamoorthy · 2022 · DOI

• This article defends a contrary thesis and demonstrates the exact ways the underexplored notions of communal relationships, human dignity and social justice - and the normative principles to which they give rise - grounded in African philosophy can usefully address critical concerns regarding exploitation in the sharing of research resources to facilitate open partnership/collaboration and reuse.

  Addressing exploitation and inequities in open science: A relational perspective · 2022 · DOI

• A clarification – and perhaps more than just a clearing up – is warranted about the stimulus, prevailing and possible meanings, end-goal, and horizons, but also how, in light of the call for the decolonisation of higher education in SA, we – meaning students, teachers, researchers, therapists – might design African psychology university courses, research, professional programmes and therapies, as well as networks.

  Frequently asked questions about African psychology · 2017 · DOI

• Such a perspective remains unexplored in historical literature, including literature on the Cold War in southern Africa, which highlights how global powers engaged with African nationalist movements without considering the manner in which liberation movement members used such interventions for other ends.

  Education in Exile: International Scholarships, Cold War Politics, and Conflicts among SWAPO Members in Tanzania, 1961–1968 · 2017 · DOI

• The key argument that the article poses is that the implementation of these narrowly defined strategies in isolation is insufficient and could be of greater value as part of more comprehensive, multi-disciplinary strategies which take proper cognisance of the relationship between social-historical context and disciplinary problems.

  Die behoefte aan 'n multidimensionele benadering tot dissiplineprobleme op skool : navorsings- en oorsigartikel · 2008

• This is no small achievement, even if the benefits for many at the grassroots have been limited by the persistence of “brown areas” in which there is low or no presence of the state—understood as “a set of reasonably effective bureaucracies and of the effectiveness of properly sanctioned legality” (O’Donnell, 1993) and in which sources of nondemocratic power still hold sway (Chipkin and Thulare, 1997).

  Getting Better Than “World Class”: The Challenge of Governing Postapartheid South Africa · 2005 · DOI

• Third, people in the West, for whatever reason, receive negative, limited information through themedia; images of ethnic wars, dictatorships, famine, and AIDS predominate, so the potential contribution of African values is often lost.

  <I>Ubuntu:</I> Reflections of a South African on Our Common Humanity · 2003 · DOI

• Even though many other writers including several missionaries, anthropologists and historians, depicted Africa in a rather positive and scientific manner (Davidson 1966b, Goody 1966), much of the negative image created long ago still exists and needs to be examined and corrected.

  A review of traditional Ghanaian and Western philosophies of adult education · 2003 · DOI

• The belated interest in democratization leaves open questions as to whether the campaigns now linked with SAPS can and will be sustained in the long term.

  African Churches in Social Transformation · 1996

• EDITED BY)AMES E. BLACKWELL AND MoRRIS)ANOWITZ This work assesses and interprets the contributions of black sociologists to the development of their discipline. The contributors examine such topics as the tensions generated by black studies on the cor porate life of American universities. and the diffi cult circumstances under which black sociologists have operated in the American Sociological As sociation. 1974 384 pages Cloth $15.00 Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 John W. Blassingame A study of the education. family, religion, and social and economic activities of blacks living in New Orleans from 1860 to 1880. Professor Blas singame's illustrated and thoroughly documented work sheds important new light on this poorly understood era of black history. 1973.wiii. 302 pages il/us.

  Africa: Challenge of the Unfinished Revolution · 1974 · DOI

• 1973 objective and critical historical documentation is lacking, as in the case of large parts of African oral tradition, the scientifically authentic history of events is much more difficult to reconstruct than in the European cases quoted by Eliade.

  Philosophy of African history · 1973 · DOI

• The recent UNESCO declaration which recognizes the existence of ethnic groups that differ genetically, outruns the psychological evidence by claiming that these differences are limited to the physical and physiological domain.

  The study of African ability · 1952 · DOI

• Conversely, the study identifies five structural and ideological barriers, including neoliberal capitalism, colonial legacies in policy and education, globalization, limited literature, and unsupportive organizational governance.

  Facilitators and barriers to the use of Ubuntu values in social work and social development · 2026 · DOI

• There is potential for intellectual decoloniality to foster a compromise between these strands of Pan-Africanism, but this has not yet been explored by scholars in the field of African identity politics or the field of decoloniality.

  Reforming Pan-Africanism · 2025 · DOI

• Using a decolonising lens that foregrounds epistemic justice, we conclude that substantial work remains to be done for knowledge production in South African Psychology to fulfil the decolonising imperative of distributive epistemic justice.

  Decolonisation and South African Psychology research 30 years after democracy · 2024 · DOI

Most-cited papers in African cultural and philosophical studies

• The decolonial bandwagon and the dangers of intellectual decolonisation · International Review of Sociology · 2020 · 297 citations
• Postcolonialising Geography: Tactics and Pitfalls · Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography · 2003 · 230 citations
• The cognitive empire, politics of knowledge and African intellectual productions: reflections on struggles for epistemic freedom and resurgence of decolonisation in the twenty-first century · Third World Quarterly · 2020 · 198 citations
• Globalisation and Education in the Postcolonial World: Towards a conceptual framework · Comparative Education · 2001 · 165 citations
• Decolonizing African Studies · Critical African Studies · 2020 · 121 citations
• <I>Ubuntu:</I> Reflections of a South African on Our Common Humanity · Reflections The SoL Journal · 2003 · 113 citations
• Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations: Centering Race within the Contemporary Large‐Scale Infrastructures of East Africa · Antipode · 2020 · 100 citations
• Surfacing a hidden literature · Educational Management Administration & Leadership · 2017 · 93 citations
• Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya · The Journal of African History · 1990 · 79 citations
• Temporalities of waiting in Africa · Critical African Studies · 2020 · 74 citations

Most recent work

• Introduction: roaming and rooted – migration, religion, spirituality and the transnational lives of African youth · Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2026
• Reframing the lens: transnational youth, lived religion and rethinking mobility and transnationalism · Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2026
• Echoes of Fanon in South African praxis: Embodied, localized and communal knowledges in group analytic practice · Group Analysis · 2026
• Repositioning Africa in the Global Social Marketing Dialogue: Evidence, Voice and Institutionalisation · Social Marketing Quarterly · 2026
• Reflective masculinities: Black boys contesting hegemony in peri-urban South Africa · NORMA · 2026
• Ordering outside an order: Africa beyond the menu · Contemporary Security Policy · 2026
• Ubuntu, generative AI and machine-mediated relationships in South Africa · South African Journal of Philosophy · 2026
• The meaning of being human and the future of humanity in the world of artificial intelligence · Verbum et Ecclesia · 2026
• Reconstructing the Moral University: Critical Idealism as a Framework for Moral Formation in African Higher Education · International Journal of Advanced Research · 2026
• Decolonisation of Education in Public Primary Schools in South Africa: Challenges of Integration and Adaptation for the Way Forward · International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research · 2026

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