Africentric Social Sciences for Human Liberation

Social science represents as much an expression of a people's ideology as it does a defense of that ideology (Asante, 1980). The extent to which that ideology contains elements of implicit oppression is the extent to which that particular social science is in fact an instrument of oppression. Nobles (1978a) discusses the fact that Science, particularly social science, like the economic and political institutions has become an instrument designed to reflect the culture of the oppressor and to allow for the more efficient domination and oppression of African peoples. Consequently, the uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of Western science by African people is to participate in our own domination and oppression. Nobles, in the same discussion, goes on to justify the need for a social science system reflective of our cultural reality. Our objective in this discussion is to identify some characteristics of Western social science and to suggest some alternative assumptions for the establishment of an African social science. African social scientists have failed to come to grips with the fact that the tools that they have acquired in the course of their training in the Western social science tradition have illequipped them to deal with the fundamental task of liberating