More than one Independence Generation psychiatrist attempted to formulate meta-psychologies useful for clinical practices. Scientists and engineers among them compiled taxonomies of African plants and animals, created pharmacopeia, and studied etiologies of ailments common in the tropics. They concentrated on undoing colonization’s thought infrastructure and labored hard at proving the validity of the human experience in the African context. This may have proved to be a flag-only independence in less than just a decade, but when these eyewitnesses to formal freedom stepped forth into scholarly careers, decolonization was tangible and their faith in the need to fully realize what we may call freedom dividend was firm.Įxpanding on the legacy of predecessors like Leopold Senghor and Jomo Kenyatta who had exited from direct activism into political office, the Independence Generation of scholars strived to render legible hitherto obfuscated features of African intellectual self-understanding. I am calling them the Independence Generation because they reached maturity, many of them having gained westernized university training, around independence early in the 1960s. But as they were being tutored in colonial schooling systems, anticolonial agitations and wars of independence raged around them.
AṢA AWÉ FULL
World War II circumscribed their birth and full bore colonization oversaw their formative years. The passing on 5 December 2020, of Professor Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì (1939–2020) 1 instigated the writing of this article, although the reflections call as much attention to the work of a distinct cohort of scholars in African humanities that Anthonia Kalu named as “age-grade Irele,” (34) after the late Francis Abiola Irele (1936–2017).
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