Munyaradzi Mawere

Gertjan Van Stam
email: gertjan@vanstam

eLearning in an African Place: How 'alien' eLearning Models are Failing Many in Africa

Keywords:

This paper discusses eLearning in contemporary times in an African place. While the paper acknowledges the importance of eLearning in that it facilitates distance learners' activities and bridges geographical gaps across the world, it notes that in convoluted environments such as those of Africa, eLearning raises a lot of critical questions, some of which are cultural, and others are ethical and epistemological. This ambiguity emerges largely because eLearning, as it is understood in Africa, comes in foreign packages. The paper argues for the decolonisation of eLearning -that external practices of eLearning, particularly those 'imposed' on Africa from Europe and North America, fail many environments in Africa. This failing is because such practices rubberstamp the long-criticised philosophy of one-size-fits-all which has been blamed for impoverishing Africa besides underestimating the potential contribution of the African continent to the global world. On this note, the paper concludes that unless we decolonise eLearning and consider the issues of sensitivity, inclusivity, and attainability, eLearning will not be palatable or at least beneficial for most in Africa.

eLearning in an African place

The received practices and theories of eLearning, mostly from the USA and Europe, may represent internationally accepted good practice yet they also embed deep political, epistemological, and cultural assumptions that may be incongruent with the cultural knowledge of users in many communities in Africa. Generally speaking, eLearning is learning that uses electronic technologies/media such as the internet, intranets and extranets [START_REF] Welsh | E-learning: emerging uses, empirical results and future directions[END_REF], also referred to as educational technology. Typically, this learning takes place outside of a traditional classroom, for example, online, or blended and somehow informal as was the case in African education systems before colonialism. While this kind of learning seems worthwhile as it facilitates distance learning, provides convenience, and tries to bridge geographical gaps, in an African context, eLearning raises many questions some of which are cultural, and others are ethical and epistemological. The first question that [African] critical minds engage with as soon as they receive eLearning guidance from outside is: who designed the eLearning model and for what reason? Given the exclusion of Africa in the designing of most contemporary dominant eLearning applications, from a cultural and political perspective, this overture could be interpreted as cultural imperialism as just like what colonialism did to Africa. In this manner, a theory can impose cultural ethos of Europe and the Americas on Africa. The question that remains perturbing is where Africa in this whole eLearning discourse and model designing is? The second question is to what extent does e-Learning speak to the cultural and ethical concerns of Africa? This question, as is the issues raised above, is critical because any learning carries with it cultural and moral sensibilities of a people. Now, if Africa is excluded as was the case during the 1884-5 Berlin Conference when the continent was partitioned in the absence of African representatives, isn't it that imposition of eLearning on Africa tantamounts to a recolonisation of Africa? Putting it more precisely, why are most Africans remain unrepresented in the designing of theoretical and practical models that affect them directly or otherwise? The third critical question pertains to affordability -where most African rural areas are without electricity and internet connection. Is eLearning useful and practical to people living in such areas? This issue points to the fact that the imported theories of eLearning are not only culturally problematic but also morally, politically and epistemically problematic. Of course, there is a wide variety of proposed theories and practical approaches. They depend on how one approaches learning, but as noted earlier, many as they are, little comes from African perspectives.

Methodology

The authors of this paper are academics with decennia of experience in African institutes of higher education in Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Through living research [START_REF] Van Stam | Method of Research in a We-Paradigm, lessons on Living Research in Africa[END_REF], they study how communities (of belonging, as will be shown in this paper) engage, review cultural heritage and contemporary cultural practices and paradigm switching and shifting in sectors which include, among others, education, health, and digital technology. For this paper, the authors researched technology and African communities from an African positionality, embedded in institutes of higher education, supporting institutes in health, and rural communities. The authors tested these insights in e/merge 2018, an online festival of e-learning in Africa, 9-20 July 2018.

3

Discordances of eLearning with African cultural expressions

Kwame Nkrumah [START_REF] Nkrumah | Consciencism[END_REF], an influential philosopher and political leader, provided an intellectual framework on social conscience founded in the African values of communal solidarity in his book consciencism. Paulo Freire (2000), the author of the widely read, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, documented his participatory practice from culture circles in North-eastern Brazil in the 1960s. However, it seems, contemporary, imported eLearning models are entirely ignorant of the various epistemai in the world.

It is necessary to pinpoint that half of the world is not connected to the Internet and that in Africa, less than a quarter of the population is using the Internet [START_REF]International Telecommunications Union: ICT facts and figures 2017[END_REF]. When assessing eLearning theories and practices in Africa, they need deconstruction and reconstruction as to review how they fit with features that are salient in African locales, at least, those that have existed over a substantial amount of time. There is identity grounding of African cultural properties that existed long while been recurrent in many African places in a way they have tended not to be elsewhere [START_REF] Metz | How the West Was One: The Western as individualist, the African as communitarian[END_REF]. Although there are many and convoluted realities present in the pluriform African realities, from an assessment of the kind of African properties Thaddeus Metz [START_REF] Metz | How the West Was One: The Western as individualist, the African as communitarian[END_REF] alludes to, we identify three main areas of discordance. These are paradigmatic, concern the channel, and deal with platforms and practices.

3.1

Paradigmatic discordance eLearning theories rely on the epistemic grounding of the researcher and those who are being researched. It reflects the learning-perspectives adopted, mostly categorised as associationist/empiricist, cognitive, or situated [START_REF] Mayes | Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models[END_REF]. These perspectives, however, are also located. Subsequently, the models and technologies that come out of them are elements of a system of behaviour. Through models and technologies, they pass from one person to another. Therefore, eLearning models and technologies represent memes. Contemporary theories, mostly originating from outside of Africa, are said to be undergirding 'internationally accepted good practice'. Cognisant of the multiepistemic world, in the complex African environment and a multi-epistemic world, one must question from which paradigm such claims of 'good practice' have been generated. Have Africans been widely involved, and have African communities been part of the process of research, validation, development, implementation and assessment? Therefore, on which grounds is the claim of 'internationally accepted' being made?

Most conventional eLearning examples put the human learner in the centre. In such an approach, invariably the learner is set as a persona in a cultural setting that aligns with a postmodern Western urban culture that wishes to be free, with the individual being self-sufficient and self-centred. African cultures, however, put the community as the centrepiece of their worldview [START_REF] Mawere | Maslow's Theory of Human Motivation and its Deep Roots in Individualism: Interrogating Maslow's Applicability in Africa[END_REF] unaligned with normative epistemologies but featuring dynamic, integrative epistemology [START_REF] Bigirimana | Beyond the thinking and doing dichotomy: integrating individual and institutional rationality[END_REF]. African frameworks of how societies or nature works regard the individual to belong to a layering of communities, being an intrinsically and always connected part of such communities [START_REF] Nyamnjoh | Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds[END_REF].

So far, we are not aware of eLearning that put 'the community' at the centre. Of course, in contemporary learning, there is ample recognition that education is a social activity and learning approaches based upon constructivism appear to align with life in communities, but they do not do so at the paradigmatic level. The individual learner is solidly posed at the centre. eLearning and its contemporary practices that come from a paradigm reasoning from a personal self in an atomistic universe, culminated in individualism, clash with the cultural knowledge of African students across African education [START_REF] Mawere | Paradigm Clash, Imperial Methodological Epistemologies and Development in Africa: Observations from rural Zimbabwe and Zambia[END_REF]. African paradigms view reality from social personhood, in a universe of coherence, focusing on social cohesion and collective unity, culminating in communalism, social bonding, balancing of duties and rights, and reciprocity. It is, therefore, not strange that there appears little uptake of eLearning in African institutes [START_REF] Aguti | Capacity building for teachers: The weakest link in transforming ICT integration in education[END_REF].

In many parts of Africa, learning focuses on how the community learns, and from such learning, how community members gain understanding [START_REF] Mawere | Oratio: A Framing of Knowledge in the Context of Technology and Academia[END_REF]. The concept of 'community of practice' and learning approaches based upon constructivism do not adequately cover this kind of meaning-making, because they focus on the individual first and upon their relationships in a community second. In many African cultural expressions, the concept of the collective surpasses the individual. These expressions pre-date the concepts of communities of practice. In many parts of Africa, an approach putting the individual as the central focus of attention is not seen as aligned with local cultures but pushing learners towards self-cultivation, individualism and, ultimately, assimilation with foreign ways of thinking. In that sense, eLearning facilitates alien ways of meaning-making and links to gaining a different way of living, e.g. set in capitalism.

Channel discordance

At present, eLearning is mostly proposed from 'the West' and aligns with the thinking/paradigm that created the information and communication channels (for instance, the internet) and tools (for instance mobile devices) that dominate in the global society. These models are complementary to, and intertwine with, broadband internet networking. eLearning platforms and services bank upon the ubiquitous use of computing devices and digital platforms, a setting that Dourish and Mainwaring [START_REF] Dourish | Ubicomp's Colonial Impulse[END_REF] show to be inherently colonial. The apparent positioning of the use of internet telecommunications channels and (imported) computing devices as the preferred channels for eLearning is, therefore, quite problematic. This discordance can be explained as an analogy to the differences between narrowcasting and broadcasting.

In line with the paradigmatic centrality of the individual, the current channels for eLearning link in with narrowcasting [START_REF] O'hara | Inequality.com Power, Poverty and the Digital Divide[END_REF]. A community-centred paradigm, however, would need channels that would map with broadcasting. In the African society, one's membership of the community is not the result of one's 'own choice', but memberships are set by, for instance, one's birthing into a family and introductions into groupings of people in a geographical area. In the Shona language, this is signified by the reference to 'kumusha' as this touches upon issues of identity.

Although constructivism regards learning as behaviour, learning as the construction of knowledge and meaning, and learning as social practice, the channel of Eurocentric Information and Communication Technologies is forcing its users into individualistic framings as the technology is geared towards establishing channels with and to the individual but does not do so for the community and with the community. For instance, there is a significant difference in using the means of the Internet on mobile devices or the use of ICT in the form of radio and call-in programs.

Platforms and Practices

Western knowledge systems are structured along disciplinary boundaries, while African knowledge is embodied in a transdisciplinary community, geared towards orality [START_REF] Mawere | Oratio: A Framing of Knowledge in the Context of Technology and Academia[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia[END_REF]. Therefore, eLearning can only work well when the disciplines become un-disciplined, ensuring conviviality, intellectual freedom and generative symbiosis, in line with Ubuntu principles [START_REF] Nyamnjoh | #RHODESMUSTFALL. Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa[END_REF]. No wonder that the paradigm mismatch and channel mismatch have stalled eLearning praxis to be 'more of the same' in Africa. This situation calls for decolonisation of science and indeed the African academy [START_REF]African Studies in the Academy. The Cornucopia of Theory, Praxis and Transformation in Africa? Bamenda[END_REF] and moving the centre of conceptualisations near the community of users [START_REF] Bidwell | Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa. AI & SO-CIETY[END_REF]. Current eLearning models and practices facilitate the belief in technology determination, as if the availability of computing devices and other tools and eLearning platforms will, by their sheer availability, lead to learning outcomes [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF]. However, when underlying technologies do not necessarily align with technical, organisational and pedagogical systems that are current in African communities, such techniques are catering for foreign agendas, in their wake disrupting systems of knowing that have been working well. Thus, contemporary eLearning models and practices are discordant with African cultural expressions, because  the paradigm mismatch negates necessities of belonging  the channel mismatch negates the issue of identity  the platforms and methods align with (digital) imperialism.

African considerations influencing eLearning

From our long-time experience in higher education and research, we noted three aspects of African culture that set boundaries for eLearning. These are 1) sensitivity, 2) inclusivity, and 3) attainability.

Sensitivity

Learning in an African environment is intertwined with content for specific groups and life-periods, where information transfer depending on time, place, and authority. There are great sensitivities where particular pieces of knowledge and values reside.

Information can be considered sacred or subject to taboos such that they should be imparted only to specific individuals or groups of people. There are, for example, epistemic values -such as on certain rituals and rites of passages -meant explicitly for women, girls, boys, or men. In an African context, these values are not imparted in undesignated settings. eLearning is, however, not sensitive to such forms of knowledge, hence the problems when the foreign e-learning models are applied as they are in African contexts.

Inclusivity

There is a void of a decolonised understanding of the characteristics of eLearning that would make it useful for engaging African communities and their members and facilitate learnings sensitive to belonging, identity, and societal cohesion. The colonial history and presence of supremacy, hegemony, and domination, results in significant differences in the perception and realities of perceived value of what comes from 'the outside' and what comes from 'the inside', and with which system of thought, or reality, even paradigm, one links up [START_REF] Mawere | Between Rhetoric and Reality. The State and Use of Indigenous Knowledge in Post-Colonial Africa[END_REF]. Africans live with a history of having had to accept foreign ideas and absorbing them without critically investigating their source, history, necessity, and workability in the context of the African space. Systems of thought were introduced which instigated rebellion against the established (and working) indigenous systems of local governance and knowledge transfer. Currently, imperialistic digital systems overlay and build out these colonial systems. Subsequently, such systems sustain the continuation of the expropriation of resources out of Africa through, what we call, super-colonialism [START_REF] Van Stam | The Coming-of-Age of Super-Colonialism[END_REF]. African communities are located networks of relationships and interactions, often in line with Ubuntudefining 'good behaviour'. Community instigates collective identity, local participation, and diverse support networks. Community membership and participation involve aspects of belonging, identity, participation, informedness, and associations like support networks. eLearning is designed to result in targeted outcomes. Such a design approach imposes models or 'solutions' upon communities and learners without them being able to decide if and what should be structured and, often, without their involvement. We recognise five main cultural ingredients that African eLearning practitioners could look for to be facilitating [cf. 19]. 1. Putting the community, 'being together', at the centre. Ubuntu, for instance, is a crystallisation of African philosophy in a culture that is inclusive, focusses on the contribution of everyone in its vicinity [START_REF] Mawere | Ubuntu/Unhu as Communal Love: Critical Reflections on the Sociology of Ubuntu and Communal Life in sub-Saharan Africa[END_REF]. 2. Focus on oral and holistic means of communication, where the aim is for embodied knowledge, a knowing that develops while sharing and discussing information involving all present while working things out together, continuously and for the good of everyone, which we dubbed 'oratio' [12, cf, 23]. 3. Focus on sharing, recognising the learner as a representative of community life and its collective (embodied) human repository of knowing, dubbed 'relatio' [START_REF] Sheneberger | Relatio: An Examination of the Relational Dimension of Resource Allocation[END_REF]. 4. A focus on the here-and-now, the ongoing experience, having a constant reestablished history and accepts an unfolding future, dubbed 'animatio' [cf. 25]. 5. Respecting maturity and recognised and authorised leadership, dubbed 'dominio'.

In African eLearning, the focus would not be innovation, or 'new knowledge' per se, but is explicitly focussed on both improvisation [example in 26] and diversity.

Richard Heeks [START_REF] Heeks | ICT4D 2.0: The next phase of applying ICT for international development[END_REF] positions ICT in 'ICT4D 2.0' as a transformative platform. However, if such a platform does not align with local realities, its transformation might not be development but an upsetting disruption of existing established and stable community practices. Sustaining community is an iterative process in which community members, together, continuously develop and amend what binds them, in a continually changing awareness and knowledge base that informs, shapes and triggers improvisations in community life. The main opportunities for eLearning, thus, are the engagement of community members and the provisioning of space for shared development, in the community, for the community. Without such a facility, one sets up individuals with individual knowledge which might be detrimental to the development of the community and may, ultimately, lead to expulsion or migration of such individuals.

The knowledge creation and sharing in the communities are profoundly holistic and transdisciplinary [START_REF] Du Plessis | The Concept and Application of Transdisciplinarity in Intellectual Discourse and Research[END_REF]. This creation involves a complex context of relations and interactions with all kind of entities, both with humans and non-humans. These conversations are supported by a robust and multi-layered infrastructure of existing and changing technologies, like transport, communication tools, and meeting facilities. Contemporary eLearning models fall short of facilitating such a complex environment in many African communities.

Attainability

We must consider the qualitative and broad political, cultural, macroeconomic, and institutional drivers of eLearning and its proposed positive and potential negative consequences. Digital colonialism, also through eLearning platforms, can be sources of impoverishment and underdevelopment [START_REF] Kwet | Break the hold of digital colonialism[END_REF]. The so-called 21 st -century skills often necessitate imported and expensive devices and the use of foreign platforms.

Discussion

If we seriously consider the issue of sensitivity, inclusivity and affordability, then eLearning could be usable in Africa, otherwise, for now, the current proposals appear fruitless packages for Africa. We are not aware of research that proves or disapproves that attention to eLearning is more effective than direct support for educators, improvement of school infrastructures and labs, and such kind of interventions, the improving existing systems [START_REF] Van Stam | Preparing the Next Generation of Teachers[END_REF]. Reports are suggesting either way, providing a narrative of success [START_REF] Chen | Education Nation: six leading edges of innovation in our schools[END_REF] or deficiency [START_REF] Biagi | ICT and Learning: Results from Pisa 2009[END_REF]. Andreas Schleicher of OECD's directorate for education and skills concluded cautiously: "the connections among students, computers and learning are neither simple nor hard-wired; and the real contributions ICT can make to teaching and learning have yet to be fully realised and exploited." [START_REF]OECD: Students, Computers and Learning. Making the Connection[END_REF] It is clear; the verdict is not yet out and, thus, research is crucial to determine the impact of different methods on learning and their influences. In Africa, eLearning is a new realm, mostly apart from long existing processes, and invariably linked to Western notions of modernity. The underlying and long-term effects of eLearning are yet unknown. There is a lack of longitudinal and qualitative research, embedded in African communities and sensitive to the epistemology, culture and embedding of people in Africa. Further, eLearning research seems often linked to a particular intervention or platform (e.g. Content Management Systems or Learning Management Systems) with a multitude of technologies that, in practice, have different meanings in different contexts. As all hegemonic theories and practices, eLearning needs decolonisation. Such an orientation puts communities of belonging at the centre of theory and practice. Thus, this is not the community of learners at the time of learning, but, first, putting the community that one belongs to, the complicated African citizenship at the centre [START_REF] Nyamnjoh | From Bounded to Flexible Citizenship: Lessons from Africa[END_REF].

What eLearning 'is' and an understanding of the undergirding theory is constructed contextually and locally. The moral grounding of currently used eLearning seems mostly (if not exclusively) framed in Western culture. As morality is a cultural variable [START_REF] Haidt | The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology[END_REF], the ethical mismatch of eLearning models engendered through Western lenses and the use in non-Western societies result in severe dysfunctionalities. Most eLearning models proposed for Africa fall short in how they include the local perceptions of affection, loyalty, authority and spirituality, among others. The process of the creation of eLearning theory and practices, and the focus of its facilitation (e.g. towards the community instead of the individual) call for putting those being affected in the driving seat of their developments which includes in the conceptualisation of the facilities for human behaviour and learning.

Current literature on eLearning cases and tools appear to prioritise 'doing' -its inputs and outcomes -often vocalised in weaponised language as 'targets' or 'penetration'. Such descriptions and vocabulary negate its 'being' and are strongly influenced by military, gender, and technical perspectives. The resulting models, therefore, are value-laden. This concoction, in an Africa place, acts out super-colonial [START_REF] Van Stam | The Coming-of-Age of Super-Colonialism[END_REF]. Therefore, eLearning theory and practice insensitive to the local, African contexts are actors, or instigator, of a social change in the direction of the researcher's and designer's motives, instead of being facilitators of an ongoing, locally validated and embedded social life.

Linking eLearning models to contextuality, both for the positionality of their origins and for the positionality of its use does not make it a form of relativism but constitute a call for discussion of the kinds of values that were involved in their conceptualisations. Drawing on the emerging understanding of African expressions of eLearning, there will be tools that give direction to the deconstruction of received guidance of eLearning. From careful thinking, we can be able to understand and, subsequently create and maintain eLearning facilities that support communities and decolonised education in African societies and beyond. Such a learning-(eco-)system is aligned with the resource availability and social cohesion in a context of inclusive and respectful accommodation of all people in African lived-lives.

The contemporary monistic approach to eLearning links in and strengthens the position of the dominant (often US-based) platforms. These platforms are closely linked to (usually US-based) institutes of Eurocentric (higher) education, perpetuating its views and neoliberal ideologies. This singular process aligns with the internationalisation of education, ushered forth by globalisation that fails to deliver social, political, administrative, distributive, cultural or ecological justice [START_REF] Olivier | Ethical Challenges Regarding Globalization of Higher Education[END_REF]. Likewise, the current framing of eLearning complicates and imposes the political, economic and cultural hegemony of the West by entrenching its power seeking and defining what knowledge gets validated and what not. This framing has many drawbacks, as diversity is challenged, like those of languages, culture, and indigenous knowledge and epistemologies -for instance, on how to interact with nature. As a result, the exploitation of the less powerful by a rent seeking elite accelerates. Current eLearning rely heavily upon the ideology of market, choice and unlimited growth. Its proposals are positioned as offerings in a market, based upon unfettered freedom, for individual choice, upon the adagio that the homo economicus knows best. The models seek the maximisation of 'educational returns' in a considered stable, efficient and just society. In this ideology of individual choice, the externalities, as presented in this discussion is delegated to be sorted through 'the market of sciences'. In the current dispensation, this market is colonised by Eurocentrism and (e-)realities framed by rhetoric from corporate businesses [START_REF]UNCTAD: Trade and Development Report 2018. Power, Platforms and the Free Trade Delusion[END_REF]. These contexts actively omit, or nudge out, unwelcome information and ways of knowing by shifting the baselines, negating that what is considered 'not helpful' for their production [START_REF] Mansell | Our digitally mediated society[END_REF]. In the meantime, (foreign) governments and (international) corporates harvest a vast amount of data through digital educational systems and platforms, gaining knowledge of academic performance and personal backgrounds within settings where the local or national guardians or societies bear responsibilities for. The generation that grew up with computers (and dominant eLearning models and systems) think that the ecosystem in which one lives is 'normal' [START_REF] Ndemo | Digital Kenya. An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making[END_REF] although the systems pose significant dangers by their potential to distract, facilitate harm (e.g. bullying), and lower productivity. The de facto situation of a limited choice of ecosystems (with the current one neutralising 'other ways of knowing') represents poverty in thinking and systems conceptualisation. The result is a shrinking variety and multiplicity. Decentralisation the conceptualisation of eLearning and recognising a poly-episteme world is crucial for an eLearning transition for the field of research to be relevant (and aiding) eLearning use in many (most?) parts of Africa.

There is ample need for multiple perspectives on various purposes of eLearning in different contexts. Such is a venture to discover and formulate decolonised African expressions of eLearning. The collective action, struggle and study towards such recognition is an essential process that, by and through itself, will recreate an African identity in eLearning. This endeavour could well lead to the development of new technologies that amplify African intentions, set to support the needs and desires within African paradigms, e.g. sustaining social-cultural constructs like Ubuntu. Most probably, such a theory and practice might well be unaligned with the coloniality embedded in contemporary digital systems and platforms. They will not facilitate nor sustain the extracting of African labour for a foreign private benefit. Such an eLearning will not necessitate people to leave rural areas for the city to seek connectivity to access appropriate education. It will support education geared towards sustaining a quality of life within African communities and not set up people to have to leap beyond one's physical borders to sustain life. The alleviation of Africa's dependency on foreign platforms and the blocking the tromboning of African information -where a communication starts and ends in Africa, yet transits in an intermediate country outside of the continent -is critical for African improvisation of its life-conditions.

Conclusion

The worlds of learning and technology are both complex and diverse. In this paper, we endeavoured to show that the current rendering of these worlds in eLearning is difunctional for African settings. Significant flaws denote omitting a diversity of both worldviews and cultural practices with regards to Africa. Africa's diverse and dynamic cultural expressions centre around communities, oral communication methods, sharing, timely relations and the recognition of authority, among others. Lived-lives in Africa, set in spirituality and social belonging, and a community life that is always available and engaging, seem to be uncatered for by current renderings of eLearning. Contemporary eLearning theory and practices are set within powerful and framing forces of digitisation and communication technologies. The nature of eLearning, together with the use of equipment that mesmerises, appear to put constructors of models in the position where (western) thoughts and technologies limit the view on potential 'constructs' of their implementations, as they catalyse changes not only in what we do but in how we think. This subjective effect influences the fields of understanding, linking eLearning models actively with euro-and technocentric, western narratives. This linking combines with a general ignorance of western-centric academia, especially in the field of natural sciences, of other epistemologies and of different ways of knowing. Therefore, it might well be that relatively few researchers have the critical background, knowledge base, and awareness to resist such a dominant framing that is part and parcel of a global narrative of technology solving problems. In this paper, we endeavoured to step back and assess eLearning according to its merit, or lack of it, in Africa. There is a great need for transmogrification of eLearning, which could, indeed, be surprising for western actors. Such an eLearning would 'be' in line with African ways of knowing and learning, so both knowing and learning are supported seamlessly within African cultures and established ways-ofliving in communities.

eLearning practices mostly frame its use from foreign settings. They are uninvolved with African strains of philosophies of education and technology and therefore are not reflective of how eLearning could be constructed in Africa. Therefore, contemporary eLearning theories are mostly philosophically unsatisfying and its practices too rigid to cover the vastly potential of perceptions of eLearning.

African guardians of knowledge, the African academia, has a significant task to generate awareness to fulfil the vital role in safeguarding African and indigenous knowledge. In many African places, actors have multi-vocational responsibilities. Creativity and energy exist at what imperialism considers 'the periphery'. There lies a prime source for dynamic and integrative contributions for policy development while catering for multiple worldviews, for instance, supporting students at a school, communities in the lived environment, and religious institutes in the experience of their faith.


Gertjan Van Stam
email: gertjan@vanstam.net

Macha Works

Method of Research in a We-Paradigm, lessons on Living Research in Africa

Keywords: Africa, method of research, we-paradigm, values 1

This paper paints a picture of how a method of research in an African we-paradigm looks like. The paper describes living research, where the researcher is an integral part of a community, being a recipient of communal grace and partaker in, and reporter of, the communal development of embodied knowledge.

Introduction

Jaco Renken and Richard Heeks [START_REF] Renken | Social network analysis and ICT4D research: Principles, relevance, and practice[END_REF] argue that the complexities in the social realm succinctly demand diversity in research methods in ICT4D. They posit that the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, harbour a resource pool of techniques from which researchers can glean approaches that could diversify the theoretical and methodological methods used. This paper presents such a diversification, albeit without adhering to key assumptions that Ramon Grosfoguel [START_REF] Grosfoguel | The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism / Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century[END_REF] shows are considered commonsensical in settings informed by a Euro-Western genealogy. The method of research presented conforms to paradigmatic and value propositions deduced from research at the intersection of technology and society in rural communities in Southern Africa, since the year 2000. The underlying line of inquiry emerged after embodied experiences in the communities in which the author reside(d) show that ICT4D is uncannily Eurocentric. The discourse often fails to recognise local, African ways of knowing and to, subsequently, navigate the clashes of paradigms [START_REF] Van Stam | Orientalism Embedded in Foreign Narratives of Technology for Development[END_REF][START_REF] Mawere | Paradigm Clash, Imperial Methodological Epistemologies and Development in Africa: Observations from rural Zimbabwe and Zambia[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF].

A fundamental problem: alien framings and foreign methods

ICT4D research often appear to hold a technocentric gaze set in Eurocentric framings [START_REF] Toyama | Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology[END_REF][START_REF] Unwin | Reclaiming Information and Communication Technologies for Development[END_REF]. Such framing is managed from academic strongholds aligned with Eurocentric worldviews [START_REF] Nyamnjoh | #RHODESMUSTFALL. Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Hlabangane | Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal? Decolonial Meditations[END_REF][START_REF] Nyamnjoh | Potted Plants in Greenhouses": A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa[END_REF]. Africans living in Africa have had little chance for participation in constituting discourses [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | Is Technology the Solution to the World's Major Social Challenges?[END_REF]. Such framings inculcate coloniality [START_REF] Hlabangane | Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal? Decolonial Meditations[END_REF][START_REF] Nyamnjoh | Potted Plants in Greenhouses": A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | Decolonising Science: Switching the Paradigm to 'Community[END_REF][START_REF] Dourish | Ubicomp's Colonial Impulse[END_REF]. Dominant philosophy, constructs, theories, methods, and interventions are conceptualised within a logic set in systems of thought aligned with a Eurocentric meaning-making [START_REF] Ndlovu-Gatsheni | Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity[END_REF][START_REF] Nhemachena | Animism, Coloniality and Humanism: Reversing Empire's Framing of Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Grosfoguel | Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality[END_REF][START_REF] Maldonado-Torres | On the Coloniality of Being. Contributions to the development of a concept[END_REF]. Coloniality obscures the local meaning arrived at through the epistemology of those that are experiencing technologies in their daily lives, outside of Western settings [for example , 18, 19]. Methods set the way researchers claim the validity of perceptions and, subsequently, set the base from which theories are proposed. Methods include epistemic filters that frame reality and provide a base of interpretations of what constitutes reality [START_REF] Heidegger | Being and Time[END_REF]. Western epistemes, however, are mostly foreign to the understanding non-western value orientations [START_REF] Mawere | Whiteness" and the Euro-American Socioeconomic and Political Exploitation and Theorisation of Africa: An Introduction[END_REF]; In the poignant words of Alik Shahadah [START_REF] Shahadah | Agency and Africans[END_REF]: "You cannot measure an African success with a European ruler."

The South African Cornel du Toit [START_REF] Du Toit | The restoration of subjectivity in science, rationality and knowledge systems as a precondition for scientific integrity Introduction[END_REF] calls to recognise and value subjectivities when assessing scientific integrity. He put this in historical perspective: "[In premodern Africa] the person and what she says is one. This contrasts with the Western notions that the inner world of consciousness and thought is separate from the way the person presents herself in the world." [START_REF] Du Toit | African challenges. Unfolding identities[END_REF] Research in Africa using imported methods undervalues much that is relevant in the local societies [START_REF] Mignolo | Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom[END_REF]. In an effort to provide alternative perspectives and ways to a conversation, I introduce an embedded method of research for unearthing community driven-perspectives, deduced from dynamic and integrative engagement in African communities. Such a method of research, I argue, aligns with the realities in the 'we-paradigm' where an entity exists integral to the whole [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF].

3

The We-Paradigm

Being full time embedded in African communities since 2000, I noticed incompatibilities in the views of those indigenous to rural African realities and those being introduced to such realities from the outside [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | Is Technology the Solution to the World's Major Social Challenges?[END_REF]. Underlying intricacies I observed through paradigmatic perspectives. In previous work, I conceptualised three distinct paradigms between which my African interlocutors switch voluntarily: the I, we, and it-paradigms [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF]. A fundamental difficulty in this paper is to describe a weparadigm in a possibly incommensurable I-paradigmatic setting of a Western-framed academic audience [START_REF] Hlabangane | Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal? Decolonial Meditations[END_REF].

In the I-paradigm, an individual is a unit of analysis. Gert-Jan Roest [START_REF] Roest | The Gospel in the Western context. A missiological reading of Christology in dialogue with Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton[END_REF] argues how this paradigm is dominant in western belief systems; Life is seen as being lived in an age-of-authenticity seeking a self-consciousness that regards the individual (and, therefore, individualism) as the primary agent interacting within society. Roest paints the analogy of likening people to billiard balls, bouncing off each other. In this realm, an individual is urged to seek human power and agency, freedom and fulfilment in self-sufficiency, self-reliance, autonomy, through self-cultivation, and immanent prosperity and security [START_REF] Roest | The Gospel in the Western context. A missiological reading of Christology in dialogue with Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton[END_REF]. The individual is the center, placing the self-acting in the world to the exclusion of others.

In the We-paradigm, there is no view of an individual in an existence in that way. Reality, in this worldview, is embedded in a myriad of relationships within a community that contain performers including humans, non-humans and other beings [START_REF] Mawere | Humans, Other Beings and the Environment. Harurwa (Edible Stinkbugs) and Environmental Conservation in Southeastern Zimbabwe[END_REF]. Community is given primacy where situations arise on who to prioritise between the community and the individual, summed up in: "I am because we are, we are therefore I am" [START_REF] Mbiti | African Religions and Philosophy[END_REF]. These words link to the idea that human beings cannot live in isolation. Many African cultural settings foreground the primacy of community over the individual from the understanding that humanity depends on community, interconnectedness, conviviality and interdependence [START_REF] Mawere | Ubuntu/Unhu as Communal Love: Critical Reflections on the Sociology of Ubuntu and Communal Life in sub-Saharan Africa[END_REF].

I-paradigm-embedded theories of knowledge and their enactors, I experience daily, have great difficulties to facilitate and recognise the intellectual practices in a we-paradigm. Gayatri Spivak [START_REF] Spivak | Can the Subaltern Speak?[END_REF] argues that it might be impossible to know what lies outside of one's perception. However, the IFIP 2019 conference seeks to facilitate South-North cooperation and therefore could be sensitive to different ways of knowing. I disagree with Thomas Kuhn [START_REF] Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[END_REF] who argues it to be impossible to identify a different paradigm, as in previous work I have shown paradigm switching to occur in African communities [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF]. Dennis Gioia and Evelyn Pitre [START_REF] Gioia | Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building[END_REF] argue that insight in different paradigms is possible when we apply transdisciplinary metaperspectives, a technique used by many African authors when they reflect on coloniality in Africa. For instance, Kwame Nkrumah [START_REF] Nkrumah | Consciencism[END_REF], an influential philosopher and political leader in Ghana, in response to his experience with Western theories provided an intellectual framework on social conscience founded in the African values of communal solidarity and presented these in his book consciencism. Other philosophers of note, giving indications of how the epistemic justice could play out in Africa are Kenneth Kaunda, Reuel Khoza, Patrice Lumumba, Munyaradzi Mawere, Lovemore Mbiqi, Julius Nyerere, Francis Nyamnjoh, among many others. From these writers, one gleans that in a we-paradigm knowledge is embodied in an ever becoming social personhood, in a universe of coherence [START_REF] Mawere | Ubuntu/Unhu as Communal Love: Critical Reflections on the Sociology of Ubuntu and Communal Life in sub-Saharan Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Mawere | Oratio: A Framing of Knowledge in the Context of Technology and Academia[END_REF]. The Burundian Stanislas Bigirimana [START_REF] Bigirimana | Beyond the thinking and doing dichotomy: integrating individual and institutional rationality[END_REF] shows this embodied knowledge to be a dynamic and integrative knowing. Thus, in the we-paradigm, life unfolds itself as a holistic doing through being, with knowing being part of community engagement, conversation, and representation.

Research in the we-paradigm is to be understood in terms of its meaning and relevance for the communities in which it is performative. Knowledge divorced from a local sense, local knowing or expressed in isolation is void to the local community [START_REF] Bigirimana | Beyond the thinking and doing dichotomy: integrating individual and institutional rationality[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia[END_REF]. When knowledge is represented in manners foreign to the community [for instance, in textuality, see 36], such declarations of intellectual faculty speaks solely about the researcher's encapsulation in a particular (geo)political agenda [START_REF] Hlabangane | Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal? Decolonial Meditations[END_REF]. Of course, subsequent interventions ensue uphill battles for their local uptake and might even derail development [for a poignant example from Liberia, see 37]. Except, maybe, during a disaster, it is perverse to talk about local communities and make (research) plans and (research) strategies without authorised representation and engagement of such a community from the very start of deliberations, conceptualisations, planning, and activities.

Virtues and Values Orientation, examples from Southern Africa

Many communities in Africa maintain an alliance to so-called indigenous, non-Western values. These values express themselves in convivial cultures like Ubuntu, espousing communal love [START_REF] Mawere | Ubuntu/Unhu as Communal Love: Critical Reflections on the Sociology of Ubuntu and Communal Life in sub-Saharan Africa[END_REF]. The academic equivalent of such a convivial worldview is a philosophical approach that values positive character traits dubbed virtue epistemology [START_REF] Chinn | Expanding the Dimensions of Epistemic Cognition: Arguments From Philosophy[END_REF][START_REF] Flyvbjerg | Social science that matters[END_REF]. Such an epistemology necessitates a convivial understanding of local values. Virtue epistemology seeks to share forms of understanding with others in a conscious and intellectual carefulness realising that perception intertwines with matters of attitude, beliefs and morality and knowing benefits from the acknowledgement of a multiplicity of knowledge systems. Table 1 presents a working-scheme of five African values with some keywords describing their contents. These values do not match with I-paradigmatic propositions as exposed by Roest [START_REF] Roest | The Gospel in the Western context. A missiological reading of Christology in dialogue with Hendrikus Berkhof and Colin Gunton[END_REF], cited earlier. There is no overlap with neo-liberal ideals of independent markets [cf, 40] or dominant theories of human motivation like those espoused by, for example, Abraham Maslow [START_REF] Mawere | Maslow's Theory of Human Motivation and its Deep Roots in Individualism: Interrogating Maslow's Applicability in Africa[END_REF]. Of course, cultures and values are dynamic, shift, and hybridise over time. However, as I argue in my book Reflections [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF], this toolbox is productive in view of the conceptualisations regarding philosophies, methods, and theories concerning research in many African communities.

Living Research

The philosophical grounding of living research in Africa relies, of course, on African philosophy. Munyaradzi Mawere and Tapuwa Mubaya [START_REF] Mawere | African Philosophy and Thought Systems. A Search for a Culture and Philosophy of Belonging[END_REF] describe African philosophy as meaning "the contextualised critical thinking, articulation of ideas, and attempts to seek solutions to problematic situations by Africans." African philosophy, in the sense of Mawere and Mubaya, presupposes plurality and the participation of all in communiversity (ibid, 46). The articulations of African philosophies and related ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and metaphysics are relatively recent as selfexploration of African thought by African researchers was actively suppressed till the end of settler colonisation in the 1960s and 70s. The initial propositions about such a philosophy, of course, are not settled and leave much room for debate, exploration and contributions [START_REF] Hountondji | African Philosophy: Myth and Reality[END_REF][START_REF] Hallen | A Short History of African Philosophy[END_REF].

The outset of living research is to push the method of research beyond 'the usual suspects' where normative epistemologies dominate, silence, objectivise, and normalise [START_REF] Bigirimana | Beyond the thinking and doing dichotomy: integrating individual and institutional rationality[END_REF][START_REF] Burawoy | The Extended Case Method[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | An Introspective, Strategic Narrative on Living Research on Technology and Community in an African place[END_REF]. Beyond what is pre-set in the researchers' Eurocentric academic vocabulary, the approach to research seeks sensitisation and training to discover consciousness from within the locally active paradigm. The method of research seeks priority for attaining an appreciation of the local understanding of local expressions of phenomena, in local manners. Living research depends upon one's inclusion and living-the-life, being part of the structures, practices, hopes, aspirations and fears in a community [START_REF] Bets | Modeling and Practise of Integral Development in Rural Zambia: Case Macha[END_REF].

Focus on community is pivotal in a decolonised research [START_REF] Van Stam | Decolonising Science: Switching the Paradigm to 'Community[END_REF]. Both the source and clients of research are embedded in communities. Any interaction involves communications within communities and derivates are subject to communal processes. In the case of Macha Works in Zambia [START_REF] Mweetwa | Community Engagement in Community Networks in Rural Zambia: The Case of Macha Works[END_REF], I distinguish seven steps that facilitated the living research in that community [START_REF] Van Stam | Decolonising Science: Switching the Paradigm to 'Community[END_REF]: 1) the community prioritises research and asks for its execution [for example, 49] 2) community members introduce research to the relevant authorities [for instance, in the House of Chiefs in Zambia, 50], 3) development of research concepts, proposals and execution processes take place within and with the community in the methods of co-creation [5] 4) any development and any communication is instantly interacted upon in the (geographical) location of the communities concerned [36, 51] 5) community members disclose embodied knowledge first and continue to be preferred presenters on research progress (for example, Macha's Fred Mweetwa at SXSW, USA, in 2014, and the Community Networks Summit, South Africa, and African Internet Forum, Sudan, in 2018) 6) any presentation or write-up concerning the research is co-developed, discussed and shown in the community first, after which representation could be granted for its dissemination outside of the community [52] 7) the community has veto rights to cancel or stall external propagation [for example , 53] In living research, the researcher is an integral member of the community and visible as such, being a participant in interactions that affect embodied knowledge. The researcher, in my experience, mostly receives culturally-framed, implicit invitations to contribute to the dynamic and integrative processes that constitute communal knowing and, subsequently receives explicit requests to represent theoretical understandings that interact with broader social phenomena or extant theories.

The communal inclusion of the researcher in a community is an act of communal grace. Such grace is common in the sociology of ubuntu where "everyone exists by the grace of the other" [cited in , 5, 54]. Grace unsettles oriental, imperial, and colonial frames. Living research, therefore, acts within the parameters of the grace received from a community based upon a confession of character [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF]. Such grace is remarkable as it is not necessary for a community to enable a researcher to be part of communal life.

The validity of living research links in with the means of entrance, the introduction. Also, such research is subject to local authority and thus reporting to local governing bodies. In this, being a researcher and doing research is not a removed activity nor confined to the academic art of writing of papers; It is a vocation, an identity [cf, 45]. Any breath and action in a community has moral and scientific consequences. Such an outlook surpasses artificial dichotomies, for instance, in being and doing by blending role performance, authority, and observatory virtue in continuous communal learning and growing in knowing and becoming [START_REF] Ellingson | Autoethnography as Constructionist Project[END_REF]. Such a stand might very well need measures of faith as to the materiality of the learnings to be acquired and a hope that it is possible to know.

Communities have distinctive authorities over what happens at the sites of enquiry. Gaining the necessary trust through tests of character and consistency of interactions and, subsequently, receiving the invitation to become an embodied part of the collective knowledge base takes many interactions in every facet of ones living [START_REF] Bets | Modeling and Practise of Integral Development in Rural Zambia: Case Macha[END_REF]. Depending on the context, for instance, it took me at least five years of active waiting to be allowed access to local ways of knowing in various communities in Zimbabwe and Zambia [START_REF] Van Stam | Reflections: a narrative on displacement of technology and meaning in an African place[END_REF].

Living research and its exploits are about understanding in relation with others, through covenants between people [START_REF] Winks | A covenant of compassion: African humanism and the rights of solidarity in the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights[END_REF]. Through such covenants, the community is both sovereign and bound while remaining empowered as what and how to reveal whenever and however the community wishes to act and position any proceeds. Anything outside of such a covenant, for instance, appropriated data and uncollaborative write-ups, the community can consider manipulative, embezzlement, and/or projection [cf, 57]; "If the end product of foreign academic research is a takeaway text written in academic English, then the foreign academic appropriates local culture for private and foreign profit, leaving the local community objectified and exploited." [START_REF] Van Stam | Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia[END_REF] The primary drive for living research is to get to know people and practices embedded in conversation in communities. In practice, this involves a never-ending and continuous interaction with anyone in any setting, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Only death or expulsion can end such a connection. Research, thus, involves transparency and intellectual commitment in any encounter where one lives and works and where one meets. The researcher relies upon an outward-looking posture and attitude, with continuous attention and interest in those around: actively getting to know interests, believes, dreams, and fears, in a metaphysical world.

Discussion

Michael Burawoy [START_REF] Burawoy | The Extended Case Method[END_REF], among others, elaborates on the existence of various sciences.

He positions one side focusing on positive sciences that rely on rationality, logic, and facts (which he shows, convincingly, to be unattainable). The other side, Burawoy positions reflexive sciences involving a presence and agency of the person looking.

Living research is a paradigmatic response to the fundamental questioning of methods of research and how they relate with power. Nokuthula Hlabangane [START_REF] Hlabangane | Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal? Decolonial Meditations[END_REF] provides insights into how methodologies issue from and adhere to a particular knowledge system: Eurocentric research issues from the I-paradigm. In this manner, for instance, living research differentiates from various forms of group-/collective-/networkoriented ICT4D research, especially where the latter thrives on aspects of individualism, seeks delineations or bifurcations, aims for textualisation, or insists on categorisations set outside of the community. With its orientation towards dynamic and integrative/embodied knowledge and conviviality, living research is ever emerging and changing and can only give an indication of temporary status. Also, living research differentiates with autoethnography, as the latter links in with the researcher's individual self, as in a Descartesian conversation with oneself considering one's own nature. Living research, however, seeks the local epistemology as the frame of reference, seeking to align with a communal-self, inclusive of meaning contained in congregating beings and non-beings, for instance in Ubuntu [START_REF] Mawere | Ubuntu/Unhu as Communal Love: Critical Reflections on the Sociology of Ubuntu and Communal Life in sub-Saharan Africa[END_REF].

The outcomes of research in the I-paradigm appear quite incommensurably with research in the we-paradigm. The I-paradigm is perpetuating as texts, written out of context, becoming pretext in subsequent research. Proceedings in the we-paradigm cannot be judged from the I-paradigm. Often, knowledge and judgement from the Iparadigm are irrelevant and a nuisance to an African community and their knowledge keepers. I experienced that such knowledge and judgement could generate damage in the form of the arrival of unsustainable electronic artefacts [START_REF] Johnson | The Shortcomings of Globalised Internet Technology in Southern Africa[END_REF], broken relationships because of exclusion criteria, or a general feeling of inferiority or exploitation [START_REF] Van Stam | Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia[END_REF][START_REF] Tuck | Suspending Damages[END_REF][START_REF] Van Stam | The Coming-of-Age of Super-Colonialism[END_REF].

Being privy to, and included in, local ways of knowing involves moral obligations for constant communal reflection on any aspect of the research. Power issues are a prime subject for discussion as are matters of means of colonisation hidden in the practice of research (example: vendor lock-in). Other items are how to deal with the bifurcating presence of individualism (a particular trait and ideal in the I-paradigm) or questions about why perceived deductions were unavailable and why they should become embodied (example: the issue of taboos).

Living research involves periods of imagination. As Kahneman [START_REF] Kahneman | Thinking, Fast and Slow[END_REF] shows, the human mind starts with assumptions and reflects information against those assumptions. In living research, the community challenges the pre-set assumptions and engages to reconcile history and contemporary contributions into embodied knowledge [START_REF] Mawere | Oratio: A Framing of Knowledge in the Context of Technology and Academia[END_REF]. For this, the researcher has to assess evidence and 'knowledge' with a reflective mind's eye, recognising what Francis Nyamnjoh [START_REF] Nyamnjoh | Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds[END_REF] called the conviviality of knowledges, celebrating incompleteness, and prioritising fluidity against fixedness of prescriptions, standardisations or routines.

Communal processes that sustain knowing involves the oratory art of articulation [START_REF] Van Stam | Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia[END_REF]. Co-production, in the communal setting, is the construction of deductions in manners that are recognised by the local community, the wider community, and the world (in that sequence). This articulation is not necessarily in writing (first) but involves a whole range of ways in which to express thought. The result, an emerging reconstruction, is subsequently embedded and embodied in the researcher as part of a local system of knowing, ongoing conversation, and, when expanding beyond what is known so-far, on improvisation [START_REF] Mawere | African Engineering and the Quest for Sustainable Development: Levelling the Ground for all Players[END_REF].

Conclusion

This paper calls out at the Eurocentrism in ICT4D research by providing insights into a method of research embedded in the we-paradigm. The paper has drawn on extensive experience and African scholars to show the value of African scholarship to discuss phenomena in words and language set in context and associated with African place and positionality. Through living research, the paper offers directions forward that can inform method of research in ICT4D, although it appears far removed from practices as trained and executed in Western epistemology-based research practices.

In daily practice, living research is all-consuming, with the researchers entirely being engaged with the lived-life of the research in community.

Living research resonates with African contexts and worldviews. Of course, it needs stamina, to continue even when confronted with discomforting truths, confronting opinions, cognitive dissonance or even emotional dissonance appear. The presented paradigmatic approach, its practice, and a supporting set of communal values, I hope, can be helpful to both native African researchers and those visiting from foreign contexts.

Table 1 .

 1 A working-scheme of African value orientations [source: 5].

	Value	Description	Keywords
	Ubuntu	Communal love	African cosmology & philosophy, morally good
			behaviour, conviviality, affirmation, compassion,
			solidarity
	Oratio	Communicating	Orality, narrative, knowing, inclusive, collaborative,
		embodied knowledge	conversation, community deposits
	Relatio	Relational resource	Sharing, needs orientation, relationship building
		allocation
	Animatio Continuous present	Here-and-now, constituting history, emerging future,
		moment	connectedness, rhythm, belonging, humaneness
	Dominio Seeking maturity	Reconciliation, continuity, covenant

Acknowledgement

I acknowledge the communal grace of communities throughout Africa that allowed to unearth the principles presented in this paper. Also, I acknowledge the constructive criticism and suggestions of the (unfortunately) unnamed reviewers of the earlier version of this paper.