African indigenous games: Using Bame Nsamenang’s Africentric thoughts to reflect on our heritage, pedagogy, and practice in a global village

Abstract

As we go global and begin to make early childhood practices universal, certain aspects of communities remain fixed in deep realms of their everyday living and can only be accessed by those who believe in it. Believing in it requires having faith in a practice that will always be better than what others bring as “best practice”. This is because that aspect is what defines who you are and changing it amounts to removing a piece of you with the intention of replacing it with an “artificial part”. This may be the case with African indigenous games that have been played in various settings to define the Africanness of given communities. The values that these games bring to the Africans as they try to hold on to what belongs to them, is discussed in this paper. Bame Nsamenang used such thoughts to propel the Africentrism philosophy to direct thoughts into values that are African in nature, even when there are no clear boundaries of African in Africa. This article focuses on Nsamenang’s Africentric arguments in line with promotion of African indigenous games as a heritage, pedagogy, and a practice.