Welcome to AfricArXiv
This initiative showcases UbuntuNet's commitment to fostering knowledge sharing, collaboration, and accessibility within the African research community. With AfricArxiv, researchers across the continent have a dedicated platform to disseminate their findings, making them accessible to a global audience. By facilitating open access to scholarly work, UbuntuNet Alliance plays a pivotal role in advancing the principles of open science, enhancing research visibility, and driving innovation across Africa.
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- The general repository is open for individual submissions by researchers, librarians and research administrators.
- Showcase of project activities, presentations, and scholarly contributions curated by the AfricArXiv initiative.
- Scholarly items sorted by country > Institution > Department
- A Rapid Grant Fund to address research questions and implement science engagement activities associated with COVID-19
Recent Submissions
Dignity Without Dance
(2025-12-02) Dr Kiese Kituevewa, Historian, Descendant of Bana Nkole (NY, USA); Dr Lawren Mutamba, Psychologist (GA, USA); Dr Clark K Nzundu, Historian, (GA, USA)
This paper argues that the Kimbanguist prohibition on dancing is not merely a moral “puritan” rule, but, within a specific Kongo–Kimbangu memory stream, a disciplined memorial technology forged under colonial humiliation and resistance. It then explains how a rule can remain formally intact while its civilizational meaning collapses locally. We propose a two-track model: scripturalization (Bible-centered legitimacy becoming compulsory as a preaching template) and westernization (prestige incentives that stigmatize ancestral memory as “obsolete,” “merely cultural,” or “demonic”). Using “no dance” as a case study, the paper introduces a falsifiable drift-measurement protocol grounded in two primary corpora: (i) public leadership statements since 2005 (video corpus) and (ii) a documented internal governance device, weekly Tuesday reminders instructing preachers to “restore the church as it was” and teach Kimbangu’s civilizational inheritance “as it is.” The existence of repeated re-anchoring directives alongside persistent divergence supports an implementation gap + prestige drift interpretation rather than a claim that “the institution changed the rules.” The ecumenical interface is treated as an amplifier: Kimbanguist entry into the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1969 created long-term incentives for doctrinal legibility, while the WCC’s 2021 discontinuation of membership confirms that legibility pressures were structurally real.
The Extended Fifth Law of Thermodynamics: Establishing Information as a Fundamental Physical Quantity
(Publisher, 2025-12-11) Barack Ndenga
The classical laws of thermodynamics describe the evolution of energy, entropy, and equilibrium in physical systems, yet they do not explicitly treat information as a physical quantity with thermodynamic status. In this work, I propose the Extended Fifth Law of Thermodynamics, asserting that information acts as a fundamental physical variable governing organization, stability, and the direction of evolution in complex systems. I formalize this principle and introduce a quantity—organizational efficiency, denoted R—defined by the balance between information and entropy. I demonstrate how thisframework unifies phenomena across physics, biology, computation, and artificial intelligence.
I develop the mathematical formulation of the law, analyze its implications for non-equilibrium systems, and show how it directly enables the construction of new computational models, including the R-Law AI framework. Examples from machine learning illustrate how information-entropy dynamics shape learning trajectories and structural coherence. I conclude by discussing the broader relevance of the Extended Fifth Law for understanding order formation, self-organization, and intelligence in natural and artificial systems.
Health Sovereignty Under Conditional Generosity
(Pan African Strategic Observatory, 2025-12-08) A. Diallo; N. Mbele; L. Simpson; R. Johnson
We analyze the Kenya–United States Health Cooperation Framework as a contemporary case study of health-sector imperialism. We argue that the agreement reproduces a pattern already described in the Imperial Selection Model (ISM) and in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Human Structural Pathologies (DSM-H): external powers select and reward local elites who accept asymmetrical control over strategic systems in exchange for conditional funding and symbolic prestige.
Using documentary analysis of the 37-page framework, court filings by the Consumers Federation of Kenya (COFK), Kenyan constitutional provisions, and the emerging literature on data colonialism and pathogen sharing, we identify fifteen red-flag clauses. These concern long-term access to health data and genetic material, automatic acceptance of foreign regulatory decisions, one-way audit rights, digital infrastructure dependency, legal immunities for foreign actors, and escalating domestic financial obligations combined with easy aid withdrawal. We show how these clauses shift strategic control over surveillance, biological specimens and health decision-making toward the United States, while formally presenting the arrangement as a partnership for capacity building and pandemic preparedness.
Our findings support three main claims. First, the framework is structurally incompatible with full health sovereignty under the Kenyan Constitution. Second, it fits the ISM prediction that imperial actors will attach control over data, specimens and decision rules to any renewed flow of funding. Third, at the level of collective psychology, the agreement normalises a chronic state of dependency in which the local population carries financial and epidemiological risk, while strategic and commercial benefits concentrate abroad.
We conclude that African states require explicit health-sovereignty standards, independent review bodies, and binding benefit-sharing rules before entering similar frameworks. We propose a set of minimum safeguards and outline how the ISM and DSM-H can guide structured risk assessment for future health agreements in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and beyond.
The myth of "Africans did it to themselves": Resistance as the Norm
(CEMA - USK, 2021-12-06) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi
This paper argues that African resistance, not “African complicity,” is the baseline pattern in the history of Atlantic deportations and their afterlives. Using the Kingdom of Kongo as a primary case, it shows that systematic violence, racial dehumanisation and explicit contempt for Africans were present from the start of European expansion. These conditions made equal “trade” and shared ideology impossible. Collaboration by African elites therefore has to be read as a survival strategy and a profile formed under power imbalance, not as proof of innate anti-self racism.
I combine four strands of evidence. First, Afonso I’s letters, Kongo oral traditions and archaeological studies reveal a kingdom that experienced and resisted depopulation, and that remembered Mpanzu a Nzinga as a kind, legitimate ruler overthrown in what can be read as the first Western-backed coup in Kongo memory. Second, demographic reconstruction from Paper 1 shows several million people removed or killed from the broader Kongo catchment, far beyond the 1.8 million documented in surviving Portuguese records, which must be treated as a censored minimum. Third, psychological theories of the Dark Tetrad, moral disengagement and dehumanisation, applied at institutional scale, help explain why European actors turned domination into a moral entitlement and why they cultivated co-opted elites. Fourth, comparative cases from other African kingdoms, apartheid South Africa and non-African contexts illustrate that similar patterns of structural violence, elite capture and scapegoating appear wherever one group strips another of basic humanity.
We differentiate servitude and captive incorporation in African and other societies from racialised chattel slavery and systematic invasion. They differ in scope, in effects and in philosophical and psychological foundations. The paper integrates these threads into a simple principle. Resistance is the norm where human beings face organised dehumanisation. Collaborators and their profiles are products of asymmetrical power and deliberate engineering. Treating them as proof that “Africans did it to themselves” is only possible once Africans have already been stripped of full humanity in the eyes of the observer.
Perpetrator Pathology and the Entitlement Cascade
(CEMA -USK, 2020-12-07) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi
Abstract
This article develops a decolonial psychological model of the entitlement cascade: the process by which repeated domination is reframed as a right, explaining the persistence of the trans-Atlantic deportation system and genocidal regimes. The research question is what psychological and cultural machinery normalizes this violence and the undercounting of victims. Building on prior work on the Dark Tetrad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism) in imperial institutions, our contribution is the formalization of the cascade in a four-stage process and the mapping of a three-tier collaborator spectrum (coerced, ambivalent, converted) linked to Puppet Syndrome. The methodology is a comparative reading of cases (Kongo, Congo Free State, postcolonial regimes) integrating demographic constraints. Findings reveal the cascade stages (exceptionalisation, normalisation, moralisation, epistemic locking) and cross-period continuities. The conclusion is that the stubborn insistence on the documented 1.8 million captives (a floor, with plausible totals of 8–12 million) is a key symptom of perpetrator psychology—an institutional lowballing that makes continuous killing manageable. The study outlines clinical and pedagogical applications for reparative justice.-----Keywords: Entitlement Cascade, Decolonial Psychology, Dark Tetrad, Puppet Syndrome, Trans-Atlantic Deportation, Epistemic Locking.
Keywords: Entitlement Cascade, Decolonial Psychology, Dark Tetrad, Puppet Syndrome, Trans-Atlantic Deportation, Epistemic Locking.
Résumé (FR)
Cette recherche développe la psychologie décoloniale de la cascade de l’entitlement (droit perçu à dominer) pour expliquer la pérennité du système de déportation transatlantique et des régimes génocidaires. Le contexte est la persistance de la violence institutionnelle au-delà des facteurs économiques. La question de recherche est de comprendre le mécanisme psychologique qui normalise la violence de masse et le sous-dénombrement des victimes. Notre contribution est la formalisation de cette cascade en un processus en quatre étapes, lié à la Tétrade Sombre (narcissisme, machiavélisme, psychopathie, sadisme) dans les structures étatiques, et l'établissement d'un spectre de collaborateurs (du contraint au converti). La méthodologie repose sur une lecture comparative de cas historiques (Kongo, Congo Free State) et l'intégration des reconstructions démographiques. Les résultats décrivent un processus en quatre phases (exceptionnalisation, normalisation, moralisation, verrouillage épistémique). La conclusion est que l'insistance sur le chiffre de 1,8 million de captifs (au lieu d'une fourchette plausible de 8 à 12 millions) est un symptôme de cette psychologie de l'agresseur, appelant à des outils cliniques et politiques pour désarmer ces mécanismes de défense.
Mots-clés : Cascade de l'Entitlement, Psychologie Décoloniale, Tétrade Sombre, Syndrome du Marionnette, Déportation Transatlantique, Verrouillage Épistémique