It is with the continued advances in the discipline of African American (Black) Studies that this essay comes to life. Recent articles by Bunzel and Grossman take dubious aim at Black Studies, its instructors, and its organizing principles. Grossman is even so obtuse as to use Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa, a book with virtually no grounding in reality as it relates to African Studies, to help prove her misguided thoughts. The authors are not concerned with Black Studies so much as they are with the fear of losing the privileged position White studies maintains. They use their articles as a poor attempt to discredit or otherwise slander a discipline that they simply do not understand or even attempt to understand. Articles such as “Tales from the Black Studies Ghetto” and “Black Studies Revisited” are clear evidence of the fear and ignorance Eurocentric thinkers are gripped by when dealing with an Afrocentric paradigm.

Administration, Staff, Students, and Workers,

It gives me great pleasure to be with you tonight.

I thank you for inviting me to give this annual memorial lecture.

African countries, like many other developing countries, suffer the problems associated with poverty—malnutrition, poor health services, high infant mortality rates, low life expectancy, high illiteracy rates, poor infrastructure, and inadequate technology. These problems are especially severe in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Alice Walker and former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado have something in common. Both advocate the cessation of female circumcision in African countries, and both tout themselves as feminists, though Walker, borrowing from African American culture, prefers to be labeled as a womanist. What the elders had in mind when they described young African American women as “womanish,” or as “omanish,” the eclipsed form of that same word, was that such girls were too fast, or that they obtruded upon areas that were not their business. While Schroeder cannot properly be called a womanist (to do so would be to misapply the term), one can say that, similar to Alice Walker, Schroeder is putting herself into other people’s business, specifically the business of female circumcision in African communities.

The scholarly studies on political corruption in Africa are not conclusive, given the lack of knowledge of how neopatrimonialism contributes to state corruption. This is an important omission. There are obvious relationships between regime types and the likelihood, nature, and extent of political corruption. The analysis of political corruption in Sierra Leone has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between neopatrimonialism and state corruption.

The concept, ‘discipline’ has two broad meanings, namely, discipline as a field of knowledge, and discipline as order. The latter is the focus of this paper. Discipline as order has several sub-categorizations. These include the order by conduct and action which results from training, instruction, and education; the order maintained and observed by persons under control or command; a system of rules of conduct. Discipline is also used to denote control gained by enforcing obedience or compliance especially by use of punishment. In sum, discipline implies controlled and orderly behavior. By contrast, indiscipline means absence or lack of order. Simplistically defined, it implies unruly, wild, undomesticated and uncontrolled behavior. But when defined moralistically, indiscipline encompasses more serious violations such as crimes. Therefore, indiscipline refers to deviation from prescribed norms whether such norms are mere folkways, matters of etiquette or serious crimes.