ABSTRACT
At the heart of the ‘white saviour’ premise lies a narrative, an authority and a process of moralisation that legitimises the superiority of the white helper over the nonwhite person being helped. As the white outsider assumes the role of ‘saving’ the poor and the unfortunate Africans from their ‘oppressed’ realities, they inadvertently position Africans as passive, helpless and powerless victims who lack agency to solve their own problems. This imperialistic and paternalistic approach features prominently in social work practice and reinforces a universalising and infantilising rhetoric that reiterates colonial ‘single-story’ narratives of Africa and Africans.
By summoning a post-colonial theorisation, I will problematise the colonised and whitewashed social work education and practice in Africa, and Kenya more specifically. This will be achieved by examining various Indigenous ways of ‘social work’ practice in Africa and implications of their erasure while also probing how Western epistemologies in present-day social work have intensified the ‘white saviour’ and the ‘single-story’ discourse, consequently creating a conundrum – a contradiction – and an oxymoronic complexity for anti-oppressive social work practice in post-colonial Africa.
