Quizzing the ‘Social’ in Social Work: Social Work in Africa as a System of Colonial Social Control

ABSTRACT Social work is generally presumed as an embodiment of social justice and human dignity as well as a solution to the many social ills unraveling modern societies. However, a dialectical-historical investigation of forces and events that shaped social work in Africa reveals how the profession was produced within the dynamics of the modern capitalist system as a direct response to social challenges of the modern era with a prime object of maintaining social order and sustaining coloniality. Through critical interrogation of the question of the social, the article demonstrates how western social work as a colonial instrument in the form of a helping profession institutionalized the subjection of Africans through the systematic destruction of indigenous ways of solving problems and their replacement with alien and vaunted Euro-North American systems of psychosocial care. The article uncovers the underlying ethical indictment of western social work linked to its historic failure to embody and address the inherent and prevailing challenges of social and cognitive justice within itself. Thus, the article reaffirms the need to ‘work and research back’ to the African roots as a way of stemming the tide and addressing the coloniality embedded in social work and the devastating effects of coloniality on the African social fabric and its inherent systems of psychosocial support.