Abstract

This article makes the case for recognizing African insights about animals, particularly as they pertain to psychological knowledge. A theory of complementary duality is proposed to account for the co-presence in contemporary Africa, of theories of animal behavior arising from the experimental laboratory procedure alongside those derived from the indigenous observational approach. What is clear from the article is that Western approaches to the study of animals in Africa largely rely on laboratory studies while the indigenous African approaches rely on observation of these animals in their natural environments. The main contribution of the article is the understanding that knowledges gained about African animals through the open field observational approach provide a richer range of insights about human abilities and behavior than what has ever been achieved through the avenue of Western study of laboratory animals.

Keywords: Animal Psychology in Africa, Laboratory approaches to animal studies, Observational approaches to animal studies, Hermeneutic phenomenology, Theory of complementary duality, Ethology