Madness in South African Public Administration Scholarship: An Afrocentric Therapy

The aim of this article is to engage with Mokoko Piet Sebola's publication titled "Critiquing scientific writing for knowledge development in South African public administration scholarship: Selected reviews in South African articles and books". Based on the blend of critical analysis and interdisciplinary discourse analysis, this article argues that 'self-hatred, fear of the new, and anger against the young scholars' have robbed the author of an opportunity to learn in preparation for making a meaningful contribution to the debate, whether real or imagined. Instead of educating and informing his audience, the author has exposed himself to self-inflicted intellectual wounds that have the potential to produce nothing but epistemic madness or confused knowledge. While Afrocentric therapy (also read as theory) does not provide a guarantee for lifelong healing of terminal epistemic madness, it wields the potential for intellectually stabilising the ageing professoriate whose line of thought has been inherently compromised by Westernised consciousness.