Westernalism as Institutional Predatory Disease: A DSM-H Analysis of Anthropological Discourses on Mandombe

This article argues that Westernalism should be analyzed not as a neutral intellectual inheritance, but as a recurrent institutional pattern of epistemic self-centering that becomes especially visible when non-Western systems begin to function as generators of theory rather than as objects of description. Using anthropological and review literature on the Congolese script Mandombe as a case study, the article examines how even apparently sympathetic accounts often recode African symbolic systems as art, ritual, or identity performance while minimizing or ignoring their epistemic, scientific, and generative dimensions. The article develops this claim through a three-part design. First, it conducts a critical discourse analysis of major Western anthropological texts on Mandombe, especially those that have become gateway references in subsequent discussion. Second, it applies a DSM-H–informed structural scoring protocol to recurrent institutional behaviors found in the texts, focusing on four dimensions: negative narcissism, sociopathy toward external contributors, epistemic Machiavellianism, and structural sadism. Third, it triangulates those texts with an African counter-archive composed of publicly accessible research outputs on Mandombe’s phonographic, ideographic, and algebraic uses, as well as clearly identified testimony used only for interpretive support, not for legal or clinical accusation. The article’s main finding is not that all Western scholarship is reducible to bad faith, but that a stable pattern of containment appears when Mandombe is discussed: its aesthetic and cultural dimensions are foregrounded, while its conceptual and generative capacities are left unexamined or treated as marginal. In contrast, African-led work treats Mandombe not merely as a script of representation, but as a multistratal system with phonographic, ideographic, and geometric-algebraic properties already mobilized in computing, cognition, and clinical-structural modeling. The article concludes that methodological suspicion toward Westernalist discourse is not resentment, but a rational precaution grounded in asymmetric patterns of evaluation, extraction, and denial. The broader claim is not anti-Western but anti-predatory: any epistemic formation that demands recognition while refusing reciprocity can and should be modeled critically. Mandombe, in that light, is not a folkloric curiosity but a test case for epistemic sovereignty and for a more plural, human-centered science.