No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
AfricaN SCHOLARS, AfricaN STUDIES and KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION on Africa
Abstract
The editors invited this article, and the subsequent four response pieces, as a contribution to the debate on knowledge production in Africa and African studies, which was a critical issue in the late colonial and post-independence African universities, and which has continued to be a concern of leading African scholars in the decades since. Here the contributors examine questions regarding the political economy of knowledge production in universities in postcolonial Africa, reflecting on historical and contemporary challenges. What factors undermine knowledge production in Africa? What roles can African universities play in 'decolonizing knowledge production' on the continent.
... Some scholars who raised concerns about the imposition of Eurocentric knowledge production from the field of humanities and social sciences attributed the problem of academic scholarship in Africa to a constructed epistemology imposed during colonialism (Mamdani, 1996(Mamdani, , 1998(Mamdani, , 2008(Mamdani, , 2011Ake, 1979;Diop, 1976;Amin, 2002;Arowosegbe, 2014Arowosegbe, , 2016Adebanwi, 2016;Oyewumi, 2022). These works focused intensely on actualising an allembracing African renaissance, reclaiming the humanity of Africans by decolonising knowledge and the strategies of knowledge production that promote endogenous knowledge as a recovery project, and projecting the African voice as the most authentic expression of the African condition. ...
... The writer would only have the option of generalising the problem as a continent based or taking the option of abandoning the study. The faulty assessment criteria raise an essential question about the success of decolonising knowledge production in Africa as canvassed in humanities and social sciences (Mamdani, 2008(Mamdani, , 2011Arowosegbe, 2014Arowosegbe, , 2016Adebanwi, 2016;Oyewumi, 2022). ...
This paper argues against conventional approaches that analyze the knowledge economy from a Euro-centric perspective. The debate on knowledge production in Africa raises serious questions among academics, as academic institutions have a compelling need to innovate in terms of technologies and human behaviors that are relevant to global competition. Emerging from the clutches of colonialism, postcolonial African scholars in the humanities and social sciences have accused European Enlightenment thinkers of universalizing knowledge expressed in the spirit of domination and using it as a reference to classify societies as developed, modern or underdeveloped and archaic. The problem lies not so much in identifying Euro-centric knowledge production, but in finding an appropriate theoretical model that can reorient knowledge production towards a knowledge economy of Africa. Caught in the trap of knowledge poverty and economic development, African scholars educated in the emerging Eurocentric development paradigm rationalize African failures to catch up on the basis of internal contradictions in accordance with Enlightenment thinkers. Unfortunately, Africa seems to be descending on an escalator that is going up, which pulls the demand for an academic program that can place Africa in the competitiveness of the global market down. Some questions emerge: Are African academic programs demand-driven? What kind of research methodology underlies research in Africa? How have African universities structured their evaluation criteria? Our point is to argue that the African historiographic explanation that has been detached from any positive contribution to humanity and scientific innovations is only part of the explanation. The substance lies in methodology and theory. The identification of an appropriate research methodology and theoretical model will not only domesticate existing technology, but will stimulate indigenous science and technology for competitiveness in the global marketplace. It is this gap that we want to fill in this article. Résumé : Ce papier s'inscrit ouvertement contre les approches conventionnelles qui analysent l'économie de la connaissance à partir d'une vision euro-centrique. Le débat sur la production-Akoko Ondo state (Nigeria) 54 de connaissances en Afrique suscite de sérieuses questions parmi les universitaires, car les institutions universitaires ont un besoin impérieux d'innover en matière de technologies et de comportements humains adaptés à la compétition mondiale. Émergeant des griffes du colonialisme, les chercheurs africains postcoloniaux en sciences humaines et sociales ont accusé les penseurs européens des Lumières d'universaliser les connaissances exprimées dans un esprit de domination et de les utiliser comme référence pour classer les sociétés comme développées, modernes ou bien sous-développées et archaïques. Le problème ne réside pas tant dans l'identification de la production de connaissances euro centrique, que dans la recherche d'un modèle théorique approprié qui puisse réorienter la production de connaissances vers une économie de la connaissance de l'Afrique. Pris au piège de la pauvreté des connaissances et du développement économique, des universitaires africains instruits dans le paradigme du développement euro centrique émergeant, rationalisent les échecs africains pour rattraper leur retard sur la base des contradictions internes conformément aux penseurs des Lumières. Malheureusement, l'Afrique semble descendre sur un escalator qui monte, ce qui tire la demande d'un programme universitaire qui peut placer l'Afrique dans la compétitivité du marché mondial, vers le bas. Certaines questions émergent : les programmes académiques africains sont-ils axés sur la demande ? Quel type de méthodologie de recherche sous-tend la recherche en Afrique ? Comment les universités africaines ont-elles structuré leurs critères d'évaluation ? Notre point est d'avancer l'explication historiographique africaine qui a été détachée de toute contribution positive à l'humanité et aux innovations scientifiques n'est qu'une partie de l'explication. La substance réside dans la méthodologie et la théorie. L'identification d'une méthodologie de recherche appropriée et d'un modèle théorique appropriés , permettront de non seulement domestiquer la technologie existante, mais permettront de stimuler l'autochtonie de la science et technologie pour la compétitivité sur le marché mondial. C'est cette lacune que nous voulons combler dans cet article.
... Many commentators argue that because these efforts have largely been driven from outside Africa and by people with limited understanding of the research capacity landscapes and issues in the continent, few of the initiatives have produced sustainable changes in the region's research capacity needs [14][15][16]. For instance, scholarships for Africans to train in universities in the global north have not: created a critical mass of locally networked researchers in the region, addressed the lack of established career pathways for researchers, or strengthened local research support structures [7][8][9]17]. Critics of oversea graduate training point to its particular role in draining the region of its best and most promising scholars and scientists [17,18]. Research projects led by northern scholars also often turn African scientists into mere project managers or researchers whose scientific focus changes with the shifting research focus of their north-based collaborators (M. ...
... For instance, scholarships for Africans to train in universities in the global north have not: created a critical mass of locally networked researchers in the region, addressed the lack of established career pathways for researchers, or strengthened local research support structures [7][8][9]17]. Critics of oversea graduate training point to its particular role in draining the region of its best and most promising scholars and scientists [17,18]. Research projects led by northern scholars also often turn African scientists into mere project managers or researchers whose scientific focus changes with the shifting research focus of their north-based collaborators (M. ...
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) experiences an acute dearth of well-trained and skilled researchers. This dearth constrains the region’s capacity to identify and address the root causes of its poor social, health, development, and other outcomes. Building sustainable research capacity in SSA requires, among other things, locally led and run initiatives that draw on existing regional capacities as well as mutually beneficial global collaborations. This paper describes a regional research capacity strengthening initiative—the African Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship (ADDRF) program. This Africa-based and African-led initiative has emerged as a practical and tested platform for producing and nurturing research leaders, strengthening university-wide systems for quality research training and productivity, and building a critical mass of highly-trained African scholars and researchers. The program deploys different interventions to ensure the success of fellows. These interventions include research methods and scientific writing workshops, research and reentry support grants, post-doctoral research support and placements, as well as grants for networking and scholarly conferences attendance. Across the region, ADDRF graduates are emerging as research leaders, showing signs of becoming the next generation of world-class researchers, and supporting the transformations of their home-institutions. While the contributions of the ADDRF program to research capacity strengthening in the region are significant, the sustainability of the initiative and other research and training fellowship programs on the continent requires significant investments from local sources and, especially, governments and the private sector in Africa. The ADDRF experience demonstrates that research capacity building in Africa is possible through innovative, multifaceted interventions that support graduate students to develop different critical capacities and transferable skills and build, expand, and maintain networks that can sustain them as scholars and researchers.
... The defining problem has been the neglect of the universities by states. The telling impacts of this neglect, together with the repression of academic freedom, have been accounted for in the literature (Arowosegbe 2016;2021;. In the postcolonial universities, the devastations of this crisis together with the failed responses to them are illustrated in the failure by African intellectuals to reinvent and transform the inherited colonial character of the post-Enlightenment universities in the new states. ...
I am grateful to all the authors who contributed thoughtful reflections on my 2016 and 2023 articles; and to the editors of Africa for calling on me to have the last word and write back in a compelling conversation on knowledge production and the crisis of public universities in Africa. It is time to pull the strings together. As I seek to do this, my aim is less to answer – collectively or individually – the authors and their contributions to my articles. Rather, I endeavour to put on record further thoughts on issues about which I have been silent in earlier publications. In pursuit of a longstanding interest in (1) how knowledge is produced on non-metropolitan societies, (2) the future directions of postcolonial universities, and (3) the relations of knowledge and power in Africa, I ask further questions and examine new archives and bodies of evidence. I appreciate the difficulty of ignoring the economic determinants of Africa’s material base – built as it is on dependent and disarticulated capitalist economies. In recounting my lived experience as an eyewitness to university life in Africa, and in shedding more light on the historical problems that I grapple with, I acknowledge change and continuity in historical explanations and the historiographies of my universe. In the present as in the past, the sense of sight shapes experience. I admit, with Ludmilla Jordanova (2012: 3), that vision has a history and that objects necessarily play a central role within it. ¹ As Peter Burke (2008) has shown, looking at alternative evidence and records enables one to examine historical problems and subjects in a different and hopefully renewed way. Historians therefore ask different and new questions. Such questions are informed by the changing nature of the environments and universes of analysis, historiography and historical scholarship. These activities demand continuous examination of existing arguments and conclusions against the backdrop of changing evidence and facts. Understood as the best intellectual imagery of modern society, I turn to the postcolonial universities in Africa. Ultimately, this effort, together with my other works, should illuminate what one might safely conjecture about the future of the universities in Africa.
... This dynamic positions Western epistemologies as universally valid, actively subordinating Indigenous knowledge systems, often dismissed as context-bound and lacking scientific rigor. As Arowosegbe (2016) notes, "Knowledge production in Africa is structured by the dynamics and nature of Africa's insertion into the modern-originally mercantilist, later neoliberal and now globalizing-Euro-American civilization (p.325)." HE in Nigeria was established under the British colonial administration primarily to serve the administrative needs of the colonial government rather than the educational or developmental goals of Nigerians (Fafunwa, 1974). ...
This chapter unravels the intersection of colonial legacies, epistemic injustices, and the marginalization of indigenous knowledge systems, specifically Ifá as a legitimate scientific epistemology within Nigerian higher education (HE). It appropriates Fricker's concepts of hermeneutical and testimonial injustice to explicate how Western epistemological frameworks and the influence of Abrahamic religions through colonization continue undermining Ifá's legitimacy as a scientific and epis-temic system. In addition, it highlights Ifá's potential as a holistic knowledge system ringfencing cosmology, ethics, decision making, and probability and presents it as a viable alternative to Eurocentric scientific paradigms. The discussion, therefore, advocates for decolonizing science education with a sense of urgency, emphasizing the necessity of recognizing Ifá's potential to contribute to global knowledge and promote equity in epistemic representation.
... Western in uence on the continent has persisted from the late colonial era through the rst two decades after independence. During this time, there have been deliberate efforts to promote independent knowledge production and indigenize the processes of knowledge creation in response to Western dominance (Arowosegbe, 2016). Since knowledge producers are situated within various national economies and draw their unique perspectives from their speci c historical backgrounds, disparities among these nations accumulate and form the primary sources of inequalities among individual actors and knowledge producers on the global stage (Mamdani 1993;Zeleza and Olukoshi, 2004). ...
The pursuit of decolonial work in African academia can be delayed by the prevailing pressure to attain international recognition as a requirement for academic promotion. Academic promotion for scholars is often linked to publishing in high-impact journals, which often lack African representation. This paper looks at internationally benchmarked system of evaluating and rating researchers used by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and how the notion of Considerable International Recognition (CIR) brings consequences for local work. Utilizing Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA) this study investigated how the definitions and criteria related to CIR in documents provided by the NRF of South Africa influences researchers to prioritize international scholarly activities over locally relevant work. This analysis also seeks to uncover the implications of this prioritization for decolonial work within the South African research landscape. It explores how the pursuit of international recognition, as defined by the NRF, may intersect with and challenge efforts aimed at decolonizing knowledge production and promoting research that is more attuned to local contexts and needs.
... Past scholars have suggested that Africans create knowledge form Africans and for Africa (Hountondji 2009, Nabudere 2006, Okolie 2003. Another publications cite the importance of ownership of knowledge creation, dissemination, and positioning (Arowosegbe 2016, Oppong 2017. This knowledge should be accessible, self-reliant and for the betterment of African societies. ...
This systematic literature review explored the application of Ubuntu, an African philosophy, in business contexts. Ubuntu has been increasingly recognized for its potential to advance positive outcomes in various settings. However, despite its growing prominence, a comprehensive understanding of Ubuntu's antecedents, descriptors and consequences is still required. This paper analyzed existing articles, using a thorough search strategy to identify relevant literature. The findings of this paper reveal that the most ubiquitous precursors of Ubuntu in businesses are a mandate for corporate social responsibility and cultural diversity. A business culture of fairness was found to be the most prevalent driver of implementing this philosophy. Conversely, individualism was determined to be the prevailing inhibitor of Ubuntu. Humanness and interdependence were found to be the most frequently used descriptions of Ubuntu in the included articles. Increased collaborative decision-making and better stakeholder relations are the most common outcomes found. This study concludes with managerial implications and recommendations for future research.
... In addition to the divisions around theoretical and empirical intellectual labour on the one hand, and the separations formed along the lines of doing comparatist versus single-case studies on the other hand, Alatas (2003:607) highlights perceptively the division between doing 'other country studies and own country studies'. Arowosegbe (2016) posits that knowledge production on Africa happens within a historically determined and on-going power asymmetry, and that the political and economic domination of the African continent by the West has sustained epistemic dependency in African universities. Other scholars have raised the problem of epistemic domination of Africa by Western social sciences in different ways (Omobowale 2013;Keim 2008). ...
Special Issue on The Politics of Knowledge Production in Africa (With selected papers from the 15th CODESRIA General Assembly) Contents Academic (Im)mobility: Ecology of Ethnographic Research and Knowledge Production on Africans in China Kudus Oluwatoyin Adebayo..........................................................................1 What Should Globalization Mean for African Humanities and Why? Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi..........................................................................23 Sociology of Knowledge in the Era of Academic Dependency in Africa: Issues and Prospects Oludele Albert Ajani..................................................................................39 Situating African Indigenous Ideas within Conventional Learning as an Impetus for Knowledge Construction in Africa Babatunde Joshua Omotosho.................................................................53 Skills or Credentials? Comparing the Perspectives of Degree- and Non-degree-holding Ghanaian Graduates on the Value of Higher Education Nana Akua Anyidoho............................................................................67 Globalisation, Decoloniality and the Question of Knowledge Production in Africa: A Critical Discourse Olugbemiga Samuel Afolabi..............................................................93 Propos sur un Bandoeng épistémique: l’Afrique, le Sud Global et la production du savoir à l’ère de la mondialisation Germain Ngoie Tshibambe................................................................111
... In addition, many times, national researchers are second, third, fourth, or fifth authors on publications, while Europe-based ones are first, underscoring how national experts are often used as data collectors without due regard for their overall intellectual contributions. This means that evidence of past and ongoing research collaboration does not necessarily undercut the historically determined asymmetrical power relations in social science scholarship and knowledge production in general [69,[73][74][75]. However, it points to the gradual changes happening in democratizing and decolonizing knowledge production in Africa, as international research institutions such as the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research (e.g., George Schoneveld's affiliation) and the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development (e.g., Lorenzo Cotula's affiliation) are seeing the need to partner with experts beyond the usual groups of European or North American scholars. ...
The large-scale acquisition of land by investors intensified following the 2007/2008 triple crises of food, energy, and finance. In the years that followed, tens of millions of hectares of land were leased or sold for agricultural investment. This phenomenon has resulted in a growing body of scholarship that seeks to explain trends, institutional regimes, impacts, and the variety of actors involved, among other subtopics, such as impacts on food security and livelihoods. Focusing on the case study of Ghana, this paper presents a review that uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to critically assess the state of large-scale land acquisitions for agricultural development in Ghana. Our objective in this review is to provide an overview of what we know about such acquisitions in Ghana while pointing to gaps and directions for future research. Contrary to the perception of large-scale land acquisitions being undertaken by foreign investors, the review shows there is a significant role of Ghanaian investors. Additionally, we found the negative impact of these acquisitions , specifically biofuel projects, which featured predominantly in the literature captured in this study. In addition, the role of traditional authorities (chiefs) was a central focus of studies dedicated to land acquisitions in Ghana. Areas that are either understudied or missing from the literature include conflicts, climate change, biodiversity, corporate social responsibility, gendered social differentiation, ethnicity, and the role of diaspora. These gaps call for future research that examines the land question from a multidimensional and multidisciplinary perspective.
... These notwithstanding worsened the already hostile and unrewarding environment for the production of sociological knowledge where university teachers continued to receive insufficient and dishonourable salaries; environments for teaching and learning increasingly deteriorated; research opportunities and funding diminished more and more; and sociological enquiry declined to merely descriptive, prescriptive and commonsensical exercise (Isiugo-Abanihe et al., 2002). All of these led to a drastic reduction in the quantity and quality of academic publications and the scarcity of indigenous sociological texts free of western narratives (Arowosegbe, 2016). Responses to the situation took the form of internal and external brain drain, elongated strikes, and crises and instability in Nigerian universities. ...
Beginning in the post-colonial era, some African scholars became intellectually conscious of the need to indigenise and domesticate the Western orientation of knowledge production in the social sciences. This scholarly agitation is an attempt to write and speak against the dominant Westernised mode of knowledge production. The need for this agitation is borne out of the perpetual dominance of European knowledge in Nigerian Universities, which undermines regionalising sociology in Nigeria. This paper focused exclusively on the imperialist social sciences and the challenges of indigenising sociology in Nigeria by exploring scholarly contentions regarding indigenisation projects in Africa and Nigeria. In doing so, this study identified three schools within the indigenisation paradigm which consist of the "total rejectionist school", "moderate rejectionist school", and the "universalist school". The paper then concludes that the moderate rejectionist position appears practicable because the call for total rejection of Western knowledge on Nigerian intellectual soil is implausible. It is also unwise to believe that sociological methods and theories are a "one size fits all" approach as advocated by the Universalist school. Moreover, aside from the challenges of socio-political failure of the government in facilitating a stimulating university environment where indigenous knowledge can be reliably produced, the intellectual servitude and dependency mindset of the Nigerian intellectuals also poses a severe challenge to the indigenisation project in Nigeria, thereby making it a difficult task to attain despite the presence of some indigenous sociological courses.
Cite and reference this work as: Abdullateef, I.B., Abdulganiyu, A.O., Abdullahi, R., & Fanu, O.O. (2022). “Imperialist Social Sciences and the Challenges of Indigenising Sociology in Nigeria” KOGJOURN; Kogi Journal of Sociology 7(2), 91-100.
... For Mamdani, 'African universities are still a colonial project' (2018, p. 9). Across Africa, critiques of Eurocentrism and the 'imperial hierarchies of knowledge' (Arowosegbe, 2016) are increasingly heard. Scholars of doctoral education (Ndofirepi & Maringe, 2017, 53) argue that Africa should not 'simply reproduce the knowledge required elsewhere, especially in the global north' (2017, p. 53). ...
The expansion of university systems across the planet over the last fifty years has led to the emergence of a new policy assemblage–‘global higher education’ that depends on the collection, curation and representation of quantitative data. In this paper I explore the use of data by higher education policy actors to sustain ‘epistemic coloniality’. Building on a rich genealogy of anticolonial, postcolonial and feminist scholarship, I show how decolonial theory can be used to critique dominant global higher education imaginaries and the data infrastructures they depend on. Tracing the history of these infrastructures, I begin with OECD’s creation of decontextualised educational ‘indicators’. I go on to track the policy impact of global university league tables owned by commercial organisations. They assemble and commensurate institutional data into rankings that become taken-for-granted ‘global’ policy knowledge. I end by exploring the policy challenge of building alternative socio-technical infrastructures, and finding new ways to value higher education. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
... The elevated role of universities as central actors in society is not a recent phenomenon, but rather, is steeped in colonial and post-colonial history Arowosegbe 2016). Universities have been important institutions and agencies of change in India which was already acknowledged by Gandhi despite his criticisms of universities alienating students from their homes and homelands. ...
Violence in Bangladesh’s student politics is complex and closely connected to political party contestations and shifting power relations. When Tarikul Islam Tarek, a non-partisan student from Rajshahi University and joint convener of the quota reform movement, was severely beaten by the ruling party’s student wing, in what is known as the ‘hammer incident’, the equilibrium that spared non-partisan students from becoming victims of political violence was broken. This ‘another kind of beating’ led to a shift in the ‘geographies of violence’, producing an autocratic social order marred by an atmosphere of fear. In the past, student politics in Bangladesh were mostly deployed in the struggle for self-determination (i.e. the partition from India in 1947 and independence in 1971) and to open democratic spaces in 1991. Since then, student politics have increasingly shifted to protect political party stakes. The violence between political party student wings has emerged as part of a new social order—a trend also observed in other parts of South Asia (e.g. Pakistan, India, and Nepal). The ‘hammer incident’ serves as a marker of how violence in student politics transforms and integrates into a well-performing, autocratic party machine to enforce societal control within and beyond university campus confines.
... In addition to the divisions around theoretical and empirical intellectual labour on the one hand, and the separations formed along the lines of doing comparatist versus single-case studies on the other hand, Alatas (2003:607) highlights perceptively the division between doing 'other country studies and own country studies'. Arowosegbe (2016) posits that knowledge production on Africa happens within a historically determined and on-going power asymmetry, and that the political and economic domination of the African continent by the West has sustained epistemic dependency in African universities. Other scholars have raised the problem of epistemic domination of Africa by Western social sciences in different ways (Omobowale 2013;Keim 2008). ...
Since the emergence of China in the geopolitical and economic spaces of Africa, academics have followed Chinese and African people moving in both directions and conducted on-the-ground, cross-border ethnographies. However, academics are not equally mobile. This autoethnography analyses the intersections of ethnography, mobility and knowledge production on 'Africans in China' through a critical exploration of the contextual issues shaping the unequal participation of Africa-based researchers in the study of Africa(ns) in a non-African setting. Based on my experiences before, during and after migration to Guangzhou city, I demonstrate that 'being there,' fetishised as ideal-type anthropology, conceals privilege and racial and power dynamics that constrain the practice of cross-border ethnography in the global South.
... Furthermore, in the global knowledge economy that we live in, "the global structure of knowledge production and distribution" is critically important (Arowosegbe, 2016: 324). To meet the demands of a global knowledge economy, universities are expected to teach and produce research that is innovative, transformative, and relevant to 21st-century economies (Jowi, 2012;Altbach, 2013;Arowosegbe, 2016). African universities therefore have an essential role to play in ensuring that Africa joins "the global knowledge society and…compete effectively in the sophisticated knowledge economies of the twenty-first century" (Altbach, 2013: 316). ...
Violent attacks on African migrants have produced a richer body of knowledge on
African transnational migration, xenophobia/Afrophobia, and their intersections with
questions of citizenship and autochthony, especially in a country that historically has
always been a home for African migrants. Constellations of narratives now vilify South
Africa as a demonic state whose hatred of Africans and fixation on exorcising them
have short-circuited the process of nation-building. The vilification of South Africa
also tells us that many researchers, scholars, and even migrants are unaware of the ways
that the country has transformed the lives of its increasing African migrant population.
This article reflects on the changing material conditions of Cameroonians in South
Africa to understand why this “Afrophobic” state is still a key migration destination
for Cameroonians. Drawing on personal exilic experiences, observations, and relevant
literature, we argue that despite the victimization of Africans, including Cameroonians,
this constitutional democracy has opened up political, economic and sociocultural
opportunities for many Cameroonians residing permanently in the country. In
forging this argument, the article interrogates the political landscape in Cameroon
and examines key economic and sociocultural moments/activities in South Africa as
well as accomplishments in this migrant community, to elicit how access to different
opportunities in South Africa has significantly transformed the lives of Cameroonians.
... Today, Africa is not only limited to its capability to contribute to the world's scientific enterprise, but its contribution is still diminishing (Ajiferuke 2011;Mngomezulu and Maposa 2017). This small share has made Africa the continent that has been situated least to contribute to the world's scientific repository (Ajiferuke 2011;Arowosegbe 2016;Sawyerr 2004;Smith 2009). For example, a research finding has indicated the share of African scholars to the world scientific repository is under 1%, among which Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria take the biggest stake (Miller et al. 2013). ...
African researchers could have contributed vital scientific products to the world’s scientific enterprise, yet they have a limited share. There is even a piece of evidence that shows that their role has been falling in the scientific research publication. This has a direct bearing on the development of research, knowledge, and technology transfer in Africa. There have been a few attempts to comprehend this dearth; however, most of the endeavors have been from outsiders’ points of view. The objective of this study is, therefore, to uncover the hands-on challenges of African scholars and bring into the spotlight from the native Africans’ perspectives. The essential motivation behind this study is to evoke a subject of scholarly forums on how to extend their contributions to scientific repertoire amidst tremendous challenges. Data were collected from all the accessible scholars from six African countries through focus group discussions. A qualitative research approach based on a grounded theory method was used to handle the data collected from the participants. The present findings show that African scholars’ challenges are progressively complex and long-standing. The challenges span personal inadequacies to the more extensive system-related issues. Therefore, calling for forums for Africans and the international communities to discuss the challenges for reasonable intervention stands indispensable. It will be, therefore, possible to increase their share of the world’s scientific repository and improve their scientific research works.
... Even decades after independence, the possibilities and constraints of knowledge production in African universities are determined by the economic and political domination of the continent by the Global North, especially by the former colonisers (Arowosegbe, 2016;Johnson and Hirt, 2104). It is in this light that capacity building projects should be understood. ...
This paper analyses so‐called capacity building projects in African universities in relation to mobility and access to materiality. Capacity‐building projects are typically framed as transnational projects funded by a donor in the Global North, targeting researchers in the Global South. Inevitably, these projects are embedded in various types of coloniality, which the “capacity building” discourse itself shows. During and after colonialism, uneven access to libraries and laboratories gave rise to mobility, that is, scholars travelling to the Global North to get access to materialities necessary for knowledge production. Through analyses of Danish capacity building projects aimed at relocating materialities for knowledge production to West Africa, I show how local access to materialities can enable more “independent” knowledge production. However, this mobility of materialities has not reduced academic mobility. Despite increased accessibility of scientific knowledges and its materialities in the peripheries of (hegemonic) Anglo‐American knowledge centres, the “competition fetish” (Naidoo, 2018) and demands for internationalisation mean that mobility to these knowledge centres still play an important role for many African scholars.
... The asymmetric publication landscape partly reflects the differences between the working conditions of scholars based on the continent and those based elsewhere. While many African academics have adopted ingenious strategies for research and publication that rely on both external and local resources (Olukoju 2002), excellent research is sometimes consciously limited or appropriated by vested interests -including, at times, Government (Adebanwi 2016;Arowosegbe 2016;Ogen and Nolte 2016). Non-African researchers committed to empirical research also come under pressure from African politicians or businesses ( Cramer et al. 2015), but their institutions are far less likely than those of their African colleagues to be affected by such interventions. ...
Over the past two decades, Africa has returned to academic agendas outside of the continent. At the same time, the field of African Studies has come under increasing criticism for its marginalisation of African voices, interests, and agendas. This article explores how the complex transformations of the academy have contributed to a growing division of labour. Increasingly, African scholarship is associated with the production of empirical fact and socio-economic impact rather than theory, with ostensibly local rather than international publication, and with other forms of disadvantage that undermine respectful exchange and engagement. This discourages our engagement with Africa as a place of intellectual production in its own right. By arguing that scholars can and should make a difference to their field, both individually and collectively, the article suggests ways of understanding and engaging with these inequalities.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, in important South African universities, professorships and chairs related to anthropological studies were created. The academic field of the discipline reflected the socio-political framework of the country: on the one side Afrikaans ethnology (volkekunde), on the other side Anglophone social anthropology. The latter, starting with the valuable presence of Radcliffe-Brown in Cape Town and its connections with prestigious British universities, distinguished itself not only locally, but also internationally, with leading South African anthropologists such as Isaac Shapera, Monica Wilson, Hilda Kuper and Max Glukmann playing significant roles. The difficult “racial” coexistence, the segregation policies and the context of strong change led to theoretical debates, political confrontations and conceptual reworkings of great importance in the history of world anthropology. With the end of apartheid, anthropology in South Africa found a new identity, moving between post-colonial criticism and a renewed heuristic and applicative impetus.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the historical dynamics of the development of the processes of decolonization of African studies in the period from the 1960s to the present. The decolonization of knowledge has been a longstanding topic, gaining significant relevance in academic discussions in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades due to the impact of postcolonial discourse. The author examines the theories and practices related to liberating the knowledge production system that have been suggested and put into action by researchers and sociopolitical leaders of African descent. The paper analyzes initiatives to consolidate researchers, and particular attention is paid to the history of the creation of the Pan-African non-governmental research organization CODESRIA, which is still active today. The study also addresses the debates that occurred at the University of Dar es Salaam between the mid-1960s and 1980. Evidence suggests that during the initial two decades of independence, African intellectuals sought integration at the continent, the diaspora, and the international academic community levels. The emphasis is placed on the factors influencing the necessity of further transformations in the research and educational sphere in the 21st century. These factors encompass epistemic and epistemological injustice, along with academic asymmetry. It is noted that the works of modern intellectuals, such as Achille Mbembe and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, form an “ideological continuum” with the works of their predecessors, Claude Ake, Samir Amin, Cheikh Anta Diop. The article also introduces and characterizes the concept of pluriversality. The author’s conclusion is that contemporary African researchers focused on decolonizing research and education frequently look to the thoughts of earlier scholars when striving to establish their own niche within the pluriversal system of knowledge.
The pursuit of decolonial scholarship in academia can be impacted by the pressure to attain international recognition as a requirement for academic promotion. Academic promotion for scholars is often linked to publishing in high-impact journals, which frequently lack African representation. This paper critically examines the internationally benchmarked system of evaluating and rating researchers employed by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, focusing on the concept of Considerable International Recognition (CIR) and its ramifications for decolonial scholarship. Utilizing Qualitative Document Analysis (QDA) this study investigated how the definitions and criteria related to CIR in documents provided by the NRF of South Africa influences researchers to prioritize international scholarly activities over locally relevant work. This analysis also seeks to uncover the implications of this prioritization for decolonial work within the South African research landscape. Findings indicate that NRF ratings heavily prioritize international recognition, often overlooking locally impactful research, which can limit support for decolonial scholarship. Recommendations call for expanded criteria that include local relevance, enabling researchers to be rated for contributions grounded in locally relevant work.
This chapter introduces the volume, placing the minimisation of the contribution of African scholars in the study of African Pentecostalism in the discourse on the politics of knowledge production in African Studies. The chapter contends that the dominance of scholars from the Global North runs the danger of relegating African scholars to the position of perpetual juniors in the field. It summarises the debate on the power imbalances between scholars from the Global North and African scholars, calling for the recognition of the contribution of African scholars. It highlights the diverse publications by African scholars who employ disparate methodological approaches in the study of African Pentecostalism. The chapter draws attention to developments in African Christianity and how they have shaped the study of African Pentecostalism. To provide a balance, the chapter acknowledges the pioneering and ongoing contribution of scholars from the Global North to the study of African Pentecostalism. Overall, the chapter discusses the historical, political, ideological and methodological issues relevant to appreciating the volume.
To what extent is it possible to disclose an epistemic coloniality within a corpus of primary sources related to encounters with Otherness in the Italian colonies in Africa from the late 1880s till the eve of the First World War? This paper draws on newly rediscovered private diaries and letters related to fieldworks conducted in the African colonies with the aim of analyzing the local land systems which paved the way for settler societies. A preliminary critical analysis of the manuscripts allows an understanding of colonial taxonomies in the making, and how they depended on African intermediaries, whose knowledge informed the colonizers of social and individual disputes, as well as on the local balance of power. The manuscripts are the outcomes of extensive traveling, eyewitness accounts and evidence gathered on the location. Thus, their study contributes to deciphering the framed view of African territories, and the methods employed to manage people’s lives, providing insights into the issue of land tenure during early colonial rule.
This chapter provides the background to the volume. The volume, located within the larger discourse of the contribution by African scholars to the study of African Pentecostalism, brings to the fore some of the key themes in the field. It highlights how themes such as the Bible, women, healing, masculinities, the media, prosperity, governance, responses to COVID-19 and others intersect with and transform Pentecostalism in Africa. However, it is important to indicate that these themes are not exhaustive, but representative. They serve to highlight the vibrancy of the phenomenon and to draw attention to the contribution of African scholars in clarifying some of its most significant dimensions. Overall, the volume serves to confirm that African scholars are key stakeholders in the study of African Pentecostalism.
How has historical scholarship fared in Africa? What is the state of decolonization and deconstruction historiography in the production of historical knowledge on the continent? What role does the state play in aiding or undermining historians’ access to official historical data and the production of historical knowledge in postcolonial Africa? This article engages these questions. It harps on the reconstruction of African intellectual history as a daunting postcolonial challenge, and argues that historians on Africa need to engage with and reexamine the development of the discipline of history in Africa in relation to the debates on decolonization and the enterprise of history-writing in the production of historical knowledge and historical scholarship across the continent. This illuminates the understanding of the history of contemporary Africa. It also throws fresh light on the continent’s remote past as a way of establishing its connections with the present. Complementary to the problems of writing the history of contemporary Africa, this work argues that to appreciate and understand the problems of history-writing on Africa, we need to focus on the development and limitations of the discipline across the institutional sites of the universities in postcolonial Africa.
Innovation scholars disseminate their significant findings through international scientific journals. We conducted content analysis of 2,869 peer-reviewed articles on innovation in Africa, examining their origins, themes, collaborative networks, and scholarly influence. These articles, spanning the years 2015–2021, were curated from the Web of Science database across scientific, social science, and humanities journals.
The findings reveal that 46.3% of these articles lacked contributions from African organizations or scholars, while 25.1% involved collaborations between African and non-African entities. A remaining 28.6% were exclusively authored by African scholars, with South African universities being the most frequent contributors.
Notably, articles authored by scholars from non-African institutions garnered more citations and appeared in journals with higher impact factors. Key themes within these articles revolved around the knowledge economy, African business innovation, agricultural advancements, and the role of mobile phones in knowledge dissemination and marketing. Surprisingly, sustainability topics were notably absent. South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana featured prominently in the discussions.
In conclusion, it is imperative to foster broader participation from African nations and scholars in innovation research and ensure a stronger African perspective in international publications. Additionally, as open-access publishing gains momentum, concerns about escalating publishing costs warrant attention.
Extensively ignored by the literature on the subject, recent interest in the fate of academic freedom in Africa is linked with shared concerns about the exploding nature of its societal crises. The collapse of political integration and social cohesion; the decline of the civil society and the implosion of conflicts; the rise of authoritarian, non-developmental populist regimes amid extreme poverty; and the worsening material conditions of the populations are major indications of such crises. Nowhere are these crises worse illustrated than in the universities where constrained funding, infrastructural collapse, massive brain drains and strained relations with the state inhibit the production of knowledge. This article reflects on the trajectory of the universities in postcolonial Africa. It draws on the national public universities in Nigeria and accounts for the changes and continuities underlying their performance against the backdrop of hostile material conditions and uncongenial political control, which not only remain disruptive but continue to undermine institutional autonomy and the integrity of scholarship in the universities across Africa.
This chapter focuses on African Studies centers or programs abroad and their contribution to manufacturing Africa as a continent and subject of inquiry. By imagining the African Studies center/program as a site of knowledge production and dissemination, it specifically interrogates the role of whiteness and of African agency in teaching African Studies outside of Africa. To what extent is the permanence of whiteness and epistemic exclusion or hegemony sustained in African Studies through institutionalized centers/programs of African Studies in North America and Europe? Through a pilot study of some African Studies programs across three countries (i.e., Canada, U.K., and U.S.), the chapter answers this question by pointing to ways through which whiteness—also manifesting as academic racism—plays an important role in African Studies pedagogy. This contribution presents a stark picture of the dearth of Black agency as a whole in a field whose subject matter focuses specifically on Black histories, experiences, and futures. It also points to institutionalized structures and the systemic racism that sustain pedagogical practices, which exclude diverse voices and perspectives.
Development discourses have been widely criticized for creating hierarchical dichotomies, such as “developed” (the global North) and “developing” (the global majority), with the former being the ideal standard to which the rest must catch up. The development paradigm has infiltrated academic spaces globally, including international research collaborations, creating various categories such as (non)scientific (local) expertise. We see such hierarchies as mechanisms of legitimation to maintain the ongoing subjugation of African scholars based on the historical and contemporary asymmetries in global knowledge production. Informed by the experiences of five female African doctoral researchers in the Netherlands, this paper problematizes and disrupts the concepts of “Expert” and “local expert”. We question the relevance of these concepts in a context where global knowledge production continues to feed from coloniality and also question the old power relations that continue to enable knowledge inequalities between the global North and global South.
Anthropology in Spain has been strongly institutionalised in recent years through its presence in academic spaces. Nowadays the discipline is pursuing its institutionalisation through professional development outside the academic field. In this text, we present what has been called the first proto Anthropology in the light of the discussion about who should construct the history of the discipline. Then we developed a series of events that allow us to mark what we have called the “chronology of a discipline”, which we have found useful to situate the reader in the Spanish context. Starting by highlighting the links between Social Anthropology and folklore studies in its beginnings, we followed a line through the discipline developed in contemporary times. We focus our descriptions on the development of ethnographic museums, the associations of scholars and intellectuals that gave rise to the discipline’s first scientific journals and its subsequent institutionalisation in the academic world. Here we highlight the studies on the process of identity construction in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. We conclude our chapter by focusing on the development of the periodic anthropological congresses that have given shape to the discipline, and that serve as a reference space for thinking about Social and Cultural Anthropology as a profession.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, in important South African universities, professorships and chairs related to anthropological studies were created. The academic field of the discipline reflected the socio-political framework of the country: on the one side Afrikaans ethnology (volkekunde), on the other side Anglophone social anthropology. The latter, starting with the valuable presence of Radcliffe-Brown in Cape Town and its connections with prestigious British universities, distinguished itself not only locally, but also internationally, with leading South African anthropologists such as Isaac Shapera, Monica Wilson, Hilda Kuper and Max Glukmann playing significant roles. The difficult “racial” coexistence, the segregation policies and the context of strong change led to theoretical debates, political confrontations and conceptual reworkings of great importance in the history of world anthropology. With the end of apartheid, anthropology in South Africa found a new identity, moving between post-colonial criticism and a renewed heuristic and applicative impetus.
This book discusses the global and local processes of legal education reform and resistance and explains what these processes mean for law and lawyers inside and outside of the United States. It provides critical insights into how these transnational processes operate in different jurisdictions around the world in light of globalization and local legal structures and hierarchies. It also shows how institutions and practices of legal education have historically moved across jurisdictions and shaped legal education practices transnationally. The impact of European empires, for example, is still very evident in legal reform impacts today. The book analyzes how diffusion relates not only to empires and imperial competition but also in recent decades the rise in power of the United States after the Cold War, including the related diffusion of neoliberal economic policies that have fueled the spread of corporate law firms modeled on the United States and legal education reforms aiming toward the training of corporate lawyers. This new wave of reform is critically examined by focusing on how these global processes intersect with local structures of power. The book recognizes that this power of US approaches was not inevitable and is subject to change as global power, including the rise of China, shifts. What is often portrayed as convergence to “best practices” in legal education is inseparable from shifting global hierarchies and balances of power.
Cette étude porte sur les perceptions locales d’une intervention régionale africaine – à savoir de l’Union Africaine et de la CEDEAO au Burkina Faso en 2014/15 – ainsi que sur les connaissances sur ces organisations détenues par différents acteurs locaux de diverses couches sociales. L’étude est le résultat d’une recherche collaborative et empiriquement profonde effectuée dans la capitale et plusieurs localités du pays. Nous montrons que les deux organisations régionales africaines sont plus contestées localement que ce qui apparaît dans la littérature académique, et sont à la fois perçues plus positivement que suggéré par l’imaginaire social dominant relatif à ces organisations comme « syndicats des chefs d’État ».
This chapter explores how colonial legal relations continued to shape legal education and institutions in Africa after independence. It outlines the nature of legal education within the context of postindependence policies that span from the periods of optimism to the radical degeneration in the higher education sector until the mid-1990s. It also highlights how Africa lags at the bottom of certain higher education globalization indicators, possessing extreme degrees of internationalization through the mobility of its students or dependence on foreign funding and epistemic resources. The chapter argues that the idea of Africa provides a critical lens in rethinking the role of legal education in the twenty-first century in a context of widening material and epistemic inequality. It considers the role of international donors with their renewed support for higher education from the 1990s.
Intellectuals are in a strict sense a product of the societies in which they are historically located and from which they could not assume a sense of themselves as an independent social force. Nor could they have developed an intellectual trajectory entirely peculiar to them as exclusively autonomous of the state. Their challenges, compromises and failings therefore, cannot be objectively evaluated in absolute disregard of their realities and social options. Rather, these must all be measured in clear reference to the determinate circumstances in which they operate—bearing in mind the material conditions encountered and transmitted to them from their past traditions. Drawing on the role of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in building and defending the academies and societies in Nigeria, this article discusses the engagement by African intellectuals with the decolonization project and their quest for academic freedom and institutional autonomy in their relations with the state. As an itinerary for future research, it shows that far from being democratically transformatory, given its character, namely, its lack of autonomy, its non-developmental orientations and other underlining problems endemic in its pathologies, the nature and role of the state in Africa in relation to decolonization, knowledge production and the universities, are subversive. Such subversion induces class conflict and socio-economic inequalities. It undermines ideational governance, institutional stability and respectful engagement with Africa as an autonomous location and original source of intellectual production, among other components of the pan-Africanist liberatory project.
This chapter examines the interactions between the state as a constitutive political authority and the state of knowledge production in African universities. The chapter traces the origin of African universities and the Eurocentric basis of their curricular and identity. It argues that in over six decades of gaining political independence, the state has had an ambivalent relationship with the universities. Although there were expectations that universities will contribute to fostering socio-economic development, some of them soon turned to sites of ideological contestations with the state. The socio-economic crisis faced by the state in the 1980s created further problems for the universities. Interventions from international financial institutions brought more conditionalities. The chapter concludes that in order to ensure that universities serve the purpose of fostering socio-economic development, decolonisation of curricula and identity is imperative.
Digitalization of research processes, like those related to open science, for example, has had mixed outcomes for the visibility of African scholarship. One reason for this may be that ICT-based interventions aimed at improving African research systems presume a country deficit model, that is, a view that Africa’s research environment is inherently under-resourced, and failing. Our study set out to explore, through a collaborative rich picture exercise, how research practices are viewed in Rwanda in the light of digitalization by a mixed group of global North and South information specialists. Through an in-depth qualitative inductive analysis of the participants’ accounts, we uncovered not only a dominant discourse of “deficit”, but also an underlying but hidden counter-narrative of resistance to this. We extrapolate how this view could be seen as having the potential for more optimistic outcomes in promoting a more inclusive African research paradigm. We then suggest a research agenda to explore the potential for the digitalization of research processes to provide a means of enabling a dialogue between Western and indigenous forms of knowledge.
This paper investigates the epistemic politics at work in radically contrasting academic representations of African university futures. Euro-American policy entrepreneurs and research funders call for major investments in Africa’s scientific research training capacity to strengthen the continent’s integration into a global knowledge system. Meanwhile, African social scientists and humanities scholars critique the epistemological hegemony of ‘Western’ models of the academy, and call for the decolonisation of African universities.
This paper sets out a three-step approach to dealing with the politicisation of ‘academography’ (Thorkelson 2016) in this decolonial moment. The first step is to acknowledge how epistemic power relations shape all analytical moves. The second is to recognise that ‘generative antagonisms’ (Burawoy 2004) are inherent to disciplinary knowledge production. The third is to develop an ethnographic sensitivity to everyday academic practice within these institutional worlds and epistemic cultures. Together these moves offer space for dialogue between different visions of African higher education.
What has been the contribution of African intellectuals to postcolonial and decolonial scholarship? This question arises because there is emphasis on privileging works of Diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia for postcolonialism and Diasporic scholars from South America for decoloniality/decolonisation. This article contributes to the complex politics of knowledge in Africa through centring often-ignored contributions of African intellectuals to the decolonisation of knowledge and politics. Conceptually and theoretically, what is introduced are issues of how epistemology framed ontology, how the cognitive empire invaded the mental universe of Africans, and how the quest for epistemic freedom informs resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century. Thus, the article performs four key tasks: (1) it explains how epistemology frames ontology as its entry into the topical politics of knowledge; (2) it introduces and defines the concepts of the cognitive empire and epistemic freedom as they enable a deeper understanding of the complex politics of knowledge; (3) it historicises African struggles for decolonisation as reflected in African decolonial scholarship and the quests for epistemic freedom; and (4) it makes sense of resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century as embodied by the Rhodes Must Fall movements in South Africa.
Colonial practices of ethno-racial segregation impacted grievously on conflict and state building in Nigeria. While such practices have continued to undergird postcolonial contexts of institutional fragility and state weakness, their impacts are yet to be accounted for in the literature on economic and political development in Africa. This article examines the colonial constructions of Fulani, Hausa and other groups ethnically not indigenous to Yorubaland as migrants and minorities, through their denial of land rights; dispossession and marginalization using customary law, indirect rule and other institutionalized instrumentalities of the colonial ethnographic state. It accounts for the continuing impacts of such struggles over land for citizenship, state fragility, state weakness and the forging of nationhood in Nigeria. How have colonial constructions of the customary affected resource-based conflict and postcolonial conceptions of citizenship and inter-ethnic relations? Drawing on archival and ethnographic data generated in Yorubaland, Nigeria, on the conflict between Hausa-Fulani migrant pastoralists and indigenous Yoruba agriculturalists over land, this work underlines how the struggles over agricultural resources, governance, land and political power have continued to affect the manner in which political authority is constituted in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.
This article studies issues of coloniality in so-called capacity-building projects between universities in Africa and Scandinavia. Even fifty years after independence, the African higher education landscape is a product of the colonial powers and subsequent uneven power relations, as argued by a number of researchers. The uneven geography and power of knowledge exist also between countries that were not in a direct colonial relationship, which the word coloniality implies. Based on interviews with stakeholders and on our own experiences of capacity-building projects, this article examines how such projects affect teaching, learning, curriculum, research methodology and issues of quality enhancement. We analyse the dilemmas and paradoxes involved in this type of international collaboration and conclude by offering ways to decolonise capacity-building projects.
Research on men and masculinities in South Africa, and the related intervention programmes, depends largely on theories of gender developed in the Global North. Such theories define masculinity as socially constructed and accomplished relationally in social action. Masculinity does not have an “inner essence.” This article argues that Northern gender theories offer inadequate accounts of African masculinities because of their being embedded in western epistemologies. In order to account fully for the complex lives of African men, scholars need to develop theories of masculinity based on African conceptions of reality. Such theories should treat masculinity as both socially constructed and as being influenced by unseen elements of personhood, as encapsulated in traditional African thoughts. To illustrate these ideas, the author uses anthropological and philosophical literature on African concepts of personhood, together with examples taken from personal experiences and observations.
Decolonization and transformation of the academy are important topics under debate at South African universities, but they also speak to wider issues on education access and funding, employment equity, diversity, and language policy, which are of relevance to national political debates. This paper discusses issues of decolonization and transformation of Geography curricula at different universities in South Africa, and whether issues such as decolonization and transformation are being addressed in these curricula. The University of the Witwatersrand is used as a case study, (1) discussing strategies and progress with respect to decolonization and transformation at the university as a whole; and then (2) presenting evidence for strategies and progress in decolonization and transformation of the Geography curriculum, based on semi-structured interviews with four key stakeholders from the Geography department. These results show the contested meanings, scope and goals of decolonization and transformation at all levels, and that these issues are commonly linked to or conflated with a range of other factors including access to bursaries, employability and institutional culture. In Geography, parallel processes of decolonization and transformation may pose both challenges and opportunities, including highlighting how Geography research, curricula and skills are relevant to the twenty-first century local-to-global worlds.
Over the years, the social sciences and related disciplines in postcolonial societies have agitated against the dominant Eurocentric mode of knowledge production. In this case, the grouse against Eurocentric knowledge production is that it undermines attempts at indigenising Eurocentric sociology in Nigeria. This article is an engagement with efforts to evolve a Nigerian sociology. It draws upon the concept of the captive mind, developed by Syed Hussein Alatas, a Southeast Asian intellectual, to critically explore the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria. In doing so, the article explores the development and entrenchment of Eurocentric sociology as well as attempts at indigenising it over five decades of the production of sociological knowledge in Nigerian universities. It portrays the ways in which the ‘captive’ Nigerian sociologists, students of sociology and the antagonistic material conditions of producing and propagating knowledge connive against the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria.
The 20th century was one of the bloodiest periods in recent history. As the world moved on into the 21st century, violence continues to preoccupy the best of minds alongside its twin, an increasing poverty on a global scale. Violence and poverty have come to define how the world relates to Africa. There is a reason for the focus on violence when one takes into consideration the reality on the continent. Africa has experienced 80 successful coups d’état, 108 failed coup attempts, and 139 reported coup plots between 1956 and 2001 as noted by McGowan.
According to the 2011 Global Peace Index (GPI), published by The Institute for Economics and Peace, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region least at peace and 40 per cent of the world’s least peaceful countries are in Africa. In 2011 the world witnessed a contested election that ended in a military intervention to oust President Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire. North Africa went through what was called ‘The Arab Spring’ that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and lastly US/NATO intervention to overthrow Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. In July of this same year, Africa’s largest country split into two (Republic of Sudan and Republic of South Sudan), effectively ending Africa’s longest civil war. This essay sets to argue that despite the urgency to end violence and reduce poverty; a different kind of poverty holds the key to both the problem of violence, poverty, and the many other problems that the continent is facing today. The common denominator for Africa’s failing in the global system is its intellectual poverty. I will illustrate this by looking at a study published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
One element in the contradictions underpinning Nigeria's development crisis is the marginalisation of the youth. This article examines the factors that influence youth restiveness in Nigeria's Niger Delta region. It discusses the impact of conservative elite politics and the oil-centric political economy characterised by the impoverishment, neglect and the repression of the oil-producing communities on the youth in the region. The article raises pertinent questions on the violence–development dialectic, drawing upon the context, dynamics, explanations and impact of youth violence in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta. It examines the contradictions and injustices existing against the ethnic minorities of the oil-bearing communities in the region, from the centralisation of oil revenues by the federal centre and how these have generated marginalisation and violent conflict in the region. Detailing the repressive responses by the Nigerian state and the forms of violence that have occurred in the region between 1999 and 2007, the article discusses the implications of youth violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta for national development in Nigeria. It provides a context for understanding the connection between youth involvement in violent conflict and its deleterious impact on Nigeria's development. Tapping into issues of ethnicity and high-stake elite politics, it locates violent youth behaviour in the politics of exclusion and proffers suggestions for restoring the trust of marginalised youth as a necessary step toward development and peace in Nigeria.
Animating Africa within the field of African studies is presently deeply problematic. This is mainly because the power undergirding the construction of Africa within the field is wielded within the epistemic modes of Western intellectual thought. Consequently, unless Africanism is decolonised from that epistemological mode, African studies not only remains a colonised field of enquiry, but also continues to legitimise and validate the theses on Afro-pessimism. Its utilitarian value for the continent also remains ineffectual. Actualising the decolonisation of knowledge in this regard is no doubt an epistemological project. It is also a matter of intellectual and political struggles. This is mainly because the actual histories of the various disciplinary practices around which knowledge production takes place - on Africa - have a profoundly colonial genealogy. The task of working Africa's destiny out of that heritage is therefore a compelling task for postcolonial studies. How did Africa become the object of historical and scientific enquiries? Through what historical conditions did the African subject become the object of a possible knowledge system? How can African historical knowledge further African development? And how might African studies serve as an instrument of liberation and progress rather than domination? These questions are central to my attention in this article. Drawing on differend as an illustration of the opposing claims and premises around which knowledge production on Africa takes place, it underlines the Africa-driven interventions in this field and discusses some of the foremost attempts at combating the subjugation of endogenous knowledges on the continent.
Although the ideas of political leaders in Africa provide a popular entrée to African politics, the exploration of their contributions and profiles still remains a largely underdeveloped genre. This is especially the case with intellectuals and scholar-activists on the continent. Yet by challenging existing hierarchies and oppressive institutions as well as truth regimes and the structures of power that produce and support them, engaged scholars occupy a critical position in society as vanguards of various popular struggles. The world therefore has a lot to learn from their contributions and failings as progressive social forces. This article examines Claude Ake's corpus as a basis for filing this gap. It discusses his contribution to the autochthonous transformation of the state in Africa - using endogenous knowledge production - as one of his major legacies for the social sciences in Africa. Being a political scientist with an unusually broad intellectual formation and horizon, the article highlights the developments and shifts, which shaped his worldview and writings. It pays attention to his production - over the last four decades - of a wide ranging body of works, which have been quite instructive not only for their analytic acuity, methodological rigour and theoretical sophistication, but also for being remarkable works of magisterial erudition, the products of an exceptionally great mind, written with a deftly profound authority and also constituting a significant attempt to adapt the intellectual legacies of Marxist scholarship towards understanding the political economy and social history of contemporary Africa from a broadly critical perspective.
The World Social Science Report 2010 reveals the marginal presence of south Asia and India in the domain of international social science research, and the dominance of the west in the creation of knowledge in the social sciences. Using evidence from the report, this article locates India's poor position vis-à-vis other countries in both global and local factors - historical and political developments in the west, the internationalisation of English, shifts in the global labour market, and a lack of funding and institutional autonomy in India.
This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of Ake's contribution to the social sciences and knowledge production in Africa. It discusses the relevance of Ake's works for adapting the intellectual legacies of Marxist scholarship to understanding the political economy and social history of contemporary Africa. It also highlights the shortcomings noted in his ori- entation, and dispositions to expatriate knowledge generally, and the Western social science in particular. Given his advocacy of the need to re- construct existing disciplinary fields following uniquely African critiques and interpretations, the study presents Ake's works as a corrective inter- vention to Euro-centrism and advocates the practice of 'non-hierarchical' 'cross-regional' 'dialogue', in which neither the North nor the South is taken as the paradigm against which 'the other' is measured and pro- nounced inadequate.
Radical History Review 83 (2002) 146-172
—Amitav Gosh
Dear Dipesh,
Although we have never met, I feel I have known you a long time because of the many friends and acquaintances we have in common. Recently I also met Uday Singh Mehta. I'd read his Liberalism and Empire: India in British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago, 1999) this summer in Calcutta and it had made a great impression on me. I felt that it was the most important theoretical work I'd read in many years. It so happened that I was doing a reading at Amherst last month—and who should be in the audience but U.S. Mehta! We had a long talk afterwards and he spoke very highly of you and Provincializing Europe.
I acquired a copy of Provincializing Europe soon afterwards. Reading it was an experience of such rare pleasure and excitement that I wanted to write to you while it was still fresh in my mind. First I want to congratulate you on your extraordinary achievement. History is never more compelling than when it gives us insights into oneself and the ways in which one's own experience is constituted. I don't think I've ever read anything which does this more consistently than Provincializing Europe. It is truly a wonderful book, brimming with ideas and insights. To take just a few examples: I was deeply impressed by your discussion of the ways in which literature is imbricated in the emergence of modernity in India—particularly in your discussion of the place of Tagore's work in the culture of 20th century Bengal. I felt that it helped me understand an aspect of myself and my past which I had often wondered about and never quite comprehended—and I'd say the same about your discussion of the way in which India produced a wholly idiosyncratic version of the private/public aspect of modernity. The chapter on 'adda' was a particular delight—its insights were at once illuminating and hilarious (I am reminded particularly of the wonderful anecdote about the thwarting of Mahalanobis's attempt to functionalise 'addas').
But Provincializing Europe is so rich in ideas and insights that it has also raised many questions in my mind, both large and small. I hope you will not mind if take the liberty of addressing some of these to you.
First the small questions: I was intrigued by your comment on Tagore's belief in the Goetheian 'idea of world literature' (198). I wonder if you could give me a reference on this?
I was much struck also by your re-configuration of the role of the family in Indian fiction. I agree substantially with your observation that this should not be read as a 'compensatory move'. But as a writer myself I'd like to take this a step farther. Two of my novels (The Shadow Lines, and my most recent, The Glass Palace) are centred on families. I know that for myself this is a way of displacing the 'nation'—I am sure that this is the case also with many Indian writers other than myself. In other words, I'd like to suggest that writing about families is one way of not writing about the nation (or other restrictively imagined collectivities). I think there is a long tradition of this, going back at least to Proust—and it's something that Jameson, Anderson (and even Bhabha) never seem to take into account.
I want to move on now to a...
UNISA's Principal and Vice-Chancellor's address during a seminar entitled “African intellectuals: knowledge systems and African futures - challenges, prospects and imperatives
- M Makhanya
The state, democracy and development in the work of Claude Ake
- J O Arowosegbe
African history and self-government
- K O Dike
The relevance of research in a university
- M Mamdani
Towards a discourse on nationalism
- Chakrabarty
Confronting global knowledge production inequities
- L Czerniewicz
From slave ship to space ship: Africa between marginalization and globalization
- Mazrui