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?
INTRODUCTION
Characterized by unequal categories, the production of knowledge on Africa in the humanities and social sciences takes place within historically determined as well as ongoing asymmetrical relations of power. These categories include: first, the objects of historical knowledge; second, the producers of such knowledge; and third, the global structure of knowledge production and distribution. While the objects of historical knowledge include the geographical and social units of historical enquiry, the actual historical actors and the social phenomena produced by the historical process, the producers of such knowledge include academics generally, archivists and librarians as well as researchers and university teachers. The global structure of knowledge production and distribution, on the other hand, includes the raw materials, the producers and the distributors. The raw materials are chiefly made up of evidence in the form of oral information, physical archaeological evidence and written documents. With an emphasis on academic knowledge, the producers are largely the professional scholars who work as authors, editors of journals and reviewers. The distributors include the publishing houses, research funding organizations, research centres and universities. All these components have central stakes in the knowledge production process.
Given that the producers of knowledge are located within the geographical spaces of different national economies and derive their distinct world views from their specific historical experiences, inequalities between these nations aggregate and constitute the major sources of inequalities among the individual actors and producers of historical knowledge on the global stage. In these circumstances, far from being altruistic, independent and value free, the historical assumptions and theoretical constructs underlining knowledge production and research are often politically charged. Also, their operations are never innocent of intentions and interests. While knowledge is power, given the unequal distribution of global economic, military and political resources, unequal access to knowledge is a major part of the asymmetries of power that historically underline North–South relations. Consequently, and for the same historical reasons, countries controlling the concentration and possession of such resources naturally dominate the global production and dissemination of knowledge. There is therefore no neutrality in scholarship. It is thus not an accident that the most serious academic outlets – for publishing books and journals – are based in the West (Makhanya Reference Makhanya2011; Mamdani Reference Mamdani1993; Zeleza and Olukoshi Reference Zeleza and Olukoshi2004). It is also not surprising that Africans and non-Africans often have fundamentally different assumptions about history and society. While Africans may blame their backwardness and underdevelopment on colonialism and other external factors, some Africanists are wont to point to the internal failings of the state in Africa, thus nullifying any supposition about the possibility of homogeneous understandings of the world, the legitimacy of which is ultimately a matter of power rather than truth (McKelvey Reference McKelvey1991: xi; Inikori Reference Inikori1996: 123).
Knowledge production on 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. The economic and political domination of the continent by the West continues to determine the limitations and possibilities of independent knowledge production in universities in Africa. The late colonial era and the first two decades following independence witnessed a process of conscious responses to the need to indigenize the focus, orientation and processes of knowledge production on Africa. Among other efforts were the continent-wide engagement with the question of orality, which later became relevant for the development of African literature; the rise of the Ibadan school of African history, originally constructed around the debates on Africa's past in response to Georg W. F. Hegel and Hugh Trevor-Roper; and other intellectual ferments and renditions across various university campuses on the continent, but especially in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Makerere. These constituted the earliest post-independence responses to Africa's marginalization in the global industry of knowledge production. A notable contribution to the development of anti-imperialist historiography on Africa is Kenneth O. Dike's (Reference Dike1953) argument – in response to Margery Perham's derogatory portrait of Africa – that there is no credible criterion by which to compare one culture in terms of progress with another. This is because there is no people without its civilization: every culture is a product of its environment and must therefore be judged primarily in relation to the community that it serves.
The firm and loud assertions that began in this period, together with the insertion of indigenous African scholarship into global discourses on knowledge production, were halted by the challenges of Africa's political economy, including the rise and consolidation of autocratic rule across the continent that led to the collapse of many African economies. These also accelerated the ascendancy of neoliberal economic principles organized around the structural adjustment programmes with their assault on the knowledge-producing industry, especially as experienced by universities in Africa.
The consequences of this era continue to haunt African universities. In particular, such consequences have led to the dislocation of significant African intellectual resources – and, in many cases, their relocation to the West. Any account of the historical backdrop to the challenges of knowledge production in contemporary Africa must therefore address the questions surrounding its politics and political economy. Such an account must also ask how and where knowledge production should be located both in the universities in postcolonial Africa and also in relation to dislocated and relocated African intellectual resources. Are African scholars in the diaspora part of knowledge production in the universities in postcolonial Africa? If so, how? And if not, why not? How has knowledge production on Africa contested and responded to the different modern eras of the global Western imaginary, which has provided the context for African studies from the initial era of African studies as liberation studies, from the 1940s to the 1970s, through the era of African studies as development agenda (Lambert et al. Reference Lambert1984; Bates et al. Reference Bates, Mudimbe and O'Barr1993; Guyer Reference Guyer1996)? How has knowledge production on Africa been affected by NGO-ization, the consultancy culture and the relocation of significant financial and intellectual resources from the universities into international and local non-governmental communities?
The question of Africa's place in world history has provided a huge genealogy of discourse. For two disturbing reasons, research environments across Africa face many depressing challenges. First, because of the economic crisis of the 1980s, the quality and regularity of academic publishing in Africa as a concomitant and index of scholarly research have suffered a noted decline. Nowhere has this been worse than in Nigeria, a country marred by declines in both the funding and standard of education owing to decades of military rule. The calamitous devaluation of national currencies on the continent has not only led to brain drain but also to despair and disillusionment for those trapped in the dismal conditions at home. There has been a general marginalization of tertiary education and the specific neglect of history and other disciplines that are not considered directly relevant for technological advancement. Academics now suffer from many distractions from research and teaching as they simultaneously confront official neglect through strike action and strive to cope by taking on consultancies (Olukoju Reference Olukoju, Zeleza and Olukoshi2004). This context accounts for the endless spate of strikes for a better academic environment since 1981. It also explains the rapid collapse of several long-established academic book publishers and reputable journals on the continent. The Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, published by the oldest professional society in the country, was an internationally respected outlet for scholarly research. Ibadan University Press and other universities' presses that have become inactive or have fallen into oblivion are other examples.
Since independence, there have been at least three generations of indigenous researchers in Africa. Each has witnessed changes in their countries' culture and society as well as in their economic and political trajectories. All of these experiences and factors have impinged on the meanings and nature of their academic careers (Mkandawire Reference Mkandawire1995). Mamdani blames the current crisis in knowledge production across the universities in Africa on our collective failure to contextualize and domesticate the excellence and global standing achieved through overseas training by the first and second generations of African academics (Mamdani Reference Mamdani1993).
The dominant practices and values shaped and shared by the Northern research agenda distort and engender imbalances in knowledge production across the global South generally. Such practices and values legitimize certain regional interests but neglect others. For example, while the World Web of Science measures science journal articles as the sole representation of academic and scientific outputs, leaving out authored monographs, book chapters and other valid outlets such as working papers and research findings published as grey literature, the positioning of science journals is not neutral (Czerniewicz Reference Czerniewicz2013). Engagement with them is characterized by several levels of uneven participation. Their operations also take place within a discourse in which international may narrowly refer to the global North.
As a consequence, while Africa's past contributions to the development of European and global political economies have been widely acknowledged (Rodney Reference Rodney1972; Mazrui Reference Mazrui1999), postcolonial Africa has not contributed much to the global knowledge system barring its natural resources. The crisis experienced in the development of higher education, and in the university system in particular, has spelled doom for the region. Africa's intellectual outputs are meagre when measured in terms of its expenditures in research and development as well as its representation in globally recognized publications. Africa ranks last among the world's continents in knowledge production. In 1990, its share in world publications stood at 1.4 per cent, while its overall expenditure on research and development declined from 1.3 per cent of the global total to 0.8 per cent in 2000. In 2003, Africa accounted for 0.5 per cent of the world's scientific publications (Zeleza Reference Zeleza2003; Singh Reference Singh2011). Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and the Pacific have all had steady increases during these periods (Zambakari Reference Zambakari2011).
AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE COLONIAL PROJECT
The field of African studies, like Asian and Latin American studies, developed historically as part of a post-Enlightenment agenda to study non-Western societies from the perspective of an area studies approach based on Western standards. It was contrived as part of an epistemological attempt to control backward regions of the world using the ideology of developmentalism and the notion of the plural society (Furnivall Reference Furnivall1939). Its development was linked directly to the operations of the colonial project and its policies on the native question.Footnote 1 Its genealogy, therefore, cannot be divorced from the colonial strategy of ruling over indigenous populations.
For the most part, the earliest academic journals within area studies began first as colonial newsletters. Such journals were used for explaining the factors underlying the lack of development in backward and traditional societies across the global South. They were also used for elaborating numerous Eurocentric options for development in these societies. Later, during the period of anti-colonialism, when independent African newspapers were published by various nationalist groups across the colonies, such journals also served to defend the colonial states from criticisms levied against them. They were later transformed into academic journals by established institutions of learning in their respective home countries. African Studies, published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis) on behalf of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, formerly known as Bantu Studies, is a notable example.
It is worth examining the context and experience of South Africa, a country where the development of African studies dates back to the earliest part of the twentieth century. The University of Cape Town (UCT), the first university in Africa to establish a school that would focus on African studies, played a major role. African studies at UCT began at the start of the twentieth century when missionaries such as W. A. Norton suggested that a Chair of Bantu Philology needed to be established in the Cape (Gordon Reference Gordon1990: 17). In 1917, Norton presented ‘the study of the language of the natives as the best index to their psychology’ and queried that it was absurd for a South African university to ignore the ‘languages and customs of five-sixth of the population’ (Gordon Reference Gordon1990: 18; Ntsebeza Reference Ntsebeza, Nhlapo and Garuba2012).
Apartheid and colonialism were made possible not only through the deployment of force and the institutions of cultural technologies but also by relying on a system of knowledge, in this case African studies, that kept the continent as a central part of the North's periphery even in the post-apartheid and postcolonial periods. The immensity of colonial power was illustrated not only in terms of how coercion was institutionalized and used, but also in how knowledge categories were generated and later routinized, especially in administrative conduct, thus acquiring a power of their own. The ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ critique is therefore an old one (see Asad Reference Asad1973). With reference to South Africa, Lungisile Ntsebeza (Reference Ntsebeza, Nhlapo and Garuba2012: 4–5) points out that:
the genealogy of the concept of African studies at UCT cannot be divorced from the colonial strategy of ruling over the indigenous people. The role that Radcliffe-Brown and by extension anthropology played in this regard is of particular interest … there was clear complicity between Radcliffe-Brown and the colonial project, something which, according to [Robert] Gordon, had far reaching implications for the discipline of Anthropology and its implication not only in the colonial project but also in the elaboration of the apartheid project in the 1940s and later … General Smuts personally invited A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to establish the social anthropology course at the University of Cape Town in 1921, leading to the establishment of the first distinctly South African anthropological journal, Bantu Studies. [Meyer] Fortes remarked that at the time there was not a single full-time professorship of anthropology in any British university, suggesting that the first full-time professorial position in the British system was awarded to Radcliffe-Brown at UCT.
However, although there are striking connections and similarities with the South African example, the overall pictures across the continent certainly vary and do not entirely follow the South African trajectory.Footnote 2
ACHIEVEMENTS AND TENSIONS
Without doubt, some achievements have been recorded in the task of Africanizing and decolonizing knowledge production on Africa. A number of autochthonous African perspectives have successfully been reflected in knowledge production on Africa over the years; this is evidenced by the growing body of works by such African scholars as Achille Mbembe, Archibald B. M. Mafeje, Claude E. Ake, Kenneth O. Dike, Mahmood Mamdani, Mamadou Diouf, Samir Amin and Thandika Mkandawire, which challenge and problematize received historiographies on the continent. The practice of giving absolute and categorical preference to European institutions while derogating and neglecting African institutions has been questioned significantly, even if the South African and other national academic systems continue to cultivate similarly unequal structures in knowledge production with biased ranking systems. Several established institutions across the continent have not only achieved excellent reputations but have also attained a global standing. UCT, the University of the Witwatersrand and others in South Africa are among the top-rated universities in the world. Enjoying significant international recognition, a considerable number of the scholars produced by these institutions have published articles and books with highly rated publishers and enjoy high academic standing. These institutions have initiated and sustained a number of outstanding periodicals in partnership with their expatriate counterparts. Furthermore, the former Afrikaans-speaking universities in South Africa are adapting to changes in society and are rapidly benefiting from support for their efforts by scholars who are eager to promote an African agenda. These are certainly commendable initiatives in the drive towards strengthening African efforts with regard to knowledge production on the continent.
While such decolonizing efforts began during the first wave of late colonialism and the immediate post-independence period in the universities across Africa, they reached their high point in the 1970s. This decade was marked by four remarkable developments, starting with the establishment of post-independence universities across the continent. The second was the founding of the African Association of Political Science, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa and other major pan-African research organizations. These were based on philosophies of actualizing an all-embracing African renaissance; reclaiming the humanity of Africans by decolonizing 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 third major development was the inauguration of the schools of thought in Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Ibadan and Nairobi that posed radical questions about the operations of Eurocentric knowledge on the continent. Finally, there was the role played by the neo-Marxist debate at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual rendition that marked a radical turning point in the careers of Abdulrahman M. Babu, Claude E. Ake, Dani W. Nabudere, Emmanuel Hansen, Samir Amin and other notable members of the first generation of now leftist academics across the continent (see Arowosegbe Reference Arowosegbe2010: 26–55; Reference Arowosegbe2012).
However, unlike the first and second generations, which were anti-neocolonial and emphasized the decolonization of the intellectual terrain, the third and subsequent generations of African academics have arguably been complacent and nonchalant. Their commitment to knowledge production has been overshadowed by their resort to the consultancy culture (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2011). They have abandoned their engagement with knowledge production both for its own sake as well as for economic development and industrial transformation. Knowledge is now pursued as a means for certification and seeking appointments and positions. With the exceptions of Botswana, Egypt, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa, the state in Africa has neglected its universities. Nigeria has produced worrisome illustrations of these experiences, as the state has exited the country's education and knowledge production industries. Its academics are hence scattered all over the world and its nationals are widely spread in overseas academic institutions in their quest for graduate and postgraduate education.
The fate of universities on the continent has been worsened by the increasing relocation of their best brains into other governmental, non-governmental and international non-governmental organizations. Again, Nigeria has been hard hit by this singular crisis. Many of the brightest minds are no longer available for university-level mentoring, research and teaching in Nigeria. Members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have never attracted any beneficial attention or patronage from the Federal Government in Nigeria without heated – and usually prolonged – struggles conducted through long-drawn industrial strike actions. Such strikes have been double-edged swords. On the one hand, they have succeeded in compelling political elites to comply with the type of industrial democracy evident in collective bargaining in line with relevant conventions of the International Labour Organization, thereby making the Federal Government honour outstanding agreements with members of the union. On the other hand, students have had to suffer unnecessary delays as academic sessions have been distorted and elongated. Between August 1993 and September 1998, I studied for a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in Political Science at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. Between 1995 and 1996, this university cancelled and lost one academic calendar due to industrial strike actions. Between September 2004 and December 2010, I researched for a doctoral degree in Political Science at the University of Ibadan. This university lost one academic session due to various local and national strike actions between 2006 and 2007. The resulting disillusionment and uncertainties have not only fostered brain drain but also worsened the already failing international image problem suffered by universities in Nigeria since the late 1980s. This loss is not limited to the academics leaving the country, but also concerns research students relocating. Hence the union's history and reputation as an anti-government and combative organization – and hence this author's impression of Nigeria as a country that is anything but knowledge-driven. The consumerist lifestyles of some Nigerian academics together with the materialistic nature assumed by the knowledge production enterprise in the country are entirely in tandem with the aspirations and social values of the larger Nigerian society. The illustrations of this assertion are legion.
First, the considerations that shape socio-political life in Nigeria conflict fundamentally with the demands of intellectual and national development. This is clear enough in: (1) the allocations and choices of federal designs; (2) the interpretations and uses of basic federal institutions and principles such as federal character, and the creation of new localities, states and universities; and (3) the rotation and zoning of major political appointments and offices. Second, the structural root of conservative elite politics in Nigeria is the bifurcated citizenship that confounds commitment to government accountability by the citizens. Conservative elite politics is a debilitating element of Nigerian politics, which accelerates governance failure and fundamentally inhibits state capacity. It involves a ‘cake-sharing psychosis’; the corruption of state officials; the determination of public policies based on competition for sectional advantages; the misuse of state resources; and a lack of accountability in the democratic political process. As a result, federalism – which was adopted politically as a constitutional design that would allay any fears about domination by various minorities and ensure balanced representation in Nigeria's polycentric society – has been reduced to a means of sharing federal revenues and for distributing federal offices as political booties in the context of a rentier state.
With the exemplary exception of the University of Ibadan, there is no other university that reflects the country's ethnically diverse demographic profile. Virtually all the federal and state-owned universities are dominated by people who are ethnically indigenous to the states in which those universities are located. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka is dominated by Igbo and has an insignificant representation of Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and other ethnic groups in the country. Although located in North Central Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria no longer reflects the federal identity of the Nigerian state. As a basis for generating funding from the federation account, Ahmadu Bello University and other universities in Northern Nigeria politically fight to be accorded the status of federal institutions, as a way of shifting their economic burdens onto the Federal Government. After achieving that, they ethnicize and limit the appointment of academic and other staff exclusively to people from the core states from Northern Nigeria. Rather than focusing primarily on academic merit and other objective considerations that relate to capacity and character, the universities in Northern Nigeria now base the appointment of academic staff and the admission of students mainly on catchment area policies, the aim of which is to exclude populations from unwanted regions. The ethnicization of intergroup relations has thus been rapidly extended into the universities. This has significantly undermined collegiality and intellectual production throughout the country. In the 1990s, using the Northern Elements Coalition (NECO) as its militant arm, Ahmadu Bello University ‘northernized’ its staff and student populations. This skewed policy decision frustrated and marginalized academics and students of Igbo, Tiv, Yoruba and other ethnic origins. Academic exchanges and intellectual interactions have also been regionalized as a consequence. The resulting resentment compelled academics and students of Tiv and Okun extractions to demand the creation of Benue State University, Makurdi, as well as Kogi State University, Anyigba. The respective local quarrels of these institutions have not only consumed them but have also led to exclusionary politics. There are currently no gainful academic interactions between members of these universities.
Third, given the nature of governance in Nigeria, which is underscored by a high degree of corruption, a low level of public accountability and poor service delivery, politics is not about the productive transformation of society, but rather about the accumulation of public resources. These attributes have made Nigeria a deeply problematic case of ineffective constitutional politics. They not only continue to shape the administration of most Nigerian universities, but are also tied to the aspirations undergirding the values of the larger Nigerian society (Arowosegbe Reference Arowosegbe2009). For example, in the 1970s, the authors of Nigeria's constitution defined political power as the opportunity to acquire prestige and riches, and to hand out benefits in the form of contracts, gifts of money and jobs to political allies and close relations (Nigeria 1976: v). This orientation characterizes the perception of many Nigerian academics. Similarly, in the 1980s, political scientists Ali D. Yahaya, Eme O. Awa, Haroun Adamu, L. Adele Jinadu, Sam E. Oyovbaire, Tunde Adeniran, Tunji Olagunju and other ‘respected academics’ in the country accepted an invitation from retired General Ibrahim B. Babangida, who cavalierly used them to legitimize the longest, most controversial and most expensive transition programme in Nigeria's political history.Footnote 3 As Jibrin Ibrahim (Reference Ibrahim, Nzongola-Ntalaja and Lee1997) later showed, their participation in that military regime revealed to the world that the most celebrated Nigerian academics are not necessarily morally superior either to ordinary Nigerians or to the corrupt politicians whom they criticize so adeptly.
All these experiences, together with the poor state of facilities in university laboratories and libraries, have drastically undermined capacity and output. Nigerian universities are increasingly being run by very poorly equipped academics and administrators with very little international exposure. The frequency of exchanges and interactions with fellow academics from overseas has decreased. Similarly, the presence of a sizeable international non-indigenous population, which is usually a key component of university ranking and one of the features of a truly modern institution, has been lost by these universities since the late 1980s. With historians whose scholarship has not gone beyond the thresholds of narrative historiography, philosophers who have no knowledge of, for example, Hegel and Heidegger, and psychologists who have neither heard of nor read Derrida, Lacan, Althusser and Foucault, the quality of interaction with the present crop of locally bred academics in most Nigerian universities is disappointing. Unsurprisingly, these academics spend more time attending administrative meetings and less time at academic seminars. Senior academics are now available for seminars only when their graduate students are defending their work; they often claim to be too busy dealing with university administration to attend. And the very idea of academic seminars has been reduced to postgraduate students' presentations. With a very few exceptions, most academics in Nigeria stop publishing after attaining their professorship. The commitment to university-level mentoring and teaching also declines immediately after becoming a professor. Yet, these academics never stop using their professorial titles until they die.
In almost all the first-generation universities in Nigeria, emeritus professor positions have been created. However, their impact is hardly felt within the system. The societal practice of abandoning one's core assignment while equating seniority with abstinence from duty has made such senior academics conspicuously marginal and invisible to the knowledge production enterprise after retirement. Viewed against the backdrop of contributions made by their contemporaries and peers in Australia, Europe and North America, where various categories of professorial chairs are endowed and instituted, the efforts of these senior academics leave a lot to be desired.
Similarly, universities in the country do not express any commitment to demanding compliance with ways of meeting global standards. Very few journals published by Nigerian universities are indexed in the World Web of Science. Most university presses in the country are inactive. The few still publishing are barely competitive in an international context. This neglectful disposition has reduced the density and quality of academic debates and interactions in the country's ivory towers. It has also undermined the collective capacity to publish internationally, to re-appropriate agency, and to represent the self within both African studies and knowledge production generally. Against the backdrop of the increasing efforts made by universities in China, India, Japan and South Africa, it is difficult to present any Nigerian university as effectively aspiring to be competitive on the global stage.
One way of appreciating the abandonment currently suffered by the university system in Nigeria is to note the massive funding injected into various categories of research groupings in South Africa for academics in training (postgraduate students), emerging academics (postdoctoral and senior research fellows) and established academics (professorial research and teaching positions) by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) of the Department of Education and the Department of Science and Technology. This is in addition to the numerous sources of support generated by several international and local foundations across the world. No doubt, this remarkable development has helped the country attract some of the most talented scholars across the disciplines throughout the world. It is also thanks to such efforts that UCT has emerged as the top-rated university in Africa – a position it has retained since 2010 – and also one of the leading universities in the world.
In Nigeria, the Federal Government's decision to create and license several new private universities as a way of liberalizing and privatizing university education without committing to the development and training of staff has had a devastating impact on the first-generation universities and on university education in the country generally.Footnote 4 Similarly, the policy of increasing the number of postgraduate students as a way of boosting internally generated revenue has grievously undermined standards. With graduates hardly employable within the local economy, and postgraduate students who struggle to compete with their peers outside the country, the first-generation universities are now battling to regain the global standing they once attained. There does not seem to be any emerging oasis of hope.
Critiquing the private universities initiative is difficult. This is mainly because private universities in Nigeria emerged and derive their relevance largely from the failings of the public universities. Unfortunately, far from assuaging such weaknesses, private universities in the country have compounded and multiplied them. These universities are characterized by high fees and reproduce the class configurations of Nigerian society, and therefore admissions are not accepted on the basis of the academic merit of prospective students, but strictly according to their capacity to pay the stipulated tuition fees. The majority of students in these universities cannot meet the merit demands of the public universities. Yet, a large percentage of them graduate with first-class and upper second-class degrees. Battling with the shortage of facilities and faculties as well as the high turnover of existing academic staff due to the lack of academic freedom, most of these universities adopt very repressive modes of relating to staff and students.Footnote 5 This is in addition to their usually unsuccessful attempts at securing full accreditation for their programmes from the National Universities Commission.
Between September 2003 and July 2007, I taught politics at Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria, and from August 2007 to March 2011, I taught politics at Igbinedion University, Okada, Nigeria. According to my observations, as well as opinions and rumours widely circulating in these institutions during these periods, given the endemic nature of its autocratic culture, Covenant University is known as having the highest turnover rate of university academics throughout the country. It is also reputed to have the most repressive mode of relating to students. In 2006, the university asked its first set of graduating students to present themselves for a compulsory HIV/AIDS test and decided not to issue statements of results to students confirmed as testing positive. Although this compulsory medical examination was not part of the agreements signed by the students at the beginning of their academic programmes at the institution, it was nevertheless retroactively introduced by the university at the point of the students' graduation. It took an intervention by a Court of Law to stop the university from enforcing this undemocratic decision. On the other hand, owing to the ‘cake-sharing psychosis’ and other distributive pressures of its ownership, Igbinedion University, Okada, Nigeria is widely considered as facing a continuous struggle to secure interim accreditation for most of its academic programmes. Marred by depleted libraries, empty laboratories, epileptic supplies of electricity, poorly maintained offices as well as unsecured hostels and residential quarters, this university provides a very challenging learning environment. In March 2011, academic staff at the university embarked upon an unprecedented one-week warning strike to demand an improvement in salaries and working conditions. In response, the owner of the university, Chief Gabriel O. Igbinedion, who is also the controversial Esama of Benin Kingdom, disappointingly asked all displeased teaching staff to resign immediately, claiming that he owed no one explanations about how he runs his business.
CONCLUSION
This article has reflected on the performance of African studies and knowledge production in universities in postcolonial Nigeria and post-apartheid South Africa. After seventy years of the decolonization of knowledge production in most of the continent, the time is certainly ripe for stocktaking within the field. Since one can best assess the preceding day after the sun has set, the postcolonial era is therefore an appropriate period in which to evaluate the preceding era of colonialism. In Hegel's immortal words, ‘the owl of Minerva spreads out its wings only with the falling of the dusk’ (Hegel Reference Hegel1967). This article has examined the phenomenal decline of postcolonial universities, resulting from government neglect, the attitudes of incompetent and opportunistic senior academics, mismanagement, political interference and underfunding. My aim has been to underline some of the external and internal challenges undermining university education and knowledge production across the continent. Without denying the impact of the colonial legacy, internal failings are more crippling for academics across Africa. Fired by an objective displeasure with the existing status quo, I have developed my critique from the conviction that the best way to defend academics across the continent is to open up our practices and scholarship to criticism and radical questioning. I have therefore tried to be provocative.
Notwithstanding the efforts to Africanize knowledge production on Africa, the internal failings of the state illustrated by the crisis in higher education and in African universities in particular have continued to undermine decolonizing initiatives across the continent. Beyond the known challenges faced by universities in Africa in the early post-independence era, knowledge production has been marked by distress since the 1980s. Externally, the dominant perception remains of Africa as a lifeless object, whose populations – governors and governed alike – constitute a permanent enigma on which the Africanist is the only expert and the only legitimate interpreter. The task of working Africa's destiny out of its inherited Eurocentric mode of cognition thus remains an incomplete project.
The colonial experience continues to energize and reproduce the postcolonial subject within a particular mode of thinking about the self, which mainly re-inscribes the self into the same historical conditions created by the colonial system. The contradiction of critiquing imperial hierarchies of knowledge on Africa while also re-inscribing oneself into them is a key illustration of the continuity of the logic of the colonial condition in the postcolonial situation. Intellectual thought on Africa thus betrays a characteristic element of self-contradiction: an urge to emphasize the differences of indigenous knowledge and of local and national culture from those of the West conflicts grievously with a simultaneous aspiration towards modernity that is definable only in terms of the post-Enlightenment rationalism of European culture. Nationalism thus sings the glory of the national culture as it is simultaneously anguished by a perceived backwardness of the nation. The axioms and frameworks deployed by nationalist thought are not different from those employed by the imperial powers. Intellectual thought on Africa thus unwittingly accepts and adopts the same essentialist conceptions based on the distinctions between the East and the West, the same typology created by a transcendent studying subject, and the same objectifying procedures of knowledge constructed in the post-Enlightenment age of Western science. Far from being independent, intellectual thought and knowledge production on Africa therefore continue to exist within a borrowed and dominated framework (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1986; Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty1987; Reference Chakrabarty1992; Ghosh and Chakrabarty Reference Ghosh and Chakrabarty2002; Arowosegbe Reference Arowosegbe2008).
Has the colonial project actually led Africans into irretrievable pasts and paths? Is the colonial dilemma really a permanent imagery of Africa's destiny? Is the colonial moment truly over in Africa? And is development in Africa, defined either as change, policy or process, already destined to failure? In answering these questions, we must continually historicize and re-examine colonialism, rather than making it appear as if a self-evident answer has already been produced, from which one draws only conclusions. The aim must be to decolonize African studies with a view to deploying them as a corrective to Eurocentrism through 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 pronounced inadequate. This article closes with an invitation to further explore and problematize Africa as a question for critical thought. Its aim is not just to awaken the consciousness about colonialism as Africa's counter-experience or counterpoint, but to make historical analysis increasingly sensitive to some of the changes taking place across the continent.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article draws on research funded by the A. C. Jordan Chair in African Studies at the Centre for African Studies, in collaboration with the Research Funding Office of the University of Cape Town. Between March 2013 and February 2014, I was a Fellow in the A. C. Jordan Chair in African Studies at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. I gratefully thank the Research Funding Office at the University of Cape Town for funding an international conference, which I convened, where some of the issues discussed in this collection were first raised. I am especially grateful to Adetoun Oyelude, Adigun A. B. Agbaje, Christian A. Williams, Harry O. Garuba, Horman Chitonge, Ifeanyi Onyeonoru, Jane Bennett, Lungisile Ntsebeza, Osisioma B. C. Nwolise and this journal's editors and external reviewers whose comments, goodwill and inputs contributed immensely to the overall quality and success of this output.
