- Rethinking Knowledge production in Africa
Jean and John Comaroff enthusiastically claim that Africa constitutes a rich site ‘of new knowledges and ways of knowing-and-being … that have the capacity to inform and transform theory in the north, to subvert its universalisms in order to rewrite them in a different, less provincial register’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011).1 What role, then, can the African university – which, as described by Jeremiah Arowosegbe, is in a lamentable state – play in creating and generalizing these ‘new knowledges’?
There are many issues that arise from Arowosegbe’s important disquisition about knowledge production on and in Africa. I can engage with only a few of them here. The author should be commended for raising, again, some of the critical questions that have simultaneously energized and frustrated leading African scholars in the last seven decades or so: how endogenous knowledge on Africa and the world is (re)produced in Africa, and how such knowledge can be globally validated.
I start with the author’s conclusion. He argues that intellectual thought and knowledge production on Africa are not ‘independent’ as they ‘continue to exist within a borrowed and dominated framework’. I will argue that the question at the heart of intellectual thought and knowledge production in Africa is not so much about its ‘independence’ as it is about its ‘originality’. The production of original knowledge and the marginalization and circumscription of the same, both internally and externally, are responsible for the (semi-)destruction of the university – both as an idea and as an institution – in most African states. Since the colonial era, power in Africa has regarded original knowledge – the most sublime manifestation of human liberty – as dangerous or subversive. Therefore, the political, economic and social processes that led to the emasculation of the institutions and practices of knowledge production are not incidental to the fundamental crisis on the continent: they constitute the grounds for the crisis. The debate about knowledge production, therefore, must grapple with the fact that knowledge, like all phenomena in the world, as Olúfémi Táíwò (2012: 966) reminds us, is a product; as a product, it is ‘implicated within the larger modes of production (material and social) where most artificial creation takes [End Page 350] place’ (ibid.). Against this backdrop, it is useful that Arowosegbe examines the political economy of knowledge production in modern Africa and points to the processes, institutions and agencies responsible for what he describes as the ‘depressing challenges’ that ‘research environments across Africa face’.
This crisis has produced many diagnosticians but few clinicians in the post-Cold War era. While understanding the nature of the crisis is fundamental to solving the problems arising from it, as African scholars we seem to have failed in providing sufficient, credible and feasible proposals for how we can resolve the crisis while committing ourselves to the practical challenges of making these proposals work. Undoubtedly, we need more diagnoses; however, such diagnoses must proceed towards clinical work. In doing the latter, we will have to engage with institutions beyond the academy, particularly in articulating and mobilizing for the kinds of rival motifs that will force a redirection of intellectual energies at the level of the state.
This is without prejudice to the multifarious, important and beneficial interventions by international development agencies, research institutions and foundations based in the global North – despite their ‘baggage’. Such external funding and external initiatives represent one of the two major responses to the challenges of higher education in contemporary Africa. Even the major ‘African’ initiatives, such as CODESRIA, have had to rely on external funding. The latest of such responses include the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (ADF), a scholar fellowship programme for educational projects at African higher education institutions by African-born academics in North America, and the African Higher Education Summit. The latter was convened by TrustAfrica and held in Dakar, Senegal in March 2015, with the theme of ‘revitalizing higher education for Africa’s future’. The impact of such efforts should not be understated. However, unless they are additional to a massive (re-)investment by the African state in higher education specifically, and in education at all levels generally, these...