Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
‘We continue to have [Western] universities in Africa, rather than African universities in Africa.’ Ndumiso Dladla
A people’s categories of being and knowing are as material to their existence as the geography, climate, physical security from marauders and the diseases they bring. There is nothing in these abstractions that is intangible. Yet, these categories of being and knowing are fragile. They are tangible abstractions after all. They need institutions to protect and nurture them. These institutions can take physicality in worship, in political power and in education. This reflection is concerned with the African university as one of the material institutions that plays this nurturing role of knowing and being for African societies.
There can be no independent thought – indeed no independence – without institutions to sustain independent research and produce relevant knowledge. The key institution is the research university (Mahmood Mamdani: Scholars in the Marketplace).
The constitutive elements of ways of being and knowing of any people are the minutiae of subjects like languages, sciences, architecture, song and dance, theology, economics, fashion, sexualities, just to name a few. But the endless list of constituents is not as important as the whole they form: knowing and being.
Knowing and being are necessary twins. They affirm that a people cannot be without knowing themselves and their environment and – intricately so – vice versa. All languages, sciences, architecture, song and dance, pedagogical methods, written scripts – and I dare say, even the choice of many peoples to not develop written scripts – express individual emotion and communal knowledge, individual beliefs and communal worship and so on. These express values, notions of immortality and a peoples’ view of their place in the cosmos.
Retaining the joint conceptualisation of being and knowing as necessary for all human societies is a strident rejection of the pseudo-science created by imperial thought to suggest a sub-humanity of African and other global South peoples. After all, one cannot enslave his equals, so Empire needed and still needs to promote notions of the inferiority of certain peoples. From Georg Hegel’s defilement of otherwise important contributions to the history of philosophy, through Jan Smuts to Nicolas Sarkozy’s and Emmanuel Macron’s casual reference to the childlike non-participation of Africans in ‘history’.
To put it differently. If a people are, then they know, and because they know, they certainly are. It is therefore inevitable that Empire will repeatedly seek to destroy any institution that helps a people to know, and therefore to be.
In this reflection, I posit that the Afrocentricity of the African university – and its lack thereof – is a reflection of the ongoing scramble for and partition of the African mind and being, a process that formally started at the Berlin Conference 140 years ago. I propose that the World Bank-led 1986 Harare Conference on African Higher Education is a critical continuity of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference because it reinforces a process of deliberate dismantling of this important material institution that protects African ways of being and knowing. It represents the ‘Empire striking back’ at the decolonisation fervour of the 1960s and early 1970s. It is in this sense that I call the 1986 Harare Conference ‘Berlinesque’ as it forms a critical continuity of the imperial project in Africa.
The strike back of Empire of the 1980s came at a time when the World Bank was implementing structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that targeted publicly funded social programmes in African countries, especially education and health. These SAPs struck precisely when African social programmes – and especially African universities – were thriving, producing an empowered young generation of healthy, well-educated Africans. It is precisely this strike back of the SAPs of the 1980s that led to the dire situation of education and other social programmes that we witness in Africa today.
The postcolonial African university
If the Berlin Conference formalised the continuing colonisation of Africa in the 1880s, then the 1960s era epitomised the formal attempt to decolonise Africa. So let me start here. In the 1960s.
The idea that Africa will need to build a human resource bank to secure its postcolonial aspirations was very much alive in the spectrum of African thought in the late 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the debate about whether Africans were ‘ready’ for independence was precisely premised on the belief, on the part of colonisers and some ‘Uncle Tom’ sections of Africans, that Africa needed the coloniser to survive, let alone develop in the ‘modern’ world. Some Africans were obviously deeply offended by the proposition of the need for an affirming white gaze.
Julius Nyerere is famously recorded in a black and white interview, presumably before Tanganyika’s political independence in 1960, when in response to a question on whether Africans are ready for independence, he replies in his characteristic piercing humour:
‘If you come into my house and steal my jacket, don’t then ask me whether I’m ready for my jacket. The jacket was mine, you had no right at all to take it from me. … The mechanism of whether really, I can look right in my jacket when I put it on, this is different. I mean, it may not be … I may not look as smart in it as you look in it, but it’s mine!’
In a 1963 piece titled ‘The Positive Contributions of Tribalism’ Mboya salutes the values of community and solidarity over individualistic material acquisition as benefits of ‘tribal’ education.
‘Missionaries taught Africans to despise their tribal culture, telling them it was in conflict with the modern world. No effort was made to trace what was good…’
With independence, African states wasted no time to plan for the creation of an African academy. The 1961 Addis Ababa Conference of African Ministers of Education and 1962 follow-up conference in Antananarivo (Madagascar) established a ‘vigorous development philosophy emphasizing that the education establishment, especially higher education, would play a fundamental role in social, economic, and political transformation and reconstruction of post-colonial African nations’. The Antananarivo conference ‘articulated seven functions that African universities were mandated to accomplish’. The 1980 Organisation of African Unity Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980-2000 also ‘venerated universities as the embodiment of the highest national aspirations and political ideals, and the undisputed instrument of socioeconomic and political transformation. Most African countries domesticated these core developmental principles into their national development plans during the 1960s and 1970s’.
However, beginning with the 1973 Carnegie Commission for Higher Education report, the value of universities began to be computed based on ‘rates of return’ rather than the value of human capital to society, or what Tom Mboya would have called the positive contributions of tribalism.
Milton Obamba described the 1986 watershed event in terms worthy of fuller reproduction:
‘The ideological and political onslaught against university education in sub-Saharan Africa intensified and acquired a life of its own during the 1980s and 1990s. At a meeting with vice-chancellors of African universities held in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1986, the World Bank sensationally claimed that African countries would be much better off if they closed down existing universities and trained their people in foreign institutions instead. A highly polemical World Bank Discussion Paper entitled Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa laid out an unprecedented and devastating indictment against university education in Africa. The paper stated that university expansion was phenomenal yet the labour market for university graduates was weakening; the unit costs of university education were extremely high; and that the rising public costs of university education must be urgently transferred to students who were now seen as the direct beneficiaries.’
Obamba’s recounting is important because this language has been present in consent-manufacturing reporting of African politicians in local news media from the 1980s to date – that university education is too expensive for our poor economies and the cost burden ought to be transferred to the ‘only’ beneficiary, the student.
The 1986 Harare meeting was, to my mind, very much a follow-up conference of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference. It formalises what was already an ongoing deliberate effort to dismantle the reconstruction efforts that Africa attempted in the 1960s. The Harare meeting does not merely concern African universities, but just like its predecessor meeting constitutes an attack on a critical component of a viable society. And the attack begins by sowing a seed of doubt as to the validity of the society’s foundational institutions.
In 1992, Makerere University becomes the first public university in East Africa to be subjected to neoliberal reforms, spurring a book length critique by Mahmood Mamdani. I have reflected on how such ‘reforms’ have had a definitive impact in categories of being and knowing in the African university. Like unrelenting punches of an invisible fist, the neoliberal commodification of the public good that education is reverberates back to how we perceive our knowledge and our place in community as African scholars.
The Berlin Conference and the ‘legacy of late colonialism’
The Berlin Conference marks the moment a centuries-long fumbling in imperial/colonial methods settles into a refined science. Indeed, over the preceding century, Europeans had deployed every intellectual effort, from pseudo-science to prejudiced theology, precisely to refine this ongoing process.
In the first episode of his nine-part 1986 documentary, Ali Mazrui posed a question that never ceases to trouble me, even as I offer my mind reasoned answer after reasoned answer.
It is not often realised how brief the colonial period was. When Jomo Kenyatta was born, Kenya wasn’t as yet a Crown Colony. He lived right through the entire period of British rule, he outlived British rule by 15 years, ruling Kenya by himself. If the colonial period was so brief, how deep was the impact, how strong?
Why is colonialism in Africa so effective? Why is it even more efficient in East Africa – so short yet so consequential? Mahmood Mamdani summarises it well: ‘Late colonialism brought a wealth of experience to its Africa pursuit.’
One way to understand this baffling phenomenon is to recall that the forces that coalesce into formal colonisation in Africa over Christmas in 1884 in Berlin were already centuries-long in play by the late 1800s. Across what we now call the global South, the imperial project had spent several centuries honing the colonial skill: one genocide after another, one instigation of fratricidal war after another, one unjust ‘treaty of protection’ after another.
And this brings me back to the finesse of late colonialism, so well theorised by Mamdani. The Berlin Conference exemplifies this ‘wealth of experience’ that Mamdani describes. And I dare say, the most important scramble (and partition) was for African ways of being and knowing.
I started off this reflection by quoting Ndumiso Dladla’s lament of the Western nature of African universities. The white gaze is unshakably dominant in African educational systems. By attacking the sites of knowledge and power – and every African community can recount how their priests and seers, and therefore belief systems and sites of communal being, were first attacked by the colonial project – Empire erases ways of being and knowing, and soon, the next generations have but the Empire’s benevolence to look to for answers for everything from ‘how to cure a cold’ to ‘who is God’.
In seeking to control for themselves, to the exclusion of their fellow European tribesmen, the water ways and adjacent lands of Africa, the late colonialism that visits the African interior eviscerates the African sense of being and knowing so completely that details of methods of arts and crafts are destroyed, and principles of philosophy and cosmology are relegated to the foul cesspit of ‘witchcraft’.
The ‘other native question’ in higher education
Ilana le Roux described universities in Africa with Steve Biko’s words as ‘institutions of higher education … precisely where people are trained to (re)produce a ‘province of Europe’. My friend Harrison Mbori questions why so few African faculties of law teach African customary law, and when they do, it is always in pejorative reference to what colonial law called the ‘repugnancy clause’ – the blanket proviso that invalidated African customary law for its being repugnant to natural justice, morality and good conscience. The term itself ‘repugnant’ conjures up mental images of the foul cesspit of witchcraft.
In reproducing a province of Europe in Africa, the African academic is forced into a world of false choices to answer prejudiced questions. If the grand colonial question was the ‘native problem’, as Mamdani describes in Citizen and Subject, its postcolonial version of African disdain of the African is what I call the ‘other native question’. This asks: how does one African ruling majority control/subjugate the other non-ruling majorities – and obviously minorities.
The other native question has real world effects. It impacts how we regard our epistemologies, and how we regard our individual and communal knowing and being. It affects what we teach and how we teach, what we legislate and how we govern our fellow Africans, from the family to the classroom, restaurant, places of worship, how we drive, to the corridors of presidential power. The ex-cathedra approach to relating with the other African is exemplary of the scramble for and partition of African ways of being and knowing.
Conclusion
It would be naïve to underestimate the success of the 1986 Harare Berlinesque Conference. African universities are now so underfunded as to hardly stand a chance of retaining our best minds. They can neither compensate comparably nor sustain top end research. It is normal for Africans to go to Europe to complete postgraduate programmes in African studies.
The most devastating effect – above all the many empirically described deprivations such as the brain drain, or the lack of vertical social mobility of brilliant young Africans, or the stunting of developmental outcomes – of the scramble for and partition of the African mind and being is the establishment of conditions that make it such that the African academic regards him/herself as better than the ‘other native’.
The hierarchies that develop, creating an inferior one at the feudal servitude of the other, rather than establishing the African academic as a servant of his or her society and fellows, debilitates Africa. These hierarchies make us as a community of scholars less capable of impacting our societies for good and leave our societies vulnerable to the enticements of Empire while minimising the possibility of imperial powers clashing among themselves over their academic fiefdoms. And that is precisely what entails the continuities of the Berlin Conference.
As always, there is hope. That this reflection is but a rehash of the disruptive thinking of African and global South scholars working to describe this phenomenon shows that the battle is being fought precisely where it should be, in the mind and being.
Footnote
*Interaction between Prof Humphrey and his students that led to the creation of the above illustrative image:
Prompt: Please generate an image that shows the university undergoing epistemic violence due to the Berlin Conference.
Response: Here’s the image illustrating epistemic violence in higher education during the Scramble for and Partition of Africa. It symbolises the erasure of indigenous knowledge and the imposition of colonial perspectives in an academic setting.Also, they clarified that in the first response, it generated the same old image of delegates around a table, and he asked again, using the word ‘university’. This can probably show that the Berlin Conference is still seen largely as a division of geography and nothing more, yet the sharing up of geographies is precisely what cut up tribes and nations into majorities and minorities in the new colonies and began the epistemic violence we discuss.
Humphrey Sipalla is a university teacher, interdisciplinary scholar and current researcher in international law. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief at Kabarak University Press, Kenya.
