The 1980s was a wonderful time to attend university in South Africa. The rich vibrancy of the debates appealed to me. While attending the former University of Durban-Westville, my circle of friends included students who supported the inherent logic of apartheid (that races could not co-exist), those who were Marxist, others Black Consciousness, and still others who supported the exiled African National Congress.
For myself, I joined the Communist Party as soon as it was unbanned. Lecturers encouraged differing viewpoints in the class, no matter how intense they were. Personally, I looked forward to doing assignments – knowing that the lecturer was open to any perspective we took on a given matter as long as we could substantiate it.
Feeling as if we were contributing something important, every one of the students in my class did more than the required reading. In the days before the internet, every one of my political science fellow-students would read at least two newspapers per day – always making the connection between theory and empirical reality. I found my passion, I found my calling early in life and upon graduation, opted to continue with my studies with an eye to securing a post in academia. This goal however was not possible for some time, as with a young family, I had to earn a salary whilst studying part-time. My path took me to working in think-tanks and NGOs, starting a newspaper, and working as a consultant to businesses and governments as well as international organizations. I then finally realized my dream of a tenured academic position.
In retrospect, this circuitous route to academia was the best thing that happened to me. It allowed me to constantly check abstract ideas against the harsh reality out there. Sadly, this is not the norm at humanities faculties.
United States of Africa
At a recent conference, a delegate asked me about my position on a United States of Africa. The way the question was phrased was as if one could merely declare the formation of this feel-good notion. Absent here was why this concept, which has been around for at least 70 years, found no traction amongst African leaders despite the usual rhetorical support for the concept.
Also missing was any critical understanding that any such unification would need steps towards functional integration between states to tie such a union together. Consider here that the European Coal and Steel Community set the basis for what became the European Community and European Union. Then there is the perennial question of what common values will drive 1.6 billion Africans? However, humanities academics are increasingly approaching matters through an ideological prism, with no critical reflection on the concepts we so blithely throw about.
Worse, this ideological view seems to be stuck in the 1960s. Speaking at a conference on the future of Africa, one delegate stressed the importance of the transfer of land to the rural population as a way of empowering them. However, such a position provides no critical reflection on the fact that because two thirds of agriculture in Africa is subsistence farming, there is no ability to scale up food production and make use of the latest technological innovations to create crops on the scale needed, given our burgeoning population.
African megacity
Perhaps more to the point, we are witnessing the rise of the African megacity – those cities with a population of 10 million or more. By 2042, the number of people living in African’s urban areas will double by more than 1 billion. By 2050 African megacities will include: Abidjan, Khartoum, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Addis Ababa, Bamako, Dakar, Ibadan, and Kano. Stuck to antiquated and romantic notions of ownership of land as the way to prosperity in Africa, humanities scholars are generally oblivious that the future of the continent will be determined by its cities.
Then there is decoloniality. Decoloniality is important to be taught as one perspective given Africa’s deliberate misrepresentation. Africa first grew in popular consciousness through accounts of missionaries and colonial governors. Their representations of Africa served the imperial power and proliferated unchallenged for generations in academic publications, the media and Hollywood movies.
These colonial tropes need to be challenged and challenged aggressively. It is for this reason that the important project of decoloniality must be pursued with added vigour as we challenge these narratives about Africa: the continent perpetually regarded as backward, weak, poor – the perpetual victim. However, decoloniality needs to move from critique to incisive policy interventions. Many decolonial scholars lack strategic depth to their critique, and it is hardly ever a guide for serious policy inputs. As such, despite the popularity of decoloniality in academia, it hardly ever translates into practical policy recommendations.
Current decolonial scholarship reminds me of a quote from Yale University’s Ian Shapiro about the state of political philosophy. He wrote, “It has produced a normative theory that is no longer informed, in the way that the great political theorists of the tradition took it for granted that political theory should be informed, by the state of empirical knowledge of politics. A result is that the normative theorists spend too much time commenting on one another as if they are themselves the appropriate objects of study… This might bump up citation indexes and bamboozle tenure committees in the desired ways, but it scarcely does much for the advancement of knowledge…”. It is a terrible indictment.
An added imperative to engage in the real world is to prepare our students for the world of work. Their certificate upon graduation will be worthless if our academic constructs do not speak to the world of work they will encounter.
Shut down
Finally, unlike during my student years where robust debate was the norm, debates in the humanities, I fear, have been shut down by political correctness. Often academics engage in self-censorship – fearful of expressing a dissident view for fear of being labeled reactionary and thereby seeing their promotion prospects diminish.
Such fear kills off innovation, it diminishes the purpose of what a university education is about – a contestation of ideas. If the humanities are to reclaim their purpose and relevance in these turbulent times, such fear needs to end.
We need to revel in our articulation of different perspectives, and we need to constantly check our academic concepts against the world lying beyond the university’s gates.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Image by Nikolay Georgiev from Pixabay