From Eurocentric caricatures to formidable centres

African universities have been urged to stand together against systemic racism and become agents for advancing equity, democratic freedoms and social justice for all peoples of African descent. But to do so, institutions have to undertake radical reforms.

The call was recently made by Professor Cornel West, an African-American philosopher who spoke during the recent virtual conference ‘African Academic Diaspora Virtual Homecoming’, organised by the Association of African Universities jointly with the African Union and the government of Ghana.

In the conference segment entitled, "Higher Education: A panacea to racism, equity and promoting social justice", West said the time had come for African universities to join global forces that were opposed to institutional racism on the continent and in the diaspora. But to achieve the objective, West argued African universities would have to undertake radical reforms.

“The issue is that systemic racism is hard to identify. It is subtle as it is embedded as normal practice in matters related to discrimination and denial of human rights in criminal justice systems, economic empowerment, health care, political power and higher education,” said West.

Speaking in the context of the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in the US, West said issues of racism had taken centre stage and the moment provided an opportunity for African universities to create awareness of prevailing social injustices against peoples of African descent. He said the onslaught of discrimination and suffering of peoples of African descent had been going on for too long, hence the need for pan-Africanist scholars to use higher education to reject racism.

A radical paradigm shift

Professor Hilary Beckles, vice-chancellor of the University of West Indies, also called on scholars to tackle racism.

“African academics and their counterparts in the diaspora should lead in calling out the players and beneficiaries of slavery, slave trade, colonialism and neocolonialism,” said Beckles.

He urged scholars to expand their academic reach beyond the continent and start engaging with the African diaspora that consists of the worldwide collection of communities that descended from Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the African Union Charter, the diaspora included people of African origin that currently live outside Africa, having been dispersed around the world through colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade or voluntary migration.

But if the African universities were to accept the new mantle presented to them by West and the galaxy of scholars of African descent who participated in the AAU’s conference, they would have to reform their curricula, not just by establishing centres of African and African diaspora studies, but to make a radical paradigm shift in terms of their philosophical orientation.

Revolutionary spirit

The issue is that as creations of colonial regimes, African universities were set up to produce a pool of indigenous manpower sufficiently educated and trained to help in colonial administration and finally to take over positions left by departing colonial officials in the public service.

Joel Samoff, a former World Bank consultant on higher education and currently at Stanford University’s Center for African Studies, reflected on the consequences. “Even after independence, the critical mission of the African universities continued to be narrowly defined and focused on manpower training,” he said.

According to Francis Nyamnjoh, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cape Town, most universities in postcolonial Africa have significantly Africanised their personnel. They have been less successful in Africanising their curricula, educational structures and their theories of knowledge, despite efforts to transform themselves.

Professor Mahmood Mamdani, the director of Makerere Institute of Social Research, said to a large extent, the hundreds of universities created after independence have stayed triumphantly universalistic and uncompromisingly foreign since a study conducted almost three decades ago, University Crisis and Reform: A reflection on the African experience.

So far, nothing has changed as many African universities have continued to deteriorate in academic excellence.

To date, there was nothing concrete to show that African universities were ready to adapt to a revolutionary spirit which entailed bringing divergent communities of peoples of African descent to fight systemic racism and its attendant vices of discrimination.

Granted the perceptions of the lack of a revolutionary nature among African university students and professors, Mamdani argued that this was partly true, as most academics are accustomed to seeing themselves as leaders-in-waiting, while the students are made to believe that they are the leaders of tomorrow. Probably this is the reason why the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015 did not attract African university students outside South Africa, although demonstrations against the divisive personality of Cecil Rhodes were more about decolonisation.

In this regard, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, only a small group of African academics and students came out openly in support of #BlackLivesMatter, a movement with aims that include attaining dignity, equality, social justice and human rights for the people of colour.

Postcolonial control

In a study, Decolonizing the University in Africa, Nyamnjoh argued the underachievement of African universities in terms of generating new knowledge and championing causes of African people on the continent and those in the diaspora was increased by the unavailability of resources.

“Underfunding and marketisation of universities have placed African universities at the mercy of market forces and pushed scholars to resort to consultancies and moonlighting, to the detriment of fundamental basic and applied research and sustained scholarship,” said Nyamnjoh.

Since their inception, African universities have also suffered colonial and postcolonial state control to the extent of never having tasted any form of academic freedom. For decades, academic staff deemed to be too independent were expelled from the universities.

According to Professor Ali Mazrui, the late Kenyan political scientist, writer and critic, just like the colonial administrators, postcolonial African strongmen are equally never fascinated with ideas from academia as they fear new thinking would upset life within the Orwellian ‘animal farm’.

Indeed, throughout their history African universities had been impacted by external forces, even though, to their credit, national governments paid salaries, built physical learning facilities and student hostels, albeit sometimes inadequate and poorly maintained.

According to Samoff, foreign aid dependence by African universities was not about education systems that received their principal funding from abroad but the notion that academic improvement and change required external support, advice and often personnel to drive the academic agenda.

Consequently, questions arise as to how many of the 1,950 African universities have the capacity to lead the pan-African mission as suggested by scholars of African descent – including Dr. Gary Bledsoe, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Texas in the US; Dr Akwasi Osei, an expert in global studies at Delaware State University, also in the US; and Verene Shepherd, a professor of social history at the University of West Indies.

Ishmael Munene, a professor of higher education and education leadership at Northern Arizona University during the last two decades, said some of the best national public universities in Sub-Saharan Africa had been weakened by intense competition from regional universities in terms of student intake and recruitment of qualified staff.

“To date few universities in Sub-Saharan Africa could claim to being an institution of higher learning ‘where people’s minds are trained for clear thinking, for independent thinking, for analysis and for problem solving at the highest level’, in accordance with what the late Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere defined a university should be,” said Munene.

A massive brain drain

There is also the question as to whether African leaders would be willing to allow African universities to shift their orientation from being Eurocentric caricatures to formidable institutions that exercised academic leadership in advocating the rights of 1.3 billion people of African descent. But if past record is an indicator of the answer to that question, African leadership has been largely responsible for the massive brain drain in Africa that currently stands at about 50,000 African-born academics working in foreign universities abroad, most notably in the United States and Canada.

Dr Martha Ferede, the project coordinator of the UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa, said in about ten years, approximately 450,000 tertiary-educated Africans have migrated to member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

No doubt the call on African universities to be revitalised for the struggle against racism and denial of social justice is a tough reminder by the diaspora academics that the journey to liberate all people of African descent from political, economic, cultural and intellectual domination is not yet over, despite independence on the continent.