African scholars, African studies and knowledge production on Africa

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 2011; Mamdani 1993; Zeleza and Olukoshi 2004). 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 1991: xi; Inikori 1996: 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...