Read Africans, Decenter Scholarship

The ongoing integration of area studies into international or global institutes (or schools) in Euro-American universities raises a host of questions for area-studies programs, particularly how best to educate graduate and undergraduate students in this new environment and facilitate their career paths and professionalization. Educating college students in area studies, particularly in African studies, is a challenging undertaking for educators in institutions of higher learning, and the ongoing integration is likely to compound the existing pedagogical challenges that include, but are not limited to, the availability and use of textbooks authored by continental African scholars in Euro-American classrooms. Do the new international institutes’ structures have the capacity to encourage or facilitate the consumption of knowledge produced in Africa? Who stands to benefit from this integration if the scholarship produced by others continues to receive qualified attention, especially in the West? This essay argues that one of the best ways to educate graduate and undergraduate students in African studies under the new setting is by exposing them to diverse scholarship that includes textbooks by continental African writers. In other words, this essay calls for decentering scholarship and hopes that international or global institutes will encourage Western educators to consider using textbooks from the South, particularly those by intellectuals of African descent.

My academic experience in America’s colleges and universities suggests that Western scholars hardly use textbooks written by African intellectuals when teaching about the continent and its people. For more than thirteen years, I studied in America’s public institutions of higher learning, where I received my undergraduate and graduate degrees, but at no point during my experience was I introduced to textbooks about Africa by African writers. As evidence suggests, continental African writers have made significant contributions to the study of African history, but Euro-American writers get the most attention in classrooms. More often than not, Western historians tend to privilege African historical narratives written by their peers in the West. They often give little attention to the scholarship developed by African writers, even when it is clear that these writers adhere to useful disciplinary guidelines.¹

The tendency to examine Africa through Western prisms has contributed to the confusion surrounding the real and imagined Africa to which Curtis Keim alludes in his magisterial work, Mistaking Africa. This confusion is most apparent in the public discourse about Africans, particularly in mainstream news media and social outlets, which often tag images of Africa with an ideological spin before releasing them to the public. For the most part, these images constitute the ritual knowledge that students bring to the classroom and may have a major impact on their learning.² Pedagogical experts remind us that ritual knowledge is a bottleneck that impedes learning and should be disrupted.³

Disrupting ritual knowledge requires that students be exposed to diverse scholarship that accounts for non-Euro-American writers’ works. Though educators in the recent past have attempted to expand students’ conceptual knowledge of others, the textbooks and other reading materials that they select have often undermined their efforts. Unless students enroll in specific courses on Africa, they are unlikely to read from an African writer in non-African courses. Even then, courses in African history, especially in North America and Western Europe, do not always guarantee exposure to textbooks and other literal texts by African writers. For this reason, the expectation that students ought to “think critically about the past when they are constantly asked to consume our [Western] expert knowledge”⁴ requires close scrutiny.

Paulo Freire did not exaggerate when he observed that education is an exercise of domination that stimulates students’ credulity.⁵ Convinced, as he was, that education exemplifies the ideology of the ruling elite (an ideology educators often overlook), he argued that the school curriculum indoctrinates students “to adapt to the world of oppression.”⁶ The indoctrination to which he referred often occurs through pedagogy, research, and required texts, which, for the most part, espouse the ideology of the dominant group. Textbooks about Africa written by Western historians are laden with multiple examples that give credence to Freire’s observation, and they hold the potential to...