African Studies: Ato Quayson Speaks!
PIUS: Still on Diaspora-inflected thought, you belong to an expansive clan of African producers of knowledge based in Euro-America. In an age of unbridled globalism, when knowledge and culture are engaged as part of monumental global flows, a significant portion of expatriate African intellection “flows” within a Euro-American Africanist – and now postcolonialist – bubble, unable to establish a meaningful conversation with continental communities of discourse. For instance, as I participate actively in University life in Nigeria in the summer, I make references to the current thought of, say, Ato Quayson, Paul Zeleza, Simon Gikandi, Tejumola Olaniyan, Adeleke Adeeko, Olakunle George, Kwaku Korang as elaborated in their recent books, books that these very active communities of discourse have never heard of or are not actively engaging. I always come out of such engagements with the idea of two Africas: the transnational, “postmodernised” Africa we engage in our Euro-American contexts and an almost oppositional Africa which colleagues based in the continent traffic in – and which we access when we travel almost as privileged theorists in search of native informants and theorizable raw materials. I am not sure how many of your recent books – and those of your contemporaries above – have continental and affordable editions and so we know what’s responsible in part for this scenario, and I'm sure you’ll adduce other reasons in your response. In the face of such institutional impediments, when does Diaspora-inflected Africanist knowledge become alienation? In what ways do African Diasporic thinkers need to re-Calibrate their terms of engagement with the continent in order to establish a more meaningful conversation with local communities of discourse and reduce the asymmetries of power that location almost always foists on their engagements of the continent?
Ato Quayson
ATO: Your remark on what I would describe as the two solitudes of African Studies is highly pertinent both to how knowledge is generated and circulated in relevant circles. But the causes, as you know, are highly complicated. The first reason that might be adduced for this state of affairs is, of course, the very well-known one of the state of Africa’s universities. Most have had to struggle with basic rudimentary libraries and research facilities. It hasn’t helped that African governments have spent more money buying arms to oppress their own peoples than in investing in education. And there are also cases where African scholars, while abroad, have tried in vain to set up linkages with their universities at home. I am yet to meet an African trained at home but now works abroad, who has not come up with a scheme to send books, or computers, or to take out journal subscriptions to their home universities only to be frustrated by a lack of interest or unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. Let me cite my own efforts as an example: when I got my first job at Cambridge I realized that it was quite easy to generate a huge amount of free books from reviewing manuscripts for presses. As you well know, you are often offered the option of either payment in cash or in twice the amount in the relevant press’s books. I wrote to the then Head of the English Dept of my home university to send me a broad list of areas that they might be interested, so I could come to some arrangement on how to send down some books as and when the opportunity arose. My calculation at the time was that even if I dedicated three such reviews a year to my former department it would generate anything from $600-$1000 in free books. What do you think happened next? Silence. Absolute silence. I wrote again, this time adding a second sweetener in the form of annual subscriptions to any journal of the Dept’s choice to be placed in their library. More silence. I ended up sending a large pile of books to a peer of mine at Cambridge who had gone back home to teach in South Africa. And that was the end of that. This process ran on for about three years until I finally gave up, but it tells you a little bit of what happens to others, who might have an interest in establishing mutually beneficial exchanges and ploughing something of their resources and expertise back into the educational systems they were formed by. I have devised a research project that takes me annually to Ghana for periods of up to six weeks at a time. This has been running since 2003. And each time, well before I set foot in the country, I write colleagues there to ask if there are any seminars I might participate in or lectures I might give. I once even offered to design and teach a free interdisciplinary graduate summer school course. Response? No real interest. To be fair I have been invited to give a couple of lectures in the country over the past ten years. But consider how paltry that is: two lectures in ten years, when I practically turn down invitations almost monthly to give talks all over the rest of the world. And don’t get me started on suggestions for joint collaborative projects, for which I would have tried to apply for research funding to take back to Ghana and other places. That is another story altogether. Most recently, and despite all the frustrating indications I have just enumerated, Emmanuel Akyeampong (Professor of African History at Harvard), myself, and Prof Irene Odotei, the former head of the Institute of African Studies at Legon have teamed up to found a new International Institute of Advanced Study. We have got a fabulous building for the Institute in Accra and are going to launch it in August this year. This has taken a fair bit of planning and a lot of hard work but we are hoping to make a direct impact on the country’s research ethos.
What do we take from the frustrating scenarios I earlier described, which, as I am suggesting, can be replicated across the board for many Africans now teaching, or indeed working, abroad? The fact is that African countries have not fully understood the value of the vast manpower that they have in the Diaspora and which they could duly draw upon. And there are existing models that might be deployed to make this happen. The Philippines government runs an elaborate system by which specific categories of manpower are exported abroad (primarily nurses and others working in the healthcare industry). Receiving governments are then contractually obliged to pay back some portion of their salaries to the Philippines authorities. There is also the model that Kagame has devised in Rwanda. A few years after the 1994 massacres, Kagame came to the conclusion that there was no way that Rwanda could be restored as a fully working operation without some serious help from its citizens abroad. As it happens, because of the country’s long history of refugees, which dates back to the 1970s, they have the highest number of PhDs per capita of any country in Africa (some even think in the whole world). This is because the many refugees who were hosted in Tanzania and Uganda were overseen by the relevant UN agencies. This meant access to an excellent education for those who took up the opportunity.
Kagame is reputed to have drawn up a list of several Rwandese now in prominent places across the world and got in touch with them to ask them their suggestions for improving the situation back home. In some instances he spoke to these people personally and has got several of them to relocate with some quite handsome packages. And to top it all, there is an apocryphal story I heard about him (but which, given his reputation as a workaholic, I wouldn’t completely dismiss) in which he is said to have invited a team of computer specialists from one of the top international computer firms and locked them up in a hotel room for four days, asking them to come up with a blueprint for transforming Kigali into the next Bangalore, a place that would be a sophisticated service centre for multinational corporations as well as a potential source for top end computer science graduates. Now think for a moment what other countries in Africa could do with their Diaspora manpower with even half of the effort attributed to Kagame. Think what Nigeria for instance could achieve. The possibilities are extraordinary, to say the least. There are other aspects to your question, however, that have to do with the shifting nature of global knowledge production. It is not entirely true that everyone in Africa is completely disconnected from the global circuits. I know of academics in various parts of Africa, who have managed to keep well and fully connected to the global flows and are present at every big conference, get invited to lecture at various places, and generally keep up with the most current research and scholarly trends. How they do this is by precisely converting their position as locals in to a conduit for intervening in translocal debates. This is not quite the same as them being native informants. The people I have in mind do not consider themselves native informants by any stretch of the imagination. However, by the mere fact of being based on the continent, their pronouncements gain a certain salience in wider debates for the simple reason that globalization ultimately has no interest in obliterating the local. What it really desires is to transform the local into an instantiation of the global so that a seamless relationship can exist between the two. But you will find that these well-connected local scholars are marked by a distinctive work ethic and general attitude. They actively seek out opportunities to maintain their contacts with colleagues elsewhere, whether these are African or not. Furthermore, despite the many hurdles that are imposed upon them for working on the continent, they have managed to produce some serious scholarly work, in certain cases of a much higher quality than that generated from scholars working in the Diaspora. This attitude and work ethic is however under severe attack in many parts of Africa. Thus to address the imbalances of knowledge production one of the things that will need to be addressed is precisely the question of the work ethic in many scholarly communities on the continent. And please don’t reduce this to the perennial question of African time (or the lack thereof). I am talking of the attitude of restless curiosity and the capacity to share of one’s own insight, which is the hallmark of any real scholar. To a degree the augmentation of this attitude has to go side by side with the development of adequate infrastructure to support research and scholarship on the continent.
In countries such as Ghana, Uganda, and South Africa, changes in the structure of spending on tertiary education has produced some startling results on universities. In the past five or so years, Ghana, which is the case I know best, has freed up millions of dollars to improve conditions in tertiary education. The results are palpable when you visit places like the University of Ghana at Legon. New buildings are rising up everywhere and fresh and innovative professional programs are being introduced and run admirably well in various departments. There are also literally hundreds of foreign students, who pass through university annually on various programs from the US, Canada, and the UK, generating even more money for investment. How all this is translating into the appropriate research attitudes is yet to be determined, but the point I want to make is that, in certain places, the infrastructural question is actively being addressed, without a concomitant attention being paid to the issue of the research ethos that supports the university. There is still a lot of work to be done on this front.