Decolonizing Research and Knowledge Generation in/on Africa

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Moving beyond ‘north’ and ‘south’ in international research collaboration

Proposal

Historically, across Africa as across much of the world, higher education has been nationally-oriented and -organized. Increasingly, however, higher education initiatives and institutions in Africa are regionally or continentally focused, indicating a fundamental shift towards thinking of cross-national responses to the continent’s colonial legacy and related development challenges. Following decades of disinvestment, the research process in African universities (and knowledge generation in general) is predominantly externally oriented, and is often crippled by a lack of theory-building infrastructures (Hountondji, 1995), and by reliance on externally-dominated funding processes (Samoff & Carroll, 2004). This accounts for the argument that Africa needs to adopt its own order of knowledge or episteme apart from the epistemological locus in the West (Mudimbe, 2016).

This presentation interrogates both the dilemma of reaching the African epistemological locus without recourse to established Western methods (Ogot, 2009), and the theoretical and practical opportunities to escape it. It is based on a careful review of the goals and activities of three continent-wide knowledge producing institutions operating within an “African renaissance” framework: 1) the African Association of Universities (AAU), 2) the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and 3) the Pan African University (PAU). Similar to past and present liberatory ideals and social movements (e.g. Negritude, Garveyism, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Consciousness), the AAU, CODESRIA and the PAU are prompted by a commitment to Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu (humanism).

They share the conviction that research and the generation of knowledge are the keys to the transformation of Africa, and constitute African-led efforts to revitalize higher education on the continent. All three organize across geographic, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries, and actively encourage cooperation, collaboration, and knowledge exchange among African universities, research organizations, and other training institutions. In addition, they all seek to challenge the fragmenting effects of colonialism on African scholarship, and work towards a prosperous, integrated and peaceful Africa. The cross-national and Afrocentric solidarity ideals embodied in the AAU, CODESRIA and the PAU hold potential for decolonizing and deracializing elements of the research process, and for providing alternative ways of framing and analyzing international research partnerships.

The discussion, therefore, explores how the three organizations succeed or fail to establish an alternative knowledge generation and research collaboration model, and why. Of particular interest are the ways in which the organizations conceptualize boundaries and belonging in the context of increasing levels of migration. Equally important is how they go about trying to harmonize the continent’s education systems; stem the endemic tide of brain drain; provide for the utilitarian mobility of students and scholars; interact with national governments, other inter-regional education initiatives, international funding agencies, non-African universities, and knowledge producers around the world; and mobilize adequate resources to sustain the envisioned continent-wide partnerships and forms of knowledge generation. By situating the study around three higher education institutions that straddle Africa’s diverse geographical, historical, social/cultural, and philosophical contexts, the roundtable seriously engages with alternative possibilities for Africa playing a different role in the global higher education landscape.

Author

• Upenyu Silas Majee, University of Wisconsin-Madison