Introduction to Campus Forms

This Special Issue investigates contemporary African literary and cultural approaches to the university as an idea, an institution, and a physical space. Rapid growth both in the number of students seeking tertiary degrees and in the number of institutions of higher education on the continent; decades of structural adjustment policies that have created ever more challenging conditions for teaching, learning, and research; public uproar over sexual harassment on campus; a surge of internationally visible and transnationally resonant student movements; a global pandemic; and a devastating fire at one of the continent’s oldest academic libraries are just some of the contexts that drew our interest to the question of what the African university is for – what is its use, what is its mission, what is its cultural and political meaning – in this tumultuous third decade of the 21st century.

In attending to representations of the African university across myriad cultural forms, the work included in this Special Issue emerges from a series of meetings, conference panels, conversations, and relationships that have formed over the course of five years across continents. The Lagos Studies Association’s annual conference has been an especially fruitful occasion for collaboration, as have the African Studies Association of Africa’s meetings in Nairobi (2019) and Cape Town (2022). The articles included here are among the first articulations that have reached publication from this growing scholarly network. We eagerly await, for example, the published versions of conference papers by Kolawole Charles Omotayo on study of toilet access on Nigerian campuses (2018, and forthcoming in Journal of African Cultural Studies); Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw on how and why to rethink student vanguardism in the Ethiopian Revolution (2021); Kayode Gboyega Kofoworola’s project on Nigerian campus novels from the 1960s to the present; Wendo K. Nabea’s unpublished work in progress on the Kiswahili campus novel; and Chichi Ayalogu ongoing doctoral research on the colonial and neocolonial histories of Nigerian campus cults (2022). Future issues of the Journal of African Studies will continue to engage this topic and expand this network and conversation.

With the important exception of Jonathan Haynes’s (2016) survey of Nigerian campus films, existing cultural and literary scholarship on the African university campus is sparse. The myriad creative responses to South Africa’s #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements have prompted newfound scholarly attention to this topic.¹ Carli Coetzee’s account of how memoirs by Black scholars “provincialize” Oxford (2022) and Lavelle Porter’s study of African American campus fiction in The Blackademic Life show how African and African American literary treatments of the university campus crucially rework the otherwise conventionally white and Western genre of the campus novel (2020). Crucially expanding our sense of what campus forms are, and who they are for, this scholarship emerges in concert with a wave of campus-based movements demanding a reckoning with the neoliberal university. Calls to “remake”, “decolonize”, and/or “abolish” this institution now abound in response to crises which are in some ways specific to the 21st century (the near-complete co-option of higher education by corporate and market interests) and in other ways deeply entangled with centuries-old histories of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. What is a university for today? Who is a university for? Is it a tool of liberation or a cog in the wheel of colonial-capitalist exploitation? What does it take for African students and professors to make use of or even simply survive this institution in the 2020s?

The articles featured here explore how these questions are addressed in a range of geographically and formally diverse cultural texts. They are authored by scholars from diverse institutional and national contexts and at different career stages, some of whom have lived and worked at the universities they are writing about. The range of national and regional contexts treated in this issue makes clear that there is no single story of the African university campus. Neither do these stories get told in a single genre. Notably, only one of the five articles attends to novels, and is joined by one article each on poetry, comics, memoir, fiction, and – attesting to Caroline Levine’s insistence that “form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics” (2015, 2) – protest itself as a form.

These articles take up texts and archives that consistently reject stable and pat “scripts”, to borrow Luan Staphorst’s term (this issue), for the university’s social and political significance. The most readily available of these scripts were set in place through the African university’s colonial beginnings, and the brutally competitive economy of educational credentialization that was perhaps the central component of the colonial educational system. In the mid-twentieth century, when higher education opportunities were available only to a select few, the elitism of a university degree produced students who both enjoyed enormous privilege and social status and suffered the pressures that accompanied that elevated status, including resentment and suspicion over whether their communities’ and countries’ heavy investments in them would be made worth it. Structural adjustment programmes in later decades meant that future generations of students completed their education under far less lucrative circumstances. Yet the perception of university students as relatively entitled has endured, and as Silvia Federici observes, authoritarian states have been quick to scapegoat students for any number of social and political woes (2000, 58). African university studenthood has always been accompanied by a host of high expectations and demands. The scripts that lock students into particular roles, affects, and politics emerge around the high stakes of seeking a degree under increasingly challenging conditions of living and learning on campus.

The texts examined in this Special Issue register these realities by exposing and unpacking the tension between campus as a space of imaginative projection and one in which everyday life is lived. In this archive traces of the mid-twentieth-century romance of higher education as an engine of national development are joined by other dreams that reflect the drastic institutional and demographic changes of the past few decades. While access to these institutions is still limited, the university is now a more standard component of middle-class African identity than it was in the 1960s. As Haynes notes, the university’s role as an object of desire and as a symbol of the dream of class mobility has only increased as a result of these changes; indeed “the struggle to obtain the places that are available for only a fraction of qualified candidates creates a sense of value in itself” (2016, 258), intensifying the symbolic importance of this institution despite and even because of its continued exclusivity.

As fantasy, the 21st-century university campus represents first and foremost various forms of equality. Campus is a space that offers freedom from some of the limitations of class, race, and gender that predominate elsewhere in society, an opportunity to form identity and community in ways that are not beholden to those categories. Nanna Ikpo’s novel Fimí Sílè Forever (2017), Uvile Ximba’s Dreaming in Colour (2021), and Rudolf Okonkwo’s short story “Fiona, My Fiona” (2014) are just some examples of texts that foreground how African universities are also spaces that offer opportunities for LGBTQ + identity exploration and affirmation, even in the face of an uptick in homophobic laws and rhetoric in some countries. The prevalence of love stories in the campus forms’ archive can be read as a means of registering these aspirations: individual romance is a way to imagine or perhaps regain access to a romance of community, as both Luleadey Worku and Anne W. Gulick’s articles explore in this issue.

The university’s spatial distinctiveness is crucial to the fantasy of universities as engines of equality and fulfillment of anti-colonial aspirations. All the articles in this issue attend to campus as a space set apart from the rest of society; its removal both enables unique forms of personal development and confers privilege on those lucky enough to claim ownership over this exclusive national space. However these texts also expose that this spatial and conceptual separation between campus and its environs is less stable than it seems. As Krystal S. Strong and Jimil Ataman’s survey reveals, campus space provides no meaningful protection against state violence. And as both Luan Staphorst and Mahriana Rofheart demonstrate, campus can serve as the site of a reassertion of linguistic hegemony, both within and beyond the lecture hall. The “real world” creeps onto campus in myriad ways and underlies the lives that are lived there.

This porousness between the space of campus and the space of the city, nation, and continent explains why protest is a prominent concept and term across all the articles in this issue. In one way or another, all the articles confirm Krystal S. Strong and Jimil Ataman’s central claim that protest “constitutes and is constituted by the university”. Strong and Ataman make a case for why university campuses are distinct and unique spaces of protest in 21st-century Africa. Drawing on a comprehensive study of protests in institutions of higher education between 2000 and 2018 across the continent, they argue that the advent of protest, and the forms in which protest takes shape, illuminate vital information about what the African university is and how it works. Just as campuses and their imaginative representations are inseparable from the rest of the world, so the cultural criticism approach that the remainder of the authors in this collection take is best understood as incomplete in isolation from the story that social science research has to tell about the African university. And it is this disciplinary perspective that allows Strong and Ataman to demonstrate the ways in which protest is best understood as its own “campus form”. Campuses, and more specifically students, have developed tactics of protest that are unique to this institutional space, which both creates the conditions under which various forms of protest take shape and is a space that takes on meaning through the activity of protest. Strong and Ataman’s is the one article in this Special Issue that takes #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall as its central case study, and it does so quite deliberately because these movements, as they show, have enjoyed outsized international media attention – which in turn has made them “an important exception to the tendency to minimize the campus as a locus of struggle”, a means through which to recognize the dramatic recent history of protest across the continent, in all of its varied forms. But it is the variety and multiplicity of forms of protest on university campuses from Cape to Cairo that comes into focus through the interactive map, through which the authors visually represent their research.

Thus even as campus protest is ubiquitous across Africa, its tactics, goals, and meaning vary considerably, even among individual student populations. In “Spaces of Protest: Seydina Issa Sow’s Campus Graphic Novel Sidy”, Mahriana Rofheart observes that, while protest is an integral feature of Sow’s protagonist’s experience at the Université Cheikh Diop de Dakar, and while there is certainly much to protest at this post-SAP university where living and learning is a struggle, the work of self-fashioning and carving out a space of belonging are far more central to the story of Sidy’s time on this campus. The comic form, Rofheart shows, enables Sow to illuminate the distinctiveness of campus space, represented in an iconic graphic language, while also drawing attention to the experience of Sidy’s decidedly non-iconic everyday life, which entails struggling to find space in overcrowded lectures and a place to sleep in oversubscribed student accommodation. Sidy stakes out a sense of belonging on campus, but he does so not by participating in the performative work of protest, of which he is at times critical, but instead by learning how to inhabit the university under challenging everyday conditions.

Luleadey Worku’s “Campus Movements and Student Revolutionaries: Imagining Haile Selassie I University in Hiwot Teffera’s Memoir Tower in the Sky” attends to the memoir of an Ethiopian female student revolutionary whose engagement with politics is far more explicit and central. Yet Worku similarly draws her readers’ attention to the importance of the everyday, demonstrating how Hiwot Teffera’s political education is the product of all of her experiences on campus, from sartorial choices to dating the leader of the student movement. While historiography of Ethiopia’s revolution has long established the significance of the university to that struggle, women’s experiences with both the revolution and the university have been underexplored. Worku argues that the “essential testimonies” embedded in memoirs such as Hiwot Teffera’s not only serve as a corrective to the history but also broaden our sense of how Haile Selassie I University has served as a site for revolutionary pedagogy. A university education is supposed to provide a ticket to the middle class, but Hiwot Teffera’s time on campus allowed her to shed her middle-class identity and be reborn as a new kind of political subject.

Luan Staphorst’s “‘fokkol graad vi jou nie’ [fuck all degree for you]: Black Afrikaans Poets, Critical University Studies, and Transcripting the Afrikaans University” is similarly concerned with voices that have received little recognition in a student revolutionary struggle – in this case the Kaap poets of South Africa’s Afrikaans-language universities, whose experiences are erased by the #AfrikaansMustFall movement. The poetry, authored by Black Afrikaans-speaking students, that Staphorst examines, broadens and enriches the discursive terrain of contemporary South African campus protest. Read through the lens of critical university studies, this poetry invites its readers to imagine an alternative, decolonial university that is “anti-racist”, “anti-neoliberal”, and “affective”, one of many “possible spaces for a lifeworld centred around an abundance of African difference and divergence”.

Anne W. Gulick’s “The Campus as War Zone: Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Post-Independence Civil War, and the African University” also turns to texts that imagine an alternative order for knowledge production and tertiary learning on the continent, but do so by turning to the past and the post-independence political crises that changed the fortunes of so many countries and their educational institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. In the novels discussed here, campus is the space in which anti-colonial politics of protest and resistance are redirected toward the postcolonial state, and the future promise for which universities once stood is tested by the quickly changing political landscape around them. I argue that these texts gesture toward ways to reimagine the African university as a site of a new ethical and political dispensation in the future, one that borrows from a mid-twentieth-century liberatory imagination and pushes that imagination even further.

The articles featured in this Special Issue are but one set of articulations about the African university campus and its cultural forms in the 21st century. The work presented here should be read as an invitation to enter into this conversation, and to take it up in future research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Tembo (2019), Arseneault (2021), and Sacks (forthcoming), also Coetzee (2019).