Editorial

The politics of global knowledge production, and the place of Africa within it, has been an abiding editorial theme within JCAS purporting as it does to become a viable vehicle for evidence-based scholarship firmly rooted on the continent. When Steve Feierman presented a keynote address on ‘Writing History: Flow and Blockages in the Circulation of Knowledge’ at a Regional Assembly of the African Humanities Programme (AHP) held in Dar es Salaam in January 2019, it struck a chord with this overarching concern. The responses to his keynote by three discussants, Fred Kaijage, Oswald Masebo and Innocent Pikirayi as well as Feierman's subsequent rejoinder are published in this issue to provide our readers with food for thought about the ongoing crises in research and publishing we face. Kaijage's attempt to provide a broader context for the global inequalities in knowledge production ends with a call for ‘a more inclusionary, more participatory system of academic publishing in which scholars from the global South, including Africa, will exert a positive impact on decision-making’. Following Kaijage's sage engagement, Masebo takes up the issue with an analysis of the overarching indifference by northern scholars to the work of those in the south and Pikirayi briefly emphasises the importance of the entirely different contexts operating in Africa and elsewhere.

It is clear that the blockages exist, the point however is not to complain about them but to seek ways in which local agency may contribute to the kinds of changes needed to promote continental scholarship in the context of globalised knowledge. In this regard, the creative roots of our scholars can be nourished by a commitment to deciphering the social, political, economic and cultural challenges we face. While such an engagement ought not to compromise the autonomy of scholarly work, research cut off from the messiness of the real world risks drifting into irrelevance. In fact, the creative roots of our scholars can be nourished by a scholarly engagement with the problems and struggles of the vast masses of our continent.

In his piece entitled, ‘The Importance of Research in a University’, Mahmood Mamdani (2011) made the following telling remark when he said:

The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what it means to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current historical context and, in particular, in the post-colonial African context. What does it mean to teach humanities and social sciences in a location where the dominant intellectual paradigms are products not of Africa's own experience, but of a particular Western experience? Where dominant paradigms theorize a specific Western history and are concerned in large part to extol the virtues of the enlightenment or to expound critiques of that same enlightenment.

He does not elaborate on why this is the central question (amongst so many others) and we may debate this until the cows come home, but he has raised a major feature of the disciplinary architecture of our universities which deserves our attention. In the first instance he mentions how pre-colonial institutions of higher learning, such as Al-Azhar in Egypt, Al-Zaytuna in Morocco, and Sankore in Mali, have marginal significance in our current curricula, largely because higher education across Africa is based on university models developed in the West and premised on the enlightenment. The canons of our disciplines are inherited from Western modernity, and planted in Africa with little consideration for nor understanding of local conditions on the continent. It is this fact that provokes Mkandawire to assert that ‘African universities, for all the joyous celebration at their birth, were born in chains’ (1997). The twins of colonialism and capitalism foisted their modernity on us and in the main we’ve accepted these canons with little questioning, little debate, little assertion of what it is that we can contribute to global knowledge production. This is part of the reason that Mkandawire can make the statement that, ‘We are probably the only part of the world about which it is still legitimate to publish without reference to local scholarship’.

There are many, many experiences of this exclusionary behaviour, but here I’d like to mention just two. Can you think of how many conferences and associations are dedicated to African Studies, outside of the continent? Many years ago, Mkandawire called for opening a dialogue between Africans and Africanists, this appeal was repeated more recently by Fantu Cheru in his opening remarks entitled ‘Africanists and African Scholars – Poles Apart’ at the 4th European Conference on African Studies with the Theme, ‘African Engagements: On whose Terms?’ (See Cheru 2012) Needless to say, despite a few telling instances of real engagement, it is fair to say that this dialogue has simply not happened and Cheru’s poles seem to moving further and further apart. We obviously need to explore why this is the case. Politically, it usually happens that dialogue may succeed when the more powerful partner initiates an opening of talks, or to use a South Africanism, to begin ‘talks about talks’. Fantu Cheru and Thandika Mkandawire’s call for dialogue has fallen on deaf ears. The studied indifference towards scholarship based on the continent persists to this day.

In response to these crises in knowledge production and circulation JCAS, in collaboration with the AHP, will be organising a colloquium in March 2020 to discuss practical ways in which we can make a contribution to dealing with these blockages.

As usual, this issue covers a variety of articles covering many areas of interest on the continent, following the Special Issue on Corruption, (JCAS 2018). Apata provokes further discussion on an issue of abiding concern. Hogberg et al. examine the role of traditional leaders in power relations in Upper Guinea Coast societies, Engels and Muller revisit social movement theory from the perspective of the south, and in Africa in particular, Grell-Brisk provides an overarching survey of the place of Africa in a globally stratified world, Santiago looks at the ongoing debate about land-grabbing in Africa with a focus on Bugala-Island in Uganda, Urtuzuastigui investigates just how effective aid is in development and, using the case of the Cape Verde Islands, Resende-Santos warns about the dangers of a singular dependence on tourism for economic development in small states.