Ethical?! Collaboration?! Keywords for our contradictory times

The idea for this set of contributions initially came from a panel that was convened at the biennial conference of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) held in September 2018 at the University of Birmingham in the UK (http://www.asauk.net/asauk-2018-conference-11-13-september-university-of-birmingham/). The panel, called ‘Ethical Collaborations’, brought together a group of activist scholars from diverse locations. They were asked to respond to the ways in which North–South academic collaborations are often framed and were invited to suggest ways in which these collaborations can be practised in more ethical ways. The insights and recommendations from this conversation, it was hoped, would be disseminated widely and would generate useful debate and institutional discussion and would inform the policies of funding bodies and scholarly organisations.

The panel included Divine Fuh, Toby Green, Ambreena Manji, Caroline Mose, Grace Musila, Insa Nolte, Dan Omanga and Ola Uduku, and was chaired and convened by Carli Coetzee. The ASAUK conference took place against the background of a growing visa crisis for Africa-based scholars attempting to travel to the UK, and an accompanying call for Africa-centred conferences to move to locations across Africa. Insa Nolte’s Presidential address, published in this same issue of Journal of African Cultural Studies (Nolte 2019), documents some of the background to the visa refusals and the attempts by academic associations to intervene in UK Home Office policies.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated and ever more African scholars are being denied visas to attend conferences in the UK, but also in Europe and the USA. At the same time, significant Africa-based conference series have become regular features of the academic calendar at a range of institutions. Among many, some notable examples include the biennial conferences of the African Studies Association of Africa (http://as-aa.org/index.php/asaa-2019-conference) and of the Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Association (https://ealcs.wordpress.com/), as well as the annual Lagos Studies Association conference (https://lagosstudies.wcu.edu/?page_id=903). This increasing de-centring of Europe and the USA as the location of knowledge production and dissemination marks a new era in the study of Africa from Africa, and a sense of great optimism and excitement about these developments informed the proposal for the ethical collaboration panel at the ASAUK conference.

While the panel was conceived rather optimistically as an intervention that could lead to the creation of documents and protocols for best practice, the live event did not confirm this sense of optimism. The conversation during and after the panel instead made clear that the keywords ‘ethical’ and ‘collaboration’ were in fact hot spots of contestation, disillusionment and complaint. Instead of providing a set of protocols and guidelines as we had hoped, this collection of responses instead records and gives space to a range of complaints against what goes through as ‘ethical’ and ‘collaborative’ practices.

Ethical collaboration is one of the recurring phrases of our time, and ours was not the only panel to have been advertised with this same title; a search for the phrase ‘ethical collaboration’ at African studies conferences and discussions over the last few years would itself be a worthwhile and revealing undertaking. Most of these panels and discussions ask similar questions to those asked by our panel: How do we ensure equitable and ethical North–South collaboration? How do we share resources and opportunities? How do we address the fact that African studies is seen by many as a field that is hostile to African scholars and scholarship? The titles of recent African studies conference panels and lecture series have with increasing frequency included further terms such as ‘decolonise’ and ‘collaborative’ alongside ‘mentor’ and ‘workshop’, words that promise connection and agreement, connectedness and equality, but have attached to them also less visible conversations shot through with discontent and complaint (as we see in the contributions included here) about these keywords and their contexts.

In his influential 1976 publication Keywords British scholar Raymond Williams developed a resource as well as a method, and the keywords project has frequently been adapted since then. Some relevant examples include a collection of AIDS keywords (Grover 1987), South African keywords (Boonzaaier and Sharp of 1988 and the new version by Robins and Shepard 2008) and African American keywords (Edwards, Ferguson, and Ogbar 2018). The African Studies Association (ASA) and their associated journal African Studies Review has initiated an ongoing keywords project for which they have invited ‘proposals for individual critical scholarly essays that explore themes, topics, and ideas of interest to the ASA membership and Africanists globally, reflecting emerging trends in Africanist research, local, global, and indigenous terminologies, including words in African languages’ (https://africanstudies.org/2019-call-for-panelists/keywords-in-african-studies-african-studies-review-sponsored-panels/) and during 2019 will host keywords panels at various conferences.

Williams’s project reveals a preoccupation with the deep conflicts of value and belief he observed in British society after the Second World War. His keywords project had as its aim to log and analyse disagreement over the meanings of selected words and terms, rather than to document consensus over usage. For Williams, each entry was chosen precisely because of tensions and conflicts he observed within the term; and he saw the problems related to the meanings of the word as inextricably bound up with the problems they were being used to discuss. One of the major contributions of his project remains its emphasis on the need to analyse the issues and problems that are inside the vocabulary, rather than seeing language as neutrally reflecting reality (Williams 1976, 15). Our interventions honour this same approach: to find in the uses of keywords such as ‘decolonise’, ‘mentor’ and ‘collaborate’ not harmonious overlap and continuity (a self-satisfied sense that one’s actions are ‘ethical’) but instead conflicts and debates that foreground discontinuity and the shifting, disputed and contextualised meanings of these terms.

The word ‘keyword’ has itself become one of the central keywords of our time, and in particular in the world of academic publishing. The Journal of African Cultural Studies first started using keywords for academic articles in 2010, and it is today impossible to submit an article for consideration without complying with the request to enter keywords in the online ScholarOne web page. In useful documents on the web site of Taylor & Francis, under Author Services, one can find documents on topics such as ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/a-researchers-guide-to-seo/) and ‘Making Your Article (and You) More Discoverable’ (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/making-your-article-and-you-more-discoverable/), resources to which I often refer authors. Both documents imagine the internet search engines as benevolent machines that act as a friendly ‘hub’ connecting an author to her readers and supporting her as she maintains her research profile, submits her manuscripts and applies for grants and promotions. Keywords have become an essential part of the professionalisation of academics in certain regions of the world, as a tool to unlock opportunities, to build reputations and to attract funding.

The discoverability discourse creates a sense of a harmonious and equal landscape where choosing the best keywords means your work will indeed be found, read and disseminated and will contribute to building your scholarly reputation. Yet the keyword metrics map only that scholarship which is published in the journals that are included in the metrics. This means that research that circulates elsewhere, or is not captured by the same databases, can seem of another time and therefore irrelevant to what is regarded as the ‘cutting edge’ in rooms that have excellent broadband and access to complete catalogues of keywords. In the introduction to the updated version of Williams’s keywords project, Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, the editors (MacCabe and Yanacek 2018) write that the term ‘key’ refers to an instrument designed to be inserted into a lock and turned, and in that sense suggests a solution or an explanation for a problem (MacCabe and Yanacek 2018, ix). They point out how the word ‘keyword’ has taken on a new life to denote a search term in a database or a search engine, driving a certain way of thinking about research and metrics as a solution to academics’ problems. The inequalities of access to the databases (both as authors and as readers) makes ‘keywords’ itself a term that holds within it possibilities of discontinuity and discord. The key unlocks the door, but this door is a portal between certain (locked and pay-walled) spaces only.

Perhaps the keyword of African studies scholarship in the Anglo-American world currently is ‘decolonisation’, and Ngũgi wa Thiong’o’s still important 1987 book Decolonising the Mind is often invoked as an inspirational document and reference, alongside the South African #Fallist movement. Ngũgi’s introduction to Decolonising the Mind laments

a neo-colonial situation which has meant the European bourgeoisie once again stealing our talents and geniuses as they have stolen our economies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures. (1987, xii)

The language of theft here refers to the dominance of English in knowledge networks about Africa and Africans, and I suggest we can extend it to the Anglo-American locatedness of keywords and metrics.

One additional layer to add to the careful work outlined in Williams’s keywords project (that is: tracing the development in a word’s meanings over time, and marking the simultaneous and conflictual meanings of a term) would be to place the English language keywords alongside terms from other (in this case African) languages. Simon Gikandi (2018) writes on the meanings of the word ‘modernity’ in his contribution to the recently published Critical Terms for the Study of Africa (Desai and Masquelier 2018). Tanzanian leader and intellectual Julius Nyerere preferred the Swahili term ‘maendelo’ over the English term ‘modernisation’, insisting on the additional nuance and contextualisation added by the Swahili term, which does not include the pejorative associations that the English term does (240). To Williams’s keywords project an African (studies) keywords project would want to bring knowledge of such comparative terms from African languages, to contest and debate the meanings of words like ‘develop’, ‘mentor’, ‘ethical’ or ‘collaborate’. Such a project would reveal the extent to which Anglophone academic discourse maps a world only visible to itself and often thinks it sees the entire landscape.

Keywords have different and sometimes conflicting meanings, Williams showed us; some uses will in fact defuse or obscure others. One might want to ask, for example, what the relationship is between demands to decolonise Yale and the intellectual conversations happening as part of #RMF in South Africa. Do some the meanings of ‘decolonisation’ in fact delete and dilute others? Does theorising and discussing decolonisation in and from Oxford obscure the specific and contingent meanings of what is happening at Makerere? To whose benefit is the keyword ‘decolonisation’ being invoked and circulated? Some uses of the term have already led to self-forgiving discourses that in fact seek to maintain rather than transform well-resourced institutions, and at the same time render invisible other meanings and uses of the term. Robtel Neajai Pailey recently made a similar comment about the extractive potential of the kinds of decolonisation discourses that are separated from the day-to-day urgencies of people living in formerly colonised spaces, and that instead become the drivers of (Northern) careerism (2019).

In this collection of provocations and interventions, we have gathered voices reflecting on the disputed keywords of our time. Some of these authors have been invited to present here in revised form interventions they made in the speeded-up world of Twitter, which creates an instant debating chamber with a different date stamp from the slow-growing peer-reviewed academic article. Twitter fulfils many roles, one of the most significant being to act as a space for what Sara Ahmed calls ‘complaint’ discourse (Ahmed 2019). On Twitter one overhears fragments of conversations that debate the terms through which value is assigned in academia, and the ways in which certain issues are manipulated and white-washed.

Nanjala Nyabola (2018) in her Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics provides a useful discussion of the ways in which social media and the networked public sphere have changed the way people are able to interact (44–45). Twitter, she shows, enables community building (88), allows people ‘to operate outside their offline communities’ and to constitute new online communities with more inclusive rules of belonging (92). At the same time, social media is not in any simple way neutral and egalitarian. Dan Omanga, for example, has pointed out that ‘digital publics do not simply emerge, but are a complex product of specific agencies, cumulative social capital and voice within a digital space’ (Omanga 2019, 13) and George Ogola cautions that we should be attuned to uneven global access to the internet and the large number of people excluded from participating in new digital publics (2017, 2019, 124). These are some of the issues that surface frequently in conversations about academic matters, both offline and online.

This collection of interventions attempts to capture some of the liveliness and liveness of these conversations overheard over lunch, while walking between buildings or read late at night on Twitter and Whatsapp. Using the ephemeral and volatile registers of complaint and other forms of academic gossip, we include here insights and provocations that are not peer reviewed in the sense that academic publishing understands it, and that are not ‘discoverable’ in ways that can be measured by metrics. Here we read complaint discourses that comment on a range of the ‘keywords’ of our time.

In the contributions by Divine Fuh (2019) and Portia Roelofs (2019) we read responses to the hyper-mobility of some and the restricted mobility of others. Fuh uses the memorable image of African researchers having to bend both backwards and forwards to serve so-called ‘global’ research networks. In the case of many research partnerships, he writes, ‘generous benefactors’ are surprised, disappointed and unsettled when those who are meant to be grateful instead insist on critiquing or criticising aspects of the relationship. What he would like is not more invitations to more conferences in the North, nor more opportunities to collaborate with more Northern colleagues; what he asks for instead, in a shocking accusation, is empathy and recognition of his dignity and humanity. Portia Roelofs’s piece documents an uncomfortable encounter during which she chooses to turn down what is offered as an honour and an opportunity: an all expenses paid trip to Cape Town to give a lecture as part of a prestigious university’s seminar series. Her rejection of what sounds like an idyllic few days (she imagines herself sipping a beer in the shadow of Table Mountain) is based on her ethical concerns about the hyper-mobility of Northern academics and the ‘dirty little secret’ of academia – the carbon footprint of (white) privilege and mobility.

Chisomo Kalinga, a medical humanities researcher, often tweets about illness and its toll on the body – in particular on African bodies. Here she writes about a related ‘disease’: the exhaustion experienced by communities who have to act as host to researchers who ask intrusive and repetitive questions and come to extract information as well as bodily fluids without a thought of giving anything back. Kalinga’s piece is in the mode Sara Ahmed calls ‘complaint as diversity work’. As a fairly junior scholar, a Black woman and an African, her complaints about the ways in which research projects are run are tolerated at best, but mostly remain unheeded. Dan Omanga and Pamela Mainye (2019) describe their involvement in a Northern-funded research project that turned two highly skilled and qualified researchers into ‘glorified data collectors’. This is a story we often hear, but their experience also revealed the uncomfortable blurring of lines between scholars and donor agencies (what they call ‘the NGO-isation of African studies’). It became clear the data and app use they were tracking in Kibera and Mathare in Nairobi were in fact linked to the online activities of NGO workers and not the ‘slum dwellers’ whose phone use the research project claimed to track.

Neelika Jayawardane’s (2019) piece reflects on the ‘hokum’ of funded writing workshops that claim to ‘build capacity’ but where most of the budget is in fact spent on the travel and (luxury) accommodation of those who fly in from the North. Her intervention points out the harm that can be done by workshops that promise collaboration and capacity building, but in fact are disconnected from urgent needs and local networks and end up replicating and amplifying inequalities. The real learning and networking, her piece shows, happened in minibuses, during late night conversations and on Twitter and Whatsapp, where participants discussed and debated the day’s events and developed their activist ‘complaint as diversity work’ futures.

Toby Green (who lives offline as much as he can) revisits Walter Rodney’s pragmatic advice that we work within existing institutional frameworks in order to push for change. Rodney argued that the irreconcilable contradictions of the colonial system would facilitate its collapse. Green’s case study of funded research networks shows how the contradictions of our unequal academic world can offer opportunities to create spaces for those ‘crowded out of academic progress, trumped by the priorities of class and connection’ (2019, **). His contribution describes how individuals have built extraordinary research networks from within the wreck of poorly conceived funded projects.

Caroline Mose’s (2019) contribution marked a turning point in the live panel, when she turned to her fellow Kenyan male colleagues to ask them to acknowledge their gendered privilege. In a discussion that had not foregrounded gendered difference, her intervention reminded us of the inequalities within African academic institutions and networks, and how Northern funded projects can – but generally do not – change these patterns for African women academics. In a heartfelt series of tweets she followed up on this discussion, calling out and thanking her female ‘sponsors and blessers’ for the opportunities that they had pushed her way.

Grace A. Musila’s piece develops an argument for not collaborating, and outlines for us the reasons why one might choose to ‘wander off’ rather than wait around, bending backwords and forwards, being tolerated or ignored, or enduring Northern scholars’ lack of empathy. Like Kalinga’s, her piece documents exhaustion and depletion, and she writes about the repetitive work of resisting what is offered as ‘ethical collaboration’ by ‘people who build entire careers off writing about inequality’ (2019, xx) but whose practices are not informed by the values they discuss in their much-cited and peer-reviewed papers. What, she asks, ‘are the ethics of choosing to surrender to fatigue’, and what does it take from African scholars to persist and not simply to ‘wander off’? One such a version of wandering off is to opt out of what she calls ‘the academy’s temporal logics and its fetish of the new’, a mindset that leads many to regard Africa-based scholars and that which they consider to be urgent contextualised debates as not theoretically ‘cutting edge’, and therefore not worthy of publication in ‘quality’ journals. She refers to the work of Kenyan scholar Keguro Macharia, who describes the reasons one might choose to be and act like an ‘indifferent native’ and to wander off, disinterested in the Northern understanding of what ‘ethical collaboration’ could look like. Macharia’s ‘Visiting Africa: A Short Guide for Researchers’, is an important document, and in his excellent ‘guide to fieldwork’ he includes this advice: ‘Map the intellectual terrain. African intellectual work happens across multiple spaces, not simply in North American or European peer-reviewed journals and monographs. Look for exciting intellectual work on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube. Figure out how to engage that work. If you’re a very traditional scholar, get digital. And quickly’ (2015). What is cutting edge and urgent may not be equally visible everywhere – and in particular not where the metrics and keywords are the measure of worth, unlocking only doors that lead to other interlocking and ‘air-conditioned rooms’ (Coetzee 2018).

We understand Williams’s keywords project as one that wants to document rapidly changing terms, and the range of discourses that circulate in the debating chambers that are generally not documented, peer reviewed or published in ‘quality’ journals, but where thoughtful conversations comment on and critique these official, hyper-visible and searchable discourses. In this sense, we understand the keywords project more like what I have called elsewhere ‘a rapidly changing and volatile intellectual FOREX Board’ (Coetzee 2018, 111). A keywords project for our contradictory times will not lead us to congratulate ourselves on the equal and mutual success of our ethical collaborations; instead it will bring to the surface the complaints, the gossip and the discontent that structure and underpin what some call ‘African studies’. While the optimism with which we set out to draft ethical protocols has not borne fruit, this group of interventions maps the new directions already taken in academic discussions, as the contributors debate the terms that stand in as keywords of our time, or sometimes simply wander off too exhausted to engage any longer or to wait outside the (locked) door. The authors collected here intend to provoke and to log their complaints, as many of them do as part of their daily labour: Ethical?! Collaboration?!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.