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ABSTRACT
Intellectuals are in a strict sense a product of the societies in which they are historically located and from which they could not assume a sense of themselves as an independent social force. Nor could they have developed an intellectual trajectory entirely peculiar to them as exclusively autonomous of the state. Their challenges, compromises and failings therefore, cannot be objectively evaluated in absolute disregard of their realities and social options. Rather, these must all be measured in clear reference to the determinate circumstances in which they operate—bearing in mind the material conditions encountered and transmitted to them from their past traditions. Drawing on the role of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in building and defending the academies and societies in Nigeria, this article discusses the engagement by African intellectuals with the decolonization project and their quest for academic freedom and institutional autonomy in their relations with the state. As an itinerary for future research, it shows that far from being democratically transformatory, given its character, namely, its lack of autonomy, its non-developmental orientations and other underlining problems endemic in its pathologies, the nature and role of the state in Africa in relation to decolonization, knowledge production and the universities, are subversive. Such subversion induces class conflict and socio-economic inequalities. It undermines ideational governance, institutional stability and respectful engagement with Africa as an autonomous location and original source of intellectual production, among other components of the pan-Africanist liberatory project.
Acknowledgements
For their help with discussions, opinion surveys and oral interviews on ASUU, I am grateful to Abdul G. I. Jawondo, Abdullahi Usman, Abubakar S. Mohammed, Adelaja O. Odukoya, Ademola K. Aremu, Aina O. Adeogun, Attahiru M. Jega, Ayodeji Omole, Bright E. Omoregie, Charles O. Nwafor, Christopher B. N. Ogbogbo, Dele Ashiru, Francis O. Egbokhare, Kingsley Okpara, Kole A. Shettima, Olufemi A. Bamiro, Sulaiman A. Gbadegesin and Tajudeen A. Akanji. For administrative services, I am indebted to Beatrice Jessen, Cindy Pearce, Donne Petito, Herman Joachim, Jennifer L. Hansen, Jonathan M. Peele, Laura McCune, Linda L. Cooper, Linda Lee, Munirah Bishop and Tina Gaspari. At the library of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, I owe Karen Downing, Kirstie Venanzi and Marcia Tucker a huge measure of appreciation. For reading earlier drafts of this work, I thank Alondra Nelson, Didier Fassin, Joan W. Scott, Marion Fourcade, Michael Walzer and Virag Molnar.
Notes
1 We are focused here on its postcolonial variants. Intellectuals existed everywhere in pre-colonial Africa. They include indigenous chiefs or rulers, merchants, musicians and priests. These are called indigenous, local or traditional intellectuals. Marginalized by the colonially-created modern Western-educated elite wielding authority and power alongside the indigenous bourgeoisie, the landowning classes and the neo-colonial metropolitan bourgeoisie—the three dominant propertied classes—in the overdeveloped bureaucratic-civilian or militarily structured postcolonial state from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries onward, these local intellectuals remain instructive for understanding the dynamics of pre-colonial Africa. For an account of their roles and transformations vis-a-vis decolonization and nationalism, see Toyin O. Falola (Citation2001). See also Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe (Citation2018).
2 On the particularities of the state in these societies, see Syed Farid Alatas (Citation1997).
3 For a theorization of the state in Africa, see Claude Ake (Citation1985).
4 On the trajectory of the state in Africa, see Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe (Citation2011a, Citation2011b).
5 For an account of Amilcar L. Cabral’s conclusion on the state in Africa, see Editorial (Citation1976, 1).
6 The tensed relations between the church and the state in funding the universities in medieval Europe and their impact on governance have been examined by Joan W. Scott (Citation2019, 96–97).
7 See Mahmood Mamdani (Citation2016) and Joan Scott (Citation2019) on the role of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) in the development of the modern university in Berlin in nineteenth century Europe.
8 We are focused on and limited to the economic and political assaults. In doing so, we offer no exhaustive and totalizing explanations. We have however acknowledged other constraints.
9 This is another expression for “academic disciplines.”
10 Clarence Birdseye’s (1907) thought as paraphrased by Frank Donoghue (Citation2008, 1–23).
11 Clarence Birdseye (1886–1956), an insurance lawyer, fathered a frozen food magnate. He also founded the Birds’ Eye Frozen Food Company, a major Empire in twentieth century US history.
12 See Nicholas Westcott (Citation2019) on Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, the US strategic global rivalry with China and Russia, and the lack of interest in Africa except for commerce.
13 On the centrality of race to liberal thought and its functionalities as (1) a persuasive tool of Empire for articulating colonial ideas of tutelage—the not yet of history—a subtle locution for never, in liberal imperialism; and (2) as the foundational social fact of post-Enlightenment Europe and post-1857 Empire embedded more in practice than discourse from the mid-nineteenth century onward, see Eric Eustace Williams (Citation1944) and Uday Singh Mehta (Citation1999). As Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Citation2002, 148–151) have argued, how else can one understand (1) the contradictory positions of the major European political philosophers, say for example, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) who worked as a political theorist on liberty in nineteenth century England; his advocacy of benevolent despotism in the British Asian colonies and his role as a colonial administrator or employee of the British East India Company from 1823 to 1853; (2) the onset of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the epic moment in the development of the Enlightenment and ultimately modern political theory together with the simultaneous rise of European colonial Empires and the establishment of overseas plantation economies based on slavery, during the same period; as well as (3) the tension in the universalist aspects of “science,” and the particularistic emphases on “race.”
14 Several deviations were noted in the application of British and later, European norms across all the colonies. These related to the problem of incorporating the forms of government together with the systems of law and property relations of indigenous African and Asian populations within an acceptable European political order. Since these conquered territories were not considered as having any credible political experience or society worth integrating into the emergent imperial order, a system of double standard based on Edmund Burke’s (Citation1991 [Citation1788]) skewed plan of geographic morality was instituted. Underlined by a norm-exception construct, this ambivalence was mediated by the rule of colonial difference. On the differentiated application of legal procedures—equity, justice and lenity—to colonial officials and their colonized subjects based on racialized segregation by the colonial state, see Homi K. Bhabha (Citation1994), Partha Chatterjee (Citation1994, 14–20; Citation2011, 4–11) and Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Citation2002, 149).
15 Other members of the subaltern studies collective in India and South Asia are Ajay Skaria, David Arnold, David Hardiman, Gautam Bhadra, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, M. S. S. Pandian, Pradeep Jeganathan, Shahid Amin, Shail Mayaram, Sumit Sarkar and Susie Tharu. Under the leadership of Ranajit Guha, this project intervened with globally noted impact in postcolonial studies. For an account of the trajectory of this intellectual project—its articulation of Indian citizenship, its critique of elitism in South Asian historiography and the colonial state in the subcontinent—see Dipesh Chakrabarty (Citation2002) and Ranajit Guha (Citation2002).
16 For about 200 years, India was the world’s leading exporter of textile materials. In fact, in the Roman Empire, there were debates about Roman Senators complaining about the amount of Roman Empire’s gold sent to India due to the taste of Roman women for Indian cotton. In the name of free trade, the British destroyed the free trade that had made India a leading exporter of textiles. British soldiers smashed the looms so that people could not practice their crafts. They imposed punitive duties and taxes on the export of Indian textiles; while duties and taxes were lifted on the import of British clothes. They achieved capital market at gun point. Cities like Musheedabad, Tarkaa and West Bengal were depopulated. In one notorious incident, weavers had their thumbs cut off, so that even when their looms were repaired, they could no longer weave. Textile was systematically destroyed as an industry in India by the British. For a detailed account of the underdevelopment of colonial India by Britain, see Shashi Tharoor (Citation1997, Citation2003).
17 Late in the nineteenth century, Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912) dealt with Christianity, Islam and the Negro.
18 Based on a kind of “romantic gloriana,” Diop (Citation1954) harped on the complexity of the human civilization and underlined its origins in the Nile Valley. On Diop’s historical legacy, see John Henrik Clarke (Citation1989).
19 Leopold S. Senghor engaged in “romantic primitivism” and celebrated simplicity in his immortal phrase, “emotion is Black while reason is Greek.”
20 Kwame Nkrumah (Citation1970) calls this synthesis “philosophical consciencism.”
21 Universities in Cairo, Cape Town, Harare, Legon and Nairobi were all inspired by this debate.
22 African Association of Political Science and other national associations of political science, like Egyptian Political Science Association, developed from 1973 onward, are examples of these.
23 Like other social categories, intellectuals are products of specific social formations. The colonial experience can therefore not be absolved or waived in accounting for their historical challenges and continuing dilemma. As Gayatri C. Spivak (Citation1988) reasons, since these intellectuals are products of the historical encounter between the Third World and the West, the term, “Third World intellectuals” is contradictory.
24 Mamdani (1994, 247–261) points at the language of discourse by African intellectuals, which he claims, deepens their class and cultural alienation from the working people, and their contradictory relations to the civil society and state power, as illustrations of this crisis.
25 This assault was later dubbed the Lindsay affair of 1964.
26 For estimates and figures on Nigeria’s economic performance during this period and her accelerated decline occasioned by poor economic management, see Richard A. Joseph (Citation1978).
27 This was later renamed, in the late 1980s, as Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife.
28 Following the establishment of these first-generation universities in 1962, the National Universities Commission (NUC) was put in place, also in 1962, first as an advisory agency in the Cabinet Office. Later in 1974, it became a statutory body in the Federal Ministry of Education, charged with accrediting and regulating all Nigerian universities, just like the University Grants Commission of India, of 1945, later enacted in 1956.
29 Unsurprisingly, at such periods, for example, from 2015 and 2020, as Nigeria affirmed her anti-corruption position, private universities recorded a sharp decline in students’ enrolment.
30 Through this strike, Nigerian University Teachers demanded an unconditional release of their colleagues detained by state agencies and an end to government’s repressive and undemocratic practices across the universities.
31 Biodun Jeyifo was at that time at Obafemi Awolowo University Ile Ife.
32 Uzodinma Nwala was at that time affiliated with the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
33 This is one of the longest industrial strike actions in ASUU’s entire history. It began on 23 March 2020 and ended on 23 December 2020.
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Notes on contributors
Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe
Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. His areas of research interests and teaching specializations include African development and African intellectual history as well as political philosophy and political theory. Between 1 September 2019 and 30 September 2020, he was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America.