An allAfrica.com interview of the American president. Hat-tip to Jeremy

… I realize that the financial world’s lack of interest in wider social matters cuts to the very heart of what has gone wrong. What social anthropology teaches is that nothing in society ever exists in a vacuum or in isolation. Holistic analysis that tries to link different parts of a social structure is crucial, be that in respect to wedding rituals or trading floors. Anthropology also instills a sense of scepticism about official rhetoric. in most societies, elites try to maintain their power not simply by garnering wealth, but by dominating the mainstream ideologies, both in terms of what is said, and also what is not discussed. Social ’silences’ serve to maintain power structures in ways that participants often barely understand, let alone plan. Gillian Tett, on Page 298, Fools Gold

I now write a weekly column called Anthropologically Speaking for Nigeria’s BusinessDay newspaper. I am not sure that it is already on their website, but if you are in Nigeria you can check it out every Tuesday…. I will post the link when I am sure.

1. Open Anthropology Cooperative – a network of anthropologists and anybody who is interested in anthropology

2. The new issue of the open access journal Anthropology Matters is out. You can check it out here

3. Want to read more on Ms Moyo’s Dead Aid? See this, this and this. For a brief roundup of the fist-fight see this. (Now I can safely decide to forget about Dead Aid)

4. Cheta Nwanze flying the flag

5. Where is the home of cyber crime?

6. Sometimes, there is something good to say about Lagos.

I just got this article through my Twitter friend @crystalsimeoni. I like it so much that I decided to post it here. The full text:

Good or bad, the African university is all we have
Keguro Macharia’s article “African universities crippling their students’ (The EastAfrican — December 29, 2008-January 4, 2009) pricked me. I found myself agreeing with it as much as I disagreed.

I wish to write about my own experience with universities in Kenya.

Allow me also to draw upon my experience with the Council for Development and Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria), based in Dakar, Senegal, which has been active since the early 1970s.

My everyday experience with African universities rotates around Kenyatta University where I was admitted as an undergraduate student in 1990, earned a BA in 1994 and was soon after admitted for an MA in 1995 on a staff development programme as a graduate assistant.

I earned my MA in 1997, the same year I attended the Codesria Governance Institute in Dakar. This gave me the first opportunity to network at a pan-African level.

In 1998, I applied for the Codesria African Humanities Institute tenured at the University of Ghana at Legon and at the Programme of African Studies at Northwestern University in the US.

I was selected for this programme which saw me spend the first half of 1999 in Accra, Ghana, and the second in Evanston, Illinois.

It is Codesria that made possible my initial ventures into the international academic network.

The institution has also influenced my thinking about African scholarship and universities in a way that my sojourn in the West, both in the US and UK, was unable to alter or revise.

Through my undergraduate training at Kenyatta University and through Codesria, I appreciated the existence of a vibrant community of scholars and scholarship in Africa and became convinced that the centre of knowledge production about Africa will always be in Africa.

The primary producers of this knowledge must, therefore, be Africans. They can decide to enlist the support of others, but they cannot apologise for putting the continent at the centre.

Even though Africa is the base around which my understanding of the world rotates, from 2000 to 2006, I was at Northwestern University for my graduate studies.

My stay and travels in the US confirmed the importance of Africans as primary and priority producers of their knowledge and trainers of future generations of intellectuals.
Not being assigned to read African authors in my graduate classes was a revealing omission.

If this was meant to undermine my belief in African scholarship or to convince me that there were no epistemic communities on the continent, it sharpened my enthusiasm for Africa and cemented my expectation that African universities will one day do something to rectify the situation.

Given the numerous challenges confronting our society, our universities are unlikely to match the expectations of those tenured in a US university.

I refuse to give up and insist on being part of the solution. The task of righting the wrongs in our university system needs a self-selecting group; a group that will commit, in whatever small way, to that tortuous long-term task.

Seeking refuge in Western institutions of learning is for me the easier option. This is not to say I will never take that option; it means that I will acknowledge this fact when I take that option.

“Every generation,” wrote Frantz Fanon, “must out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”

Our institutions supply enough excuses for us not to believe in our ability to discover and fulfil our mission.

The path to discovering and fulfilling our mission will forever remain stillborn if we accept all the excuses that our society provides in order to stay away from our own institutions.

I decided to overlook most of these reasons when in October 2006, I relocated with my family from Evanston to Nairobi and resumed my teaching at Kenyatta University. I know of some other colleagues who took the same decision.

In my travels in the US and the UK, I have met a number of Africans who decided to stay abroad and realise their potential. Those who belong to the universities constitute those I interact with most.

I respect their choices and, whenever possible, encourage them to use their skills for personal and collective growth.

A colleague from Nigeria at King’s College, London, has been instrumental in running a leadership programme that is extremely beneficial to mid-career African women.

She plans to relocate the programme to Kenyatta University this year. I consider her an ally in a broader struggle that will ultimately contribute to making a better world.

For some colleagues out there, however, Africa is incidental to their being and vision. It is useful only in so far as it provides the excuses for them to distance themselves from the continent.

They take the first opportunity to disparage local scholarship. They express surprise that I am still in Kenya. “How do you manage?” “Why are you still there?” “You know there are better opportunities out here?” they say. Others assume that good scholarship can only be undertaken outside Africa.

Africa is supposed to be corrupt. Its intellectuals are bankrupt of ideas and inept. If you want good scholarship, look for familiar African names in Western universities. Our local intellectual contribution is judged by where we reside.

Some will immediately proceed to list their accomplishments and conclude that they would not be where they are if they were working from a base on the continent.

The continent, their motherland, is conceived as a problem. One even counselled me recently to try publishing with Cambridge University Press instead of Zed Books because the former had a better profile and credibility.

In one stroke and never having read any of my publications, this colleague had dismissed me. He assumed that credibility and profile are value-free.

When I left Northwestern University in October 2006, I made a conscious decision to relocate back to Kenya. I had to turn my back on several beckoning job opportunities and offers for which I was qualified and was specially invited to apply.

My own department at Northwestern asked me to stay on for a while to teach the African history course since most of its Africanist faculty were proceeding on leave. Even the church members ganged up to convince my sons that it was a bad idea to return home! It did not work.

The same week I arrived home, the university lecturers went on strike. Except for a few colleagues who welcomed me back, most were surprised and others alarmed that I made such a stupid decision.

Subsequent experiences have alerted me to elements of this “stupidity” enshrined in the difficulties of teaching at a public university.

The most trying moment came in October 2008 when I won a one-month study residency at the Centre for African Studies at Oxford University to write my manuscript on Kenya —Democracy on Trial — under contract from Zed Books.

I was awarded a grant that took care of my travel and accommodation.

I asked Kenyatta University for permission to be away, which I was granted. But there was a rider. The finance officer was instructed to withhold my salary for the month and the Head of the Health Unit to suspend medical benefits to my family for a month. What a way of encouraging scholarship!

Still, it’s not yet time to give up on Kenyatta University.

True, the Internet system there, like many other universities, is slow. When the system was being put in place last year, those in charge skipped a number of offices — mine was one of them. I cannot therefore claim that I have access to a good ICT system.

The library is not conducive to advanced academic engagement. I normally use all my per diem whenever I travel abroad to buy books and access journals. I regularly pay penalty charge for excess luggage.

In fact, my MA students relied exclusively on my personal library for a course I taught on “Methods of Historical Research and Political Processes in Africa.” I hope this did not cripple them.

In teaching, I push my students beyond what is mundane. I expect something more than the unimaginative. I worry every day about being repetitive in my research topics and writing.

But I also guard against confusing postmodernist language games with intellectual sophistication. I expect students to know how to read a text, critique it and how to write well. I always warn them that learning how to write well is always a work in progress.

In class, we try to compensate for what they missed learning as undergraduates while learning what they need to know at MA level. I am sure that colleagues like Karuti Kanyinga, Frederick Wanyama, Wanjiku Khamasi, Felicia Yieke and Simala Inyani all demand the same from their students. If so, their anecdotes constitute a pattern, a pattern that gives me confidence about the possibilities at home.

Non-governmental organisations provide a useful avenue to complement my university work, not to replace it.

I was at a meeting at a Nairobi hotel that discussed sexuality. Sylvia Tamale was also there. She is by far one of the most respectable scholars and feminist activists in Africa.

Her studies on sexuality are innovative, imaginative, pioneering and rooted in Africa.

As an article of faith, I pay attention to how rooted and relevant my work ought to be in Africa and appreciate such rootedness from any scholar, African or non-African.
Tamale used her base in Makerere University to achieve this. She is a positive inspiration to many of us.

The distinction between the university and civil society is, therefore, conceptually useful but difficult to sustain in everyday life. Again Sylvia Tamale is a perfect example: Her understanding of feminism requires of us scholars to produce work of fine scholarship and use it to change gender relations in society.

Joyce Nyairo, another fine scholar, did her most illuminating work at Moi University. She is now with the Ford Foundation, supporting civil society organisations.

As for the idea that sites of knowledge production have shifted from universities and that the most vibrant production is in matatu graffiti, on street corners, in community-based theatre productions, I have two comments. First, I am yet to see an illuminating piece of serious scholarship on matatu graffiti that is not written by a thorough intellectual.

Second, I pray this claim, if indeed it is true, does not inspire more people to give up on the universities as sites of knowledge production.
The sustainability of these “alternative” sites depends very much on the willingness of donors to support them and this, as we know, is always short-term. I cannot handle the tyranny of measurable outcomes dictated by such donors. I love the “luxury” of sustained critical reflection.

In a nutshell, we must get a few more people with a little more faith in and patience with the African universities; the alternatives to the African university are so bad we shouldn’t exaggerate their prominence.

Credit: Godwin R. Murunga
Source: The East African

1. If you have any interest at all in anthropology, go and check out the Open Anthropology Cooperative

2. Financial secrets of the world’s poorest people

3. The global economic crisis and human rights

4. A report on microfinance

5. What happens when medicine is seen as business, and doctors become businessmen

6. Jeffrey Sachs writes about peace through development

Maybe a fallout of the current global crisis is a kindler, gentler IMF. The Fund just published a staff position note titled Fiscal Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa in Response to the Impact of the Global Crisis

The executive summary:

The global financial crisis poses significant challenges to fiscal policies in Sub-Saharan African countries. Growth will weaken considerably as export prices and volumes, remittances, tourism, and capital flows decline. The fiscal effects of the crisis are likely to be large and to operate mainly via revenue losses, with commodity-related revenues particularly hard hit.

Countries will need to weigh their options for fiscal policy responses. Countries with output gaps and sustainable debt and financing options have scope to implement expansionary policies, by letting automatic stabilizers work, accommodating declines in commodity-related revenues, and in some cases implementing discretionary fiscal stimulus. The main focus of fiscal stimulus should be on the expenditure side, particularly infrastructure and social spending given pressing needs, as reducing tax rates may be inequitable and the scope for doing so is limited given low revenue ratios. Other countries will have to adjust, in a way that will not affect critical spending. Additional donor support would reduce the need for adjustment. In all cases, countries should give priority to expanding social safety nets as needed to cushion the impact of the crisis on the poor.

Hat-Tip to Dani Rodrik. His comments on the policy note are here.

I thought to draw attention to Jeffrey Sachs comments on Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, and Ms Moyo’s response. Mr Sachs’s comments were a bit disapointing. I have expected more in substance from him. Read the opening, for instance:

The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big opponents of aid today are Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed net. Her colleague in opposing aid, Bill Easterly, received large-scale government support from the National Science Foundation for his own graduate training.

I certainly don’t begrudge any of them the help that they got. Far from it. I believe in this kind of help. And I’d find Moyo’s views cruel and mistaken even she did not get the scholarships that have been reported (Easterly mentioned his receipt of NSF support in the same book in which he denounces aid). I begrudge them trying to pull up the ladder for those still left behind. Before peddling their simplistic concoction of free markets and self-help, they and we should think about the realities of life, in which all of us need help at some time or other and in countless ways, and even more importantly we should think about the life-and-death consequences for impoverished people who are denied that help.

Kind of bellow the belt, don’t you think?

My copy of the book should arrive today.

1. What would happen if marijuana were decriminalized?

2. Anthropology, Islam and homosexuality

3. In Nigeria, thousands flee violence, hundreds suspected dead

4. Child sexual abuse requires greater parental indignation

5. Do you want to read Nigerian blogosphere fiction? Check out Waffarian’s piece for NigeriansTalk

6. Seun Kuti comes of age

is a cooperative of anthropologists who are interested in collaborations across space (I almost added time!), using different kinds of media. It is still in the formative stage so anthropologists, or anybody who is interested in anthropology, should please join the discussion by clicking here.