Presentation at the joint Symposium on Knowledge and Transformation: Social and Human Sciences in Africa, organized by the South African Human Sciences Research Council, 27th General Assembly of the International social Science Council, 29th General Assembly of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, Cape Town, November 26-28, 2008
Let me begin by thanking the organizers of this symposium, especially the President and CEO of the HRSC, Dr. Olive Shisana, for inviting me to this wonderful gathering of eminent thinkers and policy makers concerned with the production of knowledge in the human sciences held in one of my favorite cities in the world, Cape Town.
We live in an exceedingly complex and rapidly changing world of scholarly knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. The changes are as evident in the institutional, intellectual and ideological infrastructures of higher education as they are among the increasingly vital centers of knowledge production outside the universities, whose emergence is itself a sign of the growing pluralization of knowledge production. The transformations can be attributed to national and transnational forces in which pecuniary, paradigmatic and political dynamics are intersected in complex ways, and they signal the emergence of new social and epistemic economies of knowledge production. Despite these shifts the position of Africa-as an object of study and center of knowledge production-remains quite precarious in the international division of intellectual labor.
The factors behind the global marginality of African knowledge production are too well-known to detain us much here. Decolonization did little to dismantle Euroamerican epistemological hegemony partly because the nationalist assaults against it and the intellectual substitution drives were compromised by the decomposition of African universities in the face of structural adjustment programs on the one hand, and the rise of deconstructive paradigms, especially the ‘posts'-poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism-that questioned the very enterprise of constructing alternative truths, collectivities, metanarratives, and centered subjects on the other, not to mention the methodological obsession for mathematization in some of the social sciences. Given the relative weaknesses of African states and economies, African universities were devastated more than most by the ferocious regime of neo-liberal capitalist restructuring of the last thirty years which saw massive divestment from social sectors and the devaluation of state commitments and interventions. In the meantime, embattled African scholars succumbed to the epistemic distractions of the ‘posts' and methodological narcissism or the economic demands of consultancies, one in homage to the reflexes of colonial intellectual dependency, the other to the imperatives of survival in the neo-liberal order.
Clearly, the intellectual and developmental promises of the early post-independence years were derailed in much of Africa from the 1980s with the demise of the nationalist project that drove Africa's historic pursuits for self-determination in all walks of life including the academy and scholarship. As neo-liberalism implodes following the recent meltdown on Wall Street and the tenets of free-market fundamentalism tumble in the massive nationalizations orchestrated by governments that used to fervently preach the gospel of neo-liberalism in a desperate effort to stall their countries' recessionary spiral into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the analytical limits of the ‘posts' and methodological sophistry to explain the structural deformities of the contemporary world become more evident, new spaces are opened up for revisioning higher education as a public good and resurrecting the liberatory impulses of African scholarship.
However, it is not possible to return to the nationalist era of the 1960s, to the quest for development within the national confines of the postcolonial state. To be sure, the nation-state remains a crucial site for the organization of social life, the space where struggles for empowerment, equity and accountability, in short, for democratic governance and development, can be waged most effectively. But the processes and projects of globalization over the last three decades have unleashed transnational flows and forms of interconnectedness among communities, countries, and continents that cannot be easily disentangled or wished away. In terms of scholarship, we can isolate three dynamics that exert and will continue to exercise powerful influence: the transnationalization of education, the electronification of knowledge production, and the rising migration of knowledge workers. The trends represent both challenges and opportunities, although their inflections and implications vary for different regions and countries depending on the history, size, and composition of their knowledge systems. In confronting these developments Africa in general, and specific African countries, face particular constraints and possibilities.
Fundamental to their capacity to meet and exploit the changing contexts of global knowledge production is the revitalization of their universities through massive state investments aided by private capital and domestic and foreign philanthropic agencies. Besides this, I believe, the contemporary African academic diaspora, largely produced out of the very depredations of structural adjustment, is particularly well positioned to facilitate the globalization of African knowledges and the Africanization of global knowledges. The paper begins with brief notes on transnationalization and electronification of knowledges before exploring the social composition of this diapora and examining its possible mediations and contributions in renegotiating Africa's position in the world knowledge production system.
Among the many profound pressures facing universities, the challenges of internationalization and transnationalization, which are driven externally by the processes of globalization and internally by the growing complexity of knowledge, loom large. It is quite evident that universities are becoming more interconnected internationally for both economic and epistemic reasons, the first because universities have always been, or aspire to be, universalist and universalizing institutions an imperative reinforced by growing global reflexivity and the explosion of knowledge that makes transnational collaborations more important than ever, and the second because trade in educational services is expanding rapidly and becoming subject to global trade rules and negotiations under the legally-binding auspices of the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In the past transnational education and knowledge production often entailed mobility of students and faculty, whether unregulated or formalized, as well as the incorporation of foreign subjects, themes, topics or languages in the curriculum. Needless to say, the patterns of academic mobility and exchange were and continue to be grossly unequal, uneven, and unstable in so far as the physical flows of students and faculty have predominantly been from the global South to the global North, the latter's knowledges are incorporated more readily than the former's, and the systems of exchange are better resourced and organized in the global North than in the global South. Rooted in the histories of imperialism and colonialism, these practices have reproduced western epistemological hegemony, which allows Euroamerican scholars often to set the terms, themes, topics and theories of intellectual discourse and research.
The changes associated with the globalization processes of the last three decades have led to the acceleration of the old trends including the increased mobility of students, professors and researchers and the internationalization of curricula and extra-curricular activities. New trends have also emerged principally the growth of what is variously referred to as ‘transnational,' ‘crossborder,' or ‘borderless' education and the development of new international partnerships, networks and consortia. African universities can neither afford to blissfully ignore the new forces of transnational education nor embrace them blindly. They must engage them as critically, creatively and collectively as possible.
A crucial context in which these developments are talking place concerns the emerging regime of international trade in educational services that the WTO seeks to regulate through GATS. The GATS agenda must be contested vigorously, while pursuing more productive paths of internationalization, both old and new. Another context centers on the development of electronic technologies which are transforming all aspects of knowledge production from research to publishing, teaching to conferencing. Clearly, the new information technologies have facilitated the unparalleled growth of transnational education and knowledge production. Online education has changed the dynamics of distance education delivery and the new information technologies ttogether with the internationalization of the professions and skilled labor migration have opened new possibilities for international scholarly communication and networking, notwithstanding the continuing challenges of uneven access within and among countries and institutions.
The growth in international skilled labor migration is one of the key features of contemporary global migrations. It has assumed greater importance both in terms of the actual flows and in the formulation of migration policies at national, regional, and international levels. The tide of skilled migration, a category that is not well defined, but is assumed to take many forms, including ‘brain drain,' professional transients, skilled permanent migrants, and business transfers includes African intellectual migrants. Theoretical explanations for skilled migration echo many of the conventional migration theories. The first is the micro-level human capital approach which contends that individuals move to maximize gains from the investment in their education and training. The second is the macro-level structuralist neo-Marxist perspective which emphasizes the operations of unequal development between core and periphery countries. Finally, there is the ‘structuration' approach which stresses the important role of international agents, regional policies, and global networks.
Skilled migration can be examined in terms of its motivation, spatiality, mechanisms, and temporality. Skilled migrants are motivated to move for various reasons, such as fleeing from oppressive regimes, or through direct and indirect inducements from foreign governments, industries, or agencies. Spatially, they move from the global South to global North, or vice-versa, and within each zone. The mechanisms or channels of migration include personal networks, the internal labor markets of multinational corporations, or movements with the assistance of international recruitment agencies. And the stay of the skilled migrants may be permanent, temporary, or circulatory. In addition, skilled migration flows are affected by the nature of the migrants' reception and integration into the host countries.
The migration of African professionals including intellectuals is a product of conditions in both Africa and the global North. Economic, social, political, and educational developments in Africa have conspired to generate emigration pressures, while the skill-selective and wealth-selective immigration policies of the Northern countries have offered opportunities for highly skilled Africans to migrate. The migration flows have been sustained by the intricate and intense educational networks that link universities in Africa and those in the North, the recruitment drives and inducements of various institutions and organizations, and the cumulative traditions of migration that have emerged as skilled migration has expanded. Like international migrants from other regions, African professional migrants have increasingly become part of transitional communities involved directly and indirectly in both home and host countries, in ways that have an impact on, "economic and political processes in the sending and receiving countries and relations between them which may reinforce or challenge existing relations of power within and between countries" (Hamilton and Chinchilla's 1996:198).
The migration of African intellectuals to the global North is an outgrowth of complex movements of African intellectuals in the continent itself. Therefore, in order to fully understand the North-bound migration, it is important to examine the structures of knowledge production and mobility within Africa itself, and the linkages and networks that have been established between African and Northern educational institutions and scholars, which facilitate and reproduce African intellectual migration. African intellectuals are members of complex networks linking universities and independent research centers in Africa to those in the global North through training, publications, and research funding. Ali Mazrui's suggestion made in the 1978 that African universities functioned as branches of multinational corporations remains apt despite strenuous efforts to nationalize and indigenize the universities. In other words, African universities still derive their organizational and scholarly models from the global North. Large numbers of students continue to be sent to the global North for graduate training; research themes are not only influenced by Northern fads but a lot of African research is funded by foundations and agencies from the global North; and Northern media dominate scholarly publications and set the standards. It is this complex web of dependent institutional, intellectual, and ideological linkages between Africa and the global North that facilitates and sustains the flows of African intellectual migrations.
Africa suffers from the highest rates of skilled labor migration. Africa's stock of people with tertiary education is a mere 4%, yet this group accounts for 30.9% of all immigrants from the continent to other world regions, principally Europe and North America. The mismatch for the other regions is limited to varying degrees but none equal the African pattern. The highest shares of skilled emigrants in Africa are from Southern Africa (62.1%), followed by Western Africa (42%), Eastern Africa (40.8%), Central Africa (30.9%), and Northern Africa (19.6%). While only one African country features among the top 30 skilled migration countries in absolute numbers-South Africa with 168,083 and in 29th place, nine are among those with the highest emigration rates: Cape Verde (67.5%), The Gambia (63.3%), Mauritius (56.2%), Seychelles (55.9%), Sierra Leone (52.5%, Ghana (46.9%), Mozambique (45.1%), Liberia (45%), and Kenya (38.4%).
Let me give the example of the United States. The African born population currently claims the highest levels of education of any group in the country, foreign born or native born. According to the 2000 Census, among the African-born residents aged 25 and above, 49.3% had a bachelor's degree or more as compared to 25.6% for the native born population and 25.8% for the foreign born population as a whole. The irony of people from the least educated continent in the world having the highest levels of education in the world's lone, indeed, lonely superpower is quite striking. Some of the highly educated African born residents in the United States consist of students who don't return to their home countries after graduation.
It is easy to see the migration of African professionals including intellectuals to the global North as an unmitigated economic, political, and cultural disaster for Africa. Remittances from them and other migrants, while important for their families, communities and countries, which currently constitute the largest inflows of ‘foreign aid'-estimated at between $40-$150 billion-do not seem to compensate for the net losses of their productivity and potential contributions to national development. It has also been argued that these migrations deprive civil society of the organizational political skills of middle class professionals. That explains, according to the critics, why while African governments publicly decry the migration of their intellectuals, they do little to create conditions that would stem it.
All this may be true, but it forecloses the possibility that the migrants can also be turned into assets for Africa. In so far as many of the migrants may not return, despite the proverbial wishes of migrants to return home ‘someday,' African countries and the migrants themselves need to devise creative strategies that exploit and enhance the potential benefits of African skilled migration. Demands on the Northern countries to compensate African countries for the emigration of their skilled personnel and lost human capital, which have been made, have not gone far and are unlikely to. Neither is the record of restrictive policies and return programs encouraging. Bonding schemes that require those awarded publicly funded scholarship to return have not had much success either in stemming the tide of skilled labor migration. Also limited have been the effects of repatriation programs. For example, by the end of 1994 the program of the IOM's Return of Qualified Africans program had assisted merely 1,200 African migrants to return to six target countries: Ghana, Kenya, Somalia (until 1991), Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, some of who, I am sure, eventually returned to the trails of international migration. Only time will tell whether recent efforts to negotiate temporary migration schemes between African countries and the major labor importing countries in the OECD, will bear fruit.
African countries and international agencies interested in the question of African global migrations have three choices. First, they can continue bemoaning the ‘brain drain' and engage in mutual recriminations, occasionally pacified by remittances. The second is to pursue ‘brain gain' through the return option in which international migrants are encouraged and enticed to physically return to the continent. Reference is often made to the return of Indian and Chinese professionals from the global North who have contributed to rapid economic growth in their countries, or the role of the Jewish diaspora in protecting the interests of Israel despite the small numbers of Jews in Euroamerica. It is undeniable that Africa and its diaspora have not always effectively mobilized to serve and advance each other's interests. The new African diasporas can help invigorate the re-awakened interest in Africa among the historic African diasporas, and serve as trans-Atlantic and trans-Mediterranean bridges, as cultural mediators between Africa and Afro-America and Afro-Europe, whose communication and knowledge of each other has largely been through the distorted lenses and prejudices of imperialist and racist media.
The third is the ‘diaspora' option that recognizes the migrants as new diasporas and seeks to build effective strategies of ‘brain mobility' or circulation between them and their countries of origin and the continent as a whole. This option needs to be based on a sober understanding of the mutualities of interest, that neither Africa nor the diaspora can succeed in this ruthlessly competitive globalizing world without the other, that the diaspora will continue to be molested by racism and denigration as long as Africa remains underdeveloped, and Africa only stands to benefit and accelerate its prospects of development by maximizing the contributions of the diaspora, by recognizing that the diaspora constitutes a strategic asset possessing enormous social, financial, and intellectual capital, that in the case of the new diaspora it is already the continent's biggest donor, whose remittances exceed foreign direct investment and official development assistance, and it is the only constituency in the global North that has a profound emotive and cognitive commitment and the capacity to play a progressive role in Africa's social transformation, and in the case of the historic diasporas that it has the political potential and propensity, which it has demonstrated historically in struggles against colonial rule and apartheid, to mobilize in support of a new civilizational compact between Euroamerica and Africa that was so cruelly disrupted and distorted by the Atlantic slave trade that created that diaspora in the first place and the countervailing ideologies and movements of Pan-Africanism through which the diaspora sought to reconnect itself to and help redeem Africa from European capitalist imperialism that its own unpaid labor of four centuries had helped build.
Migrant African intellectuals, as cultural producers, have an important and specific role to play in brokering relations between Africa and the global North, in Africanizing the Atlantic and Mediterranean. They must resist the seductions of the Northern academies to become native ventriloquists, complicit authentic others who validate narratives that seek to marginalize Africa. Nor should they let themselves be manipulated as a fifth column in the global North's eternal racial wars by disavowing the protracted struggles of historic African diaspora communities for the full citizenship of racial equality, economic empowerment, and political power. Sometimes migrants from Africa or the Caribbean in Europe and North America tend to forget that the roads they ride on to their jobs in industry or the academy were paved by those who preceded them. Solidarity requires respect for each other's struggles and recognition of our splendid diversities anchored on a strategic racial essentialism, in so far it is the historical racialization of our humanity that has produced and continues to reproduce our collective exploitation and denigration whether in Africa or the global North.
Thus Migrant Africans should not be seen solely in the magisterial role of Edward Said's cosmopolitan revolutionaries or the ministerial role of Ali Mazrui's teachers subverting the global North through counter-penetration, let alone the floating symbols of Appadurai's various -scapes of globalization. They belong to both worlds as economic workers, cultural producers, and political agents who should, in solidarity with historic African diaspora communities, construct practices, commitments, and knowledges of their multiple worlds that demystify the roots of Africa's and diaspora Africa's oppression and exploitation; that seek to empower their communities; that expose and confront the tyrannies of Northern imperial power and Africa's dictators; that promote respectful conversation between Africa and the global North.
Before exploring the mediations and possible contributions the new African academic diasporas can make to African knowledge production and its globalization, it is important to note that like their counterparts on the continent, this is a complex community divided by diverse intellectual and ideological tendencies, some of which are clearly not beneficial for Africa. It is not easy to categorize the various tendencies, although several attempts have been made. For example, Toyin Falola has observed that ‘like all communities they have their tensions, petty rivalries, and resentments toward members who are perceived to be especially successful,' and he discusses how they deal with the questions of identity politics and scholarly audience, singling out the experiences of Manthia Diawara, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nawal el Saadawi. However, his tantalizing distinction between ‘migrants as revolutionaries,' as people with ‘alternative allegiances,' and as ‘agents of culture' is not further developed.
Francis Njubi Nesbitt offers a more compelling typology of the new African academic diaspora. He has argued that the Duboisian ‘double consciousness' of African migrant intellectuals in the United States, which is spawned by the contradiction between their high academic achievements and an inferiorized identity in America's unyielding racial hierarchy and between their alienation from Africa (where they are often condemned for abandoning their countries) and the need to come to terms with their Africanity and to promote Africa, produces three ‘types' of migrant intellectuals: the comprador intelligentsia, the postcolonial critic, and the progressive exile.
Members of the comprador intelligentsia cynically use their Africanity to authenticate the neocolonial and neoliberal agendas of the international financial institutions; they are infamous for defending the global order and condemning African countries for corruption, ‘tribalism,' and ineptitude. For their part, the postcolonial critics see themselves in a mediating role, as expert interpreters of the African experience to the West and transmitters of the ever-changing panorama of Euro-American perspectives-from liberalism, modernization, Marxism, dependency, and the ‘posts'-to Africa and to ‘explain' the African experience. The progressive exiles seek to use their space of exile to develop a dignified Pan-African identity by unabashedly promoting African knowledges and participating in the liberation struggles of both the diaspora and their countries of origin. Njubi suggests Ngugi wa Thiong'o as the paragon of the progressive exile and Kwame Anthony Appiah for the postcolonial critic, and one could point to George Ayittey as the quintessential comprador intellectual.
Undoubtedly, one could come up with other typologies based on different criteria. Njubi's classification primarily refers to the contemporary African academic diaspora's ideological positioning toward African liberation. They could also be classified in terms of their disciplinary orientation-as humanists, social scientists, scientists, and professionals - each of which has a bearing on the kinds of research they conduct and the possible collaborations they can establish with colleagues and institutions on the continent because each of these organizational branches in the academy has its own intellectual requirements and institutional and reputational resources. For example, research in the humanities is more poorly financed than in the sciences, and scholars in the literary disciplines can conduct their textually-based research without ever going to Africa, which would be frowned upon for historians or anthropologists who need to conduct empirical and ethnographic research. Also, in many social science and humanities disciplines it is common to work individually, while in many of the sciences collaboration is often necessary given the cost of the research apparatus and the academic culture that has evolved in the sciences.
The permutations and implications of the disciplinary schema as a basis for organizing knowledge production and classifying academics and assessing the nature of their potential or actual engagements with Africa obviously deserve consideration. Yet, one cannot resist the search for a more comprehensive typology that incorporates as many of the dynamics that frame academic knowledge production as possible including the institutional, intellectual, ideological, and individual dynamics. With this in mind I would propose three broad classifications of African diaspora academics: the Pan-Africanists, the Northenists, and the globalists based on the organization and content of their research, publishing, and teaching practices. Members of the first group conduct their research and derive their research agendas, and do their publishing and sometimes their teaching (conventional and electronic) in both Africa and the global North, while the second are largely focused on the global North in their research, publishing, and teaching practices, and the third are connected to multiple sites besides the global North and Africa. Needless to say these ‘choices' are driven as much by ideological and individual predispositions as by institutional and intellectual predilections, as well as material incentives.
It cannot be overemphasized that this is a rather rudimentary typology, that many people straddle these categories at different times in their careers. Indeed, many African academics circulate between Africa and the global North as students, faculty, or visitors. It simply underscores the fact that for African diaspora academics located in the global North, it is not just their personal politics toward Africa and its struggles that are important as far as knowledge production is concerned. Equally important, perhaps even more so, are their academic practices, which do not always coincide with their personal inclinations or ideologies. A more comprehensive typology would in fact also help us to differentiate among those in the historic African diaspora who are engaged in African studies, and identify the tendencies among the two diasporas that continental research networks and organizations might fruitfully engage for mutual benefit. Beyond these ‘natural constituencies' of Africa in the global North, there are of course the Euroamerican Africanists, and many others who have more than a nodding acquaintance or interest in knowledge produced for, in, from, and about Africa. The African knowledge production enterprise in the global North is indeed a house of many mansions.
Scholarly production and conversation is conducted through publications, conferences, classrooms, and increasingly through the Internet. What ought to be the role of migrant African intellectuals in African and Africanist scholarly production and discourse? Let me make a few proposals that suggest the possibilities of turning migrant African intellectuals from liabilities into assets for African intellectual development based on the recognition that while many may not be able or want to return permanently to their native countries they, like most migrants, often suffer from abandonment guilt which they seek to alleviate by continued participation in developments at home. In days gone by, global migration often entailed permanent relocation or long separation and infrequent encounters with one's native home through mail and the occasional visit. The contemporary revolution in telecommunications and travel has compressed the spatial and temporal distances between home and abroad, thus offering migrants unprecedented opportunities to be transnational, to be people of two worlds, perpetually translocated, physically and culturally, between several countries or several continents. Thus, globalization is not simply facilitating the rapid flows of capital and commodities, but also revitalizing old cultural and community networks, thus strengthening transnational ethnic, racial, and national identities.
It is in this context that the possible contributions of migrant African intellectuals need to be examined. There is need to develop innovative and cost-effective exchange programs that facilitate the periodic flow of migrant African intellectuals from the global North to Africa. To date exchange programs have largely focused on Northern scholars coming to Africa, and occasionally African scholars visiting Northern institutions. Too often, the linkages have been one-sided, used by Africanists in the North to underwrite their academic careers, leaving little intellectual benefits for African scholarship. We need to devise programs that specifically target migrant African intellectuals, who constitute, I believe, an important, but under-utilized, link in the transfer of technology and intellectual capital from the global North to the continent and the global dissemination of African knowledges. They have a responsibility to be Africa's intellectual eyes and ears. As we all know Africa is routinely defamed and denigrated in the popular media and in scholarly publications in the global North. Migrant African intellectuals ought to continuously challenge such misrepresentations, particularly among Africanists and other scholars, and to raise the intellectual costs of maligning and misrepresenting Africa.
Let us explore more concretely how new linkages and forms of collaboration can be established between migrant African intellectuals and intellectual communities on the continent around each of the three critical areas of scholarly pursuit: teaching, research, and public service. Migrant intellectuals can contribute to teaching and training in Africa in five ways. First, through joint appointments in African and Northern universities, which could enable them to teach in Africa during a designated period in an academic year or over several years when they are, say, on sabbatical or leave of absence. Upon their return to the global North they could continue supervising graduate and advanced undergraduate students and provide them with access to research materials from the North that may not be locally available. In this way, periodic teaching visits by the migrant intellectuals would foster continuous interaction with students. This could be a far more effective method of ‘transferring technology' from the global North to Africa than can be expected from expatriate workers, transnational corporations, and foreign aid.
Second, the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for collaborative distance teaching between African scholars in the global North and their counterparts on the continent. The delivery systems can range from simple E-mail communication, to using list serves and chat rooms and video conferencing facilities that would allow for lectures, seminars, and conferences to be held among various sites on the continent and in the global North. The establishment of virtual universities offers a unique opportunity to utilize African intellectuals in the North and link them to students and colleagues on the continent. This is to suggest the need to build a network of virtual universities and collaborations in teaching, research, and publishing. Third, migrant African intellectuals need to take advantage of study abroad programs sponsored by their institutions and various consortia by not only encouraging the development of more such programs in Africa, but by ensuring that they are designed in such a way that they actively participate in them and that they involve African students and are not restricted to, or are glorified tourist junkets for, students from the global North.
Fourth, migrant African intellectuals ought to participate in existing, or in establishing new, national and regional specialized institutes. Such institutes offer unique opportunities for concentrated and short-term teaching and training. Each of the major independent research centers, such as CODESRIA and OSSREA in the social sciences and many others in the natural sciences and the professions, as well as some universities, have set up specialized training institutes, whose structure allows for participation by scholars based in different countries, including those from the global North as trainers and resource persons. Finally, it is possible for migrant African intellectuals to contribute to curriculum development in African institutions through informal and formal communications with their colleagues on the continent, informally through personal contacts, and formally through linkages between their institutions in the global North and African institutions. There are already many such inter-university linkages, but migrant African intellectuals have not always been as actively involved as they could be.
Each of these linkages in the teaching domain can foster more fruitful research linkages between African intellectuals within and outside the continent and contribute to the advancement of research and development in Africa. Specifically, in the realm of research there are four ways in which migrant African intellectuals can play a productive role. First, joint research projects ought to be pursued more vigorously in a manner that maximizes the ‘comparative advantage' of each group in terms of access to data, research funds and materials, and theoretical formulations. All too often, researchers from the global North, equipped with fistfuls of dollars or Euros and theoretical conceit descend upon Africa to test their latest pet theories and use their African colleagues as research assistants to collect data. Northern-based African scholars could help in changing the dynamics of such a research culture and promote more equitable relations by openly criticizing exploitative practices and sensitizing universities and foundations that fund African research to promote research that is truly collaborative, from the conception of research problems, to collection and interpretation of data, to writing and publication of research results.
The appointment of increasing numbers of Africans as program officers and directors in some of the large foundations, such as the Ford, McArthur, Rockefeller and Carnegie, offers African intellectuals on the continent and in the diaspora an opportunity to promote new North-South research linkages and practices. Similarly, the appointment of Africans in senior administrative positions in African studies programs provide a basis for building new Africanist research cultures and practices. The establishment of mutually beneficial institutional linkages and support between African researchers across the Atlantic and Mediterranean constitutes the second area in which migrant African intellectuals could advance research in and on Africa.
The third area centers on publication. Co-authorship and co-publishing between African scholars and publishers based on the continent and their counterparts in the North should be encouraged. It offers the former wider markets for their ideas and products, and helps the latter to focus their research on fundamental questions confronting Africa thus saving them from the sterile seductions of post-something theorizing beloved among many Northern scholars. African scholars based in the global North should try as much as possible to publish in Africa-based journals and monograph series as a way of building African intellectual capacities and communities and of promoting intellectual conversation across the Atlantic and Mediterranean in so far as it will be in their interest to see to it that such publications are marketed and read in the global North. The reciprocal responsibility on the part of continentally-based scholars and publishers is that they must export well-produced texts of impeccable scholarship. They are unlikely to attract their compatriots based in the global North seeking to ascend the slippery poles of tenure and promotion if their publications are shoddy and reinforce the perceived inferiority and marginality of African scholarship. In short, co-authorship and co-publication offers possibilities to promote and mainstream African scholarship.
Besides the migration of people, a few African scholarly journals have also migrated to the global North. The principal example is Transition, founded in Uganda in the 1960s, now relocated to Harvard University in the United States. Such journals have a special responsibility to act as a medium of serious, two-way intellectual conversation between Africa and the global North. They must avoid the dangers of developing historical amnesia and falling easy prey to the seductions of the post-something and methodological sophistries parading in many a Northern academy which many African intellectuals on the continent find at best amusing, and at worst dangerous. They must address the fundamental processes, issues, and questions that have shaped, connected, and differentiated Africa and the global North. Through them we must remember and reconfigure the Middle Passage and the numerous ties that bind Africa and the global North.
In addition to collaborative research, migrant African intellectuals could contribute to the development of respectful intellectual conversations across the Atlantic through the establishment of extensive general and specialized review periodicals, edited and published jointly in the global North and Africa, in which African and Africanist publications would be routinely reviewed. The review periodicals could also assist in advertizing African books in the global North and vice-versa, and in breaking the cycle of self-referential solitude that currently characterizes Africanist scholarship. Such scholarly media would help promote more accountability and respectful communication between African and Africanist and other Northern scholarly communities. Today Northern scholars writing on African countries do not need to worry about what their African colleagues think or say, especially if the latter are based on the continent, because they are unlikely to review their work. This promotes intellectual indifference and misconduct, which sometimes includes outright fraud and the falsification of data.
Migrant African intellectuals have, I believe, a special responsibility and role to mainstream African scholarship in global scholarship by promoting the consumption of African scholarly texts in the global North. This often requires nothing more than simple commitment in so far as university professors have considerable freedom in designing courses and setting reading materials. That African intellectuals in the global North must inform themselves of scholarly publications by their colleagues on the continent which could be used as class texts cannot be overemphasized. More challenging is to ensure that African publications are ordered by libraries with dwindling acquisition budgets and that they are included in index and citation systems that increasingly act as gateways to research products and inquiries as publications and information explode. Not to be cited by the major indexing services often spells intellectual invisibility and death. Migrant African intellectuals, working in collaboration with Africana librarians, need to push for the inclusion of African publications in these indexes which filter and legitimate scholarly products.
As for public service, migrant African intellectuals can also play several roles. First, there is advocacy. Together with the historic African diaspora communities, and working with groups interested in Africa, they can contribute to the formation of active lobbies for Africa with key public and private constituencies, ranging from governments and the corporate sector, to the increasingly influential NGO movement and the media. As intellectuals, they have the capacity, or should develop the capacity, to provide coherent analyses and chart the contours of fruitful and mutually beneficial relations between Africa and the global North. At the very least, African governments and institutions ought to use them as interpreters of the global North. Their work is also essential to minimizing media misrepresentation and marginalization of Africa. This is connected to the second public service function that migrant African intellectuals can perform: being actively engaged in outreach either through existing institutions they belong to or new institutions that they can form. Outreach aims at promoting informed knowledge and public discourse on Africa. The constituencies for outreach include the institutions and sectors mentioned above, as well as educational institutions, movements with potential international scope, such as labor unions and religious organizations, and various cultural communities, especially those among the historic African diaspora.
Finally, wherever possible Migrant Africans need to actively participate in the politics of both their countries of origin and countries of settlement. Generally migrant Africans tend to be more preoccupied with politics back home than in their new countries, in which they participate through fund raising activities, formation of exile political parties, and lobbying in Northern capitals against dictatorships and governments they disprove of. It is important to balance this with engagement in the electoral politics of the global North, which often requires taking up citizenship. As their numbers and political voices rise in specific locations, and through coalition building with groups and constituencies favorably disposed towards Africa, the new African diaspora could begin to influence the foreign policies of their adopted countries towards Africa. The election of Senator Barack Obama as the next U.S. President shows the immense political promise of the new African diaspora. The role of migrant intellectuals in this endeavor is to map out the trajectories of African political participation in the global North and to interrogate the current constructions of citizenship and to articulate new ones that resonate with their transnationalism and the positive possibilities of globalization.
Clearly, effecting these changes and developments requires a lot more than personal commitment by individuals. Institutional anchors are required to navigate the demanding rigors and rituals of academic life and migrancy. The institutional mechanisms can include both old and new institutions. Better use could be made of existing academic associations and NGOs, such as the African Studies Association in the United States, the largest African Studies Association in the world, of which I am the current President, and the Association of African Universities based in Ghana to coordinate and develop some of the activities outlined above (the two signed a memorandum of understanding two weeks ago at our annual meeting in Chicago to do just that). International organizations such as UNESCO and UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development) also have a role to play. But the way forward might require setting up separate organizations, linked to all these entities that specifically focus on promoting the utilization of migrant African intellectuals in the development of teaching, research, and public service in and on Africa along some of the lines suggested in this presentation. Such organizations could put to much better use some of the funds currently allocated to programs promoting the permanent return and relocation of migrant Africans, or the huge sums spent on technical assistance by often ill-informed or indifferent non-African expatriates. These suggestions are based on the recognition that the challenge for Africa is not simply one of capacity building, but also of capacity utilization, of finding the most effective ways to fully exploit the intellectual and technical capacity that has already been built, which for various reasons, is now scattered all over the world. Thank you!
