Group items tagged Development - Development Africa

Dr Rodney was assassinated in 1980 against the backdrop of a mass movement for political change in Guyana, which was being led by his party, the WPA, and inspired partly by him as a symbol of the times. After years of inaction by both the PNC and PPP governments, the Ramotar-led PPP in 2014 mounted a Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the assassination.
...

Cancel
It immediately became clear that this move was meant more as a political manoeuvre by the PPP than as a search for the truth. The PPP, leading a minority government, was prepared to do anything, including pimping the martyr, to regain total power.
...

Cancel
As was the case with many intellectuals of his generation, Dr Rodney did not confine his energies to the traditional classroom. Rather, he extended the classroom to include the street corners and bottom-houses where the masses of people could be reached. Walter Rodney was the consummate public intellectual, whose academic work was first and foremost a tool and avenue for socio-political change. As a product of the Caribbean decolonisation and Independence moments, he saw his primary role as one of service to the wider community in aid of making independence and freedom meaningful to all citizens, especially the poor.
...

Cancel
...5 more annotations...
In keeping with his praxis of the responsibility of the intellectual to the wider society, Dr Rodney became involved in the struggle for socio-political justice wherever he found himself. This activism brought him into conflict with the new post-independence government and state, which quickly became suspicious and, in some instances, intolerant of dissent. It was against this background that he was banned from Jamaica in 1968 by the then government, which viewed his groundings with the poor and the powerless as a form of political destabilisation.
...

Cancel
His move to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica brought him into contact with the wider Caribbean movement. It was at this point that he made the crucial decision to study African history, a decision that further broadened his world-view. By the time he earned a doctorate in that field at age 24 in 1966, his reputation as a brilliant scholar was already developing.
...

Cancel
The challenge for both parties and the government to which they belong is how to isolate the PPP’s cynicism without compromising justice for Dr Rodney. Unfortunately, the government has done a poor job in that regard. Reckless and uninformed statements by some ministers have not helped. How do we expect to build a new political culture when we pay scant respect for justice for those who suffered and engage in derision and dismissive rhetoric about those who sought to liberate our minds and our society from plantationhood?
...

Cancel
In the end, this government which I voted for and support to the fullest cannot and must not stand in the way of its own historical mandate to help raise Guyana to a new and enlightened existence. This government cannot disappoint Guyana; if it does, we will be forever confined to the backwaters of the political world.
...

Cancel
In the end, Walter Rodney’s spirit will not go away because, he, Dr Rodney, was more than just a trouble-maker, he was, still is and will always be a huge part of the conscience of this idea and reality called Guyana, the Caribbean Civilisation and their contribution to World Civilisation.
...

Cancel

African academics face a huge divide between their real and scholarly selves - 0 views

theconversation.com/eal-and-scholarly-selves-55899

academics africa international development dewaal

shared by Arabica Robusta on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached

Consider the biases in academic reward and promotion. Teaching is undervalued. Peer-reviewed publication is rewarded, particularly if it appears in high-ranking journals that prefer certain methodologies and questions. Those methods are typically quantitative. They build beautiful castles in the air or palaces on foundations of sand.
...

Cancel
Supervisors in foreign universities rarely have the subject matter expertise, so they tend to guide students towards more theoretical approaches. Examiners and peer reviewers likewise reward and reinforce their own disciplinary biases. On the other hand, it is common to see junior Western scholars doing rather uninteresting quantitative studies or superficial case studies. Despite their shortcomings these studies are published. These scholars, then, become the group that undertakes peer review.
...

Cancel
To become an academic in a Western university she or he may be obliged to unlearn important knowledge, and learn frameworks and skills that are actually irrelevant to the situation at hand but are necessary for being considered a professional academic.
...

Cancel
...3 more annotations...
Historians and anthropologists have tried to problematise this concept, but it carries with it a strong teleology: a one-way process of state formation and state-building. It is a process of turning robber barons to landowner barons to constitutional government, moving from a traditional patronage-based political order toward theorist Max Weber’s definition of a state.
...

Cancel
Occidentalism also occurs in policy engagement. Analysis is shaped to suit the audience, and scholars end up speaking their language. Rather than evidence-based policy, there is policy-based evidence-making.
...

Cancel
Writing and publishing good quality, fact-heavy accounts of African realities is also not easy. Detailed accounts of what is actually happening don’t fit neatly into 5,000- to 8,000-word journal articles. The market for books is very small, so that there is not much chance of publishing the kinds of local histories or detailed political memoirs that are commonplace in Europe.
...

Cancel