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Arabica Robusta

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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Walter Rodney: Balancing isolation of political cynicism and facilitation o... - 0 views

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

A tribute to Sam Moyo - a giant of agrarian studies | zimbabweland - 0 views

  • In Zimbabwe’s land debate nearly everyone at different times disagreed with him, but they all listened. Whether inside the state and party, among opposition groups or with the World Bank and other donors, no one could ignore what Sam had to say. And his influence in seeking a more sensible line has been enormous.
Arabica Robusta

Francis Nyamnjoh: Francis Nyamnjoh: Rhodes Fell Because of an Illusion - 0 views

  • Nyamnjoh based his talk on his essay with the same title published in the Journal of Asian and African Studies in which he argues for conviviality as a currency for frontier Africans by using a literary example, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the late Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola.
  • The skull represents the quest to become the “complete gentleman”, and when Africans are on such a quest to adapt to a Western style zero sum logic, “we lose out”, Nyamnjoh argued.
  • Nyamnjoh says Africans are “frontier beings”, which he defined as people who question institutionalised ideas and practices of being, becoming and belonging.
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  • “They are interested in conversations, not conversions. They find abstract distinctions between nature and culture sterile. They would rather try to understand what cities have in common with towns and villages and bushes and forests, or what interconnections there are between concepts such as ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, Europe and Africa, the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.
  • Nyamnjoh contrasted “completeness” with “conviviality”, defining the latter as recognition and provision for the reality of being incomplete.
  • “It challenges us to be open-minded and open-ended in how we speak and how we identify ourselves. It encourages us to reach out, encounter and explore ways of enhancing or complementing ourselves with the added possibilities of potency brought our way by the incompleteness of others.”
  • Nyamnjoh argued that ideas of completeness are an extravagant illusion and it therefore makes more sense to speak about incompleteness and to invest in the sort of interdependence that can enhance us to be more efficacious in our actions.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Women up in arms - 0 views

  • While the Kurds have been fighting for their survival against ISIS in the Syrian/Turkish border town of Kobane, the Zapatistas put down their arms over 20 years ago and have maintained a non-violent struggle since. In both cases, women have fought alongside men against their own collective obliteration while making radical changes in their gender relations. Working towards more equity makes possible more direct democracy in building greater autonomy from the state.[1] In both efforts, there is also a deep connection to land[2] that regards the value of women and the environment as essential to life itself.
  • These radical changes in gender relations are occurring in contexts of tremendous violence and war of both high and low intensity. In Kobane, near the Turkish border, Kurds have been upholding a heroic resistance to the ravages of ISIS on the one hand, and the racist and repressive manipulations of the Turkish State on the other. In Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been building their autonomy within the increasing violence of a narco-state that dominates much of the nation, where it is hard to discern the difference between government and drug traffickers.
  • Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. His “Democratic Confederalism” aims to build a new system that works towards the just distribution of resources as well as the conservation of the environment. It seeks to create a society free of sexism, replacing traditional patriarchal societies, religious interpretations, and capitalist merchandising of women. The movement has undertaken an intense societal and educational labor to combat the patriarchal mentalities implanted in women, as a form of submission, and in men, in form of domination.[4]
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  • Similarly, the PKK’s “Jineology Committee” studies women’s histories to understand the construction of hierarchies and nation-states that erode women’s power in society. Both communities come from intense patriarchal histories and contexts, so there is still a long way to go in both movements. Yet in a short time they have made extraordinary gains. Women are increasingly represented on governing councils and active in their armed ranks, but the real revolution is seen within the domestic sphere, where caring for children, health and home are shared labor between men and women.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Ivory Coast needs a transition phase - 0 views

  • can this requirement be fulfilled this year? For many pressure groups like the Committee of Actions for Ivory Coast in the United States (C.A.C.I-USA), there cannot and should not be any election in Ivory Coast in 2015, unless the political body wants to trigger new violence and erase the democratic gains that Ivorians have enjoyed starting April 1990.
  • The second reason is that accepting a presidential election in 2015 would legitimate the regime in power, condemn Laurent Gbagbo, approve violence as a means to access power, and negate Ivory Coast’s right to sovereignty and democracy.
  • The relative obscurity for Ivory Coast is the uncertainty of durable peace and independence. There are two ways to end this obscurity: refraining from a presidential election in 2015 and installing a political transition. There are ample constitutional reasons to object to the presidential election now. The most important is avoiding further chaos and giving the political body sufficient time to install a political transition. Indubitably, a political transition is the golden alternative for peace in Ivory Coast.
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