Are
All African Intellectuals Doing African Studies?

A Response
to Issa
Shivji’s Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture

Chambi Chachage

It is difficult, indeed redundant, to respond to someone or
something you almost fully agrees with. However, when a point of disagreement
close to one’s own heart, no matter how small, emerges, one is bound to
respond. So, here I am, responding to Shivji’s take on African Studies.

Shivji presents a profound personal and collective “auto-critique”
of African intellectuals. In doing so, however, he singles out a “few, brilliant
ones” who “migrate to the North joining ivy leagues.” Although he does not
name names, one can sense that the example par
excellence is none other than his friend and colleague during the heydays
of the radical Dar es Salaam School of the 1970s, Mahmood Mamdani, currently
based at Columbia and Makerere. Shivji queries:

What
about our migrants to the North? A significant few attain celebrity status.
They are held up as an example of some – I say some! – brilliance in an
otherwise intellectually barren continent. They are under pressure to produce
best sellers to maintain their status. And what sells best in the North is that
which finds a niche in the academic fashion of the day. Which means they end up
recycling and regurgitating the same content packaged in fancier language.

 

Karim Hirji, another colleague of Mamdani during the famed Dar
es Salaam School, shares Shivji’s nostalgic sentiments. However, Hirji is more
overt as he does not shy away from naming names. In his recent book on The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he devotes a whole section on Mamdani as “an
instructive example”:

The
Ugandan political Scientist Mahmood Mamdani is a case in point. An erstwhile
Marxist and colleague of Rodney at the University of Dar es Salaam, he authored
well regarded leftist books…. To this day, he remains a prolific, respected,
award winning writer on African issues. Yet while a few of his writings still
display a critical stand on the Western role in global affairs… his conceptual
horizon shifted in a fundamental way. Economic issues and ideas like
underdevelopment, imperialism, neo-colonialism, neoliberalism and class
analysis are no longer germane to his analytical method. Instead, he operates
on the legal, political, and cultural planes with identity group, ethnicity,
religion, race, tribe, and nation as his basic unit of analysis. His focus is on
politics, law, administration and conflict resolution, with class and
anti-imperialist struggles deleted from the picture. Insightful and well
researched as his analysis is, it is incomplete and biased as it avoids the
underlying reality and economic trends that constitutes the long-term
foundation for the problems he examines…Mamdani thus…stands in the company of
the bulk of modern day historians of Africa who can go no further than distort
and superficially critique the works and Marxist approach of Walter Rodney.


Contrast that with what Shivji lamented about in 2003 on
Mamdani’s apparent metamorphosis:

It is unfortunate that in his
magnum opus, Citizen and Subject:
Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (New Jersey:
Princeton, 1996), Mahmood Mamdani abandons political economy too radically and
falls into an institutional analysis
of the colonial state. He finds that the colonial state was bifurcated, when an
examination of its social character reveals the unity of state power. While his conclusions on the tasks of
democratic struggle are unassailable, his institutional analysis results in a
“recommendation” that state structures be reformed rather than a call for a new
form of nationalist struggle. Throughout his analysis, Mamdani concentrates on
the “native question,” the preoccupation of the colonial power, but has little
to say about the National Question, the preoccupation of the resistance.

This background enables us to see where Shivji is coming from
when he thus laments in 2017:

As
the academia is increasingly commodified, universities become market places.
Academics, willingly or under duress, have to break up their courses and
introduce new ones to make them saleable to the consumers. They have to
package, brand and certify their products. History becomes tourism and
heritage; corporate greed becomes corporate responsibility and democratic
governance is taught as good governance. Archaeology is museumised whose
artifacts are exhibited at a fee to ignorant and disinterested American
tourists. Political economy is replaced by econometrics, with no sense of
either politics or economy. Africans in Africa study Africa in Centres of
African Studies in the image of Centres in the North. Aren’t all our studies
African studies? Law students write PhDs applying the convention on
rights of indigenous people to their own citizens. To talk of citizens’ rights
is foreign, Western; to ruminate on indigenous rights is authentic, African! We
have been metamorphosed – from colonial natives and migrants to neo-colonial
indigenous and tyrants, thanks to imperial intellectuals and their African
caricatures.

As someone who has studied African Studies in both the ‘Global
South’ and the ‘Global North’, I find it difficult to agree with Shivji’s
rhetorical question that seems to imply that all our studies are African
Studies. For instance, to study Sociology in Africa does not necessarily makes one
study African Studies. Its ‘holy trinity’ remains Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and
Marx Weber and not Ibn
Khaldun, W.E.B.
Dubois and Ida
B. Wells. In my erstwhile discipline, Psychology, it is the same story – we
start with the likes of Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers rather than Frantz Fanon
and Chabani
Manganyi. An African student in the Philosophy department may graduate
knowing the German George Hegel without having heard of the Ghanaian Anton
Wilhelm Amo who taught and published in German universities in the 18th
century way before Hegel. As Ernest Wamba dia Wamba reminds
us, the “foundation of African scientific research is still based on a
philosophy of returning to the Western sources.” Shivji himself has captured this intellectual predicament in regard to
his discipline elsewhere:

Some of us who adopted
more radical approaches, albeit still within Western traditions, did not
perhaps subscribe wholly to Thompson’s thesis that the rule of law was an
‘unqualified good’. Yet we, too, saw in bourgeois law and legality, space for
struggle to advance the social project of human liberation and emancipation.
Law, we argued, was a terrain of struggle; that rule of law, while expressing
and reinforcing the rule of the bourgeoisie, did also represent the achievement
of the working classes; that even though bourgeois democracy was a limited
class project, it was an advance over authoritarian orders and ought to be
defended. The legal discourse, whether liberal or radical, thus remained rooted
in Western values, exalting the Law’s Empire. 


So, no, we are not all doing African Studies. However, all African
intellectuals ought to do it irrespective of our disciplinary boundaries. Harry
Garuba has consistently made a case for this by highlighting that the study of
Africa has not yet been fully integrated in the traditionally Western disciplines.
The “study of Africa”, he
aptly notes, “was calling upon us to open the disciplines rather than adopt
and justify their self-admittedly fragmentary understandings of the world.” It
is what he refers to as the “blinkers of the inherited disciplines” that needs
to be fully smashed. What is a better way of doing it than ‘Bringing
back African Studies to Africa’?