Nigerian universities are shut down by a warning strike now in its fifth week, thanks to official inattention; but Nigerian scholars at home and abroad continue to insert their work and forte into global discourses and the fast-paced flow of innovations. This is not the place to discuss why Nigerian scholars based at home are not visible enough on the global academic map. What is interesting for now is that Nigerian scholars in the diaspora continue to make us proud and to constitute mirror images of what Nigerian academic culture could have been if we had leaders, who are not apathetic towards the generation and distribution of knowledge, especially the infrastructure that supports them.
Two new remarkable books published this year deal with economic diversification, much talked about in Nigeria but little implemented, as well as the struggle, if there is still one, to decolonise African studies and unbundle it from the Western hegemonic straitjacket into which it has been fixed for a very long time. The first work entitled, Industrialisation and Economic Diversification: Post-Crisis Development Agenda in Asia and Africa, published by Routledge is by Professors Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka and Kaushalesh Lai, both well-known scholars of Development Studies, who have had stints at the United Nations University based in Maastricht, Netherlands. Oyeyinka who spent two decades working in several United Nations agencies is currently the Senior Special Adviser to Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank currently based in Abidjan. The second work, Decolonising African Studies; Knowledge Production, Agency and Voice, published by University of Rochester Press is written by Professor Toyin Falola, distinguished Humanities Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, United States.
One of the reasons for bringing these two intellectual works to public attention goes beyond the fact that they were published this year to include the simple reason that most Nigerians may never encounter them. These include our policy makers who need them most and, regrettably, some of our academics who may never have access to them unless they order them electronically. The much talked about marriage between town and gown often does not take place in countries like ours partly because of a dearth of resources, the disinclination of non-academics to root with our intellectual culture and the increasing datedness of much of our scholarship, the bulk of which sadly takes place at the backwaters of the global academic matrix.
The book by Oyeyinka and Lai puts into impressive contexts the travails and status of African economies compared to the Asian ones, many of which transformed themselves from the relegated province of underdevelopment to the cutting edges of technological and industrial development, while carrying the majority of their people along into substantial welfare upgrades. In contrast, however, African economies and societies continued to vegetate on the margins of contemporary modernisation breakthroughs while leaving their populace in a lurch in which they descended from one degree of poverty to another.
According to the authors, five to six decades after independence, African countries remain the least economically diversified and consequently extremely dependent on natural resources. This is fairly well-known. What is not so well-known is that in present terms the future looks bleak for Nigeria and other African countries because, with one or two exceptions, the continent is yet to liberate itself from raw material extraction and the sale of commodities subject to the vagaries of the global market in exchange for manufactured goods. Why are Nigeria and other African countries not developing? Largely because of the failure to diversify their economies away from the enclave character, which it has acquired over time, failure to insert themselves in scientific and technological developments, institutional deficiencies, grand corruption and the lack of developmental vision.
Hopefully and somehow, the book may reach the hands of several of those angling to lead us in 2023. It will be a shame if the next crop of leaders takes office without an economic breakthrough charter.
The second book has been described as Falola’s magnum opus by one reviewer, Oluwatoyin Adepoju, who insists that if the author wrote nothing else he would have established himself as a seminal and major thinker and theorist of post-colonial Africa. Of course, those who doubt the claim or simply wish to verify it are free to access it, if they can, as this columnist is only able to provide the preliminary taste of the pudding which lies in the actual eating. Needless to say that this is not a policy handbook iterating low-hanging fruits for the next Minister of Information and Culture; nonetheless, after all the academic prospecting, the book offers strategies on how to decolonise the Nigerian and African academies while raising issues relating to language, literature, identity, gender and totems. As Falola makes clear, the battle to free African studies and culture from their colonial umbilical cords has been a long and protracted one. As an undergraduate at the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), one of my first intellectual shocks was the recounted reaction of the former Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, Hugh Trevor-Roper, when he was confronted by African students that they wanted to be taught African history. As documented in several books, Trevor-Roper answered bluntly, not to say sharply, that “there is nothing like African history. The story of Africa is the exploits of white men in Africa…”
Nobody needs to tell anyone that knowledge may be power but power—economic, social and cultural—often sets the boundaries of knowledge. After Trevor-Roper’s infamous statement, a generation of Nigerian historians, who were taught at Oxford and other Western universities that there is nothing like African history, began the project to decolonise their discipline from the ethnocentric stranglehold of Western academies. That resulted in the well-known Ibadan History School with names like J. F. Ade-Ajayi, Tekena Tamuna, R. A. Adeleye, Bolanle Awe among others at the forefront. Several years later, Yusuf Bala Usman, radical nationalist scholar, began a new revisionism by arguing that the Ibadan History School had run its course and achieved its limited objective. They wrote history, he alleged, as if only kings, princes and nobles were worth talking about. The masses, their livelihoods, their politics, religion and bondage had not been talked about. So, Usman undertook, at the time at Ahmadu Bello University, a process of curriculum revision which inserted the ordinary people into the writing of Nigerian history. Unfortunately, that worthy goal-setting appeared to have been short-lived because of the passing on of that great scholar.
I narrate this to show both the importance and many-sidedness of decolonisation of African studies which continues to go on, though not at any real speed, in several disciplines. In some disciplines like Political Science, the work has stalled while in Economics, the dominant school is still the hegemonic neo-liberal economics shot through by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank perspectives.
Falola’s book, therefore, though magisterial, will open up several rivulets even political ones such as how much of Nigerian identity and culture will our children and grandchildren trained at Oxford and Cambridge imbibe?
The two books will no doubt enrich our knowledge and database on the Nigerian project and provide clues as to how to end the protracted Nigerian nightmare.
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