Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 1 | Scholarship Emerges in Africa, page 5

In addition to being Westernized, these first modern literary scholars also tended to be male, Conteh-Morgan notes. “African literature today is about widening the landscape. There are more women and more writers dealing with the many different peoples and places of Africa. Literature in Africa has entered the post-nationalist phase. There is a greater recognition of indigenous traditions. Writers are more prepared to examine the societies in which they live—warts and all. Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Wole Soyinka has always been a part of this modern tradition.”

Habila concurs, saying, “The new African writer is in many ways better placed to understand and represent Africa than his predecessors. The new writer is part of the new, powerless middle class. He has no privileges. Often the best job he can hope for is as a teacher or a journalist. He is also luckier than those who went before him because he has an emerging, indigenous, educated audience to address.”

The study of philosophy is also an emerging field in Africa: it simply did not exist on the continent 50 years ago. Dr. Sanya Osha, one of Africa’s leading philosophers, says that one of the first tasks within the discipline “was to debate whether there was such a thing as African philosophy. We wasted several decades on that question. But now we have moved beyond it to define it.”

African philosophy is different than in the West, Osha says, “because of the unique nature
of our experiences—out of which all philosophy arises—which include slavery, colonization, apartheid, decolonization and genocide.”

The “relevance” challenges confronting all African academics are hitting philosophers particularly hard, Osha notes, saying, “Within universities and governments, there is an unrelenting demand to know how the study and teaching of philosophy matters to the pressing developmental issues of society. This is forcing philosophers to adopt a more multi-disciplined approach—delving more into the social sciences, like history. Philosophers must now deal with issues like democracy and human rights in order to justify funding for research and even their very existence within universities.”

South Africa
Not surprisingly, perhaps the one country to have largely escaped such overarching demands for “relevance,” as well as many of the other issues confronting other scientists on the continent, is South Africa, which many scholars across Africa do not regard as a developing country.

Dr. Loyiso Nongxa, the vice chancellor of South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, acknowledges that the apartheid government “built a considerable research infrastructure” at universities there—a tradition the new government is maintaining. And whereas research in most of the rest of the continent is rigorously applied, South African scholars still find the funds and time for so-called basic research, or, as Nongxa put it, to do research for its own sake.

Not surprisingly, South Africa has the continent’s best-equipped laboratories and many of the continent’s most distinguished scholars. The vast majority of them, however, are white, as are the leaders in virtually every South African institution. “We face multiple challenges as black academics,” says Nongxa. “The primary challenge is to transform the universities so that the student body and faculty come to more closely resemble the black majority population.”

There are several budding South African scholars beginning to draw attention. One may be the only black astrophysicist on the continent. The cosmic imagination of Dr. Thebe Medupe of the South African Astronomical Observatory and North-West University, was fired as a child when he grew up in a poor village without electricity, looking up at the African sky while listening to the elders tell traditional stories about the African animals depicted there.

Another new researcher attracting a lot of attention is Tebello Nyokong, professor of physical-inorganic chemistry at Rhodes University, who recently achieved a breakthrough that may greatly improve treatments for cancer in its early stages. After 13 years of research, Nyokong has identified new molecules that, in combination with lasers, would destroy cancer cells.

Hard as it was for a black scientist to rise in a society where until the late 1980s such courses were reserved for whites, Nyokong, who is female, insists the difficulties for women are just as pressing. “I have been ostracized by men in the sciences. It’s definitely an old boys’ club. When it comes to socializing or mentoring or just being helpful, the men stick to themselves.”

Hard science research such as Nyokong’s has proceeded without much interruption in South Africa, but the social sciences have undergone a revolution, in that they have tracked the trends in the rest of the continent to emphasis more practical outcomes. Professor Deborah Posel, the director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), says that after the democratic government was elected ten years ago, “Those of us in social sciences realized that we had a responsibility to help reconstruct the country. A process of social engineering had to take place in order to redress the social engineering of apartheid.”

Many social scientists, Posel says, moved aggressively into applied research—either through the universities or as a result of an explosion of private consultancies. “That produced a very technocratic approach to knowledge production,” Posel adds. “We became fixated on knowledge that could be used to fix things. That is why we positioned WISER as one of the relatively few institutions left that reemphasizes basic research on the big questions,” she says. One of these “big” research questions, according to Posel, revolves around what she calls “the meanings of money.”

One of the problems posed by the many “meanings of money” presents a serious challenge to the development of scholars in South Africa, as well as throughout the rest of the continent. Most scholars interviewed for this article voiced serious concern about the continent’s ability to produce a new generation of scientists and researchers.

“A black graduate who has talent,” Posel says, “is snapped up by other fields. There’s the temptation of money, and there are huge sums of money to be made outside academia.” The story is the same all over Africa. Many scientists themselves say they would not encourage their children to pursue a path similar to theirs because ‘there’s no money in it.’”

“It’s a very serious problem,” agrees Professor Mayunga Nkunya of the Faculty of Science at the University of Dar es Salaam. “Law and economics are the most popular programs at the university. Developing countries need good scientists and engineers. If every good person becomes a lawyer, then the prosperity of Africa is at very serious stake.”

Dr. Monty Jones, the NERICA rice inventor, was perhaps the one voice of optimism regarding the future. “Not everyone can become lawyers or business people,” Jones said. “There will always be some students who are attracted to research and scholarship. As African countries continue to stabilize and grow, there will be more scholars. That is why, when I come to the U.S. in October to accept the World Food Prize, I will accept it on behalf of all of Africa. I will accept it for what we have done, we are now, and for what we will become.”

Kenneth Walker, who currently runs Lion House Productions, a South African strategic communications firm, has had a distinguished career as a journalist. In the U.S., he worked for ABC News, covering the White House as well as the U.S. Justice Department and also served as a foreign correspondent. Before that, for 13 years he reported for The Washington Star newspaper, which assigned him to South Africa in 1981 where his work earned several of the most prestigious awards in print journalism. In 1985 he won an Emmy for a series of reports he did on South Africa for the ABC news program Nightline.