by Kenneth Walker

As universities on the continent grow stronger, research and science with a particular emphasis on practical results to aid national development are on the upswing. But can this trend continue, given the pressures to Westernize?

Long before the murders, rapes and mutilations that resulted from one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, the Sierra Leone of Dr. Monty Jones’ childhood recollections seem almost idyllic. “It was a beautiful and peace-loving country,” Jones recalls, adding. “People looked out for one another.”

“Certainly, no one back then could possibly dream of any Sierra Leonean doing anything like ‘short-sleeving’ or ‘long-sleeving,’” adds Jones, referring to the practice of civil war rebels of cutting off the limbs of their victims either at the hand or the elbow.

“Sure,” he continues, “there was some hunger and poverty, but I couldn’t imagine a better place to grow up than Sierra Leone. Our currency was on par with the dollar.”

As the son of an engineer and a teacher, Jones—currently executive secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa—lived a life of privilege. It was not unusual for government ministers and other officials to be invited to dinner. Jones recalls being enthralled with the conversations he overheard about the challenges facing Sierra Leone and the continent—about the need to alleviate hunger and poverty and the desire to see Africa grow. Jones and his siblings were sent to Roman Catholic schools and made to attend mass seven days a week. Jones looked forward to the rituals of the church, where he served as an altar boy.

But as Jones was nearing the end of secondary school, a great rift developed between him and the Irish priests he had loved so long.

“The fathers wanted me to go to seminary and study to become a priest,” Jones recalls. “I told them I wanted to go into agricultural science. They were very angry with me, but I said that I wanted to help produce food that would help feed the world.”

With his father’s support, Jones defied the priests and chose his own path.

This October, Jones will become the first African scientist to receive the prestigious $250,000 World Food Prize. “When I come to America to receive the prize,” Jones says, “I hope, somehow, the priests learn about it and realize that I made the right choice.”

Jones is receiving the award for almost single-handedly transforming rice farming in West Africa. Early in his career as a research scientist, Jones noticed that West African rice, which has been under cultivation for 3,500 years, seemed to grow almost anywhere—in swamps, mountains, plains—even in areas known for recurring droughts.

Several millennia of exposure to such harsh conditions had made the rice extraordinarily hardy—resistant to pests, salinity, acidity, viral and fungal diseases, weeds and droughts. There was just one problem: the rice had very low yields.

“Asian species,” Jones said, “have more than four or five times more grain. It was obvious to me we needed to combine the two.”

That’s exactly what Jones did. The result was “New Rice for Africa,” or NERICA. The new strain of rice retained the hardiness of the African variety and exceeded the yields of the Asian rice. And the normal six-month harvest time was cut in half. NERICA is transforming agriculture in much of West Africa—benefiting twenty million farmers, most of whom are women who were previously unemployed. Its cultivation is spreading through much of West, East and Central Africa.

Demand for rice is growing faster there than anywhere else in the world. Imports drain an annual $3 billion from these African economies.

“Imagine,” Jones says, “what difference that $3 billion can make in the lives of the people in those countries.”

Research and Science: Coming Back from Diaspora
As a scientist, Jones is rare, not only for his talent, but for his continued presence on the continent. Africa never had many scientists to begin with, according to the international reference book, African Higher Education (Indiana University Press, 2003). In the 1960s, which many consider to be the era of African independence, the continent had only six universities and these enrolled only a handful of students.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, reached independence without a single engineer, lawyer or doctor. Most of the professionals the country was able to produce were driven away by decades of tyrannical rule by the late Mobutu Sese Seko and a murderous and long civil war, which, while officially ended, still produces occasional outbreaks of violence.

Rwanda had its own unique brain drain. Joseph Karemera, the current Rwandan ambassador to South Africa, was his country’s minister of education immediately after the genocidal
violence that took place there in 1994 was crushed.

“Out of 3,000 students and professors,” Karemera says, “we lost 1,500 students and 200 lecturers to the genocide. We had to bring in foreign manpower to assist us in the government and the university. We also tried to attract our people in the Diaspora to come back and assist. And we sent out hundreds of students to study in India, the U.S. and other African countries.”

Finally, Karemera founded the Kigali Institutes of Science and Technology, Education, Health, and Agriculture as a means of rebuilding Rwanda’s academic and scientific classes.

In the years following independence, new governments, focusing on development, nurtured a small but vibrant academic community in Africa.

But over the next 25 years, as wars, economic collapse, one-party states and military dictators crippled much of the continent, many—perhaps even most—of Africa’s scientists and academics were forced overseas.

Between 600 and 700 Ghanaian physicians, for example, are practicing in the U.S. alone. That’s half the total population of doctors remaining in Ghana. An estimated 10,000 Nigerian academics now work in America. Between 1980 and 1991, only 39 percent of Ethiopian students returned from studies abroad out of 22,700 who left.

Many of the academics who soldiered on in Africa increasingly abandoned research and development activities as their universities thought them too expensive to maintain. Numerous scientists were forced into side work, like chicken and pig farming, just to make ends meet.

The result, according to the Science Citation Index, is that Africa accounts for 0.4 percent of the world’s R&D expenditures and produces just 0.3 percent of “mainstream science.”

But recent visits and conversations throughout much of West, Central, East and Southern Africa show that this picture is slowly beginning to change.

The number of conflict zones has decreased. Multi-party democracy is taking hold in several countries and the economies of several nations have begun a slow but steady climb. African nations also declared a new era of accountability in founding the African Union and the launching of the New Partnership for African Development, both committed to continent-wide socioeconomic progress. In addition, many universities have initiated radical reforms in their operations in close cooperation with their governments.

International donors are also contributing. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other donors spent years refusing to fund tertiary education activities in Africa, insisting that this was a waste of money better spent on primary and secondary education.

But times have changed. The World Bank, for example, now recognizes the value of supporting higher education in Africa and other funders, such as Carnegie Corporation of New York, are emphasizing the support of African universities in their grantmaking programs. The Corporation is also part of the Foundation Partnership to Strengthen African Universities, which has pledged to provide $100 million over five years to advance universities in six sub-Saharan countries. The other members of the partnership are the Ford, MacArthur and Rockefeller foundations.

All this has served to create a kind of nascent rebirth of scientific research in Africa—but there is very little of what is referred to as “ivory tower” science, or basic research, in most of Africa. Virtually all of it is strictly applied and practical. The research is focused like a laser on poverty alleviation, food security, healthcare, economic development and fundamental social issues, such as the link between cultural practices and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Research on food security addresses how to increase the production of staples like rice, corn, cassava and bananas. Elsewhere, many scientists are focused on curing or alleviating Africa’s tropical diseases.

Some scientists insist that the relative absence of basic or theoretical research will always leave African science behind. Others, like Dr. Asifa Nanyaro, director general of the Tanzania Industrial Research and Development Organization, are not as pessimistic. “We have many challenges in Africa,” he says. “We have limited resources and capacity, and there is a great demand for solutions to problems. If we don’t alleviate poverty and grow our economies, there will be no one left to do basic research. Once African economies grow, there will be enough time and money to go off and think deep thoughts. The next generation can do that.”

The combined efforts at reviving African universities and the research within them has led to the formation of what one scientist calls “islands of excellence” in African research, which are often focused around scientists like Monty Jones. These leading researchers have much in common. They tend, like Jones, to have received postgraduate training in top Western or Japanese universities. Most seem to come from professional and deeply religious families. Almost all share a messianic zeal to make a contribution to Africa’s development. Each seems acutely aware that, to many in the West, the phrase “African scholarship and research” is an oxymoron.

Next page: Dr. Keto Mshigeni, professor of marine botany at the University of Namibia, is one of the new breed of African scientists.

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