Jeune Street

The past week has brought a couple of excellent posts on higher education in Africa. Thabo Mbeki delivered the Africa Day Lecture at the Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute, calling for more intellectual production in Africa. Here's Alex de Waal's take on some of the main themes:

As with material goods, Africa is a primary producer of intellectual resources, and also a consumer of finished intellectual products, but makes little contribution to the value that is added in between. Much (perhaps most) African intellectual production occurs under northern (American and European) contracts. Consequently, Africa’s intellectual agenda is set outside the continent, with African scholars are co-opted as consultants and primary researchers, while the ablest of them are provided with careers in western universities, research institutes and policy institutions. The final product is then re-exported, its value having been multiplied many times over, to Africa for consumption by African people, governments and institutions. The fact that African names appear as authors of these products does not necessarily mean that they are more “African-owned” than a mobile phone containing African coltan is an African product. Meanwhile African leaders have become so estranged from the structures of intellectual production that they overlook the strategic importance of paying for domestic universities and research and hence owning the processes of generating and refining ideas.

The next generation also speaks: Iyinoluwa “E” Aboyeji, a Nigerian student at the University of Waterloo:

The current system where African higher education receives little or no support while universities in the west launch multi-million dollar “Development Research Centres” they don’t need is not only clearly unsustainable, but highly self serving. It pushes an imperialistic mindset that allows western institutions to serve as command centres for Africa’s economic and political systems without the proper context and it leaches Africa’s best academic minds, leaving young Africans not fortunate enough to afford an expensive international education largely clueless and underesourced with respect to international development issues in their own countries (HT: Chris Blattman).

It all makes David Strangway's proposal for Africa Research Chairs sound like an opportunity for far-sighted donors to invest in long-term Africa's development.