Why African Intellectualism Needs to Move Beyond Decolonisation

More than 60 years after independence, decolonisation remains appealing to large swaths of Africans. Writers and other creative artists occassionally make it the core subject of their enterprise. Scholars in African studies still latch on to decolonisation as the magnum opus of ideas. And, of course, contemporary putschists have made it their article of faith when they justify seizing power from the political class. It is almost a given that to present yourself as an African intellectual or activist, you have to wear the insignia of decolonisation.

More than 6 decades after what Ademola Araoye calls flag independence in his book Ghettos of Pan-Africanism, we seem not to want to move on ideologically as we continue to fight what we see, at best, as the vestiges of colonialism and, at worst, brazen imperialism, on the continent. No wonder the recent coups in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso were greeted with excitement. These putschists were immediately deified as messiahs who will sever their countries from the imperialist apron strings of France. This troika of revolutionaries has been described as a model for other African leaders. There is a straight line you can draw from public intellectuals (think Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o) to activist politicians (think Kwame Nkrumah) to musicians (think Fela Kuti). Whether it is Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude or Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism, the call has consistently been for Africans to divest themselves of the white man’s colonial programming.

Yet, I find a contradiction at the heart of the decolonisation discourse. Creative writing has a doctrine: show, don’t tell. If truly African history or culture is as great as our thought leaders make it seem, we should be doing more showing than telling. Wole Soyinka was spot on in his response to Senghor’s Negritude. He quipped that ‘a Tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.’ The decolonisation orthodoxy, I’m afraid, has largely been in the realm of telling by constantly mourning the loss of an idyllic cosmology because of the evil white man. And, again, we’ve done this for some 60 odd years.

My attempt here is not to chart a new vision for decolonisation. Rather, my intention is to express my frustration at how the supremacy of the anti-colonial discourse has stunted our growth in other areas of intellectual enterprise. Apart from what I call victim studies (Africanism, Pan-Africanism, Decolonisation, etc), Africa contributes little in terms of knowledge and research. For instance, Africa produces about 1.1 per cent of global scientific knowledge. When you imagine who an African intellectual is, the image that pops up in your head is likely to be some grey-haired, Danshiki-wearing, bespectacled academic whose shtick is to lecture his fellow Africans on the ills of colonial mentality or to use Fela’s neologism, colo mentality. When it comes to other discourses, from the social sciences to the natural sciences, nobody thinks of Africa. I blame this on over 60 years of championing the victim studies.

Name a famous African psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, archaeologist, or geneticist. Name an African science communicator like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, or Carl Sagan. The point isn’t that we don’t have academics in these fields. The issue is that they do not have the acclaim of anti-colonial figures like Wole Soyinka. Might I add that the quality of research we do in these fields is abysmal and has little relevance in addressing issues within the African purview. And even in situations where we do actual, meaningful research, it goes almost always unnoticed, even within intellectual circles. 

I recently read Anxious Generation by one of my intellectual heroes, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist in the US. The book explores the harmful effects smartphones and social media have on young people. Haidt shows that around 2010, Gen Z became the first generation to reach puberty in the age of social media and smartphones, and that had acute psychological and social effects on them. Thanks to his book and research, countries like Australia have legislated laws banning under-16s from social media. Some states in the US have either passed similar laws or are currently working towards that direction. This is a case of an academic applying the tools of his field to study a social phenomenon. By the way, psychology is one of the fields we pay little regard to in Nigeria. I can’t count how many videos I have seen of some dude saying that no one in their right senses should waste four years studying disciplines like psychology in Nigeria. I say, exactly because of this attitude and our constant emphasis on victim studies, is why we are where we are today.

Apart from the supremacy of victim studies, we also have a culture that detests scholarship. And this pans out in the quality of conversations we have online and offline. Our academics certainly do not help matters. They are guilty of intellectual elitism and that’s why they do not use social media or often grant requests for podcast interviews. One of the consequences of this is when they do meaningful research, the rest of of us are likely not to know about it. I wrote recently that in countries like America, Canada, and the UK, there are academics who have superstar status and following because they put themselves out there. I wrote:

“Richard Dawkins, an English professor of evolutionary biology, has a huge following on social media. He has written bestseller books. He has done numerous podcast appearances and, in fact, has a podcast of his own. Everybody, of course, knows Jordan Peterson. Before Peterson got famous, he had been posting his lectures on YouTube for years. Gad Saad, a professor of evolutionary psychology in Canada, has had a podcast for about 10 years. He has a sizeable number of followers on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. His book, The Parasitic Mind, is a bestseller. And what about Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, and Jeffrey Sachs? I could go on and on. These are famous academics you can’t accuse of intellectual elitism. I’ve personally learned a great deal from watching them and reading their books.”

In an academic culture where victim studies reign supreme, no one, of course, will know academics in fields like philosophy. Ironically, the solution to our many social-economic and socio-cultural problems lies in a rigorous pursuit of knowledge across all fields of discipline. From the humanities to the social sciences to the natural sciences to applied sciences, knowledge should be pursued and celebrated. We’ve had more than 60 years of books, papers, and lectures on decolonisation. The unintended consequence of this is that we’ve been stuck and we’ve cheated ourselves out of the gains of other fields of academic endeavour.

I often hear people say that Africa needs to invest massively in STEM and I completely agree. But I will caution that we should not make the same mistake we made in making the victim studies the focus of African scholarship if we begin to invest in STEM. We definitely need to take science, technology, engineering, and mathematics seriously. They hold the solution to problems like infrastructural decay and public health crises. I hate the fact that Africa has to always depend on the West for simple things like vaccines. Remember how we had to wait for Ebola vaccines to be developed in America? Indeed, the reality of not taking STEM seriously stares at us right in the face. However, we should not prioritise STEM at the expense of the social sciences, the humanities, and other fields. Everyone from historians to epidemiologists ideally plays an important role in any society. The pursuit of knowledge is not a zero-sum game. As a matter of fact, I believe in a consilient approach to knowledge.

I don’t want to always have to turn to academics and thinkers from other countries before I learn, say, evolutionary psychology. Though African academics write papers every now and then (after all, we live in a publish-or-perish culture), Africa is grossly under-researched in important areas. I want to see social phenomena like thuggery researched. For instance, I have a hypothesis that there is a nexus between fatherlessness and thuggery. We need to research things like microplastics and nanoplastics in Nigeria. To what extent, for instance, does drinking pure water (sachet water) contribute to microplastics in our bodies? This is how to apply scientific tools to investigate real issues that affect us. Now, I’m not unaware that African scholarship suffers from inadequate funding. And I also find it ironic that a substantial part of research funding comes from abroad yet, we speechify all day long about the evils of western imperialism.

I joined a TikTok Live a few days ago on the culture of entitlement and the constant expectation for celebrities to do giveaways in Africa. I argued that if I could urge any celebrity or billionaire to give back meaningfully to society instead of their occasional giveaways, I’d tell them to give out research grants to African institutions. A society is only as good as the quality of its academia. Quality academic research has a lot of downstream consequences. Tellingly, Africa ranks poorly on the Global Innovation Index. That’s because we do not invest in the knowledge economy. Switzerland, the most innovative country in the world for 14 years in a row, spends approximately 3 per cent of its budget on research. If we took research a bit more seriously, we’d begin our ascent to innovation. The best way to show how great Africa is is to contribute meaningfully to knowledge. Then, we wouldn’t have to proclaim our tigritude, we’d be pouncing!