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By the way, this really is something that I'm very,

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very excited about this this launch on the special issue itself because it's been four years in the making and any of you,

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the Facebook friends of me or Twitter followers will know that I've been

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shamelessly promoting both this issue and this event over the course of the week.

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I've been trying to do the whole 21st century kind of scholar thing of getting the work out,

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which we think is a really important academic contribution to a really important

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set of debates to networks of scholars that might be interested in this.

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So I've been apologies if if you've been bombarded by by my Twitter feed.

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I do think though before we get into, I need to work on my my target audience and how I reach my target audience as the

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only person up until yesterday to have commented on my Facebook post with my mother,

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who said, Looks good, then this case, it's not really the sort of impact it was looking to have, but you know, I'll take it anyway.

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So the issue is entitled Student Activism in an era of decolonisation,

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and I think it's quite timely insofar as it builds upon a resurgence of interest in student

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activism that's occurred since the Rhodes must fall in the FeesMustFall movement in South Africa,

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whom we have some participants of wits in the room today, as well as the Decolonise,

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the academy movement in the global north and many institutions in the global north.

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Now, when Luke and I started working on our doctorates on student activism,

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we were actually interested in a different tradition of student protest and kind of keyed into a different tradition,

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which was the sorts of activism and protests that were going on on a lot of African campuses over the last 30

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years has largely been associated with issues of structural adjustment and emaciation of African universities.

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But these two traditions of student activism do have some similarities.

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First, I think one of the key shared characteristics are student belief,

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shared belief in the notion of political agency, their sense of political urgency that they can produce change.

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And the second is the fear often held by institutional and political authorities

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about these young people that these young people somehow in my movement,

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Dhoni's words can be catalysts to get other groups to act.

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A contention of this special issue is that to understand the power and shape of

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student identities today requires appreciating where these identities come from.

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Hence, this special issue explores some of the foundational moments of student activism

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in late colonial and early post-colonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

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This was the era of decolonisation, when university education was deeply embedded in dominant ideas of state building.

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Now, despite that, the state of the existing literature on this particular era is quite thin.

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Instead, scholars have focussed on other periods. Historians of nationalism have often focussed on the university experiences of anti-colonial

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nationalist leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta or cleaning crew that have spent time in London or Paris,

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or, in fact, the ideas of the West African Students Union, which was founded in London in 1925.

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At the other end of this period, scholars of politics have often looked at understood student activism in the 1980s and 1990s as a kind of key

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constituency within processes of democratisation and as a kind of response to structural adjustment politics.

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The literature that does exist on this particular period has tended to emphasise two really important things.

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First, that these student protests have often been an example of the beginning of the

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turn of post-colonial governments to more authoritarian forms of governance.

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So the beginning of this process of this kind of more authoritarian government.

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Second, these these student activism during these years has often been seen as contests between elites,

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political elites that are in power and students as proto elites.

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So notions of elite contestation and student activism as being a process of elite formation.

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Now, I think these two points are really important. But the literature on this era has often lose sight of a few things.

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First, it often loses sight of the content of student politics themselves,

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and in particular, the radical ideas the radical, leftist and pan-African ideas.

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They're often animated politics in this era and student protest in this era. Second.

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Did that sort of literature doesn't really appreciate the what the implication that these ideas had

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and these practises of student had on the lives of student leaders after they left university?

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So viewing students only as a constituency as students doesn't appreciate their role as elites if they did go on to become elites.

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Third, this literature tends not to understand the differences between how postcolonial states responded

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to these protests and the variants of the kind of type of state society relationship that exists.

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And lastly, this sort of literature has often been largely national in focus and ignore the hundreds of thousands of

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African students that during the Cold War started the campuses abroad on both sides of the Iron Curtain,

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as well as across the Third World. So what a special issue tries to do in the round cumulative, the gestalt of the special issue,

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we try and address open up three lines of enquiry for Iran three themes.

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First, we try and expand the idea of higher education as a process of elite formation in

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postcolonial Africa and explore the implications of this by using oral histories.

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Many of the papers track how these how student politics shaped people's aspirations and informed people's life and career trajectories.

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These were people who often went on to play critical roles in the foundation of opposition parties in the 1980s.

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So in understanding those opposition parties and the genesis of their ideas, appreciating student activism in the 60s and 70s is quite important.

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Second, these papers consider the relations of ambivalence that developed between African states and university students in this era

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and explores the varied ways in which student activism and state power came to be mutually constitutive of one another.

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During this period, and third, some of the papers in this issue track the transnational dimensions of student activism

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and chart the ways in which experiences student experiences on campuses across the world.

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Shaped political ideas differently created different notions of praxis and the state,

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and led to the establishment of different forms of Diaspora networks of solidarity.

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So those are the kind of key conceptual contributions that this special who

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seeks to make and in terms of empirically the papers within this special issue.

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Also at very specific country histories on literature on Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, on Kenya, on Niger,

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on Sudan and Uganda, on Zimbabwe and South Africa, and on a diverse array of African experiences in East Germany.

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So that's what the special issue in the round attempts to do and before moving on to the three of the papers.

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So you'll get a taste of three of the papers, one from Luke, one from Massey and one from myself.

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I just before we move on to that, I want to say a very, very heartfelt thanks.

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First of all, to Africa Journal for guiding us through this process and accepting our papers.

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So thank you. As our editor, thank you, Stephanie, as our editor as well.

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And also thanks to Deborah, who's been key in this as well.

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And also thanks to David Prutton, who sadly can't be here, but who was important in linking us up initially into the journal.

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And secondly, I'd also like to say this was the workshop.

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We had a workshop around which these papers were based in 2016,

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which was held here in Oxford at the Department of International Development, and we have some really critical and important feedback.

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So I'd just like to say thanks to my my lama who isn't here, David Anderson, who also isn't here.

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But for those who are here for Josh Alexander, who gave some really great feedback and for some quite a good,

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he gave an absolutely excellent keynote speech. So thank you to you as well.

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So lastly, to say go, go and read the special issue, please make sure that I'm not just tweeting to my mother,

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but that it's actually hitting the academic audiences that I'd like it to hit.

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And now over to look. OK. Hi, everybody.

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My name's al-Shara. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Universidad de Los Santos in Bogota and Colombia.

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I co-edited the special issue with Dan and I co-wrote the introduction.

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I think thematically,

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my paper fits neatly into the second theme that they spoke about in that I think it's primarily interested in charting the ambivalent

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relationship that developed between post-colonial African states and university students in the initial post-colonial decades.

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My papers case study is Kenya, and I want to start today's talk where I began the paper,

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and that is with a coup attempt in August of 1982 against the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi.

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Now, the coup attempt fails,

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and more uses this opportunity to attempt to consolidate his power and marginalise his opponents so he overhauls the security forces.

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He reconstitutes the Air Force and significantly for the purposes of my paper.

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He initiates a major crackdown against the University of Nairobi.

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Now, for those of you familiar with Kenyan political history of this period.

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This will come as no surprise because by the late 1970s,

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the University of Nairobi and its constituent Kenyatta College had come to be a centre on important centre of national dissent within the country.

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In fact, in the lead up to the coup, the tensions between the state and university faculty and university students had began to rapidly deteriorate.

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So you have the student union being banned in October of 1979.

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Remember, Moyo comes to power in August of 78. You have the academic staff union being registered in 1980,

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and then it starts to get nuts because Moise starts to literally start imprisoning both student leaders and leftist faculty.

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Right?

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So when university students decide to take to the streets to celebrate the premature and ultimately inaccurate news that the Moyo regime had fallen,

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their reputation as enemies of the state is cemented.

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And so in October of 1982, it's not surprising that Moye makes a public address,

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and in this public address, he announces that the university is going to be disbanded.

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And here's what he says. He asserts that he wanted that the government and I'm quoting here,

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wanted a new university with no prospect henceforth that it could lie in our midst as a source or instrument of destruction end quote.

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In that same speech, Moyes singled out university students specifically for criticism,

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arguing that the university and this is a real quote, by the way,

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had been brought and I'm quoting now brought into disrepute by a student body which proved

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itself pathetically vulnerable to the crudest stupidities of dialectical subversion end quote.

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I still have no idea what that means. These remarks suggested that Moise simply did not aspire to create a new university,

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but that he wanted to create a new kind of university student, one that was loyal and obedient to his regime.

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And a big part of this agenda is the focus of my paper, right?

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It's the introduction in May of 1984 of the National Youth Service Pre-University Training Programme.

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This is a mandatory a mandatory programme of 14 weeks of paramilitary training that every

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university student men and woman had to go through prior to arriving at Kenyan universities,

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right? And the idea with this was that the programme would help to facilitate the transformation of prospective

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university students into responsible and disciplined citizens who would offer their loyalty to Moyes regime.

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In practise, the key central argument of my paper is that the scheme had unintended consequences, right?

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Instead of fostering obedient and loyal university students who were ideologically committed to moist political project.

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The programme served to further alienate these students from the ruling party,

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helping to politicise a significant portion of them who by the time they arrive on campus,

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confront the Moyo regime with some of its most defiant political challenges of this period.

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Essentially, the article is arguing that the new dispute played a crucial and hitherto unacknowledged role

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in shaping student activism at the University of Nairobi during the latter half of the 1980s,

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and I highlight a number of ways in which I believe that this was the case, right?

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One of them is for many student recruits. The camp is.

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Released as an unwarranted punishment.

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This creates a sense of grievance amongst them, and it's around these grievances that they begin to develop collective solidarity and through

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which a small but vocal core of these student recruits come to embrace oppositional politics.

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So that's one to the programme unwittingly provides these students with the time and space to construct and nourish and nurture durable social bonds,

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i.e., they become buddies, right? And they begin to refine, in some cases, their political ideas prior to their arrival on campus.

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So these bonds come to be utilised. Once students arrive on campus and they begin to politically organise, finally,

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there's a kind of haphazard political education that can use offering in these afternoon lectures at the camp.

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Right.

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And so you got a bunch of Nairobi bigwigs coming, and they're talking about the history of the ruling party development strategies, yada yada yada.

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But the important part of this is it gives these student recruits a kind of novel,

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unprecedented opportunity to confront the government to criticise the government publicly, often for the first time in their lives.

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They're able to have this opportunity, right? And so two things happened as a result of this one.

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Students see who their leaders should be. They're able to identify the brave ones, the most firebrand ones.

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And a lot of these guys kind of develop a reputation before they arrive on campus, and this ensures their political success once they arrive.

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The second part of this is for a lot of students. It exposes the ideological shortcomings of the Kanu regime to them.

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And so in some ways,

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I guess what I'm arguing the paper is that while the noise spewed effectively serves to discipline and punish the bodies of student recruits,

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it's guilty of disregarding their minds and the consequences of that.

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I'm going to talk a little bit about later in the presentation, so there's a lot of stuff I got to skip, obviously, because it's a long paper.

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The first part of the paper kind of looks over or situates the emergence of NYC kuti within a broader history of nation building within Kenya,

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but also the broader history of student activism within Nairobi.

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The argument I'm making is that the NYS needs to be understood as as the kind of moist

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state responding to how do we deal with this problem of student unrest and dissonance?

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Right. And this is the solution that they devise in the second part of the lecture.

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I look at the actual experience of the camp from the perspective of the student recruits himself.

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I was very, very lucky to interview a number of them, and a lot of this stuff is fascinating.

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One of the key parts of this section of the paper is that students experience this as a punishment,

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and one of the reasons they do is because the people overseeing these camps are often buds, right?

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They are regular NYS servicemen. And so what a lot of these student recruits say is I did all of this work.

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I came from the rural areas. I was the best student. I succeeded and I'm being treated like in one of the students said there's a school dropout.

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In other words, I'm being punished for excelling these guys. You don't have anywhere near.

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My educational achievements are able to kind of play the tune and I got to follow it, and they resented that.

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Anybody who knows Kenyan politics probably knows me going to Miguna. He's one of the guys I interviewed.

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He's still a kind of pillar of oppositional politics in Kenya, and this is what he had to say about his treatment at the camp.

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This is a direct quote. This was the worst of it. These are funders are subjecting you to this sort of dehumanising treatment.

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And these people did not finish. Elementary school cannot speak English. All they know was shouting.

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And for them, they get satisfaction of having to do this to someone who presumably performed better than them and progressed to A-levels end quote.

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Right. So you get the sense where the poor treatment of these student recruits makes them begin to have profound questions not only about the camp,

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but about the government that organised it and sanctioned its conditions. And so what ends up happening is the experience of the NYU.

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Spotty left many student recruits feeling more alienated from and antagonistic towards

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the state and the ruling party under more than they had been when they arrived.

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In the fourth part of the the essay, which I'll talk, I'll spend the rest of the time talking about the kind of exciting part.

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It's when these student recruits arrive at Nairobi, and initially it looks like this reform is working.

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This is almost like a 10 month period where there are no protests.

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Then in early February, three students are expelled and another five have their scholarships revoked and students go nuts.

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They start boycotting classes.

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They they start to initiate a High Court injunction against expulsion, and they're demanding that the state explains expulsions.

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And one of the shocking things for the regime. Is that at the heart of these protests that emerged in February of 1985?

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Are these NYS graduates? So on February 10, students organise a nondenominational prayer meeting because they think that there's no way the university

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administration will stop a prayer meeting and the right and NYS graduates decide they want to dress up in their NYS,

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puty uniforms and do a guard of honour on campus that is going to be inspected by a student leader by the name of one to wear them a.

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So essentially a normally a guard of honour would be inspected by the head of state or high ranking military official in this case.

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They want it to be inspected by a dissident student leader, and the symbolism here is hard to miss, right?

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It's the argument being that the university has come to be a state unto itself.

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In other words, that the students no longer recognised state authority when Maganda comes to speak.

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He's almost immediately hauled off and arrested, and police and the GSU begin to literally beat on the students that are attended at this meeting.

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But the students fight back now in the aftermath of this.

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You've got policemen injured, you've got students injured and one student dies.

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But even this clash, 19 students are arrested after universities closed a month later.

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These students are told that they have to return their NYS uniforms.

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Remember, they were given these uniforms as a token of appreciation for how well they did in the camps.

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The only way they get readmitted is if they give back the uniforms.

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Guess what they do to the uniforms they start marching around Canada, college and military drills that they learnt at NYS.

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And they burn the uniforms at the main Gate of Canada College, right?

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These two events make the Moye regime realised for the first time.

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[INAUDIBLE], we're in trouble here. This may be having counterproductive outcomes.

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And as one student put it to me,

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this proved that noise and I'm quoting again had become a space where you are radicalised by the time you were coming out of NYU Sport.

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You know who the enemy is, i.e. the Kenyan state after Bloody Sunday,

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which is what the the the February 10th event was called more realised that he had a monster on his hands.

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End quote. Right. So there's a momentary lull in protests.

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But in 1987, Wafula book, Who's an NYC puty graduate, comes to be a legendary student leader.

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He is elected in an unprecedented landslide as the head of the student union.

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Remember, in his first year as a student before he's elected, he pro.

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He leads a protest against the American bombing of Libya that gets national press coverage.

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And here's what he said to me and I'm quoting again.

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I can imagine if you just came to the university straight from home, you can take a little while before you make your way around.

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But remember, I organised a demo in the first year. I had never been in Nairobi since I was born.

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The first time I'm landing in Nairobi University, I am conscious and confident enough to organise a demo in solidarity with another country out there.

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The reason was because my foreplay had been done in the spot and quote right.

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Days after he ascends to power with this radical cabinet, they have a public comecou and a political meeting where they essentially say three things.

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One, that they want to ban all ethnic associations on campus because they think it's a source of disunity.

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Two. They want to stop government funded student trips abroad with moit because they

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see it as a way that the government is distributing patronage to students.

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And three they demand that their student colleagues become more active in national political debates.

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Two days later, they're rounded up in the middle of the night on campus and the entire cabinet is arrested.

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Students respond in the absence of their union leadership by literally clashing with state forces over the next couple of days.

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43 of those students are expelled. The university is closed again.

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The student union is banned and will continue to be banned for almost the next 10 years and for the first time ever,

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more says We're going to introduce user fees.

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You're going to have to start paying to go to this university now and book is is remains in prison for the next five years.

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So this is a dramatic event now, with over 20 university closures between 1970 and 1990.

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Perhaps no university in Africa was more disrupted by student unrest during this period than the University of Nairobi.

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So in some respects, you can say, well, the November 1987 protests fit a predictable pattern a predictable cycle of protests in Kenya.

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But I'm making the argument in the paper that the widespread popularity of the newly

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elected new leadership in conjunction with their explicitly progressive political agenda,

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demonstrates the unprecedented sense of unity and anti-regime sentiment that had come to mark.

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Kenya's young generation of university students during this period. And I think the only way that we can understand these developments is if we take

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seriously the experiences of the NYPD because against the government's best laid plans.

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The Moye regime's decision to implement the NYPD, which was designed to rein in dissidents of its very students, had produced the opposite effect.

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It plays a significant role in fostering the creation of an unprecedentedly united

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militant and mobilised student mass that was unafraid to publicly challenge the regime.

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Thank you very much.