By the way, this really is something that I'm very,
very excited about this this launch on the special issue itself because it's been four years in the making and any of you,
the Facebook friends of me or Twitter followers will know that I've been
shamelessly promoting both this issue and this event over the course of the week.
I've been trying to do the whole 21st century kind of scholar thing of getting the work out,
which we think is a really important academic contribution to a really important
set of debates to networks of scholars that might be interested in this.
So I've been apologies if if you've been bombarded by by my Twitter feed.
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
only person up until yesterday to have commented on my Facebook post with my mother,
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.
So the issue is entitled Student Activism in an era of decolonisation,
and I think it's quite timely insofar as it builds upon a resurgence of interest in student
activism that's occurred since the Rhodes must fall in the FeesMustFall movement in South Africa,
whom we have some participants of wits in the room today, as well as the Decolonise,
the academy movement in the global north and many institutions in the global north.
Now, when Luke and I started working on our doctorates on student activism,
we were actually interested in a different tradition of student protest and kind of keyed into a different tradition,
which was the sorts of activism and protests that were going on on a lot of African campuses over the last 30
years has largely been associated with issues of structural adjustment and emaciation of African universities.
But these two traditions of student activism do have some similarities.
First, I think one of the key shared characteristics are student belief,
shared belief in the notion of political agency, their sense of political urgency that they can produce change.
And the second is the fear often held by institutional and political authorities
about these young people that these young people somehow in my movement,
Dhoni's words can be catalysts to get other groups to act.
A contention of this special issue is that to understand the power and shape of
student identities today requires appreciating where these identities come from.
Hence, this special issue explores some of the foundational moments of student activism
in late colonial and early post-colonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
This was the era of decolonisation, when university education was deeply embedded in dominant ideas of state building.
Now, despite that, the state of the existing literature on this particular era is quite thin.
Instead, scholars have focussed on other periods. Historians of nationalism have often focussed on the university experiences of anti-colonial
nationalist leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta or cleaning crew that have spent time in London or Paris,
or, in fact, the ideas of the West African Students Union, which was founded in London in 1925.
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
constituency within processes of democratisation and as a kind of response to structural adjustment politics.
The literature that does exist on this particular period has tended to emphasise two really important things.
First, that these student protests have often been an example of the beginning of the
turn of post-colonial governments to more authoritarian forms of governance.
So the beginning of this process of this kind of more authoritarian government.
Second, these these student activism during these years has often been seen as contests between elites,
political elites that are in power and students as proto elites.
So notions of elite contestation and student activism as being a process of elite formation.
Now, I think these two points are really important. But the literature on this era has often lose sight of a few things.
First, it often loses sight of the content of student politics themselves,
and in particular, the radical ideas the radical, leftist and pan-African ideas.
They're often animated politics in this era and student protest in this era. Second.
Did that sort of literature doesn't really appreciate the what the implication that these ideas had
and these practises of student had on the lives of student leaders after they left university?
So viewing students only as a constituency as students doesn't appreciate their role as elites if they did go on to become elites.
Third, this literature tends not to understand the differences between how postcolonial states responded
to these protests and the variants of the kind of type of state society relationship that exists.
And lastly, this sort of literature has often been largely national in focus and ignore the hundreds of thousands of
African students that during the Cold War started the campuses abroad on both sides of the Iron Curtain,
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,
we try and address open up three lines of enquiry for Iran three themes.
First, we try and expand the idea of higher education as a process of elite formation in
postcolonial Africa and explore the implications of this by using oral histories.
Many of the papers track how these how student politics shaped people's aspirations and informed people's life and career trajectories.
These were people who often went on to play critical roles in the foundation of opposition parties in the 1980s.
So in understanding those opposition parties and the genesis of their ideas, appreciating student activism in the 60s and 70s is quite important.
Second, these papers consider the relations of ambivalence that developed between African states and university students in this era
and explores the varied ways in which student activism and state power came to be mutually constitutive of one another.
During this period, and third, some of the papers in this issue track the transnational dimensions of student activism
and chart the ways in which experiences student experiences on campuses across the world.
Shaped political ideas differently created different notions of praxis and the state,
and led to the establishment of different forms of Diaspora networks of solidarity.
So those are the kind of key conceptual contributions that this special who
seeks to make and in terms of empirically the papers within this special issue.
Also at very specific country histories on literature on Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, on Kenya, on Niger,
on Sudan and Uganda, on Zimbabwe and South Africa, and on a diverse array of African experiences in East Germany.
So that's what the special issue in the round attempts to do and before moving on to the three of the papers.
So you'll get a taste of three of the papers, one from Luke, one from Massey and one from myself.
I just before we move on to that, I want to say a very, very heartfelt thanks.
First of all, to Africa Journal for guiding us through this process and accepting our papers.
So thank you. As our editor, thank you, Stephanie, as our editor as well.
And also thanks to Deborah, who's been key in this as well.
And also thanks to David Prutton, who sadly can't be here, but who was important in linking us up initially into the journal.
And secondly, I'd also like to say this was the workshop.
We had a workshop around which these papers were based in 2016,
which was held here in Oxford at the Department of International Development, and we have some really critical and important feedback.
So I'd just like to say thanks to my my lama who isn't here, David Anderson, who also isn't here.
But for those who are here for Josh Alexander, who gave some really great feedback and for some quite a good,
he gave an absolutely excellent keynote speech. So thank you to you as well.
So lastly, to say go, go and read the special issue, please make sure that I'm not just tweeting to my mother,
but that it's actually hitting the academic audiences that I'd like it to hit.
And now over to look. OK. Hi, everybody.
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.
I co-edited the special issue with Dan and I co-wrote the introduction.
I think thematically,
my paper fits neatly into the second theme that they spoke about in that I think it's primarily interested in charting the ambivalent
relationship that developed between post-colonial African states and university students in the initial post-colonial decades.
My papers case study is Kenya, and I want to start today's talk where I began the paper,
and that is with a coup attempt in August of 1982 against the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi.
Now, the coup attempt fails,
and more uses this opportunity to attempt to consolidate his power and marginalise his opponents so he overhauls the security forces.
He reconstitutes the Air Force and significantly for the purposes of my paper.
He initiates a major crackdown against the University of Nairobi.
Now, for those of you familiar with Kenyan political history of this period.
This will come as no surprise because by the late 1970s,
the University of Nairobi and its constituent Kenyatta College had come to be a centre on important centre of national dissent within the country.
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.
So you have the student union being banned in October of 1979.
Remember, Moyo comes to power in August of 78. You have the academic staff union being registered in 1980,
and then it starts to get nuts because Moise starts to literally start imprisoning both student leaders and leftist faculty.
Right?
So when university students decide to take to the streets to celebrate the premature and ultimately inaccurate news that the Moyo regime had fallen,
their reputation as enemies of the state is cemented.
And so in October of 1982, it's not surprising that Moye makes a public address,
and in this public address, he announces that the university is going to be disbanded.
And here's what he says. He asserts that he wanted that the government and I'm quoting here,
wanted a new university with no prospect henceforth that it could lie in our midst as a source or instrument of destruction end quote.
In that same speech, Moyes singled out university students specifically for criticism,
arguing that the university and this is a real quote, by the way,
had been brought and I'm quoting now brought into disrepute by a student body which proved
itself pathetically vulnerable to the crudest stupidities of dialectical subversion end quote.
I still have no idea what that means. These remarks suggested that Moise simply did not aspire to create a new university,
but that he wanted to create a new kind of university student, one that was loyal and obedient to his regime.
And a big part of this agenda is the focus of my paper, right?
It's the introduction in May of 1984 of the National Youth Service Pre-University Training Programme.
This is a mandatory a mandatory programme of 14 weeks of paramilitary training that every
university student men and woman had to go through prior to arriving at Kenyan universities,
right? And the idea with this was that the programme would help to facilitate the transformation of prospective
university students into responsible and disciplined citizens who would offer their loyalty to Moyes regime.
In practise, the key central argument of my paper is that the scheme had unintended consequences, right?
Instead of fostering obedient and loyal university students who were ideologically committed to moist political project.
The programme served to further alienate these students from the ruling party,
helping to politicise a significant portion of them who by the time they arrive on campus,
confront the Moyo regime with some of its most defiant political challenges of this period.
Essentially, the article is arguing that the new dispute played a crucial and hitherto unacknowledged role
in shaping student activism at the University of Nairobi during the latter half of the 1980s,
and I highlight a number of ways in which I believe that this was the case, right?
One of them is for many student recruits. The camp is.
Released as an unwarranted punishment.
This creates a sense of grievance amongst them, and it's around these grievances that they begin to develop collective solidarity and through
which a small but vocal core of these student recruits come to embrace oppositional politics.
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,
i.e., they become buddies, right? And they begin to refine, in some cases, their political ideas prior to their arrival on campus.
So these bonds come to be utilised. Once students arrive on campus and they begin to politically organise, finally,
there's a kind of haphazard political education that can use offering in these afternoon lectures at the camp.
Right.
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.
But the important part of this is it gives these student recruits a kind of novel,
unprecedented opportunity to confront the government to criticise the government publicly, often for the first time in their lives.
They're able to have this opportunity, right? And so two things happened as a result of this one.
Students see who their leaders should be. They're able to identify the brave ones, the most firebrand ones.
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.
The second part of this is for a lot of students. It exposes the ideological shortcomings of the Kanu regime to them.
And so in some ways,
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,
it's guilty of disregarding their minds and the consequences of that.
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.
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,
but also the broader history of student activism within Nairobi.
The argument I'm making is that the NYS needs to be understood as as the kind of moist
state responding to how do we deal with this problem of student unrest and dissonance?
Right. And this is the solution that they devise in the second part of the lecture.
I look at the actual experience of the camp from the perspective of the student recruits himself.
I was very, very lucky to interview a number of them, and a lot of this stuff is fascinating.
One of the key parts of this section of the paper is that students experience this as a punishment,
and one of the reasons they do is because the people overseeing these camps are often buds, right?
They are regular NYS servicemen. And so what a lot of these student recruits say is I did all of this work.
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.
In other words, I'm being punished for excelling these guys. You don't have anywhere near.
My educational achievements are able to kind of play the tune and I got to follow it, and they resented that.
Anybody who knows Kenyan politics probably knows me going to Miguna. He's one of the guys I interviewed.
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.
This is a direct quote. This was the worst of it. These are funders are subjecting you to this sort of dehumanising treatment.
And these people did not finish. Elementary school cannot speak English. All they know was shouting.
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.
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,
but about the government that organised it and sanctioned its conditions. And so what ends up happening is the experience of the NYU.
Spotty left many student recruits feeling more alienated from and antagonistic towards
the state and the ruling party under more than they had been when they arrived.
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.
It's when these student recruits arrive at Nairobi, and initially it looks like this reform is working.
This is almost like a 10 month period where there are no protests.
Then in early February, three students are expelled and another five have their scholarships revoked and students go nuts.
They start boycotting classes.
They they start to initiate a High Court injunction against expulsion, and they're demanding that the state explains expulsions.
And one of the shocking things for the regime. Is that at the heart of these protests that emerged in February of 1985?
Are these NYS graduates? So on February 10, students organise a nondenominational prayer meeting because they think that there's no way the university
administration will stop a prayer meeting and the right and NYS graduates decide they want to dress up in their NYS,
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.
So essentially a normally a guard of honour would be inspected by the head of state or high ranking military official in this case.
They want it to be inspected by a dissident student leader, and the symbolism here is hard to miss, right?
It's the argument being that the university has come to be a state unto itself.
In other words, that the students no longer recognised state authority when Maganda comes to speak.
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.
But the students fight back now in the aftermath of this.
You've got policemen injured, you've got students injured and one student dies.
But even this clash, 19 students are arrested after universities closed a month later.
These students are told that they have to return their NYS uniforms.
Remember, they were given these uniforms as a token of appreciation for how well they did in the camps.
The only way they get readmitted is if they give back the uniforms.
Guess what they do to the uniforms they start marching around Canada, college and military drills that they learnt at NYS.
And they burn the uniforms at the main Gate of Canada College, right?
These two events make the Moye regime realised for the first time.
[INAUDIBLE], we're in trouble here. This may be having counterproductive outcomes.
And as one student put it to me,
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.
You know who the enemy is, i.e. the Kenyan state after Bloody Sunday,
which is what the the the February 10th event was called more realised that he had a monster on his hands.
End quote. Right. So there's a momentary lull in protests.
But in 1987, Wafula book, Who's an NYC puty graduate, comes to be a legendary student leader.
He is elected in an unprecedented landslide as the head of the student union.
Remember, in his first year as a student before he's elected, he pro.
He leads a protest against the American bombing of Libya that gets national press coverage.
And here's what he said to me and I'm quoting again.
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.
But remember, I organised a demo in the first year. I had never been in Nairobi since I was born.
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.
The reason was because my foreplay had been done in the spot and quote right.
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.
One, that they want to ban all ethnic associations on campus because they think it's a source of disunity.
Two. They want to stop government funded student trips abroad with moit because they
see it as a way that the government is distributing patronage to students.
And three they demand that their student colleagues become more active in national political debates.
Two days later, they're rounded up in the middle of the night on campus and the entire cabinet is arrested.
Students respond in the absence of their union leadership by literally clashing with state forces over the next couple of days.
43 of those students are expelled. The university is closed again.
The student union is banned and will continue to be banned for almost the next 10 years and for the first time ever,
more says We're going to introduce user fees.
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.
So this is a dramatic event now, with over 20 university closures between 1970 and 1990.
Perhaps no university in Africa was more disrupted by student unrest during this period than the University of Nairobi.
So in some respects, you can say, well, the November 1987 protests fit a predictable pattern a predictable cycle of protests in Kenya.
But I'm making the argument in the paper that the widespread popularity of the newly
elected new leadership in conjunction with their explicitly progressive political agenda,
demonstrates the unprecedented sense of unity and anti-regime sentiment that had come to mark.
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
seriously the experiences of the NYPD because against the government's best laid plans.
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.
It plays a significant role in fostering the creation of an unprecedentedly united
militant and mobilised student mass that was unafraid to publicly challenge the regime.
Thank you very much.