1 00:00:03,260 --> 00:00:13,010 Wonderful. OK. Professor Wiley at a binary you're colour run across Steve Kornacki are invited guests. 2 00:00:13,010 --> 00:00:21,500 Professor Daley Associate Professor Amber Murray Panopto, chief of Nazi Democratic to, is also associate professor. 3 00:00:21,500 --> 00:00:27,050 But it's not clear yet. Is Esther a bear here? 4 00:00:27,050 --> 00:00:33,560 Not yet present and past members of the Oxford Africa Society Executive Committee 5 00:00:33,560 --> 00:00:37,730 past and present members of the Oxford Africa Conference Executive Committee. 6 00:00:37,730 --> 00:00:43,070 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third Oxford Africa Society annual lecture. 7 00:00:43,070 --> 00:00:46,940 My name is Cynthia Stewart. I come from Switzerland. 8 00:00:46,940 --> 00:00:56,990 I am the general secretary of the Oxford African Society this year, and I am especially honoured to be hosting this year's annual lecture, 9 00:00:56,990 --> 00:01:01,370 partly because this marks the beginning of our Africa week and the Oxford Africa Conference, 10 00:01:01,370 --> 00:01:05,840 which is taking place May 17 to 18 at the Blavatnik School of Government, 11 00:01:05,840 --> 00:01:13,250 but also because tonight's lecture is obviously a very important topic and one that is close to my heart. 12 00:01:13,250 --> 00:01:22,760 The lecture is Africa. Similar systems, professional reflections on Africa and knowledge production will be delivered by Professor Wiley and Divinely, 13 00:01:22,760 --> 00:01:29,060 who is the director of the African Studies Centre, as well as Rhodes professor of race relations. 14 00:01:29,060 --> 00:01:33,410 We're joined after the lecture by an international guest panel, including Running Glass, 15 00:01:33,410 --> 00:01:40,820 who is with us from the United States and has been an activist in the environmental, justice and environmental education movement for many years. 16 00:01:40,820 --> 00:01:50,300 Cesar Mkhwanazi is navigation of the International Higher Education System is a story of unrelenting ambition and perseverance, and to women who, 17 00:01:50,300 --> 00:01:52,640 in the midst of their undergraduate degrees, 18 00:01:52,640 --> 00:01:59,600 spearheaded the largest protest in democratic South Africa to afford free and equitable access to higher education for all. 19 00:01:59,600 --> 00:02:04,160 So Uralkali and pendulum catcher, thank you all for coming. 20 00:02:04,160 --> 00:02:10,610 I'm sincerely looking forward to this. I hope that you'll stay afterwards to get to know the panellists and also to speak more with each other. 21 00:02:10,610 --> 00:02:14,270 I hope that tonight brings about more than just the conversation. 22 00:02:14,270 --> 00:02:20,110 I think the idea of decolonising education is more than just a discussion to be had between panel and attendees, 23 00:02:20,110 --> 00:02:24,140 so I hope that you'll take the opportunity to see what we can do together after this. 24 00:02:24,140 --> 00:02:37,950 Thank you again for coming. Without further ado, Professor Wendy. 25 00:02:37,950 --> 00:02:45,720 I think the Oxford Society for inviting me to give this lecture that's very grateful to the president of the New Society, 26 00:02:45,720 --> 00:02:55,080 who is on his way and especially to be there, I think it is have to explore for delegates in organising this event. 27 00:02:55,080 --> 00:03:03,840 I'm happy that he has invited discussed of these concerns to explore this important theme of decolonisation of education, 28 00:03:03,840 --> 00:03:09,780 and I hope that what I have to say would be, you know, would be useful in this discussion. 29 00:03:09,780 --> 00:03:16,830 The title of my talk of the nation is East Africa, a similar system. 30 00:03:16,830 --> 00:03:25,200 No. Two in Africa and no production. I would start by talking about how studying the margins in the metropole, 31 00:03:25,200 --> 00:03:29,460 I talked to a class called Introduction to African Studies for a little less than one decade 32 00:03:29,460 --> 00:03:33,510 in the African-American and African Studies Department of the University of California, 33 00:03:33,510 --> 00:03:34,620 Davis. 34 00:03:34,620 --> 00:03:43,590 It was a lower division class that is one designed for first year students who might be learning about Africa for the first time in the university. 35 00:03:43,590 --> 00:03:51,900 The class also two days of difference at different stages in the undergraduate programme programmes in different disciplines across the university. 36 00:03:51,900 --> 00:03:55,710 And if you know, in the American system, people can come from different disciplines, 37 00:03:55,710 --> 00:04:03,240 from engineering to, you know, sciences to take classes in the humanities and social sciences. 38 00:04:03,240 --> 00:04:08,820 Many of these students, roughly about 50 percent, had the least interest in Africa. 39 00:04:08,820 --> 00:04:12,240 You register for the class as a general education requirement. 40 00:04:12,240 --> 00:04:19,890 Therefore, for these half of the class, it was often obvious when the first day of class that given the choice, they would have to be elsewhere. 41 00:04:19,890 --> 00:04:24,720 Each year, I would start the first day of class after the introductions by asking the students 42 00:04:24,720 --> 00:04:28,980 to take out a piece of paper and write down the first image that came to mind. 43 00:04:28,980 --> 00:04:40,320 Once they heard the word Africa or filiale every year, the responses were overwhelmingly negative or at best, exotic remaining suspects were items. 44 00:04:40,320 --> 00:04:48,210 Elephants don't go decisions. It was violence, poverty, ethnicity and colonialism. 45 00:04:48,210 --> 00:04:59,130 The most positive, if you can call these positive where safari cradle of mankind volunteer and Peace Corps. 46 00:04:59,130 --> 00:05:07,020 Why North Americans are geographically, geographically far removed from Africa Despite the tragic history that binds the Americas and Africa, 47 00:05:07,020 --> 00:05:13,740 and take into cognisant of the fact that most ordinary Americans do not care about the rest of the world and do these 48 00:05:13,740 --> 00:05:21,360 responses were quite instructive in terms of challenges of teaching the so-called that continent to these students. 49 00:05:21,360 --> 00:05:26,730 Perhaps it should be stated in parenthesis that if the way the student viewed Africa 50 00:05:26,730 --> 00:05:31,950 as expressions of ignorance about the continent by recent high school graduates, 51 00:05:31,950 --> 00:05:38,100 we should record the if most was sure of the Oxford historian who Travelopia, who, despite the thoughtful, 52 00:05:38,100 --> 00:05:42,070 evidence based contemporary efforts of the likes of Basil Levinson, 53 00:05:42,070 --> 00:05:50,880 the insisted in the 1960s that African history was the history of Europeans in Africa because, 54 00:05:50,880 --> 00:05:53,430 according to him, before the Europeans came to Africa, 55 00:05:53,430 --> 00:05:59,820 there was only darkness and evidently darkness is not the subject of history like he gave before him. 56 00:05:59,820 --> 00:06:05,160 Group captured the position of many in the way, so he sees that as a child and baby captures it, 57 00:06:05,160 --> 00:06:12,120 could the human experience of blacks should be understood as fundamental difference and good. 58 00:06:12,120 --> 00:06:16,200 But I quote again the status of the African saying In the midst of the economy 59 00:06:16,200 --> 00:06:21,330 of totality being precisely because it has survived the likes of Travelopia, 60 00:06:21,330 --> 00:06:25,860 Adiga, Doris, he should not have been so shocking to many scholars. 61 00:06:25,860 --> 00:06:31,020 When Bruce Gillum, in the now controversial article published in the Third World Quarterly, 62 00:06:31,020 --> 00:06:38,940 entitled The Case for Colonialism, concluded that not only could Western colonialism in Africa wars as a general rule, 63 00:06:38,940 --> 00:06:47,890 both objectively beneficial as subjectively legitimate, but also that quote anti-colonial ideology, which of course must include greed, 64 00:06:47,890 --> 00:06:55,500 guaranteed early scholarship and the equalise the decolonisation agenda of groups like Oxford African Society. 65 00:06:55,500 --> 00:06:59,970 And I continued, You could not impose grave harms on subjects the subject. 66 00:06:59,970 --> 00:07:06,750 People continue to support sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places of good. 67 00:07:06,750 --> 00:07:15,270 In light of this body of evidence and good, Dele called for the reimposition of colonialism in Africa. 68 00:07:15,270 --> 00:07:20,190 Politics is irrelevant to adding parentheses again, that Guinea does not study Africa. 69 00:07:20,190 --> 00:07:26,430 He advertises himself in court as a specialist on the comparative wages of China and Russia, 70 00:07:26,430 --> 00:07:32,760 but sees what many needs as a good measure about Africa and its complex history to be an expat. 71 00:07:32,760 --> 00:07:40,850 Perhaps you will qualify as one. So what? The implications of such views as these about Africa for African studies, 72 00:07:40,850 --> 00:07:44,810 if most of the countries in the continent are regarded as unqualified for several. 73 00:07:44,810 --> 00:07:52,670 How can we study such a subject people, if Africans are not considered to be agents of history, even their own history? 74 00:07:52,670 --> 00:08:01,160 Can you study of Africa move beyond the perennial focus on the continent's reported the similarities with the rest of the modern world? 75 00:08:01,160 --> 00:08:07,610 The images of Africa, which some of my thoughts yesterday in the US carried India in their first year in the university are no different 76 00:08:07,610 --> 00:08:12,620 from the images and dates of those who are in control of critical spheres of decision making in the West, 77 00:08:12,620 --> 00:08:18,070 but squarely in contemporary United States. Of course, one witness is President Donald Trump, 78 00:08:18,070 --> 00:08:25,460 as each country's scholars have described this attitude as a form of distance from critical forms of knowledge. 79 00:08:25,460 --> 00:08:33,170 It is. This is this kind of attitude to Africa that provoking, quote unquote volume Africa and the disciplines published in 1983, 80 00:08:33,170 --> 00:08:38,150 which emphasises how knowledge of Africa has contributed to different disciplines. 81 00:08:38,150 --> 00:08:47,180 The book is in part, is part of the larger and ongoing attempts to quote Shift the geography of Reason unquote, 82 00:08:47,180 --> 00:08:50,640 to expose the ignorance that masquerades as knowledge or watching. 83 00:08:50,640 --> 00:09:01,490 The more critical tradition championed by Martin constitutes the quest to dismantle what the colonial library where promoting African epistemological. 84 00:09:01,490 --> 00:09:04,700 If Africa is assumed to be so dissimilar from the rest of the world. 85 00:09:04,700 --> 00:09:09,530 But why the West should do so for us and study and teach Africa about Africa. 86 00:09:09,530 --> 00:09:16,640 Accept these as we give or teach and conduct our research as if this were an essential absolute truth. 87 00:09:16,640 --> 00:09:24,350 That is, most Africans assumed an idea accepted this similarity, both in global history and in the contemporary global system, 88 00:09:24,350 --> 00:09:32,720 be the absolute departure point for our pedagogy, as well as for our epistemological in the age of global studies. 89 00:09:32,720 --> 00:09:43,280 Can we truly give a robust account of the continent's diversity complexity, as well as its presence in what it describes as the income of the world? 90 00:09:43,280 --> 00:09:50,600 If the fundamental basis for studying and teaching Africa is its essential and absolutely similarity, 91 00:09:50,600 --> 00:09:53,690 its prominent contrast with the normal regular practise, 92 00:09:53,690 --> 00:10:01,790 the wisdom and its particularities which do not include its similarities and continuities with the rest of humanity. 93 00:10:01,790 --> 00:10:07,340 Why is a continent that has always been global in its interface with the rest of the world for good or for you, 94 00:10:07,340 --> 00:10:10,700 as any elementary student of history would know, 95 00:10:10,700 --> 00:10:18,320 popularly imagined and largely taught as one that was forced into global relations only in the contemporary era. 96 00:10:18,320 --> 00:10:24,020 And yet you still describe a people as remotely go global. 97 00:10:24,020 --> 00:10:29,120 These are the questions which have partly admitted the debate of African studies in the last few decades. 98 00:10:29,120 --> 00:10:38,090 As Judy Byfield asserted Coach Africa is central to any intellectual intellectual enterprise, but especially one that purports to be global. 99 00:10:38,090 --> 00:10:46,070 While I cannot hope to exhaust the dimensions of this debate in this lecture, I hope to address some of these important dimensions. 100 00:10:46,070 --> 00:10:55,700 Those of us who teach and study Africa have a duty not to not only drive the continent's particularities, including its differences, 101 00:10:55,700 --> 00:11:04,610 which many have done if not excessively, but also to emphasise and document its presence and presence in the global context. 102 00:11:04,610 --> 00:11:09,170 Against the backdrop of we short reflect on African studies in Africa, the United States and the UK. 103 00:11:09,170 --> 00:11:12,620 What I hope to do in this lecture is to point to some of the salient teachers 104 00:11:12,620 --> 00:11:16,700 that have been raised and add a few more that might push the debate for them. 105 00:11:16,700 --> 00:11:21,380 My purpose is not a criticism of African studies or have any critique that points to 106 00:11:21,380 --> 00:11:25,880 existing tensions and some of the surviving elements of the old attitudes and paradigms, 107 00:11:25,880 --> 00:11:31,610 and the consequences of the enduring study of Africa as an essential and negative difference, 108 00:11:31,610 --> 00:11:40,460 which looks to the past as a fundamentally dissimilar system, no less primitive African scholar assessed by non-African Africans. 109 00:11:40,460 --> 00:11:47,450 This Africa difference perspective is particularly problematic because the difference is, on the one hand, 110 00:11:47,450 --> 00:11:53,600 being deployed as a means of if you arise in the continent, as well as the humanity and experiences of its people. 111 00:11:53,600 --> 00:12:02,030 And on the other, I see a way of claiming the Africa things Africa must be defined as or by anything that is not the West. 112 00:12:02,030 --> 00:12:10,370 The latter view has been described by me to recently as one field by what he called quasi debt anxiety. 113 00:12:10,370 --> 00:12:16,580 Indeed, some of the fundamental and fundamental misunderstanding of the decolonial movement. 114 00:12:16,580 --> 00:12:22,830 I feel this Africa is different perspective, but we can return to these questions later. 115 00:12:22,830 --> 00:12:30,830 The study of Africa has developed tremendously since the era, when Africa was, as as the lesser argues, is subjective anthropological folklore. 116 00:12:30,830 --> 00:12:35,900 Yet some of the assumptions of that era linger in the contemporary era, and I would. 117 00:12:35,900 --> 00:12:40,730 Briefly now about what way Africa stories in Africa? 118 00:12:40,730 --> 00:12:45,950 I'll use my personal trajectory to illustrate this trend of the continent, that experience of study in Africa. 119 00:12:45,950 --> 00:12:48,020 I joined the Department of Science in the university, 120 00:12:48,020 --> 00:12:56,210 but in 1999 as an assistant lecturer at the Ibadan School of Political Science is famous for its solid scholarship, but not of the radical form. 121 00:12:56,210 --> 00:13:02,840 It boasts of an epistemological tradition that is as grounded in Western traditions as it is focussed on Africa needs, 122 00:13:02,840 --> 00:13:07,340 as well as comparative interpretations of local and global dynamics. 123 00:13:07,340 --> 00:13:12,530 This has produced theoretical revolutions that reinterpretations or received Western Orthodoxy. 124 00:13:12,530 --> 00:13:16,190 The school's direct and indirect dialogue with the famous Ibadan School of History, 125 00:13:16,190 --> 00:13:22,150 is perhaps one of its perhaps one that is best represented in the debate between the by the late 126 00:13:22,150 --> 00:13:28,160 pre-eminent African historian Peter Picking the political sociology of divided school of Politics. 127 00:13:28,160 --> 00:13:31,700 The two disagreed on how best to approach colonialism in African history. 128 00:13:31,700 --> 00:13:39,830 Well, Ajayi insisted that colonialism was an episode amongst several would be sought in the long diary of African history. 129 00:13:39,830 --> 00:13:46,250 A. In his view, most to probably argue that colonialism considered an airport in Africa's history, 130 00:13:46,250 --> 00:13:58,580 not one that not only changed the colonial present and possibly ruined our future, but also affected how we understand the colonial pre-colonial past. 131 00:13:58,580 --> 00:14:02,420 This debate is too familiar to African scholars to bear repeating here. 132 00:14:02,420 --> 00:14:04,490 What I want to draw attention to, however, 133 00:14:04,490 --> 00:14:11,330 is the tradition of engaged and critical scholarship to which we were here in the political science department debates. 134 00:14:11,330 --> 00:14:15,740 It was a tradition to embrace global scholarship without regarding its all rigorous 135 00:14:15,740 --> 00:14:20,660 admissions as inferior to any prises eastern traditions of study society. 136 00:14:20,660 --> 00:14:25,820 The Ibadan schools saw what some scholars have described as quote alternative 137 00:14:25,820 --> 00:14:29,270 ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political practises, 138 00:14:29,270 --> 00:14:38,870 unquote. However, there was no assumption that these alternative ways or forms of political practises were outside of the common human experience. 139 00:14:38,870 --> 00:14:43,790 Adam Jaworski and Henry Jones famous book The Logic of Comparative Enquiry was a 140 00:14:43,790 --> 00:14:47,900 compulsory text in the graduate school of My Generation of Citizens Juries in Ibadan, 141 00:14:47,900 --> 00:14:53,840 as was it case colonialism published in Africa, a theoretical statement which was published in 1975. 142 00:14:53,840 --> 00:14:58,640 There was a dos caricature, a theory constructed on techniques and strategies, 143 00:14:58,640 --> 00:15:04,160 and the logic of explanation regarding the problem of contemporary political science were fascinating to all us, 144 00:15:04,160 --> 00:15:10,070 even if initially slightly elusive for those of us who were interested in comparative cross-cultural research. 145 00:15:10,070 --> 00:15:14,390 The arguments about the primacy of understanding systems through the lens of what 146 00:15:14,390 --> 00:15:19,790 they describe as most similar and mostly dissimilar systems was most enlightening. 147 00:15:19,790 --> 00:15:26,690 Study the case to public and its comparative analysis of the emergence of public spaces in Europe and Africa, 148 00:15:26,690 --> 00:15:31,900 and the fundamental difference that colonialism made in bifurcating the public sphere in Africa. 149 00:15:31,900 --> 00:15:41,030 Course set a great example for some of us of how the perspective of the most dissimilar system in comparing Europe with Africa could be problematic. 150 00:15:41,030 --> 00:15:45,590 But a greater value of it is this is not merely enjoying our similarities, 151 00:15:45,590 --> 00:15:52,700 but also in using the similarities in historical evolution through human agency and structural changes to find your way. 152 00:15:52,700 --> 00:15:58,400 Different socio economic and political outcomes have been recorded in three different parts of the world. 153 00:15:58,400 --> 00:16:04,220 Its greater value is in pointing out the fundamental basis of a myriad of social classes, 154 00:16:04,220 --> 00:16:10,250 which emphasise the epochal nature of colonialism from the 1960s. 155 00:16:10,250 --> 00:16:16,460 It is universally by the lucky few ideas of his generation, including the University of Ghana in Lagos and the University of East Africa, 156 00:16:16,460 --> 00:16:19,940 which later became macro in Uganda and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, 157 00:16:19,940 --> 00:16:28,340 University of Nairobi in Kenya to call the mission of ensuring that knowledge production reflected Africa's history and emergence in the modern world. 158 00:16:28,340 --> 00:16:32,540 In doing so, some felt it was important to establish Institute of African Studies. 159 00:16:32,540 --> 00:16:39,380 This was opposed by all this, who argued that there was no need to study Africa separately in an African institution. 160 00:16:39,380 --> 00:16:43,850 However, a few critical voices and leaders insisted that Institute of African Studies were 161 00:16:43,850 --> 00:16:49,610 necessary as centres driven by the need to engage in good forms of knowledge 162 00:16:49,610 --> 00:16:53,570 production of Africa that challenged colonial categories and the conventions 163 00:16:53,570 --> 00:16:58,910 of academic discipline that was Africa S. Africa based and globally engaged. 164 00:16:58,910 --> 00:17:08,620 And the emphasis for me as a global engagement that sought to transcend the politics of the Cold War and defied the demonic impulses of US politics. 165 00:17:08,620 --> 00:17:16,970 My ozment all as explained. Two examples of these were the Institute of African Studies and the University of Ghana, which was started in 1964, 166 00:17:16,970 --> 00:17:22,880 but formally 2063, and the issues of africana studies at the University of Ibadan, which was started in 1962. 167 00:17:22,880 --> 00:17:29,540 African studies in this. It was approached in Ibadan North as a fundamentally different form of knowledge, 168 00:17:29,540 --> 00:17:35,100 but that quote Africa's one contribution to the global pool of intellectuals, unquote. 169 00:17:35,100 --> 00:17:43,690 We aim. Not just for Africa to understand himself, but also to present knowledge of Africans to the rest of the world from Africans perspective, 170 00:17:43,690 --> 00:17:49,690 the United States as an interdisciplinary research institute with a mandate to quote, 171 00:17:49,690 --> 00:17:56,000 to build a body of knowledge and to construct an attitude of each election that we not take for granted 172 00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:01,750 the heritage of African people's experiences in the present and the aspirations for the future. 173 00:18:01,750 --> 00:18:10,540 However, the mission of the as in Ibadan, while liberation was not as radical as the eye is establishing Leghorn. 174 00:18:10,540 --> 00:18:16,180 This was not surprising given the differences in the nature of their founding, founding and funding. 175 00:18:16,180 --> 00:18:22,060 The idea was partly funded by Deception by Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. 176 00:18:22,060 --> 00:18:28,990 In the case of various East Legon, the involvement of the first British Organic Farming Chroma in setting the mandate and the core 177 00:18:28,990 --> 00:18:35,020 responsibility of the institute with regard to knowledge reduction likely determined its initial trajectory. 178 00:18:35,020 --> 00:18:43,540 The East Legon Lagos mission was to challenge what I'd either to consider African studies in the west city of Goma, 179 00:18:43,540 --> 00:18:50,320 the opening of the institute first and foremost. I would emphasise the need for a reinterpretation of our past. 180 00:18:50,320 --> 00:18:51,940 We need to recognise, frankly, 181 00:18:51,940 --> 00:18:57,730 that African studies in the form in which they have been developed in the universities and centres of learning in the West, 182 00:18:57,730 --> 00:19:04,930 have been largely influenced by the concept of old style colonial studies and still as true to some extent, 183 00:19:04,930 --> 00:19:09,250 remain under the shadow of colonial ideologies and mentality unquote. 184 00:19:09,250 --> 00:19:12,550 Nkrumah encouraged the study of African history. Culture, institutions, 185 00:19:12,550 --> 00:19:23,470 languages and the arts include new Africa centred ways in entirely different propositions and presuppositions of the colonial appeal, 186 00:19:23,470 --> 00:19:27,220 and from the distortions of those who continue to make European stories of Africa. 187 00:19:27,220 --> 00:19:36,130 The basis of the new assessment on court also we encouraged the study of Africa could in the widest possible sense, 188 00:19:36,130 --> 00:19:42,640 Africa in all of its complexity, diversity and its underlying unity. 189 00:19:42,640 --> 00:19:47,950 There are two important points here in relation to the study of Africa and the present with implications, of course, for the future. 190 00:19:47,950 --> 00:19:54,010 First Income I wanted it to be studied not as part of colonial science or area studies. 191 00:19:54,010 --> 00:20:01,120 The latter, which emerged as part of the National Security and Strategic Planning, as well as global surveillance in the Cold War era. 192 00:20:01,120 --> 00:20:08,830 Second, it wanted Africa to be approached in all of its dimensions, ensure that contemporary everything, including the study of North Africa. 193 00:20:08,830 --> 00:20:14,170 You wanted us to transcend the Arabic, French and English device and knowledge production in Africa. 194 00:20:14,170 --> 00:20:22,270 Therefore, he had argued for the inclusion in African studies of Africans in all parts of the world, including in the Americas in Europe. 195 00:20:22,270 --> 00:20:26,530 Initiate what he describes as Africans abroad thought. 196 00:20:26,530 --> 00:20:33,220 He called for a reimagining reinvention of our knowledge of Africa was produced, interpreted and circulated. 197 00:20:33,220 --> 00:20:40,180 However, the 1960s this mission did not. Include recruiting Western scholars to help in its implementation. 198 00:20:40,180 --> 00:20:46,810 So the universally feel to recruited WASPish Jack from Oxford, most learnt Bodkin also, 199 00:20:46,810 --> 00:20:51,350 I know, accept accepted evolution as a director this June 1962. 200 00:20:51,350 --> 00:20:53,950 Arkansas, the mission as one in which I would consider it, 201 00:20:53,950 --> 00:20:59,320 is to assist in the process of what he describes as African evolution by exposing a racist colonial myth, 202 00:20:59,320 --> 00:21:08,140 by building up quote systematically as comprehensive a body of source material as possible to disprove the and take 203 00:21:08,140 --> 00:21:14,410 the mission on the mission of the interpretation of the evidence and the wide dissemination of this interpretation. 204 00:21:14,410 --> 00:21:20,380 As Gene Allman recently noted, we wanted African Studies Centre that were, 205 00:21:20,380 --> 00:21:25,330 quote liberated as far as possible from conventional wisdom presuppositions. 206 00:21:25,330 --> 00:21:32,860 Nkrumah argued that it was in dissent as though it was possible to produce knowledge about Africa in which we could have confidence. 207 00:21:32,860 --> 00:21:42,380 It is therefore not surprising that W.E.B. Dubois became part of a much larger project alongside his investment in the Institute of African Studies. 208 00:21:42,380 --> 00:21:50,560 Nkrumah mobilised the to work on the Encyclopaedia Africana, which had been partially sabotaged by Escovedo, 209 00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:56,770 the man who is regarded as the founder of African studies in the US in the 1930s. 210 00:21:56,770 --> 00:22:02,590 It is interesting that the popular view is is beside the front of our custody in the United States was a deliberate 211 00:22:02,590 --> 00:22:08,830 attempt to obscure the story of Africa pioneered by African Americans in historically black colleges and universities. 212 00:22:08,830 --> 00:22:14,650 The HBCU, which preceded it period in which schools became the vanguard for the study of 213 00:22:14,650 --> 00:22:20,200 Africa and the formation of the African or the US African studies in 1957, 214 00:22:20,200 --> 00:22:27,250 the African American pioneers of African studies towards the laser focussed on Africa civilizational status, 215 00:22:27,250 --> 00:22:33,910 the continent as a whole and its Diaspora Connexions unquote. This started with New Hansberry, 216 00:22:33,910 --> 00:22:41,620 who imposed a coherent approach to the programme in African studies when he joined Howard University's history department in 1922. 217 00:22:41,620 --> 00:22:49,780 Despite the opposition, he Astbury started a series of courses on what he called Negro civilisations of Asia and Africa. 218 00:22:49,780 --> 00:22:55,240 Dubois later introduced the course on Issues Africa at Atlanta University in 1946, 219 00:22:55,240 --> 00:23:02,500 in what department correctly described as the reimagining of knowledge production of Africa globally and on African terms. 220 00:23:02,500 --> 00:23:11,200 Nkrumah, who had been trained at one of these vehicles that is Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, was a critical figure. 221 00:23:11,200 --> 00:23:19,630 This practise of often a leader today in the scholarship on Africa, in particular knowledge production in and about Africa in general. 222 00:23:19,630 --> 00:23:26,170 Indeed, as Omar points out, the December 1962 International Congress of Africa needs to Accra, Ghana, 223 00:23:26,170 --> 00:23:30,840 in which members of these two of African studies are dissected out of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 224 00:23:30,840 --> 00:23:36,550 by which it brought together Africans from all parts of the world north, south, east and west. 225 00:23:36,550 --> 00:23:44,650 There were attempts, even at this point, to take over the control of this process from Africans as racial politics or knowledge production surfaced. 226 00:23:44,650 --> 00:23:50,440 These are successes so successfully resisted, as old man, as noted, 227 00:23:50,440 --> 00:23:55,810 and I quote the fact that the epistemic crisis was unfolding in an independent African nation. 228 00:23:55,810 --> 00:24:02,950 We took very seriously. The challenge of elevated African studies was not insignificant or could yet cause this 229 00:24:02,950 --> 00:24:07,180 seismic shift in the balance of power in the production of knowledge about Africa, 230 00:24:07,180 --> 00:24:13,990 which already by the likes of Escovedo, who insisted the expertise of Africa was located outside of the continent, 231 00:24:13,990 --> 00:24:22,480 did succeed for a few years as the African ization of African studies raised important questions about the mission of the postcolonial university. 232 00:24:22,480 --> 00:24:30,820 These questions, unfortunately, were to be Assad in disastrous ways from the mid 1960s and the post-Cold War era. 233 00:24:30,820 --> 00:24:34,570 What happened to African studies physically and production in general in Africa since the 234 00:24:34,570 --> 00:24:40,180 coming of one one-party are not Daichi realities of different hues is common knowledge. 235 00:24:40,180 --> 00:24:44,260 Whatever was left of the integrity of our education was exposed to the devastation 236 00:24:44,260 --> 00:24:47,950 wrought by the IMF and World Bank through its structure adjustment programmes, 237 00:24:47,950 --> 00:24:54,070 as implemented most with most African countries in the 1980s and early 1990s. 238 00:24:54,070 --> 00:25:00,340 One of the most devastating consequences of these was the hollowing out of the centres of the centres 239 00:25:00,340 --> 00:25:05,050 of knowledge production in most African countries and the subversion of the project of the 1960s. 240 00:25:05,050 --> 00:25:11,890 Do you imagine I reinvent how knowledge in and about Africa was reduced, interpreted as I believe it? 241 00:25:11,890 --> 00:25:18,460 This led to the displacement of a substantial part of Africa's intellectual formation from the continent to the West. 242 00:25:18,460 --> 00:25:25,270 While this may be a form of blessing to African studies in the West, but not in the United States, to which most of the African scholars emigrated. 243 00:25:25,270 --> 00:25:32,230 This attempt to foster a measure of intellectual rigidity in the continent's science sector, particularly from the 1980s, 244 00:25:32,230 --> 00:25:35,650 those despite the guarantee force of many that remain in the continent, 245 00:25:35,650 --> 00:25:39,980 it is impossible to understand reproduction by Africans in the contemporary without. 246 00:25:39,980 --> 00:25:46,810 If we're not knowledge production by Africans outside of Africa, it is therefore understandable that until the last few years, 247 00:25:46,810 --> 00:25:54,340 the most critical contestation of age manipulate production by Africans were happening in the global north more than in the continent. 248 00:25:54,340 --> 00:26:00,160 The RhodesMustFall movement and the famous movement, as well as the movement for the decolonisation of the curriculum, 249 00:26:00,160 --> 00:26:05,590 have since changed the face and feet of the struggle and production from within the continent, 250 00:26:05,590 --> 00:26:10,360 as well as outside of the continent, as as we witnessed the end of 43 years ago. 251 00:26:10,360 --> 00:26:16,450 In this context, it is important to note that Islamic countries constitute a specific experience because of 252 00:26:16,450 --> 00:26:21,940 its peculiar history when South Africa in from pertaining to multiracial democracy in 1994. 253 00:26:21,940 --> 00:26:28,990 Its leading universities struggled, struggled with the legacy of Bantu education and the attempt to reimagine or reposition African studies. 254 00:26:28,990 --> 00:26:35,410 The case of the University of Cape Town we have forgotten it to the U.S., is a movement that was recruited to help lead this initiative. 255 00:26:35,410 --> 00:26:41,350 Is this another example of the crisis of knowledge production in the post about that once? 256 00:26:41,350 --> 00:26:51,520 In 1997, Mandela was appointed the director of the Centre for African Studies used utility as he eloquently describes the crisis that led to his exit, 257 00:26:51,520 --> 00:26:59,190 which I would suggest was, of course, part of the backdrop for the current struggle to decolonise our education in South Africa. 258 00:26:59,190 --> 00:27:00,430 In particular, 259 00:27:00,430 --> 00:27:09,830 the path to stylisation of africana studies in the former whites only university meant that Mandela was initially hired as an advertisement, 260 00:27:09,830 --> 00:27:14,290 the mascot for the Centre for African Studies, unquote. 261 00:27:14,290 --> 00:27:15,190 This centre was, 262 00:27:15,190 --> 00:27:23,410 quote totally marginal to the real work of the university teaching and research on the key question the Mamdani race in South Africa in 1987, 263 00:27:23,410 --> 00:27:28,000 which is yet to be fully answered two decades later. 264 00:27:28,000 --> 00:27:38,260 How to teach Africa in a post about it But as there is a movement to decolonise the curriculum by the students in South Africa, 265 00:27:38,260 --> 00:27:43,690 armed forces have not given up despite the illusions of South African exceptionalism, 266 00:27:43,690 --> 00:27:51,550 such as the assumptions of South Africa's culture, economic and political similarities with the rest of Equatorial Africa. 267 00:27:51,550 --> 00:27:54,940 Now talk about African studies in the United States. 268 00:27:54,940 --> 00:27:59,890 I mention my experience with the Class one introduction of African studies as you add that the good 269 00:27:59,890 --> 00:28:05,770 thing about this was that the student who took the study of Africa seriously and who would therefore, 270 00:28:05,770 --> 00:28:19,150 you know, to other classes after the first year, eventually found that Africa was not about just lions and elephants and safari nine five. 271 00:28:19,150 --> 00:28:27,130 They found an Africa Africans whose social processes are as dissimilar as they are similar to the social processes in the United States. 272 00:28:27,130 --> 00:28:35,860 I'll give one example. One of the new classes that I designed I taught at UC Davis is the politics of life in Africa, we write. 273 00:28:35,860 --> 00:28:42,190 We have, since they can hear the objectives of the class was to present an overview of the quality of life in Africa, 274 00:28:42,190 --> 00:28:48,430 including how socio economic and political lives are constituted and the implications of this process for what Africans 275 00:28:48,430 --> 00:28:55,210 live with or know it and how they die and their struggles with ideas lives both within and outside of Africa. 276 00:28:55,210 --> 00:29:00,310 The glass usually started with the question from Bemba, which I find instructive and I quote it bamboo. 277 00:29:00,310 --> 00:29:06,670 If we want to reflect briefly on the borders of life and the drama of being and what it means to be alive today. 278 00:29:06,670 --> 00:29:12,730 Then we have to get out of the petrified systems and languages in which certain traditions or special things have been present. 279 00:29:12,730 --> 00:29:19,480 The African experience on court. I tried to encourage critical relations and cooperative thinking about life in Africa and beyond, 280 00:29:19,480 --> 00:29:23,740 including put new things in historical and social context relating to push of African social 281 00:29:23,740 --> 00:29:28,810 and lay theories about life in Africa to waste time theorising about life in the West. 282 00:29:28,810 --> 00:29:33,910 What I find most striking was that for the five years that I thought this glass half of the time for discussion 283 00:29:33,910 --> 00:29:40,510 was often devoted to the reality of life in the United States and other places where we are most today, 284 00:29:40,510 --> 00:29:44,380 so emigrated there. 285 00:29:44,380 --> 00:29:51,280 There are, of course, major differences, positive differences, you know, but these differences do not define our common humanity. 286 00:29:51,280 --> 00:29:58,840 Rather, they have historical, geographical and social expertise, and I give them both specific and general forms. 287 00:29:58,840 --> 00:30:07,000 Those cross-cultural comparison between Africa and United States are not defined within the context or the politics of life by only dissimilarities. 288 00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:12,160 Despite a wide disparity in the quality of life index. 289 00:30:12,160 --> 00:30:20,590 Indeed, as I regularly pointed out in decline, Botswana's infant mortality rate was comparable to that of Mississippi. 290 00:30:20,590 --> 00:30:25,270 The lesson is that another country is not fundamentally dissimilar to one of these two really 291 00:30:25,270 --> 00:30:30,190 important states in the United States in the structural and social conditions that affect life. 292 00:30:30,190 --> 00:30:35,260 Though Bush one is one of the best cases in Africa and Mississippi, obviously the worst case in the United States. 293 00:30:35,260 --> 00:30:39,750 There are some historical, structural, political and physiological reasons that can be used to. 294 00:30:39,750 --> 00:30:44,400 And similarities. One of the key texts in my radar class, 295 00:30:44,400 --> 00:30:51,720 which was an African modernity and globalisation itself every time was important to our colonialism pre-emptive modernity in Africa, 296 00:30:51,720 --> 00:31:00,630 where he argues for the singularity of the Enlightenment project. I reject any claim that the Enlightenment is not a common narrative that shows 297 00:31:00,630 --> 00:31:06,030 that colonialism was not an extension of the Enlightenment by subversion of it, 298 00:31:06,030 --> 00:31:11,640 though based on enlightenment, pretensions, colonialism thought would use pre-emptive modernity, 299 00:31:11,640 --> 00:31:14,970 which missionary Christianity had implanted in Africa. 300 00:31:14,970 --> 00:31:22,290 He therefore perceived that to understand the trajectory of modernity in Africa, we need to disentangle modernity and colonialism. 301 00:31:22,290 --> 00:31:29,730 Those in thinking about modernity the missionaries should be regarded as revolutionary while the colonial administrators were the reactionaries. 302 00:31:29,730 --> 00:31:35,160 I use these examples to illustrate some of the limitations used in the teaching of African studies in the United States, 303 00:31:35,160 --> 00:31:41,490 largely due to the massive increase in the number of African studies now teaching about Africa in North America. 304 00:31:41,490 --> 00:31:46,650 It's really suggestive of the role of the new African diaspora in teaching in Africa, in the United States. 305 00:31:46,650 --> 00:31:52,560 Of course, in which it operates with by lingering prejudice and persisting ignorance. 306 00:31:52,560 --> 00:31:59,370 The fact that more Africans are now teaching about Africa and United as not only ensure diversity that's helped in raising questions about the 307 00:31:59,370 --> 00:32:09,150 nature of knowledge production in ways that has expanded in ways that have expanded your raising of student study in Africa and the United States. 308 00:32:09,150 --> 00:32:11,910 In some cases, and this is the America, 309 00:32:11,910 --> 00:32:18,540 the new African diaspora are also able to point attention to the conveniently forgotten history of African studies in the United States. 310 00:32:18,540 --> 00:32:23,100 While Escovedo has come to be regarded as one of America's oldest in the US, 311 00:32:23,100 --> 00:32:27,510 the larger process of advertising African authority departments or programmers at times or 312 00:32:27,510 --> 00:32:31,440 whatever they are called in the United States affords us the opportunity to intervene. 313 00:32:31,440 --> 00:32:36,900 And you write this history as both styles as brilliantly drawn by reminding us 314 00:32:36,900 --> 00:32:41,820 that Africans started to notice this was actually pioneered by African Americans, 315 00:32:41,820 --> 00:32:44,880 while indeed Africa studies did not start in Africa. 316 00:32:44,880 --> 00:32:54,840 In its fourth iteration, it was indeed a study of Africa's past, present and future and of Africans by displaced Africans. 317 00:32:54,840 --> 00:33:02,910 Those it included a vision of what I call Global Africa, in which people of African descent all over the world were incorporated. 318 00:33:02,910 --> 00:33:07,710 However, as we out, it became the story of Africa, not of Africans. 319 00:33:07,710 --> 00:33:13,860 As my has argued, African studies of the Escovedo tradition, which became the mid-1990s, 320 00:33:13,860 --> 00:33:20,640 which in a way followed the tradition in Europe, developed in the context of colonialism, the Cold War and apartheid. 321 00:33:20,640 --> 00:33:27,120 This period, Mamdani argues, could shift the organisation of social science social studies into Western academic. 322 00:33:27,120 --> 00:33:34,950 The key division was between the discipline and area studies. The disciplines studied the white experience as a universal human experience. 323 00:33:34,950 --> 00:33:39,780 An area study studied the experience of people of colour as an ethnic experience. 324 00:33:39,780 --> 00:33:45,120 This was partly why Kumar wanted to take Africa out of the ghetto of India studies to make it 325 00:33:45,120 --> 00:33:49,470 a foundation for knowledge production that related to the rest of the world on equal terms. 326 00:33:49,470 --> 00:33:55,380 One that locate itself in global history as part of what it did because an income, 327 00:33:55,380 --> 00:34:03,210 one that is part of a common humanity and everything looked alike with us in a different region of one world. 328 00:34:03,210 --> 00:34:09,360 No doubt these opposition to the ghettoisation of Afrikaans radio one that dissimilarities Africa 329 00:34:09,360 --> 00:34:15,720 as just an area continues to excite the mind of those who want to control African studies. 330 00:34:15,720 --> 00:34:18,060 It was evident Phillip de Cotton, 331 00:34:18,060 --> 00:34:26,280 who saw the growing number of Afrikaans teaching in Africa history in the United States as a mathema and therefore the rising of African history. 332 00:34:26,280 --> 00:34:34,320 So intellectual dunkaroos was raised in the African community in the 80s, when the American historian that is Gordon wrote in 1919. 333 00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:40,830 In 1985, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that the new economy of hiring scholars of African descent to teach 334 00:34:40,830 --> 00:34:47,520 Africa history was a form of intellectual apathy because he believed that white historians were not be hired, 335 00:34:47,520 --> 00:34:57,060 thus leading to declining standards. The reaction is to put cotton in a way can be read as an attempt to take the area out of the area of 336 00:34:57,060 --> 00:35:03,270 African studies and globalising things in the larger debates on the politics of knowledge production. 337 00:35:03,270 --> 00:35:08,400 Yet the area of Afrikaans already has survived in the United States and of course, in Europe. 338 00:35:08,400 --> 00:35:14,280 However, there are reasons there isn't recent average for efforts to globalise African studies, 339 00:35:14,280 --> 00:35:20,400 which has led to moving African studies from areas to which is the done to global studies in some universities. 340 00:35:20,400 --> 00:35:25,830 Incidentally, he writes Global Land Area in, but that's another story. 341 00:35:25,830 --> 00:35:31,740 The mission of the history of African studies in Columbia University is a good example of a new approach to African studies. 342 00:35:31,740 --> 00:35:39,660 While recognising specificity as grounded in a region of the world, which is particularities including, quote, a unique set of. 343 00:35:39,660 --> 00:35:48,080 These experiences acknowledges the institute is eager to fully embrace after casting session historically in the present and future in the world, 344 00:35:48,080 --> 00:35:58,520 but not as if quantitative lack as evident in the popular imagination and the way oh, I see continuity in the clutches of the past and tradition. 345 00:35:58,520 --> 00:36:05,780 The make up rule of Columbia Institute of African Studies as its director Mahmoud Mahmoud, would you articulate? 346 00:36:05,780 --> 00:36:10,280 It is good to understand Africa in a global context and to a certain African 347 00:36:10,280 --> 00:36:15,560 experience in the discussion of globalisation and global issues on court doors. 348 00:36:15,560 --> 00:36:19,640 Their mission is Africa in the world, the world in Africa. 349 00:36:19,640 --> 00:36:23,210 That is the overriding theme in navigating the global storm. 350 00:36:23,210 --> 00:36:30,080 This positioning places Africa at the centre of the long jury using quote entire across these united 351 00:36:30,080 --> 00:36:36,170 discussions and debates in new ways that challenge this assumption and move the field in new, 352 00:36:36,170 --> 00:36:46,340 exciting directions. Though some scholars have noted that global studies create a lengthy list of diplomatic dilemmas for area studies, 353 00:36:46,340 --> 00:36:48,650 programme in general and African studies in particular, 354 00:36:48,650 --> 00:36:55,310 I'm not suggesting merely the study of Africa as part of global studies body foregrounding of global African studies. 355 00:36:55,310 --> 00:37:03,080 This will mean the transformation of pedagogy, including the transformation of how issues concerning Africa and its globally to its 356 00:37:03,080 --> 00:37:08,750 multi dimensionality and multispecialty are pushed in the final part of this talk. 357 00:37:08,750 --> 00:37:16,160 I will elaborate briefly on how this new vista can be beneficial in thinking about the future of African studies in the UK. 358 00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:24,890 What I want to do in this section is to push for some of the issues already raised as possible pathways for the future of African studies in the UK. 359 00:37:24,890 --> 00:37:29,480 I wish to draw out what I consider as the key questions that arise from these in the 360 00:37:29,480 --> 00:37:33,530 light of the existing challenges in the history of African studies in Africa and the UK, 361 00:37:33,530 --> 00:37:37,940 in the US and in Europe. I will do so against the backdrop of policy. 362 00:37:37,940 --> 00:37:45,560 Let us try to Africa. So it is a group that African studies in Europe remain by and large the study of the colonial and post-colonial, 363 00:37:45,560 --> 00:37:51,560 or that one of the most articulate analysis of the dynamics or custody in Europe and Africa is 364 00:37:51,560 --> 00:37:57,170 by Gore lost in his 2005 plenary lecture at the European Council of these conference in London. 365 00:37:57,170 --> 00:38:03,860 I would argue that a key question that lost they raised more than one decade ago can be a departure point for thinking, 366 00:38:03,860 --> 00:38:10,640 rethinking and reorienting African studies in the UK from the standpoint of what has been called global Africa. 367 00:38:10,640 --> 00:38:16,190 And this is the question I raised. How far might our analyses of African societies, 368 00:38:16,190 --> 00:38:25,700 economies and polities be better adapted to exploring and how far Africa indigency might combat local and global structures of inequality, 369 00:38:25,700 --> 00:38:31,640 injustice and misrule? Three phrases are critical for me here. 370 00:38:31,640 --> 00:38:38,180 These are African societies, economies and polities, African agency and then global structures. 371 00:38:38,180 --> 00:38:46,220 I think these crises can be explored in light of the mission of these two of African stories, as articulated by Nkrumah more than five decades ago. 372 00:38:46,220 --> 00:38:51,680 I would like to argue that we cannot adequately address the 21st century challenges inherent in 373 00:38:51,680 --> 00:38:58,400 this question without first approaching Africa in a global perspective that is global Africa, 374 00:38:58,400 --> 00:39:08,630 both historically and in the present. As Nkrumah long ago insisted, we can do this by two could due to the Caribbean philosophical position, 375 00:39:08,630 --> 00:39:16,550 shifting the geography of reason for African studies centre US and African studies in the UK. 376 00:39:16,550 --> 00:39:23,720 Should we interrogate what's constituted African societies, economies and polities, 377 00:39:23,720 --> 00:39:28,550 they have to be reimagined not only for the conventional continent allocation of Africans in Africa, 378 00:39:28,550 --> 00:39:36,770 but globally sub-Saharan Africa, as it is often, but also from their dislocation relocations in all parts of the world. 379 00:39:36,770 --> 00:39:41,750 Dubois like if you are that of his generation and of course, the lesson here, 380 00:39:41,750 --> 00:39:47,690 try to understand and situate Africa into worldly representations and recognition 381 00:39:47,690 --> 00:39:53,960 to affirm Africa's presence that was both unique and equal to others. 382 00:39:53,960 --> 00:40:00,020 Against this backdrop, the African diaspora to become a central part of Africa through this curriculum is impossible 383 00:40:00,020 --> 00:40:06,620 to imagine Jewish studies that ignores the Jewish diaspora on the adequacy of global Africa. 384 00:40:06,620 --> 00:40:11,360 You've recently argued the African American, Caribbean and Latin American Indian Ocean, 385 00:40:11,360 --> 00:40:17,840 as well as North African libraries, should no longer be treated as extraneous to core African studies. 386 00:40:17,840 --> 00:40:24,950 I must note here that success African stories notably reject the division between sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. 387 00:40:24,950 --> 00:40:30,860 In contrast, in Oxford University, Sudan studies on the Middle East Centre, like other North African countries, 388 00:40:30,860 --> 00:40:35,630 even one more privileged to be part of the economic community of West African states. 389 00:40:35,630 --> 00:40:39,430 I simply must read the study of AFRICOM was the approach I quoted. 390 00:40:39,430 --> 00:40:45,490 Began the widest possible South Africa in all of its complexity, diversity and its underlying unity. 391 00:40:45,490 --> 00:40:50,260 Or what that means is it long described as the totality of the flat world. 392 00:40:50,260 --> 00:40:56,260 Second, when we reimagine whatever comes as a global phenomenon that is to editorialise as well as Dieterich 393 00:40:56,260 --> 00:41:01,600 to realise how we study after for candidates yesterday in both qualitatively or quantitatively 394 00:41:01,600 --> 00:41:06,970 to go back to shifting the geography of reason why the French and the American revolutions have been 395 00:41:06,970 --> 00:41:12,160 the two pivots on which eighteenth century democratic revolution has been theorised and taught. 396 00:41:12,160 --> 00:41:18,790 Changing our approach means that we are more strategic in major contributions of Africa, and he gives it to global democratic history. 397 00:41:18,790 --> 00:41:24,640 From the departure point of the revolution, the first black revolution in the modern world with global implications. 398 00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:34,420 Those are ideals must include work of R. C. R. James, Paul Gilroy, Michelle Trudeau, 399 00:41:34,420 --> 00:41:41,380 Sybil Fisher, David Cole, Suzanne Moore and the rest and also their African contemporaries, 400 00:41:41,380 --> 00:41:49,600 including, of course, Latino based leaders in critical black women, the settlers in dominant West and history about the Asian Revolution. 401 00:41:49,600 --> 00:41:52,990 As it said in the trunk root of 18th century revolutions, 402 00:41:52,990 --> 00:41:58,540 that redefined modernity can be best corrected not only by treating it as part of Caribbean history, 403 00:41:58,540 --> 00:42:01,420 but as a core curriculum in global African studies. 404 00:42:01,420 --> 00:42:09,520 As Paul Detroit as argued, we need to show students quote that the experiences of black people were part of the abstract modernity unquote. 405 00:42:09,520 --> 00:42:10,720 I show, and I quote, 406 00:42:10,720 --> 00:42:19,060 became evidence of some of the themes that black intellectuals have said about the essays of Embeddedness in the modern world, unquote. 407 00:42:19,060 --> 00:42:24,640 When you said in 1963 that Africans request this in the process of African Revolution, 408 00:42:24,640 --> 00:42:32,590 you should have added that dismal start by recognising that the first major African revolution in the modern world, which is the Asia revolution. 409 00:42:32,590 --> 00:42:38,410 The third is global processes. A lot has been written about globalisation in Africa, in Africa and globally. 410 00:42:38,410 --> 00:42:43,900 However, beyond the debates on Africa's present challenges and opportunities within globalisation is the 411 00:42:43,900 --> 00:42:50,020 recognition that Africa was not remotely global in the dawn at the dawn of the 21st century. 412 00:42:50,020 --> 00:42:56,140 It has been truly global, at least since the 17th century, when it became central to the international trade system. 413 00:42:56,140 --> 00:43:02,590 Despite the ravages of history, though, we have a duty not only to study how global processes affect Africa, 414 00:43:02,590 --> 00:43:09,670 but also how Africa affects global processes. Beyond these are the need to directly rethink and expand the curriculum. 415 00:43:09,670 --> 00:43:15,880 Novelistic and more than a decade ago, that African story starts in great need of economist and economic historian 416 00:43:15,880 --> 00:43:19,510 who might understand our the hidden mysteries of globalisation affect Africa, 417 00:43:19,510 --> 00:43:25,180 unquote. No doubt, economic historians have made great contributions to mainstream African studies, 418 00:43:25,180 --> 00:43:31,300 and a great example of this is positive as I what we need in modern economic history of Africa. 419 00:43:31,300 --> 00:43:35,890 However, economics are still a reality in most African studies centres in some places, 420 00:43:35,890 --> 00:43:41,980 as if not for said that for African economies, he separate and separate from Central African studies. 421 00:43:41,980 --> 00:43:46,420 Finally, to return to the critical issues raised by Taiwo in his recent piece, 422 00:43:46,420 --> 00:43:52,510 where he identified sedate anxiety as a phenomenon that is quote 14 African intellectuals, 423 00:43:52,510 --> 00:43:58,540 Africans as well African scholars chicken about Africa within and outside the continent must abandon 424 00:43:58,540 --> 00:44:04,810 their conscious and unconscious embrace of what I would describe as the ideological history of the West, 425 00:44:04,810 --> 00:44:12,970 which I find quote inhuman inheritance into a local western patrimony and which, you know, 426 00:44:12,970 --> 00:44:18,690 leads scholars into what you describe as an anxiety about Africa's place in the world. 427 00:44:18,690 --> 00:44:23,710 Tavernier encourages African, East African and African scholars, as well as students of Africa, 428 00:44:23,710 --> 00:44:32,650 to quote abandon any racism inflected metaphysics of difference that takes Africa out of the enormous acute or human doing and think of could. 429 00:44:32,650 --> 00:44:40,150 This is because, as you said, Africa's problem African problems are contingent iterations of human problems. 430 00:44:40,150 --> 00:44:45,070 Africa is not a difference. It is neither too dissimilar from the rest of the world. 431 00:44:45,070 --> 00:44:51,150 Nor is it constituted as an essential dissimilar problem in global history and in the contemporary era. 432 00:44:51,150 --> 00:44:56,320 Thus, it shouldn't be studied should it be still studies, I conclude now. 433 00:44:56,320 --> 00:44:59,980 I do not intend to understate the huge challenges confronted by African states, 434 00:44:59,980 --> 00:45:04,030 as reflected in the poor state of high education in many parts of Africa. 435 00:45:04,030 --> 00:45:08,170 Indeed, I would suggest that the challenges of African studies everywhere are in part 436 00:45:08,170 --> 00:45:12,610 a reflection of the structural and order deficiencies of the African schools. 437 00:45:12,610 --> 00:45:20,050 Therefore, I do not in any way wish to suggest that external reduced access exclusively account for the problems of African studies. 438 00:45:20,050 --> 00:45:25,990 In fact, one global African studies must do is to take as much cognisance of external factors, 439 00:45:25,990 --> 00:45:31,060 such as Africa's inception in such an indie trajectory and career of global capitalism, 440 00:45:31,060 --> 00:45:39,210 as much as focussed on dynamics that in turn out of the African world and how these dynamics condition and condition by. 441 00:45:39,210 --> 00:45:45,960 External relations and global context. Yet African studies must transcend what I would describe the pathologies, 442 00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:55,170 what I describe as pathologies of what that or that is or what I would describe as opposed to data resides in 1955. 443 00:45:55,170 --> 00:46:01,800 Is a route that good people who write the history of the world civilisation without devoting a single chapter to Africa. 444 00:46:01,800 --> 00:46:07,620 I see if Africa has made no contribution to the world or good. We can no longer continue with the dominant tradition, 445 00:46:07,620 --> 00:46:13,320 which assumes that Global Africa has contributed nothing to the work of the universal, as in describes it. 446 00:46:13,320 --> 00:46:18,150 Thus, the fundamental basis of African global African studies must be the central role of 447 00:46:18,150 --> 00:46:23,070 Africa in understanding and accounting for our common humanity and desirable goals. 448 00:46:23,070 --> 00:46:28,710 So he must be committed to sanctity of life, justice, equity, equality and democracy. 449 00:46:28,710 --> 00:46:36,930 We should give value to the fact that there is nothing about Africa that is outside of our common humanity and sharibu, past, present and future. 450 00:46:36,930 --> 00:46:41,400 By so doing, we can raise the profile of African studies as a field of knowledge production 451 00:46:41,400 --> 00:46:46,740 and as an entry point into a project of intellectual about the human condition. 452 00:46:46,740 --> 00:46:49,563 I thank you.