Foremost experts in the academia have called a more inclusive approach to scholarship through the merging of cultural and scientific knowledge systems.
This appeal was part of the deliberations made at the last Toyin Falola Interview Series held on Sunday and streamed on various social media platforms, television and online radio platforms.
The panel which consisted of very distinguished academics noted that the collapse of divisive polarities in the scholarship was the way to go if the needed progress in human societies was to be achieved. It was also stated that there must be a symbiotic relationship in the various knowledge systems whether cultural, scientific, environmental, political or financial.
Speaking at the interaction with the theme on African Studies were prominent scholars such as Professors Ouissen Alidou, Kenneth Harrow, Richard Joseph, among others. The gathering was also put together in honour of Professors Joseph and Harrow for recently receiving the Distinguished Africanist Award.
In his intervention, Professor Harrow stated that “I don’t think needs are solely met on only mechanical or material terms. They are in a sense: unless we have peace, unless we have food, we can’t have culture. We can’t think of human development outside of the broader, ethical and humanist issues. How much do we do that in the academy today? I think the academy is in its narrow chamber. I will say some positive things as well. Some of the more recent scholarships that I have seen have increasingly turned our field towards the question of the material. But sometimes the material side seems so abstract. For example, what is the materiality of cinema? We look at the concreteness of the materiality. On the other hand, you can’t really separate that from the production of film, as in Nollywood. Once we start taking seriously the question of materiality, it extends everywhere. We must understand the inter-disciplinarity and not the reduction to major categories. I don’t want the production of knowledge in the scientific world which is phenomenal to become separated from the production of knowledge culturally. There should no borders to the ecologies of knowledge, just as the way we all breathe air. The air in Africa is the same with the air in other continents.”
Speaking of his contributions to African Studies, Professor Joseph told the gathering that “The complexity of Africa, states, arts, cinema and governance is phenomenal. I was very much transformed in my thinking as a result of being engaged in Africa. I had the highest level of learning in the United States, France; but it was my engagement in Africa that is really responsible for the content and quality of the works that I have produced. Behind me here over my shoulder, you can see there are two piles of books. One has to do with my Cameroon work and the other has to do with my Nigeria work. I had to leave my Cameroon work behind as soon as I published my first article about what I was actually studying. I was actually able to do that work in a context in which that kind of research was not permissible. This was a regime that came to power very much shaped by opposition especially French repression of that moment. There is one pile of books there in which I was able to have significant progress. There are ecosystems that exist within African studies. When the struggles were taking place in the US which had to do with African studies, I had been trained by Thomas Lionel Hutchkins. The people who were part of that world were people like Basil Davidson. That was quite a different ecosystem. What we call African studies consists of ecosystems and such ecosystems can sometimes become enclaves. There are gates that open and you can enter. At every stage of your career, certain things can enter. You can get jobs, you can get fellowships. But there are situations in which they are not gates; they are fences. You are shut off and they operate in that way. But unfortunately what has happened in some segments of African studies is not only have they shut off ways of thoughts and approaches, they have also shut off the valves that would bring dynamism to what they are doing.”
While celebrating the scholarships of Professors Joseph and Harrow, Alidou said that “My generation recognizes the ethical foundation that earlier scholars such as Professor Kenneth Harrow and Professor Richard Joseph have set. This foundation goes across fields, across continents, across diversities of identity and philosophical orientations. Some of us have not been your direct students in your classes but I can tell you that I have been your student too. My works on Muslim women in Niger, in the Sahel or in Kenya have benefitted a lot from your own work on Islam, women and feminism, the literary and cultural studies. I thank Professor Richard Joseph on your work as a political scientist and a historian of African politics. You have looked at areas of conflict and have also provided us with resources to think critically about transition across our complex commonalities and differences, and to inform global powers on how to think of Africa and see it with its complexities within politics. I have been inspired by your work in the sense of reading it and looking at your endeavor to really push the African agenda. This means a lot to me and also to the generation of scholars who have been using your works. Peace is as complex as conflict itself.
“My training is as a linguist; I was trained as a linguist by Paul Newman at the Indiana University. He and others came to Niger to try to support the creation and capacity building in training in linguistics. When I came to the US to work with Professor Newman, that sense of what it is to do linguistics by bringing Africa scholarship to it was very fundamental. Within the American tradition, most departments of linguistics privilege one school of thought which is the generative school of thought. So African Studies actually becomes the space in which linguistics with all theoretical schools of thought is possible. It was important to find out what is the role of a linguist who is interested in bringing the voice of African women. This is because we are talking about different paradigms of interpreting different African societies. We would like to displace such dominant notions of literacy only as related to latinisation or masculinity. To be a woman in the Sahel which is the crossroads of civilization, what is the language that we produce? What are the data that we produce in theorizing about women agency and their autonomy and women’s contribution to knowledge production in different fields? There must be the notion of Africa that is both a continent and a place in its relation to the diversity of history.”