IN SEARCH OF A TRADITION FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH IN AFRICA AND A VISION FOR THE 1990's
K.K. Prah
The 1990s have an intimidating finality beyond the narrow and trifle considerations of social science research. As the terminal phase of the 20th century, it is this decade which provides the vantage of hindsight to survey in a broad sweep what the nine preceding decades have provided or failed to provide Africa. Unfortunately the dire social and economic straits, the debilitating morass of debt, shabby political systems, and infrastructural decay in which contemporary Africa is quagmired provide scant solace and certainly little room for chest-thumping.
In the course of the present century, Africa has traversed a tortuous route, from classical colonialism in the age of imperialism when the continent was carved-up, through the emergence of African nationalism as a populist form, which served as the crucible dissolving the colonial order, with the 1960s as the high-water mark of this anti-colonial awakening and independence. That was a decade shrouded in a resplendent and unbridled euphoria and societal optimism.
It lasted no more than a decade. It was swept aside by realities of neocolonialism and the excesses of the new native rulers. As the populist civilian administrations which enunciated the independence era opened the way to degenerate misrule, they gave way in many instances to the establishment of military bureaucratic states. Repression, terror, state-sponsored vandalism and brigandage became hallmarks of African political practice. In countries like Mozambique, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola and Uganda, endless war and civil strife have over the past two decades and more become the norm of political history. With economies tethering on the verge of collapse and the vagaries of the IMF's structural adjustment policies hounding African economies, scholars can hardly keep body and soul together. Academic pursuits have become unaffordable luxuries, with professors more concerned about the elusiveness of daily bread than the scientific peregrinations of the tutored mind. In the quarter century since independence,the optimism of the beginning of the era has been replaced by an unflagging Weltschmerz.
In spite of their cerebral endeavors, academics live in the real world, and the existential realities of terra firma affect the scholastic enterprise and its practitioners. Where universities and dons cannot afford food, books and journals are even less affordable. The daily mundane needs of scholars for biological survival have during the past two decades assumed brobdignagian proportions in terms of the time and the social demands that they impose. Many buckle under these pressures and become cheap and gullible pawns in the hands of spineless politicians or the military brass in Africa. Some provide as it were respectable window dressing for political parties and cabals abandoning the mandarinate and the intellectual honesty which its esprit de corps demands.
Fortunately, not all scholars have a quantifiable purchase value for the political custodians of society. From time immemorial intellectuals have, where they have moral fibre, often espoused just cases; from the Socratic moral courage and choice for hemlock in the face of entrenched and institutionalized obscurantism, or Emile Zola's passionate "J'accuse" on behalf of the anti-semitically besieged Dreyfus in 19th century France from left to right, from the pro-nazi posturing of Ezra Pound to David Caute's paputchiki, intellectuals and cultivated minds have found "just causes." False gods and barren causes, some will describe all this, better cocoon in the wisdom of Spinoza'a phraseology "neither to cry nor to laugh but to understand".
African brains have in the past submitted much baggage in the service of the emancipation and uplift of the African's condition. The result of James Africanus Beale Horton's researches which was, as Ayo Langley reports, not intended only as a scientific work but also importantly as a voice for self-government for the then British West African settlements and an ideological defence of the status and condition of the black man against the "False Theories of Modern Anthropologists," another principal object of his treatise was to "develop amongst these different nationalities a true political science".Regarding Edward Wilmot Blyden, as Lynch's study attests, Blyden in the late nineteenth century became the genius loci of intellectual and emancipatory ideas in English-speaking West Africa. Early researched contributions to the study of African society like J.M. Sarbah's work, or J.E. Casely Hayford's analysis remain pioneer studies which need better integration into contemporary African social science discourse.Ethiopia Unbound raised issues of African nationalism which are as relevant today as when they were first published.In Jomo Kenyatta's anthropological study for which his erstwhile teacher Professor Malinowski wrote a forward, he dedicated the study
to Moigo and Wamboi and all the dispossessed youth of Africa: for perpetuation of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African Freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living, and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines.
S.M. Molema's, The Bantu: Past and Present attempted to present sociological arguments for better international and race relations especially in as far as this affected the Bantu in Southern Africa. While polemical in style, it was nonetheless scholastically critical and lucid. Jabavu and Lamine Gueye were more preeminently concerned about burning social issues than the scientific analysis of society and its workings.
What is in general true of these 19th century and early 20th century African scholastically trained minds was that whatever the genre of writing they preferred and adopted, the one common denominator in their work was the concern about the need to correct western misunderstandings and distortions about the nature of the society, history, and being of the African. Until close to the mid-twentieth century hardly any of them wrote from a philosophically consistent tradition or viewpoint. Even the negritude thinkers of the interwar years and the post-second-world-war period invariably displayed eclectic approaches for which the object of writing was more important than the methodological parameters within which the ideas were couched. However both the "negrologues" (to borrow a concept from Stanislave Adotevi)and the earlier minds represented, in terms of social background the westernized elite which regarded itself more or less as the voice of les indigenes. Their overall concerns were hardly ever purely scholastic. They were more politically oriented minds with scholastic instruments than scholars fur sich. They were responding largely to what their education and nativity had taught them to be the most crucially felt needs in contemporary African society. They were reflecting what in Durkhecmian terms can be regarded as a conscience collective, a set of ideas and preoccupations exterior to any given individual but endowed with a sociologically coercive and obsessional force over individual thought and behaviours - in this case,the emancipation and vindication of African humanity.
The subsequent generation of African intellect which emerged in the post-second-world-war era and which straddles the pre-independence and the post-colonial periods has tended to define its scholastic roots more consciously and consistently within the framework of the various western philosophical and methodological schools. For one thing, most of this subsequent generation have enjoyed narrowly focussed disciplinary training in the social sciences than their predecessors. Furthermore they are apparently less caught up with the wider societal obsessions of their predecessors. Hitherto, there has been little concern shown for the need to develop a tradition distinctly African in essence, or free of the preoccupative benchmarks of the dominant western scholarship or its methodological paradigms.
As a result,they have nurtured the permanence of an appendage status to western scholarship. This outlook dictates a condition in which African scholars examine issues through western preoccupative blinkers. The selection of issues for scientific enquiry, the methodological mind-sets and the prioritization of research items are approached through western criteria. The point being made here is not that there is "African Mathematics" or "African Chemistry" distinct from universal understandings. Rather the point is that what Africans consider to be leading preoccupative societal issues are invariably different from western priorities.
The mimetic culture of neocolonialism pervades academic and scholastic work in Africa. Until and unless reference is made to western academic authorities and homage paid to scholastic shrines, African intellectuals are unable to put our their own flags and stand on their own feet. This syndrome is also reflected as an almost conscious or unconscious avoidance of African sources in footnoting and citation. This mentality reinforces inferior and appendage status for African academics, in a world where most of the prestigious institutions of higher learning are in the west, where most scholarly journals are based, and where most of the financial resources for research emanate. Thus euphemistically put, African scholars hardly speak to each other directly. When and if they do, this happens through third parties based in academic seats of the metropolitan centres of the world.
Recent social transformations in East Europe and the rise of nationalities seeking greater sovereignty and independence are being matched by the erosion of the basis of the military bureaucratic state in Africa and affects both states which espouse leftist rhetoric and rightist ones. The clamour for democratic organization, and multi-party systems is increasing both in Africa and other parts of the world. People are finding voice for ideas and jealously guarded attitudes which in the past have been suppressed for fear of state opinion and the risk of often ruthless suppression. Extended detention, torture, and in some cases murder, have been the costly price paid for views publicly aired in favour of bourgeois democracy and human rights. Times are changing and all this is usefully affecting the historical evolution of the intellectual process in Africa. Suddenly armchair revolutionaries and some erstwhile Marxists have switched philosophical positions without batting an eye. The lack of depth and reading has made the Marxian debate among African scholars a barren enterprise during the past two decades.
The ghost of Stalinism has again reared its head among some of the dilletantist fair weather Marxists of the African left. The critique of Stalin of a balanced kind is again lost in the language of some who until a year ago were extolling the virtues of Soviet-sponsored socialism with its fossilism and deadening bureaucracy. The significance of the Kruschevite position during the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU has come alive again, with differing meanings to different minds. There has also been the difficulty of the fanatics who have replaced in their minds Marxism as a sociological and philosophical method and those others who regarded Marxism as virtually a substitute for theology, who believed more than thought; who insisted on chapter and verse, unfortunately too often with poor reading. Undigested understanding and facile regurgitation has caught up with some social theorists on the left. It is important that during the present decade the left in African scholarship handle critically each other's work to avoid slipshod philosophy and demystify the discourse of the philosophical men of all seasons.
During the colonial period social studies on Africa under the aegis of scientists from the metropolitan countries developed and popularized functionalist and structuralist approaches to the anlysis of social reality. Till today, in its various versions it remains the dominant methodology favoured by western social scientists.
From the period of the shift away from 19th century evolution and diffussionism elements like Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski laid the foundations of functionalism in British anthropology. The "historical particularism" of Franz Boas and his intellectual progeny tolerated the type of eclecticism with incorporation or interpenetration of functionalist approaches. T. Parsons, Page, and American sociologists refined further the earlier formulations of functionalism. The structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss became in the middle of the 20th century the most influential anthropological approach in contemporary Europe. Within the spectrum of ideas underlying structionalism and functionalism, most western social scientists in the middle and late 20th century are represented. Most African social scientists except for the Marxists and neo-marxists would fall under the structural-functionalist category, or some similar approach to that. I have elsewhere indicated that the greatest weakness of this structural functionalist strategy is its fundamental ahistoricism.
The rise of the dependency school in the sixties has in Africa tended to eclipse functionalism, but more recently neo-marxism has come into vogue but as a reaction to Marxism. The sterlile and mechanical use of Marxian categories, and the uncritical and uncreative replication of notions conceived in substantially different social realities are presented to define the African situation.
The greatest weakness of research endeavors in africa is created by a lack of funds. African research bodies and institutes are very dependent on research funds provided by external donor agencies. These donor agencies schedule their own research, where and when, they would be willing to provide support. Most research bodies and institutes are willy nilly forced to tailor their research priorities according to the importance accorded them by the donor agencies. Sometimes donor agencies even indicate what they consider to be acceptable methodologies for research, and in this way impose ideology and research agenda on African research institutes.
Another important observation is that because the apportionment of funds is largely decided by external aid agencies of the metropolitan powers, the pool of African scholars are attracted and get drawn into research interests and priorities dictated by external factors. In order to have access to research funding, African academics alter their language and research methodology to suit the requirements of aid agencies. This in the final analysis is a reflection of the nature of the post-colonial state and its neocolonial condition.
The concept of scientific work includes as one of its main arms, research. It is the principal means for acquiring scientific knowledge, serving to test theory, refine theory, and measure the applicability and response of theory to parxis. It stands in between theory and practice and serves to provide a two-way accessibility between theory and practice.
Research is not, however, a neutral phenomenon; it is not value-free. It is coloured by history and society, in as far as it is open to selectivity both in methodology and thematic or topical interests. We choose research topics according to criteria and priorities we set. We apply in research, methodologies we approve of, or regard as scientifically tenable. Sometimes such selection is based on scientifically arguable or argued considerations. At other times other rational considerations may be invoked to justify research. But whichever way we scrutinize the ramifications of the research idea, it is difficult to dismiss the role of ideology, as historical and societal, collective and individual conditions which bear an imprint on the form and content of ideas. We would argue that it is more important to realize and recognize the ideological content of our ideas as a point of departure in research, than to deny this in the name of the pursuit of a value-free science, and in consequence have unidentified ideological factors interfere with our findings and results.
The natural sciences in research are less encumbered by sociological factors, and are therefore less prone to direct and possibly recognized ideological considerations. The measurability and quantifiability of research inputs in the natural sciences again eliminate largely the influence of idiosyncratic and philosophical factors. But it would be wrong to push the logic of the argument to the point that ideological considerations are totally, or can be totally excluded from research in the natural sciences. In the natural sciences just as in the social sciences, the selection of research topics and themes; their prioritization and social service to which such research is geared; and the structurization and costing of material inputs, are all issues which are directly and indirectly advised by ideological and sociological factors. We are thinking here of, for example, the dominant social and economic interests within a given society. Whether research, generally or specifically, is to receive a given percentage of the Gross National Product depends on the priorities of the social order, and is ultimately dependent on the social interests of the dominant groups in society.
With numerous research bodies and institutions scattered all over the globe, one pitfall of many research centres and bodies has been to drift, on account of poor information (which is itself a research problem), into research which has been done already elsewhere, and in effect duplicate research work at considerable cost. The implication of this and its main lesson is that research centres and bodies need to selectively network according to their requirements, interests and needs. As far as possible there is an important and gnawing need to keep abreast and be informed of cognate or related research which has been done or is being done elsewhere.
When OSSREA was born in Nazareth (Africa) there was excitement and much verbiage expended on the great things to come in the wake of this auspicious birth. Some palpable good has emerged from this effort and our presence here at least bears testimony to this. Under its auspices, contributory research work in the social sciences has been produced in Africa, by Africans. I hope in the first place also for Africa. Culture in general, and in this sense intellectual culture in Africa in particular, historically, needs first to be national in order to become international. Few western scientists and historians have the courage of Suret-Canale to write in the preface of his excellent introductory study on French colonialism that:
It did not prove possible, for example, to throw light on the life and history of the African peoples during the period under review as would have been fitting. Such a study would involve an enormous amount of investigation on the spot, a task that can hardly be undertaken at the present time, and one which Africans alone can complete satisfactorily.
Rather many still quietly assume that the heart of studies on Africa still lies in the western world.
The lively and acute discussions of the Nazareth meeting have lived to a tenth anniversary. Many of the minds deployed then and some of the representatives of donor agencies are not in this meeting. The scholars range virtually from one end of the philosophical spectrum to the other. Today a whole array of philosophical derivations are still represented and very fortunately a lot of new blood and mind.
This has always been a quality of OSSREA, and for fruitful debate essential; away from coteries and narrow tendencies and sects of self-congratulatory cabals, these latter being in effect intellectually suffocatory practices to the constructive development of social science in Africa.
Regional Cooperation, Integration and Pan-Africanism have found new meanings in our time, and our contributions to these issues have become crucial discussion material in the contemporary period. It is therefore very relevant that the present theme of the conference is based on these issues.
It is important that the proceedings of this African scholastic encounter reflect fresh and incisive views on this theme reflections which can serve as an academic milestone in the attempt to crystallize African intellectual thought on issues concerning the development and betterment of the condition of man in Africa today, in order to protect the interests of Africans in the future.
Some may protest this overt and explicit spirit of engagement with African causes in the course of the scholastic enterprise and the pursuit of the academic metier. It is not new and it will not be the last time intellectuals have sought causes.
This is all enriching and is the spice of academic debate. What needs to be eschewed is what Apolo Nsibambi in academic conversation to me has decried as "academic pedestrianism" and pedantism and also Eshetu Chole's eloquent denunciation of reducing whole institutions and countries to footnotes in African academic meetings. "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend".
The African experience particularly in the east and Horn area over the past two decades has been characterised by civil wars and internecine conflict. The specific causes of these conflicts vary from case to case but, by and large, underlying them all are questions of the rights of nationalities, democracy, and the inability of the existing state structures to hold in workable balance popular demands for nationality rights and attendant issues.1 With African borders drawn by European powers cutting through areas occupied by common nationalities, tensions have arisen in the post-independence era which threaten the existence of some states. Wider cooperation across existing state borders is vital to the achievement of peace and economic development. The whole problem area defined by these issues constitutes one of the most important areas for research during the current decade. Social science would need to help clarify these issues for the wider public, especially decision-makers who seek recourse to war for issues which are ultimately political and which war cannot, as experience shows, resolve. The prospects for integrative institutions for African states and Pan-Africanist solutions would need close examination and research into possible routes to peace and social stability in Africa. What have been the reasons for past failures in the area of regional integration? What lessons can be drawn from the experience of the past, and how can better approaches be formulated and adopted? Research into socio- and ethno-linguistics, social history, and anthropology would have to be given their crucial places in contemporary research concerns. Anthropology in particular has a significant contribution to make to the solution of the nationality problems in Africa.
Some social scientists too easily accept concepts and usages which have little analytical substance and sometimes smack of popular political rhetoric. Witness, for example, Erasto Muga on difficulties concerning Luo customs which affect rural development. He suggests that:
Another factor which makes the Luo people of the Kano plains unenthusiastic about participating in the resettlement schemes has to do with the Luo customs of hospitality and charity which have their root in what is called "African Socialist"
Emmanuel Hansen's notion of "conventional" military regimes or Adele Jinadu's rather flighty formulation of "the Afro-Marxist State" do not offer much cognitive and analytical gold.
Whatever strictures we may raise to assail the effort of a work of scholarship like Mudimbe's recent study, it stands up to the highest standards of intellectual craftsmanship and profound reading.While eclecticism often lacks substantial constructional from, encyclopaedism where effectively distilled is the hallmark of the consummately tutored mind.
The glib acceptance of state ideology as a basis for sociological analysis has its own pitfalls. No better example can be found in contemporary Africa than Ethiopia where during the last three months the ruling regime has changed rhetoric to the possible academic embarrassment of a horde of intellectuals who in the past too faithfully and uncritically accepted state ideology as scientific reality. Numerous examples can be recalled but perhaps Tarekegn Adebo and Legesse Lemma are good specimens of this.
The general failure of African social science to develop a sense of preoccupative autonomy, and chart out new methodological routes and the tools for this derives largely from its preference of paradigms fashioned by western observers. The nearest African social science has come to developing a distinctive and organic intellectual genre was in the University of Dar es Salaam during the early 1970s. A great deal of credit for this goes to academics like Walter Rodney, Dan Nabudere, Yash Tandon, Issa Shiviji, Mahmood Mamdani and others. But it is arguable that even there this took place in parameters set by the resident western radical liberals and neo-marxists such as John Saul, Giovanni Arrighi, Rosenberg, and the like. Dar es Salaam was a political Mecca where many hoped socialism in an African attire could emerge as a visible and viable model for African development. The Dar es Salaam debates raised issues which in many senses remain unresolved. All the same the organic character of the leftist academia that emerged there has had intellectual progeny on whom the articulation of the real lessons of the period rest. Too many of the protagonists of the debates have still too many bones to pick at the expense of cold and dispassionate analysis.
All the same the emergent body of studied literature is laying the foundations for a possible social science intellectual culture with mainly African reference points. From the sceptical and critically unaligned approaches of Akiiki Mujaju, Eshetu Chole, Fassil G.Kiros, Apolo Nsibambi and Gyngera-Pinycwa, to the more philosophically committed positions of Mandani, Nabudere, Peter Anyang-Nyong'o and Archie Mafeje, many fall between. What is needed is examination and dissection of arguments, and also very importantly, the patience and ability to research more while avoiding undue and unacademic political posturing. For those academics whose careers have been punctuated by flirtations with the African political establishment, scholastic discourse has sometimes been used to justify opportunistic historical connections with socially discredited regimes. The least one would expect from such academics is some critical appraisal of such encounters and less facile justification of such liaison.
The recent text on research methods put out by OSSREA is a very useful departure point. But it is only a beginning.More has to be done with our eyes on the ground, more reading and learning and less political posturing and flirtation.
1 . See David Caute. The Fellow-Travellers. A Postscript to the Enlightenment. New York, 1973, p.2. Also Emile Zola. La Verite on Marche. Paris. 1901.
1 . Quoted here from I.L. Horwitz (ed.). Power, Politics and People. The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Oxford 1962, p.292.
1 . See J. Ayo Langley, Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa. London. 1979, p.33.
1 . Hollis R. Lynch. Edward Wilmot Blyden. Pan-Negro Patriot. 1832-1912. London. 1990.
1 . John Mensah Sarbah. Fanti Customary Laws. London. 1897.
1 . J.E. Casely Hayford. Gold Coast Native Institutions. London. 1911.
1 . J.E. Casely Hayford. Ethiopia Unbound. London. 1911.
1 . Jomo Kenyatta. Facing Mount Kenya. London. 1961.
1 . S. Adotevi. Negritude et Negrologues. Paris. 1972.
1 . See Marvin Harris. The Rise of Antrhopological Theory. New York. 1968, p.250.
1 . Marvin Harris. Cultural Materialism. New York. 1980, p.165.
1 . K.K. Prah. Remarks on Current Anthropology in Africa. A Critique of Functionalist Ahistorisim. Occasional Paper No. 3. ISAS. Paris. 1964.
1 . Jean Suret-Canale. Afrique Noire: L'ere coloniale. 1900-1945. Paris. 1964.
1 . See K.K. Prah. Some Wider Implications of Internal Conflicts in Eastern Africa, the Horn, and Eastern Sahelian Areas. Mimeo. 1987.
1 . See K.K. Prah. A Plea for an Antrhopological Renaissance. CODESRIA Bulletin. No. 2. 1988.
1 . E. Muga. " Problems of Rural Development in Kenya. A Sociological Case Study of Social Change in the Kano Plains". Journal of Eastern African Research and Development. Vol. 1. No. 1. 1971, p.59.
1 . E. Hansen. "The State and Popular Struggles in Ghana. 1982-1986" in P. Anyang Nyong'o (ed.). Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa. London. 1987. L. Adele Jinadu. "The Concept of the Afro-Marxist State", in P. Menyns and D. Nabudere (eds.). Democracy and the One Party-State in Africa. Hamburg 1989.
1 . V.Y. Mudimbe. The Invention of Africa. London. 1988.
1 . Legesse Lemma. "Educational Transformation in Revolutionary Ethiopia" in Tadesse Beyene (ed.). Proceedings of the Eight International Conference of Ethiopian Studies. Vol. 2. 1989. Tarekegn Adebo. "Popular Participation in the Ethiopian Revolution" in Tadesse Beyene (ed.). ibid.
1 . Bashir Omer Mohamed Fadlalla and Fassil G. Kiros (eds.) Research Methods in the Social Sciences. Khartoum. 1986.