PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN AFRICA
Thandika Mkandawire
The task assigned to me by the organisers of this conference is not an easy one. Discussing the problems of the social sciences in Africa can easily turn into a litany of woes that may not be particularly edifying to anyone. Discussion of the future prospects may either lead to what has been termed "afro-pessimism" - a state of mind that simply projects past trends into the future and sees nothing but bleakness for Africa or an exercise in voluntarism and wishful thinking about a bright future for Africa unencumbered by the dreadful experiences of the recent past. Let me state from the very beginning that I believe Africa is eminently capable of advancing towards a bright future. However, the achievement of a willed future demands a deep grasp of the past and present. It is for this reason that what may seem more than undue space is allocated to the "problems" part of my assignment.
Social sciences are inextricably linked to the real circumstances in which they emerge. Consequently, in order to appreciate the nature of problems faced by African social scientists, it is essential to always bear in mind the historical context within which social science has developed in Africa. Here two things stand out sharply: (a) the relative newness of an indigenous social science community; and (b) the dramatic changes in the environment within which social science teaching, research and utilization takes place. Thus even before social science had time and space to establish itself in African society, it had to respond to rapid changes in the environment - changes which have not always been auspicious.
The recentness of an indigenous social science community is a reflection of years of colonial neglect of education of the colonised peoples. The tale has been told often enough. Suffice it here to present a set of figures that indicates the magnitude of the initial handicap and the substantial progress made since independence. In 1960 there were only about 21,000 students in Africa's tertiary educational institutions, and a few thousands in universities abroad. Since independence African governments have made laudable efforts to redress the imbalance: by 1983 437 thousand students were enrolled in African universities and a further 100,000 were abroad. Tertiary educational institutions produced 1,200 graduates in 1960, equivalent to one person trained at the level for each 168,000 inhabitants; in 1983 the figures were 70,600 graduates representing a ratio of one per 5,000 inhabitants. Because of priority given to "indigenisation" of the civil service and the much expanded primary and secondary systems, social scientists were a major component of this expansion. However, despite these efforts, Africa still lags far behind other underdeveloped countries although it has significantly narrowed the gap.
One of the effects of the newness of the social science institutions and community is continued intellectual dependence which manifests itself in various ways. Most conspicuous of these is the continued existence of replicas of institutional forms borrowed from the metropolitan countries in undiluted, albeit progressively tattered, forms as a result of the economic crunch and neglect.
A more significant manifestation of this dependence appears in the direction of research and teaching of the social sciences in Africa. Here Africa has still to wage a veritable battle for decolonisation. First, in no other continent is the relative weight of expatriates as pronounced as in africa despite some laudable attempts at "Africanisation".
The "Africanists" who usually spend brief periods in Africa, generally come to african universities with their own research priorities, problematiques, approaches, etc. In some cases, they may engage locals in their research but in most cases as research assistants and not as genuine collaborators. Usually the "collaborators" are included not because of the researchers' perceived scientific needs for such collaboration but because of the insistence by the funding organisations or local governments that the researchers indicate in their applications that they will have a local collaborator. In the worst cases, the expatriate community may be large enough to live its own intellectual life and conduct debates in which native scholars are totally marginal. An outstanding case of this sort of aloofness was the "Kenya Debate" conducted among a few expatriate scholars on what was the nature of the state in Kenya. by a process of self-reinforcing cross-referencing among themselves, these scholars were able to create a veritable enclave of intellectual discourse from which local scholars were virtually excluded. With the end of their contracts and their return to their respective homes, the "Kenya Debate" ended. Of course this division of labour does nobody much good and it has come to constitute the Achilles heel of African studies that are exclusively non-African.1
Intellectual dependence also generates a negative self-image among African scholars. Such an image may be demonstrated by forms of intellectual mimetism in which local scholarship is confined to "empirical verification" of hypothesis thrown up by institutions in the metropolitan countries without any attempt to evaluate their theoretical appropriateness and historical status. To reenforce this mimetism is a reward or merit system which accords foreign appreciation of research results greater weight than that of the local peer group. Not surprisingly, this leads to intellectual opportunism in which choice of themes and approaches are not a reflection of one's understanding of the issues but a compliance to the criteria of the dominant reward system.
Over the last two decades or so since Africa's modal year of independence (1960), the social status and material position of university education, and the social sciences in particular, have undergone significant changes within African societies. One of the major grievances of nationalism was colonial denial of educational opportunities to the African people. Not surprisingly, the establishment of higher institutions of education was placed high on the nationalist agenda. Consequently, in the initial post-independence years these institutions were treated as symbols of the new nationhood and as such they had high political premium set on them by the new nations' leadership. The establishment of universities had even greater political salience since it was seen as a contribution to the process of "indigenisation" and "Africanisation". However, in addition to these more "political" considerations, there was the instrumentalist justification of the expansion of educational institutions based on the prevailing notions about the relationship between manpower and development. In this respect, institutions of higher learning were seen as essential producers of manpower, the dearth of which was recognised as a major hindrance to economic growth and exercise of national sovereignty. To sum up, both political considerations and conventional thinking about development accorded higher education high social, political and economic roles. In turn, this justified substantial allocations of scarce resources to education and in the absence of immediate conflict between state interests and academia, relatively high degrees of intellectual autonomy, at least when compared to the sad situation today.
A decade or so after independence and even earlier in some countries, the honeymoon was over, and this for a number of reasons. First, in a number of ways the universities had been more than successful in one of their tasks - the meeting of the manpower needs for the indigenisation of state bureaucracies. In almost all countries, indigenes replaced expatriates in key administrative posts. Under these conditions, continued funding, let alone, expansion of universities had to be based on other criteria other than those that had inspired the first wave of expansion of universities. Whatever new funds - especially the external ones - were made available to tertiary education, these tended to go towards the establishment of highly specialised schools some of which were placed outside the universities.
Second was the growing tension between the new states and civil society. Attainment of independence accelerated processes of social differentiation, intensified the struggle for economic and political power and generally exposed the irreconcilable divergences in interests that had been concealed by the nationalist imperative of unity against the common enemy. In the pursuance of the new task - the management of "development" through "development planning" - the new states immediately encountered the accumulation and legitimacy crises of their economies, attempts at whose resolution only exposed the class boundedness of state policies. Unable to fulfill the nationalist promise of equality (often couched in various particularistic "socialism" - African socialism, Islamic socialism, etc.), states increasingly resorted to repressive measures and demobilisation of the popular classes that had been the cornerstone of the nationalist coalition. Universities found themselves caught up in the melee. Both the political expression and the critical thrust of scientific work emanating from the universities tended only to win university disfavour. States, which in any case increasingly viewed them as, at best, expensive white elephants, increasingly saw them as dens of "bearded" subversive elements in civic society.1
Third was the economic crisis. By the early 1980s African governments which had allocated relatively large shares of their fiscal resources to education were forced to adopt structural adjustment programmes. Most invariably these programmes call for reduction in social expenditures. In the case of Africa, the World Bank has simply called for drastic cuts in expenditure on university education especially for subjects that make up much of what is known as social science. All these economic and political changes have impacted negatively on resource allocation by African governments and aid donors to universities and on the political tolerance of free inquiry. They have worsened the context within which social science must develop in Africa.
Developmentalism has been defined as an ideological position that subjects everything else to development. Used by the state, it often assumes the characteristic of a manipulative and mystificatory ideology. However, it can also assume a genuinely humanist expectation and demand that, given the horror of poverty in our continent, all intellectual efforts should be harnessed towards development. And in many ways the social scientists in Africa have accepted this challenge, although in many cases they have been aware of the ambiguity of "development" and the social limitations of access to "development" whenever this manifests itself. However, with all our attention riveted on "development", we are unable to pay adequate attention to a whole range of aspects of our people's lives except that they are seen as "barriers" to "development" or potentialities that can be "mobilised" for "development".
Recently, I saw a play which was a take-off on Biptek's "Song of Lawino" in which "development" came out clearly as an alienating activity and humiliating to a people helplessly sensing they are to be "developed" and made to feel that their other preoccupations other than those of "development" were retrogrades, if not downright evils. And so our peoples' spiritual concerns, their history, their sense of identity, their intellectual and aesthetic aspirations - all these are marginalised or even banished from a discourse whose primary concern is "development". While it is perhaps justified for those who have come to our assistance in the process of development to confine their interests to only that research that is related to the particular objective of their financial commitment and to view us one-dimensionally as a people desperately in need of development, our interest in our societies must perforce be much broader and more permanent, encompassing a much larger vision of our own being and bringing into its purview a whole range of processes that constitutes us as a people - our history, our culture, our identities, our economies, our human dignity, our hopes and aspirations, etc.
The interface between research and policy is extremely unsatisfactory to both researchers and policy-makers and has often been a source of acrimonious recriminations between the two social actors. Part of the problem was the unrealistic expectations about what social science could achieve in the process of development. Policy-makers have always had a basically instrumentalist and technocratic view of science, research and training. In the heydays of "development decades" and national planning it seemed natural that social scientists would apply their knowledge to "the urgent development tasks" through participation in feasibility studies, evaluation of projects, drawing up of national plans and even in formulating national goals. Both by temperament and training most social scientists in Africa accepted this role in the management of change that was the leitmotif of the dominant paradigm.1 The involvement of nationals in these activities was made more urgent by the preponderance of expatriate advisors. African social scientists complained about the excessive use of foreign expertise even where national expertise was clearly present and they accused policy-makers of being burdened with a "colonial mentality" that inexorably pushed them towards foreign expertise. They clearly felt it was both their duty and right as nationals to assume the positions dominated by expatriates in the national crusade against "ignorance, poverty and disease" - that unholy trinity that featured in virtually every development plan of the epoch.
Unfortunately in the struggle for the "Africanisation" of consultancies, sufficient attention was not paid to the content of the practice that was to be indigenised, and still less was there any serious questioning of the premises underlying the whole enterprise and its long-term effects on overall social science research. Anyway, gradually both national and foreign governments and agencies accepted the need for the use of local expertise. The results of this pyrrhic victory were to emerge soon enough. David Court has aptly characterised the bitter harvest of the africanisation process and we take the opportunity here to cite him at length:
Their earlier general interest in addressing developmental issues has been submerged in a deluge of requests for service on commissions and consultancies and for the task of evaluation. As a result, in Kenya, for example, virtually all university social-science research that is not for a degree or thesis consists of short term contract work applied to specific problems. In historical terms, the involvement of local social scientists in consultancy work is a very positive development and an essential step toward the reduction of dependency upon external technical assistance. Much work previously contracted out to foreign companies and individuals is now being done by national scholars and consultants. However, the strength of demand in relation to supply has meant that a particular style of social science - short-term contract work - has come to dominate social science activity. Social science has come to mean the presentation of recommendations on a prescribed topic, in response to a request, and by means of an activity whose total time rarely exceeds six months, usually lasts two or three weeks, and sometimes is accomplished in a matter of days. In Kenya the nexus has become commercialised, in Tanzania nationalised, but the pattern and results in both cases have been remarkably similar.1
To be sure there were many social scientists who warned of the dangers of this instrumentalist view of social science and CODESRIA has published a number of the key works.1 But there can be no doubt that the "consultancy syndrome" poses severe challenge to the development of a creative and robust social science in Africa.
A widespread complaint by policy-makers is that African social scientists are aloofish or "academic" in the pejorative sense. Policy-makers accuse researchers of irrelevance, ivory tower isolationism and of negativism. Researchers in their turn accuse policy-makers of reliance on foreign expertise, manipulative use of research results and lack of clarity about goals to which research should be harnessed. It is not that African social scientists have chosen to sit out the current crisis, confining themselves to the arcane concerns of their particular disciplines to avoid sallying their hands in the day-to-day murk of politicking and "nation-building". Most African social scientists in the post-independence era generally embraced the "developmentalist" tasks assigned to them and quite openly saw themselves as being, in a rather utilitarian way, agents of development. In those early days, when the nationalist coalition still had some steam and when "developmentalism" was at its zenith and "development planning" was a la mode, it seemed only logical that the state, the party or simply the policy-makers should set up and articulate national priorities which would guide research in the new institutions. Researchers were to be guided in their own research priorities by these national priorities. In general the work of a number of "development institutes" tended to, nominally at least, follow these national priorities. Researchers, even when critical, tended to confine their criticism to the lack of implementation of national plans, reliance on foreign expertise, etc. However, in those early phases there were few African researchers, research being largely dominated by expatriates. These expatriates, often funded by their national governments or institutions or as part of aid packages were not bound by national priorities and their research tended to reflect the concerns of the development establishment abroad.
In more recent years, with the decline in "national planning", the triumph of the market, the preponderance of foreign institutions in policy-making (through so-called "policy dialogues") any pretension to national priorities providing guidelines to research has simply vanished. Where national research councils still exit the statement of priorities is never more than a wishful declaration of intent. One may parenthetically note the irony in the fact that at the time when most African governments insisted on their national priorities there were few indigenous social scientists and most of the experts were expatriates who were not bound by national priorities. Now that Africa has large numbers of social scientists, African governments have significantly lost degrees of autonomy and in one way on another are pursuing objectives imposed by external financial institutions. Thus two or three IMF experts sitting in a country's reserve bank have more to say about the direction of national policy than say the national association of economists.
Two factors have affected the relationship between basic research and applied research. The first are the "developmentalist" demands for applied research and denigration of basic research as "academic", irrelevant or, at worst, a "luxury we cannot afford". In addition to the technocratic demand of governmental and corporate interest for "applied" research, African social scientists have now to deal with populist demands by NGO's for "action-oriented" research needed for the implementation of small projects scattered all over Africa. The effect of this bias towards "policy-oriented" research is the "neglect of theoretical and speculative research into theoretic-methodological issues in the social sciences".1
The second is the prevailing division of labour in the international social science community itself, a division of labour in which the more tedious basic data gathering is left to the Africans and the theoretical digestion and elaboration is left to "Africanists". We ourselves seem to have succumbed to the exigencies of a division of labour that allots to us the humdrum task of gathering data, leaving to the centre the task of formulating the problematique and synthesizing the empirical data. This division of labour has proved unsatisfactory to all concerned. On the one hand it leads to a kind of mindless empiricism in which Africans are contracted to churn out meaningless data while on the other hand it leads the "Africanists" towards faddish theoretisation of the African reality and pursuit of often exclusively expatriate and ephemeral "debates" that vanish as mysteriously as they emerged without due consideration of the historical specificities of the African condition.
One of the most wasteful outcomes of this division of labour is that only those data digestible by the "North" become valid. As a consequence the existential experience of African social scientists of their reality is blocked from scientific discourse because it fails to meet the demands of the imported frameworks and the footnote fetishism that characterises contemporary research. About the only way this experience and knowledge seems to see the light of day is through footnotes by expatriates claiming use of African scholars as primary sources in their research projects. And so we have the bizarre situation in which the knowledge of an African social scientist about the politics of his/her country only becomes "scientific" if it is footnoted by a visiting scholar as an interview. For societies in which much that goes on is not written about or recorded, a social science practice premised entirely on the written record is deprived of a vast source of its nourishment.
Remarks on the current division of labour should not be misconstrued as something aimed against empirical work. If social science is to be true to its self-conception and if it is to serve in the understanding and transforming of the African reality, both basic empirical and applied research will have to be firmly grounded on the African continent.
A disturbing feature of social science practice in Africa is the weak empirical basis of much theorising. This weak empirical basis can be attributed to the following factors:
Some paradigms simply subsume the African experience under some general category and thus obviate the need for concrete studies on Africa. This has permitted approaches in which one adopted theoretical constructs form other parts of the world and simply assumed they are applicable to Africa, although there may not be the slightest evidence to that effect.
Perhaps the most strikingly visible feature of the crisis of social sciences in Africa is the disintegration of the research infrastructure. Libraries are, as a result of the "Book Hunger", collapsing; means for travel to carry out field work hardly exist and, where they do, they are linked to some short term consultancy work for government or external agencies.
Official institutions charged with the collection of national data - e.g. central statistical offices - are no longer able to keep their data up-to-date either because of severe financial and personnel constraints or because of the primacy given to the collection of data demanded by donors or other external agencies for specific projects or programmes.
In addition to these peculiarly national problems there are the international problems of the flow of information, control and dissemination. Here Africa's underdeveloped acquisition of new technologies of information processing is proving a major handicap.
Given the enormous difficulties in gathering data, a number of scholars have turned around and argued that preoccupation with empirical material is "empiricist". While some of the criticisms directed at mindless empiricism are justified, much of this rings as making virtue out of necessity. It is an escape from the reality that we are severely constrained in doing empirical work in Africa and the unpleasant fact no amount of theoretical acrobatics can obviate the need for sound empirical work.
The growth in consultancy has introduced new patterns of data gathering and consumption that lead to highly selective collection of data, fudging of data to meet deadlines and to fit the predispositions of the clients, inflation of basically empty data bases, etc.
In terms of publication, although there are some valiant efforts to provide research with outlets against incredible odds, the economic base for publications has been undermined by the ubiquitous foreign exchange constraint, the reactions of transnational publishers to the market squeeze and the political constraints imposed by national publishers.
First, the transnational firms that have hitherto dominated book publication in Africa are pulling out of Africa either because of foreign exchange constraints blocking repatriation of profits, or because of sharply reduced domestic markets as a result of austerity packages imposed on educational institutions. In addition there is the perhaps more potent fear of political reprisals for publication of books that are controversial or that displease the state. Most of these publishing houses are increasingly confining themselves to primary and secondary school level books which may be subsidised by aid agencies and which create less political risks.
Private domestic publishers, where these exist, suffer from similar economic and political constraints. State-owned national publishing houses provide no solution to the domestic private publishers or transnational corporation. A number of them are themselves being asphyxiated by the general economic malaise of the continent and in any case censorship has rendered them not particularly attractive outlets for serious research.
A number of journals of varying quality and frequency are being published in africa, although they generally remain obscure and poorly distributed.1 However the general picture is one of debilitatingly high levels of mortality of journals. The "Volume One, Last Number" syndrome is, I am sure, painfully familiar to all of us.
Foreign journals provide some respite but they are definitely no solutions. In most cases, the editors and referees of these journals consider that what we write on is "too specific" for their audience. Our dated references, reflective of the parlous state of our libraries, give the impression, often wrong, that what we say is out of date.
The absence of journals hinders the creation of a truly African social science community which is aware of the work being carried out by colleagues, cross references its own writing. In the absence of awareness of what is going on in the continent, there is enormous amount of useless inventiveness and one does not get a sense of being engaged in a cumulative process of understanding literature through intellectual interaction.
In many cases in Africa, foreign funding provides the only meaningful support to research and there can be no doubt that it significantly expanded the breathing space for researchers. Indeed in many countries and in many research areas and for virtually all regional social science organisations, the only source of funding is foreign. One would be extremely unappreciative not to acknowledge their indispensable contributions. And yet precisely because they play such a key role, there is a need to critically and constructively examine our relationship with them.
Attitudes of donors vary widely and generalization can be treacherous and unfair. The donors range from those that allow greater room of manoeuvre to recipients to those that keep a close watch on the research institute; from those who provide core and/or united support to recipient institutes to those who only fund specific projects; from those who insist that their own nationals carry out the research or at least be counterparts to those that insist that the researchers should all be local; from those who support basic research to those who insist on "action-oriented" research.
These differences acknowledged, let me here outline some of the more general problems that African researchers face in their interaction with external donors. I am sure most of these will ring familiar but I am convinced they bear repeating.
First there is the problem of proliferation of sources of funds. Besides such major funding organisations as the Ford Foundation, IDRC, SAREC and the UN system, there is a whole new range of NGOs who often respond to particular crises and whose focus is on "action-oriented" research.
Funding organisations often come with their own burdens - ethnocentricism, accountability to their own constituencies, national research traditions, their perceptions of the African countries, colonial or noncolonial past, national styles of management, habits of scientific practice, etc.
An African institute seeking to survive must somehow come to terms with all these different sources while at the same time maintaining its integrity and without losing sight of its own mission and mandate.
The proliferation of funding sources has raised the problem of "duplication of efforts" that the uncoordinated inflow of research funds is said to cause. However, in my view, this is the least worrisome of the problems. If there are resources allowing a number of researchers to work separately on a common theme, the "duplication" is only apparent. Researchers may stimulate each other either through emulation or competition. The main problem then is not duplication but dispersion which occurs when a badly funded institution is forced to engage in a wide range of completely unrelated research projects, all in responses to the idiosyncracies of donors anxious to get instant "action-oriented" reports or to the force of passing fads.
A second set of problems arises from conflicts over time perspective. A number of donors, especially those interested in "policy-oriented" research, insist on something that Jinadu has aptly referred to as the "quick-fix".1 This is not because of malice on the part of donors. It is usually in the nature of the source of funding itself. Funding to social sciences in Africa is subsumed under the "developmentalist" imperative and often only receives political support from the donor countries if it can somehow show "concrete results".
A third major problem, often derivative of the above, is the insistence on "project funding". Project funding has many attractions for the donor. It is, conceptually at least, easy to evaluate. It has a terminal point and presumably it generates immediately "usable" knowledge. For the social sciences this approach can be disastrous. It can contribute to the creation of a fragmented and non-cumulative social science. Worse, it encourages loss of scientific integrity in the research. With the ease of "cut and paste" writing facilitated by modern word-processing technics a scholar can make a good living by modifying a single report to fit the idiosyncracies of the consumers - policy makers and aid donors.
A fourth problem is the tendency of some donors to explicitly or implicitly insist that researchers fit their work within some ideological, theoretical or paradigmatic framework. This problem is, of course, not peculiar to Africa. But given the precariousness of the material basis of individual researchers and the enormous powers enjoyed by regional representatives of funding agencies, the temptations to exercise and to succumb to intellectual pressures are enormous.
A final problem, and one that I believe is most pressing is the bureaucratization of the evaluation of research projects and research output. More often than not, this is in the nature of the tasks assigned to regional offices of donors and the relationship of these offices to the local scientific community. Few funding organisations rely on peer group evaluation of research, and in response to the extreme thematic diversity of requests for grants, it is tempting to increasingly rely on bureaucratic ways of allocating funds in which the form of the application, its budget schedule, its "doability" within a given time become more important than its intellectual content. The executive summaries and reports replace articles and books.
It should also be recalled that funding organisations are accountable to their won headquarters. In addition an embarrassingly large number of African researchers and orgnisations have failed to properly account for funds allocated to them. Thus the bureacratisation of research evaluation may be the result of the desire to hold a tighter reign on the dispersion of grant in light of nasty past experiences with unaccounted for use of funds. However, more often than not it logically follows from the new trend towards project rather than institutional support.
Let me here touch upon a range of problems that are internal to our own community and for which we are directly, at least, partially responsible. One of the effects of the recentness of our arrival on the scientific scene is that we have as yet to establish ourselves into a community with stable scientific "rules of the game" and procedures of self-evaluation. Our community remains fragile and quite easily falls prey to a whole range of pressures.
However, we should self-critically acknowledge that in many ways we ourselves have been our worst enemies. We have not, all of us, worked towards a community which is self-reproducing in a dynamic way. We have in many cases reproduced within our institutions the very authoritarian and repressive structures that we condemn the state for. Our own institutions are characterised by all kinds of internal censorship, ideological parochialism, subservience, and intellectual opportunism that do not contribute much to research. We have in some cases selfishly circumvented established scientific procedures of peer review. We have not always managed public funds responsibly. In some rather baffling cases, we have admitted to our ranks colleagues we know had abused public funds. In some cases, these antics have been treated as heroic anti-imperialists. This is of course self-deception. We have introduced hierarchical styles of discourse that stifle creative exchange of ideas. We have discriminated against each other on the basis of creed, race and sex. Where convenient, we have used state power to settle academic or intellectual conflicts. We have at times behaved in a disgraceful and unprincipled manner. Perhaps the most shameful and despicable example has been the flow of African scholars to the Bantustuns in South Africa.
In face of dwindling opportunities, those that have made it are not always anxious to help the younger ones. The director of a research institute who attends all international conferences regardless of the theme is, alas, not always only a caricature of our reality. Consequently, we are faced with systems that do not internally ensure an expanding and vibrant social science community. The feeling by the young researchers that their seniors constitute a "mfaia" that attends all conferences and awards itself all the fellowship is quite widespread.
All this has gone to undermine the moral and intellectual authority of our pronouncements. It is clear to me that we ought to introduce styles of managing our affairs that repel these tendencies and that exert enough moral pressure on members of our community to discourage unprincipled behaviour.
I have deliberately chosen to use "we" in faulting the social science community to underline the responsibilities that we all ought to bear in constituting a social science community that can be proud of itself and also to stress how damaging to the community certain individuals' behaviour can be. To those outside our community we are all to blame.
I have perhaps unduly concentrated on matters relating to the empirical aspect of research and perhaps given an impression that all is light on the theoretical front. The fact is that even on that front there is much to be done. First and partly as a reflection of our intellectual dependence, the paradigmatic crises in the "North" have left some of us in the lurch. The demise of the "dependence school", the crisis of marxism, especially the state variant, the crude involvement by financial institutions in the social sciences and their identification with certain theoretical positions - all these have generated an environment of extreme theoretical uncertainty that is at best conducive to a debilitating eclecticism and the worst intellectual sclerosis. Part of our problems is that we are abandoning theories not because we have found them wanting or unreconcilable with our reality and historical specificity but because that is the latest news from the "North".
Secondly, we have all been victims of the "developmentalist" ideology that has been discussed above and the statecentric bent it gives to theoretical orientation. Consequently, we have not theoretically tackled the issues that are outside the realm of the state proper: social movements, "silent" forms of resistance, the constitution, cultural and political responses of civil society, the role of gender, etc.
In response to the intellectual dependence, there have been calls for "indigenisation" of the social sciences that go beyond the indigenisation of staff. As in many other areas, even as simple a call as indigenisation is steeped in controversy. First, there is the age old problem of reconciling the universal with the specific. Second there are the sharp ideological differences among the Africans themselves so that indigenisation is interpreted differently by different individuals. Thus, in those cases where those wielding political power have called for indigenisation, they have largely done so in reaction to critical social sciences which they blame for being foreign. The implication here is that truly indigenous social sciences would be "positive" or "constructive", meaning compliant and apologetic. Given the African leaders' penchant for enunciating (and enforcing) personal ideologies, in some countries social scientists have been called upon to elaborate on the philosophical ruminations of the leaders. In Zambia, Kaunda set up an institute for the study of his personal version of "Humanism". In Zaire funds were made available for those that elaborated on Mobutu's authenticity. In Senegal, work on "negritude" was clearly favoured by the state during the Senghor era. Quite predictably, not much intellectual gain has emerged from these self-serving exercises. Intellectual indigenisation cannot take place by fiat.
If indigenisation takes place at all, the process will probably be less vociferous and much less self-conscious than it is usually supposed. As African scholars focus their full attention on understanding the dynamics of their societies, they will perforce have to adjust their acquired outlooks and methodologies, discover new terminologies to come to grips with the peculiar idioms of change of their societies.
However, before that process takes full form, a necessary stage towards indigenisation will call for a settling of scores with the Africanists to exorcise the study of Africa of the extra-afrocentric setting within which Africanist discourse has taken place. It will also be necessary to compel Africanists to respect African scholarship which they have either blithely ignored or used without proper acknowledgement.
But perhaps even more important, we will, as a community, have to become more conscious of each others' work and quite consciously establish research environments in which cross-fertilisation of ideas is deliberately cultivated and in which our activities are cumulative in their effects. Here we as a community are to blame for habits that persuade us not to properly acknowledge each others' work. It is depressing to note how little cross-reference there is in African scholarship. Here we compare quite poorly with our colleagues in Asia and Latin America.
The picture painted above may seem rather pessimistic and it may be correct to end on a more optimistic note. If I believed we were helplessly condemned to go under the weight of these problems, I would be left with little justification for the work of such orgnisations as CODESRIA. Indeed one is sustained by a number of positive factors which may have received short shrift in the remarks above. Much has been achieved and much more can and will be achieved.
First, social science now enjoys greater institutional anchoring than it did in the past. This is a result of conscious efforts by the social scientists to organise themselves regionally and nationally and to reach out to other social scientists outside Africa. A number of regional and sub-regional organisations such as the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the Southern African Universities Social Sciences Conference (SAUSSC), the Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern Africa (OSSREA) are already active. So are specialised professional organisations such as the African Association of Political Science(AAPS). These organisations are creations of social scientists themselves and already not only contributing to the professionalisation of social science research in Africa but they are also about the only bodies that have some vision of what social science in Africa cab be. They, of course, face a welter of problems in the functioning.
Furthermore, after a phase of what seemed self-censorship in light of the increasing authoritarianism of African states, African scholars are increasingly more daring in their discussions of their societal problems. The popular demands for democracy have served as a spur to academics to speak out openly and to deny the dictators the privilege of being feared.
Thirdly, we have become increasingly aware of our preeminent position in African studies. There is a much more self-confident and conversely less apologetic or combative assertion of the specificities of African societies. Work by the various national working groups supported by CODESRIA has revealed to the participants that they have the latest information on their countries,that in a number of areas, they are the foremost specialists on particular themes relating to their countries, and that, constituted as groups, they possess knowledge on their countries that few individuals residing outside their countries would possess.
Finally, the paradigmatic crises of the social sciences in the metropolitan countries have contributed to both the de-fetishisation of African social reality and the demystification of metropolitan social science and opened new vistas to approaches that are more deeply rooted in the African social reality. And this, combined with the pressures of the current crisis in Africa, is leading to a new sense of urgency and self-confidence in African scholarship that will see an increasing decolonisation of the intellectual territory in Africa.
1 . For a rather interesting account of problems of bringing Africans into some of the major "Africanists" clubs, see Michael Crowder, "`Us'and `Them': The International African Institute and the Current Crisis of Identity in African Studies", Africa, Vol.57, No.1, 1987. An interesting point about this article is that it seems quite unaware of what the Africans are really saying about the situation, and so the plea is made one-sidedly without due consideration of what the other side thinks about co-operation.
1 . The characterization of subversive elements as bearded was made by an African head of state.
1 . As evidence of this, Professor Mabogunje, a senior and respected African scholar, states "Most social scientists in the 1960s and early 1970s acceded wholeheartedly to the imperatives of the prevailing paradigm of development" Akin Mabogunje, "Profile of the Social Sciences in West Africa", in Stifel et. al., Social Sciences and Public Policy in the Developing World (Lexington Books, Toronto, 1982), op.cit., p.183. See Irene Gendzier for an informative and thought-provoking critique of this instrumentalist approach. Irene Gendzeir, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder, Col.: 1985)
1 . David Court "Scholarship and Contract Research: The Ecology of Social Science in Kenya and Tanzania", in Stifel (ed.), op.cit.
1 . See for instance Ake, Claude, Social Sciences in Africa (CODESRIA Occasional Paper, Dakar, 1984); Amin et. al." Social Science and the Development Crisis in Africa: Problems and Prospects", Africa Development, Vol. III, No.4, 1978;, Bujra and Mkandawire, "The Evolution of Social Sciences in Africa: Problems and Prospects", Africa Development, Vol. V, No. 4, 1980. Yashir, F. "Recherche Economique et System Mondial C'apitaliste: Le tiers monde et l'instrumentalisation de la recherche", Africa Development, Vol III 1, No. 4, 1978. CODESRIA has also organised a number of colloquia on social sciences in Africa in which the critical perspective towards the instrumentalisation of social science research has been the leitmotif.
1 . Adele Jinadu, The Social Sciences and Development in Africa: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (SAREC Report, Stockholm, 1985).
1 . CODESRIA's documentation unit has prepared an index of abstracts of such publications from various African countries. See Index of African Social Science Periodical Articles, Vol 1, 1989.
1 .Jinadu, op.cit.