Njamjoh - Decolonising The University

Decolonizing the University in Africa

Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Subject: History and Politics, World Politics Online Publication Date: Jul 2019
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.717
Summary and Keywords
Since the euphoria of independence in the 1960s and subsequent attempts at decoloniza
tion of university education through promotion of perspectives grounded in African reali
ties and experiences, African universities have almost without exception significantly
Africanized their personnel but not their curricula, pedagogical structures, or epistemolo
gies in a systematic and productive manner. Even a late arrival to political independence
such as South Africa has, however reluctantly, embarked upon and covered some mileage
toward Africanization of university personnel. Hardly addressed in any meaningful and
transformative manner (even in countries that gained independence in the 1960s or
shortly before), however, is the tradition of knowledge production and the epistemologi
cal order that informs it. This paper argues that any serious attempt at making African
universities uncompromisingly inclusive institutions through embracing African traditions
of knowing and knowledge production would require looking beyond the academy in its
current configuration for inspiration. It uses the example of Amos Tutuola—a man of lim
ited formal colonial education, and his writings depicting African universes as inspired by
his Yoruba cosmology and ontology, to make the case on the reservoirs of insights and
wisdom in the lived experiences of ordinary Africans, waiting to be tapped and chan
nelled into the lecture halls of universities to refresh minds and reconfigure practice in
the interest of a more relevant scholarship. The paper baptizes as convivial such a schol
arship that dwells less on zero-sum games of absolute winners and losers, encourages a
disposition of incompleteness and humility through the reality of the ubiquity of debt and
indebtedness, and finds strength in themes of interconnections, interdependences, com
positeness, and incompleteness of being that Tutuola’s writings exude.
Keywords: decolonizing the university, inclusive epistemologies, epistemological decolonization, incompleteness,

convivial scholarship, Amos Tutuola, CODESRIA, Academic Freedom, knowledge production, African universities,
African politics
Introduction
Most universities in postcolonial Africa have significantly Africanized their personnel.
However, they have been less successful in Africanizing their curricula, pedagogical
structures, and epistemologies, despite declarations of intent and attempts at decoloniza
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tion of university education through promotion of perspectives grounded in African reali

ties and experiences (Fonlon, 1965, 2009; Ki-Zerbo, 1992, 2003; Ela, 1994; Hountondji,
1997; Diouf & Mamdani, 1994; Mkandawire, 1997, 2005; Crossman & Devisch, 1999; Sall
& Oanda, 2014; Zeleza & Olukoshi, 2004A, 2004B; Cross & Ndofirepi, 2017A, 2017B;
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Mamdani, 2016, 2018). Even a late arrival to political indepen
dence such as South Africa has, however reluctantly, embarked upon and covered some
mileage toward Africanization of university personnel. Hardly addressed in any meaning
ful and transformative manner (even in countries that gained independence in the 1960s
or shortly before), however, is the tradition of knowledge production and the epistemolog
ical order that informs it. The reasons for underachievement in this regard are varied.
They include underfunding and marketization of universities that places higher education
at the mercy of market forces and pushes scholars to resort to consultancies and to seek
ing to make ends meet by moonlighting to the detriment of fundamental research and
sustained scholarship, to rigid state control and the co-optation of universities and acade
mics to the whims and caprices of the political establishment and the authoritarian
propensities of African states and governments (Fonlon, 1965, 2009; Ki-Zerbo, 1992, 2003;
Ela, 1994; Hountondji, 1997; Diouf & Mamdani, 1994; Mkandawire, 1997, 2005; Cross
man & Devisch, 1999; Sall & Oanda, 2014; Zeleza, 2003A, 2003B; Zeleza & Olukoshi,
2004A, 2004B; Makosso et al., 2009; Higgins, 2013; Sifuna, 2014; Cross & Ndofirepi,
2017A, 2017B; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Mamdani, 2007, 2016, 2018). Other reasons in
clude insufficient will and sustained commitment by African scholars beyond rhetoric,
even as occasionally one encounters a scholar whose efforts at making a difference in
terms of greater contextual relevance in epistemology and theorizing, often at great per
sonal risk and sacrifice, are worthy of praise.
In the hope that the funds and will to change are there, and that scholars are determined
to confront political and related distractions and raise the stakes for the inclusion of
African epistemologies and theories in the academy, this article argues that any serious
attempt at making African universities unequivocally inclusive institutions through em
bracing African traditions of knowing and knowledge production would require looking
beyond the academy in its current configuration for inspiration. The article uses the ex
ample of Amos Tutuola—a man of limited formal Eurocentric education. His writings de
picted popular African universes as inspired by his Yoruba cosmology and ontology. Tu
tuola is used to make the case for the reservoirs of insights and wisdom extant in the
lived experiences of ordinary Africans, waiting to be tapped and channelled into the lec
ture halls of universities to refresh minds and reconfigure practice in the interest of a
more contextually relevant scholarship. The paper baptizes as convivial such a scholar
ship that dwells less on zero-sum games of absolute winners and losers, encourages a dis
position of incompleteness and the humility of doubt, and finds strength in themes of in
terconnections, interdependences, compositeness, and incompleteness of being that
Tutuola’s writings exude. The article is an invitation to envisage university-level knowl
edge production as a journey in collaboration and coproduction that schools in the impor
tance of recognizing debt and indebted in how and the extent to which one claims agency
and autonomy.
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In the universes depicted in Tutuola’s writings, identities are complex and often compos
ite, and there is a lot more and also a lot less to things than meets the eye. Drawing on
such insights, the paper argues that it is not merely because one is or appears African
that one is necessarily going to be critical of colonial intellectual traditions, rituals and
habitus in one’s teaching and research, and offer a menu sensitive to local realities and
“endogenous” epistemologies. Endogenous is used here in opposition to the rather limit
ed and limiting notion of “indigenous,” to evoke the dynamism, negotiability, adaptability,
and capacity for autonomy and interdependence, creativity, and innovation in African so
cieties and beyond. It counters the widespread and stubborn misrepresentation of African
cultures as static, bounded, and primitive, and of Africa as needing the benevolence and
enlightenment of colonialism and Cartesian rationalism or their residues to come alive
(Fonlon, 1965, 2009; p’Bitek, 1989; Ki-Zerbo, 1992, 2003; Ela, 1994; Hountondji, 1997;
Crossman & Devisch, 1999, 2002; Crossman, 2004; Nabudare, 2006; Devisch, 2007). The
use of endogeneity brings into conversation nature and culture, essence, and conscious
ness.
To a large extent, the hundreds of universities created after independence have stayed
“triumphantly universalistic and uncompromisingly foreign” to local cultures, popula
tions, and predicaments (Mamdani, 1993, pp. 11–15). For the most part, they have not
been domesticated through epistemological renegotiation informed by local languages,
cosmologies, and worldviews (Devisch, 2002; Jansen, 2011, pp. 31–153; Cross & Nd
ofirepi 2017A, 2017B; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, 2018). This paper argues for epistemologi
cal inclusivity at African universities by going outside the academy and drawing inspira
tion from the personal stories and creative imagination of popular Africa, ignored under
colonialism for being too savage and primitive to share a table with European colonial en
lightenment and often misrepresented the postcolonial era by ill-adapted curricula, epis
temologies, and theories, and by many an academic and scholar whose intellectual clocks
are set to the rhythm of transatlantic scholarly cannons, practices, and standards of value
in knowledge production and consumption (Mamdani, 2007, 2018; Zeleza, 1997, 2003A,
2003B, 2006).
Asking the Right Questions: A First Step in De

colonizing the University
“Silly questions beget silly answers, and bloody silly questions beget bloody silly an
swers,” Professor James Halloran of the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the
University of Leicester in Great Britain used to tell his students repeatedly in the late
1980s. This was in an effort to sharpen his students’ critical mindset and alertness to in
quiry well pursued. Indeed, central to research is the capacity to ask the right questions.
This is ably demonstrated by Mamdani (1972), published a year before the Dakar-based
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) was found
ed in 1973, with the aim of providing for and promoting African voices and African per
spectives in knowledge production (Zeleza 1997, 2003A, 2003B, 2006; Hoffmann, 2017).
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Mamdani’s study was a critical review of a previously released survey of birth control
practices in a region of India. The said study, which was American sponsored, had blamed
individual poverty on the fact of the individuals having large families. Using a different
set of questions grounded on the cultural context of India and the region of the study,
Mamdani reached a different conclusion—that individuals resort to having large families
because they are poor (Mamdani, 1972).
Asking the right questions calls for a careful and critical situation of the object of one’s
study within existing knowledge and emphasizes the need to draw on and feed back into
that knowledge in terms of theory, methodology, issues, and debates. It also entails under
standing the local context from within and involving, as much as possible, local actors in
the production of knowledge about their realities and predicaments. This is a mission un
derstood even by theologians seeking greater cultural relevance beyond the sensitivities
and sensibilities of the traditionally evangelizing West (Reed, 2018; Brooking, 2018). Re
searchers listen to, draw on, interact with, and inform the work of peers in ways that edi
fy science, the scientific community, and community at large. All of this, however, is more
easily stated than practiced because knowledge production, like all other spheres of life,
is characterized by power dynamics that are often less horizontal and democratic than
vertical and prescriptive (if not dogmatic).
Knowledge production takes place in a world of interconnecting global and local hierar
chies informed, among other things, by race, place, culture, class, gender, and age. In the
marketplaces of ideas and research findings, however compelling, intellectual visibility of
ten boils down to the race, ethnicity, geography, culture, class, gender, sexuality, or age of
the researchers involved. Such identity factors play into and shape participation and atti
tudes at scientific gatherings and other avenues of knowledge dissemination and con
sumption. Research narrowly focused on ever-diminishing circles of inclusivity, however
sophisticated in design and implementation, can never account or substitute for the com
plexities and nuances of an epistemology informed by an understanding of reality as nec
essarily interconnected and subject to reconfiguration in its dynamism.
Common to all sciences as these challenges may be, they are even more glaring in the so
cial sciences and humanities, where the very object of study—society (the human being as
an often elusive creative entity)—makes certain methodologies impossible to use in isola
tion but also changes and redefines itself in ways that nature cannot quite match. Theory
building in the social sciences and humanities is thus particularly challenging, necessitat
ing mobility and exchange of ideas horizontally, across verticals, and through a myriad of
intersections. In light of the hierarchies and unequal power relations that consciously or
unconsciously shape how social research is conceptualized and implemented, there is a
great risk of theoretical and methodological fallacies, as well as of such fallacies being
imbibed, internalized, and reproduced by those on the lower rungs of the academy, as a
result of rigid academic structures and practices that, paradoxically, tend to reward re
producing knowledge (rather than producing knowledge through creative and innovative
thinking), even as critical mindedness is promulgated in scholarly rhetoric, organizational
missions, and vision statements. In the academy, there is more emphasis on writing than
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on reading broadly and critically. This tendency is driven by a highly commercialized out
put-oriented publication industry, in which quantity is conflated with quality, and knowl
edge and knowledge production are highly commodified (Nyamnjoh, 2004).
In this context, and given the global tendency to place Africa on the lowest rungs of hu
manity, creativity, and respectability, African university institutions committed to the val
orization of knowledge production and knowledge producers sensitive to the complexities
and nuances of the African continent and African realities in context are particularly well
placed to perceive the nakedness of global intellectual gurus. To excel in this role, African
universities, in their intellectual agenda, must stay faithful to the paramount mission of
promoting multi- and transdisciplinary social research that is informed by and relevant to
the experience of Africans and the African continent. In a world of interconnecting and in
tersecting hierarchies at local and global levels, this mission necessitates policies and
practices that promote social research on different aspects of society and on being hu
man. This calls for intentionality in critically questioning (deconstructing) conventional
theories, methodologies, and research, using the basic assumptions that characterize
such theories and methodologies. If consistent and systematic, such deconstruction of ex
isting concepts, rules of engagement, procedures, and processes of scholarship would
promote among African universities and the research networks they fund and forge
awareness of the risks of intellectual bandwagonism that result from Africans unquestion
ingly participating in research and debates on themes already determined and conceptu
alized by others outside of their contexts (social, cultural, political, historical, geographi
cal, etc.) and experiences, often with little problematization of the frameworks of the the
ories and methodologies at play. Intellectual bandwagonism shaped by intellectual fash
ion designers, with little or no regard for the African contributor or consumer—with pro
vision mainly for lecturers and students reduced to potted plants and clearing officers for
cheap and untested and often ill-adapted intellectual and academic imports—is a persis
tent serious threat to Africa’s intellectual affirmation (Nyamnjoh, 2004, 2012A, 2012B,
2015). This begs the question of how to move toward locally produced knowledge rele
vant to the predicaments of Africans. Relevance as understood in this article needs to be
problematized and constantly reassessed in a dynamic, complex, and ever more nuanced
African context. It would be counterproductive, in the intellectual decolonization envis
aged here, to define relevance narrowly in terms of Africa’s developmental imperatives. A
one-sided focus on relevance is riddled with instrumentalism, producing technocrats at
tuned to problem solving, as opposed to an all-around critical approach in the pursuit of
scholarship (Mamdani, 2016, 2018).
In this regard, it is important first to question certain assumptions in orthodox research

traditions that do not sufficiently recognize the embeddedness of social research in cul
tural values (and the political and scientific histories that shape culture, and vice versa).
The point here is not to minimize the importance of surveys as a method of data collec
tion but rather to insist on the need to be conscious of fundamental differences (cultural,
linguistic, demographic, experiential, socially shaped sensibilities and sensitivities and ex
pectations and aspirations, etc.) in different societies that make it difficult to rely exclu
sively, for instance, on carbon-copy survey or interview methods that assume that gen
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uine comparability can be achieved only by administering the same questions in the same
way in all participating countries or regions (Nyamnjoh, 2006). There is a need to explore
ways of complementing methods that are steeped in preferences for and assumptions that
economic and quantitative methods (and knowledge produced from them) are more “fac
tual” or “comparatively objective.” This is particularly true when it comes to policy re
search and research “for development,” both of which are output and outcome oriented
and often fail to critically examine historical and structural factors (the state, market
economy, patriarchy, gendered relations, etc.), going so far as focus group discussions to
capture human voices. An understanding of the relationship between language and cul
ture is enough to realize that this semblance of a comparative approach is patently ab
surd in its untested assumptions. Methods of data collection, however appropriate and ef
fective in one context, are not necessarily so in another: And these methods should thus
never be taken for granted. Insisting deafly and blindly that they are is tantamount to
asking bloody silly questions. Should scholars be surprised if all their questions can fetch
—however technically sophisticated their research design and data collection tools—are
bloody silly answers? (Nyamnjoh, 2017A).
Particularly appealing is James Halloran’s discomfort with research that prioritizes effi
ciency and practicality at the expense of theorization, conviviality, and participation, and
the careful formulation and testing of hypotheses and basic assumptions. The functional
nature of research via consultancy, often driven by the need to resolve a particular com
mercial problem or policy issue, compounds the problem. Little wonder that this domi
nant approach to research tends to downplay conceptualization and analysis and empha
size description. It tends to stress more and more data collection, and to conflate quantity
with quality, almost as if to say that the data speaks for itself. It is more concerned with
sampling (which assumes that people are homogenous within prescribed sampling vari
ables, or that they belong to concentric cultural and social bubbles). As Halloran has ar
gued, this type of research is rather piecemeal in nature, lacks integration into a bigger
whole, and does not encourage or emphasize the foregrounding of interconnections,
processes, and continuities. Regardless of the social phenomenon being studied, the final
research report is usually confined to quantitative statements about amenable but rela
tively superficial aspects of a complex issue and fails to curiously interrogate outliers of
the study, purportedly because of their statistical insignificance. Such a positivistic, psy
chologistic, or behavioristic approach has the effect of taking the attention of its practi
tioners away from the value assumptions implicit in every research question and affect
the formulation of every research design. The researchers in this tradition work as uncrit
ical consultants, hardly bothering to redefine the research problem brought to them by
governments, industry, or other purported agents of development; their research tends to
serve the interests of those who pay for it; contractors and consultants alike find the
whole process useful in optimizing their security, influence, and profitability (Halloran,
1974; Nyamnjoh, 2006).
African social researchers may not be as visible in scholarly research outlets (journals,
publishers, keynote, and plenary conference appearances) as peers in the Global North.
They may not be in a position to write back on equal terms to non-Africans within the
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dominant colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal political economy of knowledge produc

tion. Either they are not getting published (due to multiple intellectual and social burdens
and to knowledge production hierarchies), or the professional risks to publishing alterna
tive and especially dissenting views are high (Nyamnjoh, 2004, 2012A, 2012B, 2015). The
consultancy and structural-functionalist models of knowledge production may provide
them with an alternative sense of relevance, but this is at the cost of their credentials as
scholars and reputation as informed public intellectuals. Their relevance is synonymous
with that of a hired hand who puts critical thinking and decolonial interrogations on
pause. The necessary participation in consultancies most often takes place in relations of
inequality, which state of relations impacts the quality and pertinence of the knowledge
produced. This consultancy syndrome, widespread in many an African university, gener
ates conventional, standardized, routinized, and predictable research that in no way
threatens the status quo, be it economic, political, or cultural. This makes consultancy re
ports and kindred literature a rich source of information on how many African social sci
entists insert conventional social scientific insights into texts produced under conditions
of intellectual contestation about the status and rationality of local knowledge and the
right to resources of subaltern populations. Decolonization would entail drawing atten
tion to the problematic aspects of such research, without seeking to make it completely
anathema.
African universities seeking decolonization should reappraise and resocialize approaches

to research and knowledge generation that have been supressed and ignored, and inte
grate new approaches that respond to contemporary challenges and aspirations (Zeleza,
1997, 2003A 2003B, 2006; Devisch, 2002; Jansen 2011, pp. 31–153; Cross & Ndofirepi,
2017A, 2017B; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Otherwise, it could be argued that the basic as
sumptions, conventional wisdom, academic traditions, and research practices, which so
cial researchers in Africa have uncritically and often unconsciously internalized, will re
main largely ill-adapted to African contexts (Nyamnjoh, 2006, 2017A, 2017B). It is curious
that focus group discussions are one of the main qualitative methods used in parachute-
in-and-fly-out consultancy research. It makes for “feel good” fieldwork, with an allure of
participation, which participation is merely performative. Some scholars have suggested
a multi-methodological approach in African research. Some have questioned the tendency
to make a priori distinctions between sociological and anthropological methods and to
equate the latter with the study of “primitive,” “archaic,” “backward,” or “underdevel
oped” societies, communities, regions, places, and spaces and have suggested that every
research situation should determine its methods. Methodological buffets offer better
prospects than the insensitive insistence that certain methods must go with certain disci
plines or certain types of inquiry. As Cheikh Anta Diop argued perceptively in the early
1960s, nowhere else better than in the study of African societies can anthropological and
sociological methods be effectively combined. Endogenous, Western, and Oriental ele
ments coexist in Africa, and changes in process are yet to be adequately understood with
research methods drawn from both disciplines (Diop, 1963; Nyamnjoh, 2006).
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Success for African universities depends on the extent to which university management
and academic staff institutionalize curricula and research that systematically and consis
tently relate to achieving their vision and mission, beyond merely stating these. Ongoing
processes of deconstructing existing theories and practices must be embedded in the for
mulation of themes for research and other activities of university life in Africa. This would
ensure that those who participate in university teaching are drawing on research findings
indicative of the fact that African populations do not live in dichotomies. Meaningful de
construction and reconstruction of theories, concepts, and methodologies does not hap
pen in the abstract but rather in relation to actual social processes. Systematic decon
struction and reconstruction informed by the imperatives of contextual relevance would
ensure good value for resources, because university management, faculties, schools, de
partments, and academics would build on past critical research results by the African so
cial research community to identify knowledge gaps and issues for further research,
thereby minimizing duplication that is wasteful of financial resources, researcher time
and efforts of scholarly and policy communities.
Funding networks rather than individuals is one way to emphasize the value of collabora
tion and humility in knowledge production. It also highlights the magnitude of the intel
lectual effort and research involved in systematic and meaningful deconstruction and re
construction of theories and methodologies. The composition of all networks should re
flect the aspiration of every university to promote cutting-edge, top-quality research and
to mentor younger and budding scholars to develop a research culture and excel as schol
ars whose work is inspired by and firmly inserted in a truly inclusive epistemological or
der. Modalities should encourage senior and junior researchers to work together in a spir
it of mutual learning and co-construction. Senior researchers are such not by age but by
evidence of a good track record in empirical research. The modalities should encourage
as well, open-ended permanent conversations on knowledge production and curriculum
review with a broad spectrum of individuals and communities beyond the academy.
Struggles for Academic Freedom and the Rele

vance of Universities in Africa
The struggle for decolonization of universities in Africa has historically been articulated
variously under labels such as Africanization, de-corporatization, and academic freedom.1
These challenge various models of universities in Africa. Africanization challenges the
colonial university as an institutional form. De-corporatization challenges a corporate
model, while at least historically many of the struggles for academic freedom were
against the development university under the repressive grip of a centralized and often
despotic state. In an article titled “The African University,” published in July 2018, Mah
mood Mamdani observes how striking it is that the modern university in postcolonial
Africa has little to do with African institutions, despite repeated attempts by African intel
lectuals and governments disabusing the African university of the one-size-fits-all charac
ter of its European colonial origins by making it more relevant to its African context. Such
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relevance, he argues, entails questioning taken-for-granted theories configured in the

Western academy that have only tended to produce mimics and caricatures among
African academics and students and coming up with alternative theories that “strike the
right balance between the local and the global.” Mamdani discusses some of the robust
debates in the 1970s, including between renowned scholars such as Ali Mazrui, who
craved an African university as home for scholars fascinated by ideas, and Walter Rodney,
for whom the university ought to serve as home for committed public intellectuals rooted
in time and place and should be deeply engaged with the affairs of their societies. The
tense debates were aimed at reconciling the quest for excellence with the need for rele
vance as public intellectuals in African universities (Mamdani, 2016, 2018).2 It is thus im
portant to note that within the current dominant global framework of the university, seri
ous efforts have been made by individual scholars and academic institutions, past and
present, to turn African universities into more responsive places and spaces to the
predicaments of Africans by offering greater representation to African scholarly voices
and to voices of Africans from beyond the academy. CODESRIA was created in 1973 with
this mission, and its activities since then have been underpinned by this commitment
(Hoffmann, 2017). The CODESRIA books and journals publication program, for example,
has achieved remarkable success in promoting greater visibility and accessibility of
African scholarship in and outside Africa, using its partnership with African Books Collec
tive to enhance dissemination. CODESRIA’s emphasis has been to encourage African
scholarship not just for the sake of scholarship but rather scholarship in tune with African
values, revelatory of social theory and practice in African contexts, and relevant to the de
velopmental needs of the continent—such concerns as articulated in robust scholarly de
bates and academic freedom programs across campuses from Dakar to Dar er Salam,
Ibadan and Kampala (Diouf & Mamdani, 1994; Mkandawire, 1997, 2005; Sall & Oanda,
2014; Hoffmann, 2017).
For CODESRIA, a relevant African university that champions African values and predica
ments is one that enjoys academic freedom as articulated in its various declarations.3 By
academic freedom, CODESRIA understands full autonomy of thought and practice at the
service of knowledge production on the African condition and of relevance to African
predicaments. It is also about facilitating unlimited access to the knowledge thus pro
duced. CODESRIA thus relates to universities as autonomous institutions: Free from the
logic and practice of those who expect to call the tune merely because they finance re
search, publication, and teaching. CODESRIA sources and makes available research fund
ing to its members in universities across the continent with minimum strings attached,
especially when this comes in the form of core funding that allows the autonomy to define
and prioritize research questions and objectives in tune with CODESRIA’s Africa-centered
vision and mission.
Scholars imbued with this CODESRIA tradition of academic freedom are quick to tell
every donor or sponsor, regardless of political, economic, or cultural orientation: “Pay and
support research and scholarship as much as you want, as long as you do not expect to in
fluence my thoughts and research or my desire and freedom to teach, write and publish
as I deem appropriate or necessary.” The research sponsorship and funding CODESRIA is
Page 9 of 36

least enthusiastic about is that tied to research agenda defined or determined by donors
and funding bodies whose priorities are established with scant consultation or regard to
CODESRIA’s own research agenda and strategic plan. In defense of its core values of aca
demic freedom, CODESRIA publications such as Pax Academica and the Journal of Higher
Education in Africa have promoted the production and consumption of knowledge in
formed by African perspectives and epistemologies. Both publications play a crucial role
in reenlivening and revalorizing dismembered and disenchanted beliefs and systems of
thought in Africa. Put differently, these journals are instrumental in reactivating tradi
tions of knowledge production and of knowing shackled or deactivated by the violence of
unequal colonial and neo-colonial encounters.
It is commonplace in university circles to talk, debate, and write on academic freedom in

a manner suggestive of a shared understanding of the subject matter. Regardless of the
ownership, age, size, and breadth of disciplines offered, universities are placed squarely
in the domain of “civil society”: Hence the emphasis on protection of academic freedom.
What exactly is academic freedom? When is it freedom from, freedom for, freedom to, or
freedom with? Is it achievable progressively by degree or possible only through dichoto
mous absolutes—something either fully present or totally absent but not admissible as a
continual work in progress? Who qualifies to claim academic freedom? How? When?
Why? Does context matter in the nature, form, shape, and voice of academic freedom?
What are the empirical indicators of academic freedom irrespective of whether or not a
country professes to be a democracy and a market economy? Put differently, to what ex
tent is academic freedom possible or worth contemplating at all, in a context defined a
priori as “not a democracy” and therefore as incapable of freedoms normally associated
with “a democracy”? Still in other words, is there something to be gained by looking for
academic freedom in unlikely places with which it is not normally associated? How simi
lar or different from other freedoms is academic freedom? What is the likelihood, howev
er remote, of academic freedom being mobilized to front for interests and privileges other
than academic? Granted such a possibility, what alliances, strategic or not, are soldiers of
academic freedom amenable to contemplate? And which are anathema? Some of the de
bates ignited by current attempts at curriculum reform at the University of Cape Town,
following the 2015 and 2016 student fallist movements are tellingly instructive in this re
gard.4
To CODESRIA and its membership, freedom does not amount to much if it falls short of
freedom from every foreseeable constraint to critical knowledge production relevant to
Africa and the rights and dignity of Africans. The CODESRIA community is unequivocally
committed to defending and valorizing the intellectual rights to creativity and innovation
in thought and practice of African academics and students both from the corrupting influ
ences of the market and big business as well as of states and governments. The main
stream tendency in CODESRIA circles is to frown on fellow scholars in Africa and beyond
who seem to imply that the market is unquestionably and invariably the answer to those
seeking academic freedom, simply because of the market’s liberal pretensions and ab
stract commitment to promoting autonomy and choice to consumers.
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Since the political liberation struggles of the 1990s, CODESRIA scholars are equally criti
cal of colleagues who readily give the benefit of the doubt to those who insist that social
fulfilment through higher education is best guaranteed by public universities with a mis
sion to cater for all and sundry in equal measure, even when such universities are clearly
misappropriated by the political, economic and cultural elite of the states that fund and
control them. In place of a priori subscription or rejection of abstract options, CODESRIA
and its community of scholars believe in paying ever closer attention to actual and ongo
ing practices, possibilities, and challenges of students and staff of universities on the con
tinent, regardless of who owns and controls these universities in principle. Of interest are
universities as democratic, accountable, and socially responsible crucibles of knowledge
and ideas relevant to Africans and their aspirations. To CODESRIA, the test of the acade
mic freedom pudding should be in the practical eating of it. The research it has funded
and supported, and the books CODESRIA has published since the 1970s, attest to the fact
that academic freedom can be jeopardized by political and commercial interests, pursued
independently or in complicity and connivance. This calls for prudence, where beyond a
strategic commitment to Africa and the challenges facing Africans taken collectively,
seekers of academic freedom on the continent are safest without permanent friends or
permanent enemies vis-à-vis the political, economic, and cultural forces that shape and
are shaped by what they do.
Academic freedom is indeed jeopardized when its proponents prioritize profit over the
dignity and autonomy of the very same students and academics they purport to cultivate
and protect. When is consumer sovereignty and higher education as a commodity worth
embracing as healthy for academic freedom? And when is it illusory to rigidly adhere to a
model of universities as secular institutions, free of political interference and responsive
solely to proponents of liberalism, market forces, and rational choice? The situation of
African universities in the 21st century (Zeleza & Olukoshi, 2004A, 2004B) is testimony to
the perils to academic freedom posed both by persistent neoliberal obligation to corpora
tize universities and have scholars in the marketplace (Mamdani, 2007; Zeleza, 2003A,
2003B; Makosso et al., 2009; Higgins, 2013; Sifuna, 2014) and unyielding political pres
sure by states and governments to turn critical-minded scholars into hapless pro-estab
lishment noise machines and pseudo-public intellectuals (Diouf & Mamdani, 1994; Mkan
dawire, 1997, 2005; Nyamnjoh & Jua, 2002; Nyamnjoh et al., 2012; Sall & Oanda, 2014).
There is need also to interrogate what exactly scholars do with their academic freedom as
self-interested agents, and how relevant to intellectual decolonization African scholars
are when they are able to access academic freedom (Diouf & Mamdani, 1994; Mamdani,
2016, 2018).
Much debate and activism for academic freedom in Africa has foregrounded this reality of
African scholars caught betwixt and between the rhetoric of market forces and of nation-
building (Zeleza, 2003A, 2003B; Mamdani, 2007, 2016, 2018). There are, however, many
more challenges to academic freedom, shaped in part by identity politics and the hierar
chies of humanity at play. Other factors that impinge upon academic freedom include the
racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, or religious backgrounds of those seeking,
denying, or being ambivalent about academic freedom. In light of these factors, it is im
Page 11 of 36

portant to establish to what extent the privileges of a world configured in accordance

with the diktats of ideologies of racial and/or ethnic superiority, or of patriarchy and
gerontocracy, blunts the sensitivities and sensibilities of those claiming or denying acade
mic freedom. In university campuses throughout the continent, one comes across acade
mics and students who, individually or collectively, protest in one form or another: Includ
ing but not limited to strikes, sit-ins, violent, and peaceful demonstrations against the ef
fects of hierarchies and access to power and resources informed by the privileging or un
der-privileging of factors such as race, ethnicity, place, class, gender, sex, or age, among
others. Other measures to draw attention to the fact of uneven university playing fields
have included the organization of conferences, seminars, workshops and curricula on the
subject, as well as editing books and journals that call for radical and more incremental
transformation of what they experience as a colonized academic system (Mama 1995,
2003; Jua & Nyamnjoh, 2002; Zeilig & Ansell, 2008; Nyamnjoh et al., 2012; Kamencu,
2013; Booysen, 2016; Ndlovu, 2017).
In South Africa and Zimbabwe—countries with complex histories of unequal racial and
ethnic encounters—the upsurge in protests by university students and staff seeking insti
tutional transformation and decolonization highlights the operations or workings of inher
ited racialized power and privilege. The protests call into question the narrow individual
and collective interests embedded in educational systems and defended in the name of
modernity and civilization. In both countries, the students’ protests reveal a fascinating
diagnostic of continued overt and convert oppression and exploitation by a modernity nar
rowly configured around whiteness and whitening up—a modernity experienced as deeply
frustrating by the so-called born-frees, who at face value should be an epitome of a dera
cialized and seamlessly inclusive postcolonial and post-apartheid dispensation (Booysen,
2016, Ndlovu, 2017; Nyamnjoh, 2016; Heffernan et al., 2016; Khunou et al., 2019; Swartz
et al., 2018).
In parts of Africa where race is less a major consideration than ethnicity, academic free
dom is challenged by a collusion of interconnecting factors such as an overbearing state
captured by the corrupt and corrupting elite of a dominant ethno-regional governing par
ty. A predicament common to universities across the continent is that of female students
and female academics silenced by the patriarchal order of male-dominated universities
and yearning for more gender sensitive institutional cultures and practices (Imam, Mama,
& Sow, 1997; Sall, 2000; Mama, 2003; Nnaemeka, 2005; Gquola, 2016; Morrell, 2016). As
evident from the landmark CODESRIA book, Imam, Mama, and Fatou (1997),
CODESRIA’s mission and ambition to decolonize knowledge production in Africa did not
immediately translate into a de-patriarchalization of institutional cultures, nor to the
adoption of feminist theoretical, methodological, and epistemic sensitivities and sensibili
ties. As the debates in the pages of the journal, Feminist Africa, would attest, the struggle
for gender equality and sexual freedom at university campuses across the continent is a
work in progress but far less to show in achievements than was anticipated when the call
for engendering African social sciences and knowledge production processes was first
made in the 1990s (Mama 1995, 2003; Mama & Hamilton 2003).5
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Be it on matters of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or other aspects of institutional

transformation, the situation is compounded by the scant regard accorded student youth
and their opinions, who are often under-recognized and under-represented in debates on
curricula transformation and intellectual life in universities by the older generation of
scholars who presume to know best by virtue of being older (Chimanikire, 2009). In this
regard, we may well contemplate the following question. How ready are we, academics
and students—elderly and youthful alike—to contemplate the classroom not in terms of a
“safe space,” but rather, to quote Paul Gilroy, as a “dangerous space” that fits a “sense of
the university as a unique environment where special rules apply with regard to disagree
ments and where we acquire a special kind of discipline with regard to the foolish or
loathsome opinions of others”?6
Another key constraint to academic freedom is the generally poor salaries that tend to
push academics to seek additional incomes through non-academic activities. A growing
consultancy syndrome has tended to triumph over academic values such as excellence in
teaching, research, and publication and to diminish the stature of the academics involved
as informed public intellectuals. The temptation to relocate elsewhere (especially in the
West) through greener-pasture-seeking migration remains great. Many a university pro
fessor on the continent is often derailed from the pursuit of academic excellence by myri
ad parallel non-academic calls on their time and effort usually in a bid to complement
their salaries. Almost without exception, even the most inspiring of academics work un
der extremely difficult conditions for relevant creativity in teaching and research (Zeleza
& Olukoshi, 2004A, 2004B).
In view of market-driven and market-sustained interconnecting global and local hierar

chies inspired by and configured around race, ethnicity, place, gender, sexuality, and gen
eration, among others, academics even with purportedly transformatory credentials and
commitment to promoting African values and voices in knowledge production and con
sumption find themselves often forced to prioritize standardization, routinization, and
predictability at the margins of global scholarship, and either completely ignore or re
duce to lip service the need to struggle for critical revision and transformation and the
necessary epistemological breaks envisioned in calls for decolonization of the mind and
Africanization of curricula and the languages of instruction (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1986,
2005). This is the case even when such scholarship is about the lived experiences of
Africa and Africans. The recurrent nature of transformation, decolonization, and financial
difficulties as a theme in student movements and activism right into the 21st century with
the #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall and #EndOutsourcing in South African universities
in 2015 and 2016 being the latest examples (Nyamnjoh, 2016; Booysen, 2016; Heffernan
et al., 2016; Jansen, 2017; Ndlovu, 2017; Habib, 2019), is ample demonstration of how lit
tle has changed for the better in Africa’s higher education institutions to make them truly
accessible and relevant to Africa and its peoples.
Page 13 of 36

On Epistemological Decolonization: Inspiration

from Beyond the Academy
Within the academy, there indeed have been initiatives seeking to reconnect universities
to lived life and embedding research in African communities that are worthy of encour
agement. Such initiatives range from Afrocentric or Africa-centered social science (As
ante, 2003; Ani, 1994; Cooper & Morrell, 2014; Nabudare 2006) to African philosophy and
philosophy in Africa (Appiah, 1992; Eze, 1997; Hountondji, 2002), through popular cul
ture (Barber, 1997, 2018; Edman, 2010), history, legal, and political processes (Ekeh,
1975; Ake, 1979, 2000; Amadiume, 1987, 1997; Mamdani, 1996; Falola & Jennings, 2002;
Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006, 2011), and gender relations and identities (Amadiume, 1987,
1997; Imam et al., 1997; Nnaemeka, 2005; Oyewumi, 1997, 2005; Mama, 2007; Morrell,
2016).Without ignoring these efforts and their achievements in the pursuit of transforma
tion, inclusivity, and decolonization of universities on the continent, it could be argued
that persistent clamoring for change by students, academics, and university management
alike would suggest that whatever creative imagination there is within African universi
ties appears to be more rhetorical activity than results. If the decolonization process is
generally slow, epistemological decolonization seems particularly so. This section of the
article seeks to address the epistemological decolonization imperative by attempting to
answer two important questions: How might African academics and universities be extri
cated from the web of Halloran’s “bloody silly questions” and “bloody silly answers” high
lighted above? How do we reconcile the need for recognition of African scholars with the
need for relevance to the communities whose sweat and toil fund them and their activi
ties? In view of the fact that whatever attempts at tackling epistemological inclusivity in
knowledge production (Connell, 2007; Nyamnjoh, 2012A, 2012B; Cooper & Morrell, 2014;
Connell et al., 2016; Collyer et al., 2019) remains an emergent movement that is yet to re
sult in a critical mass of alternative theories and practices in any systematic way (Rosa,
2014; Morrell, 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, 2018), the paper makes a deliberate effort to
venture outside the academy, while the jury of alternatives is still out, for inspiration on
the need to bring these and related initiatives into an urgent conversation on
“incompleteness” (Nyamnjoh, 2017B), in the interest of bringing the academy closer to
the lived realities of Africans desperate to participate in foregrounding and seeking solu
tions to their predicaments. This is all the more urgent, if, as Jean and John Comaroff ar
gue, Euro-America is evolving toward Africa (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2011). The paper
draws inspiration from an unlikely intellectual ancestor: Amos Tutuola.
Who Was Amos Tutuola?
Amos Tutuola was born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1920.7 He benefited from only six years
of frequently interrupted formal education and died on June 7, 1997. He desperately
sought completeness in a world of binary oppositions and obsessions with winning. With
in the framework of colonial education and its hierarchies of credibility, Tutuola was seen
by some as an accidental writer or “the unlettered man of letters.” Never wholly en
dorsed at any given time, away or at home, Tutuola’s literary career went from, in the
Page 14 of 36

words of Bernth Lindfors, “foreign enchantment and local embarrassment” to “universal

but qualified acceptance” to “foreign disenchantment and local reappraisal” between
1952 and 1975 (Lindfors, 1975).
Tutuola’s parents—Charles and Esther Aina Tutuola—were cocoa farmers. They were also
Christian, and Christianity, its symbols, morality, and beliefs feature prominently in
Tutuola’s books, where not even the bush of ghosts is able to escape its ubiquitous grip.
This is a clear illustration that Tutuola is far from stuck in a frozen African past filled with
fear and terror, as some of his critics have suggested.
In his works, Tutuola seeks to reassure his readers that it is possible to be “open and
porous and vulnerable” to a world of spirits, powers, and cosmic forces and “disenchant
ed” enough to have the confidence of Taylor’s “buffered self,” exploring one’s own “pow
ers of moral ordering” (Taylor, 2007).
Tutuola did not, however, allow his embrace of Christianity to serve as an ideological
whip to flog him and his Yoruba cultural beliefs into compliance with the one-dimensional
ism of colonial Christianity or the dualistic prescriptiveness of European missionaries. His
Christianity simply afforded him an opportunity to add another layer of complexity to his
identity (adopting the name “Amos” for example, without giving up “Tutuola”) and to his
Yorubaness of being.
As a Christian named Amos, Tutuola was resolute in turning down invitations to break
with his past and to disown the gods, beliefs, and traditions of his land, even as these
were reduced to thunderous silence, often with the complicity of purportedly enlightened
Africans. He was at odds with the hypocrisy of some Africans who harkened to Christiani
ty by day and succumbed by night to endogenous African religions disparaged as super
stition. Studies of African religions and religiosities indeed attest to the tensions and frus
trations felt by many an African with a Christianity unyielding in its preference for con
version over conversation and determined asphyxiation of endogenous religions and be
lief systems in Africa.
Tutuola served as a servant for a certain Mr. F. O. Monu, an Igbo man, from the age of
seven. Mr Monu sent him to the Salvation Army school of Abeokuta in 1934. He also at
tended the Anglican Central School in Abeokuta. Following the death of his father in
1939, Tutuola left school to train as a blacksmith, a trade he practiced from 1942 to 1945
for the Royal Air Force in Nigeria. The significance of Tutuola’s employment by the Royal
Air Force is worth bearing in mind, as some critics express surprise at how Tutuola refers
to airplanes, bombs, and other technological gadgets usually assumed European. How
could Europeans fail to realize that in exporting themselves and their cultures and tech
nologies of power that these would ignite the imagination and sense of appropriation of
those they sought to conquer, humble—and à la Frederick Lugard, pacify—through the
creation of native authorities and a system of indirect rule, or what Mahmood Mamdani
has termed “decentralised despotism”? Given colonial origins and continuities, there can
never be a “completely un-British Nigeria”; Tutuola’s work “reflects the coexistence of
English and Yoruba influences in both his cultural past and present” (Tabron, 2003, p.
Page 15 of 36

37). His work, in Yorubanized English, is a building block in the materialization of the
imagined community known as “Nigeria.” As a lingua franca, English (domesticated and
otherwise) provided Tutuola and continues to provide other “Nigerian” writers a chance
to bridging ethnic divides communicatively, exploring possibilities, challenges and limita
tion of nationhood, and seeking recognition and relevance in an interconnected and dy
namic world.
Tutuola tried his hand at several other vocations, including bread seller, photographer,
and messenger for the Nigerian Department of Labour, which he joined in 1948. From
1956 until retirement, he worked as a storekeeper for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corpo
ration in Ibadan. He married Victoria Alake in 1947 and had eight children with her. He
published his first book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, in 1952, followed by My Life in the
Bush of Ghosts in 1954. In 1967 he published Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty, with a ded
ication that read: “In memory of my Mother Mrs. Esther Aina Tutuola who died on 25th
November 1964.”
It could be argued that Tutuola is an embodiment of the incompleteness and composite

ness of being and becoming through interconnections, interdependencies, flexibility in
mobility and encounters, and conviviality that the universes of his stories depict—the
epistemological importance of which is explored below.
Epistemological Insights from Tutuola’s Stories

In his stories Tutuola foregrounds interconnections, interdependencies, flexible mobility,
encounters, and conviviality—among humans and across geographies and between hu
mans and nature and super-nature. By so doing, he makes a compelling case for incom
pleteness of being and as an indispensable driver of becoming through crossroads con
versations. The opening lines of The Palm-Wine Drinkard are tellingly poignant in this re
gard. Rich and powerful though the drinkard is, he can hardly claim independence extrav
agantly without being disingenuous about just how indebted he truly is to the palm-wine
tapster whose life and labor were entirely consumed by the drinkard’s insatiable appetite
for palm wine. Such claim of autonomy can only result in or come from social death. Tu
tuola seems keener on exploring the constructive tensions and challenges of the cross
roads of palm-wine drinking and palm-wine tapstering, than focusing exclusively on ei
ther or on each at a time.
In terms of the current clamors for epistemological inclusivity in African universities, the
provision in Tutuola’s stories for a disposition of incompleteness as a normal order of be
ing and becoming is richly instructive. Just as the palm-wine drinkard and his palm-wine
tapster are inextricably entangled and co-productive of each other, the academy and the
contexts are also relevant to its existence and practice. The drinkard realizes just how de
pendent on his tapster he has grown to be since the age of ten, when, suddenly, the tap
ster falls from a tall palm tree and dies. The drinkard’s delusions of independence are
shattered. Refusing to accept his fate or to allow death the last word, he sets out to find
his dead tapster, even if this means undertaking a journey to Dead’s Town. This turns out
Page 16 of 36

to be a journey of activating or re-activating his sensitivities to interconnections and in

terdependencies long blunted by a life of power, privilege, and pleasure in superabun
dance. It is a journey that emphasizes the importance of recognizing debt and indebted
(beyond purely economic terms) in how and the extent to which one claims agency and
autonomy.
In the course of his quest, the drinkard comes to a town where a beautiful girl has been
lured away by the “Complete Gentleman” into the distant bushes inhabited by curious
creatures. It happens that the “Complete Gentleman,” like an African academic com
pelled to embrace knowledge production as a highly individualized zero-sum pursuit, is
not that complete. There is a lot less to his glitter and dazzle than meets the eye. His
charm and handsomeness are less than skin deep. Indeed, almost everything about him
belongs to others. He is in every way a composite being—a sort of Ubuntu human. He be
longs with a community of curious creatures deep in the bushes who are reduced to a
bare-bones lifestyle—they live their lives as skulls. When the wind blows their way ru
mors of a young beautiful girl in a distant town who repeatedly turns down every suitor,
this curious creature reasons that a girl who turns down every man’s hand in marriage
must want as husband an otherworldly man. So, he decides to try his luck by embarking
on a journey of self-enhancement through borrowing body parts from others along the
way to the town of the girl with high standards. He borrows all the body parts he needs,
as well as a lovely outfit and a horse. As a composite being, he felt truly handsome. In
Tutuola’s words, the skull turned human thanks to his borrowing was the “Complete Gen
tleman.” As soon as the girl sets eyes on him, she abandons everything and everyone and
decides to follow him. He was as gentlemanly as he appeared to be complete. He warned
the girl repeatedly that there was a lot less to him than met the eye. But the girl insisted
that she had found what she desired: A truly handsome gentleman—the realization of her
fantasy. Her eyes knew what they had seen. At the crossroads, he warned her for the last
time, but when she insisted, he branched off and took the path leading back to his com
munity deep in the bushes. As junctions of myriad encounters, crossroads in Tutuola’s
universe are significant in the manner in which they facilitate creative conversations and
challenge regressive logics of exclusionary claims and articulation of identities and
achievements. Being the gentleman that he truly was, and having acquired the wife he
had set out to win, the man began the process of self-deactivation by returning all the
things and body parts that he had borrowed for the occasion and paying the price he had
agreed with the lender. The bride learned too late how deceptive appearances sometimes
are. If only the “Complete Gentleman” was not so much of a gentleman as to insist on rec
ognizing and paying back the debt of things and body parts he owed others, he just might
have continued to live a lie. This is not dissimilar to the lie many an African academic co-
opted into resilient colonial education with its Eurocentric index and epistemological or
der find themselves living, reduced to offer little more than lip service to decolonization
of the African university.
Within the current dominant Eurocentric epistemological order of binary oppositions,

confusing, conflating, and sweeping generalizations are the order of the day. Africans are
invited to see themselves in the image of a purported “West”: And few among the ordi
Page 17 of 36

nary citizens of the different countries that fall under this category of “the West” can
identify with it. As Tutuola repeatedly demonstrates through his sweet-footed boundary
crossing quest-heroes, if a frozen or bounded Africa exists nowhere empirically, why
should Africans uncritically subscribe to a mind-numbing abstract idea of the West that
every purported Westerner is assumed to identify with? Why can Africans or Westerners,
often presented as extreme binary opposites, not simply be like Tutuola’s quest-heroes,
who do not have to belong to the worlds of their adventures from the beginning to claim
and be claimed as part and parcel of these worlds? There is much to inspire scholarly
imagination in creative and innovative ways by taking a closer look at the capacity of
Tutuola’s quest-heroes to take the inside out and the outside in, and to acknowledge the
value of debt and being indebted. Until the freedom to wander and be recognized be
comes common currency for all and sundry without exception, African researchers, even
in relation to endogenous knowledge systems in Africa, will continue to prioritize theories
and theorists from elsewhere. This is because the empirical realities that shaped their
theorizing were everything but African, but the relevance of those theories can at best be
indirect. The suggestion to study and understand Africa first on its own terms will contin
ue to be easily and uncritically dismissed as an invitation to celebrate African essential
ism and exceptionalism, even as the imported colonizing theories and theorists are noth
ing but essentialist and bounded as “Western,” as are the assumptions they make of
Africans, their communities, and identities.
Without the humility to acknowledge debt and indebtedness on the part of the West and
its African acolytes, it is hardly surprising that there is little patience with anything
African, even by Africans, as the story of overwhelming rejection of Amos Tutuola from
the 1950s till his death in 1997 tells us. There is little discourse on Africa for Africa’s
sake, and the colonizing West has often used Africa as a pretext for its own subjectivities,
fantasies, and perversions. And no amount of new knowledge or insistence on side
stepped old knowledges seems challenging enough to bury once and for all the ghost of
simplistic assumptions about Africa. Even in the 21st century, representations of Africa as
a necessarily negative trope in the language of Eurocentric modernity (perfected in the
era of imperial imagination and conquest) continue to be re-actualized in a manner that
defies the very logic and science they are purportedly inspired by.
Legitimately and meaningfully enlivening accounts of Africa entails paying more attention
to the popular epistemologies from which ordinary people draw on a daily basis, and the
ways they situate themselves in relationship to others within these epistemologies. Con
sidering and treating the everyday life of social spaces as bona fide research sites entails,
inter alia, taking the popular, the historical and the ethnographic seriously, and emphasiz
ing interdependence and conviviality within and between disciplines, and among discipli
nary practitioners across geographies, gender, generational, class, and racial divisions. It
means creating links of conversations, collaboration, and co-production with interlocutors
outside of the academy and the professional circles of academics and scholars. It also
means encouraging “a meaningful dialogue” between these epistemologies and “modern
science,” both in their old and new forms. However, because the popular epistemologies
in question have been actively discouraged and delegitimized since colonial encounters,
Page 18 of 36

not least by African intellectuals themselves, there is need to revalorize them and the
multitudes shaping and sharing them. Systematic and critical non-prescriptive research
into these silent epistemologies of unheard majorities will benefit significantly from Tu
tuola and his writings.
Epistemological recognition and conviviality entail moving from assumptions to empirical

substantiation of claims about Africa. Hence the importance of questions such as: Who
are these ordinary people? What do they do for their living? What is the nature of their
epistemologies? Where do Africans, brought up under and practicing the colonial episte
mology, position themselves? How ready are the elite to be led by unheard majorities sub
jected to elitist discourses? Until the elite know what these epistemologies actually are,
they would not know where and how, or with whom, to dialogue. Like Tutuola’s narrators
in The Palm-Wine Drinkard and The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts who both have
to fight from the belly of a hungry ghost that swallows them, the angel of studying ordi
nary Africans in a relevant and meaningful way may well be in the belly of the beast, just
as the beast may well be in the belly of the angel. On this as on many related issues,
Tutuola’s creative imagination offers interesting insights (Nyamnjoh, 2017B).
How Can Tutuola Inspire the Re(situation) and Re(imagination) of

the Social Sciences and the Humanities in Africa?
The 2015, 2016, and surging protests by university students across Africa make the turn
to Amos Tutuola for inspiration more urgent (Pax Academica, 2015). In South Africa, in
tensifying student protests for the decolonization and transformation of an alienating, of
ten racialized, higher education system—symbolized by the “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Fees
Must Fall” and related movements initiated by University of Cape Town students—are an
indication that even so-called privileged African students in first-rate African universities
feel unfulfilled by an overly Eurocentric index of knowledge and knowledge production
(Booysen, 2016; Nyamnjoh, 2016; Heffernan et al., 2016; Ndlovu, 2017; Jansen, 2017;
Swartz et al., 2018; Habib, 2019; Khunou et al., 2019). It must be added, however, that
this model, especially in its export version, is essentially an extremely narrow form of Eu
rocentrism (or Euro-America-centrism), which excludes a lot of European and American
traditional and popular forms of knowledge. That said, the global dominance of such nar
row Euro-America-centrism means that there is almost total discontinuity between the
idea of knowledge in African universities and what constitutes knowledge outside univer
sities and in African art and literature.
The student-driven ferment seeks recognition and integration in teaching and research of
popular and endogenous forms of knowledge and ways of knowing informed by African
experiences and predicaments and especially by the continent’s frontier realities. These
are realities that derive from Africa’s disposition as a zone of encounters, interconnec
tions and circulation, and the continual ability of Africans to straddle myriad identity mar
gins and bridge various divides. In such zones, crossroads are paramount, as people,
ideas, things, and inspiration flow from all directions, enabling likely and unlikely conver
sations with difference, and forging cosmopolitan dispositions. As a frontier author of
Page 19 of 36

frontier stories with little interest in zero-sum games of dominance and conquest, Tutuola
is well placed to point us in the direction of more truly inclusive, solidly open-ended
Africanized systems of higher education on the continent.
Once despised, exoticized, primitivized, and ridiculed as a relic of a dying and forgotten
past of a dark continent awakening and harkening to the call of the floodlights of a colo
nizing European civilization, Tutuola is increasingly influencing younger generations of
storytellers and filmmakers, especially following his death in 1997. His brushstrokes are
gaining in popularity. New editions of his works are surfacing, and scholars of different
disciplinary backgrounds, students, and intellectuals of other walks of life who hear of
him are keen to read his books. As Wole Soyinka suggested in an introduction to the 2014
edition of Tutuola’s first published novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Tutuola appears to be
enjoying a “quiet but steady revival” both “within his immediate cultural environment,
and across America and Europe.” What might account for such growing interest in some
one who was for a long time summarily dismissed by elite African intellectuals as an em
barrassment and an expensive distraction? This paper finds Tutuola inspiring for the fol
lowing reasons.
Tutuola’s novels are not just works of fiction. They are founded on the lived realities of
Yoruba society—realities shared with many other communities across the continent—and
depict endogenous epistemologies that are popular in Africa. The stories Tutuola re
counts are commonplace across the continent. A close look at the universe he depicts
suggests it has far more to offer Africa and the rest of the world than the one-dimensional
logic of conquest and completeness championed by European imperialism and colonial
ism. Tutuola’s universe is one in which economies of intimacy go hand-in-hand with a
market economy and where pleasure and work are expected to be carefully balanced, just
as balance is expected between affluence and poverty, nature, culture, and super-nature.
Tutuola draws on popular philosophies of life, personhood, and agency in Africa, where
the principle of inclusive humanity is celebrated and the supremacy of reason and logic
questioned. Collective success is emphasized (and Black Tax is not a sin or a sign of prim
itive collectivism), and individuals may not begin to consider themselves to have succeed
ed unless they can demonstrate the extent to which they have actively included intimate
and even distant others (family members and friends, fellow villagers, and even fellow na
tionals and perfect strangers, depending on one’s stature and networks) in the success in
question.
Despite his English domesticated by his Yoruba syntax and his modest and less than intel
lectual education in elite African terms, Tutuola has contributed significantly to docu
menting and sharing ways of life and worldviews otherwise suffocated and suffering un
der the weight of extractive colonialism, globalization, and the market economy. His sto
ries of accommodating resiliency contrast with metanarratives of superiority and con
quest championed by aggressive and powerful persons and institutions. Tutuola’s stories
emphasize conviviality and interdependence, including those between market and gift
economies.
Page 20 of 36

From Tutuola we can learn how to integrate and draw on popular and widely shared on
tologies of incompleteness, which theme he explores extensively in his writings. Through
the capacity of his quest heroes to reach beyond the normalcy of their bounded geogra
phies and existence for solutions to predicaments for which they have no readymade con
ventional answers, Tutuola exposes us to the fathomable and unfathomable richness and
possibilities of crossroads and frontiers as zones of encounters and to likely and unlikely
conversations with difference. Crossroads encounters and conversations have potential
for conviviality as a currency in popular African ideas of reality and social action and in
doing justice to the nuanced complexities of what it means to be African in a world of flex
ible mobilities of people, things, and ideas.
Tutuola is a fascinating precursor to ongoing debates on flexible and fluid categories,

identities, and social and biological bodies. He demonstrates how to usefully bring
essence and consciousness into fruitful and innovative conversations. Consciousness
opens windows to tangible and intangible, visible and invisible forms of being, by means
of which it constantly enriches itself. Tutuola introduces us to the complexity of con
sciousness not only through the transcendental capacity for presence in simultaneous
multiplicities but also through the reality of intricate interconnections and interdependen
cies.
Tutuola’s ontologies of incompleteness are useful for (re)situating and (re)imagining so
cial research in Africa. His conceptions of incompleteness could enrich the practice of so
cial science and the humanities in Africa and globally. The paper suggests that we consid
er incompleteness as a social reality and form of knowing generative of and dependent on
interconnections, relatedness, open-endedness, and multiplicities.
Incompleteness harbors emancipatory potentials and inspires unbounded creativity and

hopefully a reclamation of more inclusionary understandings of being human and being in
general. Incompleteness is not a unidirectional concept. Every social organizational cate
gory is incomplete without the rest of what it takes to be human through relationships
with other humans, as well as with non-humans or other beings—in the natural and su
pernatural worlds. Africa is incomplete without the rest of the world, and the world is in
complete without Africa. It is worth insisting that this articulation is within the context of
incompleteness as a dominant model and disposition. The contrary is true if one contem
plates Africa’s incompleteness within the current dominant zero-sum model where debt
and indebtedness can be ignored with impunity and ambitions of dominance and superi
ority are made to count more than recognition and provision for a common humanity with
equal rights and entitlements locally and globally. Within the latter framework, in which
being incomplete is a negative, Africa’s incompleteness is historically produced through
relations of unequal encounters with the rest of the world, or at least certain segments
thereof. Historically, Africa was never just a skull needing to borrow body parts to acti
vate agency. It was a full person, or at least had more body parts, and was through vari
ous historical processes systematically dismembered. Thus, the idea of incompleteness
cannot be understood or accommodated within the framework of zero-sum games of su
Page 21 of 36

periority and ambitions of dominance. On the contrary, it presupposed rupture with that
framework.
Social sciences and humanities steeped in the dualisms of colonial ways of knowing and
producing knowledge in Africa are ill prepared to midwife the renaissance of African
ways of knowing and knowledge production. To achieve such an epistemological turn,
African scholars and academics would have to turn to and seek to be cultivated afresh by
fellow Africans immersed in everyday life and popular traditions of meaning making,
which involves not only the actualization and re-actualization of endogenous African sys
tems of knowing and knowledge production but also the creative ways in which they are
busy Africanizing their encounters with the West, the Orient, and beyond in the spirit of
incompleteness. Tutuola’s experiences as a writer illustrate that these people in rural ar
eas and urban villages are the very same Africans to whom the modern, ivory-towered in
tellectual elites try and deny the right to think and represent their realities in accordance
with the civilizations and universes they know best. Many scholars schooled in Western
modernity push away or even run from these worldviews and conceptions of reality. In
stead of creating space for the fruit of “the African mind” as a tradition of knowledge,
they are all too eager, under the gawking eyes of their Western counterparts—who are
equally oblivious of or indifferent to their own incompleteness in disregard to their reality
of debt and indebtedness—to label and dismiss (however hypocritically) as traditional or
superstitious the creative imagination of their fellow Africans. Put differently, just as their
colonizing Western counterparts who choose to ignore or be insensitive to their own in
completeness and indebtedness, many an African schooled in Western modernity are ea
ger to pass for complete gentlemen and complete ladies in the eyes of the West, at the ex
pense of the humility and inclusiveness that comes with recognition for their skully ori
gins, and to the fact that there would be a lot less to them than meets the eye if only they
were to factor in the reality of debt and indebtedness in the making of the West and its
modernity.
The full valorization of African potentialities in future social scientific endeavors depends
on the extent to which scholars in the social sciences and humanities are able to
(re)familiarize themselves with and encourage these popular modes of knowing and
knowledge making in the production of social knowledge. There is a clear need to de-cen
ter social sciences and the humanities from their preponderantly parochial or provincial
(as well as patriarchal) Eurocentric origins and biases and from illusions of completeness,
and for African researchers and scholars to (re)immerse themselves and be grounded in
endogenous African universes and the interconnecting global and local hierarchies that
shape and are shaped by them. How, exactly, one might ask, do we go about the business
of reconciling this quest for the endogenous with the fact that many African universities,
the workplaces of these researchers and scholars, are far from indigenous? How does one
truly bring into conversation the apparent chasms between the indigenous and the colo
nially imposed and violently internalized? Zero-sum games aside, such conversations are
only possible through an emphasis on endogeneity that constantly reconstitutes itself
Page 22 of 36

through mobility and ingestion of difference. Scholars must take themselves out into the
wider world and in terms intelligible to those encountered in the process.
Appropriation and re-appropriation are the norm in a universe of encounters not in
formed by ambitions of dominance but rather by a recognition and provision for incom
pleteness. In this light, endogeneity challenges the fixity or boundedness associated with
indigeneity, in its capacity to evoke and provide for the dynamism, negotiability, adapt
ability, and capacity for autonomy and interdependence and for creativity and innovation
in Africa and beyond. Endogeneity as indigeneity in motion counters the widespread and
stubborn misrepresentation of African cultures as static, bounded, and primitive, and of
Africa as needing the benevolence and enlightenment of colonialism and Cartesian ratio
nalism or their residues to come alive (Fonlon, 1965; p’Bitek, 1989; Ki-Zerbo, 1992, 2003;
Ela, 1994; Hountondji, 1997; Crossman & Devisch, 1999, 2002; Crossman, 2004; Nabu
dare, 2006; Devisch, 2007).
Tutuola’s presentation of crossroads and frontiers as zones of contact, possibility, and re
newal in the stories he tells is fascinating and inspirational. Africans who are able to suc
cessfully negotiate change and continuity by reaching out and taking in what they en
counter at the crossroads and bringing into conversation various dichotomies and bina
ries qualify as frontier Africans. Their frontier-ness comes from their continual straddling
of myriad identity margins and bridging of various divides. These experiences of strad
dling and bridging train them to recognize and provide for the interconnections, nuances,
and complexities in their lives.
Popular ideas of reality and the reality of frontier Africans suggest an approach to social
action in which interconnections, interrelationships, interdependencies, collaboration, co
production, and compassion are emphasized, celebrated, and rewarded. Within this con
vivial framework of intricate entanglements and manglements, if hierarchies of social ac
tors and actions exist, it is reassuring to know that nothing is permanent or singular
about the nature, order, and form of such hierarchies, and that no one or nothing has the
monopoly of action.
Commitments to crossroads conversations across divides make frontier Africans express

discomfort with suggestions or ambitions of absolute autonomy in action and reject ideas
that humans are superior to any other beings and that a unified and singular self is the
only unit of analysis for human action. In the absence of permanence, the freedom to pur
sue individual or group goals exists within a socially predetermined frame that empha
sizes collective interests at the same time that it allows for individual creativity and self-
activation.
Social visibility derives from (or is facilitated by) being interconnected with other humans
and the wider world of nature, the supernatural, and the imaginary in an open-ended
communion of interests. Being social is not limited to familiar circles or to fellow humans,
because it is expected that even the passing stranger (human or otherwise, natural or su
pernatural) from the next neighborhood, a distant land, or out of this world should benefit
Page 23 of 36

from the sociality that one has cultivated on familiar shores, hills, plains, and/or grass
fields.
The logic of collective action that underpins the privileging of interconnections and fron
tier-ness is instructive in a situation where nothing but change is permanent and where
life is a currency in perpetual circulation. The tendency toward temporality, transience, or
impermanence calls for social actors to de-emphasize or domesticate personal success
and maximize collective endeavours. To cultivate this at the university level would mean
transforming primary and secondary school curricula to emphasize greater cooperation
and communication incorporate incentive systems that are less hierarchical and competi
tive. It would also necessitate thinking about the role of the university in conversation
with the economy. Humility must reign while mentalities and practices of absolutes and
conquest are interred (Nyamnjoh, 2017B).
Conviviality of Popular African Ideas of Reality

and Social Action
Scholars interested in rethinking African social sciences and humanities could maximize
and capitalize upon the currency of conviviality in popular African ideas of reality and so
cial action, as evident in Tutuola’s writings, the ethnographic richness of which makes
them more than just works of fiction. Conviviality is recognition and provision for the fact
or reality of being incomplete and a rejection of linear thinking toward completeness. If
incompleteness is the normal order of things, conviviality invites scholars and indeed all
and sundry to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate delusions of grandeur
that come with ambitions and claims of perfection. Conviviality emphasizes repair rather
than rejection of relationships with fellow humans as well as with the non-human world,
in view of its recognition of debt and indebtedness as a permanent feature of being and
becoming. Conviviality is more about cobbling and less about ruptures. Conviviality is
fundamental to being human—biologically and socially—and necessary for processes of
social renewal, reconstruction and regeneration. Conviviality favours diversity, tolerance,
trust, equality, inclusiveness, cohabitation, coexistence, mutual accommodation, interac
tion, interdependence, getting along, generosity, hospitality, congeniality, festivity, civility
and peace, among other forms of sociality, over ongoing conflicts within and between
generations (Nyamnjoh, 2017A, 2017B).
Convivial Scholarship Rather Than Delusions of Completeness
Drawing inspiration from the story of the “Complete Gentleman,” and in view of the reali
ty of bare life as the starting point of being and becoming, how do scholars frame and re
search places and spaces as realities that have activated themselves for particular ends
at different points in history. And how are such processes shaped by (or shape) relation
ships within and beyond such places and spaces? As the meeting points and neutral
grounds that universities are expected to be, they ought to serve the function of cross
roads in Tutuola’s stories—that is, as places and spaces with the potential to welcome, ac
Page 24 of 36

commodate, and enable activation for myriad forms of potency for the efficacy of those
who inhabit them, however temporarily. Creative renewal in universities lies firmly with
an approach to the university as a crossroads of multiple influences and possibilities, mix
ing and blending, in the manner of Tutuola and the universes he depicts, to forge a reality
where certainties are never too rigid and the prospect of innovation a constant source of
hope. Taking incompleteness seriously and providing for interconnections and interde
pendencies as well as crossroads conversations across myriads of creative imagination
and material possibilities stands to serve as a rich reservoir for a scholarship of convivial
ity on the nimbleness of being and becoming.
Granted the intricacies of popular conceptions of reality and in view of the frontier reality
of Africans caught betwixt and between exclusionary and prescriptive regimes of being
and belonging, nothing short of convivial scholarship would do justice to the quest for an
epistemological reconfiguration of African universities and the disciplines, a reconfigura
tion informed by the sort of popular agency and epistemologies championed by Tutuola.
In convivial scholarship, the logic of inclusion is prioritized over the logic of exclusion and
the violence of conquest. Such scholarship is likely to provide for and take seriously com
prehensive depictions of endogenous universes in Africa wherein reality is more than
meets the eye and the world an experience of life beyond sensory perceptions and the
logic of binary oppositions. Truly convivial scholarship does not seek a priori to define
and confine Africans, anyone or anything, into particular territories or geographies, par
ticular racial and ethnic or national categories, particular classes, genders, generations,
or religions—or whatever other identity markers are ideologically in vogue. Convivial
scholarship confronts and humbles the challenge of over-prescription, over-standardiza
tion, over-routinization, and over-prediction. It is critical and evidence based (though not
in the limited sense of the observational sciences). It challenges problematic labels, espe
cially those that seek to unduly oversimplify the social realities of the people, places, and
spaces it seeks to understand and explain. In practice, this could imply providing for a
buffet of teaching and learning models that includes bringing scholarship and learning
outside the boundaries of the classroom and traditional institutional spaces.
Convivial scholarship recognizes the deep power of collective imagination and the impor
tance of interconnections and nuanced complexities. It questions assumptions of a priori
locations and bounded ideas of power and all other forms of relationships that shape and
are shaped by the sociocultural, political, and economic circumstances of social actors. It
is a scholarship that sees the local in the global and the global in the local by bringing
them into informed conversations, conscious of the hierarchies and power relations at
play at both the micro and macro levels of being and becoming. Convivial scholarship is
scholarship that neither dismisses contested and contrary perspectives a priori nor
throws the baby out with the bathwater. It is critical scholarship of recognition and recon
ciliation, scholarship that has no permanent friends, enemies, or alliances beyond the rig
orous and committed quest for truth in its complexity and nuance, in communion with the
natural and supernatural environments that make a balanced existence possible.
Page 25 of 36

Convivial scholarship does not impose what it means to be human, just as it does not pre
scribe a single version of the good life in a world peopled by infinite possibilities, tastes,
and value systems. Rather, it encourages localized conversations of a truly global nature
on competing and complementary processes of social cultivation through practice, perfor
mance, and experience, without preempting or foreclosing particular units of analysis in a
world in which the messiness of encounters and relationships frowns on binaries, di
chotomies, and dualisms. Indeed, like Tutuola’s universe, convivial scholarship challenges
scholars, however grounded they may be in their disciplines and their logics of practice,
to cultivate the disposition to be present everywhere at the same time. It is a scholarship
that cautions disciplines, their borders, and gatekeepers to open up and embrace the
crossroads culture of presence in simultaneous multiplicity and concomitant epistemolo
gies of interconnections. With convivial scholarship, there are no final answers, only per
manent questions and ever exciting new angles of questioning (Nyamnjoh, 2017A,
2017B).
Conclusion
Tutuola suggests ways for Africans to challenge victimhood with their dynamism and
compositeness informed by a recognition and provision for the humility of incompleteness
of being and becoming as a permanent work in progress. In Tutuola’s stories, ordinary
Africans are quite simply extraordinary in their capacity to challenge victimization and
brutal and brutish zero-sum games of power and conquest. The stories challenge the illu
sion of the autonomous, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent individual by inviting
the reader to embrace and celebrate incompleteness as the normal order of being and of
things. They suggest an epistemology of conviviality in which interdependence is privi
leged and delusions of grandeur and completeness discouraged. Rich and poor are co-im
plicated and mutually entangled in Tutuola’s universe of the elusiveness of completeness
and the impermanence of power.
Like most Africans outside of the ivory tower whose stories he shares, Tutuola himself
epitomizes the universe he depicts, not only through his own cunning and trickery, prank
ishness, and elusive quest for completeness in a world of zero-sum games of civilizations
founded on exclusionary violence but also by pointing a critical finger at the modern
African intellectual elite who have unquestioningly yielded to a narrow Eurocentric index
of completeness, civilization, and humanity. It is an index founded on borrowing without
acknowledgment and on the fallacy of the permanently activated autonomous self-made
complete gentleman or lady.
As interacting and interdependent beings à la Tutuola, humans (academics and intellectu

als included) are not always in a position to determine their actions and their outcomes,
even if they delude themselves every now and then that they can, and that they are free
willed and endowed with a capacity to make rational choices in the interest of their au
tonomy as individuals (and as thought leaders). What humans may initiate with a particu
lar intention or expectation in mind may not always—and indeed, often does not—deliver
Page 26 of 36

their intended or expected outcomes. The imponderables and the unexpected are part
and parcel of the excitement and frustrations of being human, being social, and being a
researcher in a non-prescriptive and non-linear fashion. This might make it extra difficult
to be rigid about scholarly concepts and conceptualizations, but it calls for rigorous and
systematic critical mindedness about the taken-for-granted within disciplinary and acade
mic logics of practice, as well as in popularized pretensions that science and scientism
are superior to all other forms of knowledge and knowing.
As one gathers from reading Tutuola, a form of knowledge common in Africa that is not
immediately amenable to science and scientism narrowly construed is the belief in a hid
den hand or the power of invisible forces. Within such an understanding of power, as con
stituting both a visible and invisible dimension, it makes sense to look beyond the obvious
and the immediately apparent, for reasons why, for example, mass and occasionally vio
lent protests and clamoring for decolonization (such as manifested by students of the
2015 and 2016 #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements in South African univer
sities) seldom result in what could remotely be termed rupture. At the heart of the failure
of many an ambition for rupture or delinking—such as called for by Samir Amin, one of
the founders of CODESRIA (Amin, 1985)—is the obvious or hidden reality of interconnec
tions and interdependences that bind the oppressed and the oppressor.
Recognizing the importance of bringing concepts and lived experiences into regular con
versation imposes the need to scrutinize frames and framing much more than scholars
tend to do in their scholarship. Asking questions on how productively to frame, problema
tize, and research decolonization from a social scientific standpoint is a conversation
worth having. How does one recognize and name decolonization? Is it as things unfold in
the present, or as an invariably after-the-fact longue durée sort of approach? Is it usually
with the passage of time that scholars assess and conclude that what may have started as
a protest against oppression grew into something else, and in combination with other fac
tors, resulted in what could be qualified (however mutedly) as decolonization? Are dis
courses of discontent and discontented discourses a necessary and sufficient indication
that decolonization is definitely coming home for dinner? Should one take seriously dis
courses of decolonization even when the action unfolding falls short or apparently contra
dicts declared intentions? If one agrees that decolonization is a process and not an event,
how does one factor in contributing events and decide on a threshold beyond which some
thing qualifies as decolonization, or the baby steps thereof?
It is commonplace to assume—especially because as sympathetic commentators, intellec

tuals are eager to assist in the liberation from colonial mindsets and legacies—that every
eruption into mass protests is necessarily a sign of an intention to break free of some
thing. In a postcolonial context where there are far more continuities than discontinu
ities, mass protests by the oppressed may not necessarily be because of an intention to
break away or to decolonize in a manner suggestive of rupture. Given the possibility of
creative innovation through copying, imitation, mimesis, and mimicry, violent outbursts
might sometimes signify a yearning to break into the ranks of the status quo and not nec
essarily to break away from business as usual to create something new or explore radical
Page 27 of 36

alternatives of a zero-sum nature. In such situations, it is the inequalities in the contents

of the template, frame, or framework that are being questioned and not necessarily a sev
ering of links with the dominant framework, of the sort called for by Samir Amin (Amin,
1985). Studies of invented or imagined traditions in postcolonial Africa speak more of
blending (bricolage) of apparent change and real continuities than they do of rupture.
The frame or template stays put, even in the heat of incendiary rhetoric and violent acts
of discontent and disruption (Mamdani, 2016, 2018). Often the repressive forces, be these
local, national, regional or global, are able to contain any semblance of radical disso
nance and to insinuate themselves back into the equation of unequal encounters, with a
sense of business as usual. Hence the call for convivial scholarship informed by an under
standing of decolonization as recognition and provision for incompleteness à la Tutuola,
not as something negative or an admission of inadequacy, but as a disposition of humility
in the face of the reality of interconnections and interdependencies and of debt and in
debtedness as a permanent characteristic of being and becoming.
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Notes:
(1.) I am grateful to CODESRIA for permission to reproduce, adapt, and update an ex
cerpt of my published introduction to PAX ACADEMICA: African Journal of Academic
Freedom. Revue Africaine de Liberté Académique nos. 1–2, 2015, titled “Introduction:
Academic Freedom in African Universities,” pp. 7–14.
(2.) Mahmood Mamdani, “The African University.”
(3.) See “The Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility, 29
November 1990, Kampala, Uganda.” The Kampala declaration was preceded in April the
same year by “The Dar Es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom and Social Respon
sibility of Academics, 19 April 1990, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.” Subsequent to these dec
larations, CODESRIA has regularly intervened through issuance of statements condemn
ing perceived infringement of academic freedom in various African states. Such state
ments include:
(•) Declaration of intellectuals and scholars about the destruction of manuscripts of

Timbuktu, Symposium AfrikaNko, 29 janvier, 2013 (CODESRIA et Point Sud);
(•) Violations and abuses of Academic Freedom in Malawi: CODESRIA postpones hold
ing of international colloquium in honour of Professor Thandika Mkandawire, April 8,
2011.
(•) Kampala declaration on African history, October 27–29, 2008.
(•) Safeguarding academic freedom in the University of Kinshasa!, May 15, 2008;
(•) An urgent call for the release of the Ethiopia 38, June 17, 2007.
(•) Message of solidarity with the people of Guinea, May 2007;
(•) Juba Declaration on Academic Freedom and University Autonomy, February 26–27,
2007, Khartoum, Sudan.
(•) Declaration on Africa’s development challenges, April 26, 2002, Accra, Ghana.
(4.) See Curriculum. Change Framework; George Hall, “New social justice creed puts
UCT at the crossroads”;Comments on Curriculum Change Working Group Framework
document; Tim Crowe, “Post-dated falsification of fallism at UCT by Ex-VC Max Price?”;
Decolonization at the University of Cape Town (UCT): Meaningful, meaningless or just
mean?; Comments on the Curriculum Change Working Group Framework document.
(5.) Feminist Africa.
Page 35 of 36

(6.) Paul Gilroy in search of a not necessarily safe starting point.
(7.) In this and subsequent sections that draw on insights from the works of Amos Tutuo
la, I reproduce texts and arguments from two of my more detailed publications (Nyamn
joh 2017a, 2017b) on the theme. I am particularly grateful to Langaa publishers for per
mission to reproduce extended excerpts of my previously published text to make my argu
ment on Amos Tutuola and his contribution to what I have termed convivial scholarship.
Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town
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Decolonizing the University in Africa

Decolonizing the University in Africa

Summary and Keywords

Keywords: decolonizing the university, inclusive epistemologies, epistemological decolonization, incompleteness,

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

tion of university education through promotion of perspectives grounded in African reali­

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Asking the Right Questions: A First Step in De­

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Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

In this regard, it is important first to question certain assumptions in orthodox research

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

dominant colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal political economy of knowledge produc­

African universities seeking decolonization should reappraise and resocialize approaches

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Struggles for Academic Freedom and the Rele­

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

relevance, he argues, entails questioning taken-for-granted theories configured in the

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It is commonplace in university circles to talk, debate, and write on academic freedom in

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

portant to establish to what extent the privileges of a world configured in accordance

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Be it on matters of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or other aspects of institutional

In view of market-driven and market-sustained interconnecting global and local hierar­

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

On Epistemological Decolonization: Inspiration

Who Was Amos Tutuola?

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words of Bernth Lindfors, “foreign enchantment and local embarrassment” to “universal

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

It could be argued that Tutuola is an embodiment of the incompleteness and composite­

Epistemological Insights from Tutuola’s Stories

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to be a journey of activating or re-activating his sensitivities to interconnections and in­

Within the current dominant Eurocentric epistemological order of binary oppositions,

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Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Epistemological recognition and conviviality entail moving from assumptions to empirical

How Can Tutuola Inspire the Re(situation) and Re(imagination) of

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Tutuola is a fascinating precursor to ongoing debates on flexible and fluid categories,

Incompleteness harbors emancipatory potentials and inspires unbounded creativity and

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Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Commitments to crossroads conversations across divides make frontier Africans express

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Conviviality of Popular African Ideas of Reality

Convivial Scholarship Rather Than Delusions of Completeness

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

As interacting and interdependent beings à la Tutuola, humans (academics and intellectu­

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

It is commonplace to assume—especially because as sympathetic commentators, intellec­

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

alternatives of a zero-sum nature. In such situations, it is the inequalities in the contents

Ake, C. (2000). The feasibility of democracy in Africa. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA.

Ani, M. (1994). Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and

Appiah, K. A. (1992). In my father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture. Oxford,

Subscriber: University of Cape Town Libraries; date: 30 July 2019

tion of university education through promotion of perspectives grounded in African reali

Asking the Right Questions: A First Step in De

dominant colonial, postcolonial, and neoliberal political economy of knowledge produc

Struggles for Academic Freedom and the Rele

In view of market-driven and market-sustained interconnecting global and local hierar

It could be argued that Tutuola is an embodiment of the incompleteness and composite

to be a journey of activating or re-activating his sensitivities to interconnections and in

As interacting and interdependent beings à la Tutuola, humans (academics and intellectu

It is commonplace to assume—especially because as sympathetic commentators, intellec

Crossman, P. (2004). Perceptions of ‘Africanisation’ or ‘endogenisation’ at African univer

Crossman, P., & Devisch, R. (2002). Endogenous knowledge: An anthropological perspec

Devisch, R. (2007). The University of Kinshasa: From Lovanium to Unikin, In M. O. Afo

Fonlon, B. N. (2009). Genuine intellectuals: Academic and social responsibilities of Uni

Nabudare, D. W. (2006). Towards an Afrokology of knowledge production and regenera

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (2018). Epistemic freedom in Africa: Deprovincialisation and de

Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2012a). Potted plants in greenhouses: A critical reflection on the re

Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2017a). Incompleteness and conviviality: A reflection on international re

Zeleza, P. T. (2003b). Academic freedom in the neo-liberal order: Governments, globaliza