By: Edwin Adjei
In 2016, I undertook a trip to Larteh in the eastern region of Ghana to collect folktales for a research project I was undertaking for a publication. The first ten years of my life were spent in Larteh with my grandmother, so by the time I relocated to Accra to further my education and to live with my parents, I was very fluent in the Guan dialect which is spoken in Larteh. The Guan dialect is an endangered language so my research was to record folktales from this dialect that was fast dying out. To do this, I had to record my stories from the older generation of people in their 60s to 90s. Confident in my ability to transcribe and translate the stories, I went to Larteh one cold morning, nineteen years after I had left the town, only to receive the shock of my young research life. I could barely understand the dialect of the language the older generation spoke because I had been out of touch with the language for nineteen years! I therefore had to seek interpretations of some songs and some words after each story which got on the nerves of one nonagenarian storyteller until she threw some invectives my way through a song. As if my plight was not bad enough, I had to ask her to translate the invectives at which point she simply decided I was incapable of the task I had decided to embark on and therefore refused to tell me any more stories. This story demonstrates what Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has written about severally: language has always been central to colonial politics and the psychological bonds of language are very strong.
Recently, Rachel Strohm wrote a post titled “Let’s Build African Research Centers in Africa” which sought to espouse the need for African research centers to be situated in Africa and be inclusive of African scholars in order to enhance their contributions to global research. She was critical of the establishment of a new Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID) at the London School of Economics which will look at thematic areas such as families, governance, religious leadership, aid agencies, etc. and be a center for training future African leaders, who could have such training if similar centres were established in Africa and given the kind of funding they received in the West. She was also critical of the exclusion of African scholars from knowledge production, especially about Africa, with statistics showing most research on Africa flows from the global North. There have been attempts by Africans to remedy the situation of African scholars being excluded from research on Africa through the establishment of institutes of African studies in some universities on the continent, but these institutes are few and most often understaffed and also often not adequately funded to be able to produce as much scholarly work as those in the global North.
The African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) has been formed to create a platform for African scholars’ research on Africa to reach the African and wider global community. It has a mission to promote Africa’s own specific contributions to the advancement of knowledge about the peoples and cultures of Africa and the Diaspora. The ASAA will be hosting its second bi-annual conference this fall on the theme “African studies and global politics” and the theme for this paper is one of the sub-themes that will be discussed at the conference. Scholars in the global South are already adeptly managing the little resources they have access to as well as attempting to overcome the various gatekeeping modalities set in place by historical legacies and contemporary institutions in the global North that limit who can research and publish scholarly works.
Rachel Strohm mentions that she is in the process of starting an organization that would seek to remedy the unequal access African scholars have to the global scholarly community. That is a great goal to have and is actually something that CODESRIA has been doing since its founding in 1973. This is also something that the CIHA Blog regularly engages in. So, I am curious as to what exactly Rachel Strohm would like to achieve through her new organization that these other organizations have not. Could she achieve her desired goals with other organizations in Africa that have already been established? Would she be in a better position to achieve this dream of hers by teaming up with already established African organizations or institutes of African studies? Only time will tell. But in siding with Rachel Strohm, I would say that unless Africans are empowered to tell their own stories, the world will continue to hear the same tune on Africa that they have been listening to for centuries and the global scholarly community loses more than it gains if such a trend continues. Scholars from around the world have contributed enormously to knowledge about Africa and many papers written by African scholars have either supported their findings or ended up rebutting these publications.
Like my personal anecdote at the beginning of this essay, I wonder how much we are losing each time we read scholarly publications from the global North on Africa. Do these scholars really understand the nuances of the culture they are studying. Do these scholars really grasp the nuances of the languages of the people they study? This is not to say that western scholars cannot successfully undertake research in Africa but to say that as much as this is possible, like an Akan proverb says, “A stranger has huge eyes, but he/she does not see much.” How much do we lose when most of the research on Africa is based and done by those from outside the continent? As I found out the hard way, being part of a people and studying a people one does not completely understand are not the same. A lot of research from Africa in the past and even now has been spent rebutting research on Africa by non-Africans. For fruitful debate and dialogue, a multiplicity of perspectives need to be held in tandem without one being held in a hierarchy above another. African knowledge and research must be supported through the development of African centers of knowledge that privilege local epistemologies as equal to Western scientific paradigms.