Two years ago Volksblad published an article of mine on Heritage Day. The piece included some alarming results of interviews I had conducted with a random sample of university students about the meaning and symbolism of Heritage Day. Most of the students did not know what the day stood for — and some thought it was “a braai day away from classes”.
If many university students, and perhaps other South Africans too, do not know the meanings and shared values embedded in a landmark commemoration such as Heritage Day, we should be concerned about the extent to which our supposedly Africa-focused education institutions, the state and the media are helping to transform uninformed and misinformed minds.
Now, with Africa Day coming up next week, on May 25, a similar concern motivates me again — this time to reflect on the meanings, the symbolism and the reasons for celebrating Africa Day. I would like also to share some personal thoughts on the role and present state of Africa studies in general and on how, as a field of research, it may serve to invest in an occasion such as Africa Day to advance and promote its role in society more broadly.
By the time the African Union (AU) took over from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), all African countries had been liberated from colonialism and minority rule. Therefore, the AU has a greater role than the OAU had to play in preserving the continent’s political independence, accelerating socioeconomic development, resolving internal conflicts, achieving and maintaining peace, and promoting democracy, good governance and human rights.
So Africa Day symbolises independence, peace, security, unity, democratic principles, good governance and prosperity on the continent. Indeed, it symbolises an important part of the African heritage, past, present and future, that should be remembered and celebrated with respect and vision.
However, while African states and peoples rightfully celebrate the democratic and socioeconomic achievements of the continent, Africa Day should equally be a day for reflections — about accountability and assessment of failures and challenges and especially about violations of democratic principles and human rights, bad governance, poverty and pandemic diseases. It should also be a day when African leaders pledge to translate all that they preach into practice and a day for all Africans to ask what they can do for their country rather than what their country can do for them.
On the academic front the least that universities and research institutions should do is to use Africa Day to assert their recognition of the cultural and social contexts in which they are placed and by virtue of which they claim their legitimacy and African identity — that is, their knowledge bases must be relevant to the realities and challenges of Africa.
For instance, academic and social transformation at the University of the Free State (UFS) began by acknowledging the fact that no university can exist or function in isolation from its immediate and wider contexts. UFS has taken large academic strides in positioning itself locally, nationally, regionally and continentally; and the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) was established in November 2007 to promote the university’s focus on Africa as contextualised in its curriculum and research areas.
The commemoration of landmarks such as Africa Day in the history of the continent has become an inseparable part of the academic mission of CAS, where Africa’s past is researched, achievements are celebrated, present and future challenges are interrogated and academic contributions are geared towards making Africa a continent of opportunity, prosperity and a place that promises a better future for all.
Ordinary Africans are confronted with many challenges in their daily lives. These have often reached the boiling points reflected in the protests and uprisings currently under way in different parts of the continent. For this reason, the focus for our celebration of Africa Day at UFS next week will be the state of democracy in post-colonial Africa.
One of Africa’s major intellectuals, Professor Ali Mazrui, is scheduled to deliver the day’s keynote speech. Mazrui’s research interests and experience, with his numerous and enormously influential publications on African politics, international political culture, political Islam and North-South relations, furnish him with a solid command of, and a wealth of material on, this thorny issue.
I believe that an Africa-focused education, exemplified in centres and institutes for Africa studies, must play a greater role in promoting public awareness about Africa — and celebrating Africa Day provides one opportune occasion to do so. Africa studies is a multifaceted field that has morphed and changed through time and it has embraced a wide range of disciplines — such as the arts, humanities and social sciences — in focusing on the culture, history, politics, economy, religion and languages of Africa.
However, the academic content of Africa studies and its vehicles of expression are still largely alien to the African public. And because their concerns and challenges are rarely addressed by the academic institutions that focus on Africa studies, many Africans feel alienated by African academia.
This is hardly surprising when the research agenda and knowledge bases of Africa studies are partly shaped by their limited resources and partly disciplined by the institutional ideologies and/or centres of “power” and “wealth” that provide those resources. This means that research goals and the processes of knowledge production are “locked” in what Mahmood Mamdani labelled “the formal world”, so that research outcomes are consultative rather than interrogative in being crafted to the satisfaction of the recipient governments and/or donors.
In addition, the systems of knowledge production and dissemination that prevail in Africa studies still reflect a forceful Western hegemony. It follows that Africa studies and related disciplines have critical roles to play in deconstructing existing knowledge systems and reconstructing them with three aims.
First, they must embrace and provide space for African knowledge systems and local vehicles of their expression. Second, they need to ensure their research goals and outcomes are relevant to the concerns and challenges of African citizens. Finally, the challenge still remains for Africa studies to break away from predominantly rigid disciplinary approaches and open itself, through more inclusive interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, to the complex nature of Africa.
Anwar Osman is a former director of and currently a senior professor in the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State