Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998 E-Book
Ruth Craggs
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- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
DECOLONISING GEOGRAPHY? "This book presents an extraordinarily sensitive account of geography's histories in five African countries subjected to British colonial rule. Craggs and Neate draw together political and imaginative processes of decolonisation, through an innovative biographical approach that humanizes and enlivens the story of our academic discipline. It will be an invaluable resource for those seeking a deeper understanding of decolonisation, its recent trajectories and far-reaching implications, on the African continent." --Shari Daya, Affiliate Associate Professor in Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town "By placing the experiences, ideas, and practices of African geographers in the center of their analyses, Craggs and Neate provide an unprecedented account of historical and contemporary decolonizing struggles within Geography and the academy. This book should be required reading for all those looking to decolonize the discipline and dislodge it from its Global North histories, institutions, and ideologies." --Mona Domosh, Professor of Geography, The Joan P. and Edward J. Foley Jr. 1933 Professor, Dartmouth College "This meticulous work explores how colonialism, decolonization and postcolonialism shaped African geography and geographers. It sheds light on efforts to 'Africanize' the discipline, a process which I was both witness to and a participant in." --Stanley Okafor, Professor of Geography (Retired), University of Ibadan How did a generation of academic geographers engage with constitutional decolonisation during the end of the British empire in Africa? In Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998, Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate explore how the teaching, research, administration and activism of geographers in Africa shaped the discipline and the post-colonial geopolitics of the continent. The authors follow the professional lives of individual geographers to provide fresh insights into decolonisation in the former British Empire in Africa, drawing from extensive archival research and more than 40 oral history interviews with geographers in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and the UK. Decolonising Geography is a must-read for any reader in the UK and Africa with an interest in the relationships between geography and decolonisation.
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Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948–1998
Ruth Craggs
King’s College London, UK
Hannah Neate
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
This edition first published 2024
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Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
List of Figures and Table
Acknowledgements
1. Decolonisation and Geography in Africa
Introduction
African Decolonisation
Periodisation
Decolonisation, Education, and the Place of African Universities
Contributions
Historicising Current Debates
Decolonising Geography’s Histories
Professional Lives and Histories of Decolonisation
Biographical Methods
Sources
Case Studies
Structure
2. ‘New, Interesting, and Even Exciting Opportunities’: Geography and the Founding of Colonial Universities in Africa
Introduction
Asquith Colleges and the ‘Imperial Family of Universities’
Geography at the Asquith Colleges: Colonial Networks
Early Faculty
Building a Department
Teaching and Researching Geography
Campus Relations
Conclusion
3. Shifting the Centre: Africanising Geography in Decolonisation
Introduction
African Geography Students in Britain
Shifting Higher Education Structures
Africanisation of Staff
Africanisation of Research, Curriculum, and Teaching
Conclusion
4. International Networks, Decolonisation, and the Cold War
Introduction
Diversifying Influences and Americanisation
Looking to America
American Orbits
The Quantitative Revolution in Africa
Other Eastern and Non-aligned Networks
Eastern Bloc Connections
Moving the Centre
Radical Geography and Underdevelopment
Conclusion
Mobility – for Some
Decolonisation or Incorporation?
Innovation
5. Geography and National Development: Knowing, Planning, and Exploiting Resources for Independent Africa
Introduction
Geography and African Development
Producing Development Experts
Knowing New Nations (and Resources) through the Census
Research for Rural Development in Tanzania
BRALUP and Applied Research
Research for Ujamaa
Between Commitment and Critique
Regional Development Planning and New Urban Spaces in Nigeria
Rebalancing After War
Akin Mabogunje and the Geographer as Consultant
Conclusion
6. Geography, Apartheid and Anti-Apartheid Activism in South Africa
Introduction
Departmental Spaces, Geography and the Contestation of Apartheid
The Tearoom
Conference Spaces
Teaching Spaces
Campus Politics and Activism
Campus Protests
Geographers as Activists Beyond Campus
Geographical Research and Apartheid
Research for (Separate) Development in South Africa
Apartheid: An Absent Subject
Growing Critique
People’s Geography
Decolonising South African Geography
Working for Transformation
Challenging Geography’s White Institutions
Consultancy and Critique
Conclusion
7. Legacies of Decolonisation in African and British Geography
Introduction
Leaving Africa
Pastures New
Reluctance and Compulsion
Isolation and Creativity
Growing Isolation
Solidarity and Creativity
Legacies in the UK
Textbook Africa
Area Studies, Development Studies, and Development Geography
African Connections, Colonial Nostalgia
Conclusion
8. Decolonising Geography Past and Present?
Introduction
Decolonisation, its Histories and Geographies
Peopling the Historiography of Decolonisation
Decolonising Geography’s Histories
Learning from the Past
To What Extent was Geography Decolonised in the period 1948–1998?
What Does This Mean for Decolonisation Struggles Today?
Conclusion
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
CHAPTER 01
Table 1.1 Key higher education institutions...
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 01
Figure 1.1 Map of Africa showing case-study...
Figure 1.2 ‘The Chancellors Procession...
Figure 1.3 Tower Court and Administration...
Figure 1.4 Makerere College, Uganda,...
CHAPTER 02
Figure 2.1 Keith Buchanan....
Figure 2.3 Geography students...
Figure 2.2 S.J.K. Baker teaching...
Figure 2.4 Tedder Hall, University...
Figure 2.5 The geography department...
Figure 2.6 Tower court and part of Mellanby Hall...
CHAPTER 03
Figure 3.1 The wedding of Akin Mabogunje...
Figure 3.2 Students in the geography lecture...
Figure 3.3 Photographs of the former heads...
CHAPTER 04
Figure 4.1 Professor Akin Mabogunje...
Figure 4.2 Contents page of the first...
CHAPTER 05
Figure 5.1 President Julius Nyerere...
Figure 5.2 N.I.S.E.R. building, designed...
Figure 5.3 Akin Mabogunje preparing for...
CHAPTER 06
Figure 6.1 South African universities...
Figure 6.2 University of the Western...
Figure 6.3 Student protest at the Indian...
Figure 6.4 Protests at the University...
CHAPTER 07
Figure 7.1 Part of an article for school children on apartheid. Potts, D. (1985)...
Guide
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Table
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Figures and Table
Figure 1.1 Map of Africa showing case-study institutions (in bold) and other universities discussed in the book.
Figure 1.2 ‘The Chancellors Procession after his installation’. Inauguration of the University of Ghana 25th November 1961.
Figure 1.3 Tower Court and Administration Buildings, University of Ibadan, early 1960s.
Figure 1.4 Makerere College, Uganda, 1940s.
Figure 2.1 Keith Buchanan.
Figure 2.2 S.J.K. Baker teaching in the geography department, Makerere College.
Figure 2.3 Geography students with Petrus Serton centre, front row, at the University of Stellenbosch in 1953.
Figure 2.4 Tedder Hall, University of Ibadan, early 1960s.
Figure 2.5 The geography department building, University of Ghana (now renamed geography and resource management) in 2017.
Figure 2.6 Tower court and part of Mellanby Hall, University of Ibadan.
Figure 3.1 The wedding of Akin Mabogunje and Titiola Ogunmekan, London, December 1957.
Figure 3.2 Students in the geography lecture room, Makerere college, 1947.
Figure 3.3 Photographs of the former heads of the geography department at the University of Ibadan still adorn the wall of the head’s office.
Figure 4.1 Professor Akin Mabogunje at the University of Ibadan geography seminar, mid-1960s.
Figure 4.2 Contents page of the first of two special issues of Antipode co-edited by Milton Santos (Santos and Peet 1977).
Figure 5.1 President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania being installed as Chancellor of the University of Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, 29 August 1970.
Figure 5.2 N.I.S.E.R. building, designed by Fry, Drew, and Partners.
Figure 5.3 Akin Mabogunje preparing for fieldwork, 1977.
Figure 6.1 South African universities discussed inChapter 6(pre-1994 names).
Figure 6.2 University of the Western Cape students on a field trip, 1984, Gilfellan second from left.
Figure 6.3 Student protest at the Indian University College (the precursor to the University of Durban Westville) c. 1960s.
Figure 6.4 Protests at the University of Durban-Westville Campus, May 1972.
Figure 7.1 Part of an article for school children on apartheid.
Table 1.1 Key higher education institutions and their transition to university status.
Acknowledgements
This book would have been nothing without the contributions of the geographers who shared their experiences and shaped our project in oral history interviews: Tony Allen, Elizabeth Ardayfio-Schandorf, Olusegun Areola, Albert Aweto, ‘Bola Ayeni, Johnson Ayoade, Randall Baker, George Benneh, Leonard Berry, Michael Chisholm, Hugh Clout, Jonathan Crush, Patricia Cunnan, Ronnie Donaldson, Michael Dyssel, Adetoye Faniran, Calvyn Gilfellan, Keith Hoggart, Anthony Lemon, Akin Mabogunje, Alan Mabin, Brij Maharaj, Adolfo Mascarenhas, Jeff McCarthy, Ellsworth McPherson, Ngaka Mosiane, Linda Newson, Sue Parnell, Gordon Pirie, Gina Porter, Debbie Potts, Christian Rogerson, Stephen Rule, Victor Savage, Dianne Scott, Cecil Seethal, David Smith, Dhiru Soni, Manfred Spocter, Michael Sutcliffe, and Reuban Udo. Brian Berry, John Iliffe and Anthony O’Connor offered their memories via letter and email, and Stanley Okafor, David Narracott and Mike Pugh offered additional contributions. It was a privilege to speak with and learn from them all. We are extremely grateful to Joanne Sharp for allowing us to use additional oral history interviews conducted as part of research about the University of Dar es Salaam.
In addition to those who we interviewed, many others contributed by facilitating research trips and making us welcome. We would like to thank especially James Esson, Chris Ikporukpo, Tolulope Osayomi, Ibidun Adelekan, Trevor Hill, Oliver Mtapuri, Michelle Hatch, Sithembiso Myeni, Gustav Visser, Sarah Bracking, Mark Pelling, George Owusu, Eben Amankwaa, and Samuel Agyei-Mensah. Without the invaluable support and expertise of archivists in Germany, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom, this book would also have been impossible. Thanks especially to Thirunagaren Munsamy, Sandra Brits, Karlien Breedt, Clive Kirkwood, Lucy McCann, Bethany Antos, staff at the Archiv für Geographie and Abraham Olayemi, whose generosity and knowledge have improved this book immensely.
We were grateful for the feedback from audiences for papers we gave at the University of Ibadan, National University of Singapore, University of the Western Cape, University of KwaZulu Natal, University of Oxford, University of Sussex, University of Cambridge, University of Nottingham and the London Group of Historical Geographers, as well as to audiences at International Geographical Union meetings in Dublin and Paris, the International Conference of Historical Geographers in Warsaw, and at the Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers in London.
At Wiley, we are grateful to Jacqueline Scott and Grace Ong, and at the Royal Geographical Society to Phil Emmerson, Ed Armston-Sheret and Catherine Souch who supported the project and the wider teaching focused activities that were associated with it. James Esson, Iram Sammar and Jo Norcup have been a brilliant team in delivering these activities and inspiring with their work on teaching African geographies. Dave Featherstone, as Book Series Editor, has been encouraging as well as challenging throughout, and as a result the book is much improved. The reviewers of the manuscript and proposal provided very useful comments that shaped the argument. Colleagues at King’s College London, Manchester Metropolitan and elsewhere have provided critical engagement and encouragement in equal measure. Thank you to Innes Keighren, Felix Driver, Miles Ogborn and the rest of the London Group of Historical Geographers for their historical geography wisdom. Thanks especially the Contested Development Research Group at KCL, Steve Legg, James Sidaway and Paul Ashmore for providing detailed feedback on drafts, and to Katherine Brickell for reading many versions of proposals, grant applications and chapters and being an enthusiastic cheerleader and coffee shop companion throughout.
Travel for research was funded by Manchester Metropolitan University, King’s College London and the British Academy, who through a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship also supported research leave to write most of the book. The KCL SSPP Publication Subvention Fund supported the production of the index. Some of the research has previously been published in different forms in the Journal of Historical Geography (Post-colonial careering and the discipline of geography: British geographers in Nigeria and the UK, 1945-1990. Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate, Journal of Historical Geography, copyright: © 2018 The Authors) and Annals of the American Geographers Association (reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of © 2019 by American Association of Geographers).
A big thank you to Dave Weatherall for being supportive throughout, to Vic Craggs, for his company and enthusiasm in South Africa and to Jean Craggs for her support for the trip and always. Tim has provided academic ideas, archival contacts, and most of all love and encouragement to keep me going, and Daisy has provided a (mainly) delightful distraction since her arrival in the middle of the project and the start of a pandemic.
This book is dedicated to the first generations of African geographers who worked so hard to create a decolonised discipline of geography.
Chapter One Decolonisation and Geography in Africa
Introduction
Decolonising Geography? focuses on the experiences and contributions of academic geographers to decolonisation in the former British empire in Africa. Whilst geography’s engagements with the imperial project have been well documented, accounts have tended to end in the early twentieth century rather than continuing to examine the period of constitutional decolonisation itself (Craggs 2014). However, geographers, and geography, were entangled with the end of empire in a number of ways, even if, as Power and Sidaway argue, ‘this connection was not always acknowledged’ (2004, p. 588). The book focuses on both how the professional lives of academic geographers in this era were shaped through decolonisation and how their work shaped that same process. It sheds new light on the influence of late colonial development, decolonisation, and post-colonial geopolitics on geography, and demonstrates how the discipline contributed – positively and negatively – to the broader politics of decolonisation and national development.
Examining the period 1948–1998, and with a final chapter that addresses debates about the decolonisation of the discipline (and university) today, the book explores the careers of geographers working in colonial and post-colonial universities in Africa during and after constitutional decolonisation. It examines the practice of geography within the universities of the (former) British empire, as well as considering the impact of decolonisation on geography in the UK as British geographers returning from posts in the colonies joined UK departments. It draws on case studies from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, as well as the UK. The first universities in these African countries were almost all university colleges associated with the University of London, set up in the mid-twentieth century. They made up part of an expanded British academic world which connected the UK and British colonies in Africa (Pietsch 2013).
Whilst Ghana became independent in 1957, followed shortly after by Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, the 1980s and 1990s saw liberation for Zimbabwe, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. Much of the historiography of British decolonisation focuses on the 1940s to 1960s, yet the formal constitutional process was ongoing into the 1980s. The book charts geography’s engagements with decolonisation in the fifty years following the opening of the first University Colleges in Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda in the late 1940s. It extends the chronology of these histories into the late twentieth century as anti-colonial struggles continued across the continent and academics, students, politicians, and publics continued to ask questions about the extent to which decolonisation had meant a complete break from colonialism. The struggle for democratic rule in South Africa was understood by many as part of the broader process of decolonisation and the demand for racial justice across Africa, so whilst the issues in South Africa were somewhat different to those in other decolonising states, it is revealing to explore these alongside one another.
Questions about colonialism and decolonisation reverberated around universities in Africa in the mid twentieth century and continue to shape the discipline of geography to the present day. Our book makes three key contributions to debates about decolonisation. First, whilst Decolonising geography? is a historical study, it contributes to the rich and diverse debates which see decolonisation as an incomplete and increasingly urgent project in the twenty-first century. It does so by bringing the meanings, strategies, and lived experiences of a group of primarily African academics working to decolonise the discipline of geography and the university in the mid twentieth century, into conversation with those attempting the same thing today. Second, the book contributes to the decolonisation of geography’s histories, by highlighting the contributions of scholars from Africa, as well as the ongoing legacies of colonialism in the discipline. Third, we contribute to the interdisciplinary study of decolonisation by demonstrating the value of biographical approaches for understanding the end of empire as a transformation experienced and produced through individuals’ careers worked across continents, linking postcolonial states and former colonial powers, colleagues and institutions, in complex ways.
Following the professional lives of a cohort of geographers over many years the book utilises biographical methods as well as institutional histories to explore a wide range of academic labour. Whilst the published research of geographers forms one element of the analysis, the book also explores teaching, curriculum design, and student work; academic exchanges, grants, scholarships, and funding; and the often-hidden academic labour of departmental administration including aspects such as reference writing, mentoring, and promotion decisions. We examine a set of individual professional lives, from undergraduate studies through often-lengthy academic careers, alongside the institutions, networks, and disciplinary knowledges through which they were worked. Through this approach we are able to explore not only how geographers conceptualised decolonisation in their research, but also how they practised it through their broader academic labour. Disciplinary histories tend to focus on publications, and, in the context of empire and decolonisation, on contributions to either the pursuit, or the radical critique, of these processes (Livingstone 1992; Clayton 2013). Yet, decolonisation was (and is) not only about publications, but also about everyday academic practices. How departments were managed and people treated were as much part of the practice of decolonisation as geographical work like border commissions or anti-colonial critique. The book demonstrates that we must take seriously the everyday work of geographers, as well as their publications, in assessing the interconnections between geography and decolonisation. The biographical approach taken allows the book to bridge a critical gap in historical understanding, by uncovering the praxis of geography in all its messiness.
The rest of this chapter sets out the contours of our arguments, contexts, methods, and case studies. The next section first describes the periodisation of the book before moving on to contextualise the place of African universities within debates from this period about decolonisation and post-colonial state-building. The third section sets out our three substantive contributions to the lively and wide-ranging debate about decolonisation unfolding today. Following this we set out our methods and then establish our case study institutions. Finally we introduce the chapters and set out the structure of the rest of the book.
African Decolonisation
Periodisation
In this book we engage with decolonisation in multiple registers, but our empirical discussion is anchored in the historical period leading up to and following formal processes of political decolonisation. Clayton (2020, p.2) has provided a useful description that captures the different overlapping phases of this process which are explored in the book:
Postwar decolonisation encompasses three phenomena: first, attempts by Western powers to defend and reform their colonial empires and deal with a rising tide of anticolonial sentiment (dubbed late colonialism); second, the sometimes peaceful and quick but often violent and protracted means by which independence was obtained (and with nationalist and independence struggles often stretching much further back in time); and, third, the ensuing affairs of postcolonial nations and question of whether independence heralded a complete break with the colonial past.(Clayton 2020, p. 2)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993, p. 60) was more succinct in his account, personalising this history into the experiences of African writers like him, who, in the 30 years from the middle of the twentieth century, had gone through ‘the age of anti-colonial struggle, the age of independence, and the age of neo-colonialism’. He grew up in colonial Kenya, becoming one of the first generation of African students at Makerere University College, Uganda, around the time of independence. Ngũgĩ is not only a key theorist of decolonisation, but a counterpart, colleague and contemporary of many of the geographers whose contributions are explored in this book. His academic life reflects the broad trajectories of higher education in East Africa, as well as in Ghana and Nigeria. He studied as an undergraduate in a University College in Africa (affiliated to the University of London) that was a British late colonial development project. Ngũgĩ provides an evocative description of the campus and status of the institution in the colonial and early post-colonial period, which captures the optimism and excitement of decolonisation:
Kampala is a city of high hills. Makerere, after which the college was named, is one of the nine hills on which the city stands. But the name Makerere had come to symbolise higher learning in East Africa for those who ascended the hill it meant a passage into the membership of the band of the very elect. But the college was more than that. In the fifties and early sixties Makerere was the intellectual capital of East and Central Africa … What a time it was those days at Makerere, in East Africa! It was a replica of the Wordsworthian bliss at being alive at the birth of a revolution and the possibilities of a new future. Africa, Our Africa was coming back.(Ngũgĩ 1993, p. 164; p. 166)
Ngũgĩ’s powerful account captures the affective experience of decolonisation at an African university, where political hope combined with new educational infrastructures, generous funding, and intellectual innovation to produce a heady mix for the tiny elite who were part of it all.
However, from as early as the mid-1960s, and increasingly into the late 1970s and 1980s, a combination of dependency, authoritarian governments, shifting aid priorities, spiralling oil prices, and structural adjustment combined to leave many African universities hugely underfunded, subject to government attack and even physical violence (Ajayi et al. 1996). After post-graduate study in the UK, Ngũgĩ worked as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi from 1967. A well-known radical figure he was jailed in 1977 for authoring a play which was critical of the increasingly authoritarian Kenyan government. Ngũgĩ then worked in exile in the United States for many years. The excitement and then increasing challenges of working in African universities impacted academic careers and these material and affective experiences changed substantially over the fifty years explored in this book. These shifting experiences also fed into the theorisations of decolonisation produced by African scholars, politicians and activists – like Ngũgĩ – many of whom studied and worked at these very African universities.
In the following account we explore the contributions of African scholars negotiating, theorising, and attempting to do things differently in the post-colonial university. In doing so we follow Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) in arguing that African scholars (and scholars writing in Africa) have made valuable contributions to the theorisation and contestation of coloniality, and to the elaboration of decolonial visions for the future university. Constitutional decolonisation brought only ‘independence with a question mark’, but that question mark provided space for possible futures to be imagined, debated, and researched by African scholars (Ngũgĩ 1993, p. 65). In returning to this period, we hope to recover what Mbembe (2021, p. 43 emphasis in original) reminds us was the ‘eventfulness, singularity, and intensity’ of decolonisation as it played out in the lives and work of geographers and geography in Africa, as well as the creativity of the period.
Decolonisation, Education, and the Place of African Universities
The book places African geographers (and other geographers in Africa) within the context of debates in the mid-twentieth century about the place of the university – and education more broadly – in a decolonising continent. Fundamentally at issue was the role that education had played in imperialism, and the extent to which these legacies continued after independence, including through the institutions of higher education. Ngũgĩ argued forcefully that education was central in colonialism:
Berlin of 1884 [the conference seen as the highpoint of European colonial expansion in Africa] was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle …
Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for people of the world today… The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism… is the cultural bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.(Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 9; pp. 2–3)
Articulated through the ideology of ‘Black Consciousness’, Steve Biko made similar arguments about the impact of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Biko was a student in the ‘Non-European’ section of the largely white University of Natal, a student leader, and political activist who was murdered by the apartheid government in 1977. Biko argued that through colonialism and apartheid, ‘the black man has become a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated’ (1978 [1969–1972], p. 29). Drawing on Frantz Fanon (2019 [1961]), Biko argued this impact was produced in part through (mis)education:
In an effort to destroy completely the structures that had been built up in the African Society and to impose their imperialism with an unnerving totality the colonialists were not satisfied merely with holding a people in their grip and emptying the Native’s brain of all form and content, they turned to the past of the oppressed people and distorted, disfigured and destroyed it.(Biko 1978 [1969-72], p. 29)
Education had supported imperialism, reinforcing Eurocentricity and undermining African cultures and knowledges. Universities globally embodied colonial power – Western, white and capitalist – in everything from their architecture to their disciplinary knowledges. As Walter Rodney put it:
As I come onto one of these university campuses and I stand up and stare upwards and I see this tremendous structure which I know doesn’t belong to us.
Black people are here in these institutions as a part of the development of black struggle, but only as a concession designed to incorporate us into the structure …. Going beyond the symbolism of the building, I’m thinking also of the books, the references, the theoretical assumptions, and the entire ideological underpinnings of what we have to learn in every single discipline.(Rodney 1990 [1975], p. 111)
Rodney, like Ngũgĩ, was entangled with these structures, building a career through (post)colonial universities in the UK, Africa and the Caribbean, studying first at University College of the West Indies (at that time a college of the University of London), then at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, before lecturing at University College Dar es Salaam (and being appointed to this post by authorities in London) (Rodney 1990 [1975]). These experiences fed into his theorisation of underdevelopment and of the role of the ‘guerrilla intellectual’ working from the inside to transform the colonial university (Rodney 1990 [1975], pp. 111–113).
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993, p. 3) has argued that decolonisation in twentieth century Africa was ‘the political struggle to move the centre’ from Europe and to Africa. To what extent could the university – as a key site for education shaped through colonialism – contribute to (or hinder) that process? These questions were often central in the thinking not only of those within the university but also in society more broadly. Indeed, they preoccupied African nationalist politicians who lead their countries to independence. Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana was one of many of the new wave of African leaders to explicitly concern themselves with the role of the university in Africa. For Nkrumah (2009 [1964], p. 3), studying abroad, or at a colonial university college in Africa, could strip African students of their local connections and critical awareness of their own position: ‘The colonial student can be so seduced by [the western philosophies] … that he surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject’, he argued. Nkrumah himself had studied in the US and reflected on this experience in his most well-known political book Consciencism (2009 [1964]). When Ghana became independent, Nkrumah viewed universities, alongside multinational corporations and institutions like the civil service as ‘part of the apparatus of imperialism … which had to be decolonised’ (Ajayi et al. 1996, p. 95). His theory of neo-colonialism emphasised the dangers of ‘political independence minus economic independence’ and the danger of the creation of new local elites more allied with the West than with Ghana, through institutions such as the university (Nkrumah 1962, quoted in Ahlman 2017, p. 157). Nkrumah demanded universities demonstrated their allegiance to independent Ghana rather than continuing to reproduce a colonial mentality and pushed for the replacement of foreign academics with Ghanaians (Nkrumah 2009 [1964]; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017).
Julius Nyerere, the first Prime Minister and President of independent Tanzania, was also a central thinker on the role of African universities (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017). Like Ngũgĩ, Nyerere had attended Makerere, though in the 1940s before it became a university college. From 1963, Nyerere was the first Chancellor of the University of East Africa (which included Makerere as a constituent college, alongside the University Colleges of Dar es Salaam and Nairobi). Nyerere’s vision was of a university that took ‘an active part in the social revolution’, prioritising local needs and relevance, whilst maintaining links to an international community of knowledge (Nyerere 1966, p. 219–220). In Tanzania, Ghana, and across Africa after independence, concerns grew that universities were creating a new elite, out of touch with the majority of the people, rather than a socially engaged workforce contributing to national development. Fanon (2019 [1961], p. 99) argued that:
In an underdeveloped country, the imperative duty of an authentic national bourgeoisie is to betray the vocation to which it is destined, to learn from the people, and make available to them the intellectual and technical capital it culled from its time at the colonial universities.
However, instead of fulfilling this duty, Fanon argued that the educated elites aimed for personal enrichment. Nkrumah, Nyerere, and a host of other African leaders, academics and activists therefore saw the contested future of the university as central to the broader politics of decolonisation and independence.
Universities in Africa were the focus of three impulses in the era of independence. The first was the Africanisation of the staff; replacing Western, mainly British, European, and American lecturers with Africans across universities but also other institutions such as national banks, the military, and the civil service (Stockwell 2018). However, this process did not guarantee more than superficial change: as Fanon (2019 [1961], p. 103) argued early on, in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘The colonized bourgeoisie … frantically brandishes the notions of nationalization and Africanization’, seeking out the professional positions, privileges and profits previously in the hands of the colonisers for themselves, rather than bringing about revolutionary change. For Ngũgĩ, the importance of class and capital was often overlooked in the era of independence, with imperialism ‘far too easily seen in terms of the skin pigmentation of the coloniser.’ (Ngũgĩ 1993, p. 62).
A second impulse was towards the Africanisation of the curriculum to produce knowledge and expertise needed in post-colonial Africa. Describing a specific controversy at the University College Nairobi, Kenya, in 1968, around the content of the English programme, Ngũgĩ made it clear that the arguments went much wider than the specific proposals he and his colleagues had brought forward:
the debate, in other words, was about the inherited colonial education system and the consciousness it necessarily inculcated in the African mind. What directions should an education system take in an Africa wishing to break with neo-colonialism? What should be the philosophy guiding it? How does it want the ‘New Africans’ to view themselves and their universe? From what base: Afrocentric or Eurocentric? … who should be interpreting the material to them: an African or non-African? If African, what kind of African? One who has internalized the colonial world outlook or one attempting to break free from the inherited slave consciousness?(Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 101–102)
These mid-twentieth century debates were not in themselves entirely new but echoed long-standing ideas which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century about the need for universities to preserve the ‘African personality’ by including African languages, cultures, and oral traditions on the syllabus, and teaching in African languages (Blyden 1872; Casely Hayford 1969 [1911]; see Ajayi et al. 1996; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). If ‘decolonization was a struggle by the colonized to reconquer the surface, horizons, depth, and heights of their lives’, as Mbembe (2021, p. 44) described it, then this included rehabilitation of ‘indigenous forms of language and knowledge’.
Ngũgĩ’s (1986) critique of the colonial university and disciplines explored questions of culture not in isolation, but within the context of Marxist critiques of the post-colonial political economy of East Africa. These debates about disciplinary knowledges were not reserved only for the humanities. In 1979 the Nigerian political economist Claude Ake, a University of Ibadan graduate and lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam 1972–1974 weighed into the matter in relation to social science, also drawing on Marxist critiques. In a book uncompromisingly titled Social Science as Imperialism, Ake argued that
Western social science scholarship on developing countries is imperialism in the sense that (a) it foists, or at any rate attempts to foist on the developing countries, capitalist values, capitalist institutions, and capitalist development; (b) it focuses social science analysis on the question of how to make the developing countries more like the West; and (c) it propagates mystifications, and modes of thought and action which serve the interests of capitalism and imperialism.(1982, p. xiii)
For Ake, it was by the late 1970s ‘becoming increasingly clear that we cannot overcome our underdevelopment and dependence unless we try to understand the imperialist character of Western social science and to exorcise the attitudes of mind that it inculcates’ (1982, p. xiv). Africanisation of knowledge demanded new subjects, questions, theories and methods.
Alongside the Africanisation of staff and curricula, a final – and connected – debate focused on the institutional transformation of universities on the continent, aiming to make them African universities rather than universities in Africa (Sicherman 2005). This included structural changes – increasing independence in awarding degrees, changes in faculty structure and so on – as well as debates about the relationship between scholars and society (Mazrui 1978). An early aim of post-colonial universities was to satisfy what were known as the ‘manpower’ [sic.] demands of newly independent countries (that is, primarily, in the form of public administration, but also other forms of expertise such as for those taking geography, teaching, planning, surveying, and land-use allocation) (Mkandawire 1995). Another was to produce applied research to inform government decisions on national and local development. As Daniel Clayton (2021, p. 13) has highlighted, ‘decolonisation raised a very basic set of geographical questions about land, resources, territory, identity and development’ and the discipline of geography was therefore also seen as useful for supporting the project of independence. Training and data production were understood as central to decolonisation as a political and economic project: producing independence and self-reliance through knowledge and knowledgeable people. But as Mahmood Mamdani (2011, n.p.) has argued, based on his experience as a staff member at Makerere University in the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently, such applied research could also be understood as a replication of earlier dynamics of the ‘native informer’ producing data but not new theorisations or knowledge (Mamdani 2011). As such Paulin Hountondji (1990) has argued this type of activity could be one element of a broader intellectual extraversion leading to dependency. For him, a commitment to applied research betrayed the insidious inculcation of coloniality in the minds of African researchers where their labour and fields of research were only relevant to making African lands productive for extraction (Hountondji 1990).
The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui noted that in the period directly after independence, many in Africa grappled with the place of the university on the continent, and ‘that uneasy feeling that the beast in our midst is foreign in origin and too rational in its supra-social tendencies’ (Mazrui 1978, p. 217). Mazrui was a political scientist at Makerere College (later University) in the 1960s and early 1970s, and this feeling of which he wrote shaped his time at Makerere and his scholarship on education, colonialism, and nationalism. Mazrui’s unease reflected the fact that universities were understood as Western institutions – not only in structure, staffing, and curricula, but also in their commitment to detached, supposedly neutral scholarship. As ‘detachment’ became ‘suspected of disengagement’, there were increasing demands for universities to support socially committed scholarship relevant to postcolonial development (Mazrui 1978, p. 212; see also Mamdani 2019). However along with demands for relevance came questions over academic freedom and the extent to which African scholars could be socially committed whilst critical of government policies (Mazrui 1978; Ngũgĩ 1986).
Taken together, these discussions over Africanisation of staff, curricula, and institutions concerned the extent to which it was possible, and desirable, to transform African universities, and for what purpose. In these debates we can see different understandings of decolonisation as political, economic, and epistemological project. And whilst the first two elements often dominated, African scholars in the period of constitutional decolonisation grappled with how to both provincialize Europe and deprovincialise Africa, ‘moving the centre’ from which ideas and knowledge should be viewed and created to Africa (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Ngũgĩ 1993; Chakrabarty 2009). Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 3) argues that this amounts to a demand for ‘epistemological decolonisation’ and ‘cognitive justice’: ‘the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located’. The next section demonstrates how attention to these histories can make three important analytical contributions to understanding decolonisation as historical process and political project.
Contributions
Historicising Current Debates
In this book, we recentre the sometimes overlooked but important ideas and practices which emerged from a generation of politicians, scholars, and activists grappling with many of the issues central to coloniality in the mid-twentieth century in Africa. This is our first contribution. Whilst these vibrant debates dominated African universities in the 1960s and 1970s, they seem to have been forgotten by many outside the continent advocating for decolonisation today. For once again over the last decade, decolonisation has once again become a popular term. It has taken on greater and more diverse meanings than just the constitutional moment in high politics, when flags were changed, and a country became politically independent. In the context of higher education, decolonisation has been used to discuss questions about the coloniality of Western ideologies, methodologies, and institutions, and about the whiteness of the university and individual disciplines, including geography (Tolia-Kelly 2017; Bhambra et al. 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Radcliffe 2022). Publications have proliferated – including from those critical (e.g., Táíwò 2022) – as have sustained, creative, and sometimes violent protests (and their suppression) (Elliott-Cooper 2017; Ahmed 2020).
Specific South African campaigns such as #Rhodesmustfall and the connected #Feesmustfall have been influential world-wide, spawning a range of associated movements, including in the UK (Elliott-Cooper 2017; Gebrial 2018; Jansen 2019). In the UK, Oxford University’s own #Rhodesmustfall movement argued for ‘critically examining the power struggle that underpins hegemonic knowledge production, and the material structures that make this possible’, through work on iconography, curriculum and representation (Gebrial 2018, pp. 20; 23).
Epistemic freedom often forms an increasingly important part of contemporary movements to transform the university in the twenty-first century. Whilst mid-twentieth century debates focused on the primacy of political, and then economic decolonisation, seeing the former as the pre-requisite for any other transformations, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 5) argues that:
In the co-constitution of political, economic, cultural and epistemological decolonisation, epistemic freedom should form the base because it deals with the fundamental issues of critical consciousness building, which are essential pre-requisites for both political and economic freedom.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) was writing in the aftermath of the #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall campaigns in South Africa in 2015–2016, whilst based at Witwatersrand University, formerly a white dominated institution under apartheid. In these protests in South Africa, the meaning of decolonisation, a key buzz-word, was often contested. For Jansen, protests demanded ‘the quest for racially and culturally inclusive campuses and more specifically to the transformation of campus symbolism, the university curriculum, institutional cultures and the professoriate’ (2019, p. 51). But Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018, p. 189) and other commentators saw in them a much more fundamental epistemological and political critique of the philosophical, economic, and cultural underpinnings of the university, ‘rethinking and redefining the university as a truly African public institution’. In both understandings of the movement, questions of staffing, the student body, the curricula, the campus, relations with society and government were under debate, whilst for some the status and divisions of disciplines and knowledges, and the university itself, were also up for grabs.
These activist campaigns have been matched by an upswell of books and articles engaging with the ideas and practices of decolonisation in the university (Moosavi 2020). Much of the published work – nearly half of publications – has emerged from a South African context (Adefila et al. 2021). More recent research tends to move beyond theoretical interventions, instead focusing on providing summaries of the state of university education today and overviews of progress in decolonisation initiatives (e.g. in a South African context Ammon 2019; Lebelo et al. 2021; on South African geography specifically see Knight, 2018) and on specific experiments in decolonial curriculum reform (often undertaken by the authors) and their relative success (e.g. in Zimbabwe, Gukurume and Maringira 2020). Scholars have also explored current attempts to create new institutions either within or beyond traditional university settings, such as an ‘indigenous pluriversity’ within a Columbian institution (Padilla 2021) or the Pan Afrikan Marcus Garvey University in Uganda (Mwesigire 2016; see also Schildermans 2021 on university experiments in a Palestinian context).
Much of the recent theorising about decolonisation within and beyond geography has taken its cue from Latin American contexts and discussions of coloniality. Coloniality is defined as the enduring colonial matrix of power in which coloniality and modernity are inextricably linked (Quijiano 2000; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; on the use of these approaches in geography see Radcliffe 2017; 2022; Stanek 2019). These discussions describe how ‘modernity/coloniality has worked and continues to work to negate, disavow, distort, and deny knowledges, subjectivities, world senses, and life visions’, whilst decoloniality tries to construct ‘paths and praxis toward an otherwise of thinking, sensing, believing, doing and living’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 4). But some scholarship on decoloniality has not engaged in detail with African scholarship, nor with the period of constitutional decolonisation in Africa (Daley and Murrey 2022). This is in part because of the regional context from which decolonial debates emerged, and also because these histories and ideas are not always understood as relevant to contemporary contexts. For example, whilst acknowledging the legacies of non-alignment and the Bandung Conference – in which African and Asian leaders explicitly engaged with many of the issues central to coloniality – Mignolo and Walsh (2018, p. 4) do not see these legacies as ‘the central foundation’ of the decolonial project. They argue that
Decolonisation during the Cold War meant the struggle for liberations of the Third World and, when successful, the formation of nation-states claiming sovereignty. By the 1990s, decolonisation’s failure in most nations had become clear; with [the] state in the hands of minority elites, the patterns of colonial power continued internally (i.e. internal colonialism) and with relation to global structures. At that moment coloniality was unveiled.(Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p. 5–6)
In focusing on continuities, this and many accounts of coloniality today skip over the optimism of the period and processes of decolonisation, as well as the geographical and historical specificity of colonial experiences (Craggs 2014). As Davies argues, the work of some decolonial theorists narrate histories of the world in which ‘The scale of the ambition is matched by thinly referenced, vast geopolitical claims. The history of decolonization becomes merely a state project which ran its course.’ (2021, p. 400). Without attention to the complex, particular histories of colonialism and decolonisation in Africa, and to the agency of African scholars, politicians, and others, we risk ‘turning colonisation into an eternal category – a form of ontology – instead of a historical one.’ (Leonard 2022, n.p.; Táíwò 2022).
As the term decolonisation has become popular, Leon Moosavi (2020) has described a ‘decolonial bandwagon’, as scholars and managers latch on to the term, but it is applied superficially, in ways that can be ineffective or even harmful. Moosavi (2020, p. 332) lists ‘reducing intellectual decolonisation to a simple task; essentialising and appropriating the Global South; overlooking the multifaceted nature of marginalisation in academia; nativism; and tokenism’ as some of the key challenges facing the project of decolonisation today. Whilst Moosavi (2020) is cautiously supportive of decolonial movements in universities today, others are much more critical. Olúfémi Táíwò (2022) is one such critic, arguing that decolonisation debates have failed to take African agency seriously.
This book documents the experiences and contributions of African geographers engaging in important, complex, and ambiguous ways with decolonisation as constitutional, state-building, and epistemological project. In doing so we pay close attention to the concerns outlined above and provide one potential way forward for studying and practicing decolonising scholarship. In examining continuities between the colonial university, the post-independence university and contemporary universities in Africa and beyond, the book is able to explore the ongoing coloniality of geography (Radcliffe 2022) and trace some of the specific legacies from these earlier periods which have shaped today’s disciplinary landscape. Our book aims to embed current debates, which sometimes risk being taken over by Western – and often white – academics (Jazeel 2017; Noxolo 2017a; Táíwò 2022), within the experiences, scholarship, and demands of African scholars.
Moreover, motivated by recent calls for ‘historical geographies of, and for, the present’ which are ‘inspired by direct engagement with problems in the present and intend to do something about them’ (Van Sant et al. 2020, p. 169), we demonstrate how historical work might inform more progressive and decolonial, current and future academic practices. Unlike Táíwò (2022) we do not see any contradiction between advocating for decolonisation and taking African agency seriously, rather, we see taking African agency seriously as central to making contemporary decolonisation a viable and emancipatory project.
Decolonising Geography’s Histories
A second key contribution of the book is to decolonise geography’s own histories, by taking seriously the period and process of constitutional decolonisation, examining the role of geographers within that process, and producing more diverse and inclusive disciplinary stories.
Over the last 40 years there has been a growth in histories of geography that highlight the peopled and always political nature of the discipline (e.g. Buttimer 1983; Livingstone 1992; Barnes 2008; Maddrell 2009; Farish 2010; Clayton and Barnes 2015; Albuquerque and Martins 2018; Schelhass et al. 2020). Since the 1990s, scholars influenced by postcolonial theory have carefully deconstructed the relationships between geography and empire highlighting links between the discipline and exploration, resource exploitation, and colonial control and violence (Bell et al. 1995; Driver 2001; Ryan and Naylor 2009). Though Ngũgĩ was most interested in literature and language, he noted ‘the [often racist and colonial] images children encountered in literature were reinforced by their study of geography and history, science and technology where Europe was, once again, the centre.’ (Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 93). For Ngũgĩ, the discipline of geography was, then, part of a wider ‘colonial alienation’, the ‘disassociation of the sensibility [of a colonised person] from his natural and social environment’ (1986, p. 16–17).
Despite this attention to geography and its role in empire building, however, the relationships between geography and decolonisation have for the most part been overlooked. This book responds to this lacuna, shifting attention to the intersections between the period of constitutional decolonisation in the mid-late twentieth century and the discipline of geography, and contributing to a small but emerging body of work on this period (Power and Sidaway 2004; Clayton and Bowd 2017; Clayton and Kumar 2019; de Suremain 2019; Ferretti 2019, 2020; Sarmento 2019; Clayton 2020), and on geography in Africa (e.g. Areola and Okafor 1998; Visser et al. 2016; Daya 2022).
