By
Obododimma Oha
Is it not quite disturbing that the study of Africa, even by African scholars, is particularly supported by organisations and governments in the West? The West started long ago to study Africa, developing orthographies for African languages, building interest in the mastery of indigenous African systems, and eventually having deeper knowledge about Africa than Africans themselves. Many Africans had this wrong assumption that an embrace of Western education meant turning their backs on things African – their values, thought systems, education, etc. But the West, even if it has encouraged such hatred of self, still takes interest in Africa. Apart from planned study trips, many that have come to Africa on tourism still find time, or have as part of the tourism, the attention to African life. The photographs, the notes, the video and other recording, all may have a place in their published and unpublished records about Africa. In fact, the fuller knowledge about Africa is not in the records kept by Africans on the continent or in their heads, but outside there in the records by Western scholars and in the works of diasporic Africans who, since the days of Olaudah Equiano, have been struggling to do some remembering and to tell the world about it. Among them, of course, are African thinkers employed in Western higher institutions and whose research is strongly supported by their employers, at least, as a way of narrating such employers further as authorities on Africa. Yes; their studies may appear to elevate Africa, but they justifiably elevate the employers and international organisations that support their researches.
Having made this point about the West and its clear attention to knowledge about Africa, let me turn to orientations in contemporary Africa scholarship in support of having a fair knowledge of the cultural other, in line with the admirable example that those we emulate in the West have shown. Let me turn my lens to Nigeria, even though Nigeria does not represent the whole of Africa. It is, however, a context of pluralism with much of mutual suspicion, a very good example of a where the other, even if doing so out of self-interest, also approaches the other to shake hands with the other.
In line with mutual suspicion and an attempt to advance the interest of one’s ethnic group above those of other groups, is the commitment to research solely about the ethnic group. The idea is to feature the ethnic group as the champion among other groups in knowledge production. We are the knowers; they are the blockheads. Politics of knowledge! Normally those who posture as knowledgeable or as very intelligent are assumed to be in a better position to lead others who know less, or who have less luminaries out there. Add to this other promotional gestures like finding opportunities for your “own people,” helping to get promotion for those, finding jobs out there for them only, etc. You must dominate the other, even from out there. It is a continuation of ethnic politics by educational means.
What about extending one’s research interests to the values of the ethnic or cultural other? What about studying the life of the other deeply as the West has shown, even if this ironically means knowing the other much to compete with it? In another light, studying the other in a plural society helps one to understand the other better; helps one to drop one’s stereotypes about the other, and helps in building the fortress of postcolonial unity. It is possible that in studying things about the other, we come across ways of life better than our own and copy those. Copying and living them along with our inherited patterns is no crime!
In studying the other also, we are disarmed and made to drop our cultural nationalistic weapons and get transformed, seeing ourselves as people who could have been born in that other cultural world and who could have had those values. In a sense, we begin to have a different view of culture, not as things we have brought from the other life to this world. Moreover, we begin to view culture as software installed into our heads and which needs to be upgraded from time to time as it converses with other cultures in our world. Edward Said was right in saying in Culture and Imperialism that no one is purely one thing. We are not just Efik or Igbo or Yoruba. We get a little a little bit of each as we move around, what more when we read and write about these cultures in scholarship.
In line with what I stated earlier about reading and writing about the other in a multicultural context and how these help in remaking the learner, helps the other to make positive and not negative uses of difference, can you see why it is damaging when we recommend only books by our ethnic champions in our classrooms? When we recommend only works by those ethnic champions, we are indirectly teaching our students to be ethnocentric, to limit their thinking to those authors and to continue the learning process as an ethnic or cultural rivalry. It is indeed admirable if you are the learner is ijaw or Igbo but is helped to see the author as an author first, before the author’s ethnicity as a Yoruba or Hausa person. It would be beneficial to make learners, even right from fresh undergraduate class, to know that knowledge from the ethnic or cultural other is vital for academic growth and for other reasons hinted earlier.
I know that it is vital to have knowledge of self and that, in fact, the classroom for such knowledge does not have to be the formal school setting, with examinations and all that. The classroom is also the homestead where the elder or someone else tells stories after supper or about the family history; it includes practical lesson sessions from both parents about home life, about the umunnadi jerks in the society; it includes age-grade meetings, meetings of the umunna the kinsmen, women’s meetings, etc. A lot of knowledge comes from these and will have to converse with knowledge about the cultural other when the child leaves the home and goes to a university.
Now, let us sum it up: knowledge about self is a given. It is taken for granted that one has to have it and not leave to the West to keep in its custody. Knowledge about the ethnic other, including the other’s language, is what one needs to have in one’s goatskin bag as one travels around in one’s formal education, and come back home to bring out and show why the child who has travelled out there is more informed than the hoary-haired restricted to the local community.
Obododimma Oha
Is it not quite disturbing that the study of Africa, even by African scholars, is particularly supported by organisations and governments in the West? The West started long ago to study Africa, developing orthographies for African languages, building interest in the mastery of indigenous African systems, and eventually having deeper knowledge about Africa than Africans themselves. Many Africans had this wrong assumption that an embrace of Western education meant turning their backs on things African – their values, thought systems, education, etc. But the West, even if it has encouraged such hatred of self, still takes interest in Africa. Apart from planned study trips, many that have come to Africa on tourism still find time, or have as part of the tourism, the attention to African life. The photographs, the notes, the video and other recording, all may have a place in their published and unpublished records about Africa. In fact, the fuller knowledge about Africa is not in the records kept by Africans on the continent or in their heads, but outside there in the records by Western scholars and in the works of diasporic Africans who, since the days of Olaudah Equiano, have been struggling to do some remembering and to tell the world about it. Among them, of course, are African thinkers employed in Western higher institutions and whose research is strongly supported by their employers, at least, as a way of narrating such employers further as authorities on Africa. Yes; their studies may appear to elevate Africa, but they justifiably elevate the employers and international organisations that support their researches.
Having made this point about the West and its clear attention to knowledge about Africa, let me turn to orientations in contemporary Africa scholarship in support of having a fair knowledge of the cultural other, in line with the admirable example that those we emulate in the West have shown. Let me turn my lens to Nigeria, even though Nigeria does not represent the whole of Africa. It is, however, a context of pluralism with much of mutual suspicion, a very good example of a where the other, even if doing so out of self-interest, also approaches the other to shake hands with the other.
In line with mutual suspicion and an attempt to advance the interest of one’s ethnic group above those of other groups, is the commitment to research solely about the ethnic group. The idea is to feature the ethnic group as the champion among other groups in knowledge production. We are the knowers; they are the blockheads. Politics of knowledge! Normally those who posture as knowledgeable or as very intelligent are assumed to be in a better position to lead others who know less, or who have less luminaries out there. Add to this other promotional gestures like finding opportunities for your “own people,” helping to get promotion for those, finding jobs out there for them only, etc. You must dominate the other, even from out there. It is a continuation of ethnic politics by educational means.
What about extending one’s research interests to the values of the ethnic or cultural other? What about studying the life of the other deeply as the West has shown, even if this ironically means knowing the other much to compete with it? In another light, studying the other in a plural society helps one to understand the other better; helps one to drop one’s stereotypes about the other, and helps in building the fortress of postcolonial unity. It is possible that in studying things about the other, we come across ways of life better than our own and copy those. Copying and living them along with our inherited patterns is no crime!
In studying the other also, we are disarmed and made to drop our cultural nationalistic weapons and get transformed, seeing ourselves as people who could have been born in that other cultural world and who could have had those values. In a sense, we begin to have a different view of culture, not as things we have brought from the other life to this world. Moreover, we begin to view culture as software installed into our heads and which needs to be upgraded from time to time as it converses with other cultures in our world. Edward Said was right in saying in Culture and Imperialism that no one is purely one thing. We are not just Efik or Igbo or Yoruba. We get a little a little bit of each as we move around, what more when we read and write about these cultures in scholarship.
In line with what I stated earlier about reading and writing about the other in a multicultural context and how these help in remaking the learner, helps the other to make positive and not negative uses of difference, can you see why it is damaging when we recommend only books by our ethnic champions in our classrooms? When we recommend only works by those ethnic champions, we are indirectly teaching our students to be ethnocentric, to limit their thinking to those authors and to continue the learning process as an ethnic or cultural rivalry. It is indeed admirable if you are the learner is ijaw or Igbo but is helped to see the author as an author first, before the author’s ethnicity as a Yoruba or Hausa person. It would be beneficial to make learners, even right from fresh undergraduate class, to know that knowledge from the ethnic or cultural other is vital for academic growth and for other reasons hinted earlier.
I know that it is vital to have knowledge of self and that, in fact, the classroom for such knowledge does not have to be the formal school setting, with examinations and all that. The classroom is also the homestead where the elder or someone else tells stories after supper or about the family history; it includes practical lesson sessions from both parents about home life, about the umunnadi jerks in the society; it includes age-grade meetings, meetings of the umunna the kinsmen, women’s meetings, etc. A lot of knowledge comes from these and will have to converse with knowledge about the cultural other when the child leaves the home and goes to a university.
Now, let us sum it up: knowledge about self is a given. It is taken for granted that one has to have it and not leave to the West to keep in its custody. Knowledge about the ethnic other, including the other’s language, is what one needs to have in one’s goatskin bag as one travels around in one’s formal education, and come back home to bring out and show why the child who has travelled out there is more informed than the hoary-haired restricted to the local community.
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