Introduction

The arena of public policy is complex, messy, tainted, contested, multi-directional and in many ways ambivalent and full of unintended outcomes and consequences. Just as there is no simple compass or map, there is no appropriate technology either, not even its own GPS to provide a useful and straightforward direction in navigating the terrain of public policy and the paths from knowledge and evidence to policy.

The relevance, significance or importance of the humanities and the social sciences as disciplines that advance our understanding of and engagement with the human condition, human wellbeing and development and the context within which it is situated, is not in doubt. For the humanities, we have been well served with literature ranging from the classics to the Busan Declaration of the First World Humanities Forum held in Busan, Republic of Korea in November 2011. The Busan Summit affirmed the humanities’ “historic role of shaping the self-understanding of peoples and societies, and thereby giving meaning to life” and the need to reposition the humanities to play these roles “in the face of divisive globalism, environmental crisis and the uncertain horizons of rapid scientific and technological development”. This need has become of greater significance in a world that has seen the devastation of the Corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic that has led to over a million deaths worldwide and immense economic and human losses. The importance of the humanities and the social sciences not only in understanding, making sense and making meaning of our current human condition but also in contributing to the design of policies that address those conditions cannot be understated.

African scholars such as Ali Mazrui, Archie Mafeje, Kofi Anyidoho, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paul Zeleza and Mahmood Mamdani, to name a few, have deployed and delivered arguments and proof in their various works in playing these roles on the continent. As for the social sciences, the application of scholarship to providing solutions to the numerous problems that accompanied the first industrial revolution and to such social, political, cultural and other issues that affected human lives since then has been the reason for their existence.Footnote 1 Several scholars in the social sciences across generations continue to address and demonstrate the relevance and vitality of the humanities and the social sciences for dealing with these issues. Several of them also surf the stormy waves of the multi-media world as public intellectuals.

Admittedly, the public intellectual is not always or necessarily the policy researcher. There is, of course, always the need for consciously policy-focused research. In this regard, several Pan-African organizations have underscored the importance of the humanities and social sciences to addressing public policy issues as they affect our lives as nations, peoples, communities, societies and individuals in Africa. From the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) which has in many forums and through diverse projects sought to assert the importance of the humanities and the social sciences to the Partnership for African Governance and Social Research(PASGR), whose main goal is to support the production and dissemination of policy relevant research in partnership with individual academics and researchers, higher education institutions, research think tanks, civil society organizations, businesses and policy communities both in the region and internationally. These institutions have been working to create a vibrant African social science community addressing the continent’s public policy issues.

Nonetheless, the case never seems to be settled as African politicians and some technocrats in international, regional and national platforms continue to fetishize a single story that sees the transformation of the African continent, as peoples and nations, as one founded only on the place and role of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematical (STEM) disciplines. In this case, other disciplines such as the humanities and the social sciences don’t matter. At the African Development Bank Annual meeting in May 2018 in Busan, Korea, an African leader considered African universities as failing because they oversupply humanities and social science graduates relative to STEM graduates. Not wanting to get into the trap and dangers of “a single story” as Chimamanda Adichie warned us, I will avoid engaging in this war of polarities, though such polarities have implications for politics, policy, vision and the deployment of scarce resources for national development. Polarities such as these also have implications for undermining our core human values as integrated and civilized beings, because of the constant public demeaning of the humanities by our political leaders and technocrats whose perspectives on education and development are singular and unnuanced. But leaving aside this battle on the roles of the disciplines in our human development, on which a lot has been said and written all over the world, I would like to begin our engagement with the subject of our concern by examining the notions of policy, policy research and the constituents of both the humanities and the social sciences disciplines that do policy research.

Clarifying the Notions

Policy Research

Policy research has been characterized as “social scientific research which has non-university groups as its main intended audience (although the results may in practice also interest academic audiences). For the most part such research attempts to apply social scientific findings to the solution of problems identified by a client … Policy research may be descriptive, analytical, or deal with causal processes and explanations. It may evaluate a new or existing policy programme, describe examples of best practices, measure social change, develop projections based on large-scale modelling exercises, or consist of large-scale experimental research in real-life settings running for years and even decades. Most policy research espouses a multi-disciplinary approach and avoids narrowly disciplinary jargon” (Dictionary of Sociology 1998).

While reiterating and affirming the fact of multi- and inter-disciplinarity in policy research, policy research is not about disciplines but more about the goals and objectives of the research carried out within a disciplinary or multi-disciplinary approach or framework. Policy research transcends disciplines, although it has been appropriated by the so-called policy sciences, (mainly the applied aspects of economics, sociology, psychology, political and administrative sciences).

As I stated in one of my earlier works on social policy:

“It is necessary first, to go beyond the conception of policy in terms of the restrictive notion of public policy as ‘what governments choses to do or not to do’ (Dye 1972). Policy here includes the action of governments but does extend to a wide range of institutionalized systematized interventions and actions effected by a wide range of agents operating in the public realm but not solely as governments or agents of the state. Thus, in terms of defining, formulating and implementing policies, actors in the terrain include the state, social movements, various social forces and what has come to be loosely termed ‘civil society’, meaning that constellation of actors in the public realm with identifiable stakes and vested interests and location in the media, social movements and other such institutions” (Aina 1997: 26-27).

Furthermore,

It is necessary to state … that the making of … policy … is not and has never been an innocent or neutral act resulting mainly from a balanced objective analysis of reality, the recognition of the needs of ordinary peoples, a commitment to these needs, or sheer altruism... Policy in modern times has emerged or changed in relation mainly to the perception and organization of vested interests and the interplay of influence, pressure and power relations flowing from the perceptions and pursuit of these needs and/or interests. Ultimately, policies are about politics and power relations and consequently about struggles between social actors. Policies, therefore, are often contested right from the point of conception and formulation to that of implementation. They are often unequal and unevenly tilted in favour of the more powerful and advantaged. They, therefore, often demonstrate massive gaps between the points of conception and those of operation and implementation (Aina 1997:27).

I have spent some time on the contested nature of policy because, as we shall see later in this chapter, this is an important recognition we need to make as scholars as we make our choices about policy research.

The Humanities and the Social Sciences

Many of us scholars and practitioners in the field of humanities and the social sciences scarcely ask questions about their roles as scholars and knowledge producers. They are immersed in their disciplines, with their methodologies and the intellectual and other problems that they pose without indulging in the luxury of self-reflection on the boundaries and foundations of those disciplines or their relationships with other disciplines and knowledge.Footnote 2 We take our disciplines for granted. Indeed, a special issue of CODESRIA Bulletin devoted to the Humanities and the Social Sciences in 2016 did attempt to define what the humanities are (CODESRIA Bulletin Nos. 3 &4, 2016). There was a lot of discussion on their relevance, on the unity of the humanities and the social sciences, but a significant absence of what constitutes the humanities. We also find this in the organization of disciplines and programmes in universities.

There is often an ambiguity about disciplinary boundaries in the humanities. This is not surprising because scholarship in the humanities is traced to the origins of knowledge in conventional Western thought, and with the changes that have occurred over time, the organization, terminology and language of Western academic thinking on these issues have not been significantly transformed.

So how do we understand the humanities? I will attempt to specify the humanities by what they do. The humanities are a body of disciplines that study elements of our society and cultures from the point of view of the meaning they make of them and how they put them to use. The humanities make sense of and interpret human experience and condition in terms of being. They inquire into why and how humans adduce meaning and give value to its different expressions in a changing nature. They study humanness, humanity, its constitution and expression. So, broadly the studies of anthropology, archaeology, classics, history, linguistics and languages, law and politics, literature, performing arts, philosophy, religion and visual arts will all be part of the humanities.

The social sciences often overlap with the humanities in terms of not only subject matter but also methods and concern. But as a cluster of disciplines, they distinguish themselves from the humanities through their application of the various conceptions of the scientific method. These range from experimental sciences found in psychology and the quantification of the disciplines found in economics, demography, statistics, sociology, geography, and the political and administrative sciences. The social sciences have in fact appropriated the status of the “policy sciences”.

With the recent tremendous changes in technologies and their application to the study of and engagement with the human condition, the methods and ways of doing both the social sciences and humanities have changed. They have been affected by digital and other new technologies and their scales of coverage and replicability have changed. But they in essence remain meaning-making and meaning-seeking inquiries about our human condition and experiences and its multiple expressions.

An important consideration of the humanities is their relevance to public policy today. A British Academy report of September 2008 provided a detailed, concrete and practical menu of “What Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Offers” the different areas of policies and governments in Britain by line ministries and government departments, from economic performance, immigration, defence, museums to water management, and so on (The British Academy 2008: 13-17). Other scholars have provided similar arguments for the USA and Europe (Miazga 2015; Bartel 2015; Evans 2013; Frodeman et al. 2003). With regards to the African situation, we have the collection of articles in the CODESRIA Bulletin of 2016 with articles by Senkoro 2016, Africanus Aveh (2016), Meneses (2016), Mbengue (2016) and Niang (2016). We are further reminded by Mkandawire (2005), in the book African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development, that the relevance is not easily framed through the lenses of basic versus applied research, but rather must be seen from the point of view of the national and global politics of knowledge production. Mkandawire states:

Few African leaders however sought to cultivate an indigenous ‘intellectuariat’ that was in the Gramsci sense ‘organic’. The default position of the African political class was a profound distrust of its country’s intellectuals. The kind of rapport that the Indian nationalists sustained with the intellectuals in the post-colonial period, or the links that Jewish intellectuals had with the Israeli state, was rarely seen in Africa … One consequence is that the African nationalist post-colonial project had no organic intellectuals and the few that sought to assume that role were reduced to acting as apologists. The African governments tended to reduce their relevance to the provision of ‘manpower’ resources for development and to indigenize the civil service (Mkandawire 2005:23).

In Nigeria, during the nationalist era and in the first 15 years of independence, scholars played active roles in the generation of the first three national development plans. Working with the ministry of planning and national think tanks like Nigeria Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), social scientists like Professors Ojetunji Aboyade, Adebayo Adedeji and H. M. A. Onitiri led the crafting and process of development planning. Diplomacy and international relations were defined and led by scholars like Bolaji Akinyemi and Ibrahim Gambari while rural development had the traces of Dupe Olatunbosun, Akin Mabogunje and Jerry Gana. Under military rule, scholars served in developing policies on social mobilization, rural integration, basic education and primary health care. In fact, between 1985 and 1993, under the military government of Ibrahim Babangida, Nigerian scholars across all disciplines were deployed as part of the production and legitimation of policies and projects, including the failed transition to civil rule programme.

The question of relevance and organic linkages to politics and social movements is not all about the procurement and provision of the correct evidence for policy. It is equally about understanding, navigating and engaging the complex ecosystem of policy making and the politics of policy. The navigating of the world of politics and policy, their context and openness to knowledge-producing sites are important because knowledge-producing sites are plural, complex and changing. Indeed, this context and the nature of evidence to policy have produced both a new industry and world of policy engagement and research uptake today. It is a world inhabited by many research networks in health, agriculture and the social sciences, and it is populated by the increasingly growing numbers of think tanks, networks and business-driven research enterprises. Emerging on the continent is also a robust and active evidence-informed policy making (EIPM) movement and networks led by African research institutions such as PASGR, the African Population Health Research Centre (APHRC), the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP) and a set of other institutions in the Monitoring and Evaluation field. Also, the world of the business-driven research enterprises is growing rapidly in Africa not only through the big Accounting/Management Consulting firms who have entered the arena of research contracting but also through the increasing expansion of research contracting in the portfolios of the big bilateral donors and the proliferation of research-contracting firms across Africa today. All of these constitute the changing context of research and scholarship in Africa today. Beyond the micro-context of the profession/calling as academics and scholars in higher education institutions, there is the macro-context of our larger world and changing times.

The Changing Contexts of Scholarship and the Academy

Scholarship Today

Scholarship today occurs in unconventional times and the role and settings of the “traditional” academic is being challenged by new and emerging roles, locations and practices driven by innovations, indeed, revolutions in technologies, the media and markets. These carry with them extensive functional differentiation and integration of publics, scale and types of demand, influence and power. Scholars and academics, although still a significant grouping in the arena of knowledge production, are no longer the sole players or the most dominant and influential producers and interpreters of knowledge. Media pundits, consultancy and knowledge companies, free-floating and independent institutes, and for-profit enterprises, all contest the roles, functions and terrains of knowledge production and validation today. The world of scholarship and academics is not the same as it was two decades ago (Alter 2013).

The notion of the scholar hitherto embodies the systematic and structured pursuit of learning and knowledge at what is recognized as an advanced level within the traditions, conventions and communities of such pursuits. Universities, churches, mosques, temples, research institutes, laboratories, libraries, archives and museums all constitute conventional locations for scholarship, but these days, think tanks, policy institutes, political parties, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), media organizations, government agencies, international organizations, Corporate Research and Development (R&D) constitute additional and competing locations and settings.

Indeed, in our emerging knowledge economies, the pursuit of knowledge is becoming generalized and commoditized, and functions and roles cut across many sectors. But all these practitioners are not necessarily scholars despite their carrying out knowledge production roles and functions. Scholarship includes additional elements of values and norms that distinguish scholars from all other knowledge workers. Scholars are found more at universities because of the related public good and mission-driven nature of universities and in some cases, religious institutions. Many African public universities and research organizations at their founding were conceived as mission-driven, public good serving entities that in those days carried the goals of national development and transformation for these countries. The value-based nature of the calling and the public good, mission-driven nature of the institutions tend ideally to provide natural affinities for scholarship and universities. Many of us in the humanities and the social sciences remain significantly aligned to the values, norms, identity and lifestyle of the scholar as conventionally defined.

Terrains and Institutions of Knowledge Production

In 2004, Ken Prewitt pointed out that despite the significant changes that have characterized global human achievements and accomplishments, universities have been the last arenas of change. According to him, “during this half millennium, the basic model of higher education has changed hardly at all: direct face-to-face exchange between the learned and the learners, heavy reliance on written texts that summarize previously established knowledge, and physical sites to which faculty and students come to reside. And … three core principles have been generally accepted: unity of research and teaching, protection of academic freedom including both the right of free inquiry by scholars and the right of students to choose their course of study, and the centrality of arts and sciences or liberal education”. Prewitt wondered at this remarkable stability in the higher education sector noting that “the institution that produces and disseminates knowledge looks much as it did centuries ago” (Prewitt 2004:36).

He asserted that the higher education and the university must change. He stated further “higher education is about knowledge. If we are entering a new phase of human history because knowledge itself is being differently produced, disseminated, and used, it logically follows that the institution responsible for knowledge can hardly stand outside” (Prewitt 2004: 36–37). Change in universities and the higher education sectors both in Western societies and in Africa is inevitable. African universities, and higher education more broadly, despite the weak institutional base and the attendant problems, are struggling with the new changes that are facing the academy and the knowledge sector broadly.

The more significant changes occasioned by forces associated with globalization and massification, resulting from large population growth and concentration, have created what is known today as knowledge economies and societies. Most human transactions and interactions are guided by the grammar and lexicon of the emerging digital and market-oriented life. Universities and research laboratories attached to them and the corporate sector are leading this transition into a globalized digital world. Their practices and norms are not only opening new ways of working and living but transforming learning, teaching, knowledge production and management. Teachers and researchers have diversified and expanded the nature and types of communication platforms and modes from conventional emails to new forms of social media and diverse digital platforms. Multi-local, multi-site classrooms and digitally mediated pedagogies such as PASGR’s PedaL approach and experimental laboratories and collaborations are occurring through videoconferencing, Skyping, real-time digital laboratories, tele-medicines, e-learning and e-class rooms.

The pace and the volume of innovations are astounding and are transforming work and leisure, learning, teaching, research, books and classrooms. As students come with multiple exposures to new media and technologies, teachers and new PhDs are being taught new ways of multi-media presentation and learning; today’s classrooms, libraries, learning and information resources are being transformed in structures, designs, practices and norms for tomorrow’s next generation of learners and users! What is important to point out here is that the key elements of the contexts have not been all benign.

African universities in the past two decades while the world was being transformed technologically have faced unique challenges that I have elsewhere noted as being significant elements of their condition. These challenges have been made more severe by the massive disruptions occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the challenges are as follows:

  • Declining revenue for university teaching and research.

  • Increasing and uncontrolled enrolments leading to crowded lecture rooms, residences and pressure on staff and facilities.

  • Decaying and inadequate infrastructure buildings, equipment, laboratories and connectivity.

  • Inadequate access to connectivity and required technologies.

  • Inadequate staffing because of brain drains, high enrolments, deficient qualifications of staff.

  • Prevalence of inherited, outdated and inequitable colonial governance, administrative and academic systems with minimal accountability, transparency and inclusiveness.

  • Prevalence of demonstrations and crises (leading to incessant closures that affect the academic calendar) as universities and tertiary institutions become the last outposts of resistance to political authoritarianism.

  • Expansion of internal negative cultural practices that encouraged the growth of violent secret societies on campus, sexism, academic and bureaucratic corruption and the interference of political parties and ethnic and other associations in university life (Aina 2010: 29-30).

Fortunately, interventions from a wide array of sources—African governments, the universities themselves, international agencies, private foundations, parents, local businesses, alumni and communities—have all contributed to helping the revitalization and tortuous recovery of African universities. Significant efforts have been put into rehabilitating and building infrastructure and facilities, in reclaiming decent and passable learning spaces, in introducing new technologies and in establishing many private universities. Of course, most of these have been within the broad parameters of neo-liberal reform efforts, where privatization is primary, the market is dominant and there is little or no debate about the social mission or a public good notion of universities and higher education. For scholars in the humanities, this is an area and issue that calls for attention, application analytical skills and knowledge.

In fact, some of the older more established universities have been privileged to enjoy more sustained recovery from previous crises such as the University of Ibadan, the University of Ghana, Legon, Makerere University, Uganda, and the University of Nairobi. These are all working on reclaiming their former high reputation and intellectual leadership. They are beginning to re-engineer themselves into becoming research universities with a renewed emphasis on postgraduate training and research. They are debating quality, excellence, retention, sustainability and relevance and are addressing these in their students’ enrolment, faculty qualifications, infrastructures, renewed facilities and new programmes. Also, a new generation of African universities that combine new operating systems with mission-driven values and goals are emerging and asserting new approaches to higher education delivery in Africa. These include Ashesi University in Ghana and African Leadership University in Mauritius.

The management of many African universities is also changing with new emphases on human capital development and talent management, advancement and resource mobilization and innovative forms of research management. This is a slow and often painful process as massive capacity deficits remain in administration and management. Institutional and programme monitoring and evaluation along with traditional accountability mechanisms are also being put in place while important equity issues such as gender and disability and sexual harassment policies are being enacted. But there is still a long way to go in recovery and rehabilitation before many African universities can reclaim the standards, reputation and accomplishments needed for a new era of knowledge societies and economies.

The previous efforts of African universities at revitalization stated above have reclaimed the basic outlines of universities, but they have not confronted systemic flaws, design problems, governance issues and the overall structures of the production and reproduction of high-quality knowledge in the African context. In this era of global university rankings and the unbridled pursuit of international recognition and acclaim, African universities are playing catch-up with the rest of the world. But the issue is not about the unbridled pursuit of placement in global ranking, but rather the definition and reclamation of excellence and relevance in research, teaching, learning and all other pursuits to which universities are committed. It is about socialization into the values and unrelenting practices of excellence, commitment and merit that will be an important defining quality of future African universities. It will be about vision, mission and the reclamation of those values such as integrity, mission and commitment which unfortunately were not the focus of investments during rehabilitation and revitalization.

Now that we believe we are entering a new phase in higher education and knowledge economy in Africa, it is time to bring back vision, mission and values. The humanities with their engagement with the traditions of inquiry and commitment to these issues are best positioned to engage them. The question is, are the values of conventional scholarship in conflict with the changing demands of the emerging ecosystem of knowledge production? If so, what is to be done? The changing world and context of scholarship have implications for policy engagement strategies in terms of competition and collaborations, and for the future of the humanities and social sciences in Africa.

Our World Today

Our world today is increasingly locked into a global system with interconnections and linkages that defy national and geographic boundaries and spaces, presenting us all with complexity, proximity, contiguity and opportunities that combine immense potential for benefits with new vulnerabilities, polarities and various forms of exclusion (Aina 1997; Aina et al. 2004). It is indeed a brave new world! It is a world that has been described with all sorts of labels that attempt to capture its unfolding dynamics and emerging structures. It has been characterized by the notion of globalization and defined by the dominance of the neo-liberal economy, ideologies and the enshrining of market forces. It is also characterized by complexity, a phenomenon, that has given rise to analytical schools that struggle to re-orient the perspectives that dominant Western knowledge systems and their epistemologies have imposed on our ways of seeing and thinking over a long period. The struggles to confront our epistemic traps have led to the worldwide “decolonization of knowledge and higher education movements”. This is a movement that demands the recognition and engagement with multiple knowledge systems beyond the Eurocentric epistemologies and methodologies. It demands anew and active awareness of complexity. The importance of complexity has become so central to our thinking that Thomas Homer-Dixon (2001) notes: “If there is a unique quality to the modern era, it is that conditions of existence have changed to such a degree that something explicitly recognized as complexity now continually forces itself into our awareness”. All of these have come to frame our world when we think of it holistically or in a global context today. This world is characterized by the following sharp features:

  • New and unprecedented dimensions in global change and cross borders threats such as those deriving from climate change, violent extremism and pandemics like Covid-19, HIV-AIDS, Tuberculosis, Ebola and new strains of other communicable diseases.

  • New and unprecedented opportunities and innovations in financial and cultural flows, economic linkages that create opportunities for investments in distant places thus introducing transnational flexibility and profits. But these have come with threats and challenges such as widening gaps in income disparities between groups within nations and between national economies. There has also been increased vulnerability of national systems to global shocks including the transfer of social and economic upheavals in one part of the world to the rest. We live in the era of tele-money, crypto currencies and block chains. Original stores of value are in flux.

  • Rapid growth and changes in new forms of technologies and the emergence of ICTs, biotechnology, nanotechnologies and advances in genetics, nuclear and space technologies. The pace of global technological innovation, adoption and marketing is unprecedented, and ICTs have completely transformed the nature of access, amount, pace and management of data, information, knowledge and learning. Indeed, we are on the verge of the fourth Industrial revolution and a new clean energy revolution. We are witnessing the rise of artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. Electric cars and various forms of renewable energy are emerging. Africa cannot stop the impact of these innovations and transformations extending to it. We can catch up, leapfrog or be dominated and exploited through these new forces. In fact, the military implications are frightening. How do our conventional forces fight sophisticated cyber wars, repulse drones and confront entire robotic battalions?

  • Significant transformation in modes, means, media and pace of communications revolutionizing the use, size, meaning and deployment of data, information and knowledge leading to new challenges with surveillance, privacy, etc.

  • The rise of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, radical populism, isolationist and protectionist politics worldwide but particularly in the Global North.

  • Transitions in the conventional modes and organization of knowledge, disciplines, institutions and knowledge production and management leading to new specializations, occupations and re-professionalization.

The Humanities and the Social Sciences, Knowledge, Politics and Policies in Africa

An important point from our discussions so far is that knowledge products and producers of knowledge have been involved in a wide range of policy and political issues in Africa, including some of the most important social projects that have made impact on lives and destinies in the continent. Using a crude periodization deriving from the colonial experience, one can identify some significant moments as follows:

The Colonial Project

Knowledge was a central element of the overall colonial project in terms of the political and cultural domination and the economic mission. Anthropologists were involved in the studies of societies and cultures of colonial peoples to ensure the effective interaction between colonial officials, the missionaries and “natives”. They were important in providing the ideological rationalization of so-called primitive peoples organized in tribes awaiting the European carriers of civilization (see Mafeje 1971, 1976, 2001 and Magubane 1971 for the critique of the notion).

Linguists, economists and agronomists were also involved in the encouragement and design of specific patterns of colonial production, investment in and compelling the production of specific cash crops and production patterns. The earliest experiences of think tanks were the institutes set up by the colonial governments such as the West African institute for Oil Palm Research (WAIFOR) and the West African Institute for Social and Economic Research (WAISER) that later gave rise to national institutions in West Africa. In East Africa, the Makerere Institute of Social Research was established in 1948 as part of the East African Institute of Social and Economic Research. The colonial project created and reinforced the often racist, otherizing and exclusionist modes of knowledge that are an important part of dominant Western and Eurocentric knowledge systems.

The Nationalist/Anti-colonial Project

Knowledge production was important in the construction and reconstruction of African identity, polities and economies during the nationalist anti-colonial struggles and early phases of nationalist rule. Nationalist history in the form of schools such as the Ibadan, Dar and Dakar Schools were central to the reconstruction of history and self-confident African identities. Literature and philosophy also contributed examples such as the ideologies of Negritude and Pan-Africanism. Institutes for African Studies such as the one at University of Ghana, Legon, were specifically set up to provide intellectual leadership, support and rationale for some of the important nationalist projects in politics, economic development, music, fine arts, languages and culture.

The nationalist project while it contributed to significant knowledge products in the humanities and social sciences succumbed to pressures from within and without resulting in the emergence of the era of neo-liberalization driven principally by the economic adjustment programmes imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Neo-liberal Project

Thandika Mkandawire (2005) provided an apt summary of the role of intellectuals in this period: “First, there was the growing ‘compradorization’ of intellectual enterprise which came with the greater ‘compradorization’ of the economy. Nationalist developmental strategies had been finally defeated as economies were privatized, opened and generally conditioned to policy initiatives from outside the continent. Compradorization of the intellectual exercise was the result of the dramatic rise of the consultancy industry and the contract research it spurned. There was now a new wave of African professions closely linked with the need for greater control of development by the aid establishment and its insatiable quest for feasibility studies, evaluations and rapid assessment results” (Mkandawire 2005:42).

This era also saw the growth of economic policy networks and think tanks that carried out policy research, capacity building and technical assistance for the new neo-liberal economic policies. These were backed not only through funding support from outside Africa but also so through the creation of various kinds of support infrastructure for the new think tanks. Apart from the economic policy-related issues of poverty reduction, social protection and cash transfers, the era also saw the emergence of new priorities such as peacebuilding, addressing violent extremism and a wide range of public health and climate change issues. All of these provided the much-needed sustenance and sustainability for the new generation of think tanks, research networks and contract research enterprises.

But this era and the key intellectual trends had significant disconnections with the lived realities of many Africans, particularly the youth who initiated the students’ decolonization struggles that started in South Africa. In this era, there were not only efforts at reclaiming the decolonization of knowledge but also the recognition and affirmation of the pluralities of knowledge and the significance of indigenous knowledge and systems.

What is important to note is that the humanities have been involved in various elements of these social projects that involved research and knowledge inputs depending on the topics, themes or sector. Their involvement did not demand a major structural shift from basic research to applied research.

Conclusion: Towards Policy Innovation Through the Humanities and the Social Sciences

The social sciences and the humanities can and have done policy research either as single disciplines by themselves or as part of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary teams or consortia. The rise and current growing interest in multi-methods research has also promoted the involvement of disciplines like anthropology, history, media studies and law. New technologies have facilitated the use and analysis of content, archival materials, ethnography, GIS (geographical information systems), cartography and the various instruments that were conventionally applied in the social sciences and humanities. Given the tools, methodologies and analytical modes available to the humanities, they can deploy skills, knowledge and methods to engage some of the most pressing issues and problems of our times. They can do these on their own but also in partnerships with the social, health and natural sciences. Often, given the trends in knowledge production, they operate as worthy and much-needed partners that complement and complete knowledge that need to be holistic and systemic. So, the question is not whether the social sciences and humanities can do policy research or in what role? The question is whether they should and how.

These are moral and political questions. They are about choices—political and moral choices—and about the intellectual tasks in our current world and in Africa. Can African scholars refuse to address the pressing problems of today such as large-scale poverty and immiseration, alienation and youth unemployment, civil strife, climate change, human rights and dignity violations, social exclusion and intolerance because we have a duty to some more purist, esoteric and aesthetic research commitment? Do we have the luxury not to connect our intellectual enterprises and mission to some of the life-threatening issues of our day? These are questions that no one has the right to legislate or define the answers to scholars and academics. But they are questions that determine the choices we make as intellectuals. They are questions about who the subjects and agents of our research are and what the goals of research should be and whose ends they should serve. They are about knowledge for what? They are also about how the state and governments are defined and the understanding of political spaces for making a difference, affecting change and transformation. They are about the understanding that policies are always politically implicated and are not absolutes. They are also about how one gauges the scale of changes one intends to make. Is it remediation and alleviation or massive structural transformation? They are about whether one wants to deal with the routine irritable immediate sufferings and debilitating manifestations of problems that arise from oppression, poverty, injustice and alienation of the poor, the excluded, the marginalized or one wants to address the immediate underlying causes that provides the much-needed transformation. The choices involve combinations of strategies and tactics and the kinds of coalitions and alliances that scholars are linked to. But the choices are not irreconcilable polarities and do not involve mutually exclusive options. Those choices affect our understanding of policy actions. The choices have determined how scholars aligned themselves with the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. They have also determined engagement and alignment with work around HIV-AIDS, gender, sexuality and reproductive rights, human trafficking, food security, migration and citizenship.

Designing how to do this is very much available in the public arena today from the documentation and narratives of several experiences of researchers and institutions, who have also done it, in the humanities and the social sciences . But it is always more fulfilling and with greater effects if it comes from intentional choice, defined by moral and political positions. Institutions, networks, social movements and organizations can define where they want to go, but scholars, researchers and academics like all active citizens must make the choice and the commitment.