Pius Adesanmi's dissection of the collapse of the university idea in Nigeria inspired me to tell a story which continues to disturb me. This May, I welcomed a student who had just joined out department and registered for Bachelor of Education in English. My department is so challenged by numbers in a university where people think language and literature is a waste of time, and in a country where the bulk of students are taking commerce and sociology because they want to work for companies or NGO's.
So I was curious to know from the student why he had chosen the degree course and what his future plans were. He said he eventually would like to do a PhD in literature and teach in the university. You can imagine my excitement! Little did I know there was a punch line : he wants to become a politician....
I timidly asked him what connection there was between PhD, university teaching and politics, but I already knew the answer. I probably knew it better than he did. Kenya's political arena and cabinet are full of spineless men and women with the title Professor. Even Wangari Maathai waded in the murky waters to the point of running a hopeless campaign to become president; that was before the Nobel Committee reminded her that there are more noble things in life and better platforms from which to effect change. And before the voters of her constituency promptly gave her the boot because infrastructure and social services cannot be built or provided by a Nobel prize. I am not sure she is entirely convinced, but we can only wait and see.
Prof Anyang' Nyong'o - I don't even know what to say. He appears on TV frowning and very miserable. Occasionally he is engaged in a battle with the Public Health Minister over the boundary between her ministry and his Medical services one. At an intellectual forum addressed by, among others, the eminent Professor Bethwell Ogot, all he had to say for his record is that he is not connected to the corridors of real power. I totally agree, but I just wondered if that is all a professor respected by African scholars had to say for himself.
Like Adesanmi's cousin Bola, I also grew up fantasizing about what it would be like to work in the university. I saw Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Okot p'Bitek and later on Anyang' Nyong'o, Wangari Maathai and Kivutha Kibwana - all people whose ideas were so powerful that then President Moi thought they were better off in the flooded torture chambers at Nyayo house or in hospital nursing police inflicted wounds. I wanted to be like James Orengo who, as a university student, wrote poems and eloquently reminded Kenyans that their country could be better. And as a PhD student locked in State College, PA, I dreamed of returning home to be like them.
I came back home with that romantic notion in my head of the publicly engaged intellectual that was part of the conscience of the nation. I was determined to follow in the footsteps of those who made me want to teach in the university. It is only now, when reading Adesanmi's post, that I realize what a fool I was. I don't know why it did not occur to me that none of the people I admired was still in a university back home. More than that, I got to hear the not-so-good inside stories of some of the eminent professors I adored. For instance, I heard that Ngugi's career as a member of the university community among his peers is not as flowery as in the Western world. Apparently he could not exercise the principles he applied to the peasants within the corridors of the University, and the victims, unfortunately, were his students.
So, when the question is asked where the rain began to beat us, my immediate answer is despair. Like in Nigeria, the destiny of professors during the Moi regime was sycophancy on one extreme and death-and-torture chambers on the other. In between, the university intellectual chose between complacency, engaging in business and consultancy for NGO's, or exile. Those intellectuals who survived these murky waters - like Kibwana and Orengo - joined politics on the basis of their impressive careers which drowned in the humdrum of dirty politics.
And that is what we have inherited. University CEO's have now joined the consultancy gravy train and demanded that lecturers prove their worth by the funding they are able to get (which is not much different from the US, but the politics are more complicated because the donors are invariably Western). Students have become cynical, thinking that the only book worth reading is that which contains content that will appear in the exam. I was discouraged by my lectures on Neo-colonialism, which I will discuss in another post, because the few fiery students had little intellectual foundation on which to base their "we are still colonized" slogans. They have not heard of Frantz Fanon, and I could tell from their participation that they had not read the extract from "The Wretched of the Earth" which I had provided almost a month in advance. The majority of the remaining students are complacently trudging through their commerce, communication and sociology degrees because their parents have told them that the surest way to a roof over their heads is in business, media and NGO's. These the careers, while important, cannot compare to those of the much needed professions in teaching, engineering, agriculture and medicine which build infrastructural and human resources for development.
And finally, there is that group of students who, like my student, look forward to pursuing advanced degrees and teaching in the university so that they may be the next Cabinet minister or, at the worst, the next permanent secretary or ambassador. But the main casualty is not the university; it is the African society whose conscience has been suppressed partly by the progressive discouragement from the culture of thinking rooted in the political onslaught of the Babaginda, Abacha, Moi and other regimes. Yet without thinking, we cannot resolve our myriad of problems. Instead, we leave the West to think them through for us, and give money to the issues which they think are the most urgent for us. And there is nothing more discouraging than hearing the impact of this mess innocently coming from the mouth of a member of the younger African generation. God help Africa.
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