By Prof Artwell Nhemachena
RECENTLY, Burkinabe President Ibrahim Traore prohibited the exportation of Burkina Faso minerals in their raw state – arguing there must be beneficiation within Burkina Faso first.
Of course, several other African leaders and regional organisations, including the SADC, have recently stressed the need to stop exporting minerals in their raw state, but to beneficiate them first.
The problem with these efforts is that they are limited to the beneficiation of minerals. Many other aspects of African lives require local beneficiation so that Africa can derive maximum benefits. Absence of local beneficiation on the African continent explains why Africans are facing various problems which are now so ingrained as to seem intractable.
However, for Africans to begin mineral beneficiation in earnest, it is necessary to consider local beneficiation of African minds first. And that is the duty of African universities to ensure that there is local beneficiation of African minds to ensure their relevance for Africa’s development. In the absence of local beneficiation of African minds, there cannot be meaningful beneficiation of African minerals.
Minds that have not been locally beneficiated lack patriotism to African causes – indeed, such non-beneficiated minds constitute liabilities on the continent of Africa, irrelevant as they are to Africa’s development. It is not surprising that even in African parliaments there is likely to be opposition to beneficiation, particularly by members whose minds are externally oriented in the sense of being Western-oriented.
Similarly, in the absence of local beneficiation of African minds, it is not surprising that everything, including ideas of human rights, development, democracy, governance, education, economy, politics, jurisprudence and laws, among others, are imported at very high costs to Africa whose own ideas are thereby vitiated. Minds that have not been locally beneficiated cannot beneficiate African ideas – instead, they always happily import ideas without even considering their costs in terms of irrelevance to Africans.
Africa is struggling with the challenge of absence of local beneficiation in different domains not just in the realm of mineral beneficiation. Whereas local beneficiation generates and increases relevance of that which is being beneficiated, colonialism has taught Africans to devalue anything local while investing immeasurable value in everything from the West.
Such colonial inversions account for absence of development in Africa in spite of the establishment of numerous universities and high-sounding academics many of whose efforts are lost in irrelevance to the local African contexts.
University libraries are brimming with books written in the West by Westerners such that African students who uncritically read such material also get lost in irrelevance. They become what others have called the ‘lost generations’ – lost in the forests of irrelevant ideas of others.
The problem here is that many African universities continue to be staffed by academics who cannot write books, and if they do, the books are mere replicas of Western ideas which are being recycled ad nauseum on the continent. Nothing new and nothing to reorient Africa is in them – if there is anything in them, it is to pillory African leaders and ancestors and glorify former colonisers as having been better than current African leaders.
African universities should make efforts to address what has been called the ‘book hunger’ or ‘book famine’ that explains the unpalatable situation in which a continent with so many universities and so many academics continues to rely on donations of often irrelevant books from the West. In fact, it is un-African to survive on donations, including on book donations, particularly when African governments are spending so much of their budgets on education, including higher education to educate students and to sustain the salaries of African academics.
The irony then is that, even as they fail to write relevant books to solve the problem of the ‘book hunger’ or ‘book famine’ on the continent, many are fond of demonising political leaders as having failed to lead and to bring about development in Africa. If there is a ‘book hunger’ or ‘book famine’ on the continent of Africa where would political leaders get relevant ideas to ensure development? It is, first of all, those who are paid to think and generate ideas who should execute their work so that African leaders can have pools of ideas from which to fish for models to develop the continent.
The idea in African universities should not be just about criticising African political leaders but to help them by generating good and relevant ideas beyond parroting Western trappings which are designed without the imperatives of relevance to Africa.
Because their minds have not been locally beneficiated for relevance to the local African contexts, graduates of such universities continue to look up to African political leaders for jobs and employment creation. Their minds, which have not been locally beneficiated, are not reflexive enough to consider designing investments and creating jobs for themselves and their fellow Africans.
In writing this, I am mindful of the fact that it is university vice-chancellors who constitute the chief executive officers running their universities on day- to-day bases. And so it lies with such vice-chancellors to ensure that African minds are locally beneficiated to speak to relevance on the continent. Otherwise, how would they justify the huge budgetary allocations to their universities that, after all, do not tire of asking for more from African governments and citizens who are taxed to generate the national income from which the budgets are allocated?
The manifest paralysis and sclerosis in Africa are explicable in terms of the failures of African universities on the tests of local beneficiation and relevance. Minds that are not locally beneficiated naturally fail to solve local problems because they are not possessed with local relevance. If charity begins at home, one can also say that relevance and beneficiation begin at home.
During the colonial era, Africans were taught about European heroes even as African heroes were demonised by the same colonial education. It was during the colonial era when Africans were taught to worship European ancestors, depicted as saints, even as the same colonial education taught Africans that their own ancestors were demons from whom they needed to take flight.
It was during the colonial era when Africans were taught the geography of Britain and Europe even when they were taught very little about local African geographies from which colonialists were quietly stealing minerals. Indeed, it was during the colonial era when Africans were taught European cultures even as the same colonial education taught Africans that their own cultures were barbaric, savage and primitive.
It should, therefore, not be surprising when some young 21st century African graduates continue to believe that colonialists were better than their own African leaders.
This is reminiscent of colonial exercises in education where African children were taught to sing “Christopher Columbus was a great man who went to America in a sauce pan” oblivious to the fact that the Italian explorer was a colonialist who oversaw the extermination of native people in North America prior to his arrival in the 1400s. In fact, the extermination of native Americans is known as the ‘Great Dying’ yet, ironically, colonialists, including in the then Rhodesia, taught African children that Columbus was a hero worth America admiration and veneration.
The problem lies with African universities which do not locally beneficiate African minds. They continue to teach colonial modes of thought and logics. They do not write books to deconstruct colonial modes of thoughts and logics – instead, in the face of the attendant ‘book hunger’ and ‘book famines’, they are proud to officiate and commemorate donations of often irrelevant books from the former colonisers.
And instead of deconstructing colonial modes of thought and logics, they deconstruct their own leadership and everything else that is African. In fact, for many, critical theories are about criticising their own institutions and leadership but not colonialism and its various manifestations and logics.
African university presses are largely dormant with very little activity happening in terms of the researching, writing and publishing of books by African academics. Indeed, some African universities would encourage academics to be contended with writing short journal articles which, for lack of space, do not adequately develop their theses – which many would not be relevant to Africa anyway.
Worse still, the journals would always be more prized if they are published in Europe or North America where their relevance to Africa is often trimmed, edited out or expunged before they can be recommended as publishable. Indeed, the journal articles are often subjected to salami slicing and designed for the echo-chamber effect.
In the light of the foregoing, African Ministers of Higher Education may have to check on the African university presses to get a sense of the activities, if any, in them. They may have to require vice-chancellors to report on the activities of their university presses, and other publications to check for local beneficiation. The ministers may have to set up multi-disciplinary committees or boards to rigorously moderate for beneficiation of African minds.
Academics and other researchers should be required to present their book publications and journal articles to mult-idisciplinary committees that rigorously check for local beneficiation and relevance – grilling the authors for the same. And of course, it would be necessary to also provide some incentives to academics who publish books, chapters and journal articles that are of local relevance. If African university presses become more functional, the resources for the incentives can, at least partly, come from royalties for book and journal publications.
And, of course, when African university presses become functional and very active, African universities may not have to always beg for budgets and supplementary budgets from African governments. Indeed, when African communities and alumni of African universities see relevance in their universities, they will always chip in to assist them.
The problem is that currently, university alumni and communities see very little, if any relevance, in what the African universities are doing – even the graduates are often jobless and incomeless because what they have laboured for, during their studies, has no relevance in their contexts. They were not locally beneficiated by their universities and so they become perpetual burdens to their communities, even as they may be wielding degree certificates.
The scandal is to teach what has no local relevance and then expect the graduates to excel in the local contexts. Of course, one may argue that the graduates can migrate abroad and function there but then the problem is that apart from justifying colonial logics that would also erroneously assume that locals will always be needed in foreign countries for which they would have been trained to be relevant.
Much as charity begins at home, relevance also begins at home. Much as charity begins at home, beneficiation also begins at home. Without local beneficiation, Africans will not develop.