 |
| Professor Wale Adebanwi |
Wale Adebanwi, 47, is the
first black African scholar to be appointed to the prestigious Rhodes Professorship in Race Relations in the School of
Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the University of Oxford, UK, since it was
created more than 60 years ago.
Adebanwi, currently a professor at the
University of California-Davis, US, will also be a Fellow of St Anthony’s
College, Oxford, from July 1, 2017 and the next Director of the African Studies
Centre of UK’s oldest university. Adebanwi holds a BSc in mass communication
from the University of Lagos; MSc and PhD in political science from the
University of Ibadan;and MPhil and PhD in social anthropology from the
University of Cambridge. He was one of former Gates scholars with “amazing
successes” celebrated recently by the Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, who instituted
the scholarship at Cambridge over a decade ago. Prof. Adebanwi discusses his
aspirations and the state of scholarship in Nigeria in this email interview
with TheCable.
TheCable: Congratulations
on your Rhodes Professorship at the University of Oxford. As the first black
African scholar to be so appointed, should we say African scholars are
increasingly getting the recognition they deserve?
Wale Adebanwi: Thank you. Many
African scholars have been getting the recognition they deserved for a long
time. There are many names that one can mention in the modern era, say from the
19th century, who have attracted global recognition, although, admittedly
not always at par with their accomplishments. Therefore, stating that many
African scholars have received their deserved recognition is not to overlook
the challenges that many have faced in getting due recognition for what they
contributed to knowledge production. Even in the last decade or two, we have
had many African scholars both in the continent and outside the continent whose
talents and accomplishments have been duly recognized. I don’t think you have
space for the names and I also do not have the capacity to name them all.
But
there is hardly any area of knowledge production that you cannot find Africans in
the contemporary world, even in the most arcane of sciences, making important
contributions, for which they are recognized. Yet, I must add that there are
many who are yet to gain the recognition that they deserve partly because
knowledge production is central to the global system of domination and
discounting the contributions of Africans to human civilization is folded into
that system. However, African scholars, particularly Nigerian scholars, have
done and are doing amazing things around the world. It is important to note
also that some of the recognition that such people sometimes fail to get is
from their home countries or continent.
What are the expectations
— and the burdens — that come with this appointment?
WA: A lot. An
important part of this is about the nature of our work as scholars, as
knowledge workers, so to say. But the Rhodes Professor, apart from the general
duties of teaching, research and service, is also expected to fulfil some
specific duties, including providing academic leadership in the field of
African Studies and in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies while
contributing to the overall development of the African Studies Centre as a,
or I will say, the, world’s leading centre in teaching and research of the
highest academic standard on African Studies. The Rhodes Professor is also
expected to attract funding to strengthen the financial position of the African
Studies Centre and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, apart from
participating in the academic life of the College, St Anthony’s College, as a
trustee. Now, the duty of raising funds to be able to provide scholarships for
students and generally enhance the production of knowledge is one of the most
interesting for me.
I
use interesting advisedly. I am committed to raising funds from within Africa,
including corporate bodies operating within the continent, whether they are
owned by Africans or by non-Africans and from Africans in the Diaspora. Of
course, we will raise funds from non-Africans and corporate bodies based
outside of Africa, but I think that encouraging philanthropy, especially of the
more enduring type, is something we have to encourage a lot in the continent.
We need to encourage people who are financially endowed to recognize the value
of philanthropy, particularly when committed to educating young people and
funding research. I can go on and on about this. But let me say two important
things about this.
One,
we have a duty to educate people about the nature of this kind of giving. In
most cases, it is akin to making yourself immortal when you give to such
causes. For instance, if you start a scholarship or a fellowship at Oxford, the
money is invested and the proceeds of the investment will be used to fund the
scholarship. Therefore, it is more or less eternal. Long after you are dead,
generations will continue to benefit from your philanthropy.
Two,
the kinds of money that you use for the benefit of humanity, in this case
through education, is something that many wealthy people spend in Africa just
to host parties or celebrate birthdays or bury the dead. We waste too much
money in the continent, particularly Nigeria, on parties. Would you rather use
your money to benefit humankind permanently, even after you are dead, or spend
it to bury the dead? I don’t know if you remember Da Rocha, the famed richest
man in late 19th and early 20th century in Lagos, perhaps Nigeria’s
first millionaire? Where is the monument to his riches? The man became a
metaphor for immense wealth. Imagine if he endowed a scholarship, even just one
scholarship, for African students at Oxford, or at the University of Ibadan –
which had started before he died. Do you know how many beneficiaries of his
wealth we would have in critical sectors of our national life now as former Da
Rocha scholars? That is one form of immortality that is permanently beneficial.
Leaving your
professorship at the University of California-Davis was not that difficult, was
it?
WA: Deciding
to leave California with its great weather was the more difficult part.
Although I must say that leaving the University of California-Davis too was not
a totally easy decision because when you already know an environment well, you
don’t want to leave it for something else. Also, the University of California
system is the best public university system in the world. I mean the entire UC
system, not just UC Davis. We have 10 UCs, each is semi-independent. But as you
know, the opportunity of teaching at Oxford is nonpareil.
What was your experience
like at California?
WA: It
has been a very interesting experience with its blessings and challenges. What
is most important for me is that I have been able to do some of the kinds of
work I have always loved to do while I was here for eight years. I have also
had a wonderful time with my wife, Temitope, and my two kids here. There have
been challenges too, but I thank God.
Do you expect something
radically different at Oxford?
WA: I
am not sure what “radically different” means. But I hope to make a difference.
I am sure there is a reason I was hired and I have my own reasons for accepting
the position. I was trained also at Cambridge University, so I am not
unfamiliar with the Oxbridge system. But the immense opportunities for making a
difference is one of the greatest benefits of taking up this position at
Oxford.
As the next Director of
the African Studies Centre of Britain’s oldest university, what should we
expect from you?
WA: I
have an agenda which I cannot advertise too elaborately on this forum. But
there is only little or nothing I will be able to accomplish alone without the
amazing colleagues and accomplished scholars and administrators and gifted
students that I will be working with at the Centre and School. My hope is that,
working with these people, we are able to take the tradition of excellence at
the centre to a new level by expanding opportunities for world-class graduate
training as well as world-class research in African Studies. I am hoping that
we can expand our understanding of Africa to include the African Diaspora
spread all over the world, while expanding the curriculum.
Is there some irony, or
conflict, that the Rhodes Professorship is named for a British businessman
known for extracting resources from South Africa, which later became a racist
enclave?
WA: It
is a fact of a difficult and disturbing history. The role of Cecil Rhodes, for
whom the professorship was named, in African history has been the subject of a
lot of controversy and debate. But I need to clarify something. People
sometimes confuse the Rhodes Scholarships with the Rhodes Professorship. Cecil
Rhodes is the direct benefactor of the Rhodes Scholarships which was started in
1902. It was established by his will. The Rhodes Professorship was established
52 years after his death. It was endowed in 1954 by the Rhodesian Selection
Trust Group of Copper Mining Companies to study ‘inter-racial relations’ and
‘racial and ethnic relations.’ It was established in his name, but not by him.
However,
this does not remove from the core issues at stake in the debates over past
injustices. Therefore, the point you are raising, which has been articulated in
the #RhodesMustFall campaign, is important. And the University of Oxford
recognizes this too. There is continuing conversation about what to do with
this legacy, parts of which, with the scholarships and the endowed chair, are
beneficial. My predecessors in this position have engaged in this conversation
long before the #RhodesMustFall campaign, sometimes directly, sometimes through
the force of the liberationist ethos of their scholarship.
Before
he became the Rhodes Professor, one of my predecessors, an English man and
professor of History, Terence Ranger, was teaching in Zimbabwe, then called
Southern Rhodesia. His views about the racist minority government of the
country and African history were so “radical” that he was deported in 1963 by
the racist regime. His famous book, Revolt
in Southern Rhodesia, 1896-97: A Study in African Resistance, explores how
Africans lived before Cecil Rhodes and others arrived there in 1890 to seize
the country. I hope to continue in the liberationist tradition of such
scholarship and push it as far as I can. For me, the key question that the
controversies and debates raise is the question of how to confront the past in
the politics of justice in the present.
Your first degree is in
mass communication from the University of Lagos and you practised as a
journalist at some point. Your shift to political science and social
anthropology was a bit radical, or you don’t think so?
WA: I don’t actually
consider it a shift. I am a social scientist with lessons in the three
disciplines which have strengthened my work and life as a student of society.
Even my work as a journalist was partly an ethnographic experience which an
anthropologist would crave for. I could only have done that as well as I did
because of my basic training in Mass Communication in Lagos. I also could not
have become the kind of political scientist that I became if I didn’t have the
kind of experience and training and also exposure that I had in journalism.
Public affairs journalism is a great laboratory for studying politics, as I did
at Ibadan. And studying anthropology at Cambridge made me a better political
scientist, while studying political science has made me a better anthropologist.
Training in anthropology gave detail and flesh to my political science while
political science training gave structure and ideological force to my
anthropology.
You’ve authored and
co-authored several books. Which would you describe as the most influential?
Why?
WA: I wouldn’t know.
And I think the books are relatively too young to know what influence they will
have. Although, some books become instantly influential, but I have not written
such a book. So, you never know with the written word. You may be long gone
before a sizeable number of people, particularly students of society, find your
work very useful. For instance, as a student of the media, I have been working
with newspapers published in Nigeria since the late 19th century up to the
present. Beyond that, in recent years, I have been particularly interested in
the newspaper and newspaper men as important members of the intellectual
formation in colonial Nigeria, especially in the context of the Enlightenment
project, specifically modernity.
So
I have been focusing on Herbert Macaulay as publisher of Lagos Daily News
founded in 1925 and John Jackson Payne (and his son and successor, Thomas
Horatio Jackson) as publisher of the Lagos Weekly Record founded in 1891. These
men were what I call “children of the Enlightenment” but they were also engaged
in a dialectical struggle for and against some of the tenets or assumptions of
the Enlightenment. Now, the point I want to make is that when they were
articulating their ideas in their newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th
century, they couldn’t imagine that it will be of such relevance to our time in
understanding the long conversation that Africa has been having with modernity.
That is the nature of the published word.
You are also a poet, but
nothing much seems to be happening on that level again.
WA: Maybe because I am
a closet poet! Art is a jealous mistress and I think I have not given my poetry
as much time as it deserves. I have a collection I have been refining and
re-writing for many years. I have published a few over the years, very few. I
am ashamed to admit that I have not given my artistic side as much attention as
I should. I have a standing and, to be honest, flattering offer from Professor
Niyi Osundare, our most famous poet, to write a blurb to my collection (he has
read some of them and teases me about one he likes best, “Mogadishu Blues”)
that I have, shamefully, not been able to take up. Maybe my muse is lying in
wait at Oxford.
Having studied home and
abroad, bagging two PhDs in the process, what do you think foreign universities
can learn from the Nigerian system?
WA: What foreign
universities can learn from the Nigerian system? That is a unique question and
I must thank you for thinking about that. The old system, plenty. The current
system? How to run universities without resources! Or, to put it differently,
how a society can cripple its intellectual formation and then accuse it of not
standing straight on its legs.
On the other hand, what
should Nigerian education system learn from these universities?
WA: I think this has
been answered adequately by more informed minds over the years. I don’t think
they bear repeating. What needs to be done is to take action on the
prescriptions. But I don’t see how we can do that with the state of our
politics.
Intellectuals
in the Diaspora tend to look down and talk down on their Nigerian counterparts.
Even many Nigerians who go to do one-year Master’s programmes abroad come back
feeling like they are intellectually superior to home-grown products. In your reading, why is this so? Are things
that bad in Nigeria?
WA: That’s not my
reading, and I would demand examples. Except, of course, if you are mixing up
people feeling better about their scholarship, because of having access to
resources, with “looking down or talking down.” When Nigeria had its priorities
right, when Nigeria had universities in the real sense, did scholars in Nigeria
ever complain about such things? In fact, the rest of the world came to learn
from our universities. Things have been bad in Nigeria in recent decades, much
worse than we often acknowledge. But this does not mean that scholars outside
Nigeria or students studying outside Nigeria consider themselves, in your
words, as “intellectually superior.” They certainly have access to better tools
and they operate in better environment without having to struggle for basic
amenities such as electricity, water and the rest. So, the question is not
about talking down or looking down; it is not about what might constitute
emotional reaction to a historic crisis. It is about this: what do we do to
return higher education to its place in the national equation? We had
world-class universities in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s before the military took
the universities to the stakes, to use an expression they are familiar with.
Nigeria voted for a
change of government in 2015. If we look back today, should we still consider
that a positive development?
WA: You will be better
with an opinion poll. But there is no doubt that the situation by 2015 was in
drastic need of change. But I am not sure people were clear about what kind of
change they wanted. Most people just wanted change, even cosmetic change.
How can Nigeria move from
underdevelopment? Are we anywhere near a positive trajectory?
WA: This a big question. We
will need a seminar to even begin to think of answers. Are you ready for one?
No comments:
Post a Comment