African Affairs, the journal of the Royal African Society that sponsors this blog, has recently published an article on the legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic response and a 'new era of austerity in Africa'.
Authors Olutayo Adesina, Aleida Mendes Borges, Carlos Cardoso and Toby Green bring to bear on this theme their extensive experience of anglophone and lusophone Africa, long-term historical and social analysis, and work on gender.
The authors restate their argument, made repeatedly since the start of the pandemic, including on this blog, that the policy response to the pandemic, driven by the global North via agencies such as the WHO and its biomedical response, would be catastrophic in the world's poorest regions. Covid-19, together with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has resulted in 'structural adjustment 2.0', contiguous with the economic shocks of the 1980s that drove an era of underdevelopment on the continent.
In this paper, they call for the opening up of a broad debate on an analysis that 'provides more questions than answers'. They ask us to 'rethink the discursive and conceptual priorities of the discipline of African Studies'. This piece highlights a few aspects of the debate to encourage further reflection.
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Captured by neoliberal and neocolonial concepts
Adesina et al. call out the academic response to the pandemic in the global North, that - some important exceptions aside - 'replicated the inequalities of the response'. They might have expected that scholars of African studies worldwide would deploy relevant frameworks 'to analyse and indict this neocolonialism'. Instead, the 'conceptual frame' related to the expansion of neoliberal frameworks was found wanting. Its language of 'precarities', 'vulnerability', and 'resilience' led to a 'triumph of discourse over materiality' which 'normalize[s] economic warfare on Africa'. The authors note that, following Andersson and Keen's work Wreckonomics, Western academic frameworks are part of this war economy.
Ignoring African experts
The section of their paper that strikes me as most disturbing, with wider application beyond the pandemic's legacy, is the account of the dominant Western academy's ignorance - or outright ignoring - of advice from the continent's leading intellectuals, in this case, on lockdown measures and the existential threat of the lack of basic healthcare. It is not possible to argue that there were no dissenting or expert voices on the continent. From April 2020, less than a month into the global pandemic response, some of Africa's top scholars, including Kwame Anthony Appiah, Olivette Otele, Francis Nyamnjoh and Elisio Macamo, were vocal on media such as Al Jazeera and social media about the 'all-securitarian model of "containment"', and the Western response model of 'risk-aversion', built on colonial history, that would weaken safety nets and livelihoods.
They were echoing history. One of the most devastating consequences of the structural adjustment of the 1980s was the division - also evoked by Adesina et al. - between European or Western expertise on the one hand, and in the colonised regions on the other. In 1989, Thandika Mkandawire complained about the excessive use of foreign expertise even where national expertise was clearly present. He felt that Europeans were unaware of what Africans were really saying about the situation.
From theory to practice
If institutional and radical discourses of decolonial theory and the geopolitics of knowledge are to be translated into practice, then we must ask: why are such leading African scholars and their works still being 'ignored' in the West? Is it because of where, and how, they are published? (But unlike the majority of Northern scholars, Africans tend to publish everywhere: in Africa, Asia and the West.) Why are European (mostly white male) theorists, important as they are, still prioritised over their African counterparts who are too little known beyond odd exceptions who are deemed acceptable? Why is it acceptable for so much African studies literature not to cite Southern scholars? Why is work that is describing a social reality in Africa considered 'radical' or 'polemical' in the West, even by African studies journals? Where are the voices of women on the consequences of a pandemic response that disproportionately impacted them, and in debates about intellectual and academic freedoms?
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Debate
Rather than foreclose this debate with the rather inevitable conclusion about the structural, gendered and racialised exclusion of scholars and experts from the South, we invite authors of the original African Affairs article, readers of this blog, and researchers and writers engaged in Africa and African studies everywhere to offer their own viewpoints. Please be in touch via [email protected] if you would like to contribute.
Stephanie Kitchen is Managing Editor at the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, including of its journal Africa. She is a co-director of the African Books Collective.
