Falola’s solution derives from grasping firmly the two horns that define the dilemma of African scholarship. How can African scholarship remain significantly essential to African postcolonial challenges without forgoing the benefits of the global academe? And how can it be integrated into global scholarship without losing itself and its core responsibility to Africa? Pan-Africanism is the reigning ideological framework that defines Africa’s relationship with the world. It is the ideological that has received its most elaborate exposition and advocacy from Cheikh Anta Diop, Kwame Nkrumah, Ali Mazrui, and others. It is also the major ideology that Toyin Falola espouses. Yet, there is a nuanced understanding of this ideology that separates Falola from, say, Cheikh Anta Diop. This understanding seeks to integrate pan-Africanism into a balanced view of globalization in a way that keeps Africa in the full view of world events, developments and happenings while sufficiently careful enough to maintain a firm grip on Africa’s cultural being in that world. This perspective, Falola calls pluriversalism, the opening up of the universe to multiple intellectual dynamics in a bid to undermine the spurious universalism of the West.
After the official end of colonialism, Africa finds itself enmeshed in a larger fight captured by the concept of globalization and the rising hegemony of global capitalism. The effects of this capitalist ideological dynamics transcend the vagaries of global and national economy to infuse scholarship and the very definition of research and pedagogy. It became the norm of global academy that the basics of knowledge production became situated right in the West. Even the matrices for ranking universities worldwide were constructed in the West. The result was therefore that everything from ideology to theoretical frameworks was imported from Europe and North America.
Take for instance social science theorization in Africa. One could argue that it mostly took its theoretical underpinning from the United States. There can therefore be no doubt as to what results we should expect when Africa’s predicament is analyzed and theorized from the perspectives of foreign theories, paradigms, ideas and theoretical frameworks. In Social Science as Imperialism, Claude Ake became one of those who got first to the critique of the Western epistemological hold on Africa. Ake’s charge was leveled against the colonial objective that the social science was meant to establish. Thus, just as the Bretton Wood institutions have specific ideological predilection that imposes conditionalities on African economies, so also do the social science literatures and theories possess distinct ideological orientations that dominate the intellectual directions of African scholars.
I do not know what specific demands the pluriversal methodology imposes, but I am clear about the responsibility it imposes on African scholars and scholarship. For one, pluriversalism insists on taking Africa as the center of research and scholarship. Thus, from Claude Ake through Ali Mazrui to Toyin Falola, we see a new face of African Studies that strenuously makes the point for a decentered global academic structure away from the West to plural multi-points across the world. If, according to Thomas Mann, “every intellectual attitude is latently political,” then every intellectual offering from the West must be critically subjected to a healthy dosage of critical inquiry. And this attitude applies more to theories and intellectual fads that we have hitherto taken for granted in Africa. What Falola specifically calls for is a methodological invasion of the global academy in a way that enables Africa scholars to privilege Africa rather than the West. This requires that African sources, African insights, African-derived theories, African epistemologies, and African experiences become the major framework that motivates scholarship from the continent. But, and this is critical to Falola’s arguments, there is no escaping the imperatives of global scholarship.
Of course, there are so many things wrong with scholarship on the continent. And many of these arise from the dysfunctionality of higher education in a postcolonial context that challenges everything. It would seem that the more tertiary education is ravaged by the sociopolitical climate of Africa, the more the quality of research and pedagogy declines, and the more Africa loses her best brains to the global academe. There is therefore a lot to learn from a pluriversal global dynamics of higher education and especially from those that deploy knowledge production to the service of development and sociocultural imperatives.
Scholarship carries a significant burden which is all the more crucial in postcolonial Africa. In the first instance, it must be done with a certain level of intellectual vigilance that does not allow the erosion of Africa’s uniqueness by foreign intellectual accretions. And in the second place, African scholarship must be aware of its own mandate in restoring Africa’s intellectual dignity as well as being vigorous in its own advocacy for the opening up of the global academe while also learning and unlearning it. In this wise, Professor Toyin Omoyeni Falola represents a significant figure whose entire corpus points us in the right methodological direction for a postcolonial intellectual restructuring of the African continent.
Concluded