“Kenya’s official languages are English, Kiswahili, and Silence.” ~ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Dust (2014)

I want to explore something I have been wrestling with over the last three weeks. About silences, and also about anger.

~~~

The Omicron variant of COVID-19 was first identified by scientific teams in southern Africa, and reported to the WHO on 24 November 2020. Since then, there has been a chaotic outpouring of news, speculation and reactions. We have also been furious about travel bans, about scientists being punished, about COVID being labelled as African, and about global vaccine inequality/apartheid.

Some of the dust is only now settling. Omicron has spread incredibly quickly worldwide, and has displaced older variants. European and North American healthcare systems are in danger of being overwhelmed. There is political fallout from the unpopular introduction of tighter controls.

The first cases from Omicron in Kenya have now been identified, but the variant has probably been here for some time. Daily case numbers began doubling just before Christmas 2021. We have entered our fifth wave.

This new variant seems extremely transmissible, but key aspects of its longer-term severity, and its ability to resist existing vaccines, remain unclear. Results from South Africa, Europe and North America about its “mildness” were eagerly projected onto a quite different population here, one with much lower vaccination levels – even as all those health systems went into crisis. New unpredictable variants are still likely to appear over the coming year.

We are still in a situation of uncertainty, but we are desperate to believe the pandemic is over.

~~~

I want to explore the psychological impact of the pandemic. There are things we need to understand, acknowledge, and address now. If we fail to do this, we may remain distracted or paralysed at a time when we really need to gather and refocus our energies.

The pandemic may be viral, but it has also created a mental health epidemic. Most of us are completely exhausted from the past two years. Our emotional and financial reserves are drained. Some of us are suffering from the longer-term effects of COVID, from isolation, or just from the stress of unpredictability.

~~~

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor wrote, “Kenya’s official languages are English, Kiswahili, and Silence.”

After the Omicron variant was announced, and the West responded with travel bans, I felt we should add a fourth language — and perhaps for Africa more broadly. Anger.

~~~

Fight, Flight or Freeze.

Many of you will recognise these as our classic responses to threats. We usually become angry in response to a source of fear — a threat. We want to fight, to protect ourselves from whatever threatens us. An ancient reactive part of our brain, the amygdala, takes over.

It has to act quickly.  It can’t do nuance.  It. Doesn’t. Have. Time.

Our amygdala has to flatten the world around us, divide it neatly into friends and foes.

~~~

Anger in itself is not a bad emotion. It evolved to protect us. Sometimes it is life-saving. Channelled well, outrage can change society in really positive ways.

However, in our modern, artificial, overcrowded, confusing, stressful and technological lifestyles, we have to be careful. Anger can be misplaced, destructive, and exhausting, especially if we become trapped within cycles of anger and trauma.

At this stage of the pandemic, we are frightened and exhausted. Some of us are on the verge of collapse and paralysis. We want this to be over.

We are also angry.

But the real cause of this anger — an invisible virus — is hard to attack.

~~~

Since COVID-19 emerged in 2019, the world has been a confusing and frightening place. COVID-19 fuelled a global pandemic in an extremely unequal and unfair world.

The pandemic, and the accompanying lockdowns, created huge fears, personal losses, sickness, deep economic and psychological challenges. Many people struggled and some genuinely found it hard to understand why.

COVID-19 fuelled a global pandemic in an extremely unequal and unfair world.

Lockdowns succeeded in reducing the initial spread, but this paradoxically undermined their justification. Without people visibly dying everywhere, some questioned whether news of the pandemic had a hidden motive. The reluctance of western media to show the suffering of white bodies also created a cognitive disconnect, especially in the US.

We were at war with an invisible virus — not with one another — but still tensions rose.

Our amygdala is not good at this new kind of war. It needs a recognisable enemy.

This medical crisis is not a fairy tale, with cartoon heroes and villains. However, when we are angry, frustrated and scared, the protective instinctive part of our brain activates.  It desperately wants to flatten complicated reality into a reassuringly simple cartoon version.

Who is attacking us?  Who are our enemies?

We needed someone to blame.

~~~

There has been a lot of coverage of far-right COVID conspiracy theories. Trump labelled COVID-19 the “China virus”, while allowing it to kill far more people in the US. An election year in the US cemented a crazy partisan divide, with right-wing politicians taking their stance against masks and vaccines. Public health was placed in opposition to personal freedoms. This soon spread to other countries online.

At a deeper level, the Christian far-right in the US doesn’t believe in evolution. A rapidly mutating virus is impossible to understand. A deliberately weaponized pathogen, developed in a lab, by godless people unlike them, made far more sense. There was someone (imaginary) to blame. They found their “real” enemy.

(This wasn’t a solely Christian problem. Religious “leaders” with political access in India also derailed the COVID response in their country, with disastrous global consequences.)

~~~

Conspiracy theories may be convoluted and nonsensical — but they are emotionally satisfying. In a confusing world, they give us someone clear to blame, to scapegoat.

The idea of the scapegoat comes from the Jewish tradition where, as described in Leviticus 16:21, the sins of a community were placed on a live goat, which was then chased off into the wilderness. I am not sure the scapegoat fully understood what was happening, and the goats I have consulted think this was probably not a huge punishment. However, the point was never really about the goat, but about the removal of sins from within the community.

Lockdowns succeeded in reducing the initial spread, but this paradoxically undermined their justification.

In the modern world, we still find scapegoats — people to blame.  They are not the real cause of our problems and chasing them into the wilderness does not resolve anything.  While the original Jewish ceremony may have served a genuinely useful social purpose, our modern versions do not.  Scapegoats are now useful distractions, used to stoke up and misdirect fear and hatred.

~~~

While there has been a lot of emphasis on far-right conspiracy theories, I think there is also a different but related phenomenon on the left.  After all, people who are scared and angry need to find someone to blame. We all need a scapegoat on whom to pile our complex, perhaps intractable problems — and then noisily chase them out of town.

This does not solve our problems — but it is something tangible we can do. It provides some temporary relief.

In the narratives of these conspiracy theories, pharmaceutical companies and Western governments have conspired to create global vaccine apartheid.  Greed, control or naked racism are the clear explanation in the wilder discussions online. There are wicked people to blame, and we must attack them.

Like any good conspiracy theory, there is a kernel of truth in these narratives. We live in a world that has been substantially shaped by capitalism, and that is still scarred by deep historical inequalities stemming from slavery and Western colonialism. Africa has been last on the list to receive vaccines. (Omicron may have emerged in Africa because of low vaccine coverage, allowing new variants to appear.)

We all need a scapegoat on whom to pile our complex, perhaps intractable problems — and then noisily chase them out of town.

A global public health emergency needed a global public health response. While there was immense public funding and coordination, it has been galling to see large pharmaceutical companies make massive profits from this catastrophe; the techniques and “recipes” for the vaccines must become public goods — not controlled for private profit.

There are very unpleasant echoes of past crises. As Zeynep Tupfecki has observed, most of the people who died in the HIV/AIDS epidemic did so after ARV medicines had been developed. Intellectual property rights and corporate profits took precedence over global health, and Africans bore the brunt of that approach.

~~~

We clearly need better global health systems.  However, this narrative that vaccine inequality was deliberate and racist — and our angry response — simplifies and obscures key issues.

There actually was a plan to make sure all countries received vaccines. This plan recognised that we were facing an interlinked global health crisis, and that we needed to address structural inequalities. COVAX was explicitly set up as “a global risk-sharing mechanism for pooled procurement and equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.”

Several things went wrong with this plan, but an angry backlash against vaccine inequality is now obscuring that history. This anger may prevent us from learning difficult lessons, or taking the time-critical action we need to focus on right now.

Our house is on fire. People are inside, still at risk, but some of us are standing outside —  feeling safe because we have been vaccinated — and yelling about who started the fire. Trying to find the people to blame, instead of figuring out how we can help right now.

~~~

Contracting most of the shared vaccines to one provider — the Serum Institute of India (SSI) — was a disastrous decision for COVAX. This decision may have been based on cost, but it was a strategic mistake to put so many eggs in one basket during an unpredictable global disaster.

Under Narendra Modi, India’s right-wing government did not take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously. A whole government department was set up to push herbal remedies, and other unproven treatments like steaming. Politicians were preoccupied with elections and religious rallies, which turned into super-spreader events. When the Delta variant began to ravage India in February 2021, the government retreated into full-scale denial.

It has been galling to see large pharmaceutical companies make massive profits from this catastrophe.

The situation in India was devastating. I was already helping to coordinate Indian volunteer group efforts, and I remember the horror of seeing the wave of infections grow rapidly, and then overwhelm the country. People struggled to find oxygen, medicines and ICU beds for their loved ones — or even for themselves.

Then things went quiet — which was even more ominous. The COVID wave was starting to ravage communities, and they had no one to ask for help.

However, the crisis in India was also an indication that a global crisis was brewing. SSI was meant to produce 700 million doses of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine for poorer countries in 2021. It had already encountered some production issues, and the Indian government, in its complacency, had not ordered doses for its own citizens until it was too late. At one point, facing threats from desperate Indian politicians, the CEO fled to London for his own safety.

Exports of the doses produced for other countries, including for Kenya, were blocked. Much of the vaccine famine we experienced early in 2021 was caused by this crisis.

Mistakes were made, and people were definitely culpable as well. However, this key event does not fit neatly into the angry narrative of vaccine apartheid. If the rich white West are the obvious villains, and black Africans are the clear victims — adding a complex disaster in India to the mix just messes up the neat fairy tale.

China developed its own vaccine. It has administered nearly three billion doses to its own people, and exported millions as well.  Cuba did even better, despite facing economic sanctions. After a delayed start, Latin America is doing far better with vaccinations, with larger countries nearing Western levels of protection.

The problem is not simply racism, but relative poverty. However, it is a better fairy tale if we just edit out the inconvenient parts.

~~~

In political theory, a surprising convergence between right- and left-wing extremes has often been noted. Starting from different initial points, positions seem to become more similar as they become more radicalised and angry. This is known as the “horseshoe theory”.

This links to how we flatten the world, and look for simple friends, foes, and scapegoats, as that part of our brain that responds instinctively takes over to protect us from threats. Traditionally, political theory has focussed on dry policy issues and class allegiances.  But with the rise of Trump and other populists mainstreaming conspiracy theories worldwide, a lot more research has been undertaken to explore deeper psychological issues around fear, uncertainty, and anger.

Politicians were preoccupied with elections and religious rallies, which turned into super-spreader events.

In a world dominated by powerful and often impersonal, confusing and opaque structures, our amygdala has to find someone to blame — like a classic Bond villain. Common examples are both right- and left-wing antisemitism, and attacks on globalisation.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, pro- and anti-vaccine groups both see conspiracies organised by greedy pharmaceutical companies. The more you think about this, the more bizarre it seems — but here we are. Anger at international structures in general has also grown, leading to strange bedfellows. At one point, I saw Elon Musk attacking the World Food Programme, and left-wing people rallying to his side. I had to switch off my devices and lie down for a while.

~~~

The SARS-CoV-2 genome only contains about 29,903 bases of single-stranded RNA — 30kB of data, less than half the length of this article. This tiny virus is outwitting human civilization.

Our amygdala, and the adrenalin it activates, can save lives — but only in the right context. We need to act instinctively rapidly when we are running out of a house that is on fire — as did our distant ancestors when escaping predators.

However, in a slow-burning and confusing pandemic, our amygdala should not be allowed to take charge.

COVID-19 is being helped right now by our own fearful responses.

Right now, our house is on fire — and many of us are still trapped inside.  We instinctively want to save ourselves, get our boosters, and get away from the problem as quickly as possible.

However, as a country we are less than 10% fully vaccinated.  Our fire is far from out.

~~~

The last few years have been an “I can’t breathe” crisis on several levels.

Franz Fanon was a physician, psychiatrist and philosopher. His work on colonial violence, and the lasting psychological and cultural damage it caused, remains important to this day. After all, these past years have been a crisis of COVID, but also of George Floyd, and of Black Lives Matter.

I was very influenced by Fanon’s work, via Steve Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist who built on Fanon’s work.  I first encountered these ideas around lasting cultural trauma when I was a peace worker for British Quakers, based in South Africa.  About a decade after that experience, I took part in the first large Rhodes Must Fall march in Oxford, which was extraordinarily moving and powerful.

Fanon talks of the colonial world as “a Manichaean World”, divided into light and dark.  White colonizers are seen as the light, and black colonized individuals are viewed as darkness, and the epitome of evil.

In a world dominated by powerful and often impersonal, confusing and opaque structures, our amygdala has to find someone to blame.

At this point, this should sound familiar. Surely the antidote to this colonial polarisation, a world where black is bad — is it’s opposite — white neo-colonial pharma as the epitome of evil?

However, this is simplistic — as I have demonstrated with the catastrophe in India.  I am reminded of a jingle for Lotus FM in Durban: “Not everything’s black and white. . .”

I would also argue that it is literally dangerous.

Painting Africa as the wretched of the pandemic, a whole continent victimised yet again by the West, deprives us of agency and urgency. It glosses over complex but really important details.

Most importantly, while the image gives us something to focus our anger on, a scapegoat to chase out of town, it also provides us with an excuse not to actually do anything difficult but useful ourselves.

We can safely exhaust ourselves shouting at foreigners in the West, and this venting is cathartic. We are now absolved from doing anything closer to home. Powerful and evil external actors are in charge — at least until some utopian revolution dawns.

~~~

Meanwhile, the reality which this narrative obscures is that vaccines have been arriving in Africa. Kenya now has millions of vaccines available, and the immediate but very real challenges are local logistics, and persuading people with mild vaccine reluctance to get vaccinated.

Unfortunately, anger at global pharma is being manipulated to make people on the ground more hesitant at a time when we need to reassure them that vaccines are safe and effective. It is still not quick and easy to get a vaccine in Kenya. Vague rumours about side effects and large wicked corporations are enough to put scared people off doing something that seems novel, risky and time-consuming.

But while overall Africa has lagged behind other countries on vaccine uptake, we have also seen much fewer deaths.  It is not entirely clear why this is — although it will probably be due to a complex mix of factors, including our younger demographics, and fewer comorbidities from diseases of affluence like obesity and diabetes.

Painting Africa as the wretched of the pandemic, a whole continent victimised yet again by the West, deprives us of agency and urgency.

As more vaccines became available during 2021, more of them went to countries where they were more desperately needed, rather than to Africa, which had lower case rates. The overall picture includes Latin America and South East Asia, which did get vaccines when they needed them more. The now high vaccination rates in these regions are being ignored by those arguing that there is a global vaccine apartheid.

We are also likely to experience a global oversupply of vaccines in 2022. Part of the reason pharmaceutical companies seem greedy is that they know vaccines are going to commodify. Increased supply will drive price reductions, so companies want to take profits while they still can. Free markets are not morally perfect, but when they scale up, they are incredibly powerful.

(I still believe we need a more global public control of vaccines that are essential to public health. Since the Delta variant overwhelmed India in May, and torpedoed collective efforts via COVAX, I have argued that we need a “Liberty Ships” approach to this pandemic — a wartime level of effort and resources. This did not happen fast enough, and we have lost lives as a result.)

~~~

Mirroring global vaccine inequality is local vaccine inequality.

I have been concerned for some time that the relatively privileged but tiny urban elites in Kenya would get themselves vaccinated then lose interest as their own lives returned to normal. Once vaccination rates in Nairobi reached about 20 per cent, and the lockdowns and curfews were eased, this did seem to happen; although most of Kenya’s counties still had very low levels of vaccination, the national conversation moved on, unconcerned.

Once Omicron was announced, there was a vast amount of anger at travel restrictions imposed on southern African countries. There were lots of legitimate reasons for the frustration, especially as Omicron was probably already in many countries, as has proved to be the case, but African scientists were effectively being punished for being the first to identify it.

Blanket travel bans are in any case not very effective at stemming the spread of variants and those travel bans have now been largely removed.  (Ironically, France is now restricting travellers from Britain, where Omicron case numbers are rising alarmingly.)

Part of the reason pharmaceutical companies seem greedy is that they know vaccines are going to commodify.

However, the anger I sensed seemed really unfocused and confused. Kenyans were also outraged, but there was little concern or interest in the actual variant, or in the rising cases in southern Africa — the countries with which we were apparently showing solidarity. Christmas concerts and parties continued. Some people seemed more worried about having their own travel plans, and their newly regained privileged lifestyles, threatened.  I felt like a lone voice, trying to remind Kenyans just how few of our own citizens were protected by vaccines.

I am not sure what Frantz Fanon would make of our bourgeoisie.  Che Guevara would actually have shot most of the people who wear those trendy t-shirts bearing his image. I doubt Fanon would have been impressed.

We have now got our reward, with exponentially rising case numbers in Kenya as well.

My feeling is that the outrage was actually based on the deeper fear that we would return to lockdowns, and that the pandemic was not actually over. Instead of focussing on the actual problem — a new variant — we found foreign scapegoats to yell at, allowing the thing which frightened us to take root.

~~~

For Fanon, the colonized were kept constantly on edge by an “atmospheric violence”, tensed in anticipation of violence. The pandemic has done something similar to our limbic systems. While not comparable to the traumas of slavery, we are constantly stressed, and on edge.

I am strangely reminded of Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity as a “slave morality”. Good Christians, by turning the other cheek, did not push back against power. Returning to the Fight/Fright/Freeze stress response that I learnt about in school, it has been updated to include a fourth response sometimes called ‘Submit’, ‘Fawn’ or ‘Feign’.

The Slave Bible, published in 1807 in London, then circulated in Caribbean and North American plantations, was a disturbing later embodiment of Nietzsche’s criticism. Sections such as the exodus story, which might inspire hope for liberation, were removed. Instead, portions that justified and fortified the system of British Imperial slavery were emphasized.

The Slave Bible encouraged silence, subservience and passivity, in the face of injustice.  It was used to pacify people subjected to the worst forms of oppression and constant violence.

We found foreign scapegoats to yell at, allowing the thing that frightened us to take root.

The reality is more complex. Jesus himself was not passive. Theologians like Walter Wink have shown that turning the other cheek was actually a powerful act of resistance, given wider Roman culture. To turn the other cheek forced the aggressor to use their left hand, which would be seen as humiliating for the aggressor to other Romans. This would reclaim some power and agency for the Christian in a situation of powerlessness.

In the “atmospheric violence” of the pandemic, I sense we all feel disempowered. Some of us have become passive and withdrawn, while others have become angry and frustrated. However, instead of channelling the energy of anger into practical action to take care of one another, we are simply venting our frustrations publicly and fruitlessly – and sometimes counterproductively.

Some of us channel our frustrations against the pandemic restrictions of our own governments, or vaccination programmes – while others rail against international injustices.

Venting may feel helpful, but it is not reclaiming power or agency.  It may briefly feel good, but it is not really helping us.

~~~

Casting Africans as the wretched of the pandemic seems to make sense, given the obvious inequalities.  It is proving an incredibly powerful global rallying cry.

It makes people righteously, blindly, angry.  It directs all our fear and rage outwards.

It is also, however, a good way of absolving us from tackling the harder questions, much closer to home, or requiring more difficult practical action. The actors who matter are powerful and elsewhere, which limits our own direct responsibility to do more than yell from a safe distance.

We all have limited energy at the best of times, and right now most of us are depleted. Directing our energy at global injustice, while ignoring more local problems, feels wrong to me. We actually have vaccines and knowledge and hard work to do right now. Nobody else can or will do that work for us.

Perhaps this is why such anger is so attractive though.  If the problems are all global, we don’t have to look at our own broken health systems, venal politicians diverting COVID-19 relief funds, or the real challenge of addressing rumours that have spread over the past year about vaccine side effects. We can ignore the failings of our own leaders, who hold rallies and threaten our citizens, if our true enemies are global ones.

Anger directed at outside factors also prevents us from taking a hard look at how fragmented we ourselves are. While life-threatening famine was raging in large parts of Kenya, Nairobi was worried about cancelling Christmas parties and flight bans.

If you are reading this, you probably inhabit a tiny, relatively privileged bubble, just as I do.  Even those of us who want to improve vaccine access have little idea what is happening in other parts of the country. It is harder still to know how to help.

Fanon never wanted colonialism — or the struggle against colonialism — to define us, taking on a simplistic crusading missionary zeal ourselves.

~~~

I’ve been organising civil society work around COVID-19 for much of the year, but I’m struck by how few people are able to volunteer their time and energy. We are all exhausted, but it feels deeper than that.

In India, one genuine problem was that so many people wanted to get involved, which created lots of duplication and confusion, as so many people reinvented the same wheels, and made the same mistakes.

South Africa also has a much stronger civil society response than I have seen here. Kenya is one of the few places I know where activists are treated with suspicion. This feels like the shadow of both colonialism, and Jomo Kenyatta’s and Moi’s authoritarian rule. Repression and fear were normalised. Kenya suffered from atmospheric violence. The few brave activists became lightning rods — but with little support from those for whom they organised.

No country in the world had massive health service capacity in reserve, ready for a pandemic. A massive civil society effort has been needed everywhere but I simply have not seen one in Kenya. We are rightly frustrated at the incompetence and the colonial threats of our own Ministry of Health, but we are not yet willing to roll up our sleeves and get involved where we see obvious gaps. We complain loudly — but that is all we do.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor talks of silence as one of Kenya’s official languages.

I feel that that silence has been breaking over the past decade. Kenyans are more forthright, more outspoken and more critical. The internet has helped many to speak up, and to find kindred spirits. There is also a lot of buried historical baggage to process, and economic frustration and inequality, and injustice as well.

We are rightly frustrated at the incompetence and the colonial threats of our own Ministry of Health, but we are not yet willing to roll up our sleeves and get involved.

This is an important part of becoming a healthier society — one not cowed by power. We are growing up, from literally being treated as the children of the nation, which suited our rulers just fine. We have suffered the consequences of arrogant power for far too long.

We have difficult baggage to process, and the pandemic has added layers of fear and frustration. There is a lot we need to face, and mourn, but being angry is a distraction from that. I also see a hollow and defensive kind of pride, used as a shield against any kind of criticism.

These are ways of covering up our pain.

Anger is becoming our fourth official language.

This is dangerous — especially since 2022 will be an election year.

~~~

What is the alternative?

Well, vaccines are here, and will keep coming.

Kenya has more vaccines in fridges than we’ve used in total so far.

We have a national mobilisation project — to ensure all of our people are safe.

The narrative that we are wretched victims also ignores all the inconvenient good news. How did Morocco or Botswana manage to vaccinate so many of their populations?

Within Kenya itself, some counties are doing much better than others.

What could we learn from them?

Who are our local heroes?

Who needs our help?

~~~

We stand at the beginning of a New Year.

I actually think it will be a hopeful one, as far as the pandemic is concerned.

Even with new variants like Omicron, science is incredibly powerful. In particular, the mRNA platform is able to rapidly create new targeted vaccines.

There is also unprecedented global solidarity. Unlike during other previous crises, such as conflicts or famines, rich countries were the first to suffer the devastating consequences of the pandemic, so there is huge empathy. We can tell our stories online in compelling ways, and these stories resonate.

Even more than science and compassion, economically speaking, the world will put resources into ending the pandemic. Highly infectious diseases simply cannot be contained by travel restrictions. Our world is simply too interconnected and interwoven.

It is also an election year in Kenya. We can look at how politicians and governors have performed, and the state of their health programmes. This is the one time we have some leverage.

Anger is a call to action that we can channel into things that are more useful than empty, exhausting rage and the accompanying disempowering sense of victimhood. Action will be truly healing, as we find ways to take back control, after the helplessness of the past two years.

For some reason, we have also been lucky. The level of COVID deaths and serious illness in Kenya have been undercounted – but they still aren’t as high as in some other countries. This isn’t because of our excellent scientists (that’s southern Africa) or our experience with Ebola (west and central Africa). It may be demographics, geography, and exposure to other pathogens. The answer will probably be a mix of different factors.

So far, strangely enough, we’ve actually escaped the worst of it; we have simply not been the wretched of this pandemic. The worst of what I saw in India, and in many other countries, did not befall us. Our biggest challenge now is to get our own population vaccinated, with the now fairly available vaccines, so that we are better protected against new variants.

It may be demographics, geography, and exposure to other pathogens. The answer will probably be a mix of different factors.

We need to take a deep breath and take stock of where we actually are right now. Instead of fighting battles from last year, and knowing all that we now, what should be our focus?

~~~

Our next challenge is climate change, and that will be much harder. Especially for Africa.

We need to end this crisis, and in doing so, learn how to deal with our own fears and anger, our need for simple scapegoats, if we are to stand a chance of addressing the climate crisis.

COVID-19 was relatively minor, but it still shook our civilisations. Climate change is a truly existential threat.

Until recently, Greta Thunberg kept a filmed appeal to stop eating meat and dairy as the first item on her twitter account—she has been a vegan for half her life, so that is not surprising. Her message begins with pandemics but swiftly segues to climate change, as might be expected. (Assertions linking deforestation with pandemics are tenuous and speculative: there is no established link between COVID19 and deforestation or the wildlife trade.) The film was made by Mercy for Animals, which she thanks.

The film remained top of her twitter account for months. She has several million followers, so the value of the advertising she gave this little-known not-for-profit must run into millions of dollars. As opposition to livestock has become a major plank of climate activism, it is worth looking at how the world’s biggest climate influencer chooses to influence it.

Mercy for Animals is an American NGO with the stated purpose of ending factory farming because it is cruel to animals, a fact with which few would disagree. There are other reasons to shun factory-farmed meat as opposed to meat from animals raised on pasture, not least because some of the meat thus produced is subsequently heavily processed using unhealthy ingredients and then shipped long distances. The reason factory-farmed meat remains profitable is, obviously, because it is cheap and those who cannot afford expensive free range or organic have little other choice.

There is no doubt that factory farming is an industrial process that pollutes. There is also no doubt that an average Western—especially urban—diet contains a lot of unhealthy things, including too much meat. But whether or not folk who eat sensible amounts of local, organic meat and dairy, and try to stay fit and healthy, would have any significant impact on the planet’s climate by changing their diet is another matter, which I will come back to.

Mercy for Animal’s beliefs go much further than opposing animal cruelty. The organisation believes in speciesism or rather anti-speciesism, the idea that humans have no right to impose their will on other animals or to “exploit” them. It is a view that is shared by a growing number of people, especially vegans in the Global North. Thunberg goes as far as believing that only vegans can legitimately “stand up for human rights,” and wants non-vegans to feel guilty. Even more radical is Google founder, Larry Page, who reportedly thinks robots should be treated as a living species, just that they are silicon-based rather than carbon-based!

Whatever novel ideas anti-speciesists think up, no species would evolve without favouring its own. Our ancestors would never have developed their oversized brains if they had not eaten scavenged or hunted meat, and we have always lived in symbiosis with other animals, sometimes to the benefit of both. It seems likely that the wolf ancestors of dogs freely elected to live close to humans, taking advantage of our hearths and our ability to store game. In this, the earliest proven instance of domestication, perhaps each species exploited the other.

Having visited many subsistence hunters and herders over the last half century, I know that the physical – and spiritual – relationship they have with the creatures they hunt, herd or use for transport, is very different from that of most people (including me!). Most of us now have little experience of the intimacy that comes when people depend at first-hand on animals for survival.

Hunters, for example, often think they have a close connection with their game, and it is based on respect and exchange. A good Yanomami huntsman in Amazonia does not eat his own catch but gives it away to others. Boys are taught that if they are generous like this, the animals will approach them to offer themselves willingly as prey. Such a belief encourages strong social cohesion and reciprocity, which could not be more different from Western ideals of accumulation. The importance of individual cows to African herders, or of horses to the Asian steppe dwellers who, we think, started riding them in earnest, can be touchingly personal, and the same can be found all over the world.

Our ancestors would never have developed their oversized brains if they had not eaten scavenged or hunted meat

Everyone knows that many small children, if they feel safe, have an innate love of getting up close and personal to animals, and projects enabling deprived city kids to interact with livestock on farms can improve mental wellbeing and make children happier.

This closeness to other species is a positive experience for many, clearly including Thunberg; her film features her in an English animal sanctuary and cuddling one of her pet dogs. Those who believe speciesism is of great consequence, on the other hand, seem to seek a separation between us and other animals, whilst paradoxically advancing the idea that there is none. Animals are to be observed from a distance, perhaps kept as pets, but never “exploited” for people’s benefit.

Mercy for Animals does not stop at opposing factory farming. It is against the consumption of animal products altogether, including milk and eggs, and thinks that all creatures, including insects, must be treated humanely. Using animals for any “work” that benefits people is frowned upon. For example, the foundation holds the view that sheepdogs are “doubly problematic” because both dogs and sheep are exploited. It accepts, however, that they have been bred to perform certain tasks and may “experience stress and boredom if not given . . . work.” In a communication to me, the organisation has confirmed that it is also (albeit seemingly reluctantly) ok with keeping pets as they are “cherished companions with whom we love to share our lives”, and without them we would be “impoverished”. Exactly the same could be said for many working dogs of course.

Anyway, this not-for-profit believes that humans are moving away from using animals for anything, not only meat, but milk, wool, transport, emergency rescue, and everything else. It claims “several historical cultures have recognized the inherent right of animals to live . . . without human intervention or exploitation,” and thinks we are slowly evolving to a “higher consciousness” which will adopt its beliefs. It says this is informed by Hindu and Buddhist ideals and that it is working to “elevate humanity to its fullest potential.”

We all exalt our own morality of course, but professing a higher consciousness than those who think differently casts a supremacist shadow. The alleged connection with Indian religions is a common argument but remains debatable. The sacredness of cows, for example, is allied to their providing the dairy products widespread in Hindu foods and rituals. The god Krishna, himself a manifestation of the Supreme Being Vishnu, was a cattle herder. The Rig Veda, the oldest Indian religious text, is clear about their role: “In our stalls, contented may they stay! May they bring forth calves for us . . . giving milk.” Nearly a third of the world’s cattle are thought to live in India. Would they survive the unlikely event of Hindus converting to veganism?

Most Hindus are not wholly vegetarian. Although a key tenet of Hindu fundamentalism over recent generations is not eating beef, the Rig Veda mentions cows being ritually killed in an earlier age. The renowned Swami Vivekananda, who first took Hinduism and yoga to the US at the end of the 19th century and is hailed as one of the most important holy men of his era, wrote that formerly, “A man [could not] be a good Hindu who does not eat beef,” and reportedly ate it himself. Anyway, the degree to which cows were viewed as “sacred” in early Hinduism is not as obvious as many believe. The Indus Civilisation of four or five thousand years ago, to which many look for their physical and spiritual origins, was meat-eating, although many fundamentalist Hindus now deny it.

Vegetarians are fond of claiming well-known historical figures for themselves. In India, perhaps the most famous is Ashoka, who ruled much of the subcontinent in the third century before Christ and was the key proponent of Buddhism. He certainly advocated compassion for animals and was against sacrificial slaughter and killing some species, but it is questionable whether he or those he ruled were actually vegetarian.

We all exalt our own morality of course, but professing a higher consciousness than those who think differently casts a supremacist shadow.

Whatever Ashoka’s diet included, many Buddhists today are meat-eaters like the Dalai Lama and most Tibetans—rather avid ones in my experience—and tea made with butter is a staple of Himalayan monastic life. Mercy for Animals however remains steadfast to its principles, asserting, “Even (sic!) Jewish and Muslim cultures are experiencing a rise in animal welfare consciousness.”

Mercy for Animals might look at how racists have supported animal rights over the last hundred years, sometimes cynically and sometimes not. “Concern for animals can coexist with a strong strain of misanthropy, and can be used to demonise minority groups as barbaric, uncivilised and outdated . . . in contrast to supposedly civilised, humane Aryans. . . . The far right’s ventures into animal welfare is sometimes coupled with ‘green’ politics and a form of nature mysticism.”

Mercy for Animals was founded by Milo Runkle, a self-styled “yogi” who lives in Los Angeles. He was raised on an Ohio farm and discovered his calling as a teenager on realising the cruelty of animal slaughter. He is now an evangelical vegan who believes an “animal-free” meal is, “an act of kindness”. He is also a keen participant in the billion-dollar Silicon Valley industry trying to make and sell “meat and dairy” made from plants, animal cells and chemicals. He is a co-founder of the Good Food Institute and sits on the board of Lovely Foods. Like others in the movement, he rejects the term “fake” and insists that the products made in factories—that are supported by billionaires like Richard Branson and Bill Gates—are real meat and dairy, just made without animals.

The multi-million dollar Good Food Institute is also supported by Sam Harris, a US philosopher who came to prominence with his criticism of Islam, which he believes is a religion of “bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behaviour”, and constitutes “a unique danger to all of us.”

Ersatz animal products are of course ultra-processed, by definition. They use gene modifications, are expensive, and produce a significant carbon footprint, although figures for the gasses emitted for any type of food depend on thousands of variables and are extremely complex to calculate. The numbers bandied about are often manipulated and should be viewed with caution, but it seems that the environmental footprint of “cultivated meat” may actually be greater than that of pork or poultry.

Is opposing livestock—and not just factory farming—and promoting veganism and fake meat and dairy a really effective way of reducing environmental pollution? Few people are qualified to assess the numerous calculations and guesses, but it is clear that there are vastly different claims from the different sides in the anti-livestock debate. They range from it contributing some 14 per cent of greenhouse gases, to a clearly exaggerated 50 per cent—and the fact that livestock on pasture also benefits the atmosphere is rarely mentioned by its critics. Thunberg plumps for a vague “agriculture and land use together” category, which she thinks accounts for 25 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, but which of course includes plants. It is also important to realise that some grazing lands are simply not able to produce human food other than when used as animal pasture. Take livestock out of the picture in such places, and the amount of land available for food production immediately shrinks.

In brief, some vegetarians and vegans may produce higher greenhouse gas emissions than some omnivores—it all depends on exactly what they consume and where it is from. If they eat an out-of-season vegetable that has travelled thousands of miles to reach their plate, it has a high carbon footprint. The same thing, grown locally in season, has a much lower carbon footprint. If you are in Britain and buy, for example, aubergines, peas, beans, asparagus, or Kenyan beans, you are likely consuming stuff with a high environmental impact.

Mercy for Animals might look at how racists have supported animal rights over the last hundred years, sometimes cynically and sometimes not.

In any event, there is no doubt that a locally sourced, organically raised—or wild—animal is an entirely different creature from one born and living in a factory on the other side of the world. There is also no doubt that the factory version could be a legitimate target for climate activism. So could the felling of established forests, whether it is for cattle, animal feed or any number of things.

*

Why should anyone who does not want real meat or dairy want to eat an expensive lookalike made entirely in a factory? Is it mere taste, habit, or virtue signalling? Few would dispute that the food we eat is at the centre of our identity. This has long been recognised by social scientists, and is in plain sight in the restaurant quarter of every city, everywhere in the world. “You are what you eat” is also as scientific as it is axiomatic.

Diet is central to many religions, and making people change what they eat, whether through the mission, schoolroom, or legal prohibitions, has long been a significant component in the colonial enterprise of “civilising the natives”. Many traditional indigenous diets are high in animal protein, are nutrient-rich, and are low in fat or high in marine sources of fat. Restricting the use of traditional lands and prohibiting hunting, fishing and trapping—as well as constant health edicts extolling low animal fat diets—have been generally disastrous for indigenous people’s wellbeing, and this is particularly noticeable in North America and Australia. The uniquely notorious residential schools in North America, where indigenous children were taken from their families and forced into a deliberately assimilationist regime, provided children with very little meat, or much of anything for that matter. Many died.

Western campaigns around supposedly improving diet go far beyond physical welfare. For example, the world’s best known breakfast cereal was developed by the Seventh Day Adventist and fiercely vegetarian Kellogg brothers in 1894. They were evangelical about the need to reduce people’s sex drive. Dr Kellogg advocated a healthy diet of his Corn Flakes, which earned him millions. He separately advised threading silver wire through the foreskin and applying acid to the clitoris to stop the “doubly abominable” sin of masturbation. Food choices go beyond animal cruelty or climate change!

The belief that meat-eating—particularly red meat—stimulates sexual desire and promotes devilish masturbation is common in Seventh Day Adventism, a religion founded in the US in the 1860s out of an earlier belief called Millerism. The latter held that Christ would return in 1844 to herald the destruction of the Earth by fire. Seventh Day Adventism is a branch of Protestantism, the religion that has always underpinned American attitudes about material wealth being potentially allied to holiness. I have written elsewhere on how Calvinist Protestant theology from northern Europe underpins the contemporary notion of a sinful humankind opposing a divine “Nature”, and it is noteworthy that Seventh Day Adventism starts at exactly the same time as does the US national park movement in the 1860s.

Restricting the use of traditional lands and prohibiting hunting, fishing and trapping have been generally disastrous for indigenous people’s wellbeing.

Although this is not widely known by the general public, Seventh Day Adventism is one of the world’s fastest growing religions, and has sought to push its opposition to meat into wider American attitudes for over a century. For example, the American Dietetic Association was co-founded by a colleague of Kellogg, Lenna Cooper, in 1917. It evolved into the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and is now the world’s largest organisation of nutrition and dietetics practitioners.

Protestants figuring out what God wants humans to eat dates from before Seventh Day Adventism. The famous founder of Methodism, John Wesley, did not eat meat; some years after he died, a few of his followers started the vegetarian Bible Christian Church in England’s West Country. They sent missionaries to North America a generation before the foundation of Seventh Day Adventism and were also closely involved in establishing the Vegetarian Society in England in 1847—three years after Christ did not come to end the world with fire as originally predicted. It was this society that first popularised the term “vegetarian”. In 1944, a hundred years after that non-appearance of Christ, the word “vegan” was coined.

Fundamentalist Christians might believe that humankind’s supposedly vegan diet in the Garden of Eden should be followed by everyone, and that is obviously open to question from several points of view. What is clearer, and worth repeating, is that the “normal” Western urban diet, particularly North American, contains a lot of highly processed factory foods and additives and is just not great for human health.

In 1944, a hundred years after that non-appearance of Christ, the word “vegan” was coined.

It is also true that, in spite of generations of colonialism trying to erode people’s food self-sufficiency, hundreds of millions of people still depend on eating produce—animal as well as vegetable—which is collected, hunted, caught or herded by their own hands, or by others close by, often sustainably and organically. Perhaps rather paradoxically, Thunberg visited Sami reindeer herders the year before her Mercy for Animals film. They are recognised as indigenous people in her part of the world and are about as far from veganism as is possible. They not only eat the reindeer, including its milk, cheese and blood, but also consume fish, moose and other animals. As far as I know, there are no indigenous peoples who vegan anywhere in the world.

Like the Sami, about one quarter of all Africans depend on sustainable herding, and the pastoralists in that continent have an enviable record of knowing how to survive the droughts that have been a seasonal feature in their lives for countless generations. It is also the case that pasturelands created or sustained by their herds are far better carbon sinks than new woodlands.

Some wild as well as domesticated animal species feed a lot of people. In spite of conservationist prohibitions and its relentless demonisation, “bushmeat” is more widespread than is admitted and remains an important nutritional source for many Africans. Denigrating it has an obviously racist tone when compared to how “game” is extolled in European cuisine. If you are rich, you can eat bushmeat, if you are poor, you cannot.

Many do not realise that bushmeat is openly served in African restaurants, particularly in South Africa and Namibia, the countries with by far the highest proportion of white citizens. During the hunting season, no less than 20 per cent of all (red) meat eaten is from game with, for example, ostrich, springbok, warthog, kudu, giraffe, wildebeest, crocodile and zebra all featuring on upmarket menus. Meanwhile, poor Africans risk fines, beatings, imprisonment or worse if they hunt the same creatures. When “poachers” are caught or shot, Western social media invariably erupts with brays of how they deserve extreme punishment.

Some conservationists would like to end both herding and hunting and, even more astonishingly, advocate for Africans to eat only chicken and farmed fish. In real life, any step towards that luckily unattainable goal would result in an increase in malnutrition, in the profits of those who own the food factories and supply chains, and probably in greenhouse gas emissions as well.

Controlling people’s health and money by controlling their access to food has always featured large in the history of human subjugation. Laying siege was always a guaranteed way of breaking an enemy’s body and spirit. If most food around the world is to be produced in factories—like fake meat and dairy—then the factory owners will control human life. The drive to push small-scale hunters, herders and farmers off their land, supposedly for rewilding or conservation, is a step towards that ruin.

The clamour against meat and dairy goes far beyond opposition to factory farming, and that is the problem. Of course, there is nothing wrong with celebrating vegetarianism and veganism, but claiming they are a product of a higher consciousness or morality, and labelling those who do not follow the commandment as cruel or guilty if they stick to their existing diet, as Thunberg and Runkle do, turns them into religious beliefs. These invariably encompass fundamentalist undertones that can tip all too easily into violence against non-believers.

Some vegans go beyond persuasion, and try to force others to their belief whether they like it or not. One way in which they do this is by raiding factory farms illegally to “liberate” the animals, as Milo Runkle did, or they engage in other low-level vandalism like spray-painting meat and cheese shops or breaking windows, or go further and wreck vehicles. The fact that the most extremist animal rights activists—usually referencing veganism—do all of this and a great deal more, including physical threats, arson, grave robbing (sic), and planting bombs, is unfortunately no invented conspiracy theory.

The most extreme protests involving firebombs and razor blades in letters are normally reserved for those who use animal tests in research. The homes of scientists are usually the targets, although other places such as restaurants and food processing plants are also in the firing line. One US study found that the activists behind the violence were all white, mostly unmarried men in their 20s. Their beliefs echoed those of many ordinary climate activists. They included supporting biodiversity; that humans should not dominate the earth; that governments and corporations destroy the environment; and that the political system will not fix the crisis.

An organisation called Band of Mercy (unrelated to Mercy for Animals) was formed in 1972 and renamed the Animal Liberation Front four years later. Starting in Britain, where by 1998 it had grown to become “the most serious domestic terrorist threat”, it spawned hundreds of similar groups in forty countries around the world. Membership is largely hidden but they do seek publicity—in one year alone, they claimed responsibility for 554 acts of vandalism and arson.

Of course, moderate vegans are not responsible for the violence of a small minority, but history shows that where there are lots of people looking for a meaningful cause, some will support those they latch onto in extreme ways. In brief, there is a problematic background to opposing meat and dairy that should be faced. Big influencers must accept a concomitantly big responsibility in choosing what to endorse. The most powerful influencers who demonise anything must be sensitive to the inevitability of extremist interpretations of their message.

The drive to push small-scale hunters, herders and farmers off their land, supposedly for rewilding or conservation, is a step towards that ruin.

We know that digital communication is a new and effective way of stoking anger that can lead to violence. For example, the risk that Muslims in India today might be murdered by Hindu fundamentalists if they are even suspected of eating beef seems to have increased with the proliferation of social media. Characterising a meal as cruel if it includes meat or even dairy, as Runkle wants us to, could be used to stoke deadly flames far from his West Coast home.

More broadly, well off influencers trying to make others feel guilty about what they eat should be careful about unintended consequences. Disordered eating damages many people, especially young girls who already face challenges around their transition to adulthood. In addition to everyday teenage angst and biology, they are faced with the relentless scourge of social media, now with eco- and COVID19-anxiety as added burdens. In a rich country like the UK, suicide has become the main cause of death for young people. In that context, telling people they are guilty sinners if they carry on eating what they, or their parents, have habitually eaten could set off dangerous, cultish echoes.

On another level, corporations and NGOs should stop trying to deprive people of any food self-sufficiency they might have left, and stop kicking them off their territories and into a dependence on factories from which the same corporations profit.

The obvious lesson from all this is to eat locally produced organic food as much as possible, if one can. That is a good choice for health, local farming, sustainability, and reducing pollution. Those who want to might also choose to eat less meat and dairy, or none at all. That is a good choice for those who oppose animal slaughter, believe milk is exploitation, or decide that vegan is better for them. However, claiming veganism means freedom from guilt and sin and is a key to planetary salvation is altogether different and, to say the least, open to question.

Thunberg’s core message in her Mercy for Animals film is “We can change what we eat”, although she admits that some have no choice. In reality, choosing what to eat is an extraordinarily rare privilege, denied to most of the world’s population, including the poor of Detroit and Dhaka. The world’s richest large country has 37 million people who simply do not have enough to eat, of anything; six million of these Americans are children. Those lucky enough to possess the privilege of choice do indeed have an obligation to use it thoughtfully. In that respect anyway, Thunberg is right.

African universities have had complex and contradictory experiences with internationalization rooted in colonial and postcolonial histories and the international division of intellectual labor. Africa’s insertion and positioning in the global knowledge economy have largely been characterized by marginality spawned by asymmetrical and unequal relations with the global centers. This leads to a paradox. Because of the histories of colonial and postcolonial dependence and underdevelopment, African higher education is simultaneously highly internationalized and the most internationally peripheral system.

Some of the challenges and opportunities for higher education internationalization in general and for African universities specifically have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this presentation, I would like to explore possible new directions that may develop in the post-COVID era. I have argued in a series of essays and books, including most recently, The Transformation of Global Higher Education: 1945-2015 (2016) and Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-first Century (2021) that the motivations and rationales of higher education internationalization are as multifaceted as the institutional contexts and actors are diverse.

Some of my next remarks in the next few paragraphs are derived from a chapter in my latest book. For the rest of the presentation, I seek to explore, rather tentatively as the pandemic continues to ravage economies, health care systems, organizations and institutions including universities around the world, the systemic fractures, hierarchies, and inequalities in higher education internationalization and some of the opportunities for imagining and investing in different processes, patterns, and practices that could be more equitable and mutually beneficial for African countries and universities and their global partners.

Anatomy of Internationalization

The incentives and justifications for higher education internationalization are variously articulated at national, sectoral, and institutional levels. They include national development and demographic imperatives. For decades internationalization has followed the historic trails and reproduced the unequal flows of people, programs, and paradigms between and the global South and the global North, the polite bureaucratic terminology for the old imperial metropoles and their former colonial dependencies.

For the developed countries higher education internationalization is part of their arsenal of global soft power, while the developing countries value it for its potential to build high quality human capital. For example, it was reported in October 2021 that “France is strengthening partnerships with the African higher education sector – a move perceived to be part of a broader strategy of higher education diplomacy, or ‘soft power’ aimed at strengthening African alliances to serve France’s cultural, economic and political agendas.” Among the initiatives launched was “a five-year €130 million (about US$151 million) fund to support African digital start-ups through the Digital Africa initiative… a three-year €30 million fund for democracy in Africa, in which African universities could play an important part. In addition, a ‘House of African worlds and diasporas’, will be established.” All paltry gestures and homage to the tired discourse of foreign aid.

For its part, also in October, “The British Council has announced the names of nine South African universities that were awarded grants under the Innovation for Africa project, which is part of its Going Global Partnerships program… The project, which is university-driven and learning- and networking-focused, is designed to support the development of Africa-UK university partnerships that build institutional capacity for higher engagement in entrepreneurship.”

Demographic pressures vary but reinforce these demands. Internationalization provides an important outlet for excess and specialized demands for higher education from the emerging economies and countries of the global South with their bulging youthful populations. At the same time, in the increasingly aging countries of the global North, importing students from the global South is critical to universities facing a youth demographic squeeze.

For the higher education sector, there is an assortment of economic, political, social, cultural, and academic imperatives and rationales. Economically, internationalization is often justified in terms of preparing students for careers in a globalized economy, enhancing national development and competitiveness, and as a means of generating extra-institutional income. Politically, it is valorized for promoting international understanding, global citizenship, and intercultural competency in an increasingly polarized and dangerous world. Its sociocultural imperative lies in the need to cultivate intercultural literacy in progressively multicultural societies.

There are also specific institutional rationales. Many universities pursue internationalization for financial reasons, as a critical revenue stream, since foreign students tend to be charged higher fees than local students are. It is maintained that internationalization facilitates inter-institutional co-operation, competition, and comparison, which can enhance the quality of higher education by compelling institutions to meet or rise to international standards. In a globalized world, internationalization is seen as an indispensable part of institutional recognition and branding, an essential attribute and asset in the intensifying competition for talented students, faculty, resources, and reputational capital among universities within and among countries.

Surveys conducted by the International Association of Universities including the latest undertaken in 2018 show that more than 90% of respondents mention internationalization as a priority in their strategic plans. The most important expected benefits of internationalization included “Enhanced international cooperation and capacity building” and “Improved quality of teaching and learning.” The main institutional risk identified was that “International opportunities [were] accessible only to students with financial resources,” followed by “Difficulty to assess/ recognize quality of courses/programs offered by foreign institutions,” and “Excessive competition with other higher education institutions.”

The incentives and justifications for higher education internationalization are variously articulated at national, sectoral, and institutional levels. They include national development and demographic imperatives

At the societal level, the main risks to internationalization were “Commodification and commercialization of education programs” as well as “Brain drain.” Institutional leaders were seen as the main internal drivers, while externally it was “Business and industry demand”, “Demand from foreign higher education institutions”, and “Government policy”. As for obstacles, they include “Insufficient financial resources,” followed by “Administrative/bureaucratic difficulties,” “Lack of knowledge of foreign languages,” and “Difficulties of recognition and equivalences of qualifications, study programs and course credits.”

In all regions the most critical internationalization activity remains student mobility, followed by strategic partnerships, and international research collaboration. Many institutions have identified geographic priorities for internationalization. To quote the report, “Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America are considered priority regions by all other regions, while Asia & Pacific is the top priority region for North American HEIs and the second most important region for European HEIs. Africa and the Middle East were identified as priority regions only by their own institutions who replied to the Survey.” Sehoole and Lee show that not all internationally mobile African students want to go to the global North; they prefer the comforts of familiarity in studying in other African countries that have quality education such as South Africa. Overall, North American responses in the IAU report diverged from the global norm, and there were some differences within regions as well.

Historically, higher education internationalization has entailed the flows of people, programs, and paradigms. When it comes to people the focus has largely been on student flows, and far less on faculty mobility. Globally, student mobility has been decidedly unequal. According to UNESCO Institute of Statistics datasets, the number of outbound international students rose from 4.8 million in 2015 to 6.1 million in 2019, the latest date for which data is available. It is important to note that internationally mobile students represent a small proportion of tertiary students, a mere 2.2% in 2015 and 2.6% in 2019.

The largest share of internationally mobile is claimed by Asia 2.4 million or 50.2% of the world total in 2015, which rose to 3.1 million in 2019 (51.8%). Europe came next accounting for 919,192 in 2015 (19.2%) and 1,001,931 in 2019 (16.52%) in 2019. Africa accounted for 510,491 (10.7%) in 2015 and 577,308 (9.5%) in 2019. The share for Latin America was 285,451 (6.0%) and 386,532 (6.4%) and for Northern America 132,161 (2.8%) and 152,541 (2.5%), respectively.

The script is flipped when it comes to inbound internationally mobile students. Europe and North America claimed the lion’s share. In 2015, Europe received 1.95 million international students (40.9%), while Northern America got 1.08 million (22.6%), or a combined total for the two regions of 63.44% of the world total. Asia increased its share numerically from 999,348 (29.9%) to 1.5 million (24%). Africa’s share declined from 226,155 (4.7%) to 224,312 (3.7%). Latin America and the Caribbean received 162,511 international students in 2015 and 239,769 in 2019. Oceania, principally Australia and New Zealand, which exported very few students (29,610 in 2015 and 31,285 in 2019) received 359,434 in 2015 and 570,180 in 2019.

In each of these regions there were notable differences. The bulk of Europe’s mobile students went to other European countries. In Asia, China, Japan, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates dominated. In Africa, South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco claimed a disproportionate share. Globally, the United States led followed by the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, and China. Several countries benefited from the anti-immigration backlash of the Trump administration in the US and Brexit in Britain. In July 2021, the Biden administration called for “Renewed U.S. Commitment” to international education in an unprecedented joint statement issued by the Departments of Education and State that promised to reverse policies of the Trump Administration and outlined a comprehensive national strategy.

The Disruptions of COVID-19

The outbreak of the COVID-19 at the turn of 2021 led to the closures of educational institutions from primary schools to universities around the world. Internationalization in the form of physical mobility was brought to a screeching halt. In many countries international students found themselves stranded as campuses closed, unable to go home, study, and work in their countries of residence. Some were subjected to increased racist abuse, scapegoating, xenophobia, and hate speech stoked by right wing populist politicians and pundits for whom foreigners, especially those from China and other parts of Asia and the global South, whose presence and bodies were pathologized as diseased and deadly vectors of the pandemic. Students planning to go abroad languished at home as their dreams of overseas study were unceremoniously postponed.

Familiar international engagements froze as travel restrictions led to cancellations and rescheduling of professional conferences, research collaborations became harder to pursue as the academic world moved to Zoom, organizations supporting the mobility of students and scholars became paralyzed, and retrenchments by cash-strapped institutions threatened the livelihoods, well-being, and careers of academics. Doomsayers predicted the end of higher education internationalization as it had developed since World War II.

The pandemic is of course still unfolding its lethal effects and consequences on global economies and societies. Many higher education institutions are still grappling with its massive devastations. However, they have also increasingly learned to manage and navigate its disruptions, develop new modalities of teaching and learning, research and scholarship, public service and engagement, and as hubs of innovation and entrepreneurship. The capacities to contain the crisis and plan for a more resilient, robust, and promising future vary enormously between and within countries and institutions. Overall, African universities, and smaller and poorer universities elsewhere, have been the least effective in containing the destructive effects of the pandemic, and plan for reform and transformation; many of them wishfully and desperately hope for a magical restoration of the pre-COVID-19 era.

Demographic pressures vary but reinforce these demands. Internationalization provides an important outlet for excess and specialized demands for higher education from the emerging economies and countries of the global South with their bulging youthful populations

As an administrator, I witnessed this tragic fatalism among some academics at many universities in Kenya including my own and elsewhere on the continent, a pervasive and perverse denial that the pandemic was destined to usher profound changes. Keen to protect their already measly privileges they willfully wallowed in a seductive, blinding, facile, retrogressive and nostalgic hankering for the past to return. The past that some long to rehabilitate was of course no golden age. On the contrary, it was characterized by inequalities, exclusions, hierarchies, and asymmetries. In the case of Africa, it reproduced the marginalization of the continent’s universities, scholarly communities, and knowledge production systems.

I have maintained that COVID-19 should be harnessed as an accelerator for much-needed institutional change. One paper identified seven key transformations exacerbated that were underway: reduced resources, growing competition, the impact of the fourth industrial revolution, the changing nature of jobs, shifts in university demographics, growing public demands on universities, and, of course, the impact of COVID-19. The changes identified above have implications in six key areas for universities in Africa and elsewhere: rethinking the nature of academic programs; delivery of teaching and learning; human resources; resource mobilization and utilization; institutional partnerships; and the nature of leadership skills.

In another paper, I argued that what is at stake for some universities is survival, for others stability, and for many sustainability. Institutional survival is a precondition for stability which is essential for sustainability. Confronting the entire higher education sector is the question of its raison d’être, its value proposition in a digitalized world accelerated by COVID-19. I focused on four critical dimensions: promoting progressive digital transformation, effective leadership, strong institutional cultures, and sustainable funding for African universities. For the first two I proposed a dozen strategies for each, and for the last two seven strategies for each, respectively.

As an administrator, I witnessed this tragic fatalism among some academics at many universities in Kenya including my own and elsewhere on the continent, a pervasive and perverse denial that the pandemic was destined to usher profound changes. Keen to protect their already measly privileges they willfully wallowed in a seductive, blinding, facile, retrogressive and nostalgic hankering for the past to return

The twelve-point agenda for the digital transformation of universities was outlined in considerable detail in a lengthy article. In a keynote address at the quadrennial conference of the Association of African Universities, I crystallized many of my reflections, arguing that quality higher education was indispensable for Africa’s future.

My propositions are not simply based on the appealing aphorisms that opportunity is the flip side of crisis, or that a crisis is too valuable to waste. It arises out of my reading of history as a historian, which shows that moments of global emergencies including pandemics give added impetus to trends already underway and serve to reshuffle the international pecking order, competitiveness, and sustainability of power, socioeconomic systems, and institutions. Those who wish to recreate the past after a crisis as profound as the pandemic are doomed to remain frozen as others charge past them to the future spawned by that very crisis.

For higher education institutions the changes will include the modes of internationalization that have prevailed for decades. During the pandemic universities have generally showed, contrary to their purported aversion to change, an incredible capacity to embrace reform by using digital technologies and experiment with new modalities of delivering teaching, research and support services for students, faculty, and staff.

For example, progressive universities have adopted “virtual internships and exchanges, navigating shifting enrollment patterns and student markets and reconsidering best practices in student services. While a certain measure of retrenchment and re-direction is inevitable in the short term, this pandemic is also presenting opportunities for us to broaden the scope and direction of what we do in international education. Whether we welcome these opportunities or not, these changes could potentially move us in very positive and new directions, directions that we might have otherwise not realized or been slower to pursue.”

Rethinking Internationalization

I would like to propose an eleven-pronged agenda to rethink internationalization. None of what I say is new; it simply encapsulates trends that are both old and new. First, there is need for an expansive view of internationalization that integrates internationalization at abroad and at home and embraces internationalization of the curriculum and research. The former refers to curriculum integration that maximizes “students’ learning through international and intercultural experience.” It implies international exposure that is mediated through intentional interactions with local communities that have origins in different parts of the world and embedding global perspectives in the curriculum. “A pedagogy of encounter,” writes Leask and Green, “is a powerful concept because it does not rely on mobility. There are many opportunities to engage students in intercultural and global setting in class, on campus, and in local communities.”

This is an agenda for domestic and international intercultural engagement and understanding, for “border crossing” for all students rather than the privileged few who are able to travel abroad. After all, as noted earlier, only a tiny minority of tertiary students can study abroad. In terms of research, it entails valorizing equitable, transparent, and respectful practices of knowledge production and co-creation of research projects and agendas, and penalizing exploitative, fraudulent, and unprofessional behaviors. Student research, experiential and service learning, and international and virtual internships should be incorporated.

Second, promoting transformative technology-enhanced partnerships through inter-institutional collaborations and consortia that offer innovative enrollment opportunities for students, online program management, virtual and in-person internships, quality assurance and more seamless credit transfer. The widespread adoption and acceptance of emerging digital technologies and online communication and learning platforms and scholarly engagements forced by COVID-19, should be used by universities to develop effective mechanisms for collaborative online course development, curation and exchange through multi-institutional and transnational alliances, registries, and protocols. There are also opportunities for students to create and foster global online communities with those who share their curricular and co-curricular interests.

The development of immersive technologies of virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality offers incredible opportunities for virtual internationalization, foreign language learning, co-teaching, internships, and provision of student services. Particularly exciting are the possibilities of promoting transnational lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional education programs for all those seeking upskilling and reskilling with globally valued shorter degrees and micro-credentials as the nature of jobs and lifespans undergo massive changes upending the three-stage cycle of life (education-work-retirement) to a multi-stage cycle in which education and working life are continually intersected and retirement pushed further away.

At the societal level, the main risks to internationalization were “Commodification and commercialization of education programs” as well as “Brain drain.” Institutional leaders were seen as the main internal drivers, while externally it was “Business and industry demand”, “Demand from foreign higher education institutions”, and “Government policy”.

Given the wide inter- and intra- institutional disparities in access to these technologies it is critical to address the issue of enhancing the capabilities of disadvantaged institutions and communities through bilateral and multilateral forums and the mobilization of business, international and intergovernmental agencies, and philanthropic foundations and donors.

This underscores the third critical issue, how to finance sustainable and equitable internationalization among institutions and countries that sometimes have divergent economic resources and needs. In addition to aggressively sourcing external funding, international partnerships and projects it is critical to foster candid discussions and the development of pragmatic financial models and institutional investments. It entails rethinking student aid for dispersed students and many other financial aspects of the distributed university whose functions and impact are spread across domestic and international domains, and physical and virtual arenas.

Fourth, internationalization should focus more on building faculty and staff capabilities and collaborations, in addition to the traditional focus on student mobility and exchanges. Worldwide international faculty constitute a tiny minority of overall faculty and staff members. The IAU report revealed that “At 20% of HEIs there are no international academic staff members at all and at 34% the percentage of international academic staff is less than 5%. Latin America & the Caribbean is the region with the smallest percentage of international academic staff while Asia & Pacific and North America have the highest.” Internationalization of faculty must be a critical part of what Jane Knight, the Canadian scholar calls ‘knowledge diplomacy,’ a term she deems broader than “cultural diplomacy,” “science diplomacy,” or “education diplomacy;” it refers to the deployment of internationalization to build a horizontal two-way process of bilateral and multilateral inter-institutional relations that is so essential in tackling pressing global challenges.

Institutional indifference, ignorance, xenophobia, and racism often militate against the effective internationalization of faculty and staff. This is as true of countries in the global North as it is in the global South as I know from personal experience working over the past four decades in Canada, the US, Jamaica, and Kenya, where I was ‘othered’ on racial or national grounds. The IAU report continues, “International experience is valued at the majority of HEIs, but it is considered more an added value than a fundamental requirement, and there is still a substantial group of HEIs (30%) where international experience is not perceived as something important for hiring and promoting academic staff. International experience seems to be highly valued in the Middle East but very little so in North America. In other regions, it seems to be valued more in Asia & Pacific and Europe than in Africa and Latin America & the Caribbean.”

Universities that are serious about internationalization should seek to employ more international faculty. They should also collaborate in capacitating each other in their human resources in terms of faculty development and leadership opportunities in ways that are mutually beneficial and leverage on their respective assets. This is to stress the importance of building partnerships from an asset-based mindset, not a deficit-based mindset, in which the focus is on the potential each brings to the partnership, rather than the problems. This is a particularly pernicious problem in North-South partnerships in which the currency is material wealth and brand, rather than possibilities of forging social transformation that comes from connectedness, cross-fertilization, and mutuality that encompasses equity, autonomy, solidarity, and participation.

This leads to the fifth challenge and opportunity we must confront, namely, promoting ethical internationalization. This means pursuing inclusive internationalization in line with the increasingly popular discourses of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging on North American and European campuses, although they are often championed more in rhetoric than practice. We must always ask, how do we integrate students, faculty and staff from marginalized communities, countries, and intellectual traditions in internationalization endeavors that are holistic, rigorous, robust, and transformative? The ethics of internationalization also entails sharing the results of international research, experiences, and interventions widely with the scholarly communities and societies on which the knowledges were produced and being purposeful in making meaningful contribution to society as part of a comprehensive knowledge management process.

Furthermore, ethical internationalization calls for what Luciane Stallivieri calls balance that seeks mutual reciprocity and cooperation regarding “geographic location; valuing different languages for the purposes of teaching, not just English; promoting South-South partnerships to enhance the knowledge produced in other parts of the planet; and creating an equilibrium with regard to incoming and outgoing mobility. Internationalization goals should be based on equal opportunities, symmetry, equivalence of interests and a focus on the equilibrium of international activities, especially when we design our internationalization plans and policies.” This implies institutional and intellectual accountability and integrity. These efforts must be part of the larger agenda of what some call decolonizing international partnerships, stripping them of enduring imbalances bequeathed from the histories of imperialism and colonialism.

Sixth, smart internationalization as Damtew Teferra, the renowned Ethiopian HE scholar calls it, requires integrating internationalization in institutional mission, values, strategic plan, budgeting priorities, and culture. It entails university administrations taking the leadership, the university community developing a shared understanding and commitment, engaging and mobilizing faculty and staff, and developing dual purposing resource strategies in which existing programs are enriched by incorporating internationalization initiatives and orientations.

The issue of differential tuition for domestic and international students is part of the calculus of dumb and smart internationalization. Many universities in North America, Europe, and Australasia impose much higher tuition on international students sometimes as much as four times. They rake in billions—$45 billion in the US in 2018, $15.5 billion in Canada in 2016, £22.6 billion in the UK in 2015/16, and $37.6 billion in Australia in 2018 according to official data. These revenues help many a university to balance their books and subsidize domestic students.

Treating foreign students as “cash cows” raises troubling moral questions and is unsustainable. Some studies indicate that “evidence from tuition fee reforms for international students suggests that the number of international students coming to a country can fall dramatically following an increase in tuition fees. For example, Denmark (in 2006) and Sweden (in 2011) introduced tuition fees for international students from outside the European Economic Area and experienced a sharp decline in the number of international students, by 20% and 80% respectively.” However, in the United States when the Big Ten Academic Alliance of research intensive universities raised tuition by 29% between 2007-2008 and 2014-15, they experienced “an increase of 74% in international student enrollment.”

This underscores different markets and institutions attract different types of international students. Choudaha and de Wit distinguish between “explorers” and “highflyers” who have resources and “strugglers” and “strivers” who are more price sensitive. The main Asian markets of India and China will increasingly dry up as these countries build world class universities following the path of earlier major exporters of students, namely, Japan and South Korea. The bourgeoning African market does not have the levels of wealth as in Asia to replace the declining Asian market, notwithstanding the Africa Rising/Rising Africa narrative that finds increasingly fewer cheerleaders as African economies reel from pandemic generated recessions.

Fay Patel argues that COVID-19, which led to sharp declines in international student flows and demonization of foreign students as part of pandemic panic and hysteria, opens possibilities of what she calls “humanizing international higher education.” She believes this will be achieved through the “glocalization of learning partnerships and frameworks from the developing community perspective so that compassion, kindness and empathy will form the basis for shared co-construction of knowledge in a post-COVID-19 world.” She urges international student communities to lead this agenda.

For smart internationalization to progress, the onus is on universities in the global North and global South to put their own houses in order. This entails restoring healthy and sustainable public investment in higher education that fell into precipitous declines with the rise of neo-liberalism at the turn of the 1980s. In the United States student debt has rocketed to $1.6 trillion and is higher than credit card debt. In many African countries many universities are virtually bankrupt which manifests itself in dilapidated infrastructure, poor salaries, low morale, declining instructional quality, and depressed research productivity. The private universities that have mushroomed in recent years are often glorified high schools while the public ones are ethnic enclaves mired in pettiness, corruption, and toxic politics and averse to planning for the future. Internationalization must be built on the healthy trunks of robust, resilient, and responsible universities, not the flimsy reeds of unstable, indigent, insular, and intolerant institutions.

Seventh, as part of the internationalization agenda universities need to become stronger advocates for more progressive forms of globalization as the specter of de-globalization spreads its xenophobic tentacles. The pandemic has led to border closures and retreat into the imagined safety of national laagers and brutally exposed the fictions of national isolation and security as it marched relentlessly around the world across the imaginary divides of race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and other social inscriptions. Universities must, as noted in a report by the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean issued in March 2021, take “active responsibility for our common humanity, promoting well-being and sustainability, drawing strength from intercultural and epistemic diversity, and upholding and creating interconnectedness at multiple levels.”

Universities have a more immediate sectoral interest in developing systems for easier credit transfer and qualification recognition frameworks, especially as transnational multi-institutional partnerships expand. Various regional Higher Education Areas have been created. In November 2019, UNESCO adopted the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education, marking “the first United Nations treaty on higher education with a global scope. [It is] designed to facilitate international academic mobility and promote the right of individuals to have their higher education qualifications evaluated through a fair, transparent, and non-discriminatory manner… Moreover, it promotes the recognition of refugees’ qualifications, even in cases where documentary evidence is lacking.”

The latter follows the European Qualifications Passport for Refugees that “provides a tested method for assessing and describing qualifications that cannot be adequately documented.” This was an important move given the scale of global internally displaced and refugee flows, which reached 82.4 million in 2020 double the number in 2010 and higher than it has ever been. One of the initiatives I am most proud of during my tenure as Vice Chancellor at USIU-Africa was the $63.2 million scholarship program with the Mastercard Foundation that earmarked 25% of the recipients for forcibly displaced youths. Similar programs exist at several European and North American universities.

For example, progressive universities have adopted “virtual internships and exchanges, navigating shifting enrollment patterns and student markets and reconsidering best practices in student services. While a certain measure of retrenchment and re-direction is inevitable in the short term, this pandemic is also presenting opportunities for us to broaden the scope and direction of what we do in international education.

Eighth, there is need to interrogate the impact of rankings that have become increasingly influential and ubiquitous. They have helped sanctify global academic capitalism by generating fierce competition among universities in a relentless race for reputational status that validates the hegemony of institutions in the global North and the primacy of research often at the expense of teaching and learning and social impact. To be sure, the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings were introduced a few years ago to assess universities against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The indicators compare institutions across four broad areas: research, stewardship, outreach, and teaching. However, the impact of the traditional rankings in which the top performers trade places among themselves still hold sway.

Ninth, there is need to probe the growth of international research and its implications as evident in the expansion of publications with international co-authors, increased funding for international research through grants from international organizations, national agencies, and universities’ own resources. Commenting on a report by the EU titled Benefits and Costs of Transnational Collaborative Partnerships in Higher Education, Orosz and Carcium noted, “There is plenty of evidence that international research collaborations result in more and better publications and patents.”

What are the prospects for forging new modes of academic hospitality that promote productive intellectual exchange, creativity, symmetrical and collective pursuit and production of knowledge? The recent collapse of the prominent academic partnership between Yale University and Singapore National University coming on top of restrictions faced by other major American universities in China, and growing distrust of Chinese academics in the US, has raised questions about the sustainability of such collaborations in the face of geopolitical tensions and rivalries.

Tenth, the phenomenon of international program and provider mobility (IPPM), which constitutes a crucial leg in the internationalization enterprise triad, needs to be critically assessed. The growth of IPPM is evident in the establishment of “international branch campuses, international joint universities, joint and double degree programs, franchise arrangements and distance education.” In the UK, for example, 52% of all international students enrolled in a UK qualification awarding program take some of their program through IPPM provision.” In terms of IPPM host countries such as Mauritius approximately 43% “of all local students are enrolled in some type of IPPM. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Botswana 20 to 30 per cent of all local students are enrolled in IPPM courses.” Thus, programs and providers are increasingly moving to students rather than the other way.

Unfortunately, the growth of IPPM retain and reproduce the enduring asymmetric flows between the global North and global South. In the words of a report by the American Council of Education issued in 2014, “among the institutions surveyed, enrollment in joint and dual degree programs administered by U.S. institutions is heavily skewed towards students from the partner country; participation of American students is limited, and study participants were not optimistic that this situation is likely to change. Given this imbalance, collaborative degree programs may be more of a proxy for recruiting international students and are likely to contribute to the continuing “imbalance of trade” in outward and inward flows of students. The data also reveal geographic imbalances; partner institutions are concentrated in Europe and Asia, with almost no representation in Africa. These issues are worthy of note by institutions that wish to engage their U.S.-based students in international education and to establish truly collaborative, reciprocal relationships with a diversity of inter- national partners.”

The report concludes: “Comprehensive, integrated internationalization requires a holistic approach that includes attention to curriculum, faculty engagement, leadership, strategic planning, and other key areas. Partnerships that not only allow credit transfer back and forth, but truly engage faculty, staff, and students from both institutions around substantive issues such as curriculum design and instructional philosophies have the greatest potential to advance internationalization on all these fronts. Whether through joint degrees or other program models, establishing such in-depth collaborations will help U.S. institutions lay the groundwork for mutuality and sustainability in their international partnerships, and advance not only the internationalization of U.S. higher education but also the global higher education enterprise as a whole.” I couldn’t agree more.

Let me conclude by sharing brief reflections on an important aspect of internationalization, the eleventh agenda. As you might know or would appreciate from my personal and professional biography, as an African diaspora academic I put great premium on the role of the diaspora as an indispensable global partner in Africa’s development drive. This includes higher education. Not only have I written extensively on the subject, my research on the African academic diaspora led to the establishment of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP), whose success has exceeded expectations.

For example, to date, the program has sponsored nearly 500 African born academics in the United States and Canada to work with dozens of universities in six African countries that were selected. I firmly believe the African academic diaspora, both the new and historic diasporas, represent huge intellectual assets for the development and globalization of African knowledge economies. However, as is true in other realms of international relations, the relationship between academics on the continent and in the diaspora are exceedingly complex.

As I’ve noted in my own work and is clear in the recently published African Diaspora Toolkit these relations are characterized by collaboration and conflict, misunderstandings and mutuality, and inclusivity and indifference. They are conditioned by historic and prevailing institutional, intellectual, and ideological structures, systems, and values, as well as individual behaviors and attitudes that must be clearly understood and always negotiated and cultivated to ensure reciprocal benefits. African diaspora partnerships must be embraced as an integral part of the internationalization of African higher education. This is equally true of the global diasporas of other world regions.