From recent developments, it would appear that there are four contenders vying for ownership of Africa’s urban spaces: the international financial system, the operators of the informal economy, the new elite still holding on to the post-colonial dream of building shiny new metropolis, and finally: Mother Nature.

Beginning with the last: she only recently staked an angry claim to the low-lying areas of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, in a stunning six-hour rainstorm that overwhelmed the city’s road and drainage system. The usually congested evening commute traffic jam was escalated to a biblical disaster. On top of a resultant widespread power outage, large numbers of motorists had to spend the entire night marooned in their immobilised cars.

The nightmare of that evening became even more horrifying when many of those parents received news that their children were trapped in school-buses on their way home. With police cars, fire engines and ambulances also immobilized, those children spent much of the night inside the buses, watching the rising tides of rainwater inching up to bus-window level.

In the end, at least 10 city residents were reported to have died due to the floods, millions worth of property destroyed, and what remained of the city’s reputation as perhaps the most long-standing “modern” sub-Saharan city outside South Africa, had become bogged down in less than useful official explanations.

Perhaps the greatest indication of how devastating the incident has been was the very rare sight of a Kenyan public official –in this case the Governor of the City- actually making a public apology to hard-bitten Nairobeans.

The same scenario played out even in Accra in early June last year, and in Lagos. For the city-zens of Accra, the recent floods have had nasty political aftermath. When many pointed out that the flooding was the result of informal constructions along the city’s drainage system, the authorities diagnosed the problem to be the old Sodom and Gomorrah slum. Attempting to mow it down provoked the worst riots witnessed in the the city’s recent history.

Urbanisation is the dominant trend on the continent, albeit not as quickly as for other parts of the world. The key question therefore is no longer if, but rather: how, and to benefit whom? Who will be the owners and shapers of the emergent African urban spaces, and what will be their ambitions for it?

In his book, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries in the Pillage of a Continent, the radical Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano dissects the meaning of the patterns of infrastructure there, particularly the road and rail networks, to reveal a legacy of exploitative intent. The networks, he explains, were laid down in such a way as to primarily serve the extractive agenda of the imperial powers that brought them. In short, the roads and rail network were like slashed veins bleeding treasure from the interior out to the coast by the shortest possible route, for onward relaying back to Europe.

Similar questions could be raised about many major urban centres in Africa. In name and in nature, most seem to have been established in locations logical only from the perspective of the dominant empire of the day – whether Arab or European.

As Kenyan journalist Christine Mungai explains in her May 2015 Mail and Guardian article ‘Not just trees’, even the vegetation on these spaces was often initially imposed from other eco-spaces.

Many cities are the product of the process somewhere between initial encounter and eventual occupation, in the narrative of colonialism. Some, like Nairobi, were essentially way-stations along the continuing journey further into the interior.
Others were mission stations, or trading posts or the colonial forts near which the last battles that defeated then-to-be colonised natives were fought. In all events, they owe their existence more to the arrival of new power than to the aspirations of the old one.

It is for this reason that they tend to have European names – “Lagos” is Portuguese for “bay”, for example – or the names of the monarchs, founders (or of their spouses, and sometimes hometowns), favoured saints and even immediate bosses of the time, originally.

What they all tend to have in common is a spatial and cultural disregard for the sensibilities of the people among whom they were planted. The real native African urban settlements were often either subsumed into this new reality, or left to atrophy and die out in what became “upcountry” spaces.

Therefore, with very few exceptions, the contemporary idea of an urban space in Africa comes infused with notions of new beginnings, a thing quite separated from the past (of which the hinterland is seen as a remnant) and not really answerable to it in any tangible way.

The rising urban middle class fortifies this space. After all, it is a cultural value established by, and enshrined in the dreams of post-colonialism. A modern, buzzing city was the perfect symbol of one having earned one’s place in the modern world. Literally square pegs in round holes, our cities thus speak of our elite aspirations of arrival rather than as melting pots of genuine human interaction. As such, much of the work of city administration is a civilizing mission to discipline the unruly natives into fitting into the idea. It rarely ever works the other way around.

Nigerian journalist Dolapo Aina reflects this posture with his opinions on what ails Lagos, from its days as the capital. The space is wholly segregated between a settled wealthy elite whose water and power supplies long separated themselves from what the Nigerian state had to offer on the one hand, and a large mass of struggling poor, often newly arrived citizens referred to as “JJC” (Johnny Just Come). The clear inference here is that it is the duty of the JJC to conform to the norms of the city.

Policy for Kampala is currently being driven by a similar thought process. Whatever the future of the city, its current managers seem to feel that the presence of the urban poor, owners and operators of a vast informal economy, should not be part of it.

This makes one thing clear: the actors in the informal economy are the one category of claimant who find themselves in retreat. In a pattern reflecting what is happening also in some parts of major European cities, notably London, a process of “gentrification” is driving out the hawkers, stall-owners, low-income transporters from the more financially lucrative parts of the cities.

In what is essentially a more sustained expression of the same spasmodic impetus to rid the cities of their visible poor – usually the impulse for these Potemkin visions are provoked by the hurried preparations to host one international event or another – “idle and disorderly”, vagabonds, street beggars and other failed entrants to the modern project would, especially in the autocracies of the `70s and `80s, be forcibly rounded up and “disappeared” for the duration of the event.

The figurative descendants of those poor are the participants of the large informal economies – the anonymous millions of the sprawling megapolises we see today. Notably, they have become a distribution network of sorts for the massive influx of cheap manufactured goods flooding in from the factories of South Asia; and the tonnes of freshly harvested upcountry produce brought daily into the city. It is because of their capacity to endure transport hardships and pre-dawn market indignities; a certain native intelligence has developed, and is now deployed usually at below-market rates, to ‘push product’ down the capillaries of the system.

The modernists thinking holds a very determined vision to create cities that, in terms of infrastructure, architecture and amenities, would rival the post-colonial wonders of the Far East (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc.). The critical gap in this plan is frankly, the absence of large, more ruthlessly exploited natural resources and economies. The irony here is that the national state, acting on behalf of the local business elite, may have putative control but in real terms possesses neither the discipline nor the wherewithal to support such long-term capital investment.

This is indeed where another of the abovementioned potential “claimants” to the African urban space comes in. Chinese largesse aside, there is a growing appetite among the technocracies managing our cities to finance their new ambitions for large infrastructure projects by floating municipal bonds on the international markets.

South Africa’s Cape Town and Rwanda’s Kigali, as well as the venerable Addis Ababa have already done so, with the latter even being heavily oversubscribed. Kampala now seeks to get in on the act. The city’s technocrats recently made an application to have the national government allow them to issue bonds worth $500 million on the global market, according to the financial news agency Bloomberg.

Clearly, there will be a process to every option, And with every option, an attendant risk.

For those seeking the modern “shining city on a hill”, the price paid for this will be democracy and demographics. In Kampala it has led to the locking out of the hugely popular Mayor of Kampala City, who probably drew the largest-ever majority in the last election. Alarmed by his popular mandate, the national government swiftly replaced him with a selected city commissioner, whom they could more readily control.

Reports from Cape Town indicate a creeping, unspoken policy of fiscally – and therefore as a by-product, racially – resegregating the city.

For the global financial markets, this view of Africa’s urban spaces as viable loan destinations through the municipal bonds market may well presage the kind of scenarios that led to the Debt Crisis of the early 1980s – or closer to home, present-day Greece. Where national coffers were affected and citizens shocked into austerity, exposing cities to the vagaries of the international bonds markets well threatens the onset of a similar crisis.

Is anybody asking what ‘conditionalities’ were given for municipal loan repayments? How were the loans structured, and who will bear the cost of repayment?

A worst-case scenario may see beleaguered city governments employing brutal means to ensure uninterrupted (taxable) production, such as the 2012 bloody suppression of the miners strike at Marikana.

For the owners of the informal economy and its markets, the spectre of a new economic apartheid looms large: the creation of a regulatory regime that, deeming their ‘business models’ unsustainable,  will seek to banish them from the spaces they currently occupy.

And so in this emerging era of the privatized city, what is to happen to the urban poor? Can a city really exist without them? After decades of practice inspired by a similar “brave new world” ethos, modern medicine has come to realise the importance of balance. The mass use of antibiotics has precipitated a crisis in how the human body manages infection. Put simply, western and westernized bodies were becoming so internally sanitised that the entry of any foreign organism could set off a physical crisis. This has led to the practice of “probiotics”, whereby organisms once considered to be merely germs, are actually re-introduced to the over-sanitised body so as to revive the patients natural resistance system.

A parallel can be drawn with the thinking that the “un-rich” automatically constitute a blight on the cityscape. Just as the body needs what were mistakenly regarded as mere germs, a living city may also need low-income citizens, and less-than-aesthetically-pleasing settlements, to keep the economy healthy.

Those who feel nature must make way for “progress”, seem to still be guided by the thinking of the industrial revolution which guided the original planners of the colonial cities who planted them right on top of spaces that should have best been avoided.

Much of eastern and southern Kampala – also a city prone to floods – is actually drained and filled-in swampland and waterways, as even the original local language place-names imply. A similar situation existed in Lagos where a collection of swampy islands became joined together in decades of traffic-jammed misery, until the KAYEMBA people seven hundred kilometres to the north, were displaced to enable the creation of the new capital Abuja in 1991.

With the arrival of the aspirational, and even acquisitive and avaricious middle class, this process is also gradually continued on a retail basis, with well-connected individuals now encroaching on the remaining river basins, swamps, urban woodlands and nominally “protected areas”.
As many angry commentators on Nairobi social media pointed out, this was the primary cause of the devastating floods that paralysed the city. Encroach and build where you may, they pointed out, but rainwater will still insist on finding its level.

Compounding an error, by building further on the places created by another culture for very different imperatives, may not be the wisest of the decisions that modern Africa’s governments are committing to.

Alternatively, there could emerge a leadership that seeks to respect each ambition, and find a happy medium between them, by first addressing the question: what are these cities for, and how will they feed and maintain themselves? However, the necessary re-think – which compels us all to reconsider our assumptions about what “development” should actually mean in the African context – may threaten many of these entrenched interests.

As for Mother Nature, She will continue to rain on all of man’s aspirations.

A few years ago, I noticed an interesting phenomenon in the profile of applicants for language faculty positions. A number of degree holders had studied, especially in the UK, language teaching, rather than linguistics or education. This meant that the interviews revealed gaps in the candidates’ theoretical and technical grasp of either field.

​An additional phenomenon, which was more worrying, was that when we asked some about their PhD aspirations, some of the applicants were not interested in pursuing their discipline. Some wanted to go into development and related fields, others into the more attractive degrees like communication. More disturbing among the literature aspirants was that some were not familiar with the latest fiction and other artistic output by Kenyans.

Because of Kenya’s anti-intellectual culture rooted in colonial rule and post-independence autocracy, most Kenyans reading this will collapse into the age-old narrative that Kenyan universities are at their usual game of producing graduates with “useless degrees.” However, I will argue in this article that these gaps are not just structural, but also neoliberal and global.

My interest in this issue has been ongoing, but especially in my concern that key professions in Kenya are being overwhelmed by administrative bloat, where the bulk of decisions are made by people who do not have experience or training in the professional area they are making decisions about. But my concern recently got a boost when a recent conversation about the Covid-19 pandemic shut down when I mentioned the current debates about privatization of healthcare.

Another thing that struck me about the conversation was the faith in policy to fix structural problems. This faith is not unique to health. However, I find it interesting that in several cases, many of these policies are foreign or “international” (to remove the overt Euro-American provenance), and Kenyans take the assumptions about the policies for granted. As such, people get surprised when I question the policy itself, or its ability to resolve the problems which it is being offered to solve.

I therefore decided to sample the syllabi of postgraduate degrees in public health in universities in Kenya, UK and the US. Of key interest to me were

1. Were these degrees for medical practitioners?
2. Was there any unit that potentially tackles imperialism, capitalism and privatization as a health financing model;  non-western forms of medicine; and history of imperialism and medicine in the global south?

In answer to the first question, the degrees were open to graduates not just from medicine, but from a wide range of disciplines. I am not against this in principle, but I am concerned that in a country like Kenya where business graduates have colonized the professions, this degree baptizes such graduates with health qualifications when they are not able to treat.

On the second question, none of the topics is explicitly addressed, but more interesting is that there is at least a unit or two on traditional economics and on management systems. With international pharmaceutical companies and financiers interested in commercializing health, the absence of units on racism, imperialism and neoliberalism raises a flag about the possibility that universities are creating a cohort of policy bureaucrats to infuse the neoliberal logic in public healthcare systems worldwide. This would explain the rise in such scholarships from Western government bodies to students in the global south.

And yet, if this pandemic has revealed anything, it is that health is a multi-faceted area that requires the cooperation of people with specialization in humanities, social sciences, the life sciences and physical sciences. In other words, every discipline has to be involved in discussions, knowledge and politics of health.

So why do I question interdisciplinary degrees like public health? Am I against interdisciplinary studies in principle?

Interdisciplinary degrees are a luxury

In every conversation where we are reminded how pathetic we Kenyan academics are, there is a mention of the need for interdisciplinary research. African scholars abroad also emphasize the need for African universities to introduce more interdisciplinary programmes and do more interdisciplinary research.

The problem is that advocates for interdisciplinary research do not address the culture of the Kenyan university as it now stands. These days, each discipline and department is a competitor, not a collaborator. We are all competing for student numbers to avoid the risk of being shut down or losing our jobs. That means that people whose disciplines sound job oriented, like media studies or conflict resolution, or even “public health,” attract more students than language, performing arts, history, political science or medicine. Departments would now rather create units in their departments that cover the necessary skills from traditional disciplines than allow their students to come study in the departments of traditional disciplines. Some faculty even go as far as telling their own students that the units are not available in sister departments.

To compound matters, the managerial overload in Kenyan universities means that the spontaneous interdisciplinary conversations among academics have basically died. Large class sizes mean that we can afford little time to chat and think. When we meet, we are meeting to trouble shoot inefficient systems, or to discuss administration matters such as how to fulfill the government’s regulation requirements or which new program would attract students.

This culture of self-consciousness and competition is carried into academic conferences. We don’t read or discuss each others’ work, partly because, as I noticed when I was researching on education, our research agendas are dominated by government policy and not by public conversation or challenges.

With universities divided like this into silos, students can graduate without ever hearing people from disciplines outside their degrees. The days when Anyang’ Nyong’o was a political science student publishing poetry, or when Kivutha Kibwana was a law student writing plays, have gone. For those of us in the arts, the bulk of our students are now in our classes just to meet the bureaucratic requirements and to sign the attendance sheet. And when we try to tie your discipline to actual issues in society or other disciplines, the students feel that we are deviating from the syllabus. We are asking them to think, and university education is not for their minds. University education is for employers.

This situation has been brought about by the failure of Kenyan academics to challenge the language of the market imposed by government and private sector, who often accuse universities of offering programmes that are “too theoretical” and have no practical use in the market.

But a more serious problem is now gaining root. We have less and less workers in the fundamental areas, because Kenyans are shunning arts and science-based courses, and going for interdisciplinary degrees, in the belief that they will pursue careers as policy makers in either government, business or NGO sector.

This scenario has produced the frustration of professionals in the arts and sciences. As a literary scholar, for example, I was recently frustrated by journalism which collapsed melodrama into investigative reporting. Mordecai Ogada, an ecologist, writes of the strange situation of seeking an internship at Kenya Wildlife Service, and being told by no less than the research director, that KWS did not need research scientists but wildlife managers (who are often trained in business schools). Some time back, a medical doctor expressed frustration with public health graduates, saying that their top applicant for a job “couldn’t differentiate between air borne diseases and water borne diseases. Or give an example of a bacterial STI.”

Interdisciplinary courses are failing our students because they are teaching students to integrate and apply knowledge which the students have not mastered in the first place. It is my opinion that we need a moratorium on these programs in Kenya, until such a time that we have enough health workers to treat, enough teachers to teach, and enough professionals to practice their skills in the field. Interdisciplinary fields are flooding the market with health professionals who can’t or have never treated, education bureaucrats who make policy that does not work in the classroom, and, as Ogada said, research officers who are basically revenue collection agents.

Disciplinary healing

In his book Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times, philosopher Lewis Gordon addresses this silo mentality of university departments, noting that disciplines have collapsed on themselves and stopped talking to each other. Instead, he notes, everybody attacks the other for not being them. For instance, philosophers attack religion scholars for not being philosophical, literature scholars attack medics for not being literary, and medics attack artists for not being medical. The economists attack everybody else for not being entrepreneurial. What is lacking, Gordon argues, is the recognition that education is necessarily interdisciplinary,  and requires conversations across disciplines.

These silos need to be replaced with the “teleological suspension” of our subject areas in our pursuit of knowledge. Teleological suspension, Gordon explains, “is when a discipline suspends its own centering because of a commitment to questions greater than the discipline itself.” We implement this suspension because it is more important to answer real life questions using knowledge from various disciplines, than it is to be a stickler for rules and insist that a question can only be answered by one’s own discipline, and that people who are not trained in that area cannot participate in the conversation. Just like we suspend reality when we read fiction or watch a play, we professionals and academics should be able to suspend our professional titles and trainings as a doctor, philosopher, literary scholar, scientist or anthropologist, and be able to talk to people in other disciplines over the common issues confronting all of us.

What is lacking in Kenya is not graduates. It’s real education in its true interdisciplinary character. Kenyans are unable to talk with each other across the disciplines because they have been compartmentalized by the market logic imposed by the private sector, enforced by the government and popularized by the media.

We need to return to true education, because education is the space in which society suspends disciplinary boundaries and discusses real life issues. Instead of bureaucratizing interdisciplinary-ness through degrees, we should reconstruct the university to become a community where the public, not just academics and students, come together from across the disciplines to discuss issues facing all of us. Education needs to return to being the public space through which, as Gordon says, “the unpredictable can leap forth and the creative can shine.”

Achieving such an education system requires the following:

1. 1. Constant debunking of the market logic that is imposed on education. Academics need to stop bowing to private sector’s demands for employees who subsidize company profits by paying for their own specialized training. In its demands for work-ready graduates, the private sector behaves as if the entire society must revolve around it. We need to resist this abuse.
2. A university environment that creates the opportunity for conversation and human interaction, because the supremacy wars between departments and disciplines will have ended together with the market logic. With more academic faculty and a lower teaching load, departments can invite people outside their discipline to give lectures and debates on real-life issues which can be attended by students and the general public. The discussions and questions from the audience will nurture interdisciplinary thinking without universities needing to invent interdisciplinary degrees for the students. And students will get to build interprofessional relationships with their classmates, relationships which they can use once they are working in the larger society.
3. Revive theoretical studies in the university. The popular idea of “theory” as irrelevant thinking has scared academics away from theoretical engagement and to interdisciplinary degrees to display their “relevance.” However, theory is, simplistically put, a story, no matter which discipline the story is told from. Different disciplines unite when they discuss theory. For instance, the work by Frantz Fanon is relevant to his professional training in medicine, to education, literature, politics, psychology, environmental studies and so many other disciplines. And yet Fanon is little spoken about in Kenyan academic spaces.

The war against theory, Gordon says, is in reality a war against truth and reality. In fact, one striking feature of the public health programs I surveyed is that there is no unit dedicated to theory. How are the students able to talk across diversity of disciplinary backgrounds with no theory?

Life and reality, in and of themselves, are already interdisciplinary. There is therefore need to heal Kenyan higher education so that it reflects life itself. Universities need to be communities where skills are taught in the classrooms for professionals to practice in society, but interdisciplinary thinking is practiced through collaboration facilitated by the institutional culture. With only 2% of the Kenyan population having attended university, and with the number of health workers way, way below minimum per population, we cannot afford to pour resources into interdisciplinary degrees, especially not for health.

Let us emulate the Cubans and train and employ more health workers who actually treat Kenyans, and who can resist being outnumbered and outpowered by bureaucrats implementing the neoliberal and bureaucratic logic that is destroying our healthcare. The health workers can then team up with the “useless” graduates in the arts and social sciences to come up with an experience-based, technically robust and human response to health challenges such as pandemics. That way, we would not rely on bureaucratic and “policy” responses that are proving to be more neoliberal than anything else.

I first met the distinguished Ugandan scholar Dani Nabudere in 2011, the very year he passed. I had been co-organiser of a conference held in Pretoria, South Africa, to mark the 50th anniversary of the African Union (formerly the Organisation of African Unity — OAU). The conference had been largely organised and funded by Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, the Thabo Mbeki Leadership Institute, University of South Africa, the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) and the Department of Science and Technology, South Africa.

Nabudere was a sprightly 79-year-old, alert, engaged and lively in conversation.

Before the Pretoria meeting, I had actually seen him in action at a conference held in Cairo in 2005 under the auspices of the African Association of Political Science. This was a huge international event with delegates from all over the world and there had been no opportunity to engage with him one-on-one; buying a number of his writings was as close as I got to Nabudere.

Cairo is a metropolis replete with history, culture and countless visual delights. In the permanent whirl of exciting people, cultural riches and hot dry air, not meeting Nabudere then did not seem like such a great loss.

The visit to the art shops that target tourists was an experience in advanced marketing. I bought four scrolls depicting ancient Egyptian heroes, symbols and hieroglyphics. An unusually vibrant woman ensured that I did not leave her shop empty-handed.

The trip to the famed pyramids was nothing short of awe-inspiring. I had gone with an overly cautious delegate from Nigeria who simply did not get the magic of the magnificent edifices, was not willing to explore the mysteries of the inner vaults or take any chances digging deeper below the surface. He saw his holding back as absolute good sense rather than an almost criminal failure of the imagination.

I had tripped and almost suffered a bad fall during our initial explorations at the base of the pyramids and that provided him with the awful excuse not to venture further. What was the point of venturing forth if it could end with a broken leg or worse?

But the Pretoria meeting with Nabudere was very different. It was held at St Georges Hotel in Irene, outside Pretoria, in secluded and serene environs. Also, because it was a slightly smaller event than the Cairo conference, it was possible to really speak with Nabudere as opposed to only seeing him from afar.

During the 2000s, Nabudere had studied and written extensively about the events in the Great Lakes Region (GLR) in the aftermath of Mobutu Sese Seko’s ousting as the paramount ruler of what was then Zaire. Nabudere’s writings on the topic are impassioned, lively and clearly of an activist nature. He was outraged by the rape and plunder of the region by unscrupulous Western speculators and mercenaries out for loot and illicit gain.

But by the end of the decade, Nabudere had found another equally fascinating subject of interest: Afrikology. Afrikology is concerned with the primary retrieval of the lost, submerged and obscured knowledges of ancient Egypt (Kemet), Nubia and Meroe, all of which are great civilisations of ancient Africa.

In Nabudere’s view, contemporary human existence is irreparably fractured, alienating and thus ultimately dissatisfying. Part of the reason for this sorry state of affairs is that ancient Greek scholars who visited ancient Egypt in search of knowledge, culture and civilization misinterpreted and misappropriated what they were given or had been able discover.

The first effect of this gross misappropriation led to the creation of a philosophical pseudo-problem known as the mind/body dichotomy, which is a central motif in contemporary philosophy. Nabudere argues that this motif is both false and misleading. There is nothing, he asserts, that exists as the mind/body problem which has in turn caused societal fragmentation, alienation and false thinking in current human existence. Nabudere then makes his boldest conceptual move, which is to call for a return to ancient Kemetian thought that he believed to be imbued with therapeutic epistemological holism.

But when I spoke with Nabudere during breaks in between conference sessions, he did not dwell on these revolutionary ideas. Instead, he struck me as a seasoned village elder more concerned with indigenous systems of knowledge uncorrupted by Western methods. He freely shared remedies for bites from venomous snakes. We also spoke about the difficulties in pursuing bold independent thought in the current academic environment. And then he indicated that he wanted us to continue our conversations by email.

Nabudere sent me a flurry of unpublished manuscripts. One would eventually be published as Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness: An Epistemology in 2011. Afrikology and Transdisciplinarity: A Restorative Epistemology was released the following year. Nabudere argues that “Afrikology seeks to retrace the evolution of knowledge and wisdom from its source to the current epistemologies, and to try and situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, especially with a view to establishing a new science for generating and accessing knowledge for sustainable use.”

I, on my part, began a journey that took me from Nabudere to Cheikh Anta Diop to Molefi Kete Asante and back. There are conceptual links between Afrikology and Afrocentricity. Not only did these philosophies need to be re-discovered, there were entire civilisations waiting to be explored as broken, fragmented selves sought collective healing.

Before he passed, Nabudere founded the Marcus Garvey Pan-African University in Mbale, Uganda. Garvey, as we know, attempted to launch a “back to Africa” movement for the black people of the Americas living under the yoke of racial oppression. Of course, he angered the powers that be and was prosecuted, convicted and eventually deported from the United States back to his native Jamaica on trumped up charges of mail fraud.

Nabudere’s adoption of Garvey’s name for his institution speaks volumes. It demonstrates how serious he was about the project of epistemological decolonisation, an endeavour pursued in other ways by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, another great East African writer and thinker. wa Thiong’o makes language his focal point in order to restore epistemic truth and continuity. In his view, our attachment to European languages is the most obvious manifestation of our state of dependency and most chronically, our psychological unfreedom.

Not only did these philosophies need to be re-discovered, there were entire civilisations waiting to be explored as broken, fragmented selves sought collective healing.

Indeed, the range of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s project of decolonisation is a result of focused examination of the workings of colonialism and its accompanying effects. He began by questioning the neo-colonial educational arrangement in Kenya as far back as the late sixties when he was still a rather young scholar. In his important book Writers in Politics (1981), he asserts:

Let us not mince words. The truth is that the content of our syllabi, the approach to and presentation of the literature, the persons and the machinery for determining the choice of texts and their interpretation, were all an integral part of imperialism in its classical colonial phase, and they are today an integral part of the same imperialism but now in its neo-colonial phase..

wa Thiong’o goes on to examine the relationship between literature and society and how this linkage in turn radically affects a people’s cultural orientation. A central assertion of his is that “literature was used in the colonization of our people”.  To transform this situation, it is then necessary to employ literature for the subversion of imperialism. Throughout Writers in Politics, wa Thiong’o maintains a decidedly Marxist ideological stance and so his analyses of the forces that control the economy, politics, education and culture are based upon the socialist conception of class and society.

In the early stages of his career, wa Thiong’o had reasoned:

For the last four hundred years, Africa has been part and parcel of the growth and development of world capitalism, no matter the degree of penetration of European capitalism in the interior. Europe has thriven, in the words of C.L.R. James, on the devastation of a continent and the brutal exploitation of millions, with great consequences on the economic political, cultural and literary spheres.

Colonialism gave way to neo-colonialism, which wa Thiong’o defines thus:

Neocolonialism . . . means the continued economic exploitation of Africa’s total resources and of Africa’s labour power by international monopoly capitalism through continued creation and encouragement of subservient weak capitalistic structures, captained or overseered by a native ruling class..

In turn, this compromised ruling class makes defence pacts and other unequal agreements with its former colonial overlords in order to secure its grip on political power. The underclass, for its part, is effectively alienated from the structures of power. wa Thiong’o urges that “we must insist on the primacy and centrality of African literature and the literature of African people in the West Indies and America” so as to present a unified front against the cultural and psychological effects of global imperialism. In this regard, the oral literature of our people is of particular importance. Furthermore, he argues that, “where we import literature from outside, it should be relevant to our situation. It should be the literature that treats of historical situations, historical struggles, similar to our own.”

This is a point wa Thiong’o stresses repeatedly in his numerous texts, and one reason that his notion of decolonisation can be recognised to be not only radical but also quite expansive in the way he views the world. Indeed, his understanding of decolonisation has an undoubtedly global dimension, as would be seen later. Furthermore, wa Thiong’o agrees with Fanon that decolonisation is a radical process in which the oppressed and disenfranchised classes all over the world would have to “adopt a scientific materialistic world outlook on nature, human society and human thought”. Hence it is not enough to indulge in “a glorification of an ossified past”. Indeed, he is critical of the somewhat unproductive aspects of traditional societies, as well as of imperialism. As he writes, “The embrace of western imperialism led by America’s finance capitalism is total (economic, political, cultural); and of necessity our struggle against it must be total.  Literature and writers cannot be exempted from the battlefield.”

Our attachment to European languages is the most obvious manifestation of our state of dependency and most chronically, our psychological unfreedom.

Since wa Thiong’o’s project of decolonisation is concerned with imperialism on a global scale, he stresses the need for oppressed people all over the world to unite in order to confront it. In other words, if the dynamics of imperialism are global in nature then the counter-power to them should equally be global in its articulation.

However, the task of true psychological and epistemic liberation is first and foremost philosophical. In the recent past in Africa, it was an endeavour that was usurped by charlatans and political opportunists who managed to recast it as a crude politics of nativism or indigeneity as occurred in Mobutu’s Zaire.

If Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s notion of decolonisation incorporates the linguistic perspective, Nabudere’s project, on the other hand, takes in the fundamental philosophical component as an indispensable foundation. It is in essence a call to rebuild self, society, culture and civilisation from the very beginning. It is also a repudiation of contemporary human culture in its entirety as it is incomplete, truncated and therefore profoundly misguided.

It is also in every sense a call to arms, an annihilation of the false consciousness and civilisation that veil themselves in a cloak of authenticity. In fact, Nabudere proceeds to question our current genetic state of being which might have undergone a fatally inappropriate mutation. And in order to institute a crucial re-alignment, we must reject everything about ourselves, our society and contemporary culture. Nothing could be more radical.

To imagine that such radical ideas had been formulated in the distinguished head of the old, patient and pleasant man I met with in Pretoria a few times. He perhaps did not bother to share them with me then because he knew that he would eventually send me his manuscripts. In this way, he had bridged several disparate worlds: ancient and contemporary, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, traditional griot and modern-day polymath. Moreover, he had promoted a tradition our modern institutions would find too off-kilter to handle because it had been bold enough to question their existence. And being a custodian of gnostic or esoteric knowledge, when he died, it was akin to a giant baobab falling in a forest. Without a successful passing of the torch, a huge vacuum would definitely be left in the culture, one that has been denied, vilified and suppressed for centuries. First, by external detractors and then subsequently, by the children of the Dark Continent themselves, caught up and invariably obscured, stunted and masticated by the paroxysms of modernity.