In recent fights to re-constitute Black studies in the context of Eurocentric curricula and institutions, scholars must recognize the radical role African thinkers have played in this struggle in order to avoid past divisions. This became pronounced recently when Professor Anani Dzidzienyo, a Ghanaian scholar of Brazil and the African diaspora, died in October 2020, and students, artists, and scholars from across the globe mourned. The diverse and dispersed networks Dzidzienyo built over 50 years of scholarship reveal the crucial yet underacknowledged role that African scholars played in founding Black studies methodologically and institutionally from the late 1960s through the 1980s. He pioneered the establishment of study of the African diaspora at Brown University and researched south-south relations and Afro-Brazil in ways that forged new modes for understanding globalization and retracted often unrecognized channels of Black radical connection. While the importance of prominent African American and Caribbean thinkers, artists, and activists travelling to Africa has been well documented, there is still little recognition of the vital route played by young thinkers coming from Africa to the US, and the particular role of Ghanaian intellectuals in shaping a lesser-known and often neglected global aspect of Black radicalism and Black internationalism.

Dzidzienyo is part of a generation of intellectuals who came of age as Ghana fought for independence under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. His stepmother, Grace Ayensu, was one of the first women in parliament and a prominent member of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party who forged diasporic linkages and solidarity with other Black people. In 1960, Dzidzienyo left Ghana to represent the country at the New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum. He graduated from Williams College in 1965 with a BA in Political Science and completed his graduate studies at the University of Essex in Latin American Politics and Government in 1968. He then spent three years as a research fellow at the Institute of Race Relations in London, during which time he first visited Brazil.

Dzidzienyo’s story reveals how Nkrumah’s ideas about pan-Africanism and African liberation inspired young scholars to seek out global linkages around race and power, to uncover historical connections and forge new ones. These exiled Ghanaian intellectuals insisted that mutual emancipation required that Black Americans viewed Africa as a place of ongoing political struggle and sociocultural transformation, instead of seeing the continent merely as an abstract symbol or distant heritage. At the same time, they argued that it was necessary for Africans to understand the African American and Afro-Latin Americans “reality.” These Ghanaian scholars followed a long history of Gold Coast internationalists, including Chief Sam, who inspired many African Americans to return to Africa.

Dzidzienyo started at Brown at a time when Cold War politics and Black nationalism had turned Africa into an abstract symbol for many African American activists rather than as a place of ongoing political struggle and sociocultural transformation. The work and lived experiences of Dzidzienyo and his Ghanaian cohort of exile intellectuals offer us the opportunity to rethink the Civil Rights era as a collaborative effort between Black Americans and Africans in the struggle for Black liberation in the US. Combining the study of Africa with a practical blueprint for emancipation, these Ghanaian intellectuals were also open to the particular radical and activist nature of the US Black Student movement, which enabled them to connect political education with mobilization. In his scholarship and activism, Dzidzienyo focused on what Africa meant for Afro-Latin Americans and worked to mobilize Afro-descendants in Latin America in the fight against worldwide white supremacy in his analysis.

Dzidzienyo asserted that connecting with Africa would enable peoples of African descent to generate a racial political consciousness attuned to global issues including the plight of Afro-Brazilians. His 1971 groundbreaking book, The Position of Blacks in Brazilian Society, challenged scholars to center the lived experiences of Afro-descendants within Brazilian studies and Latin American studies more broadly at a time when the lusotropicalist ideas of the right-wing thinker Gilberto Freyre still dominated intellectual discussion of race in Brazil. Pioneering the field of African diaspora studies at Brown University, Dzidzienyo helped move Black studies beyond simple Africa-US and Africa-Europe conversations toward a scholarly analysis rooted in Africa-Latin America connections.

The first tenure-track professor that Rhett Jones, an African American scholar, hired to help establish and develop an Afro-American studies department at Brown in 1973, Dzidzienyo, was according to Jones, the reason “Brown’s Black Studies unit was among the pioneers in what now is called the study of the African diaspora.” Fluent in English, Ewe, Fanti, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, Dzidzienyo ensured that Brown’s approach to the diaspora was genuinely hemispheric in scope. Working with other faculty members, Dzidzienyo made Brown’s program a prominent center for research and teaching about the Portuguese-speaking world, especially Afro-Portuguese societies.

Dzidzienyo used his classes to move conversations beyond the lived experiences of Blacks in the US. In the late 1970s, he developed two year-long courses: “African History and Society” and “Blacks in Latin America History and Society.” With Dzidzienyo’s courses as models, the faculty in the Afro-American Studies Department created two additional year-long courses: “Afro-American History and Society” and “Caribbean History and Society.” These multidisciplinary courses focused on the Black past as well as contemporary issues across various geo-cultural areas of the African diaspora.

For Dzidzienyo, it was important that the study of Africans and peoples of African descent exist outside of the framework of the global North. Thus, he asserted that a study of the contemporary political, social, and economic networks between African and Latin American countries offered an important space to rethink Black radicalism and Black internationalism.

Dzidzienyo became particularly interested in what the public memory of Africa meant for identity and emancipatory political movements throughout Latin America. Dzidzienyo research on Brazil investigated both historical and contemporary linkages to the continent. He urged scholars to shift their focus from a “frozen Africanity,” which simply celebrated specific African historical, cultural, and religious retentions, to a study of the diaspora as a “dynamic variant,” one whose crosscurrents shaped the sociopolitical realities of contemporary Africa and Latin America.

Dzidzienyo’s life and work reminds us of the important moment when a few Black scholars attempted to conceptualize the project of Black liberation beyond the shores of the United States. They followed a long line of people who had done the same, going back a century or more. Dzidzienyo was one of several Ghanaian intellectuals active in the US, Grenada, Suriname, and Senegal from the late 1960s through the 1980s. These scholars were bonded by their admiration of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism ideas, their nationality, and their forced or self-imposed exile. They all brought portions of Nkrumah’s political and intellectual vision to their new contexts, reshaping his original vision as they went along. Their collective contributions to the global development of Black studies have been largely ignored but their legacies within the institutions where they worked remind us that there were spaces in which radical African intellectuals, through the 1970s at least, ensured that the liberation of Africa was central to Black radical intellectual pursuits worldwide.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

In recent days, there have been a lot of discussions about the advent of ‘artificial intelligence’ and its potential as a game changer in the way we go about our business. This discussion has come to the fore since the OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT signed a long-term collaboration agreement with Microsoft worth several billion dollars. In Kenya, the mainstream ‘Sunday Nation’ newspaper on 29th January was equally excited about the development, running a feature on it with a tag line; “ChatGPT: Tool that helps even the lazy write magnificently”.  But despite all the hype generated, the hullabaloo about ChatGPT or machine learning is at least as much an indication of our intellectual decline as it is of any technological advance on our part, and here is why.

I have personally been hesitant to explore what AI actually does, steering clear of what seems to be a rabbit hole that doesn’t have any logical destination. Recently though, I had an in-depth discussion about developing a project proposal with a colleague better versed in this application, and he was kind enough to take me on a ‘tour’. So, I ‘asked’ the app several questions relevant to African wildlife studies (my area of expertise). In my line of questioning, I ‘posed’ as a student seeking to develop a conservation research proposal focusing on human-wildlife conflict. The app dutifully typed out problem statements, research questions, methods, and even a table of contents. The result, however, had nothing that looked even remotely new or original. They were just clichéd excerpts extracted from a myriad of conservation literature available online, which was baffling, because intelligence is defined as “The ability to apply knowledge, to manipulate one’s environment, or to think abstractly”. This definition of intelligence did not appear anywhere in the (limited) experiment that I conducted. What I perceived was just a search engine seeking specified information online and ‘typing’ out results rather than presenting a ready manuscript and creating the impression of some kind of ‘thought process’ at play.

The other cosmetic illustration of intelligence of course is the absence of attribution to any source – an attractive feature which extends itself to the user through the allure of presenting this ‘work’ elsewhere as his or her own. To the casual observer, the document looks like a complete research proposal, but a closer observation from someone familiar with the topic reveals the lack of a logical framework that can be followed from the problem statement, through the hypothesis and methods that would give a result if it were all implemented on the ground in a ‘real world’ situation. There is something scary about this.

Our society shouldn’t be frightened of apparent threats posed by the capabilities of AI, which after all are only as powerful as those of its human programmers. What should scare us is the manner in which people we rely upon as ‘experts’ perceive it as some kind of breakthrough in human development perceptions. The fact that a newspaper, whose editors are supposed to be purveyors of writing excellence, can call the thoughtless regurgitations of ChatGPT “magnificent” is what should worry us because it implies that they wouldn’t be averse to using it as an editing tool. This strange fascination isn’t limited to Kenyan media, and major US publications have also spoken about it in similar tones, with the ‘New York Times’ seemingly enthralled with the bot’s ability to write essays. We live in an age when individual opinions are routinely suppressed by states, mobs, propaganda, religion, formal education systems, and a myriad of powerful forces. This suppression has led to the mass acceptance of ideas like carbon trading and cryptocurrencies that suffer and falter under any logical examination. Consequently, when highly-educated, highly-regarded, or capable humans start offering homage to an idea, we court the threat of an indolent majority treating those opinions as paradigms.

An example of this is the excitement elicited by a January 2023 paper published by Prof. Jonathan Choi of Minnesota University Law School and others entitled “ChatGPT goes to law school”. It reported that the now famous bot passed a law school exam consisting of multiple choice and essay questions, attaining a grade of C+. This was met with the customary excitement amongst the public, despite the consternation amongst teachers who felt that this was a plagiarism threat. What was invisible to the public is that this “pass” result just illustrates a well-known fact that the study of law necessarily contains a large component of reference to existing laws and precedents, all of which are archived on the internet. The pretty average grade attained indicates that the bot hit the skids when faced with interpretation questions. The fact that a “passing’ grade in a specialized field can be achieved out of empty ‘competence’ without any logical thought should be a sobering thought for scholars and philosophers in all fields of study around the world. If this continues, where will we find a philosophical and ethical direction that will guide the progress of human societies? Philosophy, logic, and ethics are necessarily experiential and human attributes that cannot be engineered, but rote learning has reduced our thinking to a level where engineering can be mistaken for intelligence.

Our (mis)education through this method has trained us to believe that our own thinking and experiences count for nothing. My lasting memory of this came from a writing class I took as a first-year undergraduate student. On an elective assignment, I chose to do an essay on livestock keeping, something I was very familiar with, and I wrote extensively about sheep, which are probably my favourite livestock species. Amongst the details I included was the average weights of the sheep at different ages and the lecturer gave me a demerit on that point with the comment “what’s your source?” Apparently, it was unacceptable to state such information in my essay about sheep I had reared and weighed myself without a “source” or reference. If I were to quote a source, it would not likely be about red Maasai sheep (which ours were) which are ‘unimproved’ livestock, generally frowned upon by animal production experts at the time. Even if this was available, my essay was about OUR sheep, not sheep in general. The key lesson I learned from this class is how vehemently contemporary ‘education’ is opposed to the thoughts and indeed the very existence of the individual.

Nearly three decades later, this violence has gotten far worse. If a student today chose to generate an essay for such a class using AI, it would certainly score very high marks because all of the ideas offered therein would have external sources, complete with references to existing literature and data. Nothing would be original. In the years since then, I have taught classes of supervised students at a number of universities around the world at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. My tests and assignments never sought to have students find and regurgitate material because I would seek the material myself and present it to them seeking their philosophies and justifications for the same. The work I expected from them would never be created by AI, so educators worried about AI use amongst students today should re-examine their methods rather than seek to impose ‘bans’ on its use that are impossible to enforce.

The concerns that we should address urgently remain. Universities are supposed to be centers of education and innovation, so if merit can be scored merely by reference without innovation, where will societal progress emerge from? Advanced-level studies are increasingly defined not by the quality of outputs, but by how small the silo is into which they can compartmentalize a subject. This increases the quantitative rather than qualitative output of education. In practice, we have numerous publications whose findings cannot stand on their own or find relevance outside a certain circle of authors and reviewers. This isn’t regarded as a problem, because publication has become an objective in itself and academic prowess has for the last few decades been measured by quantity rather than content of publications. In the same vein, contemporary human progress has seemed to be ‘rapid’ because we now perceive it quantitatively through technological advances, even as other spheres remain stagnant or even regress. History tells us that boundaries didn’t really exist between the arts, science, communication, etc. In the ancient world, famous scholars like Leonardo Da Vinci were outstanding artists and scientists. In contemporary times, we have examples like Chiekh Anta Diop the Senegalese polymath, and Jonathan Kingdon, the naturalist whose artistic skills made him an authority amongst mammologists and many others.

The most recent peak of the ‘noise’ around ChatGPT was probably a stunt by Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a member of the US congress who recently gave an AI-generated speech to the house on 26th January 2023 and members didn’t realise until he said so. The fact that Rep. Auchincloss’s speech didn’t elicit much attention for its content is because it was empty. AI doesn’t generate logic that can be supported or opposed on its own merit; it closely mirrors the majority of speeches typically given in legislatures around the world. It is more a reflection of the decline in quality of our socio-political discourse around the world than the quality of the artificially-compiled (not generated) content.  Many members probably detected words and phrases that they’d heard before. ‘The Verge’ (an online publication) described it as “dull and anodyne as you might expect for a political speech filtered through an AI system based on probabilistic averages”. This is not the sort of material that can engender genuine human progress.

The jury is still out on AI and the excitement is still at a fever pitch, with global tech giants Baidu and Google rushing to develop apps to rival the apparent success of ChatGPT. However, in the long run, artificial intelligence may help us in ways we never envisioned. It may turn out to be the best tool at our disposal to identify AI (actual indolence). Our youth are typically adept at using digital tools in ways that aren’t even envisioned by the developers. If we do that with AI and let our natural intelligence guide us accordingly, then Africa will be just fine.

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This article was first published by The Pan African Review.

Africa is experiencing a rise in terrorism which, in addition to other humanitarian disasters, has caused mass migration and the loss of lives and property. Terrorist groups like Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab have continued to endanger the security of people’s lives and the survival of democratic governance in Africa and, unsurprisingly, the threat of terrorism has put Africa’s collective development and growth in even greater jeopardy. Economies have collapsed as investors shun countries affected by terrorism and, as statehood slowly deteriorates in some of the countries impacted by terrorism, political advancements have also been hampered.

One of the key factors contributing to the continued dominance of insurgency on the continent is the frailty of political institutions in most African countries. The blunt truth is that terrorism grows when the government is unwilling to combat it. Take the case of Nigeria as an example: The government’s longstanding unwillingness to engage in tactical warfare with Boko Haram has enabled the terrorist group to sharply increase its destructive activities and has created fertile ground for other insurgents to rise, and daily, the task of eradicating these groups becomes even more complex. Worries have been repeatedly expressed about the predicament of African countries in the face of internal and international terrorist attacks, as well as concerning potential repercussions for those African states that have been labelled as weak or failed states.

While different state actions have been carried out against terrorist groups, the lack of robust democratic institutions in Africa is a significant barrier to the success of counterinsurgency efforts across the continent. African nations have been unable to work together to combat insurgency due to acrimonious politics. A close examination of leadership structures in African nations reveals that most of them fail; how can success against the rebels be achieved in nations where the state and the people are constantly at odds? Moreover, the security structures of most African states are, in fact, relatively flimsy, and in many nations, domestic conflict further widens the security gaps and creates the conditions for insurgency to flourish. Internal conflict hinders African democratization and fosters rebel domination. It is even more concerning that leaders also use their nations’ insecurity as a platform to run for political office. Regrettably, most African leaders now place fighting terrorism at the top of their list of political priorities just because it elicits a lot of emotions that can sway elections in their favour and not because they genuinely want to tackle the scourge.

In debates about terrorism, technological progress is unavoidable. Terrorists in Africa are developing thanks to technological advancements. Terrorism and counterterrorism rapidly assume new shapes in their operations due to the expanding global instrumentalization of technology. Although both countries and terrorist organizations are modernizing their methods of operating, there is evidence that many terrorist organizations in Africa are rapidly creating technical solutions to enhance their lethal operations. The Internet, in particular, is one technological tool that is feared for its potential to significantly impact global security. Policymakers are concerned about how communication networks like the Internet may be used to carry out terrorist activities. Specialized websites and social media platforms are frequently used in conjunction with secured networks to set up chat rooms for talks and activity monitoring, to produce disinformation that can incite panic, and to conduct recruitment in Africa. Today, terrorist organizations like Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, and others use untraceable video and audio recordings to broadcast attacks, demand ransom for hostages, and engage in other hostile activities.

Terrorism in Africa has a detrimental effect on the socioeconomic and political development of the region. However, it has been demonstrated that successful counterterrorism has benefited, or at the very least can improve, the socioeconomic and political environment of the continent. Like elsewhere on other continents, Africa has experienced significant terrorist activity, but the effects have been far greater in Africa than in other more developed continents. Terrorism continues to exist on the African continent despite the efforts of various African nations and regional and international organizations to combat it. The failure of the different counter-terrorism strategies launched to maintain long-lasting peace on the continent has exacerbated the continent’s underdevelopment and it continues to lag behind other continents in scientific, social, and political progress.

These are the reasons why it has become paramount for African counterterrorism efforts to keep up with technological advancements. Due to the unique characteristics of each nation, the specific insurgent groups, and the nature of operations, counterterrorism battles in Africa assume diverse forms and employ varied techniques. Departments, institutions, and programmes have been established in countries to address terrorism, and laws, regulations, and directives have been passed to guarantee the success of counterterrorism initiatives. In addition, new technologies are being employed to gather intelligence and prepare for counter-terrorism operations.

However, creating powerful political institutions is the first transition stage that African nations must go through. A nation’s political structure has a significant role in determining its security architecture. Launching counterterrorism investigations and addressing conflicts between the political class and those in important leadership positions with access to resources and intelligence that could jeopardize government efforts is the second transition stage. As a result, corruption and money laundering are curbed, closing doors to money that may be readily transferred to fund terrorists. Additionally, collaboration with the public is required to create a community-policing operation. By acting as informants and providing the necessary information to security personnel, citizens will be involved in the security architecture of African states. African nations must also calm ethnic tensions that could lead to domestic conflict because internal weakness in a nation creates favourable conditions for the growth of insurgency. Insecurity in Africa stems from internal crises that aim to undermine people’s safety and the African state’s coherence. Therefore, individual African states must develop more effective counterterrorism policies.

A nation’s political structure has a significant role in determining its security architecture.

For this to be accomplished, effective political leadership and corporate governance must be ingrained at the internal level of the African state. The administration of each African state must understand that defeating terrorism requires teamwork and must demonstrate the capacity and willingness to achieve victory. This is because if internal conflicts are permitted to persist and damage the political structure, it will pave the way for external forces to invade. African nations must fortify political institutions in their particular domains to achieve a change in the security architecture. Also, African governments must work together with other nations to implement counterinsurgency strategies. The African Union and regional organizations like ECOWAS must intervene to maintain Africa’s peace and security. African nations must cooperate on forward-thinking projects to reach a common goal.

The trajectories of political and economic progress have been significantly impacted by security issues brought on by internal conflict, civil wars, and terrorist acts. In light of the continent’s security issues and other difficulties, and to address the problems that are slowly destroying the continent, African political leaders must use the opportunity to restructure the continent’s democratic systems. The promises made by African leaders to draw up counterterrorism technology development plans must also be reaffirmed. Establishing strong democratic and political institutions in each African state is crucial to transforming Africa into a safe continent free from terrorist attacks and other types of danger. These institutions must be capable of using both the military and diplomacy to combat terrorism.

Lastly, the effectiveness of the actions and policies put in place by the individual governments of African countries will significantly impact the future trajectories of counterterrorism and security in the continent. For African nations to effectively battle terrorism and firmly establish peace and security throughout the continent, better political institutions must be built, alliances with states that are militarily stronger must be formed, and counterterrorism policies and actions must be well coordinated. African nations must build strong political leadership and corporate governance in the battle against terrorism to overcome the insecurity dilemma brought about by terrorists in the continent. Only then can the fight against terrorism in Africa be won.

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The article is an excerpt from a keynote address at the International Conference on “Counterterrorism, Technology and Development in Africa”, 22 September 2022, Stellenbosch University, South Africa and Obuda University, Hungary.