Why don’t African scholars contribute to public policy?

This week I read in the local dailies a complaint from a writer regarding the dearth of indigenous African (and Kenyan) scholars in the social sciences and humanities. The basic point of the argument was that because we do not have indigenous scholars studying our history, politics, economics, et cetera, our stories never get told to their fullest.

What we get instead are often perceptions of outsiders whose views are tinted by biases inherent in their cultures and traditions. This is all true. However, what the writer failed to also acknowledge is the fact that the current state of affairs is not the result of some conspiracy by foreign scholars or institutions. Instead, it is the result of the deliberate failure to fund local scholarship since the late 1960s.