Tragedy of the perishing scholar

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Academic publishing is the natural outworking of an academic career, the currency of academic mobility. Yet Africa accounts for 2.1 per cent of academic journals.

In a lecture delivered to Munich University graduate students titled ‘Science as a Vocation (Wissenshaft als Beruf), acclaimed sociologist Max Weber, argued that the academic career is built largely on commitment. According to Weber, an academic must possess both a commitmcent and an experience of science. This commitment, borne out of hard work and a singularity to a specialised research area, is materially visible through academic and research publications.

Thus, academic publishing is the natural outworking of an academic career. An academic does not publish because of external prompts (say regulatory bodies or promotions) but naturally, as outworking of the vocation. Publications are the currency of academic mobility. The maxim ‘publish or perish’ is deployed to capture the reality that academics must publish or vegetate.

Gradual collapse

Ironically, while academics in Africa make efforts at producing publications, most actually end up perishing. Much of the published work by African academics is only helpful in securing promotions and meeting regulatory demands, but fails to meaningfully influence and shape debates in the respective disciplines or aide the goal of improving our understanding of the world.

But why, despite publishing, are African academics in danger of perishing?

The statistics on academic publishing in Africa are not impressive. According to a UNESCO science report, Africa accounts for only 2.1 per cent of journal articles. Sub-Saharan Africa produced an average of 13,000 scientific articles in a year.

Within the subcontinent, South Africa produced almost half (46.4 per cent) of the total, followed by Nigeria (11.4 per cent) and Kenya (6.6 per cent). In other words, these three countries alone produce two-thirds of the sub-continent’s scientific articles. These figures show that a lot needs to be done with regard to research by Africans. Several factors conspire to marginalise the African scholar from the critical space of knowledge production.

First, to understand how Africans are excluded (and also exclude themselves) from knowledge production, the issue must be looked at from the internal and the external level. At the internal level, we have to go back to history. In Kenya for instance, the rain started beating us after the gradual collapse and inactivity of professional associations such as the Historical Association of Kenya and the Literature Association of Kenya, and with them, the established journals that assured publication to scholars who participated in their annual congresses.

These associations motivated the production of high quality papers and sustained interest in them. In most of the associations, the transition from one generation of scholars to another never happened, especially when older scholars made the transition to university administration and external politics. Meanwhile, prominent publishers of tertiary texts such as Longman, Heinemann and Macmillan, simply abandoned the field for the more profitable primary and secondary schools textbooks. For now, universities continue to pay lip service to research and conference support in the context of tight budgets and financial woes.

Meanwhile, not wanting to perish, some scholars took matters in their own hands and soon a number of journals sprouted in departments and faculties in universities across the country. Some did not go beyond the first few issues before they collapsed either because of poor subscription and funding, or because of their internal contradictions.

Regarding the latter, once the editors and their friends had published themselves and their associates, and achieved their immediate objective, they lost interest in the journal. But more fundamental was the problem of funding, which was aggravated by poor subscriptions. Except for the usual captive market of own graduate students and faculty colleagues, our journals do not sell. This pattern was replicated across most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The quality of some of these journals and books published is variable. While a few are products of painstaking scholarship and quality work, most are slap-dash contraptions aimed at a promotion. Worse still, many have not been subject to peer review and copy-editing. In any case, the result of lack of peer review in the continent is betrayed by the quality of some texts (which are self-published in many instances).

As the publishers are either the authors themselves or even less competent persons, and as competent readers were not recruited to review the manuscripts, abysmal standards are unavoidable. In other instances, editors of some texts include as many as three of their own essays in a collection of about 10 papers. Editors are also accused of swapping essays with their friends, patrons and protégés in their respective journals and edited works. It is now dawning on African scholars that it is not enough to simply ‘publish.’

At an external level, the scourge of predatory journals, and the hierarchies of knowledge production have dealt a double blow to African scholars. Predatory journals, at a hefty fee, aggressively solicit and accept articles quickly with little or no peer review or quality control. They have blatant falsification on basic editorial formalities and are easily recognisable by their ‘broad’ journal titles designed to attract as wide a range of papers as possible. The logic of predatory journal is deception. As such, many have published only to perish. Statistics show that African scholars comprise the largest victims of predatory journals. Tragically, a number of top professorships in Kenya and the region are founded on predatory journals.

To address this problem, it is important that universities and research institutions improve publication literacy among early career researchers in Africa.

Increasingly, various hierarchies of scholarly production appear not to favour the African scholar. With most of the so called top indexed journals domiciled in Europe and North America, some editors in these journals still think of Africa through Joseph Conrad’s lenses, imagining that nothing creative or innovative can come out of it.

In a conference I attended in Sweden a couple of years back, editors confessed that once they received an article from an African (in an African university), they immediately formed an opinion of its quality. Academic journals on Africa, most of which are not based in the continent are most implicated.

Critical choices

The political economy surrounding publishing in those journals only worsens matters. Cameroonian scholar Francis Nyamjoh argues that the cultural dimensions of publishing on Africa, where a historically pervasive denigration of the African in western academic production, exacerbates the situation further.

Two things happen. Publishers are predisposed to holding Africans to western intellectual standards, seen as the hallmark of intellectualism and cultural production. Second, adhering to such standards, in order not to perish as a scholar, often entails cultivating insensitivity to issues of relevance to Africans. The African scholar thus faces a critical choice between sacrificing relevance for recognition, or recognition for relevance. Many, to get published, sacrifice relevance.

As such, academic discourse on Africa is at risk of slipping out of the hands of Africans’ scholarship. The reality, according to Oxford based scholar Wale Adenamwi, is that intellectual thought and knowledge production on Africa is not”‘independent” and “continues to exist within a borrowed and dominated framework”. Is it any wonder why originality lacks in African scholarship? Why, for instance, should a Journal focusing on say, East African studies; run several issues without voices native to East Africa?

Academic publishing on Africa is a colonised space in urgent need of decolonisation.

- Dr Omanga lectures at Moi University