<incom> Debate on academic, cultural and publishing perspectives across Africa

[Soenke Zehle]

not sure why the article ends with good governance, but maybe of 
interest regardless, as it does relate to open access/open educational 
resources debates etc. A lot of foundation money (Hewlett comes to mind) 
seems to go into OER, for instance, yet  the debate seems to have been 
disconnected from many ICT-based efforts in this area... I wasn't there, 
but the summary seems to frame that debate in all-too unambiguous 
post-development terms, which may be part of why some of these 
initiatives remain unaddressed, making me wonder whether this kind of 
generic 'critical' framework is really that useful here (or anywhere 
else, for that matter), also perhaps because I appreciate the 
Shuttleworth-type pragmatism, Soenke

<http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/OER/openEdResources.htm>
<http://opened.shuttleworthfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page>

Has Africa got anything to say? Academic, cultural and publishing 
perspectives
<http://www.nai.uu.se/publications/exhibits/frankfurt_panel/index.xml?Language=en>

The 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair, the worlds largest gathering of publishing 
professionals, once again supplied the backdrop for a wide range of 
discussions pertaining to the state of the worlds publishing industries. 
Surprisingly, the major focus of this years discussions in the Fairs 
International Centre was sub-Saharan Africa - hardly the frontrunner 
when it comes to the economics of global publishing. This is why the 
provocative title chosen for this panel - which was co-organised by the 
Nordic Africa Institute (NAI), the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation and the 
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa 
(CODESRIA) - seemed to hit the nail right on the head, giving short 
shrift to political sensitivities.

The framework of African publishing scholarly and otherwise in recent 
years has continued in its dismal state: illiteracy is rampant and even 
growing in most countries, despite a panoply of speeches, spin-driven 
statements by Western politicians and valiant efforts by NGOs, schools 
and libraries are undersupplied. Publishing skills, from editorial to 
distribution, are in a sorry state due to lack of training. And wherever 
a fledgling publishing industry might exist, it is heavily dependent on 
the state sector for its income, with some 95 per cent of all books 
published on the continent being textbooks. Put this together with the 
average annual income in sub-Saharan Africa of less than 600 US Dollars, 
and the stage is set for gloom and doom.

So, it did not come as a surprise that the panellists including 
professor Fantu Cheru (Research Director at NAI), Dag Hammarskjöld 
Foundation’s Director Henning Melber, the General Secretary of the 
African Publishers Network, Tainie Mundondo, as well as Fred Hendricks 
(CODESRIA) and Swedish publisher Svante Weyler - painted a dark picture 
of the current state of scholarly publishing in Africa.

Tainie Mundondo started the session, answering the headlining question 
with a general account of the situation: Of course, Africa has a lot to 
say. There is lots of information about, but the problem is access to 
this information. A statement that neatly summarises what was said over 
the next hour. Because despite all the efforts to provide information in 
digital or printed form, it is the lack of working infrastructure 
throughout sub-Saharan Africa with the possible exception of parts of 
South Africa that is at the basis of all the problems.

Take the internet as an example - hailed as the simple and affordable 
solution to the problem of access: To access the internet, there needs 
to be a working telecommunications infrastructure and a reliable supply 
of electricity. But virtually all over Africa, electric power comes and 
goes at random, and hardly any government has invested in the 
development of telecommunications, Mundondo said. This in turn cements 
the prevailing structures of information provision, which is dominated 
by the North, viz. Europe and the United States.

Fred Hendricks took the argument further by highlighting the economics 
that form the backdrop for publishing in Africa: the continent accounts 
for only three per cent of books published world-wide, with the 
aforementioned dominance of the textbook sector which in turn is 
dominated by subsidiaries of multinational publishing conglomerates. Low 
levels of literacy and the lack of expendable income to spend on books 
provide for extremely small markets, which hamper the emergence of 
sustainable publishing industries. This contributes to the plundering of 
Africa’s intellectual resources by the North because Africas 
intellectuals have no other places to go to.

This brain-drain or, as Hendricks prefers to call it, brain aid from 
Africa towards the North is the immediate result of the failing 
structures within Africa, Henning Melber argued. “Whatever there is in 
visible knowledge production by African scholars is arrived at outside 
Africa because this is where they are” he said. In almost all African 
countries, scholars are faced with non-existent academic 
infrastructures, they earn less in a month than the cover price of their 
own books published by a Northern publishing company, they have to 
accept consultancy work to make ends meet which keeps them away from 
academic research, and most governments don’t respect academic freedom, 
let alone freedom of expression.” African publishers are given hardly 
any incentives to enter academic publishing, he argued, which in turn 
leads to a lack of visibility for African scholarship.

Access and visibility and especially the lack thereof seem indeed to be 
the two keywords that embody the plight of scholarly publishing in 
Africa. Fantu Cheru, who spent many years teaching and researching in 
the United States, put it cruelly when he said: If you have a degree 
from a university in Lagos or Nairobi or other African cities, most US 
academics will regard this as a degree from a bush college. With hardly 
any research work emanating from African universities in a visible way, 
this is offensive, but not untrue. Knowledge production today is part of 
the general discourse about power and hierachies in the world, about who 
becomes the gatekeeper for what, he argued, with Fred Hendricks adding 
that in knowledge production has become commodified to a degree that 
contributed to the continuing disempowerment of those who are already 
economically disempowered.

Henning Melber put forward the point that globalisation has for quite 
some time been a reality in the African studies arena: Even in remote 
Scandinavian universities, African studies programmes can be found, with 
African scholars queuing up for places in these programmes and 
Scandinavian bureaucrats deciding who gets in and who does’nt, he said a 
situation he described as the bizarre flipside of globalisation. He 
argued that only the sustained support for local empowerment projects 
could be a way to remedy this situation: Good governance is the key to 
the solution of most problems facing Africa, and only through good 
governance on all levels can we hope to relieve African scholars of this 
absurd burden, where they are forced to work and publish in places where 
they should not be, and where their work has little impact on their 
communities.

What then was the result of the panel discussion? Well it once again 
served the purpose of clarifying positions and drawing attention to 
aspects of Africa’s overwhelming set of problems. There were no 
solutions and there could be none.

As long as Northern politicians get away with empty promises on African 
development, there can be no solution. As long as Africa remains in a 
position where bad governance helps the global economy to plunder the 
continents riches, both physical and intellectual, there can be no 
solution. As long as Africa does not rid itself of its oppressive and 
kleptocratic leaderships, there can be no solution.

So, was the discussion a mere exercise in futility? One might think so. 
One hopes this was not the case.

Holger Ehling