Nurturing lifelong learning in communities through the National University of Lesotho: prospects and challenges

This paper analyses one aspect of a pan-African action research project called ITMUA (Implementing the Third Mission of Universities in Africa). This particular paper draws on the data from that project to explore the National University of Lesotho’s contribution to lifelong learning in its communities. It provides background information on the ITMUA initiative and analyses interview and focus group responses to two case studies in terms of their contribution to lifelong learning. It uses, as its analytical framework, a modified version of Mbigi’s African perspective on the four De Lors’ ‘pillars’, by adding a fifth pillar, courtesy of Torres. The paper argues that community engagement is a two-way process between universities and their wider constituencies with opportunities for mutual lifelong learning. But there are also challenges of understanding and process which must be addressed if the full range of these lifelong learning pillars is to be accommodated within African contexts. The paper provides an introduction to the history of community engagement in Africa as a university mission, followed by a brief discussion of lifelong learning within African perspectives. After describing the particular context of Lesotho, the concept of community service and community engagement in contemporary African contexts introduces the action research project and the case studies. The final part of the paper presents and discusses the research findings

Bye-bye Barack: dislocating afropolitanism, spectral marxism and dialectical disillusionment in two Obama-era novels

In contextually specific and formally distinctive ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers are fictional interrogations of Obama’s presidential pledge to resuscitate the American dream on the wake of the global financial crash. This paper explores how they supplement and challenge familiar tropes associated with African and American, rather than African-American, diaspora writing. Given broader debates within transnational literary studies about flows and exchanges (of people, finance, cultural production, dissemination, consumption et al.) linking the global South and North, I consider how these texts grapple with the complexities and complicities of contemporary neoliberalism through the lens of renascent African Marxisms. While my chosen writers could not be described as Marxist, I engage with more materially oriented scholarship, such as Krishnan’s Writing Spatiality in West Africa and Ngugi’s The Rise of the African Novel, to consider how Americanah and Behold the Dreamers circulate in a global literary marketplace where certain texts, not to mention authors, are seen as symptomatic of an African and/or Afropolitan and/or ‘Africapitalist’ renaissance. By grappling with Marxist-inflected scholarship, this paper interrogates the politics, as well as poetics, of the oft-conspicuous airbrushing of those socio-economic, specifically class concerns at the heart of these entangled debates

African Jobless Growth Morphology: Vulnerabilities and Policy Responses

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive one disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and social backgrounds while providing alternatives to conflict. Unfortunately, in many African countries, unemployment rates are low and growth is seldom jobless. Regrettably, most of the poor work long hours and cannot make ends meet while the violation of basic human rights is not uncommon. Again, youth unemployment and unmet job expectations are alarming. Consequently, this paper provides a framework that cuts across sectors and shows that the best policy responses vary across African countries (depending on their levels of development, endowments, demography and institutions). Thus, at all stages of development, forcing economic production to spread evenly across areas is both elusive and expensive. Policy makers should therefore identify and execute strategies that balance development outcomes across areas by means of domestic integration instruments. However, in places where integration is hardest, the policy response should be comprehensively total: institutions that unite, infrastructure that connects, interventions that target, incentives that motivate as well as information and communication technologies that enables or drives

Writing African Leisure History

Bringing together often unconnected modes of analysis, research and debate on leisure in African studies, an interdisciplinary team of scholars reflects on the complex conceptions, creation and consumption of leisure in African cities from the nineteenth century to the present, drawing intriguing comparisons with leisure studies in Western Europe and North America. Covering leisure activities from football to music and dance to films and television in cities from Cairo to Cape Town, this book opens a new chapter in African cultural studies

Dancing to the beat of the diaspora: musical exchanges between Africa and its diasporas

This essay examines the complex ebbs and flows of musical exchanges between Africa and its diasporas. Specifically, it focuses on musical engagements between, on the one hand, the Caribbean and West Africa and, on the other, the United States and Southern Africa. It argues that the influence of diasporan music on modern African music, especially popular music, has been immense. These influences and exchanges have created a complex tapestry of musical Afro-internationalism and Afro-modernism and music has been a critical site, a soundscape, in the construction of new diasporan and African identities. A diasporic perspective in the study of modern African music helps Africa reclaim its rightful place in the history of world music and saves Africans from unnecessary cultural anxieties about losing their musical ‘authenticity’ by borrowing from ‘Western’ music that appears, on closer inspection, to be diasporan African music

African universities and globalisation

The challenges that face African universities and intellectual communities are many and daunting. They are simultaneously internal and external, institutional and intellectual, paradigmatic and pedagogical, political and practical. Globalisation, as a process and a project of neo-liberalism, reinforces and recasts these challenges. This essay seeks to map out the dynamics and implications of globalisation for African universities, as well as the gender implications of these changes in terms of factors such as institutional access and the production of feminist scholarship. While women's access to universities has increased, the academic division of labour, which largely confines women to the humanities and social sciences and allows men to dominate the so-called "hard" sciences and "prestigious" professional fields, persists. Staff numbers and resources within the male-dominated disciplines have risen sharply as higher education institutions move frantically toward academic capitalism: market principles of university administration and accountability, pecuniary support and public service. The vocationalisation of universities has intensified the marginalisation of the humanities, which, in turn, has reinforced the appeal of "gender work" in the form of applied gender studies. Thus, the growing ideological dominance of neoliberalism, the discursive face of what is often understood as globalisation, has far-reaching implications for universities as sites of intellectual production that are both gendered and critical to the production of feminist knowledge. The first sections of this paper locate current trends in gender research and teaching in dominant eurocentric and androcentric globalising processes; towards the end of the paper, however, I speculate about the possibilities for transforming globalisation through feminist teaching and research focusing on African and Africa diaspora communities

The disciplinary, interdisciplinary and global dimensions of African Studies

In discussing African studies or any other field, it is important to note that the economies and cultures of knowledge production are an integral part of complex and sometimes contradictory, but always changing, institutional, intellectual and ideological processes and practices that occur, simultaneously, at national and transnational, or local and global levels. From their inception, universities have always been, or aspired to be, universalistic and universalising institutions. This is not the place to examine the changes and challenges facing universities in Africa and elsewhere, a subject dealt with at length in African universities in the twenty‐first century (Zeleza and Olokoshi 2004). It is simply to point out that African studies ‐ the production of African(ist) knowledges ‐ has concrete and conceptual, and material and moral contexts, which create the variations that are so evident across the world and across disciplines.This article is divided into four parts. First, it explores the changing disciplinary and interdisciplinary architecture of knowledge in general. Second, it examines the disciplinary encounters of African studies in the major social science and humanities disciplines, from anthropology, sociology, literature, linguistics and philosophy, to history, political science, economics geography and psychology. It focuses on the interdisciplinary challenges of the field in which the engagements of African studies with interdisciplinary programmes such as women's and gender studies, public health studies, art studies, and communication studies, and with interdisciplinary paradigms including cultural studies and postcolonial studies are probed. Finally, this article looks at the focus on the study of Africa in international studies, that is, the state of African studies as seen through the paradigms of globalisation and in different global regions, principally Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia and Russia), the Americas (the United States of America (US), the Caribbean and Brazil), and Asia‐Pacific (India, Australia, China and Japan). Space does not allow for a more systematic analysis of African studies within Africa itself, a subject implied in the observations in the article, but which deserves an extended treatment in its own right

Diaspora Dialogues: Engagement between Africa and its Diasporas

The New York Times reports that since 1990 more Africans have voluntarily relocated to the United States and Canada than had been forcibly brought here before the slave trade ended in 1807. The key reason for these migrations has been the collapse of social, political, economic, and educational structures in their home countries, which has driven Africans to seek security and self-realization in the West. This lively and timely collection of essays takes a look at the new immigrant experience. It traces the immigrants' progress from expatriation to arrival and covers the successes as well as problems they have encountered as they establish their lives in a new country. The contributors, most immigrants themselves, use their firsthand experiences to add clarity, honesty, and sensitivity to their discussions of the new African diaspor