This paper is concerned with the role and responsibilities of Americans who go to African universities to profess, and with the rationale of such undertakings.

In some ways, this may seem to be a threadbare topic. The values to be achieved from such transcultural experiences have long been assumed. At least since World War II and Senator Fulbright’s great initiatives, teaching abroad has been a favored activity. Yet recently we have taken a more skeptical view. The Fulbright and other programs are in some disarray in Africa today, and there is no longer much enthusiasm, in official “development circles,” for exporting university teachers.

The setting was comfortable, and the social atmosphere relaxed. By all measures, he was a distinguished colleague. He had received a good degree from a Western university; he was respected in his own country (Nigeria); he belonged to those citizens who are often referred to as “our leaders of thought”; he had published widely; and he had been asked to speak at many professional meetings in both the Western and non-Western world. By local standards he was well paid, and his home and his family revealed all the features of his “elite” status. As a visiting researcher I had gone to see him to exchange views, to learn about the state of affairs in the country. He was polite, he was helpful; we joked about this and that, exchanged memories of events which had taken place at this or that conference. Academic chit-chat blended with that kind of casual conversation which makes life pleasant.

“Academic freedom,” Ashby asserts, is “an internationally recognized and unambiguous privilege of university teachers.” Is this proposition confirmed by experience to date as regards the academic freedom of the foreign scholar in African universities? This is the central empirical question. Or is it merely a culture-bound affirmation of a normative ideal which it is hoped might be instituted as a universal right of university teachers, irrespective of citizenship status, tenure of appointments, and the political and university systems in which they serve? Indeed, is it an ideal which can be realized, however imperfectly, or in any event, ought to be categorically affirmed as a privilege of foreign scholars serving in universities anywhere? These are among the questions Ashby’s proposition provokes, and which require, at the outset, some disaggregation of the meanings and interpretations of such a highly normative and emotion-ridden concept, whose genesis and sustenance are undeniably sui generis to a particular cultural and historical experience.