The remarkable yet untold story of the straggles to democratize African political systems is that they owe much of their recent success to the pivotal role played by university student groups and faculty associations as animateurs of protest demonstrations, debates about issues deemed taboo by the state, and as organizers of militant campus movements. At a time when most associational groups were banned or rendered politically impotent by being incorporated into existing state structures in order for them to serve state interests, secondary and university student groups and faculties remained virtually the only sources of pressure and protest against authoritarian regimes on the continent. Thus, from Dakar to Nairobi, from Addis Ababa to Harare, student movements and demonstrations, fought pitched battles with state security personnel and stimulated civilian opposition movements.

In the 1950’s a Black sailor from the United States came to Capetown and gave someone there a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son. That single copy traveled around the whole country. Each person would keep it a week or two, read and reread it, and then pass it on. Native Son convinced me that as an African writer I did not have to sound like a carbon copy English boy if I wrote in English.

I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.

The persistent, if not chronic crisis in the Nigerian education sector in general, and in the tertiary institutions in particular, has created the impression that unions are largely responsible for creating, rather than managing or regulating conflicts. Unions and their leaders are perceived as the incorrigible trouble makers, hell-bent on causing mischief and in giving perpetual headaches to the administrators of their respective institutions as well as the government, the funder of these institutions. This negative perception has been nurtured and sustained by the Nigerian State, especially under military rule, and then reinforced by intolerant and insecure administrators who see enmity and confrontation in any voice of dissent or critical appraisal. The most cogent and somewhat recent articulation of this perspective, for example, has been advanced by Mr. Ben Nwabueze, then Secretary for Education who, while addressing a gathering of Vice Chancellors and Pro-Chancellors of Nigerian universities, averred that unionism has done nothing but cause senseless distress in, and destruction of, our tertiary institutions.

On October 1, 1960, the British colonialists departed Nigeria, leaving behind one lonely university campus at Ibadan which was established in 1948 as an affiliate of the University of London and a prototype of British educational philosophy for the colonies. Thirty-five years into the post-colonial era, Nigerians established 40 new universities, 69 polytechnics, colleges of technology and of education. Twenty of the universities and 17 polytechnics are owned by the federal government while the state governments control the others. Nigerian universities are largely directed by Nigerian faculty and staff. The student enrollment in the universities is on the increase, reaching an estimated 400,000 Nigerian students and a handful of African and non-African students.

It was during my early years in high school (in Kenya), that I was first exposed to the idea that far away in the Americas lived people who were black. I was greatly fascinated by this idea. Until then, history was just another mundane class that focused on Europeans colonizing Africa and large parts of the rest of the world. Because the syllabus did not include the stories of the real makers of African History—the Africans themselves—as a young African student I found the learning experience to be fairly alienating. Part of the materials covered in class included David Livingstone’s three missionary journeys. No effort was made to bring to the student’s awareness that the caravans of the so-called “slaves” that Livingstone stumbled on in the interior of Africa were Africans like ourselves.

I was raised in Northern New Mexico, a white girl in a predominantly Hispanic population. The public education I received in this small Southwestern town was somewhat unusual, as it reflected the cultural diversity within at least our own community. So although I was subjected to the traditional Western canon, and plodded through Shakespeare, the American Revolution, and the diagramming of English sentences, the community made sure that I learned some Spanish and some aspects of Mexican culture as well. In elementary school I made skeletons from colored construction paper and paste to commemorate the Mexican Dia de los Muertes, or Day of the Dead.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, many whites, including myself, embraced antiapartheid work, partly because we were outraged at the horror of South Africa but also because it gave us a way to fight racism and do antiracism work here in the United States. I had always seen and disapproved of racism and from a very young age felt a need to fight against it. The anti-apartheid struggle gave me a solid way to do that. In the mid 70’s when I was in college, the campus that I was on was so segregated and the institutional policies so paternalistic and racist that there were very few forums for blacks and whites to work together. The first fully-fledge antiapartheid group at my university, which I joined on its inception, was established by an African-American who was a visiting artist on campus.