This article argues that education in Africa, from colonial times to the postcolony, has been the victim of various forms of violence, the most devastating of which is the violence of cultural and political conversion: externally and internally driven initiatives and processes intended to domesticate, harness, transform, alter, remodel, adapt, or reconstruct Africa and Africans through schools and universities to suit new ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking. As a result of such violence, educational systems have privileged mimicry and transformed epistemologies informed by partial theories to metanarratives of arrogance, superiority, and intolerance of creative differences. Even when clear alternatives are imagined to the current irrelevance in education, economic difficulties render their realization extremely difficult. Repressive states have perpetuated and capitalized upon this predicament by manipulating desperate academics into compliance and complicity with mediocrity. This article examines some epistemological consequences of such alienation and irrelevance and looks at their implications for theorizing Africa. It calls for a global conversation of universities and scholars in which Africa participates on its own terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans as its guiding principle.

In this article the author relates the crisis of African universities to their idiosyncratic birth during the colonial period. The African universities were, to a large extent, conceptualized according to the Western template and its inherent epistemology This Western university originates from a local knowledge system that gained a hegemonic position culminating in the colonial period. The author argues for another conceptualization of African universities, based on a diversity of knowledge systems, and refers to processes of (re-)appropriation as seen in the domain of African Independent Churches.

Cameroonians saw a positive correlation between the enactment of the Liberty Laws in the early 1990s, the increase in the number of tertiary institutions, and the contribution of its universities to worldwide intellectual endeavors. Nevertheless, as the history of the University of Buea shows, the university space, instead of becoming free, became instead a space of domination. Universities discourage critical scholarship and collaboration, harass politically suspect instructors, and put barriers in the way of professional advancement. For most faculty members, energy in the university space has become focused on survival, with many individuals more concerned with promoting their upward mobility than with the production of knowledge. One particularly unfortunate result is the continued marginalization or silencing of the African voice on the global stage.

Using the University of Malawi as an example, this article analyzes the opportunities and constraints faced by African intellectuals. It argues that during the anticolonial struggle, young nationalists conceived the University of Malawi as a potential engine for the transformation and development of the state. After independence President Banda, who established a repressive one-party state, severely restricted the university's intellectual autonomy through modalities of censorship. Some academics and students went into exile; others conformed to the dominant ideology; others resisted it furtively. Global pressures on both the university and the entire political economy of Malawi contributed to the triumph of prodemocracy movements in overthrowing the Banda regime. After the victory of the United Democratic Front government in 1994, many restrictions on intellectual freedom were lifted. Global socioeconomic forces, however, in complicity with the new government, continued to marginalize the university community. It is suggested that a productive regeneration of intellectuals' contributions to Malawi's development will be possible only through a major realignment of its intellectual capital.

The academic political scientists—mainly professors—who were hired by the Babangida military government in Nigeria between 1985 and 1993, ostensibly to theorize and articulate a new political culture and morality through the political transition program (PTP), have been objects, both then and ever since, of serious criticism concerning their role and contribution to a program that promised much but delivered little or nothing. The major criticism is that the political scientists, despite an initial commitment to help the military fashion a new political order, lost their “science” by providing an intellectual cover for the general's schemes and enriched the “political,” including the politics of corruption and self-enrichment. We examine this critique and show that these individuals, by choosing to remain in office—if not in power—even after witnessing so many broken promises by the regime, tarnished their intellectual integrity and moral credibility. Appointed to serve as an instrument of legitimization for the regime, they contained, constricted, and shrank the political and intellectual space rather than facilitating intellectual and democratic empowerment.

This article reviews the challenges and opportunities posed by the rapid growth of private universities in Uganda since 1988 and tries to identify areas of the private university system in which the state can play a positive role. It argues that the state should not leave the operation of the system entirely to market forces but should positively regulate their activities without control. Seven challenges are identified. These include the management challenge, the financing of these institutions, meeting the ever increasing demand for higher education, the devising of relevant curricula, addressing the dearth of qualified academic staff, the formation of a comprehensive national higher education policy, and the maintenance of institutional autonomy tempered by accountability of each of tfiese new university institutions. At the same time, the article identifies a number of opportunities that these institutions could take advantage of. These include the positive economic development the country has been registering for the last decade and half, the resilience of the lower educational system, the social need for higher education, the policy of Universal Primary Education (UPE), the interest of the current government in education development, and the positive international attitude toward Uganda.

This article examines the role of academic unionism in the perennial crisis bedeviling the university system in Nigeria. It is the contention here that contrary to officially sponsored opinion, the crisis can be linked to external factors, especially the government's handling of industrial disputes. The crisis in the system, which started in the early 1990s, can be seen as the direct off-shoot of the macro-economic adjustment programs foisted on the country and the subsequent decrease in government funding of the education sector. Nevertheless, the repressive practices of past military regimes have contributed immensely to the crisis, as have the frequent strikes of the the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU). The articles suggests that the crisis can be tackled only with an amelioration of the fundamental problems confronting the system—ranging from underfunding and poor working conditions to excessive government meddling in university governance—and a rethinking of strategies by both the government and ASUU.

The aim of this article is threefold: to interrogate the crises that have afflicted public universities in Kenya over a period of thirty years, starting in the 1970s and intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s; to examine the impact of student activism and protest on education policy; and to investigate the role of current and former university students in national leadership and the democratization process in Kenya. University students are destined to be the intelligentsia who one day will take over the reigns of power. Students also constitute the largest reservoir of technocrats in Kenya's development milieu, providing highly trained manpower in many sectors. To many they are also the vehicles of ideological dissemination and are often regarded as the representatives of the left and sympathetic to the cause of the common man. As such, to engage the students is to engage the common man. Yet there are lacunae in the research and academic knowledge in this area. Commentators have largely ignored student protest in Kenya despite the fact that universities have a long history of student activism in which students often have engaged authorities in running battles, some of them violent. In the national political arena, university students often rally behind radical politicians and former university students. The political course in Kenya would not be the same today without university students. This article seeks to interrogate their multiple roles.

The political liberalization process in Cameroon was marked by protracted strike actions on the campus of the University of Yaounde during the period 1990–96. Political liberalization provided space for students to organize and voice their multiple grievances about the poor living and study conditions on campus as well as the process of “institutional liberalization,” which blocked their pursuit of upward mobility. The unprecedented degree of violence that accompanied the protracted strikes may be attributed not only to the persistent refusal of the university authorities and the regime to enter into any meaningful form of dialogue with the students, but also to the internal divisions among the students along party and ethnoregional lines. The mayor lines of division were between two groups: the “stranger” students organized in the Students' Parliament and closely allied to the radical opposition; and the “autochthonous” Beti students organized in the Committee for Self-Defense and the Beti milida and closely allied to the regime in power. In their fight with Parliament, the latter groups resorted to violent forms of ethnic exclusion to reestablish control over what they considered to be their university and to maintain their regime in power.