Response | Ken Harrow

"Thus students of my generation were educated during the golden years of African universities when they were valued as engines for the realization of the historic and humanistic dreams of African nationalism: decolonization, nation building, development, democratization, and regional integration." - Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

The Zelezean trajectory, from a Malawian boy, to youthful university student and writer, to a cosmopolitan scholar writing about a diaspora encompassing all of world history and geography, is marked by a dazzling array of publications. I see so clearly that path he traces from the 70s when dictatorial rule was establishing itself across the continent, to the present, when we look at the continent from a perspective ranging from visions of China, both in the present and two thousand years ago, to Europe, a shrinking donkey skin of an empire. The Zeleza markers take us from the years of enthusiasm with Frantz Fanon to postcolonialism and globalization, and we relive those decades through the accounts of his fantastically burgeoning oeuvre.

I too was there, on the margins of all these world-shaking transformations, partly unaware of their import, partly unaware of what dances were newest, what music had emerged; partly dazzled by each new Ben Okri or Sony Labou Tansi; partly growing entranced with Djibril Diop Mambety and Jean Pierre Bekolo, as they rose to challenge the older hegemonies of the Sembene school. For me there were two years in Cameroon in the 70s under Ahidjo, when politics were whispered in the privacy of one's car, and students remained in prison for having been found with the wrong pamphlets at their doorsteps. There was Mongo Beti to voice his eternal criticisms from abroad, never seeming so out of touch as when he thundered loudest; then across time came the dead cities, its youthful enthusiasts led by the retourné Mongo Beti. Not everyone could return to take up the struggle, especially in places like South Africa. Dennis Brutus waited and mounted his demonstrations from Chicago or Pittsburgh.

In my most recent long sejour in Senegal, 2005-6, I rediscovered the excitement of Senghor's newly created statist versions of Negritude that he fostered with independence, and looking back from the vantage point of Wade's neoliberal policies, it now seems that the enforced glories of race and style that marked all those paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, carried a fashionable grace that merited more than Soyinka's and Mphahlele's blithe dismissals. And if we could not whisper too loudly our political challenges to Ahidjo, there is now something less absolute about his regime that we can dimly perceive: if rigorous statism has its repressions, the enforced unification of the country under the rubric of inclusiveness far surpasses the cynicism and violence that has decimated the territorial integrity of Cameroon, and many other states.

Zeleza provides the reference points in his personal account of his life. The early years of university, when everything seemed possible to the newly minted world of independence, were so quickly converted into repressive times, engendering the exiled poets and novelists, the Brutuses, Ngugis, and Soyinkas, and eventually the entire communities of authors, filmmakers, scholars, and intellectuals who constitute the current base of culture production for Africa. They too form the subjects for Zeleza's omnivorous production.

What do I make of it now? The university as I know it today is all but destroyed in many ways. An English department with fewer than 20 faculty teaching between 5,000 and 10,000 students cannot fulfill its function, and has become the site of despair. If not all faculties are equally desperate; there is still an enormous weight of insufficiency, often duplicitously denied. The intellectuals who reign over the institutions of production of knowledge are in denial, and have failed their charge. Although I cannot claim to know this for a fact everywhere, I believe it is very widespread-both the failure and the duplicitous denials. At the same time, the amazingly stimulating world described by Zeleza is largely the product of diaspora, with some small islands like Codesria or the Ake center in Port Harcourt holding up their candles.

The diaspora has changed completely, from its Negritudinal inspirations to the current global configurations, from its small dance floor moves of grace and beauty, to its institutionalized power bases on campuses and in pockets of urbanized cultures, the Schombergs now dwarfed by programs and conferences with thousands of scholars. Is it possible that that globalized, neoliberal monstrosity that has so mercilessly harmed the African continent and its people cannot be separated from the presses, the universities in which we teach and the students who take our classes to make of them, on their CVs, what they will. Are we quite free now of the tentacles of power that we critique? Is Appardurai right that the postcolonial industry is hopelessly implicated; or can we hold on to some portion of what we started, hold on to this vision of Zeleza that tells us, it's ok, do your work, prof, and tell the students what you can; there is no point in making judgments that only tear us down.

I won't return to revise the Ahidjo years into something called desirable; but Biya has presided over the wreck; and under Wade the beauties of the Dakarois coast are all being bought up by foreign hotels and wealthy individuals. The small clubs that promote the Freres Guissé, the Orchestre Baobab, are still there; the Jo Ramakas and Khady Syllas are still making their movies about a place called Senegal; the markets still sell their wares, despite the threats of the government to tear them down and replace them by malls. I will turn back to Zeleza's memory of the golden years, and teach my courses, write my books, as long as the work of scholarship, which we had once associated with Lemuel Johnson, still lives on. Let The Zeleza Post blogs and the increasingly numerous e-sites take the relay.