African universities crippling their students

I was told that even foreign researchers who had previously received permission from the government and the university had that permission withdrawn.

University of Nairobi library is closed. Sealed. Blocked. I asked my informant whether official letters of protest from foreign universities might help and he shook his head.

The decision is administrative and idiosyncratic, not pragmatic.

Faculty members teach ridiculously high loads, up to 400 undergraduate students in a single class, often without graduate assistants.

A colleague spoke of her MA rather than PhD students, saying many want to receive the MA to fulfil bureaucratic requirements.

As a result, research projects are often unimaginative and repetitive — the “Girl child; “FGM”; “Poverty in Africa.”

Not that these issues do not merit attention; rather, the idea of higher education as a structure that produces new knowledge is absent.

When a North America-based friend gave a lecture here on the relation between material culture and symbolism, the students were baffled, unable to make certain conceptual leaps.

In what are less than ideal conditions for producing and disseminating knowledge, Kenyan scholars have forged innovative partnerships with other cultural producers, artists, publishers, musicians, journalists, the NGO sector and the informal labour sector.

And although the volume of work emerging from Kenya may not always reflect this, interesting, unique and exciting conversations are taking place.

Faculties may work under trying circumstances, but they work. And the work is fascinating, rich, textured and has a wide audience.

In late October, for example, I participated in a workshop on sexuality. Presenters included academics, gender activists, film and documentary makers, editors and publishers.

Workshop attendees ranged from those working in sports-based activism — football for girls — to representatives from the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya. We had teachers and lawyers and actors and community-based activists in the audience.

The publication emerging from this event — due out in February 2009 — will probably run to well over 1,000 copies.

This may not sound like much. But this is where it might end up — in government offices, including those belonging to legislators; in NGO offices working in the areas of gender and sexuality; across the border in Uganda and Tanzania at the very least; in the church; with activists across a broad spectrum of fields.