On Scholar Activists and Unromantic Contexts
On 9th July 2018 I attended an inaugural lecture by Professor 'Funmi Olonisakin at King’s College London.
Inaugural lectures are part of an academic tradition designed to publicly acknowledge a scholar’s achievement of the highest academic rank — Professor. In turn, the scholar uses the platform to speak to the body of work, built over many years, that has facilitated the rank of Professor.
Professor Olonisakin in my view stands out as one of a few senior African scholars who has seen her role as that of opening academic and policy doors for younger Africans in general and African women in particular. This task is not accidental to her work as a pedagogue, researcher, policy influencer and now university administrator. It is pivotal to how she sees herself in these roles.
'Funmi I would argue belongs to that generation of Africans that by accident of birth and life found themselves living outside of Africa. However, they see their location as one from which they can leverage relative privilege for Africans and African institutions. It is this commitment that led her and others to establish the African Leadership Centre — conceptualised and driven by Africans in the diaspora and in Africa.
Like some of her fellow travellers such as the late Tajudeen Abdul Raheem and Professor Eboe Hutchful, I witnessed them metaphorically taking people by the hand and walking into spaces with them because they recognise how age, class and gender work collectively and sometimes separately to disadvantage and exclude others. I am a beneficiary of this “handholding” and I pay it forward.
As the first African woman professor and first Black and African woman senior manager at King’s College London as Vice President/Vice Principal International, Professor Olonisakin has shattered many doors for others to follow.
This racialised gender component of her professional life is one that should not be dismissed through the suggestion that she supercedes it by virtue of “excellence”. Exclusion and invisibility are never about the lack of “excellence”. They are a factor of institutional practices and underpinning systems, which are deliberately designed to sustain particular voices, bodies and ideas as normative. In this regard, Olonisakin’s inaugural lecture was demonstrative of her reflexivity.
There are two major take aways from her lecture that I’d like to turn to below.
On Nodal Points and Intellectual Turns
Professor Olonisakin’s approach to her inaugural lecture illustrated what it means to build situated knowledge. Described as autobiographical in approach, Olonisakin discussed her scholarship and therefore contribution to knowledge production and transfer through her journey as a young student in Nigeria and recent senior appointive roles in the United Nations such as serving on the High Level Panel on Peacebuilding.
By taking this approach Olonisakin disrupted the pervasive idea that academic knowledge production is an individual exercise because the systems that acknowledge merit emphasize the individual. Her influences and the turns her life took were anything but individual and without belabouring it, she recognised that knowledge is co-created through influences, interactions, conversations and indeed large scale interdisciplinary research projects.
Olonisakin foregrounded the meaning of a hybrid scholar. The academy recognises time to reflect and write as a legitimate use of resources and rewards it albeit in some form. However, engaging with the world is an equally legitimate academic exercise. While the pressure for academics to be outward facing and show impact in the “world” has become more prominent in the UK today, Olonisakin through her body of work illustrated that this way of working has been central to her praxis as a scholar well before it was en vogue.
Olonisakin’s professional transitions served as nodal points for framing situated scholarship. I observed how the politics of shaping policy when working in war affected contexts and the collateral damage emanating from that caused her to ask questions about the efficacy of the United Nations and African actors within it. These encounters also raised questions for her about the utility of theoretical frameworks in her field — war studies and security — to address conflict relapse and move beyond singular charismatic heros who emerge to implement an externally defined state making template. The body of work that emerges from this period displays an interest in interrogating these observations and evolving African informed ways of thinking about peacebuilding and security and the nature of the state in Africa.
This context is critical and research methodologies that are attentive to what local voices tell us about the state/society contract becomes central to how she approaches her scholarship. It is not enough to mine empirical data from the “field” in order to prove an externally generated theoretical model about democracy and the state in Africa. Rather the empirical data should require you to think about the utility of theoretical frameworks in the context in question. Youth Vulnerability and Exclusion in Africa is a product of this conceptual intervention.
Publish or Perish
African scholars (young or old) worth their salt think about the politics of knowledge production and transfer. How one pursues the disruption of the power structures associated with this is open for debate. Olonisakin’s insistence on being what she refers to as a scholar activist forms part of her responses to this systemic problem. That her work would not be driven by the singular purpose of amassing journal articles and books in “established” or high impact factor journals is evident in her academic publication history. That this decision was made possible by a hybrid position she occupied at King’s College London that gave room for situated research and partnerships to flourish is clear. That pedagogically, the classroom became a site of intervention where research led teaching and learning is pivotal. Finally, that the task of building the next generation of scholars who must occupy the terrain in which ideas and knowledge about Africa is being examined became an urgent and an important strategic intervention. The African Leadership Centre emerges at this point.
Inaugural lectures can be elaborate performances. However, this was a master class in what decolonising knowledge looks like in practice.