PROFESSOR, HEAL THYSELF:

Out of Africa: A pioneer of African studies explains why he left the field, and provokes a firestorm of debate within it (DANNY POSTEL, Chronicle of Higher Education)

A specter is haunting African studies -- the specter of Gavin Kitching. It's not that he is dead, but the Australia-based scholar left the field two decades ago. So it is more as an avenging spirit that Mr. Kitching has re-emerged with his essay "Why I Gave Up African Studies." Though initially a quiet affair when it was published in a newsletter and then on the Internet two years ago, word of Mr. Kitching's provocative tract has spread until, today, his erstwhile field is buzzing with reaction. This summer the online journal African Studies Quarterly will publish a full-blown debate about the implications of Mr. Kitching's reflections. [...]

"In a word," he wrote in his contrarian text, "I gave up African studies because I found it depressing."

The British-born scholar was depressed, he explained, "both by what was happening to African people and by my inability even to explain it adequately, let alone do anything about it." Africa's struggles for independence, which infused the early years of African studies with a spirit of optimism and euphoria, with time produced widespread disillusionment, as the governing classes in the newly independent African states plundered their societies and failed to deliver on their promises of "national liberation."

This trajectory, Mr. Kitching argues, has flummoxed social scientists within African studies. The failure of its practitioners to come to grips with it, and to see Africa's own ruling elites as the principal culprits for the continent's calamitous predicament, he argues, has the field tangled in knots of confusion and moribundity. [...]

The 56-year-old Mr. Kitching is a member of that generation of Africanists whose intellectual and political commitments were forged during Africa's decolonization in the 1960s and '70s. It was a period, as he describes in his manifesto, "when the hope and optimism generated by Africa's independence from colonialism was still in the air." And "like many young intellectual radicals of that period," Mr. Kitching was eager to see the experiments in "'Third Way' African socialism at first hand."

But Mr. Kitching then "lived and worked through the period when optimism and hope in and about Africa were replaced by pessimism and cynicism." The national liberation struggles that swept across the continent resulted in states that proved to be, by and large, less than liberatory. Instead of egalitarian democracies, the colonial elites were replaced by new, African elites who mirrored the political conduct of the European oppressors they did away with.

Mr. Kitching had a "ready-made radical perspective" to make sense of this state of affairs: dependency theory. The new elites -- in Marxian parlance, national bourgeoisies -- were forced to depend, given the structure of the world capitalist system, on the imperial powers for their survival. Their hands were tied.

Still, there were holes in this theory, which was predicated, Mr. Kitching writes, "on the view that these 'dependent' or 'neocolonial' governing elites were agents of 'imperialism' or of 'transnational capital' in Africa. And as the 1970s turned into the '80s and the political fragility and economic involution of so many African states became palpable this notion itself seemed ever more questionable." He began to frame things this way: "If the ruling elites of Africa are seen as managers or agents for Western capitalism or imperialism, one can only say that the latter should get itself some new agents. For the ones it has seem remarkably inefficient."

Mr. Kitching was well aware of the external constraints that circumscribed Africa's room to maneuver -- from oil shocks and attendant economic volatility to cold-war power games that left many African countries awash in armed conflict. But there had to be something more.

This led Mr. Kitching to ask himself a question to which he never found a satisfactory answer. "Why," he writes, "are some governing elites economically progressive and others not? Why are some ruling classes exploitative, selfish, and corrupt but also genuine agents for national economic and social improvement, while others are just exploitative, selfish, and corrupt? . . . Why have African governing elites been particularly prone to behaving in ways which are both economically destructive of the welfare of the people for whom they are supposedly responsible and which have led -- at the extreme -- to forms of state fission (civil war, etc.), collapse or breakdown?"

Did this perspective make Mr. Kitching guilty of blaming Africans for all of their own problems? The accusation maddened him, for it suggested a narrow binary logic -- a polarization, he writes, "between those advocating what were called 'internalist' explanations of Africa's problems and those who continued to favor 'externalist' explanations."

"Of course the vast majority of African people are the victims," he wrote, "often the horrific victims, of Africa's plight, not its perpetrators in any sense, and I, at least, would never wish to deny that." And yet he doesn't want to let African elites off the proverbial hook, for it is their behavior, he maintains, that exacerbates Africa's plight -- and Africanists have paid too little attention to this problem.

Indeed the "prime responsibility for making a decent future for Africa's people," he writes, "lies, has lain for at least 30 years, and from now on always will lie, on the shoulders of the continent's own governing elites. Simply to say that, to keep saying it, and to keep saying why it is true to any and all African people who will listen, this must be the predominant political objective of the Africanist profession at this historical juncture."

Somehow the professor manages to cling to his Marxism and blame only the black leaders of Africa, rather than himself and his colleagues who've abetted the regimes. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2003 11:43 PM