Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Intellectuals: What Are the New Challenges?” Oran 9-11 Th March 2010

1st Draft – Not for circulation or citation. CODESRIA Conference ‘Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Intellectuals: What are the New Challenges?” Oran 9-11 th March 2010 The Challenges of Feminism: Gender, Ethics and Responsible Freedom Amina Mama University of California, Davis I Introduction Feminism challenges us at very many levels, and as an intellectual politics it also faces many challenges. It is a call to freedom, in an era where (as Mkandawire noted) there is generally less ‘freedom in the air’. It denotes the struggle to free women from centuries of oppression, exploitation and marginalization in all our societies. It is a call to end patriarchy and to expose, deconstruct and eradicate all the myriad personal, social, economic and political practices, habits and assumptions that sustain gender inequality and injustice around the world. It seeks nothing less than the transformation of our institutions, including our knowledge institutions. The widespread manifestations of feminism in the 21 st century affect all of us in numerous ways in various aspects of our personal, socio-cultural and political lives. As an intellectual paradigm, feminism was only beginning to push into the consciousness of Africa’s mainstream scholarly community 20 years ago. I will trace the role and contribution of feminism as an liberating paradigm within Africa’s scholarly community between 1990 and now, highlighting some of the challenges - institutional and intellectual - which it continues to pose for advocates of freedom in general, and socially responsible intellectual freedom in particular, and discussing some of the strategies that have emerged in the context of addressing the challenges. But first I must thank my colleagues at CODESRIA – Ebrima, and CRASC – Nouria, and their colleagues for this conference. Twenty years ago I and others here attended the precursor to this event - CODESRIA’s first major international conference on Academic Freedom and the Social Responsibility in Africa, held in Kampala in Nov 1990. That was a memorable 1 occasion for many of those who attended. For those of us who were just at the beginning of our scholarly careers it was a landmark moment, and for some (myself included) it was a first contact with CODESRIA. It was inspiring enough for me to resign my job at the ISS and return home and to join colleagues in the work of building independent spaces – the CRD and NWSN – both outside the university space – Nigeria under military rule, deteriorating conditions, hard to get hired, even without a salary (anecdotes). Later in South Africa – Jimi referred in passing to the fact that there were different challenges of different colours. As we have heard (from Ebrima, Thandika, Theresa, Ibrahim and others).The universities were already experiencing crisis and divestment, so that independent scholarly networks and centres were assuming greater importance, particularly with regard to questions of academic freedom and social responsibility. Many of us have remained committed to ensuring that the basis consensus we articulated at that time would remain a reality in Africa. This was not a liberal Western notion of individual freedom, but a notion that located academics within their social and historic responsibilities for the freedom of all our people. The Kampala conference was a landmark event. We redefined the meaning of ‘academic freedom’ away from old bourgeois individualist and colonial thinking , Africanizing it by locating it within Africa’s imperatives for freedom of thought and instilling it with a notion of academia as a public good. We did this by locating the notion of ‘academic’ freedom firmly within a sense of our regional history and context, so that ‘academic’ freedom was no longer removed from the broader freedom of African people - women, men and children. The language we used to denote this epistemological shift away from ‘ivory tower’ notions of academic life as abstract and alienated from the rest of society was that of social responsibility . We reminded ourselves then that a strong sense of education as a public good, offering an important route to freedom and progress for Africa’s oppressed and marginalized majorities underlay the formation of so many publically supported academic institutions across the continent. This public interest drove all the struggles that were waged to make these inclusive, modern and to hold them responsible - not to any particular regime - but to the public, to the women and men of Africa. Later there was occasion to highlight the particular investment that women – because of their historic status and roles as women - have always had in African universities. We can trace this as 2 back to the medieval times, given the fact that one of Africa’s earliest universities, the Islamic university of University of Al-Karaouine in the Moroccan city of Fez, was established by a woman - a wealthy philanthropist by the name of Fatima El Fihria in the year 859. The Kampala conference spent a lot of time on the oppressive role that many governments of the day played in censoring freedom of thought, but it also highlighted the role of civil society, in the form of religious fundamentalist groups, claims made in the name of ‘culture’ as if culture were not always contested, and by conservative social institutions and other non-state actors. We did not spare ourselves either - the late Claude Ake presented an ascerbic self-criticism of academics, chastising scholars for reneging on our responsibilities. He argued compellingly that our role is one of constantly working to demystify and challenge the complex machinations of a global capitalist system that was not favourable to Africa’s interests or the pursuit of democratisation. There was also a paper (presented by Ayesha Imam and I) that particularly focused on the self-censorship exhibited by a male- dominated scholarly community that was reluctant to take gender seriously - inside the academy as much as beyond it. There was already a mass of evidence that we had ignored the gender dynamics of colonization and underdevelopment at our peril. It was also clear that even our purportedly ‘liberal’ universities, though these had not excluded women, were nonetheless heavily male- dominated, and formal and informal power resided in old- boys networks that made them very difficult places for women to navigate. We addressed gender injustice in the academy through the trope of self censorship, in order for it to be included in the conference at all. Today, in the liberalized universities, gender inequalities have persisted and perhaps deepened, and the significance of self-censorship has grown enormously. And self censorship has come into its own. In fact I think we might prefer to talk about how we academics have become self –regulating and self governing subjects, rather than socially responsible citizens… Twenty years ago scholars who challenged androcentrism encountered strong collegial and institutional resistance, and paid a social cost for their trouble. Some were subjected to smear campaigns, threats and even outright violent attack for propagating new ideas and concepts, as Sall (2000) was to document. Being identified as a ‘feminist’ meant you could 3 not be a sound scholar - and this led many of us to talk about ‘gender analysis’ because being identified with feminism’ meant risking one’s academic career and facing social and professional censure. Less attention was paid at that time to the ubiquitous forces of economic neoliberalism that were to come to radically alter higher education landscapes across the globe (Oanda et al. and others at this conference, Mamdani 2007, Zeleza 2006 etc). Although SAPs were already being imposed all over the region, I do not think many of us realized the extent to which market forces were going to ravage public institutions, as the Washington consensus took over and dominated development discourses, sabotaging considerations of social justice and virtually eradicating social protection. State collapse and militarization are just two extreme outcomes of this process, but the widespread effects of corporate-led globalization processes on public spaces for critical reflection have been quite catastrophic, and especially so on a continent that had the most fragile HE sector, not to mention a rather timid intelligentsia, to begin with. That all of these globalization phenomena have had gender differentiated effects on our communities goes without saying – poverty and economic underdevelopment cannot be discussed fully without reference to the feminization of poverty, military rule, militarization and conflict cannot be discussed without reference to the widespread and misogynistic atrocities perpetrated against women in Africa’s more recent conflicts, and these gendered phenomena of our day are all now in public awareness. They have complicated gender politics in ways that demand rigourous analysis – e.g. suddenly women’s informal work is to be ‘captured’ – now that the formal employemnt options have all but disappeared in poor countries. Women’s emplyment has increased in the FTZ’s etc, but the conditions are unfavourable enough to suggest that neoliberalism cynically targets ‘docile’ women and girls as workers… Political arenas also complicated ever since military regimes jumped ahead of civil society and social movements to cynically mobilize women for ends that were less than feminist… Our colleagues have challenged us by asking: What has changed in the two decades that have passed since 1990? Clearly a great deal has changed in the broad context , as well as in scholarly institutions (as others have said, and written). We heard yesterday that there have been very serious effects on the most basic rights and freedoms of our communities, as mighty swathes of Africa that have been impoverished and deprived of peace, basic needs 4 and human security, never mind the freedom to think, and think our way forward and out of the seemingly endless crises and underdevelopment. I agree with TM “We cannot develop in ignorance”.

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