The politics of the genre of academic writing;or,Professor Curtin,Professor Clegg,and the African Studies network war

Academic writing as a genre: Introduction

This article is about the style, the forms of writing, which we academics adopt when we craft our research papers within an African context. Academic writing, like fiction or poetry, is a genre. It is a neglected one. Many African writers, from the beginning of using European languages, recognized the imperative to bend language to their will, to make it express their realities. This urgency to use language differently has not been shared by us scholars, who for the most part adhere to dominant forms of academic writing, inherited through the colonial archive and which may work against our purpose of producing new knowledge. While it is true that there are sub-genres of academic writing based on the particular discipline, such as “medical English” or “legal English” (Swales, 1990: 1), for the purposes of this article, I am focusing on a broader understanding of “academic and research English” (Swales, 1990: 8), particularly as it manifests in the research paper in the broadly defined field of African Studies.

I cannot go into the question of what is academic knowledge here. I am taking this as a given. My topic is the language, the form, and style of academic writing. However, I will suggest that academic writing, in the Humanities and Social Sciences broadly defined, involves the acquisition of methodological tools and concepts, which enable meaning making, and which may resonate in other times and places. It involves problem solving and asking the kinds of research questions for which there are usually multiple answers, or perhaps only more questions. It goes beyond experience and “know-how” but these may be portals into academic knowledge. See Cooper and Morrell, 2014 for a more in-depth discussion regarding epistemology within an African context.

So, my question here is: what are the academic writing codes, conventions and their enabling networks, which shape and contain the form and style of our research efforts? To address this question, we need to examine the dominant template of academic writing, which operates broadly across many fields of scholarly endeavour. Furthermore, in the African context where what, and how, to write have been filtered through the colonial archive, it becomes particularly urgent to surface this template.

This is hard because the template is as invisible as it is powerful. It silently enforces a bonded relationship between one way of writing and the production of academic knowledge. The template is operationalized by networks of academic writers, who both enable and occlude knowledge flows in the form of peer review. Peer review perpetuates a particular kind of thinking and writing. We need to ponder how to re-direct these ways of thinking and writing. In the process, alternative forms and styles of academic writing, which may be more fit for purpose, could emerge. I will touch on some of these possibilities towards the end of this paper.

I am asking these questions as the 20-year anniversary of the notorious Philip Curtin intervention in The Chronicle of Higher Education approaches. The links between the language of academic writing, the colonial past, the field of African Studies and networks of academics who appoint each other to posts and review each other’s submissions to journals, are usually silent. They became deafening in the aftermath of what became known as the Philip Curtin debacle. It is, therefore, an important moment to wonder whether, 20 years down the line, the issues it brought to bear of power, politics, networks, and colliding knowledge highways within African Studies broadly defined, are still relevant. I think they are, particularly when looked at through the lens of the continuing power of mainstream academic language.

Who are Professors Curtin and Clegg?

In 1995, Professor Philip Curtin, the highly respected historian of some 15 books on Africa and the Atlantic slave trade, dropped his bomb in The Chronicle of Higher Education. His intervention sent shock waves through Higher Education sites of learning in the Africa disciplines in the United States, on the African continent, and beyond. It reached us in the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, where I was the Director at the very moment when a new, post-Apartheid South Africa was in the making. Here, questions of writing, publishing, race, and the meaning of transformation, within the academy in general, and in African Studies in particular, were set alight. The status and power of white scholars of Africa were interrogated in the light of Curtin’s perceived prejudice towards black scholars.

I do not wish to go into the detail, but essentially Curtin decried what he saw as the situation of white graduates in African history not being able to find employment because jobs were being reserved for African American or African candidates. Outrageously, he called this the ghettoization of African Studies. This implied that the best candidate for the job, who would often be a brilliant white scholar, was not being appointed and that standards were thereby dropping.

Curtin’s (1995) ¹ paper and the responses to it became the focus of the 1995 African Studies Association Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. The African Studies Association, as a professional body, as arbiters and bench-markers, was called upon to take a stand. Black scholars planned to form a Pan-African caucus within the organization. “Ghetto-ization” implied that black scholars were less competent than their white colleagues. In this atmosphere of rift and vitriol, the African Studies Association Board formally repudiated and distanced itself from Curtin’s views.

At face value, the issue was clearly and bluntly about race and employment in the Africa disciplines in the United States, in the context of policies legally sanctioned to the level of the US Supreme Court. However, two decades later, and more interestingly, what are the deeper issues about academic research language, knowledge, and power that Curtin’s provocative piece brought to the surface? Certainly, more black scholars edit journals and hold senior professorships these days. But specific conventions dictating what and how to write about Africa remain embedded in the dominant archive and its operationalizing networks. And these continue to uphold mainstream academic traditions, which are not always fit for the purpose of making and expressing African knowledges. There are many Africas, languages, traditions, syncretisms, mongrelisms, hybridities, and idiosyncrasies that make up African heterogeneous realities. But these do not readily find appropriate academic languages and styles through which to express them. Curtin’s bland assumptions about the who and the how best to teach and research Africa in the United States, exposed an arrogance deeply embedded in Western thinking that has not been eradicated.

So, who is Professor Clegg and how does he enter the picture? Professor Clegg is an imaginary character in a short story by Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza entitled “Trial of an Academic Tourist”. He wrote this story prior to Curtin’s piece and included it as the opening chapter of his book entitled Manufacturing African Studies and Crises, which he says was catalysed by “Curtin’s diatribe” (1997: iii). The inclusion of fiction in an academic book signals its author’s intention to write and think out of the mainstream. Curtin aka Clegg is an Africanist, which, in the terminology that was established through this controversy, is defined by Zeleza as follows: “By Africanist I mean the entire intellectual enterprise of producing knowledge based on a western epistemological order in which both educated Africans and non-Africans are engaged” (1997: v). In other words, this order, with its writing template, by mediating the language of scholarship of both black and white academics, cuts across race despite the racial rhetoric in which the Curtin debate was couched.

The satirized Professor Curtin, in the guise of the fictional Professor Clegg, who was imagined prior to his original, makes havoc of our linear sense of time and of our protocols around what counts as academic. Zeleza writes with passion and partisanship. He mingles analysis with advocacy and fiction because “in the end all we try to do as intellectuals is to tell stories. That is what makes us human, the capacity to imagine” (1997: vi). It is not by chance, therefore, that his book was published by CODESRIA, an African knowledge-making and disseminating body based in Senegal.

Professors Curtin and Zeleza confront each other on the fault lines of warring networks and shifting balances of power. The Curtin debacle exposed us peers in the Africa disciplines as non-consensual and the rock of the African Studies establishment revealed its cracks.

The dominant template of academic writing

There is a hidden template which mediates the process by which some kinds of writing are admitted, and others excluded from entering the house of academic knowledge. Knowledge, and the style in which it is presented, are mutually reinforced within this dominant template of academic writing. The template can be understood in terms of its driver, which is the episteme. The episteme is the master source of invisible wisdom, which enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded from the knowledge archive, in a wide range of apparently different fields. This uber-fount is inescapable within particular historical moments in its imposition of structures of thought (Foucault, 1980: 197). This is not to say that it is impregnable; it can be contested and even transformed, but its power permeates even the strategies which contest it.

It is useful to understand how this template developed by looking at the history of the Royal Society as an institution, and its journal as its voice, as exemplary of many other institutions and publications. The Royal Society was, of course, profoundly plaited into the colonial adventurers and explorers, whose so-called discoveries came under its remit. This is Charles Bazerman’s point in his book, Shaping Written Knowledge. Under the heading “Exclusions and Gatekeeping”, he shows how from the mid-eighteenth century, the journal established the criteria for, and acted as the mediators of, scientific value (1988: 136). This value, furthermore, became bonded to a methodology and a style. The all-important written submission to the journal readily became packaged in the empiricism of evidence-based results of laboratory experiments. This, Bazerman suggests, excluded all other dimensions — “even kings, nations, and sacred texts lose power before those representations of nature identified as empirical facts” (1988: 142).

This “scientific method” of what counts as research and of how to write about it, became the benchmark of academic writing in other fields. The social “sciences” and humanities were particularly vulnerable to being seen as soft and fluffy and so “have been moved” to adopt the methods and constraints of the natural sciences. Bizarrely, given their brief, they become removed from uncertainties (Bazerman, 1988: 257), and “what never reaches the public record” is the “tinkering with equations on the back of a cocktail napkin” (Bazerman, 1988: 200).

Those tinkerings, the stories, thinking and uncertainties, are dustbinned; they are inappropriate to academic thinking. While it is the case that research methodologies have proliferated and the situation is now much more complex, especially in the humanities and social sciences, “scientific” remains the keyword for many different kinds of research in diverse fields of scholarship. It is a metaphor that has assumed material proportions.

The big question then is: what if, buried in rubbish — the debris itself perhaps — are knowledge treasures that would alter the shape of the house of knowledge, were they to be retrieved and built into the structure? This is precisely the point made by John Law in his paper entitled “Making a Mess with Method”. He and a colleague were researching “the way in which a local hospital trust handled patients suffering from alcoholic liver disease” (2003: 4). He finds it impossible to do justice to this research in conventional “academic forms of writing” (2003: 9). He is looking for a “textual form” in which to capture “the vague, the multiple […] the ephemeral or the elusive” (2003: 9). Law, therefore, focuses on “Things That Don’t Quite Fit” (2003: 8), which do not therefore find their way into final versions of an academic paper. Or as Mol and Law put it:

The texts that carry academic stories tend to organize phenomena bewildering in their layered complexity into clean overviews. They make smooth schemes that are more or less linear […] What may originally have been surprising is explained and is therefore no longer surprising or disturbing. Academic texts may talk about strange things, but their tone is almost always calm. (2002: 2)

In the African context, what is at stake is not merely the binned cocktail napkin, or the chaos of life becalmed, but the knowledges, languages, and philosophies of those who were enslaved, colonized, and dispossessed. In a paper entitled “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom”, Walter Mignolo critiques “the figure of the detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity who at the same time controls the disciplinary rules and puts himself or herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate” (2009: 4). He insists that far from being neutral and detached, the observer/academic emerges out of specific and powerful geo-historical locations and ensures that certain bio-graphic stories were delegitimized and pushed on the side or outside of the house of knowledge.

My point is that the gatekeepers to the house of knowledge often follow the dominant, invisible rules of what constitutes academic knowledge and its presentation in acceptable forms of academic writing. They also sometimes do not, especially once these rules and their underpinnings are rendered visible. This is what I understand to be Mignolo’s project when he “focuses on changing the rules of the game rather than its content” (2011: kindle location 1504), on contesting the politics and power of dominant forms of knowledge making.

In more micro terms, it is worth touching on just one of the stylistic features which is exemplary of this dominant template: the excessive use of technical terms, which translates ordinary speech into a new language. I have to exercise caution in making this critique. The creation and use of specialized terms and concepts is appropriate and necessary to academic writing. It is all too easy to caricature it. What is problematic is writing which unnecessarily accumulates theoretical or specialized terms which converse with each other in ever narrowing self-referential circles. These are the chains that Pierre Bourdieu et al. correctly identify as occurring when students are inducted into “the essay-writing genre” (1994: 14). This genre “authorizes” the “manipulation of a finite bunch of semantic atoms, chains of mechanically linked words” (1994: 14). The example they provide is the repetition of words, like “‘epistemology’, ‘methodology’, ‘Descartes’” (1994: 15). This is less a learning apprenticeship and more driven by “the logic of acculturation which goes beyond the superficialities of jargon to the operation of a code” (1994: 16; emphasis in original). Again the code is buried in what I have been referring to as the dominant template, which mediates the what and the how of academic writing.

Bourdieu et al.’s critique of the mainstream essay writing genre is what I have been calling the dominant template of academic writing, whose code of repetition of technical terms and the name dropping of guru scholars, works against the production of new knowledge. I use terms like “mainstream” and “dominant” advisedly, given that knowledge production and ways of writing are unstable and there are, of course, masses of examples of different kinds of academic writing. But this is writing against the mainstream, which exerts a powerful mediating influence. This is nowhere more apparent than in the irony of the fact that Bourdieu makes his critique in the style of academic language that he is busy critiquing. This is Billig’s point specifically in relation to Bourdieu, but more generally applicable: “The problem is that the academics, who study academic language, usually use academic language to analyse this language. And this can limit their ability to be critical, for they are employing the very tools whose use they are examining” (Billig, 2013: 41).

Bourdieu et al. were referring to French academic language in philosophy courses, while Charles Bazerman identifies the same degeneration of the language of communication in academic writing in English in the field of psychology. In a trend he identifies as beginning in the 1960s, Bazerman describes a “significant increase in the technical vocabulary, indicating a dense specialised knowledge” (1988: 274). Specialized terms “then get used in tight combination with other such terms” (1988: 274), which results in a chasm between this language and “ordinary language”. This makes the writing less about communicating and more about induction into a secret sect. Or as Bourdieu et al. put it: “as happens in magical initiations — language is first and foremost a marvelous incantation whose whole justification lies in placing the disciple in a fit state to receive grace” (1994: 19).

I could provide more stylistic analysis of the conventions of writing within the dominant template, but that is the topic of another paper. Recent books by Michael Billig (2013) and Stephen Pinker (2014) enlarge on the stylistic components of academic writing in great detail.

To sum up, the dominant mode of academic writing tends to be serious, sombre and un-subjective. It is linear, unemotional, disembodied. This is not solely a matter of style. There is seldom place for the ancestors, fiction, or poetry within the scholarly essay. A particular way of writing, and a certain kind of knowledge, dominates academic books and journal articles. Templates may be powerful and mediating, but they are activated by individuals inserted in epistemic networks, which carry the Word of the template in their books, articles, and conference presentations. We need to look more deeply at whom we cite and why. And who are “we”?

The genealogy of thinkers

Who decides what counts as knowledge and arbitrates what is acceptable as to the right and proper way of expressing it in our academic styles and genres of writing? There is a simple answer of immense complexity: we decide; we arbitrate in our academic networks of peers. We benchmark and gate-keep in our function of “peer review”. Networks of scholars are more than neutral knowledge-producing groups of “scientific” experts.

Where the complexity of this simple answer comes in is that peer review is itself part of the system of Higher Education, with all its structures and constraints. These epistemic networks of peers both buttress, and are constituted by, the global political economy of higher education and its research practices. We may edit the journals, that accept and reject submissions; we may review grant applications and sit on selection panels for promotion and job applications, but these are themselves driven by funding councils, by industry, and by national and international benchmarking structures. Peer review is far from perfect, but will be improved if we, as peers, recognize the inevitable constraints of the system in which we are inserted, including our gatekeeping roles. This may enable us to refuse to bounce an aspirant scholar, who may simply be violating the dress code of academic style.

What is not inevitable, however, is where we place ourselves in relation to the intellectual traditions, concepts, and politics from which we choose. Mignolo won’t use Foucault because he “devoted his attention mainly to Europe” (2009: 16). In the same vein, Lewis Gordon observes that

what is absent in Foucault’s analysis but present in Mudimbe’s is (i) the historical significance of outside imposition and (ii) the ontological weight of the past as manifested in African gnosis. Invention for Mudimbe is, in other words, more weighted down in reality by the ancestors than the more epiphenomal notions that tend to accompany European post-structural readings of historical events. (Gordon, 2006: 426)

Gordon will, therefore, cite Mudimbe rather than Foucault. It is rare for scholars to be self-reflexive on their choice of sources. What Gordon is referring to is Mudimbe’s powerful sense of the distorted genealogy inherited by African intellectuals. Mudimbe decries the existence of “false fathers”:

Having been drilled from textbooks that speak of our ancestors, the Gauls, what happens when you wake up and discover that our ancestors were not the Gauls? […] What are the implications here for a practice and politics of patrimony and tradition? Furthermore, what happens when you arrive in France, at the Sorbonne in Paris perhaps? Do you claim the false patrimony that is your passport into the academy? (1994: 191–2)

Along similar lines, when Mignolo sets out his key point about “the body-politics of knowledge”, he says “Frantz Fanon is again useful to set the stage, and I do so not through Homi Bhabha but through Lewis Gordon’s and Sylvia Wynter’s reading of Fanon” (2009: 15–16). It is a point he stresses: “Regarding what to think I am following Bennabi, Kusch, and Wynter. Decolonial thinking needs to build its own genealogy of thought” (Mignolo, 2011: kindle location 1729; emphasis added).

The avoidance of Homi Bhabha in tracking the importance of Fanon, is a coded resistance to postmodernism; Zeleza too is scathing about post-modernism,

with its glib cultural hybridities and rootless subjectivities, and celebrations of ambivalences, uncertainties and contingencies, for the structural claws of imperialism remain real; […] Struggles against imperialism and neo-colonialism, therefore, cannot be waged by atomized individuals preoccupied with reinventing their personal identities every day. (Zeleza, 1997: v)

This rejection of postmodernism, seen to be a European intellectual movement which permeated postcolonialism, explains Pius Adesanmi’s vehemence:

Suddenly I am no longer allowed to be African for more than five minutes in a single day just because I move in the discursive circuits of the postcolonial and the postmodern. With their excessive fear of any form of stability, these discourses traffic in such keywords as contingency, shifts, flux, and tentativeness. Culture and any kind of identity is provisional, contingent, constantly shifting, and must be continuously negotiated and renegotiated. In the nature of things, I am allowed to be Nigerian in the morning, African at noon, black diasporic subject in the afternoon, and African or black male in the evening. If I tarry too long in any of these identity locations, the police will be on hand to remind me of the dangers of totalisation and stabilised identities. And if I dare speak of transcendental African commonalities between Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and me, that would be sacrilege. I would have occluded our differences as nationals of different African countries. (Adesanmi, 2012: kindle location 1072 and 77) ²

This is not to pass value judgement on the contribution of Western scholars. The rejection of knowledge because of where it comes from is as bad as it is futile, given how mixed and mongrel our intellectual heritages are. This paper draws heavily on whatever is fit for purpose, be it the thinking of Foucault or Mudimbe. The only point I am making here is about the significance of whom we select to cite, which goes beyond the substantive argument made by the source; it includes positioning ourselves within certain traditions and establishing intellectual genealogies. And this positioning itself carries consequences, which mediate the substance of the argument.

Another way of characterizing the genealogy of thinkers is as messengers, or what Gordon calls “the relation of messengers to messages” (2006: 418) — or, as I would have it, the networks that operationalize the episteme and buttress the dominant template of writing. Gordon asks whether “the messenger’s identity [must] be constitutive of the message?” He answers in the affirmative, given that the message cannot be “treated as pre-formed and intact and simply delivered ‘by the messenger’” (2006: 418). In order to make the argument that “the messenger affects messages”, he refers to the mythopoetic world in which tricksters such as “the Yoruba Esu-Elegbara in Africa, the clever spider Anancy in the Caribbean, the signifying monkey in African America” (2006: 418) are the messengers, the intermediaries:

Many of the disciplinary and intellectual programmes in the contemporary academy emerged out of the revolution in knowledge production that took place in Europe and then in conjunction with the colonies known as the emergence of modern science. What the African intellectual faces in the modern academy, then, is that both the message and the messenger boil down to the same story of a European hegemon. (Gordon, 2006: 418)

Gordon is calling on a tradition of writing when he evokes these slippery figures. Most notably, he is referring to the device popularized by Henry Louis Gates in his The Signifying Monkey (1988) where “signifying” became a verb for playing with English, for creating double meanings and hiding places. It is a language that African Americans used as a wily, trickster form of rebellion, of resistance and of alignment with black others: “As tricksters they are mediators, and their mediations are tricks” (Gates, 1988: 6).

This was a strategy. African Americans constructed a coded language of signifying to express the daily challenges of life within a racist society. For Gates, signifying was speaking with forked tongues, tongues in cheeks, being “double-voiced” (1988: xxv). Signifying was for the person “who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language” (1988: 520). This is a language with which to overthrow the false fathers, but it is not one in which to write academic papers.

And so, we name them, we defer to them, our utterances are out of their mouths. While our citations are fundamental to academic knowledge building, the basis of our acknowledgement of intellectual debt is not simply a matter of the objective demands of our subject. Our sources are badges of belonging to a particular circle or network of thought. They are codes of adherence as much as substantive arguments. Or, as Ronald Britton wryly notes: “Small distortions, totemic use of terms, detours into irrelevant references, links made with other work not clearly connected to the thesis are all prompted by our desire for affiliation and our fear of exile” (Britton, 1998: 209). An “ancestral reference” is to claim a knowledge family, which gives us standing as academics (1998: 209); and so “the flow of the idea had been completely interrupted but no one could doubt that it was a Kleinian paper” (1998: 209–10).

To sum up, the writing template, as well as opposition to it, is operationalized by messengers, intermediaries, interpreters, and peers — “epistemic communities” which “change and are situated on trajectories and thus articulate histories, futures and possibilities” (Meyer and Molyneux-Hodgson, 2014: 2). Its journeys are literal and figurative as it migrates between languages and continents. This brings me to academic career trajectories linked to the study of Africa.

The trajectory: “(‘I am’) in the place you think” (Walter Mignolo)

My question once again is: what does this trajectory of movement, both physical and cultural, have to do with the dominant template of academic writing? Put another way, how do the journeys across languages and continents affect the craft and content of academic writing about Africa? Judith Butler answers this well: “our intentions will become derailed to some extent in the course of the trajectory of our words” and this, she suggests, is especially so “within the context of a multicultural linguistic condition” (2003: 204). This derailment she describes as the kernel of the “problem of translation” (2003: 204). Butler was referring to the acuteness of the loss of meaning in the context of migration, when different cultures and languages collide. What emerged, however, in the wars around how African Studies should be taught and researched, and who should do so, was that the problems of the failure of translation occur as much between languages as within a language like English. This can be seen when everyday speech is translated into academic ways of writing. I will return to this question of translation in a moment.

What distinguishes African Studies networks is that African scholars, whether working out of Africa or Europe or North America, are inserted into more than one language and more than one way of seeing and understanding the world and telling their stories. Curtin seemed unaware of this reality and its consequences. This is why Mignolo is determined

to dispel the myth that there [is] only one (diverse) center where knowledge is produced to solve the problem of every body, and to contribute to breaking the Western code, I began to argue (in seminars, articles, lectures) that the anchor of decolonial epistemologies shall be “I am where I think” and better yet “I am where I do and think;” as they become synonymous. The problem is that all too often “(‘I am’)” in the place you think. And that place is not, in my argument, a room or office at the library, but the “place” that has been configured by the colonial matrix of power. (2011: kindle location 188)

I would add to Mignolo’s formulation “I write where I am”, which becomes problematic when “I write where you are”. This dislocation takes place because the bulk of research in fields like postcolonial literary studies, as just one example, takes place outside of the ex-colonies. Zeleza describes himself as “an African scholar based in the global North who has been intimately engaged with academic networks and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic”. This positioning means that he has “to navigate and constantly negotiate diverse transnational scholarly communities of which I have to make sense to avoid tripping badly” (2006: 1). It is not by chance that his metaphor to capture the specifics of unequal power in the epistemic African Studies network is that of a journey:

The information highway is a dangerous place for those on foot or riding rickety bicycles. It is designed for, and dominated by those driving on the backs of powerful and prestigious publishing systems and academic enterprises of the industrialized North, who churn out the bulk of the world’s books, journals, databases, computers and software and other information technologies, and dictate international copyright and intellectual property laws on the hapless information-poor world majority. (Zeleza, 1997: 70)

This perilous information highway is both a material- and a cyber-space. There are dangers everywhere for the academic writer, who has not been inculcated with the protocols of the language of academia. This is so for many aspiring academics, including, for example, working-class, first generation scholars, and especially the women among them. Looking specifically at the African-born academic, who aspires to succeed and appears to be “an amalgam of at least two (often several) cultural perspectives”, in reality “his or her legitimating practices — how the scholar advances truth and reality — tends to be indisputably non-African, which exemplifies a form of African subordination” (Gordon, 2006: 418). While this is different from the African American situation, there are resonances between them. Gordon’s focus is on “academics raised in their local traditions but trained in another” (2006: 422). The interesting point he makes is the necessity for what he calls “translation”:

where the task is to articulate the tenets of the traditional African culture in Western academic terms. This is a project geared not only at the non-African academic, but also at fellow African academics, for the language of the academy becomes one of the many languages they face mastering in their life’s journey. (Gordon, 2006: 422–3)

Gordon’s use of “translation” is seldom used in relation to translating from spoken English into academic English, which observes the rules of the dominant template of writing. Zeleza calls this a rite of passage: “familiarity with northern intellectual fads, and publication in western academic media continued to be the rites of passage to the secret society of academia” (2006: 33).

The rite of passage involves being admitted by the gatekeepers through the door of the house of knowledge if, and only if, the scholar has successfully translated her writing, her thinking, her scholarship, into the acceptable format. To make his point about the amplitude of the challenge of succeeding, Zeleza writes stridently and finds publication for this tone in a forum like CODESRIA (The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), which is an independent pan-African body set up to stimulate research on the continent. Perhaps his stridency is an indication of his refusal to fulfil the rite satisfactorily and he looks, instead, for alternative publishing outlets. Another outcome of the unsuccessful novice’s journey through the passage into academia is to become not strident but silent. This is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to as an “itinerary of silence” (1990: 31; 33; 34).

While she is referring to the oppressed, rather than to the academic, her term, nonetheless, resonates here. How do you “hear” a silent itinerary, how do you follow it? Again, writing is figured as a journey, with its particular itinerary. Being compelled to take a predetermined route, within an enforced mode, results in writing becoming a form of what Spivak calls “epistemic violence” (1990: 36). And her famous “can the subaltern speak?” (1993/1988), could be rephrased as “can the African scholar write?”

My own interest here, coming from South Africa and from a postcolonial literary studies background, is in the collusion between the erasures that accompanied colonialism and the forms and styles and therefore also the substance of academic writing on Africa. This is precisely what Spivak means in her comment that “in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary” (1993/1988: 75). I like the word “cathect”, which involves investing emotional, libidinal energy in what one is able to write. What kinds of academic writing could cathect audible, instead of silent, itineraries?

Dismantling the dominant writing template: Fiction, spirits and gods, time and koeksisters ³

Some academic writers have experimented with writing differently. They do so in opposition to the dominant template of academic writing, with greater or lesser success. I have space here only to touch very lightly on some of the many experimentations with academic writing that have taken place. I do this to give a taste of some of the alternatives.

Researchers may play with fiction in interesting ways. I began this paper with Paul Zeleza, who wrote his own short story to set the scene for his academic book. Achille Mbembe uses fiction somewhat differently in his On the Postcolony. He takes African writers who have played with reality in their narrative structures, and he syncretizes their imaginaries into his theoretical analysis of the nature of postcolonial Africa. These are writers like Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and Labou Tansi (Mbembe, 2001: 204). Their fictions provide Mbembe with worlds in which different dimensions of life, death, and the spirits co-exist. For Mbembe, only by entering the writers’ alternative worlds on their own terms do we begin to comprehend complexities of the political and philosophical nature of Africa today.

Amos Tutuola’s fiction in particular, with his liminal, dead, and alive beings, pervades Mbembe’s academic writing and transforms it. This includes Tutuola’s distinctive Yoruba English. The postcolony, then, is a place where life and death are so entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side of the shadow or its obverse. The question is no longer: “Is that man still alive or dead” (Mbembe, 2001: 196–7). He is alive and dead; he is many states and assumes multiple roles, beliefs, and guises. It is a world populated by gods, spirits, political dictators, and everyday lives of individuals, who do not themselves make clear distinctions between them. In Mbembe’s postcolony, as in Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine-Drinkard (1952) with which he partners, the plural is a way of writing about Africa, in and for itself, outside of the singular embedded in imperial language (2001: 179). In this way, these writers of fiction become Mbembe’s catalyst for writing postcolonial knowledge appropriate to its own histories and issues. “Faced”, Mbembe says, “with the cul-de-sac of the many discourses on Africa”, one “means for escaping the trap, is to experiment with ways of writing” (Mbembe and Hofmeyr, 2008: 253–54). This is why he played with “repetitions, inventions, a manner and rhythm of narration or description at once open, hermetic, and melodious”. He did this in his search for “a mode of writing” commensurate with the task of “encountering those zones of contemporary African life overloaded with memory, remembrance and debt” (2008: 254; emphasis added).

The gods also uneasily inhabit the world of historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, who writes about India, but whose problem is relevant to African historical writing. What he struggles with is that history writing is secular and has problems “in handling practices in which gods, spirits, or the supernatural have agency in the world” (2007: 72). Chakrabarty describes two systems of thought — one disenchanted and another “in which humans are not the only meaningful agents” (2007: 72). What interests him, and also me, is that “for the purpose of writing history, the first system, the secular one, translates the second into itself” (2007: 72). In other words, if peasants claim

to have been inspired to rebellion by the exhortations of their gods, then the historian would feel obliged to translate the peasants’ claim into some kind of context of understandable (that is, secular) causes animating the rebellion. I assume that such translation is both inevitable and unavoidable. (Chakrabarty, 2007: 89)

This word, translation, is again interesting. The transformation is enabled by a form of writing translation — from the poetic language of belief into the analytical language of the academic secular.

If this inevitability were total, however, there would be no point to Chakrabarty’s quest for a kind of writing that might not translate in this way. The refusal to translate finds a language in Mbembe’s use of the language of fiction. Chakrabarty searches for an answer of his own: “How do we — and I mean narrators of the pasts of the subaltern classes in India”, he asks,

handle this problem of the presence of the divine or the supernatural in the history of labor as we render this enchanted world into our disenchanted prose — a rendering required, let us say, in the interest of social justice? And how do we, in doing this, retain the subaltern (in whose activity gods or spirits present themselves) as the subjects of their histories? (Chakrabarty, 2007: 77)

It is worth emphasizing that documenting and acting upon labour history in the interests of workers’ rights and conditions — of social justice — is fundamental to the role of engaged academic practice. This is not lip service and I will not follow it with a “but”. The “and” that follows from this is that the challenge, taken up by the likes of Mbembe in his writing style, is to thicken that documentation with dimensions of life that go against its totalizing grain.

And so, Chakrabarty’s search is for writing manoeuvres, which could mitigate the takeover by the linear, secular code of the historian or the sociologist: “The point is to ask how this seemingly imperious, all-pervasive code might be deployed or thought about so that we have at least a glimpse of its own finitude, a glimpse of what might constitute an outside to it” (2007: 93). He ends the chapter with the metaphor of the breach: “the breach that the stories of godly or ghostly intervention make in history’s system of representation” (2007: 96). The final words of the chapter are:

If history is to become a site where pluralities will contend, we need to develop ethics and politics of writing that will show history, this gift of modernity to many peoples, to be constitutionally marked by this breach.

Or, to put it differently, the practice of subaltern history would aim to take history, the code, to its limits in order to make its unworking visible. (2007: 96)

If what is inevitable is that academics write “about” peasants and their motivations, this thickening should, perhaps paradoxically, be less and not more — a gap. This could be a space not waiting to be filled, but a silence, an admission of ignorance. Or, pushing the code to its undoing could be a kind of writing that defies the dominant template and takes us to the place where gods and peasants have agency. Pushing the code to its limits challenges the separated systems of thoughts.

What this kind of writing differently seems to entail is an interrogation of linear time: “Research on Africa has hardly stood out for its attempts to integrate nonlinear phenomena into its analysis. Similarly, it has not always been able to account for complexity […] it has assimilated all non-linearity to chaos” (Mbembe, 2001: 17). The non-linear is capacious. It invites the “scientific” into the unpredictability of the non-“scientific”. It is the world of the spirits, of the living dead, of whatever is more than what meets the eye. And this more is what is excluded in the logical, analytical language of academic writing.

This is why Mignolo tries to structure his academic writing as if it were a jazz score. This involves circular, rhythmic, and repetitive writing, which intersects with his linear, analytical discussion. “As in jazz” he writes, “I have a leitmotif and several formulaic sentences that the reader will encounter once and again in the preface and introduction, and which will reappear in each chapter and the afterword” (Mignolo, 2011: kindle location 36). What this entails is that his book “unfolds in a spiral rather than linear way” (2011: kindle location 188). What he is embodying in the form of his writing is that “differential times and differential memories and histories are delinking from the belief that there is only one line of time” (2011: kindle location 2386). This means that,

The unfolding of the book’s argument is not linear but spiral: A linear argument cannot capture the nuances, since once a name or a paragraph is mentioned or quoted in a linear flow, it does not return: repetitions are not good in English composition but are important in decolonial thinking. (Mignolo, 2011: kindle location 190; emphasis added)

Decolonial thinking writes in a different register from that of Standard, compositional English into which it refuses to translate itself; decolonial thinking is plural. It is a form of scholarship, involving a way of writing that also welcomes dimensions not normally admitted through the knowledge gates. Mignolo repeats and emphasizes this multidimensionality, reminiscent of Mbembe and Chakrabarty: “the first step in decolonial thinking is to accept the interconnection between geo-history and epistemology, and between bio-graphy and epistemology that has been kept hidden by linear global thinking” (2011: kindle location 1487).

The relationship between bio-graphy and knowledge-making involves bodies situated in concrete spaces and raises the issue of the nature of experiential knowledge and its relationship to academic knowledge, with which it is not identical. This brings me finally to the koeksisters and a paper by Moeain Arend entitled “‘It was Hardly about Writing’: Translations of Experience on Entering Postgraduate Studies”, which appears in a collection challengingly called Risk in Academic Writing (2014). Again, translation is important, here in reference to the alienating divestment of her everyday experiences of Arend’s student, Sadia, when she enters postgraduate studies at the University of Cape Town. Her course

was ultimately all couched in academic “fanfare”. Throughout the course, I struggled to find the real people (whose experience I hailed) amidst authors haranguing us with their jargon-riddled treatises about learning […] I found myself looking around the room and between the pages for Aunty Bee skilfully tossing the koeksisters in coconut, […] and oh so many other faces, sounds and fragrances squashed under a dense mass of formal works, and I felt I was being suffocated. (Arend, 2014: 230)

Arend’s question is how to assist Sadia to make knowledge out of the talents of her Aunty, who skilfully tosses the soft syrupy South African confection in coconut, without it disintegrating. This is a real talent, which I myself learnt from sad experience. Aunty Bee’s dexterity notwithstanding, this skill, this “know-how” is not knowledge in an academic sense. Like the scribbling on the napkin, is Sadia required to discard her Aunty when she writes as a postgraduate? Should Arend be training her how to do so?

In order to capture the kinds of knowledge not normally admitted into an academic paper, Arend realizes he has to write differently. He breaks up his chapter into a tale of four different stories. The first story is a piece of short fiction by the South African writer, Herman Charles Bosman, and we are back to the powerful role that including fiction can play in academic writing. The second story describes the policy in his education faculty, which recognizes prior learning (RPL) for admission to the University of Cape Town. This policy provokes robust debate in South Africa, where many potential scholars were denied formal education: their “prior learning” took place at the university of political involvement. Prior learning is on the fault lines of formal and experiential knowledge. Story Three is Sadia’s story, told in many of her own words.

Story Four incorporates all three within a theoretical framework, which respects the other stories and also transforms, not translates, them into academic knowledge. In the process, Arend writes a very different kind of academic paper. Without going into detail regarding Bosman’s story, Arend’s first, its function is to prevent Arend from collapsing the multiplicity of the different stories and genres of writing into a unified whole:

Considering Bosman’s advice in Story One, I had to resist the temptation to sew Story Four into a neat and well-packaged whole — a demand often made of writers in academia. Instead I am attempting to discard some of the ways of writing and theorising that have become “familiar” to me in order to experiment with others. (Arend, 2014: 220)

In this fourth story, Arend turns a koeksister into a non-human actor by way of his use of Bruno Latour’s theory of the network of agents and voices. The material, experiential, realities of Sadia’s life may find a place in the scholarly archive, if they become theoretical in the sense of contributing to enabling a thousand and one other stories in different times and places to find voices in ongoing social, personal, and political narratives.

Conclusion and another Professor

I have taken a leap from the largeness of the template with its epistemic engine and its knowledge networks, to the smallness of the lonely academic writer at her desk, crafting a paper in particular ways. I have been suggesting that this dominant template of how to craft academic papers, which is disseminated through those epistemic networks of guru thinkers, mediates the language and style in which academic papers are written. In the process, it partially determines the nature of the knowledge produced within its architecture. Walter Mignolo could not, therefore, be more wrong when he declares that writing in the conventional academic way, with all its “protocols” has no effect on what is written:

It doesn’t mean that discourses of dewesternization are promoting sloppiness; […] discourses are cast in good English, they follow scholarly argumentative structures, with footnotes and bibliographies and so on and so forth. This is the terrain of scholarship. In the case of official and state discourses by prime ministers or other functionaries, the discourses follow their respective appropriate protocols, which doesn’t mean that they must follow the blueprint determined by the IMF or Washington. (2011: kindle location 983)

All of those scholarly structures of footnotes and references in good academic language, will, without doubt, affect the extent to which the IMF or Washington blueprint can be contested. The dominant way of writing and thinking colludes in a way that Mignolo, as a radical decolonial thinker, should understand.

*****

Professor Clegg is an exemplary false father. He is renowned as an expert on all matters African. He flits from place to place on the continent; he speaks no African language; he supervises the new cohort of aspirant scholars in the tradition of his name. This is not inevitably the case because he is white. But in the guise of the real-life Professor Curtin, he compels us to consider once again the old divides and polarities between Africa and the West. These distinctions, interests, and differences in power may have become more blurred over the decades since Curtin’s polemical piece, but they have by no means disappeared.

When Professor Zeleza, in a time warp, imagined Professor Curtin in the satiric, fictional garb of Professor Clegg, he exemplified the importance of strengthening new networks of power through a transformed academic language. In the story, there is another fictional Professor — Muwonalero. Muwonalero takes the stage, challenges Clegg, ditches his formal speech and has the last word. He is able to do this because he speaks in a language with which he is comfortable: “My grandfather”, Professor Muwonalero chuckles, “used to tell us that words on paper do not breathe, so one cannot tell whether or not they are lying, that’s why I won’t read my prepared speech. I will speak from my heart” (Zeleza, 1997: 6).

We may or may not wish to evoke the ancestors or the koeksister-baking aunties, but the old centres of academic power will prevail, however radical our thinking, if the language in which we write our academic papers does not find a way to speak such that itineraries of silence are heard.