Nadine Machikou: "Invisible Intellectuals, African Academic Mobility in Question"

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Speaker 1: So good afternoon everybody, welcome to the second episode of the sprint lectures on mobility struggles. My name is Joel Glasman, I'm teaching African history at the University of Bayreuth. And today we are welcoming Professor Nadine Machiku. Nadine Machiku is a professor of political sciences in the University of Yaoundé II in Cameroon. She has been an invited professor and a research fellow in several universities including Lyon III in France, Hanoi in Vietnam and the University of Bayreuth in Germany. She is member of the cluster Africa and multiple. Professor Machiku has published extensively on the political sociology of Cameroon and West Africa, on topics ranging from democratisation to political violence upon health infrastructure, protest movements and migration. I especially recommend her last publications on the war in Anglophone Cameroon, an article published recently by Politique africaine, and as well as a chapter prominently published in the last volume edited by Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr, Politiques des temps, on what Professor Machiku calls the politics of compassion. Today Professor Machiku will speak about her ongoing project on African scholars at risks. And this research question is of course the question of endangered scholars and African intellectuals is of course a very good entry point into our topic of planetary mobility struggles. Thank you very much Professor Machiku for being there today.

Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1: Can you please tell us how did you come to study scholars at risk? Where does your interest for this topic come from?

Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you very much. I am first of all really grateful to have the opportunity to share some of my thoughts and projects on this issue of course, all of you, I am so happy to see you again, Cyrus, that I met last time, and thank you very much for your interest for this issue. So the question you asked me is very simple. There is a gap between spaces of danger and relief policies and how the issue of danger is taken care of by especially international relief policies. So I was interested in this policy because there is a clear, I would say distance between where places considered as being, I would say, in dangerous spaces, Africa being one of the most in dangerous spaces in terms of how, I mean people live there, and at the same time, the absence of Africans and especially scholars in relief policies. This is clearly what was my interest. And I wanted to understand, first of all, how the issue of danger is framed, what makes the issue of danger to skip, I would say, spaces considered as more fearful places on the planet. And how does this impact or help us to understand both the issue of epistemic inequality, the issue of how the global south as a whole inserts itself in mobility issues. Of course, what I wanted to look at especially is how mobility is one of, I would say, one of the traces, one of the key points through which we can analyse this. Mobility being a way of escaping places of danger. Let's put it this way, globally, when they say danger as academics are concerned, as scholars are concerned, there are three or four categories and at the same time three or four institutions that are considered. Maybe the first thing to say about this is that African scholars have been characterised historically as not being in danger. And I would say even through very critical situation, you could take the Cold War and during the Cold War, the fact that there was a move of academics, I will take the example...

Speaker 1: Of course, of DRC, of Cameroon, countries like this where there were massive mobility of students and of scholars towards the Soviet Union, nationalist movements and stuff. The Congolese Lumumbist, some of these scholars from this movement who had to flee out of Congo. And in all this situation, Biafra, the Biafran war in Nigeria, but also the, of course, the issues of democratic crisis which always had a clear impact on the situation of scholars. But all through this situation historically, the African scholars have never emerged as being characterized as an endangered situation. So what I was really looking at was especially in the categories, and these categories are endangered scholars, scholars at risk, academic at risk, categories that were framed since the thirties and all through the history of the, I mean, the intellectual history, they could see how these categories were framed, but they were not framed to be able to capture situations in which these scholars were found themselves. I was brought to look at this through both an institutional and statistical history of how the fabric of an endangered scholar is made and how the policy relief is built on this. And at the same time, a prosopography approach by looking at situations of scholars who were signalled as being in danger somehow and who had to flee their countries. And I'm really putting together these two histories, the, I would say, the institutional history of how academic at risk, scholars at risk, endangered scholars take care of, I would say, scholars in danger and I'll put it clearly, don't take care of African scholars as being endangered. And at the same time, a bottom-up approach on individual biography and even collective biography. If I take the example of, for instance, I would say Anglophone intellectuals who had to flee in the eighties and the nineties from Cameroon to countries like Nigeria or South Africa, the situation of intellectuals from the Congo, and I mean various situations. And in these individual trajectories, you hardly find them in the statistics and in the reports on endangerment, on scholar endangerment. So this is the various form that this fabric of categories interested me. And we could clearly here see an interest to question how the condition of the African scholar is qualified with regard to the categories of danger. And of course, you could look at the selection of few cases, but I want to say that this is more than just few cases because if you look at the capacity of international instrument for the protection of academics at risk, is how they trace, capture, address and I would say relieve those who are in danger, you will see that it is basically the consideration of the immediate endangerment. And this way of looking basically at the immediate endangerment and thus would somehow make invisible the situation of so many scholars who can't signal themselves, who would not have the possibility to signal themselves as being endangered. And you could understand clearly how the immediate danger and the structural or the systemic danger is one of the explanations so far on how or why these African scholars have been made so invisible.

Speaker 2: One of the statistics that you're quoting in your research is you say, on the one side, if you look at the Global Peace Index report of the ten most dangerous countries in the world, five are African countries. That's the Global Peace Index. And on the other side, if you look at the Scholar Rescue Fund of the Institute of International Education, that is an institution supporting helping scholars at risk worldwide, only four percent of the scholars at risk or classified at risk are African scholars. How do you explain this invisibility of African scholarships in these mechanisms?

Speaker 1: Maybe if you could permit me just to say a word on how effective they could be able to talk of invisibility by considering a very specific type of sources. I crossed the statistics produced by the Global Peace Index report during several years. And in this international geopolitical map for dangerous or at-risk countries, you see clearly that among ten most dangerous countries in the world, five are in Africa. And in order, you could find here, of course, South Sudan, you could find Somalia, you could find Libya, DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic. And in this different, and I would say more and more, the case of Cameroon with the issue of the Anglophone crisis. At the same time, when you look at the, for example, the statistics of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, you could see that the top five countries where people are considered as at risk or displaced, both students and scholars, the only African country I would say in five countries is Ethiopia. Is Ethiopia. And you see that there is clearly a gap between countries that are identified as the most dangerous places and countries that are considered as places where scholars and students are considered as being at risk or at least being providers of, I would say, refugees. So in this, it appears clearly that these most dangerous countries are not statistically the largest providers of academic relief seekers and even the most represented in the relief policy actually conducted at the international level and the rescue policies carried out by institutions like Scholars at Risk Network or Endangered Scholars Worldwide or the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics. You look at the three or four institutions who are in charge of taking care of them, you see that clearly, as far as African scholars are concerned, statistically they are invisible. And so it is very important to look at the tools themselves. That's why I went to the issue of how is in this institution the category of danger, what does it mean to be in danger, what does it mean to be at risk, and how is the category risk, I mean the scholar risk framed and has been framed. Of course, it's a frame that has been evolving. And what I really saw is that, as we said, the issue of the immediate, coming to the question you asked me, the immediate danger is far more so important in the way they consider who is at danger. And when I talk of this, I look at both the issue of being forced to displace, being imprisoned, being chased from their academic positions, and I would put it as all these situations where you can't continue doing your work. It's basically what would be much more interesting. And the articulation between how, I would say, the most emergency-oriented danger frames the selection of those who are going to be under the relief policies, and at the same time the disarticulation with conflict-afflicted state and situations is so interesting and so surprising that there is no articulation between the two types of realities. So predominantly, we want to look at, of course, this is still a project, we want to look at what is going on as basically the result of a qualification effect. Gouvan would say a framing impact. How is the issue, is how does the categorization and the measurement of first of all what is being an academic and then what is being endangered, these two categories clearly appear to have clearly affected the visibility or the invisibility of the situation of African scholars at risk. Of course, there is a question that can be asked which is...

Speaker 1: Is apart from these international rescue institutions or tools, is there any way, for example, at the level of the continent, the issue of the danger has been, I would say addressed by institutional, I'll take especially the CDESRIA which is the Council for the Research in Social Sciences, which is one of the institution who have been interested in the issue of academic freedom. So you will see that if the issue of danger is translated at the international level as being immediate danger, at the level of the continent, the issue of danger, academic danger is translated in terms of academic freedom and I would say especially economic academic freedom. So CDESRIA has interpreted, and this is since the Conference of Kampala in nineteen ninety, has interpreted the issue of being in danger as an African scholar as being subjected to work in a context where the university were under economic reforms of the World Bank and could not really deploy themselves. So the individual situation of danger had hardly interested these institutions. So you see that they are different, I would say different ways of framing what it means to be in danger. And this is basically what interests me in this project which has started. So far, I've been able to through prosopography to follow situations of scholars from different countries who had to flee their countries and the traces of their going out because of being the fact that they were in danger is so difficult to find. So you have to go through really personal networks and some traces that they will leave here and there and you hardly find traces of their being in danger in institutional categories. So the fact that we have to reverse the approach of identifying who is in danger has opened a lot of possibilities in terms of really qualifying both the situation of, and I say especially systemic violence, not only individual situations but also systemic situation producing the incapacity for a scholar to be able to do his job in this context.

Speaker 2: So on one side you have Western definition or concepts such as the one used by the Scholar Rescue Fund and you paper that in the Scholar at Risk database, which is a database that exists since the nineteen fifties, there is no mention of African scholars before two thousand and eleven. So according to their definition, to this immediacy paradigm of very narrow definition of what danger means. And the other side, the definition by the Conference of Kampala in nineteen ninety and used by the CDESRIA, a definition of danger linked to systematic or systemic violence. What does that mean? What does systemic violence mean? How can we imagine what the CDESRIA is saying with this?

Speaker 1: Okay. First of all, what I wanted to underline here truly the category of systemic and not necessarily individual traces of danger is based on the case of South Africa. Actually, South Africa is very interesting because of how ambiguous was the qualification of being at risk. As you know, during the Cold War and especially during the apartheid era, there was such a, I would say, an impact on South African scholars who could not actually, they were banned from attending international meetings and going through all this boycott, academic boycott of South Africa, which impacted the situation of, so basically you take a situation like the apartheid, which is a, I would say, systemic threat, systemic threat, which of course would not affect in the same perspective, I would say white and black scholars in South Africa. This is one case. And if I take that case, this is typically the kind of cases that would interest in the qualification of academic threats in the African context. And you took the example of the CDESRIA. So when the meeting of Kampala held in nineteen nineties, the position was clearly, of course, there can be an explanation to this, which is an explanation political or ideological explanation with the presence of some economists, very, I mean Marxist economics. Of course, you all know the...

Speaker 1: the work of Samir Amin within the CODESRIA. So we can see how it could have an impact on African standards of academic endangerment, uh, the gap with the international, uh, the international standards. So actually in in in nineteen nineties, uh, there were the there was the wave of democratization and this symposium in uh in Kampala on academic freedom. So basically here they they they the issue was to to think about what it means to to be uh to be an intellectual in Africa, what is the social responsibility of of intellectuals. And during this meeting which was organized by the Council for the Development of Social Sciences Research in uh in Africa, the participants mostly identify crisis and I say economic crisis and the the economic crisis provoked by the structural adjustment programs as being the primary danger to academic freedom far ahead of other issues as poor conditions of work, closure of university presses, imprisonment, killings, forced exile where hardly mentioned by by academics uh during this during this meeting. So we can clearly see that uh CODESRIA and I say there is an explanation because of the also the I would not put it as the uh ideological orientation but clearly you you you have uh the the impact of of uh how these economists were understanding, I would say the the the impact of adjustment programs on public policies in these countries. So they were more concerned by the fact that systemic condition, the systemic condition I would say the the existence of libraries, the quality of university infrastructures being more important and being putting more at risk scholars than killings, imprisonment, forced exile. And this is very interesting because we have to put these these intellectuals, these uh academic figures within also the context of authoritarianism, countries where they they lived and how they interpreted also I would say uh the the what what is the the standard of uh the the the the the I mean academic of of academic freedom. So after they they they framed a declaration, the the the Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility. And this is the main tool that shows how the interpretation of being at danger uh is is is uh in African in the African context. I want to put it that way because uh CODESRIA is the main institution who has had a position on academic freedom within the continent. Uh so so so it's interesting to look at to look at this looking at the fact that it is more the the condition of university and not the condition of the scholar individual condition of the scholar that that interested as being something that will put at at risk. Of course this has has an impact on the the possibility of identifying immediate situations of danger and especially as I said in the international tools, it is the immediate situation of endangerment and the immediate situation is the the arrests, being arrested, being imprisoned and being forced to to be to exile, the fact that one can be killed, that is considered as a situation of of danger. So you can imagine that when a scholar is applying for this relief uh tools, is applying for example for mobility uh in the context of the Scholar at Risk uh organization, he has to be able to prove that he is uh at risk to be imprisoned, he is at risk to be uh to be to be to be exiled or he was at risk, he was threatened, his life was threatened, which is not always easy to to bring out. So for decades clearly uh this way of understanding academic danger uh with a very structural uh interpretation has determined uh especially the the capacity of African scholars themselves to present themselves as being at danger. So this this is also how the the institutional tools will frame the perception that a scholar can have.

Speaker 1: of himself being at risk or not. And the fact that he could imagine that he can apply to to uh to to be protected in the the rescue uh rescue tools uh available.

Speaker 2: One thing you're doing to to show how this this definition and these conceptions of being at risk changed over the last twenty or thirty years is you look at specific biographies of of of scholars, especially from Cameroon.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: What changed between the the nineties or or um the scholars such as Jean-Marc Ellah, Celestine Monga for instance, and and the new uh generation of scholars from Cameroon who are who are who have to flee the country?

Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you for for really bringing uh the light on this this aspect. And as I said, it would be very interesting to have more uh significant cases from different uh countries. As I said, if we look at the case of uh DRC, the case of Algeria, the case of Zimbabwe or different situations, I think we could have more significant explanations on how important it is to look at individual trajectory, to have this individual biography that helps to really see how there's a gap between the institutional approach of danger and the individual condition of African scholars. So in the case of Cameroon, we can see in three generations. I I I put it as generations because I think they are three situations which are now showing a form of evolution. A form of evolution because Cameroon since two thousand and seventeen has appeared in the statistics of African of scholars at risk. Cameroon, the name Cameroon appeared in in two thousand and seventeen. And why? The name Cameroon appeared because of the case of Patrice Nganang, who is an African uh I would say Cameroonian. He's probably having also the American citizenship, who came to Cameroon on a research trip, who took a position on the Anglophone crisis and who was arrested by the the government. So the the case of uh Patrice Nganang, which is basically the I would say the most visible case and maybe the the first case signaled in the in the statistics on endangerment in Cameroon, but only in two thousand and seventeen, I would say even after some other scholars from the Anglophone region were arrested and were facing the possibility of a death penalty, but were not signaled as such. So it's very interesting to see how uh how how the the fact that uh when a scholar is inserted of course in international networks, uh it is very important to bring the light on his situation of endangerment. The the case of Patrice Nganang, I could give few examples on how uh clearly there there was a gap, there was a gap between his case whom for me and on my own uh at my own perception, he was not as at risk as some Anglophone scholars who were arrested before him, but who were not appearing in the in the statistics uh as as being at risk. So so here the difference is clearly on the the fact that uh this this scholar uh was his situation was signaled both by uh his university in US, but also by a number of uh I I would say I I could I could name them quite fast so that you can see how it's important to how the the social capital, the the academic capital is linked to this social capital of how inserted in in network could could make the difference and make the the the scholar visible. So Patrice Nganang when he was was facing, I would say very less charges, the the charges were less serious than the others Anglophone uh academics who were already in prison like...

Speaker 1: few months before him, his case was signaled by the what they call the action of Christians against for the abolition of torture, the Stonebrook University which is his university. His case was signaled by a large number of the African Studies Association in the US, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the African Literature Association. So on the website of all these institutions you could find traces of positions taken for Patrice Nganang, Princeton University and so on. And all this mobilization brought to the light the situation and he was quickly freed. He was released from detention and the charges were dropped against him. But at the same time, the other scholars facing the death penalty were still in jail. So if you take the case of Jean-Marc Ela who never appeared in the statistics on endangerment. So Jean-Marc Ela is a sociologist who left the country in 1995 after another scholar who is an historian Angele Bembe was assassinated. So when Angele Bembe was assassinated, Jean-Marc Ela felt like he was himself in danger. I should say this is in a couple of months. So they can see, he was assassinated in April 1995 and by August Jean-Marc Ela is invited for a conference in Canada and Jean-Marc Ela will leave the country. But by then he is already sixty of course and he is calling the attention on the fact that he is facing death threats because he took position on the assassination of his colleague Angele Bembe. So when he is welcomed in Canada and I said clearly he doesn't move to Canada as being in a situation where he is seeking refuge. No, he is attending a conference and while he goes to attend the conference, he will now apply for asylum in Canada. And how is the rescue organized? When he arrives there, there is another colleague who is from Togo who first welcomes him to his house and Achille Mbembe who happened to have worked with him and who was in US by then, Achille Mbembe and Celestin Monga are contacted by Paul Asobay that well Jean-Marc Ela is here and he is feeling afraid. We have to organize ourselves how to take care of him. So they will leave US and come to Canada and it is from Canada that they will organize a couple of intellectual positions that they will take. One of the positions taken is in the journal Politique Africaine where they write to mention his situation and to call the attention on the fact that he is really at threat. I should put it clearly, this is a memorandum of fourteen pages that was written describing very extensively how he got himself into this situation or this position of being at risk. So the memorandum is signed by them and then after this memorandum, the Forum of African Intellectuals from the Diaspora will also take a position on the case and it is basically through these few positions that they will call to the protection of Jean-Marc Ela. And this statement that was taken would not necessarily have an impact because we know that though Jean-Marc Ela had the, he was accepted as an asylum seeker, I mean he had the status of asylum seeker in Canada, but he could not reconstitute his career. He could not find a position, academic position. I will say somehow the fact that he moved to Canada ended his career as a scholar. But clearly the condition of being a scholar was not, I would say acknowledged and protected as such. So the third case which also speaks to us about how important individual condition, individual rescue tools are determinant for many African scholars and how invisible for that matter their situation is, is the case of Karlson Nyangwe. Karlson Nyangwe is a professor of law.

Speaker 1: who happened to be since few years one of the most critical scholars speaking on the anglophone the anglophone cause the anglophone problem and actually he had to leave the country in the nineties because he was actually following his wife who moved to Tanzania and it's from Tanzania that he moved to South Africa which now is becoming has become for for a lot of endangered African scholars a place of of release but this place of release South Africa being a place of release it is not through an institutional position of the South African university or the South African government to welcome scholars who are in danger but it's really mainly through what we call I would call it in French une filière I don't know how a path that the first person being released would be able to bring others in and this is how a lot of I'll say true Carson and young but others also many Cameroonian scholars who happen to find themselves at risk they move to South Africa so this is I'll say three different situations you will see that from the nineteen nineties to now the two thousand and seventeen to two thousand and twenty-one the evolution is clearly the fact that Cameroon has for long those situations of danger where were there never considered as a country where they were where scholars at risk though scholars were fleeing out of Cameroon and seeking for refugee and asylum and it is only in the in the two thousand and seventeen within the frame of the Anglophone crisis that Cameroon now appeared to be considered as a place where some scholars were fleeing because of being put at risk so this evolution is an evolution linked to the variable of the academic capital so you see that clearly when the mobility is already a way of seeking and obtaining attention of policy policy relief too if you are not visible if you don't have you have no mobility you are more dequalified you are more put at risk by the fact that of course you don't have the network that that will make the difference and I think in this case clearly there's a difference made by the I would say the academic capital of Patrice Nganang with the difference to Carson Nyamweya and the others

Speaker 2: Of course I have like ten or fifteen questions left just Nadine can you tell us about Fontem Aforika is he still in jail or is he free now?

Speaker 1: He was freed and actually this very interesting case the case I was talking about facing death penalty was his case and finally he was freed with the lawyer who was arrested at the same time with and actually I think now he left for US he left for US because I tried to interest him to the possibility of immobility to Germany but it happens that he is now in US he is not having an academic position he is really in the relief they put it in French dans le secours that he has been having time to just breathe now for two years since he has been free from jail and he has not had the opportunity to teach again I don't know if he is writing maybe he is writing something but he is a very interesting case of how difficult it is to find a space even within mobility even when you circulate where do you go to and how do you stay a scholar when you have been put in danger

Speaker 2: All right thank you thank you very much Professor Ashiku for this talk and these answers thanks thank you very much

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