Out of Africa

A pioneer of African studies explains why he left the field, and provokes a firestorm of debate within it

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 (http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1600gk.html), 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.

Mr. Kitching was a pioneer of African studies. His book Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie 1905-1970 (Yale University Press, 1980) won the field’s highest award and is still regarded, more than two decades later, as a classic in the field. So why, in 1983, did Mr. Kitching, now a professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, leave the field that he helped shape? It would take another 17 years for him to put his reasons into print.

“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.

Some Africanists take exception to this diagnosis. Perhaps the most vocal critic is Marc Epprecht of Queen’s University at Kingston, in Ontario, who accuses Mr. Kitching of trafficking in “sweeping negative stereotypes” about Africa and “tacitly advocat[ing] the abandonment of Africa as a focus of research and political activism.” Mr. Kitching’s “Afro-pessimism,” he says, amounts to little more than the fulmination of a “grumpy old white man.”

But for many others in the field, Mr. Kitching’s piece hit a nerve. “I’ve suddenly heard from friends, ‘My God, have you seen this?’” says Timothy Burke, an associate professor of history at Swarthmore College and the author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Duke University Press, 1996). “He says stuff that, frankly, a lot of people in the field think but don’t feel comfortable saying.”

Revolution in the Air

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.”

Mr. Kitching didn’t set out to spark a storm with these words. In fact, he says, his manifesto was “got out” of him “rather reluctantly,” by a colleague from his Kenya days, Cherry Gertzel, the editor of African Studies Review and Newsletter (since renamed the Australasian Review of African Studies), the bulletin of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific.

Ms. Gertzel extended repeated invitations to Mr. Kitching to speak at the annual conference of her group. To which his response was, “Look, I’ve got nothing to say. What do you want me to do, regale you with research that’s 15 years old?” But the invitations kept coming, and Mr. Kitching eventually gave in -- sort of. “The only thing I could possibly do,” he said to his old colleague, “is tell you why I no longer do it.”

They had a deal. The talk was delivered and then printed in the June 2000 African Studies Review and Newsletter. “It wasn’t my intention to do a sort of God-that-failed piece,” he insists, “nor to put the boot into my former profession. I was doing a favor to an old friend.”

To be sure, had “Why I Gave Up African Studies” appeared only in the newsletter, it likely would have died a quiet death.

Instead, it got picked up by Mots Pluriels, an online journal published by the University of Western Australia, which posted it in December 2000. It was then, says Mr. Kitching, that letters and e-mails began to pour in.

Blaming the Victim?

Mr. Kitching’s polemic cuts against the grain of African studies’ dominant tendency, in which primary responsibility for Africa’s plight is ascribed to the legacy of European colonialism and to the effects of corporate-driven globalization. To forces, that is, beyond Africa. Prominent representatives of this camp are figures like Terence Ranger, the author of Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe (University of California Press, 1985); Allen F. Isaacman, author of Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961 (Heinemann, 1996); and Mr. Epprecht, a professor of development studies and the author of “This Matter of Women is Getting Very Bad": Gender, Development and Politics in Colonial Lesotho (University of Natal Press, 2000). While there is no official retort to Mr. Kitching’s article (the African Studies Association did not respond to repeated phone calls and e-mail messages from The Chronicle), Mr. Epprecht has taken up the cause of many Africanists.

“For a man whose work on the development of underdevelopment in Kenya in the 1970s and early ‘80s drew to a significant extent upon [Antonio] Gramsci and other neo-Marxist theorists,” Mr. Epprecht writes in his contribution to the African Studies Quarterly symposium, Mr. Kitching’s “Afro-pessimism represents a stark turnaround.” Mr. Epprecht, 45, is not only writing for but guest-editing the debate on Mr. Kitching’s essay for the journal, which is published by the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. Other contributions to the debate, he says, are being fashioned by scholars in Africa as well as North America.

Mr. Epprecht doesn’t dismiss Mr. Kitching’s arguments entirely. “There is indeed much to be disappointed, frustrated, angry, and/or sharply critical about in the state of affairs in much of Africa,” he writes. “The waste, cruelty, greed, and stupidity perpetrated under the name of development or African socialism has been truly tragic.” Moreover, he adds, Mr. Kitching “brings out some existential questions that Africanists more typically wrestle with in silence, and to that extent deserves credit.”

But “to paint a uniformly bleak picture” of the continent is “to deny real gains in key areas of health, literacy, and even infrastructure,” he writes. “One can debate the merits and meaning of these successes, but simply to dismiss or to deny them in sweeping generalizations,” or to “fetishize the high profile setbacks,” is “hugely unfair.”

As for the diagnosis of the discipline in “Why I Gave Up African Studies,” Mr. Epprecht writes that Mr. Kitching “does not remotely describe the situation here in North America or in southern Africa” (where Mr. Epprecht does much of his research). “Yes, there are guilt-ridden individuals, and lazy, hide-behind-the-imperialist pundits. But could not the same be said of some Australianists, or Canadianists, or Ecuadorianists?”

Contrary to Mr. Kitching’s pronouncements, writes Mr. Epprecht, Africanist academic journals are “full of fascinating, sensitive, pertinent, compelling new research. Conferences are lively, colleagues are often highly politically motivated, and stodgy disciplinary and ivory tower boundaries are being torn down.”

The bottom line, for Mr. Epprecht, is that in his quest to hold Africans responsible for their own problems, Mr. Kitching is blaming the victim and “tacitly exonerating the West of its role in African frustration.” Do Afro-pessimists like Mr. Kitching, he asks, “honestly believe that hectoring Congolese intellectuals about their failings will erase the memory of King Leopold II, Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, Western backing of Mobutu, the invasion of the country by millions of refugees including genocidaires, the invasion and pillage of the country by armies from neighboring countries, and so on?”

Finally, Mr. Epprecht asks, “what of the politics of abandoning our African friends and colleagues who need us in their efforts to build a better society?” Africans are not “dependent upon Western Africanists for our brilliant ideas to inspire them or even our guilt to milk.” Rather, Mr. Epprecht writes, “they need us to bear witness about Africa to our students in the West, to our politicians, and to our media. Without us to hold decision makers here accountable for decisions that further marginalize Africa, their struggles may simply disappear from the international political agenda.”

Black Skins, White Guilt?

Mr. Kitching sees Mr. Epprecht’s response as evasive and symptomatic of what plagues much of African studies today. Mr. Epprecht, he says in an e-mail message, is “ensnared in the murk” of “the psychological aftermath of colonialism and imperialism.”

He reads Mr. Epprecht’s injunction about Africanists in the West “bearing witness” on behalf of Africa to mean “making excuses for” Africans. “Now the real question here,” he says, “is not whether there may be some good grounds for such excuses in some cases,” but “why should African elites ‘need’ us to make excuses for them at all? And why should we want to make such excuses at all?”

Drawing on the work of the anticolonial activist and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon (1925-61), the author of the landmark The Wretched of the Earth, Mr. Kitching, who still regards himself as a Marxist, says that “paternalistic guilt” is “a kind of mechanism of neocolonial control, a mechanism in which the colonial personality is very willingly complicit because, just so long as it continues, it cannot (at least in its own eyes) ever do wrong -- ever be the actual, culpable agent of harm or damage in the world.”

Mr. Kitching sees Mr. Epprecht’s response, in other words, as a form of imperialism, “a continuation of this noxious old syndrome, nothing new at all.”

“And that,” he concludes, “is really depressing.”

As for Mr. Epprecht’s “grumpy old white man” quip, Mr. Kitching considers its racial implications dangerous. “That is very easily how it could be portrayed,” he says, “and it would be very unfortunate if it stacks up that way, as a bunch of whites who got disillusioned.”

“I’m articulating views that, when I was in the field, were articulated by ordinary African people, over and over again,” he says. “People not on university campuses, not professional intellectuals -- people who don’t have any emotion invested in any ideological position. They would say these things quite openly and un-self-consciously.” As a “classic sort of white liberal,” Mr. Kitching says, “I didn’t know how to respond. I’d be embarrassed -- I didn’t know what to say. But they weren’t embarrassed. They would just come out with these things.”

“And I talked to innumerable Africanists in the field when I was who reported exactly the same thing,” he says.

He takes heart that Africanists are at least paying attention to his complaint.

“Pick any point in the last 10 years,” says Swarthmore’s Mr. Burke, “and the issues Kitching raises are percolating underneath the surface of African studies.” Mr. Kitching’s manifesto “brings it down to a level that personally, I have to say I identify with a lot.”

“There is probably no field of study,” he says, “that has as much of a chip on its shoulder -- about its utility, its necessity, its relationship to other fields, its sense of isolation. This is a field that doesn’t pay off intellectually, and it doesn’t pay off personally in some ways.”

But Mamadou Diouf, a professor of history and director of African studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, says that while Mr. Kitching is “onto something very, very important,” the current debate misses the mark in certain key respects. “Kitching is saying, ‘I gave up because we were not able to fix it, or to provide a sound intellectual framework.’ But I don’t know why Kitching thinks people are waiting for him to fix it. Why does he think that as a specialist on Africa he has to be part of the fixing process?” says Mr. Diouf, the author of Political Liberalisation or Democratic Transition: African Perspectives (Codesria, 1998) and the co-editor of Academic Freedom in Africa (Codesria, 1994).

Moreover, Mr. Diouf inquires, “Who is reading African studies scholarship in Africa? Nobody. Including the African intellectuals, because they don’t have the resources.” African studies scholars in the West “are writing for themselves.”

“They are cut off from Africa,” he says.

Critical Distance?

While some critics point to the fact that Mr. Kitching is no longer, after all, a practitioner of African studies -- he’s been out of the field for 20 years -- Mr. Kitching regards his distance from the field as an asset. It is precisely his outsider status, he believes, that makes it possible to say the things he is saying about the profession. “I’m out of this field, I don’t work in it, I’m no longer looking for plaudits in it,” he says. Africanists can thus “do what they want” with his criticisms.

One of Mr. Kitching’s hopes, he says, was that scholars would respond to his piece by accusing him of being out of date. “I was hoping to discover that the whole situation had changed, that the dreadful problems of development failure and state failure in Africa had produced a kind of hard-headed realism among Africanists,” he says.

“But in fact, no,” he says emphatically. “These issues I raised are as real as ever.”

“If I were invited by the U.S. African Studies Association to give a talk based on this piece,” he says, “I would refuse. If it’s felt important to take this up and carry it forward in any way, it should be done by people in the field.”

He senses that for many Africanists, “some of the things I say they recognize to be true -- painfully true -- but there’s no point in articulating them because it would just create complications in their professional practice, for no payoff.” His hope, however, is that some African Africanists will take it up.

“I wouldn’t much care if they took it up angrily or if they took it up in a spirit of dialogue. Just if any kind of dialogue could get going about these issues -- that’s what I would like most of all.”

With that dialogue now underway, Mr. Kitching is getting his wish.

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 29, Page A16