"African scholarship on Africa is operating at only a fraction of its true potential," writes Alex De Waal. "It is hampered by the preferences, policies and politics of the Western academy." In particular, there are three reasons for this:
- there is an over-reliance on datasets, while these datasets are in turn based on impoverished data
- actual knowledge isn't valued, while young academics are required to submit meaningless studies to academic journals
- there is a single model of value, based on occidentalist notions of 'the state'
From my perspective, the same issues impoverish scholarship in education. It's a set of problems that afflict scholarship in the social sciences in general. But it's particularly acute in Africa, where there are not good means of working around these biases and prejudices.
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