What Are African Universities For?

“The true measure of education is not what we remember, but what we restore.”
— Adapted African Proverb

“To educate the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” – Aristotle (but also any African grandmother watching a child grow arrogant)

The week after that unsettling conversation — the one about regenerative agriculture, carbon credits, and leaving Africa — I kept getting this nagging feeling on and off, you know how a bunion feels when you put on shoes, and how you almost forget it when they’re off? It felt like I didn’t get to say something, but I couldn’t quite finger it. It wasn’t about pride or soil or the dreams of an old homestead. It wasn’t about advice I should have given. It took a couple of days to realise it was about location, about where conversations like those are happening.

Universities!

Those elegant walls where we learn to critique, calculate, and classify. Where we mine texts, but rarely speak to our elders, and when we do speak to them, we feel as though their conversation skills are shallow. Where knowledge is earned but not always grown. With that realisation, I started constructing a knowledge ownership pyramid. Am sure by now you know that that’s another lengthy tangent and I’ll summarise. At the lowest level, you have Access, then Application, Internalisation and finally Custodianship at the top. I have no statistics yet, but the day I give descriptions, you’ll rank yourself, your job, not mine. Anyway, that’s not the purpose of this writing.

Back to business, we often talk about reforming African economies, African governments, even African spirituality. But very few people ask the question that now won’t leave me alone:

What are African universities actually for? I realised something in that moment: in my first attempt at going to university, I walked away from the registration line. I couldn’t relate. In my second attempt, I dropped out; it felt like stuff was just being shoved down my throat. Eventually, I did it, to silence those who believe in papers hung on a wall!

A Long Corridor Built by Others

The modern African university was not born in a village. It was not dreamt up in a forest listening to birdsong (Ever wondered why birds sing? Definitely not for your entertainment!) or kneeling beside a grandmother grinding millet. It was patterned after University of London, Oxford, Copenhagen. After institutions that trained clerks and governors to run the colonies, not to transform them.

At independence, we inherited those buildings, and those syllabuses. Many believed we could “Africanize” the system from within. Sadly, a term that also carries derogatory connotations. We thought we could replace Latin with Kiswahili, Hegel with Nkrumah. And some tried. Earnestly. But guess what? In most, even our own languages are still studied in borrowed tongues. Most of our universities today still speak a foreign grammar of success.

They measure knowledge in citations and conferences. They reward fluency in English and French, not in Kikuyu or Ewe. They teach agronomy without planting a seed. Philosophy without meditating. Development studies without ever asking who gets to define “developed.” You get customer service graduates who have no clue how the table they want to sell was built.

So I find myself asking again: what are they for?

Factories of Escape?

I met another student who was elated to have secured a scholarship to study in Germany. “After that, maybe Canada,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll come back.”

No judgment from me, I leave that to the gods. I only winced.

Because that’s what we’ve been taught: that the best use of our intelligence is to exit. To become proof that we were “good enough” to leave. Even our leaders, at times, promise to deliver “global citizens” when addressing global forums. I’m not in any of those offices to be in a position to critique the rationale, so I’ll let it be. Our universities? They’ve become skilled in training exactly that kind of ambition. One that speaks of Africa, but rarely to it. One that calls itself global, but forgets that a globe without roots is just a balloon. And balloons float away, eventually popping.

The funding? It usually comes with strings. Strings need puppets! We research what others find valuable. We write papers for audiences we may never meet. We speak in terminologies foreign to our own parents. When was the last time you described to your grandmother what you do, in detail? Still, we call it a degree.

But a degree of what?

The Possibility of Replanting

This is not a lament. It is a challenge. Because there are glimmers.

There are lecturers burning through the curriculum like it’s dry grass in the month of October, trying to make space for new thought. There are students translating academic ideas back into indigenous languages just to test whether they hold meaning. There are new institutions — like the African Leadership University, the Next Einstein Forum, the efforts at CODESRIA - that should not go unnoticed, trying to reclaim the purpose of learning.

But it’s not enough to sprinkle a few African names into the bibliography. It’s not enough to hold a decolonial conference once a year and keep grading students on APA format. It’s not enough to theorise liberation while still rewarding mimicry. It’s time for rooted originality.

We must ask: can an education system truly serve us if it’s not born from us?

The Work Ahead

If the African university is to mean something beyond a passport to exile, it must become a workshop of restoration. As asked in my Africa Day post, Sankofa, “What is more painful: the physical chain, or the desire to wear it?”

It must teach agriculture that begins in memory and ends in compost. It must teach politics that begins with kinship. Medicine that begins with plants. Law that remembers the council beneath the baobab. And literature that doesn’t flinch when a proverb enters the room.

It must know that “research” is not just about writing what has not been written. It’s about remembering what was never written down.

Maybe that’s idealistic. Maybe it’s a dream and if that’s the case, like Tanya Stephens, I’ll be dreaming my whole life through. But it’s a vision I’d rather work toward than a future where the only thing our brightest minds know how to do is pack their bags.

Because no matter how modern we become, the soul of African knowledge will not be found in a visa application. It will be found, as it always was, in the quiet dignity of those who stayed. Those who remembered. Those who taught without ever setting foot in a lecture hall.

Maybe that’s what African universities are for.

Or maybe that’s what they could be.

If we dared to begin again.

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