3 - ‘We no go sit down’: CAFA and the Struggle Against Structurally Adjusted Education in Africa

Ousseina  Alidou; George Caffentzis; Silvia Federici

doi:10.57054/jhea.v6i2-3.1613

Résumé

Cet article est un résumé des activités du Comité pour la Liberté Académique en Afrique (CAFA) depuis sa fondation en 1991 jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Il reprend les informations du CAFA sur la formation d’un mouvement étudiant à l’échelle du continent africain contre les ajustements structurels dans les universités africai- nes. Il détaille également certaines campagnes du CAFA en défense des luttes étudiantes contre le rôle de la Banque Mondiale dans la mise en place progressive de droits d’inscriptions et les coupes dans les subventions de logement et de nourriture aux étudiants et l’action répressive des gouvernements africains contre la protestation étudiante. Nous prétendons que la liberté académique inclut aussi le droit d’être engagé dans la production du savoir et donc d’avoir accès aux moyens de cette production. Refuser un tel droit aux Africains dans cette période histori- que revient à les condamner au destin d’être à nouveau les damnés de la terre et à mettre en péril la capacité des Africains à contrôler leurs propres ressources.

‘We no go sit down’: CAFA and the Struggle Against Structurally Adjusted Education in Africa

This paper is a short history of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) since its founding in 1991 to the present. It describes CAFA documenta- tion of the formation of an Africa-wide student movement against the structural adjustment of African universities. It also details some of CAFA’s campaigns in defence of student struggles against both the World Bank’s role in propagating the introduction of tuition fees and the cutting of housing and food subsidies to stu- dents and the repressive action of the African governments against protesting students. We argue that academic freedom also includes the right to be involved in the production of knowledge and hence to have access to the means of its produc- tion. To deny Africans such a right in this period in history is to condemn them to the fate of being the damned of the earth once more and to put the ability of Africans to manage their own resources in peril.

Mots-clés

CAFA Education Afrique

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Citations

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Notices biographiques

Ousseina Alidou

Ousseina D. Alidou is Professor of Linguistics and Gender Studies. She teaches in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She directed the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University (2009-Spring2015) and currently the Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership.She taught in several American Universities (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; The Ohio State University; Ohio University; Cleveland State) and was a visiting Professor at the University of Bayreuth BIGSAS-Germany, the University of Hamburg in Germany and the University of Lueneburg (Germany); Université Abdou Moumouni (Republic of Niger); University of Winneba (Ghana); She also serves (and continue to) as a Senior Faculty Advisor to UNESCO BREDA for the design of UNESCO-Rutgers University’s Gender and Transformative Leadership Curriculum for African Universities and Civil Society Organizations.
Alidou is the author of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, a runner-up Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women's Caucus of the Association of African Studies); Alidou co-edited Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean with Renée Larrier (Kentucky: (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) Lexington Book, 2015); Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa with Ahmed Sikainga (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006) and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Co-edited with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000). In addition, she has published over 50 book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA); Comparative Literature; and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and Africa Today.
Alidou is the recipient of several national and international scholarly and service awards including: Obafemi Awolowo Center for Gender and Social Policy Studies Distinguished Visiting Scholar Service Award (2015); Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Award (2015); Newark Women-in-the Media Distinguished Community Service Award (2015); Rutgers University 2011 Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching; Africa America Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2010); Ford Foundation Human Rights and Social Justice Grant Award (2005); Rutgers University Board of Trustee’s Scholarly Excellence Award (2005); University of Hamburg, Germany, Visiting Professor Fellowship, Department of Linguistics and African Studies and Graduate Faculty of Intercultural Education (2003); and University of Lueneburg Graduate Faculty in Postcolonial Cultural Studies Visiting Scholars’ Writing Fellowship Award (2002).Director of African Languages and Literature in the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers Uni- versity, New Brunswick, USA (Ousseina@hotmail.com)
George Caffentzis

Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, USA (gcaffentz@aol.com)
Silvia Federici

Professor emeritus and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, New York, USA (dinavalli@aol.com)

Références

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