John Otim

Most people agree that the colonial project in Africa was apartheid, extended beyond the borders of South Africa to the rest of the continent. In colonial Kenya they called it the Color Bar. Color Bar restricted Africans to scrubland while whites owned the good land. 

Kenyan-born Ali Mazrui of the University of Binghamton in the United States of America who died last week at the age of 81 was one of those academics every campus could do with.

Scholars today generally agree that Africans were among the early makers of human civilisation, including developments in science and learning. Paradoxically, the modern African university is distinctly the creation of the colonial state.

A beautiful sun was going down. Lights from the grid were back. I pull up my laptop, log on to the web. Such an evening, the world is a beautiful place.

We are looking in at a dinner party at the home of the head of the department of English at the newly created University College of Ibadan in Nigeria. At the dinner table was the entire faculty. The year is 1948.

It was as though the thousands of young Americans John F. Kennedy sent to Africa in the early 1960s on his Peace Corps initiative followed a biblical injunction: ‘Go forth into the world and be of good cheer.’ In good cheer they came. In like manner they were received. Africa loves visitors.

There was no stealth, no shame. The affair took place in full view of assembled villagers. The village leadership assisted in the crime. The village chief and his wife made the arrangements. They carefully crafted and choreographed the scene.