Academics with Clay Feet? Anthropological Perspectives on Academic Freedom in Twenty-First Century African Universities

Clay feet are heavy and disabling, sadly in the decolonial scholarly battlefield which otherwise requires all-weather feet suitable for ongoing battles. Drawing on autoethnographic experiences in some African universities and drawing on Melanesian cargo cults, this paper argues that to decolonise Africa, African academics should abate cargo cult mentalities which account for pathological and uncritical intellectual dependence on theories, ideas and models from elsewhere. Similarly, drawing on Melanesian bigmanism and drawing on how some academics seek to control how students and colleagues think and write, this paper contends that those that pose as bigmen and bigwomen in African universities are a serious threat to decolonial critical, creative, innovative and original thinking. Thus, populated with some high-ranking academics who, nonetheless, lack decolonial creativity, originality, innovativeness and critical thinking, African universities are – like in Melanesian bigmen societies – marked by patron-client relations within which students and colleagues are sadly corralled into epistemic clientelism. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.