Inteview with Joseph Ki-Zerbo

Professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo is often described as an icon among African intellectuals. Born in what was then Upper Volta in 1922, he received his education in his home country and in France. Since his return to West Africa in the late 1950s, he has been politically active, and at the same time pursued a career as a historian and writer. Ki-Zerbo’s L’Histoire de l’Afrique Noire, first published in 1972, is a standard work. He also was a member of the Scientific Committee for UNESCO’s eight-volume history on Africa, and editor of the first volume, which appeared in 1981. In 1997, he received the Right Livelihood Award “...for a lifetime of scholarship and activism that has identified the key principles and processes by which Africans can create a better future”. Today, he is the head of a research institute in Ouagadougou which he created in 1980, the CEDA (Centre d’Etudes pour le Développement Africain), and also a Member of Parliament and leader of the opposition party Parti pour la Démocracie et le Progrès. Every year, Prof. Ki-Zerbo spends a few weeks at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, and it was during his latest visit there that we had the opportunity to talk to him.

Karin Andersson Schiebe (KAS): Please, tell us a little about your early research.
When I began my university studies at the Sorbonne in 1950, as a colonized 'subject' from French West Africa I turned towards African history as a matter of course. There was none; its very existence was denied. There was not a single course at the Sorbonne on the history of Sub-Saharan Africa—at best, it was considered in practice as part of ethnology. As a reaction to this situation and further motivated by a number of racist incidents to which we had been personally subjected, we students who refused the concept of ethno-history for our peoples were eager to search for our authentic history at the same time as we attended lectures on the feudal monarchy in France, Florence in the XVth century or Weimar Germany. It was a question of exploring and discovering for ourselves the collective itinerary of a whole continent; but above all of demonstrating to the colonizers how mistaken they were. I wrote articles on history in the African Catholic students’ publication, Tam-Tam. After having combed the Parisian libraries, I published an article in the journal Présence Africaine which was hotly discussed at the time, entitled “The Economics of the Slave Trade, or Organized Plunder”. When I returned to Africa in 1957 to teach at a lycée in Dakar and saw that Africa was not on the curriculum, I eagerly decided to give evening classes in African history—all the pupils in the lycée fought to get a seat; and even today, more than 40 years later, African administrators and leaders still speak to me about it enthusiastically.

KAS: What is the research environment like in Burkina Faso at present?
To all intents and purposes, the only stumbling block to research in Burkina Faso, is the question of financing it; but the problem is much more complex, because the university is a sub-system of the political system characterized by the domination of what is de facto a single party system; and in some respects a state without the rule of law. This is why the campaign, which has been waged by democratic mass organizations for the past three years, against violence and the fact that economic crimes go unpunished has not succeeded. Through their unions, numerous professors and researchers participate in this campaign. They and the students are considered to be one of the main centres of opposition to absolute power, but the price paid by the professors and the researchers is high.

Students and professors are amongst the victims of violence. Some have been kidnapped, have disappeared and after many years, the authorities who are the source of this repression have still not pointed out the real site of their graves. During its 29th Session in Tripoli, in May 2001, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights condemned the state of Burkina Faso for serious violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. This is, as far as I know, the first and only time this has happened to an African State.

The policy of Structural Adjustment implemented by the government is particularly hard on the university and especially on the teachers and students; the aim is to drastically reduce the university costs which are however incredibly low when compared with the millions and billions accumulated by a handful of top bureaucrats and politicians. But the latter prefer to compare the researchers and students with even more needy categories. The plan for the professionalisation of the university curriculum aims, in fact, at adjusting the educational system, including the university, to the privatization of the ‘modern’ productive sector. Certain measures are indicative in this respect:

a) In the selection and nomination of teachers and researchers, there is a preference for candidates who are politically conformist.
b) The forces of law and order (the police, the army) are quite frequently present on the campus, sometimes totally occupying the site and banning the entry of teachers and researchers into their workplaces.
c) The cancellation of the autonomous, democratic elections within the university to choose Faculty Deans and Heads of Department and their replacement by teachers and researchers appointed by the Council of Ministers.

KAS: With your long experience as a researcher and at the same time politician, what is your experience of making research results available to policy-makers?
African politicians are not usually very interested in research findings; in particular, since 1968, when the social movements in Europe had repercussions on Africa, they are even afraid of the social sciences. This is linked to the fact that some leaders who have not had any training in these areas (primarily a good many of the first generation of military putschists) are not at all interested in this sector. Similarly, technocrats with an economic tendency who only think in terms of financial management do not have an overall vision of this sphere and the role it plays, if not in growth, at least in development. The absolute priority given to individual and economic political survival means that any non-orthodox researcher is harassed and if necessary sent into exile. I know one who, during his exile in France, pursued his studies in biochemistry on lactogenic African products until he reached the stage of being able to patent his results which required the approval of his state. He applied to his government but has never received a reply.

Sometimes the researchers themselves become frightened and cautious; some have confided to me that when they discover the formula of the active principle of an African remedy and they do not have the equipment required to bring it to production, they prefer to keep the discovery to themselves for the time being.... They are forced to become keepers of intellectual property!

Moreover, the different sections or institutes of the universities are sometimes linked by agreements to different countries or various foreign institutions—with the result that the African state which is subject to a whole set of constraints can no longer base its research policy on a coherent vision. Finally, as is the case in Burkina Faso, the inadequacies of the logistics and institutions for publishing results hamper the dissemination of findings and the research itself.

KAS: What is your personal experience of combining research and politics?
There is no fundamental contradiction, especially as a research policy is the basis of any process of general development. There are two examples of fields of research which are also areas for political choices if we wish to achieve development in Africa:
a) Research in and use of national languages in teaching;
b) Research and public health policy for the majority of the population, as regards the sorts of pharmacopoeia to be used—while avoiding the use of the term ‘ethno-medecine’.

Some of us have come into research as a result of our political involvement. To end the use of the colonisers’ school-books and the phrase: ‘Our ancestors, the Gauls’, we had to undertake research, read thousands of books, and travel the length and breadth of dozens of African countries. Our first school-books were duplicated lecture notes. But we have contributed to proving that Africa is the cradle of Mankind. Nowadays it is the Europeans who should speak of ‘Our ancestors, the Africans’.

I also learnt a great deal, and implemented many things, through my experience in the African and Malagasy Council on Higher Education (CAMES) which I directed for ten years and where in turn I set up:
a) equivalence of diplomas in fifteen African countries;
b) the advancement of the careers of teachers and researchers by a system of selection which is inter-African and endogenous and no longer neo-colonial;
c) research in African pharmacology and medicine;
d) an African version of the agrégation which is the high-level competitive examination for recruiting teachers in France.

I have even had the experience of research in exile at the time when my library of 11,000 books was destroyed in my own country. The real problem is to find the time to do good basic research and be a political party leader.

KAS: How is ‘your’ institute, the CEDA, developing at present?
The CEDA—le Centre d’Etudes pour le Développement Africain (or the Centre for the Study of African Development)—is being reconstructed after the destruction of the period in exile. Without the CEDA, politics for me would be an activity which had neither meaning nor direction: a computer with no software. With the slogan “Development means self-development”, our activities were continued in exile by the Centre de Recherche pour le Développement Endogène (Centre for Research for Endogenous Development), which produced the publication La Natte des autres which won the European Community’s prize at the Dakar Book Fair in 1993 for its originality.

Today, thanks in particular to the Right Livelihood Award, the CEDA continues on its way as best it can, part-time, with a minimum number of activities largely due to lack of personnel. UNESCO financed three studies including Les Industries Culturelles (Cultural Industries)—a study for alternative television in Burkina Faso. We have just held a very successful seminar entitled Enjeux Fonciers, Sécurité Alimentaire et Protection de la Diversité Biologique.

We have several projects in mind, for example strip cartoons and film cartoons on African history. We have successfully organised workshops on the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) Report (2000) and the concept of poverty, and on water in Burkina Faso. The CEDA is a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IUCN. But nothing decisive will happen without institutional support for the take-off and continued activities of CEDA’s operational wing, the Partenariat Hommes–Femmes pour le Développement Africain (Men and Women’s Partnership for African Development), PARTEHFDA, which is made up of a network of grass-roots associations and which forms one of the poles of the CEDA’s dialectical method linking thinking and action. PARTEHFDA has just successfully presented an ‘advocacy research project’ to the GERA, Gender and Trade Reforms in Africa.