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Introduction to Toyin Falola’s ‘African Continentalism: The Future of the Past’

25 May 2020 | Story Prof Danie Brand | Photo iStock

We are indeed privileged to have this paper from Prof Toyin Falola to include in our celebrations of Africa Day. Toyin Falola is a world-renowned African. A scholar of African history and African studies, he holds the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published, as author or editor, more than 100 scholarly books on topics ranging from diaspora, migration, empire and globalization to intellectual history, international relations, religion and culture. He has been awarded seven honorary doctorates and has received, among many other awards, the Distinguished Africanist Award from the African Studies Association, the Ibadan Foundation Award for Professional Excellence in Scholarship and the Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Excellence in African Studies. He served as Vice President of UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee, Slave Route Project from 2011 – 2015 and currently is a member of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellows Programme and the International Committee of the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at UNISA.

In this wide-ranging paper, originally presented as keynote address at the Visions of African Unity (1930s – 2018) conference at the University of the Free State, Prof Falola begins with a tour of the intellectual history of ideas of African Continentalism (Pan-Africanism / African Unity), from Henry Sylvester Williams, through WEB du Bois, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and Julius Nyerere, to Kwame Nkrumah. He then describes the current institutional landscape of African unity and present-day intellectual versions of African Continentalism. Asking, and answering the question ‘Why must Africa unite?’, he then proceeds, on the basis of a consideration of more contemporary intellectual versions of African continentalism such as Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism, Afropolitanism, and now Afrofuturism (which he depicts as ‘ideological dispensations of true African cultural recovery and re-orientation’), to propose a disaggregated approach to contemporary African unity that is not fixated on global-Northern models. This means that unity should (re)start small, working territorially from regional units toward a continental unit, on the one hand; and on the other, seeking unity and cooperation around discrete substantive themes, from the more obvious and traditional, such as economic policy, global politics and a reformed unified political and military system, to the less, such as common educational policy, synergizing science and technology with African culture(s) and language, culture and literary exchange.

We thank him for the gift.

News Archive

UFS hosts Commonwealth universities

2005-08-25

The University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein will host delegates from 14 universities across the Commonwealth next week as part of a programme to measure and promote excellence in university management.

The workshop will be held from Monday, 29 August to Wednesday, 31 August 2005 as part of the Commonwealth University Management Benchmarking Programme, run by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU).

It is the first time that the UFS will host the workshop and the second time that it is held in South Africa.

“The purpose of the programme is to promote and measure excellence in university management. Unlike other university benchmarking programmes that focus on matters such as research output, the programme run by the ACU follows a process benchmarking approach and aims to identify and promote best practice and quality assurance,” said Prof Magda Fourie, Vice-Rector: Academic Planning at the UFS.

According to Prof Fourie the programme runs on an annual basis and works on a quality improvement cycle. Every year certain areas of university management are evaluated by a panel of international assessors. This year it focuses on strategic planning, recruitment and retention of staff, and branding.
If weaknesses are identified, plans are compiled which should result in an upward spiral of continued quality improvement.

“The UFS has been taking part in the programme for the past five years. Last year we fared particularly well with the evaluation of our change management and engagement with the community,” said Prof Fourie.

“The ACU benchmarking programme is a useful forum in which we can measure ourselves against our peers. It will also help us to prepare for the audit of the effectiveness of our quality assurance policies and systems, which will be conducted in October 2006 by the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) of the Council for Higher Education (CHE),” said Prof Fourie.

Other universities that will take part in the workshop include the Leeds Metropolitan University, the University of Glamorgan in the United Kingdom, the University of Northern British Columbia in Canada, the Central Queensland University, the Monash University in Australia, and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).

Media release
Issued by:  Lacea Loader
   Media Representative
   Tel: (051) 401-2584
   Cell: 083 645 2454
   E-mail: loaderl.stg@mail.uovs.ac.za
25 August 2005

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