Biodata of Speaker:

Toyin Falola, Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin. He is an Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town, and Extraordinary Professor of Human Rights, University of the Free State. He had served as the General Secretary of the Historical Society of Nigeria, the President of the African Studies Association, Vice-President of UNESCO Slave Route Project, and the Kluge Chair of the Countries of the South, Library of Congress. He is a member of the Scholars’ Council, Kluge Center, the Library of Congress. He has received over thirty lifetime career awards and fourteen honorary doctorates. He has written extensively on the humanities, including The Humanities in Africa: Knowledge Production, Universities, and the Production of Knowledge, and a forthcoming book by University of Rochester Press, Decolonizing African Studies: Knowledge Production, Agency, and Voices.

Synopsis of Lecture:

It is my pleasure to be here today to speak to you about the state of our dear continent, Africa. I want to specially thank the Governing Council, Management and Staff of the University and the organizers for putting this Convocation Lecture in place despite the bottlenecks that the pandemic has caused everyone. For the participants here today, I am pleased to stand before you to raise issues that concern us all and explore possible solutions to them. But more importantly, I am gladl that you are all here because you still share the belief that this continent will one day attain its desired place and that the journey towards that is worth taking by  us as players and agents of change.

Each time I am called upon for a gathering of this nature, especially where students who are soon to experience the real world are gathered, I am always reminded of the hope that I have in this generation and the ones coming after. I see before me the youth that will revolutionize Africa and achieve genuine development across all levels of human endeavor. I am, however, simultaneously reminded that this will happen when there is a genuine understanding and an historical comprehensive grasp of the colonial and neocolonial rootedness of what the current problems facing Africa are, their impacts on the development of the continent, and how best to solve these perennial and seemingly intractable problems. This is why I have taken it upon myself to look into some of Africa’s recent throes and how we all can work together to adjust the challenges the continent faces daily to fit into the operations of the “New Normal”.

In recent times, the phrase “New Normal” has been used to symbolise a time after the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond its attachment to the pandemic, it signifies the time when we have to come to the realization that things are largely not the way they used to be two years ago. The advent and spread of the covid-19 pandemic has changed a lot about the way we observe, think, strategize and implement things in our societies, and as progressive people, we must learn to key into all these if we are to live up to the standards of the new world.

Putting the developmental administrative traumas confronting African nations into a realistic perspective,  Bola Dauda, for example, noted that the bland colonial education policies in Nigeria meant that the Northern Region  had less than one percent of the Nigeria Civil Service at the time of independence in 1960.[1]  Many African states were in a situation hardly any better than that of Congo (Zaire) which became independent with only three university graduates and like Zambia, mainland Tanzania faced independence with barely 100 graduates. Many African countries have not recovered fully from this stunted colonial educational development policies.How COVID-19 has worsened the problems of Africa today will be considered. There is no doubt that Africa has been a continent where perennial problems of socio-political and socio-economic coloration exist, and the pandemic has brought this to the fore even more forcefully. For a continent striving through thick and thin to survive and reach its potentials, the effects of the pandemic on its reformative institutions will always be significant. This reason is why I will also be considering how the pandemic has had major effects on the institution of education in Africa. It is important that, as an institution that prepares young minds for the future, Africa’s educational system  can duly adjust to the changes of the "New Normal” and move rapidly with global innovations as they pass through formal and informal training.

While the pandemic traveled suddenly to Africa and has done its part, the continuous problem of terrorism is another throe of the  continent. For years, the continent has witnessed  unbridled killings and wanton destruction of properties triggered by different terrorist groups and overcoming this has become a Herculean task for the continent. While still at it, the pandemic set in, leaving an effect that has both fostered and festered the power and daring capacity of these terrorist groups. This is because significant attention was shifted from fighting terrorism to saving the African people from the health crisis caused by the pandemic. Since part of our focus is on education, it is also important to brood on how terrorism – especially Islamist extremists/extremism – has, in its way, affected education in Africa, and how there is an urgent need for a new perspective geared toward not just cutting off terrorism, but also saving the future of education in Africa.