Dangers of Academic Inbreeding in African Universities, with special reference to Kenya By Maurice N Amutabi, PhD
I recently held a conversation at the Vice Chancellor’s Boardroom of the Technical University of Kenya with Dr. Dannica Fleus, a Visiting Scholar from Helmut Schmidt University (Hamburg), Germany and Prof. Dr.-Ing Francis Aduol, the Vice Chancellor of the Technical University of Kenya (where I teach), on why many universities abroad do not allow their own graduates to work for them after graduation. This conversation came out of the fact that Dr. Dannica Fleus had recently completed her PhD at the most prestigious and best University in Germany (so called Harvard of Germany) but could not be employed there as part of German university tradition, against inbreeding. German universities hate inbreeding and believe in sending out their graduates to spread their influence in the world. It allows for free spreading and sharing of ideas, in new environment away from mentors. It gives healthy ground to flourish and be independent and not become mere sidekicks of their mentors and supervisors.
The conversation made me remember my own story when my doctoral degree advisor (in the US they are called advisors and not supervisors) Prof. Donald Crummey who told me that my Alma mater, the University of Illinois (Big Ten University) had an unwritten policy against hiring its own products and recommended that I instead accept appointment for a tenure-track position at Central Washington University, where I worked for over six years as Professor before returning to Kenya in 2010. Prof. Crummey was concerned that some members of academic staff at Illinois were thinking of retaining me at the University after my PhD given the advanced age of two professors of African history, Prof. Charles Stewart and himself, who were retiring.
Many universities in Europe and North America discourage their own students from being employed at their Mother University or Alma mater immediately after doctoral studies. It works very well and that is why they remain recipients of great awards such as Nobel Prizes. The University of Illinois has had 18 Nobel Prizes (more than the recipients on the African continent combined) in different areas due to this policy, against inbreeding. Academic staff are recruited from elsewhere. I was therefore happy to hear Dr. Dannica Fleuss and Prof. Francis Aduol list many advantages of such an arrangement, of students looking out rather than inside. One of them was to have space in which they are free and can suffer no intimidation from their mentors and supervisors and forge their own academic identity, innovation, invention and discovery.
The conversation on dangers of inbreeding got me thinking about our African and especially Kenyan universities, especially the “Large or Older Seven” (University of Nairobi, Moi University, Kenyatta University, Egerton University, Jomo Kenyatta University of
Agriculture and Technology, Maseno University and Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology) which are already experiencing the negative effects of inbreeding with many cases of ‘academic mongoloids’ on their campuses. This is different from the “Big 13 or Kibaki 13” which have not reached full cycle of students who started there from Bachelors, Masters and PhD). Inbreeding refers to mating of related individuals, produced from the same gene pool, over and over again. It results in a decline in survival and reproduction (reproductive fitness), known as inbreeding depression, in most species of plants and animals. Outbreeding refers to mating between individuals from different populations, subspecies, or species and is healthier and encouraged. Even our own African families encouraged exogamous marriage (marrying outside your own clan) as opposed to endogamous marriage (marrying within the same family). It remains taboo in many African societies for one to have relations within the same clan, and can lead to excommunication. It is therefore surprising that some universities are encouraging academic inbreeding in Kenya and risk producing ‘academic mongoloids’ in many ways than one. It is unfortunate that this simple genetic logic is still lost to some of them.
I have counted many ‘academic mongoloids’ in some of our universities, who received three degrees (Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral) from the same university and started working there and have never worked elsewhere. This is the height of academic inertia and indolence. I have had chance to listen to some of the ‘academic mongoloids’ speak and have always been left with the same feeling as if I was listening to their mentors of days of yore. In such universities, things have not changed. Students still take five years to complete master’s degrees and ten years to complete doctoral degrees, because of persistence of ‘academic mongolism’ (my coinage). Some of them exhibit forms of gangster, or herd mentality and academic bulling to graduate students and junior members of staff. Oral defences for theses and dissertations are handled like conflicts, where there is more interrogation and intimidation than clarifications and corrections. .
Mongolism is a congenital disorder caused by having an extra 21st chromosome which usually results in a flat face and short stature and mental retardation and Down syndrome. Genetic disorders such as this can be avoided by promoting cross-breeding than inbreeding. For purposes of this article, “academic mongolism” is where a lecturer trains for all his or her degrees in the same university and is employed there and teaches students the same way he was taught, using similar curriculum, similar language, and similar lecture notes and in the same lecture rooms. It is basically a kind of academic recycling, almost like a poor quality relay team, where older professors hand over the baton to their former students, without any outside infusion of new ideas or any new members of staff from other universities. They simply mimic what they were taught and pass to their students. Mimicry like Homi Bhabha has noted in Location of
Culture is dangerous (Bhabha defines mimicry, as, “like the original, but not quite”).
I attended masters and doctoral defenses when I was young in some public universities which I cannot name, but when I attended some recently, I realized that things remain the same. There is a lot of grandstanding and flexing of academic muscles. The interventions at doctoral defenses from panelist still belabour conceptual framework being too touristic and not real, theoretical framework lacking rigour and not citing Adam Smith or Karl Marx, and the thesis being too broad or too shallow for the level. I immediately knew that I was looking at cases of ‘academic mongolism’ for I was baffled how some things have not changed. The students were being told that they had misquoted Barzun’s book The Modern Researcher of the 1980s when there are so many new research books on the market on research which can be cited.
Listen, ladies and gentlemen, the idea of ‘academic mongoloids’ is real, alive and well in Kenya and many African universities and the earlier we address it the better. I am an external examiner in 12 universities on the African continent and see this problem manifest itself every year. Students are not learning anything new because they are surrounded by the same ideas, passed on from one generation to the next. Students are being taught that a statement of the problem in research must be one paragraph (from the 1970s) when nowadays majority of research books call for at least four paragraphs with each paragraph standing for one objective. Students are told that conceptual framework (own road map) should come after theoretical framework (road travelled by other writers), leading to confusion. Students are not told to bring out direct voices from the field, or bring pictures from their field excursion to show authenticity as is the case in many modern researches today. There is evidence of the same old ideas being repeated to annoying levels. Students resort to copying works of earlier students in order to survive. They mimic earlier theses and dissertations and only change the area of focus. Instead of case of Vihiga for example, they write Kajiado or Kiambu. The result is frighteningly deceitful.
The situation is becoming worse because we may get people who have studied at Ebunangwe Primary School, Ebunangwe High School, and Ebunangwe University and work their entire life at Ebunangwe University. I strongly believe that no new ideas and innovation can come out of Ebunangwe, God forbid if that were to become reality, because we will have academic mimicry, leading to academic mongoloids with all kinds of deformities, due to inbreeding. For those who do not know, the most obvious effects of inbreeding are poorer reproductive efficiency including higher mortality rates, lower growth rates and a higher frequency of hereditary abnormalities. This has been shown by numerous studies with cattle, horses, sheep, goats, swine, and chicken and laboratory rodents. Many of our universities are experiencing very high ‘academic mortality’ where students are dropping out due to supervisory or advisory problems. Some scholars are leaving universities due to lack of promotion despite meeting all the criteria for promotion. The reason is that they did not graduate from the same university and therefore regarded as ‘outsiders’ by the ‘academic mongoloids’ who behave like lynch mobs when they meet anyone who did not attend the same school or university with them.
Many African universities are experiencing lower growth rate and cannot attract adequate number of graduate students because of bad track record, and nobody knows about what some of the gate keepers in our universities have published. They do not carry out any meaningful national research and recycle their doctoral dissertations in the name of research papers. In some universities in Kenya, the supervisors are ill tempered and ill prepared for the current marketdriven graduate education that they are in decline when universities such as Strathmore cannot accept all their applicants, who are too many. When the names of such scholars are mentioned, they do not ring a bell, with audiences asking aloud…Prof who? And yet they are great gate keepers of the ‘academic leukemia’ generation at such institutions. It does not require genetic scientist to know the nitty-gritties of genetically defective system that can lead to disorder. Even our grandmothers changed cockerels from time to time in order not to have chicks dying. My grandmother Beatrice Obunyukhe exchanged cocks with her friends, for good, in order to expand the gene pool of her chicken. She also exchanged farm seeds with her friends in order to promote greater variety in the gene pool. She knew the dangers of inbreeding.
I have training in history and political science and know that examples of defects seen with inbreeding include, ‘reduced fertility’ where some departments at our universities are graduating one doctoral degree in five years, due to supervisor problems. Inbreeding also leads to ‘reduced birth rate’ where universities are experiencing low enrolment in the self-sponsored programs and not in a hurry to address the cause. In the meantime, Kenyan students are still trooping to USA, Canada, UK, China, India and South Africa which are regarded as friendlier to the needs of students. The University of South Africa (UNISA) has over 50,000 Kenyan students, enrolled in over 40 programs and our Kenyan universities still lament about lack of students. The problem is looking for students from the government and not from elsewhere, which is the case in many progressive universities.
Another effect of inbreeding in genetics is ‘higher infant and child mortality’ which at our universities translates into killing dreams. Some “academic mongoloids” at our universities are killers of dreams. Many students graduate with the first degree but given the problems they go through with missing marks and incomplete transcripts and all kinds of harassment, they do not want to hear anything about pursuing masters and PhD degree in Kenya. This means that very few students are willing to enroll in universities and are increasingly preferring to enroll in KMTC and other tertiary institutions than enrolling in university. I have three cases of neighours and family friends whose children opted to enroll for medical courses in KMTC such as nursing and clinical technicians and one enrolled in a course at a TIVET institution with B grades and declined their university placement. This is a serious indictment of university education in Kenya and I strongly believe that ‘academic mongoloids’ have everything to do with these problems of eroded value for university education in Kenya. There are many cases in Kenya where students are opting to be recruited into the military or police or prisons service than pursue university education.
Another effect of inbreeding is ‘smaller adult size’ or a condition known as dwarfism or retarded growth. We have seen this at some of our universities where research output and grants have gone down. The students being produced are accused by industry as being ‘half baked’ and those who try their hand abroad are found incompetent and shipped back. We have an increasing interest among Kenyan university students to join stand-up comedy and engage in gospel and secular music instead of science, engineering and medicine. Others are opting for athletics and football than complete university education. There are many cases of university students engaging in unorthodox ways of making money in Kenya and the ‘academic mongoloids’ in the older universities do not see this as a problem worth their attention.
Another effect of inbreeding is “reduced immune function” among the children, or products. Circulating the same genetic material is dangerous. I have seen notes of professors of some universities getting recycled by their former students in the same university, four generations down the line. It seems like nothing has changed, and yet a lot has changed in higher education. Universities are not reviewing and revising their curricula many years down the line despite many changes that have taken place. How can a university run the same courses it taught thirty years ago in history, political science, etc. and no additional courses on global terrorism, environment such as effect of climate change, issues of ethics, aspects of gender equity and mainstreaming, post industrialism and so on? It is largely due to this lack of creativity and taking cognizance of realities that we see students not getting content that allows them to be competent on world stage. If you examine individual impact factor of Kenyan scholar and you get many are below 3 points on 10-point scale because they are not cited in Google scholar, Academia.edu and Research gate. Their works are not online and remain on their desks in hard copy and no one out there knows that they exist. They refuse to publish in online journals because they think their ideas will be stolen. Some publish in western journals where no one cites their articles and ignore African journals, and those published in Africa.
When one looks at the wide array of effects of inbreeding, one cannot look too far to see the problems in our older universities. The effects of inbreeding such as “increased risk of cardiovascular disease” or “increased facial asymmetry” or “increased risk of genetic disorders” such as heart problems, missing limps, large numbers of conjoined twins such as Siamese twins, big or small heads and cases of down syndrome, one begins to look for causes within the environment, where one cannot rule out the ‘academic mongoloids’ as being culpable. Issues of plagiarism, poor quality theses and dissertations, and supervisor turf wars which affect students’ progress are everywhere to be seen. Doctoral defenses are often turn into wars between scholars on campus. Conferences, workshops and seminars are turned into squabbling for superiority wars on who is right and who is wrong, which affects scholarship in our universities. Graduate students are often at the receiving end of such exchanges and many of them get scared and never want to come back.
Universities in Europe and North America have learnt the dangers of inbreeding and avoid the risk of producing academic mongoloids. They engage in cross pollination. Our universities should encourage crossing populations which may increase reproductive fitness by increasing heterozygosity and thus preventing the expression of deleterious recessive alleles (hybrid vigor) or may decrease fitness because of various kinds of genetic incompatibilities between the genes from the different populations (outbreeding depression). I have had a chance of interacting with Dr. Dannica Fleuss and know that she is happy to move out of University of Mannheim (also called ‘the Harvard of Germany’) to Helmut Schmidt University (Hamburg). I know that Prof. Francis Aduol took his doctoral studies from Stuttgart University in Germany and returned to Kenya to work at the University of Nairobi. I received my doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at went to work at other places and now at the Technical University of Kenya. We avoided ‘academic mongolism’ and there are many benefits we have given the world by sharing our ideas and knowledge outside the universities from which we received our doctoral degrees. It is the reason the three of us could engage on the dangers of inbreeding so freely which may not be the case for some of our colleagues who are guilty of inbreeding. In this article I can take ten more pages to extoll the advantages of outbreeding, such as growth of more desired products and a combination of good characters to produce high quality high breeds, but choose not to do so. There is need for graduates to move out of their comfort zones away from their mentors and supervisors. Avoiding inbreeding has tremendous amount of advantages, which we need to embrace in the scholarly or academic community in order to avoid producing academic mongoloids.
There is no denying the fact that former students always hold their supervisors in high regard. I have had the privilege of watching some senior professors standing before their former supervisors or advisors and ‘become’ students once more in their presence. Prof. William Ochieng was always his own person when presenting papers at conferences where there was no Prof. Bethuel Allan Ogot. As soon he sensed that his teacher was around, he would not miss opportunity to extol the virtues of his former teacher and would really get derailed in the process. He would get distracted multiple times to the utter embarrassment of those present, because he would seek legitimacy and validation of almost every point he was making. Is that not true, Prof, Ogot…is that not what you taught me Prof. Ogot…. that is right, isn’t it, Prof. Ogot…infinitum.
It was obvious that he could only become his own man away from the award-winning historian B. A. Ogot. Those who worked with Prof. William Ochieng at Moi University where he served as Dean away from B. A. Ogot point out that it was his best spell in academia away for the first time, from his mentor. Validation and crosschecking of facts are important but the way in which one does it among peers is different when doing it among people you regard as more senior.
Varied training backgrounds often bring out hybrids and fantastic blends. The cocktail of blended academic environments often brings out the best out of scholars. Like the African adage goes, you realize that perhaps your mother is not after all the best cook in the world. You get to know that there are many ways of cooking an egg or making stew. When I randomly pick on scholars whom I have seen grow from different, dual or multiple academic environments, I often notice such rich and wide array of ideas, creativity, confidence, exuberance and great articulation of issues compared to scholars who came from purely ‘monogamous’ academic environments. One case that quickly comes to mind is that of Prof. Elisha Stephen Atieno Odhiambo. As Prof. Atieno Odhiambo taught us at undergraduate level at the University of Nairobi, one could see the many prisms and angles of teaching benefiting from his Makerere University undergraduate education, Oxford University master’s degree and doctoral degree at the University of Nairobi making him different and attractive as a scholar. One could see that he was a student of many worlds, which provided fresh air to us as students.
When I met Prof. Elisha Stephen Atieno Odhiambo in the US when he was teaching at Rice University, I could hear new nuanced, and clearly voiced post-colonial and postindustrial discourses about agency, voice, space and power. His writing had changed and transformed. His early books such as The Paradox of Collaboration and Other Essays and Siasa: Politics and Nationalism in East Africa were replaced by more sophisticated, philosophical and more reflective titles such as Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa; and Risks of Knowledge: Investigations Into The Death Of The Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko In Kenya and Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape. I am a student of deconstruction and love the Atieno Odhiambo of later years, who is unpredictable and writes in a way that is creative and more attractive.
The last three books by Atieno Odhiambo in the above list would not have received a lot of support from his colleagues at the University of Nairobi who would have dismissed them as sociological, philosophical and anthropological and not historical enough because that is what majority of them were taught by Prof. Roland Oliver and his friend Prof. John D Fage at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where Prof. B. A. Ogot and many others did their doctorates, with strong fidelity to facts, different from the American academy where creation of interest to the reader through style, persuasion around facts, were emphasized.
Prof. Roland Oliver was educated at Cambridge and a child of the British Empire, born in India of British parents. In Britain, students of history were told “to look at a lot of ropey evidence and to write comprehensively about it” while in the US, they were asked “to make their own judgment on different versions of historical facts and support their positions.” In Britain, there was official history, often imperial and represented in archives while in the US, there were competing interpretations between conservative scholars (Republican) and Liberal scholars (Democratic) which created many versions. The world of interpretation and analysis transformed Atieno Odhiambo into an exciting writer.
There is no doubt that by the time Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o left the Literature Department of the University of Nairobi he was a fine writer and fairly accomplished scholar having produced scholars such as Chris Wanjala, Henry Indangasi, Peter Amuka, Jane Nandwa, among others. There is no doubt that his life at Makerere University, and short postgraduate training at the University of Leeds in the UK and life as professor in many universities in the US, such as New York and Cornel and at University of California at Irvine, have expanded his scholarly horizons. Many readers have enjoyed reading his many novels, such as Weep not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977). Many scholars think that his life in exile in the United States made him write Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), which has become his most famous contribution to scholarship. The book is profound in the manner in which it teases out deconstructive discourse to the point of pointing out the problems of politics of language in the colonial project in Africa.
The problem of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and other emerging ‘Phones’ such as
Sino-phone (Chinese) provide a lasting indictment to the project of ‘academic mongoloids’ in Africa. We need to liberate our universities from control of cabals and cartels to allow for free flow of movement of scholars and ideas, among and between universities devoid of gate keepers.
The “Golden Era” of the University of Nairobi was the 1970s and 1980s when the University had the likes of Simeon Ominde, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, Gideon S Were, Bethuel Ogot, Micere Mugo, Taban Liyong, David Rubadiri, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Austin Bukenya, Francis Gichaga, among others, who had completed their studies from different universities. Moi University had its golden age in the 1990s when it hired professors from other universities such as Charles Okidi, Mathew Ogutu, Joshua Akonga, Stephen Lubega, Emmanuel Mbogo, John Adeniran, John Joseph Okumu, Samuel Omulando, Peter Amuka, Samuel Gudu, Bob Wishitemi, Mohamed S Rajab and Everett Shitanda, among others.
Universities in Kenya should not discredit and delegitimize those who did not attend the same university. They should reach out to graduates of other universities in order to experience new rebirth and revival. They should rebrand and bring on board new ideas and not the old ideas which have been recycled from Oxford, Cambridge, University of London, Harvard, Stanford and other spaces of learning that are hegemonic in the way they create disciples across the planet. They should embrace diversity and not inbreeding in order to grow and expand.
There is no university which has ever become global in status from isolation. Few years ago, rugby was declining in Kenya because boys from Lenana Boys and Nairobi School were hoarding spaces on the team. If you did not come from any of the two schools, you were regarded as an outsider and excluded but a revolution appeared when boys from schools such as Maseno, Maranda, Ingotse, Nyangori, Kagumo, Kapenguria, Kapsabet, Kwale among others were incorporated and tied out in university and non-university rugby teams by coaches such as Mike ‘Tank’ Otieno and Max Muniafu. There has been resurgence in the 7-a-side and 15-a-side national teams to great recognition and world acclaim. We need the same approach in academic programs at universities in Kenya, where all she be trusted to contribute regardless of where they have come from. We need to embrace new ideas and new people if our universities have to experience real growth and development.
Prof. Maurice N. Amutabi (PhD-Illinois, USA) is a Fulbright Scholar and Full Professor at the Technical University of Kenya. You can reach him via amutabi@gmail.com
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent those of the Technical University of Kenya or any other organization.
