Convivial Scholarship in an Incomplete World: Interview with Prof. Francis B. Nyamnjoh
This is a transcript of a podcast interview conducted on September 15, 2024, for Season 2, Episode 1 of the Embodied Worlds Podcast in which Dr. Urmila Mohan interviewed Prof. Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Anthropologist, University of Cape Town. We are grateful to Dr. Lindsay Crisp, Lecturer, Open University, London, and Dr. Emily Levick, our Editorial Project Manager, for researching Prof. Nyamnjoh’s work on incompleteness and providing some of the questions in this interview. Francis’ philosophy of conviviality and collaboration is part of his framework of ‘incompleteness’ and he discussed its use in contexts of ecology, healing systems, and knowledge making. We have started our podcast’s second season with this interview of 50 mins. because Francis’ voice and actions embody our values of interdisciplinary engagement, imagination, and acknowledging incompleteness-in-motion as the state of our common world.
Citation: Mohan, Urmila and Francis B. Nyamnjoh. “Convivial Scholarship in an Incomplete World: Interview with Prof. Francis B. Nyamnjoh” The Jugaad Project, September 15, 2024, www.thejugaadproject.pub/interview-nyamnjoh [date of access]
Embodied Worlds explores and connects worlds of movement, experience, and perception, big or small, by discussing practices of doing and making and how people and their objects, ideas, beliefs, become mobile and create change. This podcast is an educational initiative by The Jugaad Project (TJP), a digital, interdisciplinary, open-access platform at the intersection of belief/religion, material culture, and embodiment.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and legibility.).
Urmila: Hello, I'm Urmila Mohan, founder of The Jugaad Project, an open access platform supporting diversity and innovation in material culture and embodiment studies. Welcome to this episode of Embodied Worlds. Today we interview Professor Francis B. Nyamnjoh an internationally recognized anthropologist and the Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Professor Nyamnjoh was born in 1961, in Bum, Cameroon. He earned a doctorate in sociology of communication from the University of Leicester, and his undergraduate degree and master's degrees were in sociology and political anthropology, respectively, both earned from the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon.
Professor Nyamnjoh has moved through different parts of Africa through his career. Most recently, he joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as a professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, where he served as a head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009. In October 2012, he received a University of Cape Town Excellence Award for exceptional contribution as a professor in the Faculty of Humanities, and his book “#Rhodes Must Fall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa” received the Best Monograph Award in 2018, which is the ASAUK Page and Oliver Prize. In September 2021, he was elected as a fellow by the College of Fellows at the University of Cape Town, and in 2024 he was elected an International Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Nyamnjoh has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies and his impressive bibliography includes work on media and democracy, mobility and citizenship, and the social shaping of information and communications technologies. His current research interests include incompleteness, mobility, and belonging. We join the conversation with Francis or Professor Nyamnjoh as he talks about his early childhood and growing up in Bum in a part of Cameroon on the west side of Africa.
Urmila: Did being in that kind of border zone or being in a slightly different place have anything to do with the way you were raised or your concern for boundaries and borders?
Francis: I was raised in a region where you had these different kingdoms, and then you also had this region of Cameroon which was administered by Britain as part of a UN arrangement following Germany losing its colonies after World War One and Two. And, it also meant that this part of the Cameroon, reuniting with the already independent part of French territory meant having to navigate different borders and different geographies and different cultural traditions and legacies. It meant also that it was an exciting moment for crossing borders, for example, that I had my secondary school education in Bamenda and then at the end of the secondary school you had to go to the university. At the time, we had only one university in the country, which was based in Yaoundé, and it meant moving out from this northwest region to this center, the political capital at the time with the only university. And, the excitement of moving from having your education mainly in English to a region where things operated mostly in the French language. These are very exciting borders and boundary issues, straddling various linguistic and political and geographical margins. So, so it's very exciting if you look at anybody's life ordinarily, boundaries and borders crop up in all sorts of ways.
Urmila: Very, very true. You talked about moving from the Anglophone to the Francophone part of the region. Was there also an ethnic language or another dialect that you had to learn?
Francis: When I moved from Bum to Mankon, I had to get used to dealing and living with the Mankon language and the Mankon culture of sharing of relationships, and moving from there, which was mainly the English-speaking area to Yaoundé we encountered not just French but also local languages such as Ewondo. So every time you move out, you move along with what you have but that also means you encounter others with what they have. And they have always had this idea of negotiation and navigation of differences as possibilities, not differences as a hindrance. And so it's very exciting. I think.
Urmila: We do share a common interest in who people are, what they carry, what they become, how they change. And you also talk about moving around regions. And of course, you also are very interested in questions of the modern making of the person through national boundaries and citizenship. But do you think that a lot of these classic anthropological categories that we talk about, such as religion, kinship, your interest in power in general was shaped through growing as that person in that area? Did you always have that orientation of being somebody who was willing to move around, or was that a constraint that was placed on you that you grew to love?
“Religion becomes a way of forging links not only with those who are still around but the ancestors extending themselves every time they have a reason to be present as a result of the things that we are able to achieve through our relationships in motion. ”
Francis: I was lucky to grow up in a context where people did not frown on mobility. But also, I was fortunate to have a family that was open to creating relationships amongst members of the same ethnic area but also beyond. If you read up on the Cameroon Grassfields, you hear of things like diplomatic marriages amongst the different kingdoms, which basically meant that that was a way of opening doors for the peoples of different ethnic groupings to get to know and extend themselves by encountering and relating with others, in this case through marriage. But it could also be through trade, short and long distance. It could be in various forms. You mentioned religion and if you notice families in the region especially in kingdoms, the royal family tend to be very big. The king might have many wives and with many wives come many children. When the king passes on succession by one of the sons, the rest of the children who do not quite succeed and do not have any reason to stay around the palace and just watch the successor continue with the business of keeping the family, would normally look elsewhere. Migrate or move away from there, establish themselves, achieve something, and then perhaps return to the palace to celebrate their achievements. And through that their efforts are recognized through various rituals within the kingdom. And you become an extension of the kingdom. Everytime the prince moves away into an area nearby or distant, you are extending the kingdom and of course, believing in your ancestors and the values that they have transmitted through generations to you means that you know a way to come back to be recognized and to pay tribute to those ancestors, and so on. So, religion becomes a way of forging links not only with those who are still around but the ancestors extending themselves every time they have a reason to be present as a result of the things that we are able to achieve through our relationships in motion.
Urmila: I see and that's of course in terms of also what we think of as religious systems. Just the sheer diversity of religious systems in the world is interesting and through this conversation we are focusing on one particular form where land, ancestry, inheritance, or maybe lack of inheritance, and the ability to be a modern person all come together.
I don't know if one can use the word ‘cosmopolitan’ or do you think that that has a different connotation than the person who grows up in such a family? Or maybe not exactly from a royal family but perhaps has to go looking for their fortune somewhere else?
Francis: If one looks at how identities are made and relate through various forms of mobility and encounters at a very local level you come up with the same set of indicators in the making of cosmopolitan identities that you would if it was a question of crossing borders or much more globally and therefore the argument is that you could talk in terms of endogenous forms of cosmopolitanism. If you make the mistake of not factoring mobility amongst the various local groups that we encounter simply because of a much more macro understanding of the world you'll miss out on the fact that cosmopolitanism is associated with every form of mobility and encounter and human activities even purely at the local level between local communities.
Urmila: To go back to your biography, when did you decide that you were interested in studying sociology at the undergraduate level? I'm imagining it was not exactly a topic or a subject that everybody was drawn to. I can't imagine a young man in the 1970s being drawn to sociology and anthropology. So, what pulled you there?
Francis: There's always been this tendency. I don't know where it comes from in me to be an outsider looking in even when I am firmly an insider. And sociology lends itself to that. In high school I did the arts and humanities, and that meant to apply to the university, you had to go to the Faculty of Letters in the University of Yaoundé as it was called at the time. I took literature as a minor and the only other thing that made sense to me was anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy, which is what I went for. And I'm glad that I did, because I've met some of the most interesting people in my life through these disciplines and these areas of interest.
Urmila: You had to move around different countries in Africa as a young scholar and a project researcher. Can you give us an overview of what that kind of trajectory was like for you?
Francis: The mobility that I've enjoyed as a result of studying or work, but in this case, work, from when I could complete my PhD in 1990 and return from Leicester to Cameroon. Even then I moved between different institutions. I first started teaching part time at the Catholic University, Yaoundé, and then I moved to the University of Buea, and from there I went briefly to the Netherlands for a year for a fellowship and then moved again to Botswana for 4 years, I think, and from Botswana to Senegal for six years, where I worked with the Council for the Developmental Social Sciences in Africa, CODESRIA, and from Senegal in 2009, as you mentioned, I came to Cape Town. So, it's been a life of mobility in that sense and whenever you move is an opportunity to share with the world in the encounter what you are all about, but it is also, more importantly, an opportunity for you to take the world that you encounter in and make it part of your experience.
You'll be surprised by how much the record left for us, by those who have been a part of our societies, part of our worlds before us, speaks almost like an archive or a testament to their own various forms of mobility. And in the Cameroon Grassfields I got drawn very early on to the language of proverbs, and one of the proverbs that tells me how disposed they were to the outside and how open they were to constantly re-composing people, is in the proverb that ‘one person's child is only in the womb’. Which is very widespread in the Grassfields. I mean from that proverb alone, you can see the societies that are ready to give up on the idea that simply because they can account for you as one of their own they don't want you to be shared by the rest of the world.
Urmila: I wanted to ask about your fascinating and very successful project, where you are one of the people who founded it, which is the Langaa Research and Publishing House started in 2004. It seems to be going from strength to strength, and I don't know how many publications you have perhaps, you mentioned 500 titles somewhere. So, can you tell us how you got involved in this idea of creating a publishing house?
Francis: I had left the University of Botswana and got this job at CODESRIA, and I was the head of publications. It published mainly academic work and 90% of what it published was research that it had funded, it had generated from its own network, and the like. But as the head of publications, I regularly received unsolicited manuscripts from various scholars searching for an outlet for things that they had written. So, there clearly was a strong demand for that. And it was at the time that print on demand technology was just asserting itself. And I thought this was an opportunity to assist in encouraging scholars and non-scholars to tell their stories because we are the stories we tell ourselves. And if you don't have an outlet for your stories, people might begin to think that you don't have any stories!
“This was an opportunity to assist in encouraging scholars and non-scholars to tell their stories because we are the stories we tell ourselves. And if you don’t have an outlet for your stories, people might begin to think that you don’t have any stories! ”
The idea of creating Langaa was to prove that there are lots of stories in Africa, and the stories need to be shared, and that you can do that without huge resources. Basically, our resources are volunteers who just like the idea of these sort of initiatives, and that you can make a difference in the world without being a billionaire or a millionaire. We are happy with what we have done. Scholars who may not have competed not because of the shoddiness of their scholarship, but because established publishers preponderantly in the global North have their own ideas of what requires to be ventilated as publications. We have a lot of things available through Langaa with which we challenge others who want to discuss knowledge in the world to engage, not necessarily to endorse, but to take such an engagement seriously and engage beyond the ivory tower, beyond our normal channels of scholarly encounters. And that's why, increasingly, I am drawn to the idea of what I call ‘convivial scholarship’, which deals with the idea of incompleteness and that knowledge production is not the prerogative of those in the academy.
Academics share the world with others outside of the academy who have ideas and work towards developing those ideas and disseminating them in all sorts of ways that may not necessarily ever be packaged and presented in the standardized routinized scholarly repertoires that we are familiar with. And then the idea of convivial scholarship is that if you really have to do justice to a world on which you don't have a monopoly of insights or a monopoly of templates, then our interlocutors have to be not confined to within the academy. We have to reach out to those who are equally active and have a perspective on things out there to become part of the conversation. And that's what we want to capture within the notion of convivial scholarship. Within the academy we would mean our disciplinary boundaries are important but they must not be too rigid to the point where they defeat the purpose of what it means to be, for example, in a university. If you are contemplating on the same world and you cannot even begin to reach out and seek out what your neighboring discipline is doing you might cocoon yourself to a point where you start insisting that the blinkered perspective that you have and share in your community of practice is the only one that exists.
Urmila: And in the context of the university, my colleague Dr. Lindsay Crisp who teaches at the Open University, London, and with whom I have worked a few times earlier on writing projects, was very interested in how your idea of incompleteness might help her understand issues in ecology, and she asks this having read your article ‘Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality’. She talks about the African endogenous universe that you yourself have written about, based on Amos Tutuola’s novel ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ as a frontier. Now, do you agree that conviviality might provide us with not only a way to resist Western colonialism, but as a way into thinking and acting ecologically? That is, is it salient to try and differentiate between humans and non-humans, and to what extent can you incorporate the importance of non-human beings or actors in your framework and in your thought?
Francis: I think that's a very good question. And yes, and yes, and yes. You can use incompleteness to frame and draw attention to an exciting and more inclusive ecological imagination. And since Lindsay referred to Amos Tutuola, one thing we see his characters doing is the fluidity, the capability to transform into anything, that highlights the fluid identities and the interconnections of all beings. And that challenges certain resilient dualistic thinking and the need to embrace complexity. And he teaches us that incompleteness is a source of creativity, and we can use it as a source to be more creative in terms of our ecological imagination, for example, recognizing the inherent incompleteness of various ecological systems, rejecting fixed solutions, and embracing the dynamic nature of ecosystems. And I think also challenging dominant extractivist views of the planet and encouraging the engagement of diverse knowledge systems particularly from the global south whose voices have often been muted. And foster the dialogue between scientific and indigenous ecological knowledge, or acknowledging the role of all dynamics in shaping ecological understanding and promoting adaptability, resilience and mutual support.
Take, for example, the idea of transubstantiation and transmutation that are very common in Amos Tutuola’s works. If you notice in ‘The Palm-Wine Drinkard’ and ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ creatures are always transubstantiating in transmutations of various kinds. Everything is impermanent effervescence and I think that highlights the fluidity again and the interconnectedness of all things. Boundaries between self and other human and non-humans dissolve, and emphasize the need for ecological awareness and recognizing our interconnectedness with all lifeforms. If a human being is incomplete in motion and if every motion leads to various forms of encounters with other humans and non-humans, in supra and natural forms, and if the encounters are never zero sum or winner takes all then every human is a composite not only through the relationships with other humans, but through the relationships with non-humans and supernatural. Here again you find religion blending in and coming into conversation, the human and the environment and the non-human coming in an open-ended manner where everything is a permanent work in progress.
Urmila: The word ‘imagination’ is used quite a bit, at least in the circles I move in, imagination and of course a more technologically loaded word ‘innovation’. So having this perspective on how new ideas are encountered, and thinking more slowly about how those new encounters are encountered, who do they come from, what do we value, what do we foreground and what do we background, is also a part of this framework that you've provided us.
The two last questions, one from Lindsay and one from my colleague, Emily Levick. Now, Lindsay has a question that pertains more to inside the university, and Emily has a question that pertains to perhaps the larger landscape of what you observed over the past 4-5 years in Africa. So, to start with Emily's question the pandemic has had such a huge change, a lot of loss, a lot of sadness, a lot of suffering. In the address that you gave to the Psychological Society of South Africa you bring in this issue of medicine, and Emily wanted to ask about the way traditional medicine or healing is considered as something inferior because of the way Africa itself is perceived in this very stereotypical way by the wider world. She herself having benefited from traditional treatments, she is interested in how communities and individuals and healers navigate this terrain in Africa. What came to the surface in your observation? During Covid and ever since, has there been a change in the way people perceive medicine, perceive Africa, and within Africa, their own capacities perceived for indigenous healing versus Western medicine?
Francis: You know it's unfortunate that indigenous and endogenous healing systems on the continent continue to be treated as inferior in relation to global hierarchies of healing practices or healing systems. And again, it is because healing, like many other things in society, is articulated within this binary logic where winner takes all, or at least winner cancels out and subdues the others. And in that case, we Africans are often led to feel that the indigenous systems are not good enough in that global pecking order and therefore to indulge in them with a sense of guilt. And this is because of this illusion of completeness that you can have a medical healing system that actually passes for modern and surpasses every other system that has been around. Instead of saying that whatever exists out there as a system enters into a logic of inclusivity when we encounter a health crisis, we do not dismiss a priori or endorse a priori particular systems. We enter into conversations with the various options that we have in our toolkit or in our repository of possibilities and see where they can be used. Which ones can be used directly or in combination with one another.
And the ethnographic reality is that because Africans know that the healing systems are not given the credit that they deserve, they tend to use them in very muted forms not in the open but to resort to using them in complement to whatever other thing is prioritized by the state or by those who promote development initiatives amongst them. They seem to say since you brought this for us we tried to accept it, but we are going to blend it with what we are used to, and we cannot afford when we are ill to put all our eggs in one basket simply because this is called the basket of orthodox medicine. We are going to ensure that we maximize our opportunities by drawing from the various things that constitute a healing system in our experience. And so, people are doing all of these things at the same time even if they don't pronounce on them or they don't declare them in public. And another situation is that because orthodox medicines have been overly prioritized and yet people cannot afford it, financially, they find themselves being victims of fake drugs in circulation, dangerous drugs of various kinds. I think really a framework of incompleteness in healing would do a much better job on many levels. First, challenge the medical practitioners to come down from their high horses and embrace context, that context matters. And also free the populace up into endorsing or being able to speak openly on the various medical systems that are out there and traditions.
Urmila: Correct. And do you think that a lot of these dynamics that you mentioned were heightened, even if they were invisibilized or maybe even decried, were heightened during Covid because of the panic, because of the crisis?
Francis: Absolutely, absolutely. In the paper that I gave to the Psychology Society, I quoted the example of the Malagasy remedy. The president of Madagascar was promoting this cure and it dismissed in certain circles, and in ways that led him to speak back in a very frustrated manner. If this was something from the West, they would not have been that hostile towards it. And it was true because at the time vaccines were still being developed and even those that hadn't been tested enough, orders had been placed for mass supply of those vaccines.
Urmila: The last question I want to move on to concerns being within academia. When you talk about ‘faltering attempts’ at conviviality in universities in your article ‘Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality’, we were interested in the term ‘faltering’—the goal being that the truly convivial university might provide a space in which individuals can embrace their own and others incompleteness. My colleague Lindsay Crisp asks, “I think a lot of us are also longing for these kinds of conversations and transformations about this, this image of the university that you have created. We wonder in your own life, when and where have you experienced this kind of convivial knowledge production?” I mean, I cannot imagine that your life was without frustration or without road bumps. Do you see this project that you're working on with the Wellcome Trust on incompleteness and the ethics of new and emerging health technologies as your work entering a different kind of space? Not just a domain or a knowledge space, but also engaging with people outside academia?
Francis: I think that's a very good question in the sense that when disciplines are so firmly established they reach a level where you have the sense that everything is automated, in the sense there's very little thinking going into what one is doing anymore, even as we might claim to be thinking very much and creating new ways of seeing and doing. Because we get so comfortable with the framework in which we operate, we speak to peers, we communicate, we attend the same conferences, we read the same books, we examine the same students, and so on. So, things have become very standardized and routinized almost like a very perfect McDonald’s. In that case, there's very little thinking! But you notice that when two disciplines come into conversation with one another suddenly there is the alertness to new perspectives and innovation being more possible.
“We get so comfortable with the framework in which we operate, we speak to peers, we communicate, we attend the same conferences, we read the same books, we examine the same students, and so on. So, things have become very standardized and routinized almost like a very perfect McDonald’s.”
The opportunities for us to actually see the value of conventional scholarship would come not necessarily from established disciplines as we are used to having them, but from the margins to different disciplines, of different contexts which fit amongst other disciplines, which means it comes from a problem that poses itself. For example, Covid 19 was hell, a pandemic, for which no single discipline had a readymade template. And it therefore means that this is a fertile zone for imagination and reimagination. No particular discipline ‘owns’ a pandemic. And it challenges us to come to it from a distant vantage point with different insights. And that is when we see the fullness of the potential of convivial scholarship. And the Wellcome Trust initiative was precisely on these lines and my colleague in science, Jantina de Vries, and I came together to write this project proposal. She knows the issues of ethics in relation to biomedicine and I came to it from the vantage point of the humanities and social sciences, and we found out that we were able to work very well together in putting these ideas and sharing them with the rest of the team. Wellcome Trust loved the initiative and, and has funded it over a long period of time to see whether this is innovative. This could serve as a model for future initiatives in that sense. And the conversations we are having now are not confined to any particular discipline, but they are driven by a common interest in ethics and biomedicine, and how it relates to culture and politics and philosophy and other disciplines that would normally not claim anything in common; the common conversation and the like.
That is one and another one which is of interest as well, and we are currently developing it, I may have mentioned to you is the program at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study called The Eye of the Future. Early career scholars have an opportunity of a three years well-funded research project, to take time off from their busy schedule at the university, and establish themselves in a capacity to think creatively and ‘think the unthinkable’ in a space that defines itself as the creative space for the mind, when no idea can be anathema a priori. And that's really encouraging in the sense that nothing is taken for granted. And you are able to position yourself in a way that you can have multidisciplinary conversations across the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.
Urmila: I definitely wish you the very best Prof. Nyamnjoh. It's been fantastic talking to you and very inspiring. You've given us a lot to think about. I think it's a testimony to the fertility of the framework that you have created that it is both inclusive but also I think willing to take seriously how people respond to it, and include critiques of it. And I look forward to more engagement with your ideas, both through the real-world practical framework of people on the ground dealing with your ideas as well as in these large funded projects. So, it's been such a pleasure talking to you.
Francis: Thank you so much, Urmila. I hope we see you in Cape Town, at Stellenbosch one of these days.
Urmila: You can listen to episodes of our podcast on The Jugaad Project website or subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcast. Just search for ‘Embodied Worlds’.
