Africa has been here before. The maps are no longer spread across mahogany tables in European capitals and the language is no longer overtly imperial.
Yet the underlying logic feels unsettlingly familiar. The first Berlin Conference or West African Conference (1884-1885) partitioned Africa’s land under the pretext of order and protection. Today, a quieter conference is unfolding¾one without flags or gunboats, but with grant calls, mobility schemes, collaborative networks, and memoranda of understanding.
If Berlin I scrambled for territory, Berlin II is scrambling for knowledge and legitimacy.
In the late 19th Century, African traditional leaders were coerced into signing documents drafted in foreign languages, surrendering land and sovereignty they scarcely imagined could be taken so completely.
For years, historians dismissed them as naïve or complicit. More honest scholarship has since corrected this view, recognising that they were victims of deeply asymmetrical power relations. The tragedy was not ignorance; it was structural vulnerability.
Today, Africa’s sovereigns wear different crowns. They are professors, researchers, directors, deans and principal investigators–highly educated, globally connected and intellectually accomplished. Yet they operate within systems that constrain their autonomy.
African universities remain chronically underfunded. Research infrastructure is fragile, laboratories are under-equipped and scholars are stretched thin between teaching, administration and survival.
In such an environment, research funding is not merely desirable–it is existential. And scarcity, whether of food or research capital, has always been an effective tool of persuasion.
This reality helps explain the renewed global enthusiasm for Africa. Universities and research institutions from the Global North are increasingly turning their gaze toward the continent.
The language is appealing: partnerships, collaboration, mutual benefit and co-creation. Staff exchanges, joint publications and capacity-building programmes dominate the discourse.
On the surface, this appears progressive¾an overdue recognition of Africa’s intellectual potential. But beneath this vocabulary lies a persistent imbalance and question: who defines the research agenda and who ultimately claims legitimacy over the knowledge produced?
Today’s treaties are not signed with ink or thumbprints, but with institutional logos on MoUs. Anyone familiar with proposal writing in African universities recognises the unspoken rule.
When a funding call is released, the first instinct is rarely to ask what African communities’ need. Instead, it is to interpret donor priorities. A familiar phrase often emerges in these discussions: “Write what they want.” It is said casually, but it marks a critical moment—the quiet retreat of intellectual sovereignty.
“What they want” shapes everything: the questions posed, the methods employed, the timelines enforced and the indicators of success.
African scholars frequently undertake the fieldwork, navigate complex local realities, and generate rich, contextually grounded data. Yet ownership of that data, control over analysis and authority over publication often lie elsewhere.
Research outputs appear in prestigious journals, with African scholars included—but rarely as agenda-setters. Communities are studied repeatedly, yet seldom transformed by the knowledge extracted from them.
This is not collaboration in its emancipatory sense. It is epistemic extraction, refined and legitimised through academic norms.
Perhaps the most insidious feature of this new ‘conference’ is how thoroughly it has been normalised and even rewarded. In many African universities, academic prestige is increasingly tied to the ability to attract foreign funding rather than to build resilient institutions or produce locally grounded knowledge.
Scholars who secure large grants are celebrated, even when their research agendas are externally driven. Meanwhile, those who pursue independent, locally relevant inquiry often struggle for recognition within the same systems.
This reality raises several uncomfortable but necessary questions.
Why is Africa endlessly researched, yet rarely acknowledged as a site of theory production? Why do African scholars spend decades explaining African poverty, governance challenges and social inequalities to external audiences, while crises in the Global North remain largely unexplored from African intellectual perspectives?
Who owns African data, and where is it stored? Why are datasets generated through African labour and communities frequently archived abroad, analysed abroad and converted into intellectual capital that remains inaccessible to African institutions?
And perhaps most critically, why have African states retreated from their responsibility to fund research? Public disinvestment has created a vacuum, one that external funders have readily filled. In doing so, donor priorities are often presented as neutral academic interests, while African universities are compelled to align with external logics rather than national or continental visions.
This is not a call for intellectual isolation. Knowledge thrives through exchange, and global collaboration remains essential. But collaboration without equity is domination in polite disguise. Partnership without agenda-setting power is dependency by another name.
The vindication of African academia will not emerge by default. It requires deliberate action: scholars willing to name these dynamics honestly; universities investing in South-South collaborations; states committing meaningful resources to research; and academic systems that reward intellectual courage alongside grant acquisition.
If knowledge is power and Africa continues to export its questions, data, and intellectual labour without owning the answers, then Berlin II is no longer a metaphor. It is a reality already in motion. The question that remains is stark: are we willing participants, or reluctant prisoners, in our own intellectual recolonisation?
Edwin Wanjawa is….[email protected]
