'Rebuild the intellectual community on the continent'

Neo-liberalism has devastated African universities, turning them from vibrant centres of new thinking and academic comradeship into factories churning out marketable academic products and "saleable" students, according to leading Tanzanian scholar-activist Issa Shivji. African scholars have become mere data 'hunter-gatherers' instead of producers of theory; while the nascent radical intellectual community that emerged on the continent in the wake of independence has been decimated, says Shivji, who occupies the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Research Chair in Pan-African Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam.