Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the question of academic freedom by following a historical trail and dwelling in moments of significant thinkers' biographies: Spinoza and the University of Heidelberg; C. A Diop and the Sorbonne; W. Rodney and the jamaican establishment; Oumar Sankhare and public opinion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the question of academic freedom in African studies. It does so by following a historical trail and dwelling in moments of significant thinkers' biographies: the Dutch Republic of the late 17th century with Spinoza and the University of Heidelberg; the Paris of 1951 with Cheikh Anta Diop and the Sorbonne; the Jamaica of 1968 with Walter Rodney and the local establishment; as well as the Dakar of 2014 with Oumar Sankhare and public opinion. These moments reveal some of the tensions inherent in the concept of academic, i.e. disciplined, freedom.

The paper starts with the offer extended to Spinoza in 1673 by the University of Heidelberg, which he declined. Here, we face modern scholarship asserting its autonomy from theology and carving its own sphere of legitimacy. We also contend with Spinoza’s peculiar and unsettling theoretical position on freedom and his intransigent and maximalist praxis of liberty. Moving on to Senegalese polymath Cheikh Anta Diop and Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, we are facing critical scholars who, to bring about Black freedom, produced narratives of the past subversive to the present they were immersed in – colonial and postcolonial presents that, qua dissertation committee and comprador bourgeois state defended themselves. The paper concludes with reflections on the late Senegalese scholar Oumar Sankhare, who, many centuries after Spinoza, faced vigorous backlash in Senegal for applying critical historical hermeneutics to the reading of scripture. Tensions between organized dogmas, state ideologies, and public opinions with the academic's freedom are thereby explored.