And this has a financial cost as well. You’re not only not recognized, but the ‘northern researcher’ then has their name on the report, puts it on th… - Akosua Adomako Ampofo

All of us have capacity that can be built. We teach because we are building capacity we’re not the 'super knowers' but we do have certain experience, e.g how to do a survey or write a paper for publication and present it within 15 minutes. But the way in which capacity building is seen is very technocratic and Eurocentric in the sense that people all over the world have some of these 'hard skills', but they do them differently we may write differently, for example, but the standard for a journal article, supposedly international, is really Eurocentric.

The African Studies Association of Africa: We’re still young – formed in 2013. The thinking behind this was that when African Studies became a discipline in Europe and North America, it wasn’t about centring African people’s lives; it wasn’t about how can we enable Africans to understand each other better. The agenda was how do we understand the natives so that we can better colonize them – to put it crudely, but realistically! The African Studies associations in UK, US, came out of that mould. They’ve changed a lot, but still don’t centre Africans enough – most of their members are not Africans, and the research is often about the researchers’ own interests.

If I might add, as this is a challenge for all journals, we also had our fair share of slow or even totally non responsive reviewers. Now that you ask us to look back, I remember a couple of senior scholars who promised, and I mean promised, us a review, and then went totally cold on us. I find this particularly disheartening because, one, everyone knows GS work is a real labor of love. But more importantly, I want to believe that most of us, especially our more senior colleagues, are invested in nurturing the next generation and not simply having their own names up in gold. For what does it profit a man (and in this case by "man" I do mean a couple of biological and social males) if he is considered to be a superstar but does not invest in his intellectual DNA?