The Research Master African Studies at Leiden University (2006-2027): celebrating and mourning a unique scholarly legacy

A Research Masters is quite unlike a taught Masters degree, which many Universities have come to regard as their cash-cow. It involves much more active learning and mastery of a given field, but crucially it also requires the pursuit of original research. In the case of the ASC, this involved periods of fieldwork across different parts of the African continent. This volume provides a poignant testimony to the voyage that graduates of ResMA embarked upon and how it shaped their ways of thinking and future careers - whether in academia or beyond it. The individual contributions reflect on the personal experience of engaging with the challenges of fieldwork and distil the main findings from some markedly different projects. It is a standing testimony to what ResMA has achieved, both for the contributors personally and for serious scholarship about Africa. It would be a great pity if it all had to end here.

Research Masters' studies should be regarded as pre-PhD training, with a major emphasis on individual and small-group coaching, and on fieldwork-based research and writing a thesis. It was and is very short-sighted to use formal criteria like numbers of students to decide about continuation or termination of RESMA programmes. The evidence of the high quality of the programme's students and products of the RESMA African Studies and of the research careers of many of the RESMA alumni afterwards shows that it is not only a short-sighted decision, but a stupid one, certainly for a University like Leiden. Hopefully they will soon decide that the programme should be restarted.

For us back in South Africa, Leiden held something of a mystique as it retained interactions with some South African universities during the 1980s. International exposure is always enlightening, as was proven with the introduction of the MA degree. I was never part of the Leiden MA class, but I did visit there once in offering a lecture, and two of my books were published in conjunction with the Centre. The support offered for this project was superb.

In reading the commemorative book’s chapters, I am reminded of the idea of self-reflexivity. Academics are very good at studying something else, or other people, out there, but tend to become visibly anxious when they themselves are the subject of someone else’s gaze. But here the gaze is from within, a refusal to forget, an attempt to record experiences, and offer analysis of what was accomplished. Everywhere academics are complaining about instrumentalism, the metric economy and the turning of us into conveyer belts. The faster the belt the sooner we approach our own self-induced extinction. We are literally measuring ourselves to death. Knowingly.

As Prof Ntsebeza argues, we do this because we have learned to play the game, to ensure the conditions of our own small scale survival, as the wider world hurtles on its pre-determined path. I was a student at Wits in Anthropology and Sociology when the Archie Mafejee affair occurred. He became a rallying cry. I was not aware that he had been denied an interview many decades later when the gesture (and appointment) would have reaped global acclaim. Sometimes one simply has to invest in the symbolic, to make amends, to show the way.

Leiden has played its part, it has prepared a small cadre to pilot Africa into a rapidly reconfiguring world, and will hopefully continue to do so.