Book Review by Dr. Stephen Ney 

Jean-Marc Éla, La recherche africaine face au défi de l’excellence scientifique (Paris: L’harmattan, 2007). Translation: African Research and the Challenge of Scientific Excellence.

Prolific in both his fields of expertise, Cameroonian theologian and sociologist Jean-Marc Éla (1936-2008) did his first doctorate on the work of Martin Luther and his second on structural changes in the society of northern Cameroonian peasants. He wrote many books and I am currently reading as many as I can; I will gladly review a few more of them if readers are interested.

Éla spent fifteen years as a missionary priest among the Kirdis people in northern Cameroon (1970-1984), then ten years serving the urban poor and students in Yaoundé, before going into exile in Canada in 1995 when his life was threatened by the Biya regime. He had come to understand the glaring oppression experienced by the society to which he was called, and he spoke openly about it, for which he was considered a political threat. Yet his politics was the result of his theology, for Éla thought that understanding and speaking about God required understanding the women, men and societies to whom he was called to speak about God. In creation and in Christ, God became inseparable from humanity, which is why over the course of his life he both explained and demonstrated that theology is inseparable from the human sciences. It is also why he might be considered as the kind of intellectual the SCS prays and works to nurture. 

Jean-Marc Éla passed away in 2008 in Vancouver while I was doing my PhD there. I hadn’t even heard of him at the time, but I wonder how my academic work and how my vocation might have turned out differently had I spent time with him in my formative years. Certainly I would have benefitted profoundly, for his life and writing take big steps in answering questions I started asking in those days, ones that I still ask: What does it mean to be a Christian in Africa today? How can Western scholars work on Africa and with Africans through partnerships that are just and fruitful? What is the value for Christians of the knowledge generated today in the humanities and social sciences, and how can it be integrated with Christian service and mission?

One of Ela’s last books, La recherche africaine face au défi de l’excellence scientifique (African research and the challenge of scientific excellence), is a reflection from an African perspective on the global knowledge economy. His theological foundation is never explicit but always implicitly present, driving his concern for justice and truth. 

Africa produces very little knowledge of the sort that the world’s universities value most highly, which is to say published research. By saying this, Éla is not saying that Africa has very little knowledge. First, there are traditional kinds of knowledge such as those held and developed in non-modern societies such as the Kurdis. Éla considers this knowledge valuable, but he does not observe that it is making an actual difference in Africa’s development. Second, as the book explains carefully, the world’s institutions and methods of producing and accrediting academic knowledge are currently very far from fair, because knowledge always has a particular perspective, emerging from its particular history and social context. Clearly Éla is influenced here by twentieth-century philosophy and cultural theory, though his approach owes no more to these sources than to his observations and his sufferings among the Kurdis people. It is also important to note that Éla’s approach is rooted in Christian faith, since (as he explains in his theological writings) the work of knowing and explaining reality–particularly God, the ultimate reality–needs always to be done in response to local questions and conditions. 

Ironically, this means that the African research that is acknowledged and disseminated tends not to be useful to Africa (since it is the kind of research that pleases foreign institutions and deploys foreign methods) and that institutions in Africa rarely prioritize the production of useful knowledge that responds to local conditions and incorporates local traditions. That kind of knowledge, as Éla states, is a society’s greatest treasure, and Africa has far too little of it. 

Though Éla gives ample reason to doubt that Africa’s universities are generating knowledge as they should and could, he has faith in academic knowledge production institutions and methods. Thus he aims to help African universities become producers of more and better knowledge, which is why his work speaks directly into the work of our Society. His argument is as important for non-African as for African scholars, since intercultural knowledge benefits all recipients.

Il convient aujourd’hui de redécouvrir la dimension sociale et culturelle de la science. Elle nous oblige à questionner notre rapport au savoir en nous rappelant qu’aucune société n’incarne l’universel. La rationalité est un processus partagé. Elle s’exprime à travers des langages différents. (p. 147)

It is necessary today to rediscover the social and cultural dimension of scientific knowledge. It will force us to question our own relationship to knowledge by reminding us that no single society incarnates the universal. Rationality is a shared process. It is expressed in different languages.