Chapter 1:
Why the Humanities and Social Sciences when people are starving?
The Transcript
Summary
In 2020, Nigeria's president Muhammadu Buhari comforted kidnapped and released school boys in Kankara, Katsina State by telling them that "You children are very lucky. I hope you will be very careful your success in the future depends not on subjects like History and English but Technology." This derision for the humanities (and the idea that one can study only one or the other, and when faced with the choice, one must study only Technology) is a widely held sentiment in Nigeria by leaders and everyday citizens. In this episode, I make a case for why 'Humanities and Social Sciences' or 'Technology and Natural Sciences' is a false dilemma. Interdisciplinary education can provide a more holistic understanding of society and foster critical thinking and communication skills in individuals. The Humanities are critical for the well-being of a diverse, democratic and postcolonial society like ours because they help us define what 'better' means for us.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to Sweet Medicine Podcast
05:20 Critique of Government Attitudes Towards Humanities
10:52 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Education
17:40 Personal Journey and Opportunities in Humanities
21:31 The Broader Impact of Humanities and Social Sciences
Last week, I asked the question, ‘Why social healing?’ And I spoke about why the concept of social healing is essential to me as someone interested in life-affirming relations in a culture of stress and survival. This week, I'm speaking to the other half of this project's core argument, why the humanities and social sciences? Why are these supposedly academic endeavors a good use of time and resources in today's Nigeria, in a country marked by unspeakable hardship and economic conditions? I'll also be speaking personally to the question, how does this feed me? It's a question I get asked all the time by the concerned and the derisive alike.
If you listened to the intro, the ‘Why Social Healing?’ episode, you know that the 'starving' part of this episode's title deserves emphasis. Nigeria is heartbreaking, and this year has truly been unbelievable. The news says it's the worst economic crisis in decades. And honestly, I wish I had a quick fix. I'm happy that there are people out there whose job it is to provide urgent solutions in times like this.
And as much as I wish I was one of them, I'm just not. In many circles, I hear that hope, mental respite, and inspiration for the long run are even harder to come by than food, fuel, and electricity. And that's where I come in.
I expressed this to one of my collaborators, Oluwakemi Agbato a few weeks ago, and she put it so well when she said,
We will always reach to the future, even when things are terrible we have ourselves and we will always have the future to reach to. So making work in service of realising that vision of that tomorrow will never be useless. Shey you get? What is the alternative? The alternative is hopelessness. What's the merit of that position? How does that help us carry on? These questions of why we're here and what it takes or what we need to be able to move into ourselves, be able to realize ourselves, to be able to find our place in this world is a universal question. Even when like the bombs are blowing up over your head, like they're so fundamental that like they ring above all of that. Or they ring beside it. Let's not even say above, let's say beside.
So as the bells of destruction are tolling, the bells of what are you going to do with your life are still tolling. And what you are trying to do is to show people how to plant seed or to remind them of how to plant seed or to give them planting ideas, soil mixes.
And so it is with the bells of destruction tolling that I am asking us to consider the value of the humanities in this work of preserving what is left in our hands and in building our future. With this episode, I am not so focused on the people struggling to eat. Rather, I am concerned with the people who set the agenda, who decide the endeavors into which Nigerian's money is worth investing. I'm here to make a case for why we should be investing more in research and education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
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Let's go to December 2020 for a moment. 344 schoolboys in Kankara in Katina State were kidnapped by bandits and released after six days. Upon their release, Nigerian president at the time, Muhammadu Bouhari, met with them to encourage them.
[news clip: You children are very lucky. I hope you will be very careful because you're in a science school. Your success in future depends not on subjects like history or English, but technology, because those are the category of people that are likely to stand a better chance of being employed in future.]
This won't be the first time that a Nigerian president was publicly deriding the humanities and social sciences to the Nigerian public. 15 years earlier, in August 2005, at a function in the presidential villa in which a group of Nigerians in the diaspora, led by Professor Bart Nnaji, paid Obasanjo a courtesy visit. Obasanjo said it was a miseducation for anyone to study subjects like mass communication and sociology in the university. The president told his guests,
“Some people came to me and they said they have two master's degrees and yet cannot get a job. Then I asked, what did you read? And they replied, mass communication. The other one is sociology. And I told them, you're uneducated. You now have to go and be re-educated to create value for your skill. The utilitarian value will not be as much as that of someone who goes to university to study computer science. It is just what the time demands."
When in 1983, the government replaced history as a subject in primary and junior secondary schools with social studies, Babs Fafunwa, the education minister, justified this by saying, in quotes, the government dropped history to encourage students to take up science and technology courses, end quote. The economy crisis brought on by the SAPs in 1980s deflated the relevance of the humanities and social sciences. And so that's why in 2017, for example, you can have a physics teacher lamenting, “since we're in a digital and scientific age, of what contribution will history make to the advancement of science and technology? I believe that science is everything, and whatever doesn't advance it is useless.”
It's not just that people started seeing the humanities as useless because they saw technology as their savior from crisis. It also appears that there was a top-down setting of agenda whereby the Nigerian government was advised or forced if you like by the World Bank to adopt this agenda of devaluing the humanities in its education budgets. I found a 2021 op-ed in The Guardian authored by The Guardian's editorial board that linked the departure from teaching history to the World Bank's structural adjustment program. The op-ed said, “the World Bank could not have meant well for the country when in 1980, it insisted on the restructuring of the educational curriculum on the pretext of the non viability of history as a course of study.”
Within the limited time and scope of this, my project, I was not able to verify the exact details of this restructuring, particularly from the World Bank's end. [Hey, by the way, PhD funders out there, I'd love to do a PhD pursuing this question.] But I did find corroboration elsewhere. In 2021, for her bachelor's degree in history at the University of Ilorin, Fumilayo Obasa wrote a dissertation on the aftermath of the abolishment of history as a subject in Nigerian primary and secondary schools. As part of her research, she spoke to Okpeh Ochayi Okpeh, a former president of the Historical Society of Nigeria. And he had said, “you will also observe that there is no other discipline that talks about imperialism with sufficient facts and evidence than history. The IMF keeps recommending that developing countries do not need cultural studies. They do not need history. They do not need philosophy. They do not need theater. There is a global conspiracy that Africans must not understand how Western imperialism is at the very root of their underdevelopment and of the problems that it continues to have. And subjects that will teach these matters are under attack.”
The glaring thing to me here is that it doesn't have to be either the humanities and the social sciences or technology and the natural sciences. On an individual level, anyone can split their time between learning engineering and studying literature. One can learn how to code while doing an anthropology degree where they research how young Nigerians use the internet to mobilize for protests. Young people in Nigeria and around the world are balancing multiple hustles by default anyway. And yes, for sure, part of this interdisciplinarity is not voluntary, but rather a hustle for daily bread. But it's also necessary for an increasingly complex world.
The demographic of unemployed people includes graduates in the humanities, technology and natural disciplines alike, which is an indication to me that the socioeconomic problem of unemployment has deeper roots than what subjects you choose to study in the university. On a national budget level, certain subjects would not be severely underfunded if the people influencing the agenda saw developmental value in them. In Nigeria sef, it even gone past the budget matter.
The federal government has a university admissions policy that requires universities to admit more science students than humanities students. And while this policy, like many others in Nigeria, is not strictly adhered to, it is worth mentioning that a lot of Nigerian students do not have control over what they study in the university. And many humanities students in Nigeria today are probably there because they do not have the required grades to study in more competitive programs, in the sciences. Mind you, these students are coming from secondary schools where the humanities and social sciences were derided and thought of as the stupid thing to do or the thing that people with NFA—no future ambition—go to study.
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So why should we care that the powerful and the majority in Nigeria derive the humanities? Sociology, for example, happens to be where you'd find people asking the question, how are Nigerians taught about how to be in the world? Which is the key question I asked my guests throughout this podcast. Each generation is groomed directly or indirectly by the generation before it. And the sociological imagination is one which is aware or seeks awareness of the relationship between the personal experience and the wider society, between particular social environments and the wider social and historical forces in which people and societies are enmeshed. At a personal level, sociology investigates the social causes and consequences of things such as romantic love, racial and gender identity, family conflicts, deviant behavior, aging, and religious faith.
At the societal level, sociology examines and explains matters of crime and law, poverty and wealth, prejudice and discrimination, business firms, schools, and social movements. And at the global level, sociology studies phenomena such as population growth, migration, war, peace, and economic development. Humanities and social sciences do not only contain invaluable knowledge and knowledge building capacity that makes sense for individual careers, our workplaces and our society's economies. They also hold the potential for fostering imaginations that enable hope.
The American political scientist Robert Bates, has this book called Prosperity and Violence, the Political Economy of Development. I picked it up the last time I was at Jazz Hole in Lagos. Just out of curiosity, right? I saw the book, it made sense for this podcast I was working on. In general, it's a discussion of how the modern state arose out of a need to protect the prosperity of inhabitants of a territory and how that protection is often coercive and how coercion for the sake of prosperity is often manipulated by states into violence for the sake of power. I bring this book up because there's a part where he talks about a research work trip he took to Uganda in the years following the overthrow of Idi Amin. And so he's hanging out to Ugandan technocrats who are working on restructuring the country. And I'm just going to quote him. He writes:
“As we got to know one another, our discussion moved from our professions to our families and our loved ones. I then learned of a central question they had been confronting. In the midst of violence, how should they best raise their children? How do you teach a child to work hard, to go to school, or to be honest when that child may die young? And why should a child or anyone else do without today when there may not be tomorrow.” He went on to write, “when the future is uncertain, investments, though desirable, may not be a rational act.”
And I think that is the sentiment that guides how we think about education in general in Nigeria, life in general in Nigeria, but particularly investment in long-term things such as the humanities, such as research. And so if your child has come to you saying they want to sociology, and you're looking at your electricity meter, looking at your fuel tank, looking at our Forex, confused as to why the child is sent to school to use their brain, now wants all of a sudden to throw it all away, which by the way is how my father looked at me when I told him I wanted to sociology and later history in 2015. I hope I've shared being able to convince and not confuse you that your child has a future.
Studying sociology, be it in school or through informal means—and for emphasis, be it in school or through informal means, doesn’t have to be just in school. But studying sociology will sharpen their minds and keep them alert to how larger social, political, and historical forces are acting upon them and how individuals just like them can shape and influence these larger forces, these larger structures. Studying sociology and other social sciences and humanities subjects will equip them with communication and analytical skills to make bolder, more informed decisions, regardless of whatever and however many careers they will have in their lifetime. I promise you that your child can pick up technical skills and pay attention to their world at the same time.
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And now I'll be transparent here and talk about how my work, my own work as a humanities researcher and practitioner has fed me these past three years. Although this field, however we can describe this field, to include museums, galleries, libraries, media houses, independence, freelance researchers, artists, writers, basically everybody and every institution who is currently working on understanding what it means to be human and what it means to be Nigerian today. Although this field is not well funded or institutionalized in Nigeria, my path has been made by walking the path. There many opportunities that I had no idea. Actually, most of the opportunities I have benefited from did not exist before I got to that point. In the same way, there many opportunities in the past, let's say 10 years ago, no longer exist now and I cannot benefit from them. And in the same way, lots of the opportunities that I benefited from today will not exist in 10 years time, but rather would have been replaced by even more, even better, even brighter, and even more context appropriate opportunities in the future. I will also say that I have had some luck and benefited from many people's gifts.
Chief among them is the my socioeconomic status as the child of an upper middle class family. When I moved back to Nigeria after my masters and my family were just too confused to be patient with me. It was a family, friends, graduation present that held me down. But, and you know, to whatever extent I can even say but here, but I have also found creative ways to navigate this system. And it's primarily because the work that I do is work that I am deeply passionate about and I have spent many years studying history, literature and society. Because of these reasons, I have been exposed to institutions and niches that support people just like me, who are doing work just like I'm doing.
The world is very big in every corner and I cannot underestimate the power of communication, the power of being able to tell a good story, power of being able to tell your story, to make cases for things, to argue, to negotiate. And a lot of that communication, negotiation, telling a good story comes from the confidence of knowledge and the confidence of building good communication, research, and analytical skills. And of course, there are many ways to acquire these skills, but one very good way is through studying the humanities and social sciences, formally or informally.
And don't just take it from me. In a 2013 op-ed in the Washington Post, Mary Sue Coleman and John L. Hennessey, presidents of the University of Michigan and Stanford University respectively, argued that “most successful careers, including in technology and engineering, do not result simply from technical knowledge. Success in life requires a sensibility about the world and one's place in it, which the humanities seek to cultivate, as well as an understanding of economic and societal context that the social sciences provide."
One thing that's undeniable is that the humanities and social sciences give us a sense of the scope of our world that other endeavors can't. They are critical for the well-being of diverse and democratic societies like ours. They help us understand why we go to war with ourselves and with others, what we can learn from how people and societies have repaired rifts in the past, why we decide to make and use the technology we use, what our problems are today and what they are likely to be in 15 years, and how we can imagine more life-affirming technologies and belief systems to solve our problems. Beyond measure, the humanities and social sciences expand our notion of who we are as a ‘we’.
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To go back to those comments from our former presidents that I shared in the beginning, what I am saying to people who think like them is, technology is about making our lives better and humanities is about defining better for ourselves. Maybe there is a problem in the way that humanities and social sciences are being taught in today's Nigeria and that requires a kind of re-education to create value for your skill.
In next week's episode, I'll be going into this in greater depth with the question, ‘What do we do with our past and with our history?’