Thandika Mkandawire and Africa's unfinished intellectual revolution: confronting epistemic gatekeeping in development economics

Africa has perfected an interesting ritual. We celebrate our intellectuals, deliver eloquent memorial lectures, quote their arguments and occasionally name buildings after them. Then we return to business as usual, often looking elsewhere for intellectual permission to determine our own economic future.

As I reflect on Professor Thandika Mkandawire’s legacy, I find this contradiction difficult to ignore. Here was an African scholar who challenged the assumptions through which the continent’s developmental difficulties were explained. Yet the institutions necessary to nurture comparable intellectual independence remain unevenly developed across Africa. We are often generous with tributes and considerably less generous with research funding.

Have we sufficiently absorbed Mkandawire’s scholarship, or have we become better at celebrating his intellectual stature than confronting the structures of thought and power he challenged?

Born in Gwanda, present-day Zimbabwe, in 1940 to a Malawian father and Zimbabwean mother, Mkandawire became involved in Malawi’s independence struggle as a journalist and political activist. Opposition to authoritarian rule eventually forced him into exile. He subsequently studied economics at Ohio State University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, before continuing his academic journey at the University of Stockholm in Sweden. He returned to Malawi in 1994 after approximately three decades abroad.

His journey illustrates the relationship between political power, intellectual freedom and the institutional conditions necessary for scholarship to flourish. I do not regard international mobility as the problem; intellectual exchange is indispensable. What concerns me is why African scholars have so often needed to look beyond their own countries for institutions capable of supporting their intellectual ambitions.

Ohio State University and the University of Stockholm formed part of Mkandawire’s academic foundations, but his significance cannot be reduced to the institutions he attended. His lasting contribution emerged from what he did with his education: challenging conventional economic thinking and creating intellectual spaces in which African scholars could produce knowledge on their own terms.

The question is not whether African scholars can compete intellectually with their international counterparts. Mkandawire demonstrated that they can. The question is why African institutions frequently struggle to provide the conditions under which comparable scholarship can flourish.

His influential 2001 paper, Thinking about Developmental States in Africa, challenged the assumption that African states were inherently incapable of pursuing successful developmental strategies. Rather than treating developmental limitations as inevitable, Mkandawire examined the historical and institutional conditions under which capable developmental states could emerge. Africa, in his intellectual vision, was not merely a laboratory for testing theories developed elsewhere. It was a source of theory and original thinking about development.

Yet contemporary African economic debates reveal a familiar contradiction. Governments speak of industrialisation while many economies remain dependent on commodity exports. They celebrate entrepreneurship while productive employment remains insufficient. They announce transformation while the structure of production changes far more slowly than their policy rhetoric suggests.

I recognise the importance of macroeconomic stability, sound public finances and functioning markets. My concern is that stability is sometimes presented as synonymous with transformation. An economy can satisfy financial markets and receive favourable international assessments while failing to generate sufficient productive employment or move decisively into higher-value production.

Can an economy pass its external examination and still fail the developmental examination set by its own people?

For me, this is a fundamental question of development economics. Reassuring investors and meeting fiscal targets may matter, but neither substitutes for expanding productive capacity, diversifying industries, deepening technological capabilities and improving people’s material conditions. The objective should be to make the state, markets and private enterprise work together to transform economic structures, rather than treating financial confidence as the ultimate measure of success.

This brings me to epistemic gatekeeping: the power to determine whose knowledge is considered legitimate, which theories become authoritative and whose interpretations influence public policy.

Gatekeeping does not always require an explicit decision to exclude African scholars. It can operate through research funding, academic publishing, university curricula, professional networks and citation practices. These mechanisms can uphold scholarly standards, but problems arise when institutional prestige substitutes for intellectual argument or the geographical origin of an idea influences its reception.

Why should African explanations of African realities depend disproportionately on validation from institutions whose priorities may not reflect the continent’s most urgent developmental questions?

I am not arguing that European or North American scholars should not study Africa, or that theories developed elsewhere have nothing to offer. Such a position would be intellectually indefensible. Knowledge advances through exchange, contestation and scrutiny. My concern is the unequal distribution of authority within that exchange.

Africa can become a source of empirical data for theories developed elsewhere while its scholars struggle to secure equivalent recognition as producers of theory. The continent supplies the case study; somebody else supplies the conceptual authority. Africa provides the evidence and then occasionally waits for an international seminar to discover what that evidence means.

The sarcasm is deliberate, but the consequences are serious. External funding priorities can influence research agendas, while under-resourced African universities face pressure to conform to established intellectual fashions. Scholars may spend more energy demonstrating that their work fits recognised frameworks than developing original approaches to African realities.

Mkandawire’s career offers an important counterpoint. Through his leadership at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where he served as Executive Secretary, he helped strengthen African social science. He subsequently directed the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development from 1998 to 2009 and became the inaugural Chair in African Development at the London School of Economics in 2010.

These achievements demonstrate that African scholarship can influence international debates without surrendering intellectual independence. They also raise an uncomfortable question: why do African institutions continue to struggle to provide the conditions necessary for comparable scholarship to flourish?

Confronting epistemic gatekeeping requires more than conferences and declarations about decolonising knowledge. Such language risks becoming another fashionable vocabulary while institutional practices remain unchanged. Africa needs sustained investment in universities, independent research funding, postgraduate education, academic publishing and research infrastructure. Universities must enjoy the freedom to question prevailing economic orthodoxies without political intimidation or financial dependence that compromises intellectual independence.

However, I would be intellectually dishonest to present gatekeeping as a problem confined to the Global North. African academics can reproduce the same hierarchies by privileging fashionable theories, dismissing unfamiliar perspectives and mistaking international prestige for intellectual superiority. Replacing external gatekeepers with African ones would merely change the ownership of the gate while preserving the culture of exclusion.

Nor should epistemic independence become intellectual nationalism. An idea is not correct simply because it originates in Africa, just as it is not universally applicable because it was developed at a prestigious foreign university. The proper test is explanatory power, empirical rigour and contribution to understanding development.

Mkandawire did not invite Africa to withdraw from global intellectual exchange. He challenged the continent to participate as an equal, questioning prevailing assumptions and contributing original explanations of its developmental experience.

Africa offers a compelling illustration of the biblical adage that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own people. Yet Mkandawire was internationally recognised. The deeper question is whether recognition of the man has translated into institutional commitment to the ideas he championed. Must African intellectuals first receive the world’s endorsement before their own societies fully appreciate their contributions?

A memorial lecture cannot substitute for an industrial strategy. Academic citations cannot replace investment in universities. Declarations about African solutions cannot compensate for the absence of capable institutions and productive industries.

To honour Professor Thandika Mkandawire is therefore to do more than celebrate an African scholar of international distinction. It is to confront the structures determining who produces knowledge, which ideas shape policy and whose understanding of development prevails.

I believe Africa’s unfinished intellectual revolution will be completed not merely when more African scholars occupy prestigious positions abroad, but when African institutions possess the resources, independence and intellectual confidence to generate knowledge that shapes the continent’s development while contributing meaningfully to the world.

Otherwise, we risk perfecting the art of celebrating intellectual independence while remaining dependent on somebody else to certify that we have achieved it.

The ultimate measure of Mkandawire’s legacy is not how eloquently we invoke his name, but whether we build the intellectual institutions and productive capabilities necessary to put his insights into practice.

Madume Hangula is an economist and thought writer contributing in his personal capacity.