This article examines the role of academic unionism in the perennial crisis bedeviling the university system in Nigeria. It is the contention here that contrary to officially sponsored opinion, the crisis can be linked to external factors, especially the government's handling of industrial disputes. The crisis in the system, which started in the early 1990s, can be seen as the direct off-shoot of the macro-economic adjustment programs foisted on the country and the subsequent decrease in government funding of the education sector. Nevertheless, the repressive practices of past military regimes have contributed immensely to the crisis, as have the frequent strikes of the the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU). The articles suggests that the crisis can be tackled only with an amelioration of the fundamental problems confronting the system—ranging from underfunding and poor working conditions to excessive government meddling in university governance—and a rethinking of strategies by both the government and ASUU.

L'ouvrage récemment paru de Jan Vansina, “Le Rwanda ancien. Le royaume nyiginya”, m'a donné l'occasion de me replonger dans l'histoire de la royauté nyiginya en quittant les sentiers battus. Cet ouvrage est, en effet, le produit d'un travail minutieux de dépouillement de textes trop négligés et auxquels l'auteur applique les méthodes rigoureuses de la critique historique. Il nous conduit à une vision plus complète et plus nuancée de la royauté nyiginya que ne l'à fait aucun ouvrage antérieur pour la période pré-coloniale. Certaines hypothèses, souvent très plausibles, font irruption dans l'histoire telle que l'a produite le courant majoritaire de l'époque coloniale, la bousculent et la remettent en mouvement. Elles redonnent vie et humanisent ces rois et leur entourage. Ils quittent le carcan de l'idéologie dominante du moment, cessent d'endosser les costumes propres à satisfaire la contemplation fascinée des élites, tant locales qu'européennes. Les rois, incarnés et faillibles sous la plume de l'historien, restent cependant au centre de son ouvrage et l'interrogation demeure: qu' était le peuple des rois? Partant de l'autre point de vue, demandons-nous à quel point et de quelle façon les rois étaient présents dans la vie des populations? Peut-on faire l'histoire de ces populations? Et enfin, pourquoi est-il important de “repeupler” le pays et de faire parvenir le royaume—et ses séquelles gouvernementales—à la periode actuelle?

Comme Vansina l'écrit, l'histoire officielle rwandaise laissait de côté la population. A vrai dire, le but principal de cette histoire était de donner une légitimité à la dynastie.

The aim of this article is threefold: to interrogate the crises that have afflicted public universities in Kenya over a period of thirty years, starting in the 1970s and intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s; to examine the impact of student activism and protest on education policy; and to investigate the role of current and former university students in national leadership and the democratization process in Kenya. University students are destined to be the intelligentsia who one day will take over the reigns of power. Students also constitute the largest reservoir of technocrats in Kenya's development milieu, providing highly trained manpower in many sectors. To many they are also the vehicles of ideological dissemination and are often regarded as the representatives of the left and sympathetic to the cause of the common man. As such, to engage the students is to engage the common man. Yet there are lacunae in the research and academic knowledge in this area. Commentators have largely ignored student protest in Kenya despite the fact that universities have a long history of student activism in which students often have engaged authorities in running battles, some of them violent. In the national political arena, university students often rally behind radical politicians and former university students. The political course in Kenya would not be the same today without university students. This article seeks to interrogate their multiple roles.

In the wake of the genocide, it has been argued many times that the history of Rwanda needs to be rewritten, that past understandings of the history of this society contributed to the atrocities of 1994. Indeed, our understanding of history influences the present by lending justification to our actions today. But such a relationship of past and present works both ways. As the very demand for a new history suggests, our vision—and therefore our presentation—of history is also influenced by our contemporary view of historical process. In a sense, history is always an attempt to make sense of political and social issues for which we have no answers in the present. Therefore, at one level, historical inquiry is always an attempt to understand the present, and a history that ignores the important questions of the day becomes simply antiquarianism.

But such a reality evokes some fundamental methodological and conceptual questions. To what degree—and in what way—do present concerns influence the ways in which we proceed to construct history? At what point does history become simply propaganda? To what degree do our current preoccupations shape our questions of history, and to what degree do they mold the content of our histories? Do we base our analyses on the known empirical record, critically analyzed, in as complete and comprehensive a fashion as is feasible? Or do we simply fashion our conclusions to meet present concerns? Concern over content—not questions—leads often to a selective presentation of the record, a simplified version of history, with the selection determined by the desired outcome.

The political liberalization process in Cameroon was marked by protracted strike actions on the campus of the University of Yaounde during the period 1990–96. Political liberalization provided space for students to organize and voice their multiple grievances about the poor living and study conditions on campus as well as the process of “institutional liberalization,” which blocked their pursuit of upward mobility. The unprecedented degree of violence that accompanied the protracted strikes may be attributed not only to the persistent refusal of the university authorities and the regime to enter into any meaningful form of dialogue with the students, but also to the internal divisions among the students along party and ethnoregional lines. The mayor lines of division were between two groups: the “stranger” students organized in the Students' Parliament and closely allied to the radical opposition; and the “autochthonous” Beti students organized in the Committee for Self-Defense and the Beti milida and closely allied to the regime in power. In their fight with Parliament, the latter groups resorted to violent forms of ethnic exclusion to reestablish control over what they considered to be their university and to maintain their regime in power.

Jan Vansina's history of the Nyiginya kingdom joins the long list of works, both essays and novels, that have proliferated since the Rwanda Patriotic Front gained power in 1994. The rigorous application of historical criticism distinguishes this from other works that give voice primarily to passions and speculations. Vansina's work is remarkable for the author's ability to bridge past and present by placing himself downstream rather than upstream in the flow of history. This important emphasis on ancient Rwanda contributes to the understanding of today's events. Vansina was ahead of those whose project it was to reread the history of Rwanda, which began in Butare in December 1998. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that it is up to Rwandan historians themselves to compile, on the basis of the facts accepted by everyone, a history that is as impartial as possible and that might offer some guidelines for the future.

In 1962, when Vansina was writing L'évolution du royaume rwanda des origines à 1900 (The Evolution of the Rwandan Kingdom from Its Origins to 1900), his work was already marked by a rigorous exploration of historical facts. In Le Rwanda ancien (Ancient Rwanda), he proposes a new chronology of the Nyiginya kingdom, whose foundation he places around the middle of the seventeenth century. In so doing, Vansina definitively separates himself from Alexis Kagame—who situates its beginnings six centuries earlier—and thereby puts to rest the argument of historians and anthropologists, and challenges those politicians who, in the pursuit of legitimacy, have based their ideologies of the Rwandan reconquest and territorial revindication on the writings of Kagame.