Beyond the Paymaster Mentality: Convivial Scholarship and Sustainable Governance in Global Knowledge Ecosystems 

Author: Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Fellow of the CORE Academy

Department of Anthropology, University of Cape Town

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61362/CORE0630 

Download the full PDF version here: Convivial Scholarship and Sustainable Governance in Global Knowledge Ecosystems.pdf

Abstract

This paper critiques the unequal power dynamics embedded within global North-South research partnerships, urging a fundamental shift toward sustainable governance and ‘convivial scholarship’ within the global academy. Drawing on foundational critiques of intellectual extraversion and contemporary structural realities, it illustrates how Western-centric epistemologies, restrictive ‘paymaster’ financing, and commercialised logistical dependencies reduce Southern scholars to marginalised data collectors. To dismantle these hierarchical configurations, this text proposes a philosophy of ‘incompleteness’ and the adoption of ‘frontier being’ identities, emphasising humility, relational processing, and the structural centring of indigenous languages and contexts. By transforming international collaboration from an extractive commodity exchange into an egalitarian marketplace of ideas, this work advocates for structural reciprocity, shared institutional ownership, and systemic reforms aligned with the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaboration. Ultimately, it calls for a collective, decolonised social science rooted in mutual dependence, global justice, and the shared responsibilities of international intellectual communities.

Introduction: The Dancing Mask of Global Knowledge

In contemplating the nexus of human mobility, citizenship, and the making of intellectual communities, one is drawn to the timeless wisdom of Chinua Achebe (1964), who observed that the world is like a dancing Mask – to see it well, one must not stand rigidly in one place. If scholarship is to remain relevant in an era deeply fractured by geopolitical inequality, economic precarity, and technological containment, researchers must abandon the ‘unambiguous heartlands’ of their respective disciplines and geographies. True intellectual encounter happens at the ‘uncertain peripheries’, where global knowledge is not merely accumulated but contested and renegotiated (Nyamnjoh 2020). Sustainable governance in international research requires a rigorous ‘keywords’ approach that logs and analyses disagreement rather than settling for a false consensus. Terms like ‘decolonise’, ‘mentor’, and ‘collaborate’ must not be treated as harmonious overlaps. Instead, they represent ‘hot spots of contestation’ shot through with structural disillusionment and institutional complaint (Coetzee 2019).

The responsibility of scholarship across countries and cultures demands that academies confront the ‘invisible work’ that sustains them. Within many research ecosystems, female scholars are frequently saddled with ‘domestic’ academic chores, such as taking minutes, counselling students, and performing emotional labour for male colleagues (Mose 2019). Intersecting features of identity, such as being both Southern and female, produce complex, multiple forms of exclusion that block academic advancement, restrict leadership opportunities, and create acute work-life balance challenges when standard institutional frameworks collide with traditional gendered roles (Mehler and Nyamnjoh 2022). To navigate these systemic barriers, scholars must adopt ‘positionality’ as an object of critical scrutiny, examining how their specific geopolitical location – shaped by passports, institutional affiliations, and funding domains – influences the power dynamics of their research (Zheng et al. 2021).

For far too long, international research collaboration has persisted as a static, highly stratified supply chain that mirrors some of the most extractive industries on earth. The Global North frequently positions itself as a self-proclaimed heartland of ‘superior attainment’. Conversely, the Global South is systematically relegated to the peripheries of data collection and hired labour. This unequal dynamic mirrors the patterns identified in Paulin Hountondji’s (2009) foundational critique of ‘intellectual extraversion’, a process wherein research in the South is oriented outward to satisfy the specific theoretical and methodological demands of Western audiences. To break this dependency, contemporary scholarship must draw inspiration from ‘other-other’ encounters, such as those between Asian and African scholars, which offer a transformative potential for knowledge production that bypasses traditional colonial binaries entirely (Zheng et al. 2021). By challenging the deeply entrenched ‘West/Rest’ separation, these interactions dismantle the framework where the West is viewed as the universal knower and the rest of the world as mere ‘data mines’.

The Geopolitical Architecture of Containment: Commercialised Borders and Academic Mobility

Before an idea or a theory can cross a border, the human being embodying that knowledge must usually travel. It is within this physical movement that the structural friction of modern academia reveals its most violent inequalities. Although Western citizens and European academics enjoy fluid border crossings and move freely, these architectures of containment remain completely invisible to them (Lighthouse Reports 2026; Gibbs et al. 2026). Meanwhile, their Southern counterparts are forced to route their intellectual mobility through private, outsourced portals that function as commercialised bottlenecks (Gibbs et al. 2026).

This vulnerability is starkly quantified by the rise of an outsourced ‘visa empire’, where corporations like VFS Global – backed by billionaire investors and sovereign wealth – hold processing monopolies across 71 governments, acting as the primary gatekeeper for the European Schengen zone (Lighthouse Reports 2026; Gibbs et al. 2026). At their core, these private hubs turn a sovereign state safety check into a highly lucrative market for private equity owners who treat travelling thinkers as a captive market to be financially exploited (Lighthouse Reports 2026; Gibbs et al. 2026). The mechanics of this extortion operate at an industrial scale, where contractors in processing hubs like Nigeria are paid as little as €125 a month, creating intense pressure to hit aggressive sales targets (Gibbs et al. 2026). Furthermore, optional add-ons like SMS tracking, premium lounges, and courier services account for up to 30% of a processing centre’s revenue, driven by portal systems that flag clean, formatted PDF files with false virus errors to force panicked applicants into paying exorbitant manual scanning fees (Lighthouse Reports 2026; Gibbs et al. 2026). These mandatory ‘premium fees’ can easily equal a month of groceries, transforming international collaboration into an exclusive, high-risk financial hazard (Lighthouse Reports 2026).

This commercial hazard fundamentally alters the science by distorting the geography of academic time, energy, and respect. Southern scholars face a persistent ‘predicament’ where they are expected to ‘bend over backwards’ – going to extreme lengths to please benefactors – because their participation is framed as a rare ‘opportunity’ to be celebrated rather than a partnership of equals (Fuh 2019). When a Northern scholar expects a Southern colleague to endure long-haul flights, massive physical exhaustion, and deeply dehumanising border checks just to attend a short project alignment meeting, the relationship degrades into a patron-client dynamic. If a European scholar were asked to fly fourteen hours, pay a month’s salary for a visa, and face intensive airport scrutiny to attend a brief workshop, the request would be dismissed as preposterous. Yet, the inverse is routinely expected of Southern researchers.

This systemic imbalance is further perpetuated by the ‘helicoptering’ in of foreign experts who, despite significant expenditures on flights and luxury accommodation, often lack transferable practical skills and provide little value that could not be supplied more effectively by local practitioners and scholars (Jayawardane 2019). Such extraction reduces home-based researchers to ‘glorified data collectors’ tasked with performing the ‘muddy’ fieldwork, while Northern partners, who set rigid research questions in concrete, remain distanced from the actual context (Omanga and Mainye 2019). Even when Northern institutions express sympathy for these struggles, they often act as ‘unconscious agents’ of exclusionary state systems, prioritising project deadlines over the partner’s ‘personhood’ and treating the travelling scholar as a flight risk rather than an equal colleague.

Intellectual Extraversion and the Data Mine: From Omicron to Frontline Fieldwork

The reduction of Southern countries to ‘theoretical vacuums’ functioning merely as immense data banks or ‘vacuum cleaners’ for foreign research agendas signifies the urgent need for a fundamental rebalancing of the global scientific ecosystem (Connell 2007; Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). If the global academy truly adhered to its core myth that science is a strict meritocracy where the best data wins, the scientists leading pioneering work in the South would automatically be fully and fairly recognised. The reality of their marginalisation exposes a deeper systemic failure, revealing that the metrics of scientific merit are themselves deeply compromised by geopolitical privilege (Mills 2025).

A stark, ironic manifestation of this epistemic erasure occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first rigorous clinical study detailing the virulence of the emerging Omicron variant was pioneered by South African scientists using robust observations from thousands of frontline patients (Davies et al. 2022). Yet, this monumental Southern study was met with international silence and scepticism, only for the global spotlight to turn toward subsequent UK-based papers reporting on a mere fraction of that sample size (Keeling & Dyson 2024). Such a lopsided reception clarifies that empirical authority is often treated not as a matter of scientific rigour, but of geographic pedigree. The databank is deemed valuable only when a Northern teller cashes the cheque.

Beyond these high-level exclusions, indigenous researchers bear a tedious, unrecorded responsibility to navigate complex social codes, body language, and community discontent (Kalinga 2019). This emotional and ethical labour is powerfully illustrated by Dorcas Kamuya’s work on the unseen burdens carried by frontline fieldworkers in Kenyan biomedical studies. Local researchers are routinely forced to privately absorb and mitigate the human gaps left by rigid Northern trial designs, whether by personally funding urgent medical care for participants out of their own meagre salaries or providing food for the hungry siblings of a trial participant when research protocols narrowly exclude them (Kamuya et al. 2013). Far from being mere technical staff, these frontline actors do more than translate words. They actively manage the moral friction of the field, stepping in as ad-hoc humanitarians to preserve the community trust that distanced Northern principal investigators take for granted.

This operational hierarchy begins when a Northern Principal Investigator sets a sterile trial protocol in Geneva or Boston, which is then mediated through an institutional mechanism that implements rigid administrative boundaries and exclusive eligibility criteria. Consequently, the local frontline fieldworker is left to confront messy human realities directly on dirt roads, absorbing intense moral friction by personally funding medical care and food for excluded siblings, while the ultimate outcome of this asymmetric pipeline results in the distanced investigator receiving clean data while local labour remains entirely invisible.

This restrictive paradigm is further maintained through transactional collaborations where Northern partners explicitly instruct local researchers not to ‘follow the data’ if it leads away from prised symbols – such as specific slum communities – that are central to Northern claims of ‘knowing’ Africa (Omanga and Mainye 2019). To essentialise this dynamic as a simple binary of Northern exploiters and Southern victims, however, would be to trade the complex realities of academic capitalism for an incomplete narrative. The Global South is best conceptualised as an epistemic and economic category born of resistance to the ‘coloniality of power’ that persists long after formal decolonisation (Quijano 2000; Santos 2014).

In practice, some of the most deeply entrenched patterns of extraction are actively perpetuated by actors within the Global South itself, most notably by certain globally celebrated ‘Southern Superstars’. These elite regional gatekeepers often operate precisely like the local middle-managers inside the Société des Hévéas du Cameroun (Hévécam) rubber plantation study of 1983 (Ela 2006). Instead of leveraging their intermediate power to structurally alter the terms of exploitation, they frequently weaponise their operational proximity to Northern paymasters to consolidate their own individual leverage, hoarding administrative resources, mimicking the exclusionary behaviours of foreign directors, and viewing foreign funding structures as an exclusive asset for individual class mobility rather than a collective infrastructure for transformation (Ela 2006).

Epistemological Archetypes: Ants, Spiders, Honeybees, and Complete Gentlemen

To diagnose and transcend these unequal power relations, one can usefully draw upon the philosophical archetypes of knowledge production articulated by Francis Bacon (2000). The first is the archetype of the ‘ant’ – the encyclopaedist who mindlessly hoards raw data, accumulating a towering pile of information from every corner of the world without offering the transformative insight necessary for genuine social growth. This perfectly mirrors the extractive databank model where researchers amass surveys and blood samples without deeper engagement. Opposite the ant stands the archetype of the ‘spider’, representing the Cartesian rationalist who spins intricate, hypnotic webs of logical theory entirely from the isolation of their own mind or pristine laboratories. These beautiful constructions lack a foundation in reality because they are divorced from the messy, lived experience of the actual world.

The ideal scholar, within this framework, must aspire to be the ‘honeybee’, who gathers sustenance and findings from the diverse fruits of nature but processes them through the organ of their own being to create something sweet, nourishing, and useful for the collective benefit of the entire hive (Bacon 2000). Yet, current mono-epistemic publishing infrastructures routinely force Southern scholars to either ‘fit or perish’ within narrow, restrictive conceptions of quality scholarship, panel-beating their research into adopting Northern accents of thought (Musila 2019; Nyamnjoh 2025).

This systemic erasure finds an even more haunting analogy in Amos Tutuola’s (1952) universe through the story of the ‘Complete Gentleman’, who achieves a dazzling, flawless appearance only by renting or borrowing body parts from others along his journey. The tragedy lies in the complete failure of the borrower to recognise the moral and material debt owed to the lenders of those parts (Tutuola 1952; Nyamnjoh 2017b). Superior partners in the Global North frequently act as this ‘Skull’, achieving academic prominence, securing tenure, and winning awards by borrowing the intellectual resources, emotional labour, and physical exhaustion of Southern collaborators, only to drop them at the border when the paper is published. Crucially, Tutuola’s account underscores that the complete gentleman was a man of integrity who was dedicated to fulfilling his obligations and repaying those debts (Tutuola 1952; Nyamnjoh 2017a).

As right-wing populism erodes the financial foundations of higher education across Europe and North America, these borrowed facades are cracking from within. Northern scholars are finding their own domestic positions deeply precarious, leaving them with little structural room to manoeuvre when their own home departments face ideological defunding and structural collapse. This pattern parallels the structural behaviour of Schengen states that offload core state functions to private corporate entities like VFS Global, turning a blind eye to documented systemic violations—including over twenty-one severe violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by transporting sensitive biometric data on unencrypted compact disks – because their own downsized diplomatic counters would completely collapse under the volume of applications (Gibbs et al. 2026).

To navigate these multi-layered containment systems, the academic community must embrace a philosophy of ‘incompleteness’ as the natural, factual order of human existence (Nyamnjoh 2017a, 2024). Acknowledging incompleteness is not a deficit. It acts as a vital catalyst that compels scholars to transcend boundaries and explore alternative, inclusionary modes of being. This imperative is vividly illustrated by the classic Rowan Atkinson (2014) comedy sketch of Tom, Dick, and Harry – a trio defined by their distinct sensory and physical limitations. Isolated, they are completely deactivated. However, through a ‘convivial choreography’, they transform individual incompleteness into a potent collective strength. Moving in an intuitive, non-verbal cadence, they access a ‘sixth sense of conviviality’ born of a collective ‘we feel’ rather than an isolated ‘I think’, navigating obstacles that would paralyse a single, supposedly complete individual.

De-Centring the Paymaster: Structural Reciprocity and Institutional Endowments

Sustainable governance cannot flourish under the overbearing administrative gaze of the ‘paymaster’ mentality, which treats researchers as mere conduits for a financier’s internal accounting logic. This overbearing attitude manifests in absurd accounting micromanagement, where funding agencies demand that local institutions reissue invoices multiple times to correct minor typos or remove standard cashier lines, prioritising rigid paper trails over professional autonomy. Paradoxically, this rigid ‘equal treatment’ often leads to absurd disadvantages, such as administrative rules that prohibit essential research expenses like warm winter clothing for tropical-based scholars invited to mandatory conferences in the freezing Global North (Nolte 2019). The Africa Charter identifies these and related imbalances as concentric circles of exclusion, ranging from the core predominance of Western-centric epistemologies and languages to the restrictive logic of the ‘development’ frame and gaze (PARC 2023).

This asymmetry is further embedded in global regulatory policy and currency conversion mechanisms. For instance, demographic template forcing occurs when applying for US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, which forces African institutions into domestic American demographic monitoring templates, requiring researchers to use strict checkboxes like ‘African American’ or ‘Hispanic’ for studies taking place holistically on the African continent (NIH 1993; Geller et al. 2018). European funding instruments, in an analogous fashion, can trap universities in a form of bureaucratic limbo. Under the Horizon Europe framework, the European Union (EU) mandates that all recipient public bodies possess a standalone ‘Gender Equality Plan’ (GEP) to address harassment (Galligan 2025; Delgado Rivera 2025). Southern universities that integrate these clauses into a comprehensive singular harassment policy are forced to waste months negotiating whether their local frameworks are deemed ‘sufficient’ by Brussels. These structural strains are compounded by currency conversion deficits, as the EU frequently demands that local expenditures incurred in South African Rand be converted back to Euros using an arbitrary spot rate on the final date of reporting. If the local currency appreciates, the project incurs punishing financial losses which, rather than being absorbed by wealthy Northern institutions, are pushed directly onto the individual researcher.

To foster transformative change such as that articulated by the Africa Charter (PARC 2023), international philanthropic capital must move away from the model of hyper-surveilled charity toward sovereign, localised administration. A powerful global model of this structural redirection is found in the architecture of the DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance, where the Wellcome Trust transfers block grants directly to an independent, co-funded entity managed within the Global South, allowing regional researchers to distribute capital according to local scientific agendas (DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance 2019). Similarly, the Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) Hub deliberately mobilised substantial financial resources directly to institutional partners across its South-South network, empowering local researchers to independently define research questions, incorporate creative arts methodologies, and drive policy engagements without overbearing Northern intervention (Crawley and Teye 2023; MIDEQ 2024).

Conclusion: Towards the Solidarity of the Incomplete

In the final analysis, the future of sustainable governance in research resides in the reconstruction of a decolonised social science rooted in mutual dependence and global justice. Granted that this diagnosis is situated within the structural landscape of the social sciences and humanities, the terrain can look notably different in the health and life sciences, such as genomics, where Southern scientists frequently exhibit a dynamic, hyper-strategic agency, expertly playing the international academic game to secure massive infrastructural footprints (Collyer et al. 2019). Yet, across all disciplines, the underlying epistemic imperatives remain deeply relevant.

Though decoloniality focuses primarily on dismantling colonial structures, conviviality offers a complementary trajectory that moves beyond critique toward building new, inclusive forms of knowledge production. This trajectory requires a deliberate expansion of what we classify as academic evidence, placing English keywords alongside comparative terms from indigenous languages to reveal the extent to which Anglophone discourse often thinks it sees the entire landscape while only mapping a world visible to itself (Coetzee 2019). In alignment with the principles for redressing linguistic imbalances, scholarship must centre local languages at every stage of knowledge production – conception, design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination (Barber 1991; Englund 2011, 2018; Deumert and Makoni 2023; PARC 2023; Diawara, forthcoming).

This paradigm cannot be treated as a performance reserved solely for external consumption. Convivial scholarship is configured like concentric circles, requiring the application of its principles at multiple, nested scales (Nyamnjoh 2020). A core limitation emerges when global partnerships perform convivial ideals if researchers fail to practise those same commitments internally within their immediate research teams, faculties, and home institutions. The primary responsibility for performing this active, daily work of structural moderation lies squarely with the well-resourced partner holding the purse strings. It is incumbent upon those in positions of structural privilege to build in legal, administrative, and financial buffers that neutralise their own inherent dominance – deliberately relinquishing unilateral veto power over budgets and intentionally funding the invisible relational labour of local field staff.

Furthermore, academic institutions must adopt standard practices to level the material playing field, such as providing modest daily stipends to all invited international visitors to ensure that hospitality is experienced as a tangible right rather than an anxiety-inducing financial burden in expensive Northern cities. Reputable global platforms must actively legislate structural reciprocity; a landmark illustration of this shift is found in the explicit authorship guidelines released by The Lancet Regional Health – Africa, which mandate that local researchers from low- and middle-income countries are substantively recognised in lead authorship positions commensurate with their actual scientific steering of the project (Draper and Madlala 2026). By working together on common research across different geographies, and by refusing to privatise our senses, the global academic community can move beyond old extractive patterns to solve intractable global problems through the solidarity of the incomplete.

References

Achebe, C. (1964) Arrow of God. London: Heinemann.

Bacon, F. (2000) The New Organon. Edited by L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barber, K. (1991) I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Coetzee, C. (2019) ‘Ethical?! Collaboration?! Keywords for Our Contradictory Times’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 257–264.

Collyer, F., Connell, R., Maia, J. Ì. L. A., and Morrell, R. (2019) Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (2011) Theory from the South: Or How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa. London: Paradigm.

Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: Social Science and the Global Dynamics Of Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity.

Crawley, H., Garba, F., and Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2022a) ‘Editorial Introduction – Migration and (In)Equality in the Global South: Intersections, Contestations, and Possibilities’, Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies, 5(1&2): 1-13.

Crawley, H., Garba, F. and Nyamnjoh, F.B. (eds.) (2022b) ‘Special Issue: Migration and (In)Equality in the Global South: Intersections, Contestations, and Possibilities’, Zanj: The Journal of Critical Global South Studies, 5(1&2).

Crawley, H. and Teye, J. (eds.) (2023) The Palgrave Handbook of South–South Migration and Inequality. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Davies, M. A., Kassanjee, R., Rousseau, P., Morden, E., Johnson, L., Solomon, W., & Mendelson, M. (2022) ‘Outcomes of laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection in the Omicron-driven fourth wave compared with previous waves in the Western Cape Province, South Africa’, MedRxiv / International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Delgado Rivera, E., de Moncuit, L., Arvanitidis, C. (2025) ‘LifeWatch ERIC Gender Equality Plan (2025-2027)’, Research Ideas and Outcomes, 11: e167869.

Department of Biotechnology (DBT) & Wellcome Trust India Alliance (2019) Celebrating a Decade of Empowering Science: DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance (2008-2019). New Delhi: DBT-Wellcome Trust India Alliance.

Deumert, A. and Makoni, S. (eds) (2023) From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics: Voices, Questions and Alternatives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Diawara, M. (forthcoming) ‘Les Gardiens du Silence : Les Etudes Africaines et la Production de Sens au Troisième Millénaire’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales.

Draper, C. E. and Madlala, H. P. (2026) ‘What does meaningful inclusion of local authors look like in The Lancet Regional Health – Africa?’, The Lancet Regional Health – Africa, 100073.

Ela, J.-M. (2006) Travail et entreprise en Afrique: les fondements sociaux de la réussite économique. Paris: Éditions Karthala.

Englund, H. (2011) Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Englund, H. (2018) Gogo Breeze: Zambia’s Radio Elder and the Voices of Free Speech. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Fuh, D. (2019) ‘Bending over Backwards: Dismantling Toxic “Opportunities”‘, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 264-267.

Galligan, Y. (2025) ‘Gender Equality Plans in Research Organisations and Higher Education Institutions as a Catalyst for Transformative and Sustainable Change’, Articles, 101.

Geller, S. E., Koch, A. R., Roesch, P., Filut, A., Hallgren, E., & Carnes, M. (2018) ‘The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same: A Study to Evaluate Compliance with Inclusion and Assessment of Women and Minorities in Randomized Controlled Trials’, Academic Medicine, 93(4): 630-635.

Gibbs, M., Bulman, M. and Thuppadolla, S. (2026) ‘How a company turned visas to Europe into big business’, POLITICO Europe.

Hountondji, P.J. (2009) ‘Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two Perspectives on African Studies’, RCCS Annual Review, (1): 121-131.

Jayawardane, M.N. (2019) ‘The Capacity-Building-Workshop-in-Africa Hokum’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 276–280.

Kalinga, C. (2019) ‘Caught between a Rock and a Hard Place: Navigating Global Research Partnerships in the Global South as an Indigenous Researcher’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 270–272.

Kamuya, D. M., Theobald, S. J., Munilit, S., Molyneux, S., and Marsh, V. (2013) ‘The Invisible Labor of Frontline Research Workers in Biomedical Research in East Africa’, Developing World Bioethics, 13(3): 146–155.

Keeling, M. J., & Dyson, L. (2024) ‘A retrospective assessment of forecasting the peak of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.1 wave in England’, PLOS Computational Biology, 20(9): e1012452.

Lighthouse Reports (2026) The Visa Empire: Borders as a Business. Co-published with The Indian Express, Le Monde, Politico, Semafor, News24.

Mehler, A. and Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2022) ‘Academic Cooperation in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Post-COVID Future’, in Greiner, C., van Wolputte, S., and Bollig, M. (eds) African Futures, Leiden: Brill, pp. 367–374.

Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ) (2024) UKRI GCRF South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub.

Mills, D. (2025) ‘A Divided Republic of Letters? Infrastructural Coloniality and the Commercialisation of Academic Publishing’, in Collyer, F. (ed) Research Handbook on the Sociology of Knowledge, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 394–415.

Mose, C. (2019) ‘Towards a (More) Gender-Responsive Model of Collaboration’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 283–286.

Musila, G.A. (2019) ‘Against Collaboration or the Native Who Wanders Off’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 286–293.

National Institutes of Health (1993) NIH Revitalization Act of 1993. Public Law 103-43.

Nolte, I. (2019) ‘The Future of African Studies: What We Can Do to Keep Africa at the Heart of Our Research’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 296–313.

Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2017a) ‘Incompleteness and Conviviality: A Reflection on International Research Collaboration from an African Perspective’, in Gebre, Y., Ohta, I. and Matsuda, M. (eds) African Virtues in the Pursuit of Conviviality: Exploring Local Solutions in Light of Global Prescriptions. Mankon Bamenda: Langaa, pp. 339-378.

Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2017b) Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds. Bamenda: Langaa.

Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2020) Decolonising the Academy: A Case for Convivial Scholarship, Carl Schlettwein Lecture 14. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien.

Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2024) Incompleteness, Mobility and Conviviality: Ad. E. Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 Frobenius-Institut, Goethe-University. Bamenda: Langaa.

Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2025) Reimagining African Scholarship: A Convivial Approach Beyond the Single Story. Bamenda: Langaa.

Omanga, D. and Mainye, P.C. (2019) ‘North-South Collaborations as a Way of “Not Knowing Africa”: Researching Digital Technologies in Kenya’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 31(3): 273–275.

Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC) (2023) Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations. Bristol: University of Bristol.

Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3): 533–580.

Rowan Atkinson Live (2014) Rowan Atkinson Live – Tom, Dick and Harry. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHj77P1wSeM (Accessed: 19 April 2026).

Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. London: Routledge.

Tutuola, A. (1952) The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber.

Zheng, W., Cheng, Y. and Coetzee, C. (2021) ‘Thinking China from Africa: Encounter with the Other Other’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33(2): 119-129.

Note: This article is adapted from a keynote address of over 13,000 words titled “Transitions toward Convivial Scholarship and Sustainable Governance in African Research,” delivered at the MIASA Conference, “Transitions – Past, Present and Future of Sustainable Governance in Africa,” held from 9 to 11 June 2026 at ISSER, University of Ghana, Legon, Accra. Further information about the conference is available here: https://miasa.ug.edu.gh/event/final-conference/ 

About the Author

Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a Fellow of the International Core Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. His scholarship has made major contributions to anthropology, African studies, decolonial thought, mobility, citizenship, media, knowledge production, and convivial scholarship. His work is widely recognised for its critical engagement with incompleteness, interdependence, and the transformation of global academic relations.

[Profile Page: https://www.coreacad.org/Member.aspx?ProId=206]