Confucius Institutes in Africa, or How the Educational Spirit in Africa Re-Rationalized Toward the East
Amy Stambach
Universities of Oxford and Wisconsin-Madison
This paper argues that current efforts in parts of Africa to teach Chinese language and culture to university students is an example of how sometimes polarized understandings of education as ‘western’ or ‘northern’ are remapped onto an East Asian-oriented future. The first part of the essay applies a Weberian-inspired theory of rationalization to a rethinking of liberal traditions within academia, arguing that discourses of development and critiques of colonialism are partly displaced by African students’ uptake of Chinese, and by Chinese teachers’ contractual approaches to education. Inspired by recent work that rethinks the relation of the global north to the global south (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012), the paper uses three ethnographic moments, drawn from 2014 field research, to illustrate cultural manifestations and contestations surrounding the re-rationalization of education toward the east: opening events at the Fifth Annual Julius K. Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week held at the University of Dar es Salaam; private Chinese language schools catering to Tanzanian students and business owners; and efforts within UDSM and the Tanzanian Ministry of Education to teach Chinese for-credit in public education settings. These three moments—the first about the past, the second about the present, and the third about the future—illustrate new orientations that are emerging within higher education. The paper closes with reflections about how these ethnographic materials illuminate concepts of networks and knowledge that are also embedded in the UK’s recent DFID-ESRC China-Africa research programme.
