Being a Philosophy Teacher and Researcher in Ghana

This is the twenty-fourth installment of The Cocoon Goes Global, a series that gives a sense of what the philosophy profession looks like outside of the Anglophone West. 

This guest post is written by Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani (Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana).  

Ghana is a country of about 31 million people (although a new census is now under way that is expected to show a higher population). The country covers an area of 238,535 square kilometers, is bordered by Togo to the East, Cote d’Ivoire to the West, Burkina Faso to the North and the Atlantic Ocean to the South. It is the second most populous country in West Africa (after Nigeria) and its capital (Accra) is its largest city with a population of more than 2.5 million.

Ghana is home to a number of ethnic groups, and in precolonial times two powerful kingdoms, the Dagbon and the Ashanti, dominated the territory. The country was also prominent in the slave trade and has at least twelve slave forts to show for this. The Ashanti were noted for their military prowess and defeated the British in a number of battles before being defeated. Colonialism followed and Ghana gained independence in 1957, being the first in Africa.

Since independence, Ghana has maintained a reputation as one of the world’s moderately peaceful countries, ranking 2^nd in Africa and 38^th in the world in the Global Peace Index Report (as of June 2021). The country’s major problem is financial. Its current debt stands at 81.47% of the size of its economy, and its leaders continue to borrow. This has affected the income of public sector workers as government does not pay very much in salaries.

As at 2021, a PhD holder in a tertiary teaching job earns less than a thousand US dollars. Every year there are negotiations between university labour unions and government representatives, but the gains of such negotiations do not last long for workers due to inflation, forcing continuous negotiations. It is, however, a legacy of the country’s peaceful profile that these negotiations do not spill into aggressive confrontations, a stability also enjoyed by the country’s election disputes.

All of these mean that the work of a professional philosopher in Ghana is significantly constrained. In the country’s public universities, government maintains a tight cap on employment, preferring that those already employed do as much work as possible. As I write this essay, I carry a load of 36 teaching hours per week (9 courses/classes multiplied by 2 credit hours for each course/class and then multiplied by 2 meetings for each class per week). The financial crunch and a few other factors have led to the exit of a good number of foreign faculty members. The enjoyable part is that the students are nice, intelligent, and considerate.

The biggest casualty in all of this is research, as the teaching load leaves neither enough time nor energy for it. However, we still get some research done. My focus has been on deliberative democracy, particularly consensual democracy (an area in which I have published more than twenty articles and book chapters). This focus has attracted some bit of global interest toward me, as I generate original research on the structures, mechanisms and problems of reaching group consensus decisions.

Ghana currently has 10 public universities, 8 public technical universities, 7 public university-level professional training institutions, and about 40 private universities. Until now, there have been only two philosophy departments in Ghana: in University of Ghana and University of Cape Coast. The one at University of Ghana (established in 1948) is the oldest, and has produced three of Africa’s most prominent philosophers: William Abraham, Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye.

William Abraham is widely known for his book The Mind of Africa, a book that seminally explains the cultural underpinnings of African traditions and discusses Akan cultural values as a case in point.

Kwasi Wiredu is arguably Africa’s most influential philosopher with his overall project of conceptual decolonization, which aims at divesting African philosophical thinking of all undue influences emanating from our colonial past. Throughout his career, Wiredu wrote philosophical essays and books targeting decolonization in religion, language, politics, and education. He argued that not everything of Western origin should be rejected, but that we needed to be doubly critical since our Western educational training involved substantial de-Africanization and we needed to re-Africanize to be true to our selves, societies and problems. Notably, Wiredu proposed a rejection of the majoritarian democracy inherited from colonial masters (on the basis that it is too adversarial) and a return to the consensual democracy of traditional African societies. For these reasons, Wiredu is among the most cited philosopher on the continent.

Kwame Gyekye is best known for his book Tradition and Modernity, a book that (in a seminal and forceful way) tackles issues having to do with Africa’s transition from traditional to modern ways of doing things. The most famous chapter in this book is Gyekye’s chapter on what he calls “moderate communitarianism”. But Gyekye is famous for other reasons, notably his book An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, and his articles on the philosophical relevance of Akan proverbs, the Akan concept of a person, and others.

Stepping into the shoes of these scholars was a big one for my colleagues and me. Like Wiredu and I, Martin Ajei and Richmond Kwesi are also interested in the subject of consensual democracy. Martin agues consistently for an unadulterated return to the consensus political systems of pre-colonial African villages (a position that even Wiredu disclaimed and which I find to be absurd in the light of living and social conditions today) whilst Richmond is still trying to settle in to the subject. The other philosophy faculty are engaged in other issues, although their work is affected by their teaching and administrative engagements. Mohammed Majeed has authored a book on traditional African conceptions of reincarnation, and is engaged in the continental debate about communitarianism in Africa.

In Ghana we have the Lectureship and Professorial ranks, and we are employed on temporary contracts until we are promoted to the Professorial cadre as Associate Professor. This is in contrast to Nigeria where employment is permanent once the employee has scaled through the probation period and received a confirmation of appointment. There are advantages and disadvantages with each of these arrangements. The temporary arrangement in Ghana promotes caution on the part of employee, but it also promotes authoritarianism on the part of some Heads of Department, who often see themselves as executioners who can “kill” people’s careers by simply refusing to renew their appointments. I think this promotes politics and negatively affects talent development and research productivity. The Nigerian lecturers are at advantage in this regard, and are more aggressive and confident in their research. I would, however, add that the major problem for our Nigerian counterparts is low wages (like Ghana) and, in addition, long strike actions and aggressive confrontations with government (unlike Ghana).

Like most other universities in most other countries, Ghana universities place some value on international recognition in research, for promotion. Anyone applying for promotion should have published in moderate to high impact journals, and the geographical spread of the publications is one of the considerations. In more recent promotion guidelines (the 2015 guidelines and the one currently under debate), however, more emphasis has been placed on teaching and community services, with points being demanded and awarded in these areas. The crafters of these promotion guidelines aim to reward people for these services, although this shift in promotion focus may play a role in explaining the decline of the ranking at the University of Ghana (the University’s ranking decline began following the period the first of these guidelines came into force) as academic begin to re-align their energies toward the new areas of focus.

The increased emphasis on teaching and community services for promotion, the heavy teaching loads, and the low wages of a university faculty, combine to put strains on research. In addition to these, the latest guidelines (which will soon be published) categorized three groups of community services: university services, national services, and international services (to be scored for promotion). The national services would be a bit of a puzzle for a foreigner to solve. A foreigner would need to put all these factors into consideration in deciding to teach and research in Ghana.

Comments

[Polaris Koi]

Thank you for an enlightening and well written post! The teaching load seems huge and that you get any research done at all, in addition to the teaching hours and course prep, indicates very long working hours. This makes me wonder, what are the typical working hours for a full time employee in Ghana? Do philosophers work considerably more hours than typical full time employees? Do academics in other disciplines (say, linguistics or economics) have a similar teaching load in comparison to philosophers?

[Breeze]

Thank you for the wonderful post! It is really detailed and informative. The introduction of three philosophers is extremely helpful!

[Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani]

@Polaris
Ghana runs a 9 am to 5 pm working day. It does not apply to academics, who are expected to do their teaching and research without needing to stay those hours in their offices. The teaching load may be the way it is because authorities did not compute the hours it entails. However, there is a regulation that the maximum teaching hours are 12 credit hours per week. We have obviously exceeded that as I currently handle 36. I know it's ultimately due to the finance, but I hope it improves.

[Stephen Hetherington]

My first job offer in philosophy was from the U of Ghana, courtesy of Professor Kwame Gyekye. This occurred early in my fourth/final year at the U of Pittsburgh, before the US job market had really kicked into action for that year. He wrote a memorably friendly, gracious, and welcoming letter to me. I appreciated it greatly at the time, and I was tempted: as a young person, the idea of a year's teaching in Africa was quite appealing, as both an intellectual and a cultural opportunity. But I was on a student visa in the US (I am an Australian), which I would have ended by leaving for Ghana, and I expected to need to return to the US in pursuit of a next job. So, I chose to stay in the US at the time. Since then, however, thanks to that interaction with Professor Gyekye, I have always wished Philosophy at the U of Ghana 'extra well', feeling a personal connection (albeit a very slight one, I know!) to it. The difficulties described here by Dr. Ani are substantial. I can only send my best wishes.(And thus I hereby do so.) Naturally, I always want philosophy to prosper wherever it can. In this case, I have an added personal motivation for wanting that to happen.