There is a long history of donor funding for African universities, research and publishing, going back to the colonial period, and the foundation of the International African Institute in 1926. The crises of higher education and knowledge flows of the 1980s, described by the historian of Africa Michael Crowder as a ‘book famine’, led to a plethora of donor-funded initiatives in support of African journals, book publishing and donations. New publishing NGOs were established including the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication and African Journals Online (AJOL). Later, other NGOs promoting access to Northern published journals included the Dutch-based Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) and the Research4Life (R4L) partnership funded by UN agencies and several of the major commercial publishers including the largest scientific publisher Elsevier.

Although these NGOs have increased access to online publishing, and to journals published by the commercial presses, they have not strengthened the economic sustainability of African journals. Over 25 years after the launch of these NGOs, African journals remain as dependent on donor funding as they were at inception. Digital discoverability tools, submission platforms, and publishing standards have rapidly evolved, making traditional print publishing obsolete, marginalising journals, and reinforcing knowledge hierarchies.

Dependency and extraversion

Hountondji understood dependency as a condition created by the capitalist core, colonial or metropolitan centres, over the colonial peripheries. This has underpinned the extraversion of scientific publishing and dependency on development donors. As Hountondji foresaw, the science communication system reinforces extraversion and dependency.

Well before the promises of the internet economy and debates about digital or data colonialism, Hountondji

wrote

that scientific infrastructure on the continent mainly served to facilitate the export of information and data, integrating the scientific legacy of the South into the intellectual production managed and controlled by the North.

The dependence of African academics on international journals and their reviewers has a well-documented negative impact on academic autonomy. Echoing Hountondji, Nyamnjoh rightly

argues

that the African academy continues to suffer from endemic reliance on external validation through Northern journals.

Jean-François Bayart criticised Hountondji and dependency theory for not properly historicising societies. Bayart developed the concept of extraversion in a new and different way, focusing on the political agency of African elites. He argued that in unequal environments elite actors, such as NGOs, may deliberately deploy ‘financial extraversion’ to mobilise donor aid. His work emphasises the actions of private foreign actors, or multinational companies, that capture Africa’s trade with Europe for purposes of commercial gain, exacerbating Africa’s dependence.

The fall and rise of multinational publishers

During the late colonial period, British multinationals dominated publishing in anglophone Africa. Their presence expanded in the postcolonial period due to increased demand for educational materials in the newly independent states. Most multinational operators withdrew in the financial crisis of the 1980s as textbooks became increasingly unaffordable.

Where once Macmillan and Oxford University Press controlled textbook markets, including in apartheid South Africa, the company with the largest academic footprint today is Taylor & Francis (T&F). Exploiting the market opportunities brought about by the end of apartheid from the mid-1990s, T&F has taken over the publishing of over 70 Africa-related journals, setting up co-publishing agreements with the University of South Africa and launching many new journals.

More recently, T&F has been publishing a rapidly growing number of papers in its ‘mega’ journals modelled on those of the science publishers. Around 40% of articles published in T&F’s

Cogent Social Sciences

are from Africa. Many of these papers are published with open access waivers or discounts funded by its partnership with the donor-funded EIFL. T&F

reports

that since 2020 more than 18,000 researchers have received either 50% discounts or complete fee waivers to publish in its journals.

The library at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal (Wikimedia Commons, 2008)

R4L …