African Studies and Sino-Africa Collaborations: Towards Our “Common Interest”

It was the morning of 16 November 2018. I had just finished an interactive session with the Faculty of the Centre of African Studies, specifically, the Department of Asian and African Languages and Culture, Peking University (PKU). It was, I think, the sixth day of my one week visit that was dubbed a “lecture tour”. Even though the meeting was formal, my talk, whose core focus I can no longer recall in its entirety, consisted of thoughts and reflections on possible areas of academic collaboration between China and Africa on the one hand, and the University of Peking and my own university, Osun State University, on the other hand. (Perhaps, due to the seven-hour time difference between Beijing and Lagos, I have a blurry and inaccurate recollection of the timeline of some of the events in Beijing.) The discussion, moderated by Ying Cheng, who served as the translator (as I spoke in English), was both animated and engaging. My meeting with the faculty was the first of the three main events lined up for me. The second was a talk delivered to a mixed audience of academics and graduate students entitled “Music is the Weapon of the Future: Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s Rebel Art, Popular Music in Nigeria and the Logic of Ideological Reconditioning”. The third event was an “African Culture Week”, a series of performances – dance, music and singing organised to coincide with my visit, and which aimed to bring together African and Africanist students studying in PKU and other universities in China as well as members of the Nigerian and larger African communities in China. Attending my first presentation were academics from other universities in China, and at least two other foreigners apart from me (Natalia Molebatsi, a performance poet from South Africa and a white American visitor) in the audience. After my talk, the Director of the Centre, distinguished scholar of African history (Li 2000) and Africa–China relations, and the most distinguished Africanist in China, Professor Li Anshan, gifted me a copy of the Annual Review of African Studies in China (2016) which was a Special Issue on African Literature, my own academic background. Professor Li signed the copy of the Annual Review with the following words in his own writing (in English for my benefit): “For our common interest”. His words will serve as an entry point for my reflections in this roundtable. They are carefully chosen and optimistic words from the distinguishedlooking Professor Anshan that gesture at the kind of role that African Studies could (and even should) play in Sino-Africa collaborations. African Studies is relatively new in