West Africa Reivew (2002)

ISSN: 1525-4488

TO OUR READERS

Tejumola Olaniyan

Careful observers of West Africa Review would have noted that, in our actions and activities, if not in our formal pronouncements, we hold that what West Africa and West African studies critically need at this time is not more “solutions” to supposed “problems” but more questions, audacious, wide-ranging, corner-raking, questions without which any solution can only be an ersatz one. For too long, West Africa has been the recipient of all sorts of “solutions” from all categories of “experts” from all climes, experts who know next to nothing about the questions that led to the problems they are called to solve. Governments and bureaucracies poured millions of dollars into the industry. Many enterprising scholars of the region too rushed to cash in on the scam, with crassly policy-driven “scholarly” papers listing warehousefuls of “problems and prospects” without raising a single systematic question. But problems are not questions, and though problems are easier to identify than raise questions, we must resist the urge of cheap satisfaction that has led us nowhere.

We at West Africa Review are for a culture of raising questions, of wrapping the entire social process of identifying problems to seeking and applying solutions in questions. There is never a time when question asking must stop, and every successful solution only legitimately calls for more searching question mark. Even this idea that gives pre-eminence to questions and questioning we still routinely subject to interrogation.

In this issue of West Africa Review, the political management of our social polity and the way we explain, relate to, and make it work or not work, is the focus of the article by Seyoun Hameso, the review essay by Adeleke Adeeko, and the reviews by Titi Adepitan and Siendo Konate. Nkiru Nzegwu and Oyekan Owomoyela examine gender arrangements—their constitution, assignment of hierarchies, representations, conservations and subversions. Both Emmanuel Uwalaka and Hisako Matsuo investigate how a community of college students are coping with the reality of a world with AIDS around them. We have gathered here writings that raise all sorts of questions from the simple to the complex and all perspicacious; questions that query all kinds of orthodoxies: of the right, left, center, mainstream or margin. And that raise every solution as a question mark.

Perhaps, even if furtively and with bated breath, perhaps we can begin—ah, yes, gingerly too—to risk some hope that some socially catalytic illuminations may yet emerge from our intellectual exertions. West Africa Review aims to be a bold and tireless herald of the new morning.

Citation Format

Olaniyan, Tejumola (2002). TO OUR READERS. West Africa Reivew: 3, 2