‘Good science can be done in African countries’

DPA

Derek Ndinteh may be sitting in a windowless tiny office at one of South Africa’s less-well-known universities writing out an application for research funding, but this brilliant 40-year-old from Cameroon is confident.
“I will be the first black Nobel laureate in chemistry,” says the researcher at the University of Johannesburg – “UJ” to its students.
The role of African scientists in partnerships with western research institutes and universities tends to be primarily that of collecting data, leaving the prestigious job of analysis – and publishing the results – to Western institutions.
In the light of this, it hardly surprising that no black African has won a Nobel prize other than in literature and for peace.
Ndinteh has been researching indigenous African plants since his favourite cousin died young from diabetes, describing 47 individual components that help to counter diabetes in his doctoral thesis.
And at UJ he believes he has found an African seat of learning that could put him on a path to the coveted prize awarded in Sweden.
“Most of my school friends went off to study in the United States, but I aim to prove to them that good science that has an impact on the world can be done in Africa,” Ndinteh says.
Western funding is often helping even here, with money made available to help African academics realize their dreams at African universities rather than take their expertise abroad.
“I think it is extremely important that African countries do not lose their best brains, with the result that they are unable to deploy (those talents) for building their own countries,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said while in Africa in October.
By no means all gifted academics abandon their home continent. One is James Ogude, whose academic career has taken him from Nairobi to a professorship, first in African literature at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand and now at the University of Pretoria.
“I believe I have made my contribution to educating the next generation of academics,” says the 60-year-old Kenyan, who is an authority on the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
The number of university students in sub-Saharan Africa is rising rapidly, although from a low base. The number of enrolments doubled between 2000 and 2010 to 5.2 million. This is equivalent to just 6 per cent of young people, by comparison with a global average of 26 per cent.
But there is still a chronic lack of good libraries, laboratories and financial support for students and
researchers.
One in every nine Africans with a university education leaves the continent, according to an OECD study, which found that there were 2.9 million Africans with a university degree living in OECD countries.
Those that remain do so to make a contribution to Africa’s progress.
“African academics are in general doing a good job under very difficult circumstances,” Ogude says, although he adds that they receive little recognition for this.
Despite strong foundations, teaching is not always up to the latest standards, as the student numbers rise sharply. Nevertheless, research is improving, and centres of excellence are being created.
Like many African parents, Ogude’s father was strongly in favour of schooling and managed to pay the school fees for his 22 children growing up in a polygamous family in rural Kenya.
“We grew up in an environment in which the idea of university was powerful. It was the best thing you could do,” Ogude says.
Over the years he has turned down repeated offers from US universities, preferring South Africa.
“My post was well paid, there was money for research and the cost of living was low, while my colleagues in the US battled financially,” the professor says. But these days the South African economy is struggling, research funding has been cut and student numbers are rising. If he were 20 years younger, Ogude says he might well find himself considering the United States.