This country is the foundation of my academic career, says top don

Prof Tiyambe Zeleza with USIU-Africa Head of Marketing and Communication Jane Muriithi. PHOTO| ROBERT NGUGI

What you need to know:

  • His interest in higher education has grown through involvement with university administration. He wrote the framing paper for African Higher Education Summit organized by Trust Africa held in Dakar in March 2015.

  • Emerging from that experience is a completed manuscript, The Transformation of Global Higher Education, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year.

  • His tenure at USIU-Africa is an opportunity to crystallise his thinking and sustain conversations with colleagues.

When the United States International University-Africa announced the appointment of a new vice-chancellor, few Kenyans knew who Paul Tiyambe Zeleza was.

Even fewer knew the Malawian’s Kenyan connection. In 1976, it is the famous Kenyan historian, Prof Bethwell Ogot, who as external examiner at the University of Malawi, vetted Zeleza for the award of a distinction in his Bachelor of Arts degree.

Prof Zeleza’s professional path, which has taken him all over the world, would years later be closely intertwined with Kenya. For his doctorate, he studied the making of the Kenyan working class during the colonial period.

Now considered one of the best historians of Kenya, he is a top academic who has written and co-edited at least 26 books, 300 articles and given over 250 keynote addresses. A former president of the African Studies Association of the USA, he was in July 2013 recognised in The New York Times as one of 43 Great Immigrants in the United States.

His early days in Kenya were transformative. He spent 1979 to 1980 based at University of Nairobi, conducting research for his doctorate, then returned in 1984 to teach at the then Kenyatta University College where he remained until 1989. These years formed him as an academic; Kenya became the base around which his pan-African consciousness and engagements developed.

Prof Zeleza recalls arriving back in Kenya in 1984 when academic life was vibrant with vigorous intellectual debates exploring important theoretical, ideological and social questions. The climax of his experience was in hobnobbing with prominent Kenyan

historians like Bethwell Ogot, Godfrey Muriuki, William Ochieng’, Gideon Were and Elisha Atieno Odhiambo.

While he enjoyed his stay, he was effectively in exile, a story lucidly told in his book Manufacturing Africa Studies and Crises. Fortunately, there was a small community of Malawian intellectuals in Nairobi including David Rubadiri, the renowned poet, author

and diplomat, then teaching at the University of Nairobi. It is under Rubadiri’s mentorship that Prof Zeleza published one of his three books of fiction, Smouldering Charcoal, in the Heinemann Africa Writers Series in 1992.

His interest in higher education has grown through involvement with university administration. He wrote the framing paper for African Higher Education Summit organized by Trust Africa held in Dakar in March 2015.

Emerging from that experience is a completed manuscript, The Transformation of Global Higher Education, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year.  His tenure at USIU-Africa is an opportunity to crystallise his thinking and sustain

conversations with colleagues.

 

Godwin R. Murunga is Senior Research Fellow at Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi