 So, please, let me invite Baroness Amos to offer us a few welcome remarks before I hand over to Professor Badri. Valerie? We know, thank you very much. And can I thank everyone who has joined the session for this afternoon's discussion on the future of African and UK higher education institutions COVID-19. It is an absolutely apt topic. As you mentioned, this roundtable is the official launch of the Africa at SOAS review report, which I commissioned. And I would like to thank you and the other co-chair, Professor Badirin, as well as the review panel members for your thorough and wide-ranging review, which I think captured the range of issues SOAS needs to address to build on its history of research, teaching and scholarship on issues in the people, countries, and the diaspora of the African continent. The world is changing rapidly. We've all been watching this over the last few years. And of course, COVID-19 and its impact is very much a part of that. SOAS I think is very well placed, given the interdisciplinary nature of our work, our subject and geographic expertise, but also, crucially, our commitment to decolonisation and to learning from mistakes which have been made in other parts of the world, the critique that we have of current practice in many parts of the world, to engage in meaningful collaboration and partnership with colleagues, not only from the African continent, but from elsewhere in the world. As African and UK universities grapple with the challenges posed by COVID-19 and the pandemic. I don't think that higher education will be the same as we go forward, and I very much look forward to this afternoon's discussion and the issues which will be raised. Thank you again to you, Wino, to Meshoud and to the other panel members for your report. Thank you very much, Valerie. Meshoud, I'd like to invite you to offer a brief summary of the findings of the report. Thank you very much, Wino, and we have had a long discussion at SOAS about the need to enhance our engagement on and in Africa. But I mean, many of us who have engaged in this know that we have just talked about it, we have debated about it, but for a long time, nothing was done about it. So for this reason, I mean, I mean, I have myself and Wino, my co-chair, we thank Valerie for initiating this former review on Africa at SOAS, which was launched in January, and which has resulted in this report. Now, so many people have been helpful in getting this report out. The report itself is, I mean, explanatory, it speaks to itself. So I would just go through a few things on it. I must also put on record that we had a very astute research assistant who really helped a lot and also the other panel members. Now, we went into this review with certain assumptions and you'll find this in the report. None of these assumptions, I believe some of us know already. But the truth is that, I mean, at least the report, since it was carried out based on evidence and also facts, it establishes, maybe, what we know before on facts. And therefore, we can go forward to be able to work well on those facts. Now, we looked at four main areas. The first one is curriculum review. The second is on studentship and staffing. Then we looked at the issue of partnerships in and on Africa and also the question of an Africa Institute at SOAS. The report talks about our methodology, then the findings and the recommendations. Now, I mean, the findings on each of the four legs, I mean, are quite clear. We find out that, I mean, some of the assumptions we went in with about our curriculum was that we had so many good, I mean, modules, so many good courses at SOAS on Africa. But we call them, I mean, we identify them as what we call scattered gems. They were all over the place. They were not, I mean, students do come and take modules, I mean, relating to Africa in different departments. But these were not really very well coordinated and organized. And we thought that perhaps, I mean, there is a need to coordinate, I mean, our modules and the curriculum, I mean, properly. And also we thought that, I mean, in some instances with the interviews you have with students, some of the expectations of students who come to SOAS particularly in relation to, I mean, studying Africa. Sometimes students were disappointed about what they found, particularly in relation to, I mean, module content and so on and so forth. And we have given recommendations on how that need to be done. Now, I mean, in relation to Africa studies, we also identified the fact that, well, I mean, so are still, I mean, we are still perhaps maybe stuck in the context of, I mean, restricting Africa studies to issues of language, culture, rather than moving forward, I mean, and putting in place much more cross-disciplinary modules in that regard. And we indicate our findings on that as well for us to be able to move forward on that. Then the issue of, I mean, studentship and staffing. Now, we also identified the fact that, well, we need to do a little bit more. We need to be much more proactive. In relation to attracting more students and also increase our staff, I mean, who work specifically on Africa. Now, on partnerships. Partnerships, as we know, are very, very important in relation to the existence of higher educational institutions. And we found out that, yes, we have individuals who have, I mean, partnership relationships with other academic colleagues in other African universities. But our institutional partnership arrangements was really very woolly in many places. And we identified the fact that, I mean, there's a need to be much more proactive in this regard. It was interesting, really, to identify, speaking to, I mean, other African institutions and other stakeholders, we identified the interest of African universities, really, to engage with UK universities. But a lot of the time, the proactiveness come from the African universities themselves, rather than from UK universities. And we, I mean, identified the fact that SOAS needed to do much more on that. And lastly, the Africa Institute, I mean, the debate has been on for a while. And we had a lot of interviews, particularly with the directors of the other institutes at SOAS. And the question was not about whether we should have an institute. Everybody was, I mean, on that, I mean, there is a need both politically and academically to have an Africa Institute at SOAS. But the question was how were we to have it? And then after going to, I mean, a lot of deliberations, we made a suggestion on how to go forward on this. I mean, looking at what other institutions are doing in that regard. Now, the report, as you see, I mean, clearly identifies the need for SOAS to be radically and more proactive in its engagement on and in Africa to sustain its acclaimed leadership, you know, in this area of study. We hope that the report sets out some general strategic recommendations to get that done. And the, I mean, roundtable to do, I believe, will perhaps, I mean, also provide us insights on how to move on much more specifically on those general strategic recommendations that the report provides. So once again, thank you very much, I mean, Valerie, for really initiating this. It's going to be one of your legacies after you have left SOAS. Thank you very much for doing this. And we hope you can take this forward. I must also thank, I mean, our incoming director, Professor Adam Hadid, for his expressed interest in seeing that this, I mean, report is implemented. So we hope down the road, I mean, we'll be able to really consolidate and enhance our engagement on and in Africa as it needs to be. Thank you very much, Awino, for your co-chairship and also all our other members for their participation. Thank you. Thank you, Masud. And let me just acknowledge Lutz Martin, who I know is here, and Marie Roday, if you're here, those were other members of the review panel from SOAS. So let me start off the discussion that sort of depends one of the key findings in the, in terms of the landscape analysis of the higher education sector, if you will, both on the African continent, but also in the UK, where we are located. And the one of the central questions was around, of course, partnerships and where universities are going, but this, as we know, has been complicated by COVID-19. And so, Adam, I'm going to start off with you, since Paul is not here yet, and ask what are the sets of questions that COVID-19 has raised for you at VITS in South Africa, in the continent, much more generally, because I know you're also a member of a group. So firstly, thank you, Awino, for chairing this. Thank you, Vashuud, for producing this review, to Valerie for initiating the review. So thank you to all of the colleagues. To respond to your question directly, perhaps I should say, for a long time, we've been saying that many of the challenges of our world is transnational in character. I think what COVID-19 has done is it's brought it to the fore. And it demonstrates in a very real way, we succeed in addressing this pandemic, this transnational challenge as a human community, or we don't succeed as all. However, while the British do, in fix and addressing the pandemic, or the Americans, or the Chinese, so long as it is playing out on the African continent, or in Asia, or Latin America, it can very easily go back to the UK, or the US, etc. We're in it together, or we're not in it at all. And it seems to me that that's what the pandemic has done. And whether you look at all of our other challenges, whether it's climate change, inequality, political and social, all of these are transnational challenges. And I think that's what this has brought to the fore. And from a British perspective, it's forced us to respond in two ways that I think is going to be inevitable for higher education. One is the shift to online. And if you're going to shift to online, you have to address in South Africa the deep inequalities in South Africa. You have to address online and mitigate the consequences for more people going online, as much as you do it for rich. That's the first thing, how to do online in deeply unequal contexts. The second is it's put the issue of global partnerships on the table. Because effectively, if we are going to address the global challenges of our time, we do need human resource capacities across the world, and we need institutional capacities across the world. And frankly, to be honest, our global partnerships for the last 30 years has been directed at individuals. It's about taking talented people and moving them to London and New York and Beijing and giving them a good education. But we lose many of them. And we weaken the institution on the continent. And it seems to me what this pandemic ties and what this review report puts on the table very firmly is that we need to reimagine global partnerships in an institutional sense, not in an individual sense, because that's how we're going to address the global challenges of our time. I'll stop there. Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Let me turn to you for me. So you're sitting in the UK. We all know you're in an institution that's relatively more financially viable or more robust, if you will, than ours. Have you faced, would you argue that you face the same sort of concerns that a vets would face or a sawers would face in terms of responding to COVID-19? And what would that be? A very, very profound question. If we think about the impact of COVID from the perspective of UK institutions, I have to say, first and foremost, robust, one can say, but what is our financial viability in the age of COVID? I don't think that many institutions in the UK, apart from Oxford and Cambridge, perhaps, I can say, yes, there's financial buoyancy in that way. We all face the same sort of challenges, but there are two things. I think there's a confluence of factors that I have observed when it comes to the impact of COVID. The first is it relates to what Adam talked about. Online education is no longer that kind of thing that you do as a luxury, and it brings forth immediately all sorts of inequalities. But I think that's number one, of course, in the UK, with the economies of, or the economics of education, if I may say so, almost everyone of us in London and in the Russell group is thinking about how do you do education differently and still reach all your clusters, all the variety and the diversities of international students. That is one set of issues. But I want to come to that impact on partnerships, on academic institutional partnerships that Adam was talking about. As where Africa is concerned, I think we've always been elitist in our approach to, and I'm not talking about Keynes, I'm talking across the board, in this case, in our approach to institutional partnerships. We want to marry the best institutions in the world, and we rank those institutions in particular ways. And I don't, and I think many, many places, many UK universities are guilty of running to South Africa very quickly. Even in South Africa, you see how all of the inequalities are laid bare. I dare say that they're doing far better than the rest of the continent when you're talking about access to education at this particular moment. So I think that if we're now going to go to the next level, post-COVID in terms of partnerships, we have to think about ethos and social responsibility, the questions of decolonizing the academy that, you know, those questions have been on the table for a long time, but there's a lot of urgency about those questions. George Floyd, alongside the differential impact of COVID, has done something really profound to the United Kingdom's institutions and not least the US and the rest of the global north, and it raises questions about how we will begin to partner with the global south. And I think it has to be excellence plus social responsibility going forward. If we're going to partner with African institutions, we have to look at equal partnerships that will do two things. One, are we helping them? Are we being socially responsible, helping them and helping us to improve access to education? Two, are we really partnering to deliver the same quality of education that our students get in London? If that's not what we're doing, and it's just about partnering for research funding, which has always been unequal, whichever way we talk to any of our partners in the global south, is the same consistent set of issues that they raise. But research partnerships, but those research partnerships are not enough. They have to change. The education partnerships we have to pay attention to because we have to fuse the ability to reach every single excellent student in any corner of the continent of Africa where they may be and marry that with excellent students in the UK. Now, Ethos has everything to do with it because if we are serious about decolonizing the academy in the UK, we have to partner in a way that allows that decolonization not to repeat itself in Africa. Africa is beginning to have its own conversation about what decolonization means because our academies are fused very tightly with Eurocentric ideas, ways of teaching, ways of learning, and we have to unlearn that in Africa as we have to do in Europe. And I think that is the first question that we have to address going forward. And if not for COVID, we will not be having these conversations at all in this way at this particular time. Thanks, Kumi. I'll circle back to you shortly, but let me bring Brian here very quickly. So, Brian, I want to pick up on this point of social responsibility, questions of access. Now, you have talked quite extensively about different ways in which African governments have responded to questions of COVID-19 at the institution where you sit. You're very interested in ideas of knowledge production. What do you see as the connection between high education institutions, whether they're on the African continent or in the United Kingdom, such as ourselves, and the constituencies that you're interested in and the movements that you want to support? First, I think to agree with Adam and Fumi that this moment allows for introspection, partly because the coalition of lies has broken down of itself, whether it is lies about certain ideological class, racial interests on how you do education, whether it is notions of how the Western Academy would help civilize its African junior partner. All this has collapsed. And in that collapse, I think what it has exposed, I mean, is the crisis of the African intelligence here and African intellectuals who have become a client class for Western and by Western French, American, Canadian and European name. And also, it exposes the racism of financing for high education, whether by private institutions or by public institutions. In the sense that the rush to South Africa and to those African countries where the tourism is good, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, had nothing to do with the stability of the country, but more to do with the exotic interests of those who would be the dominant partners in the protection company. So it would mean if the constituencies we work on are not just interested in a conversation on decolonization because that can become a sterile social-cultural conversation purely about black nationalism. The interest, as Adam and Fumir pointed out, is in both economic transformation, which would speak to a holistic institutional transformation. It is possible to have a very robust African studies department in a benignly racist institution and to become a ghetto of excellence. And it is important that we don't reduce ourselves to this. And as a result, it essentially means we are asking much more radical questions, not about just modernization, not about whitewashing the anti-racism struggle by getting white folk to feel bad and therefore talk right and behave right. This is about the power is carried through ideas and institutions, but it is also carried through economies and money. So the politics of money, we cannot change the ecosystem of higher education without changing how it is financed but without changing, as your reporters rightly say, what we teach, why we teach it. And in certain instances, let me observe that when British institutions, higher education institutions, were intended to be progressive, it was in order to champion the interest of British trade. So it was linked to the British foreign policy objective, building good relations with a particular country that had significant trade with the British. And that is well part colonial, new colonial, but also part of the crisis of marketization. You will not address access through just getting a mass of Africans into the system and then creating an industry of what Braithwaite and Drowers called model missionaries or model mercenary, right? People who would be good English anglolikes, right? If there's any radicalism to this movement, to what your reports are, it is not the creation of a gate of excellence of black education or African education in the United Kingdom. It is creating an ecosystem where we enable Africans to study not just Africa, but to also study other continent and build strategies for engagement with such other continent. So the knowledge is not simply to go beyond the cultural understanding of Africa to an economic understanding of Africa through the same imperial lens, where Africa is either a problem, an investment opportunity, or a charity case. So the radicalism of this conversation is in what Adam and Fumi have suggested. It's not just access in terms of the tools. It is, I don't want to participate if my idea will not frame what is being done. So because it's possible to have many black faces increased, go beyond 50% and simply to become echoes in imperial clothing. So I hope of pandas for everybody else, this is not a moment of a quick cultural fix. This is a moment for us to conceptualize what does a structural transformation of the historical ways of not just partnering but of teaching about Africa. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Thank you so much. Adam, let me come back to you and pick up on this idea of the transnational, which Brian is also talking about when he invokes the idea of an ecosystem. And I'm wondering as well transition to the UK in January to join scores. And as you think about the current Pan-African engagements that you have had with the Rua and the Guild and others, how do you think this particular kind of partnerships respond to the question of financing for higher education? And what more can we do? So I think Brian highlights what is essentially a challenging dilemma. And that is, how do you create equal partnerships in an unequal world? And if we don't figure that out, all we'll do is a new version of the old. Now, let me, as I understand, not only British high education, but British US, perhaps Australian high education and South Africa tried for a while around this, didn't succeed. And it's really a model that says we're going to bring the best of the world to our institutions and train them. We're going to charge them three times what we charge domestic students. We're going to make a lot of money out of it. We're going to cover our expenditure. And that all will be packaged as a global social good. We are training everybody else. Now, there's a number of problems with that. One of which is people don't go back because life happens. Two, institutions get impoverished in the other side because actually the money is going one way. And three, effectively, you teach a very sanitized version of whatever you're teaching because you teach it from the lens of a particular geographic space. And all of that is essentially compromises the education project, but it also compromises the social justice project globally. And increasingly my argument is, and I think many people's argument, is this is not a good thing for Africa. Actually, it's a good thing for the world because if Africa continues or the developing world continues to belabor these problems, actually it will sooner or later come to haunt the citizens in Europe, in the UK, in the United States, et cetera. And so the big debate for me is we've got to rethink the business model. We've got to rethink the business model not only British high education, but also African high education. And unless the money flows both ways, all of the talk about social good is nonsensical because it's not real, it's rhetorical. And that means we have to completely reimagine it for a place like so as, the idea is it's not about bringing Africans and Asians and Middle Eastern and people from Latin America to so as and charging them $20,000. It's actually, how do we use so as with Ghana, Lagoon, Macarena, or Nairobi, or Darut-Falab, or UCT, or Virts, to rethink training and on the basis of that, rethink the business model so it flows both ways and is able to cover the expenditure both ways. And that's as important as it is for kings and all of us. So that's the first big thing that I think we need to think about. And I think that Arua is essentially about that, is our conversation with the Guild of European Universities, the European Guild of Universities was don't think you're going to do what has happened before. We want to reimagine the way we partner. I also think one final point I want to make is how we teach us to change. Because I think Brian was touching on this as well. We need to reimagine learning. Are we going to breach the very disciplinary boundaries that we've inherited for the last 800 years? Because actually, you know, if you want to do a course on public health or how to address pandemics, you can't address it simply from the perspective of tropical medicine or frankly, public health narrowly. You have to understand the social dimensions that enable pandemics not to be addressed in the multiplicity of social context. So we need to breach the very disciplinary boundaries on how we teach, what we teach, when we teach. And that, it seems to me, is what this pandemic brings to the world. And that's the other thing that Arua is talking about and raising in the kinds of engagements we are having with the UK and with many other parts of the world. Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Let me circle back to you for me. And I want to pick up on the question of inequalities but to examine it from the UK context. I think that one of the questions that COVID-19 has raised for UK universities is the need to turn their focus inward, right? To think less about the loss of income from international students, but to be much more attentive to our students from what in this context are known as BME students and how we create institutions that allow the students to thrive. Now, without revealing too much about King's strategy, what would you comment in relation to this in terms of broad responses that you might be privy to? No, I think, I have to say that a core part of King's strategy, the one big factor for us is we understand we cannot do this alone. So it has to be in partnership the first time in partnership with the like-minded, not just because we need to be in partnership with the so-called world-class universities. We're beginning to find out that the rank is not what matters most because you can open inside those institutions that can say they have such high ranks and they ring hollow in terms of values, in terms of those values that allow you to solve global problems permanently but that allow you to be culturally competent. And so a big thing for us at King's is that we want to choose our partners wisely. But to what end though? Because when you look at the recurring problem across the United Kingdom, the issue is a matter of degree, not of substance. Which through we open our doors, I'm sure so has did many of us in London in particular did to our students from Aina, in all London communities and so on. And I don't know about you, but we now have at least half of our home students who are from the BME background. So we have done that. It's not enough to say we have these numbers of students in our base. It is what we do with the diversity of our campus that has now become very clear. It's become an issue of dire urgency because if those students come to our campus and they do not feel a sense of belonging, they do not even feel sometimes and I've taken the temperature of this across as many universities as I can because I came into this role and I had to study my own campus from below and across and I had to study a couple of other institutions as well. We're not doing too well when we look at the experiences of our BAME as students. We brought them into a place where the decolonized nature of the entity is beginning to affect their own success. We see that seeped through in the black attainment gap, but more importantly, we cannot even give them value for money if we cannot go and deep into the curriculum to bring out experiences that reflect their own worlds so that we can truly have a plurality of ideas in the classroom, outside of the classroom. It's a big issue and I think we're facing it now. We have to face it squarely for the first time, but what many of my colleagues, whether within Kings or outside of Kings would ask us typically is that even when we look inward, we want to do something, all right, we've done this for a long time. They ask, what do we do? And I think we spend so much time talking about what's wrong with the system. We will not always agree, but many people now agree that yes, there's something fundamentally wrong with the system if a chunk of our population within and outside the university feels really that the outcomes for them, and we can see the outcomes, the outcomes do not look good for them. So I think it requires a partnership that does three things. One, and I know that sustainability is a very big issue here, but that first aspect of the partnership is a collective agreement that all of us subjects are cross-disciplines. Those in the natural sciences will say, how on earth can you decolonize mathematics, physics, or sometimes we even say, it's the English legal system. What do you want us to do about it? It is English. That's why the question of what we teach, but especially how we teach is important. Pedagogies are the core of it, but even in what we teach, a little tweaking, like bringing history to the fore, history of the discipline to the fore of the program content is an important starting point. So it's not enough to say to someone, in my own program, I've had a couple of students ask me, are this international peace and security, they're not many African women reading lists. It struck me that I had to go back to the history of security studies on the continent of Africa. When I was growing up, when I did my first degree in Nigeria, it was difficult to find a civilian in the first instance. Even teaching this, you didn't find it in the curriculum. Civilians didn't teach it, and they would refer to them, bloody civilians at the time. No, did you find a woman teaching it anywhere? So how do you expect to find literature on this that dates back 50 years? You can't. That has helped me a lot. But how you teach it? It's not enough to simply say, physics is not designed in that way. You have to find what appeals culturally in an environment. We know why some of our Indian students are some of the best in the areas of natural and mathematical sciences. Why do they learn? How do they learn? What makes them learn the way they do? I think there's practical work to be done in the UK. But the second thing I'd like to really put to the table is therefore, if we're going to have successful partnerships, I agree totally with Adam. Sitting where I sit, you have to first think of the financial viability of the institution. But why are we thinking about the financial viability of our institution and we're not thinking about the financial viability of the people we're partnering with? So I understand profoundly that we need to bring the best of Africa and the best of the UK together in terms of academic institutions. And actually, we have different things of value that we can exchange for that. And the online space actually makes it, makes this the best time to do that. For the first time, I can have a dual degree, which half of Africa is online because my people in Africa might not be able to come here for a full year and afford to live in London. And yet I have people here whom I want to go and do that other half in Africa if they like. So we have not had these questions in this same way before because if you really count, not many UK universities have dual or joint degrees with a whole range of African universities. Now, what is the outcome that we seek? And this is my last point on this. That outcome has to be about the quality, the outcome for the graduate, the quality of these individuals that we produce because let's face it, even some of the best institutions in Africa are producing a particular kind of barren elite. They have no social, they have no conscience. It's a global issue. We are contributing to a global elite system which builds inequality fundamentally into the structures of education and they go out into the world understanding that they have an entitlement to rip off the rest of the world. Those are the kinds of graduates we are producing. I'm not saying that there are no exceptions and that's why it doesn't matter who comes onto our campuses in the UK from the African continent. They can afford 20,000 pounds. They really are probably not the poorest in the communities. Thank you. Thank you so much. There are two questions for you but I want you to write them down and I want to go to Brian and then come to the rest. The first question was how Kings has managed to do what you're saying you've done in terms of increasing the number of BME or Black students within amongst your home students. So how have you managed to increase that percentage to 50% and the second question which is for all the panelists is around whether it's simply changing the curriculum will resolve the broader questions of attainment gap for BME or Black students. Brian, I want to come to you as Fumi and Adam think about these two questions. You talked about the ghetto of... Let me look at that. I wrote it down somewhere. The ghetto of African studies. And I want to ask you that if you are to offer us a proposal so for instance, one of the things that our report talks to is creating an Africa Institute. Now Habib in our discussions with him raised questions around this as well. So I'm certain that when you talked about the ghetto he was a little happy. What would you offer? How would you imagine a space for critical thinking around African questions in relation to global challenges and in relation to the global community when folks are sitting in the heart of the empire? Because this is the challenge that we have to confront as well. We have people traveling to our institutions who say they want to understand the continent. They say they want to understand contemporary issues. How do you frame that without losing the essence of what we want to talk about? Well, let's start off by saying you sit on an island with less than 60 million people and you are studying my continent with 1.3 billion people. And you want to build a desk with 10 people or nine people. And those people are supposed to study everything from our science to our economies, right? And I'm not saying that quantity is what matters. For me, the island you are sitting on has no real basis of existence without my continent and India, in Asia. So in essence, my sense is it is not just an Africa studies center. Everything that informs your being now that we have defrocked the pretense of empire, right? And how in a very vile racist way it went about destroying African civilizations. I think that if you want to 10 invert the order of study you would have to deal with two things. To what extent is Africa and the understanding of the world between ourselves and Asia? As I suspect, we constitute more than 50% of the global population. So in economic terms, going into the future, we constitute more than 70%. So your island is in danger of extinction epistemically, intellectually, it's in danger of extinction economically. It's only because of historical stupidity that our people have looked, I mean, I do understand. But if I'm to restructure this, I would be more realistic about where power lies, right? It has historically laid in there and COVID has shown. I was saying to somebody that the entire African deaths from COVID are less than 40% of UK deaths. You are supposed to have better health infrastructure. You took all our health workers that we trained on public money. You took them up to the United Kingdom, you pay them patents, right? All that reality should tell you something about I don't see how you can understand tropical disease. I don't see how you can understand global security. I don't see how you can understand future of economies without talking of structural integration which may or may not include an Africa center but structural integration throughout. Because I don't see the future of the island you are sitting on if it does not engage in a robust way with the 4 billion Asians and 1.3 billion Africans. And these represent not just physical bodies or minerals that can be mined, they represent the future of global intellectual development. So my sense is you would need to do an integration and that integration is reflected in budget, that integration is reflected in personnel, that integration is reflected in content cutting across all departments. If for purposes of, and it's transdisciplinary because your analysis has to be transdisciplinary for you to understand the continent, for you to understand fully what the opportunities for transformation are. If the purpose of the African center is to coordinate the transdisciplinarity of African learning that's happening and to reorient all other departments to understand the continent not from the colonial perspective of a problem, an opportunity, a curiosity. I would have had to understand that, right? And so I would think and part of the problem of Africa's categorization and study that if it makes no sense for British investments and other related, you will not have public investment. If you don't have some British international charity do good who's interested in picking up poor kids and poverty pornography where kids have flies on their face will not get any funding, right? And so if we're going into the future where Africa is seen as a solution giver, as a knowledge giver, I would say integration is the one approach, right? I'm worried about a simulation. So, you know, when I talked about a ghetto is that racism by its nature has been very adaptable. Adam will tell you that when South African whites did not want to deal with South African blacks they reached out to the rest of the neighboring countries and brought them. And this has nothing to do with their respect for the black from neighboring countries. It had something to do with their refusal to address the structural questions around equality, around inclusion, around diversity. You can't do diversity purely by recognition. Otherwise it would be as pejorative and rude as going to a racist and they say to you I have a black friend or going to a sexist and they say I have a mother. I think the fundamental question we are facing here is Africa must be given its place. Not as an act of charity, not simply because George Floyd died. It must be given its place because Britain stands. Britain is because of ourselves and India and the rest of the Asian country. So, so as represents as do kings and other colleges. That change in narrative, that's not simply asking to be recognized but that's asking there is a reparative imperative in this. If we talk about this in apologetic terms, we will end up with this vile sense that says if the British taxpayer cannot afford it, we can't do it. Well, and that's not the basis of this conversation, right, of all that's been stolen from the continent and continuously so through British foreign policy. Some of the racism that British foreign policy will promote even as it does charity. Some of the most repressive oppressive and some of the most extractive forms of policies that have been forced on us from nature to wherever. As an African, I'm not asking for British charity. In fact, this is a courteous requirement that look, pay reparations, the one way you can do reparations is simple. Return resources, expertise, technologies to build the institutions that you plundered. Return the arts, the knowledge that you plundered. If you don't follow it on a reparative imperative, what will happen now is your generation will get an African center, right? And you'll get some budget. And you'll run for five years. Adam will have come, you'll run for five, six years. Afterwards, the cost question will come because it was not a structural change, it was not an attitudinal change. It was not even an ideological shift. What it was is the shame of one court with their hand in the cookage. People have just been discovered that for many years you've sustained a racist facade. So in order to purge our conscience of any responsibility without transformation, we will allow the natives to set up a native center. You will also have given us some money, Brian, for that native center. But having said that, I want to add two more questions to Adam and Fumi. One is around your views on joint or dual PhD schemes and what opportunities those offer. And another is a question around connections to diasporan communities that links back to the point you made, Fumi, about the nature of education, the kind of education that is still existing in many universities, including those where I studied myself in Africa. Let me start with Adam. No, actually, let me start with Fumi and then come back to Adam because we will close after that. Fumi? Thank you. Thanks, Awinu. Let me just very quickly talk about the first question that you asked. How come you ended up with more than 50% of home students coming from BME communities? There's a history to it, and I won't tell that history, but just a little to it. 2001 was the time that King's through the extended medical degree program brought in students from across the UK from minority groups. Many of them were the first to come to uni, to go to universities and their families by having a six-year program instead of a five-year program. So you spend the first year just trying to help them, bring them to the level, accepting the structural factors have created these kinds of inequalities where they would never really come onto our campuses if we don't do something about it and therefore they spend six years instead of five. Of course, for so-called world-class universities, this lowers your tariff, and you know that. So you're going to have to bear some brunt of it. And so on and so forth. Other things have happened since then, but that was a very clear starting point for us. You find many of our BME students are from the health schools, but you also find many from other faculties as well. There are some faculties where you're not going to find many of them. That's a humanities being an example. There are quite a few, but I'm talking about in large numbers. So I'll leave that aside. But when you talk about African dual degree, I want to talk about dual degree and not dual degree. It's not just a matter of semantics. There is a difference between both of them. On joint degree programs, the quality question, the fact that you're providing exactly the same degree to that student, albeit with two, if you like, two brands on it. That is always so difficult to come by. It's probably easier for joint PhDs, but you're not going to get very large numbers on the basis on the current business model. But dual degrees are almost here as an imperative. We have that with several European universities where they spend half the time with us at King's on a master's program on a two-year master's. We run a one-year master's like yourselves. They can spend a year at King's. Now you can do it online is what I'm trying to say. It's not very popular, but you can do it online if you're trying to ensure this access and this equality that we're talking about. And then they spend a year at the place to get two certificates for those two years. And these are programs that have been run in many other parts of the world. There are very few of them whether at undergraduate or master's level with African universities for the same reasons I was talking about later. If I think of the future though, a bit of pragmatism, I of course align myself completely with Brian's points. But in order to deal with this structural transformation, finally, we have to put some pragmatism in it. If Africans are not go cap in hand, they have to use what matters, what is of greatest value in there. And that's the natural resources. And you see how it's being used of late in a negative way. It's the land, it's the people, it's the minimal resources. Those people means that the average age of 19 that you have in Africa in 2035. By 2035, Africa will have the largest online market globally. The advantage for a place like Sours, I dare say for a place like my own institution because of the programs in place is that because we have addressed the question of values first, we will be the first to begin to transform that relationship, partnerships on the continent in the ways that I believe Adam and Brian were talking about. That has to precede anything else. Because of those values and those African institutions themselves, they're not saints. Institutions on the continent are not saints. They have really rigidly adhered to a colonial legacy of Eurocentric education and produced graduates that are usually not relevant to their society. So if we start on the basis of ethos, we put content that works for both and we allow the means to play its role. If it's online education that people can stay on the continent also avoid brain drain, take that online education. But we are all as academics, partnering in very equitable ways and changing the face of education. That's the way of the future. Because we're thinking about this first, I assume you're thinking about it because of your decolonisation agenda and if you are, then stepping into that continent on the basis of a different partnership is the way to go. Thank you so much. Thank you, Adam. So I want to make four quick points. I mean, the first is what Umi said and I entirely agree with her and what she said around dual PhDs. I would imagine we would want to go at other kinds of levels of the degree masters, etc. But what you also said that I want to underscore, none of this works unless we rethink the business model. And the business model has to, the benefits have to go in both directions or you're not going to create a sustainable model for this. So that's the first thing I would say. The second, on the diaspora, I absolutely think we need to work very strongly with the diaspora, but I just came from a conversation in the African Union. And one of the big issues I raised there was we got to think about how we work with the diaspora. Because too many of these diaspora programmes is somebody coming for three weeks hanging around in the middle of Ghana, or Lagos, and then buggering off and saying that I've been part of a partnership model. Unless you actually integrate the diasporic community into the actual teaching programme. And you can't do that without reimagining the institutional partnership. What I'm trying to ask is that we move away from notions of diasporic tourism to serious academic partnerships and that's a fundamental shift that has to happen. And frankly, we're lying to ourselves if we don't confront this conversation. The third thing that I was going to address was the academic institute. I mean the African institute, I can't resist this by saying, I think Brian's right. If the institute becomes an academic centre, it becomes an island. If it's a managerial and administrative centre that is directed towards facilitating the integration of Africa throughout the entire curriculum in every single year, then you're talking something else. And we have to reimagine what that institute is. And finally, somebody asked the question, would curriculum alone address the progression of BME students and others? And I wonder, identify what something that Fundmi said, which is, I use the term radical pragmatism. We need radical to keep an eye on the social justice component. We need to be pragmatic because we operate in a world that exists. Not a world we wish existed. And if you want to address the progression question, you have to address the pragmatics of it. Do people have money? Are they eating? Are they living in circumstances that allow them to actually progress? What is the kind of pedagogy that enables them to learn through peer review mechanisms, through applied learning mechanisms, etc.? What we have to have throughout this is what I call radical pragmatism. Radical, the eye to the social justice. Pragmatism, we operate in the real world. We need to deal with money. We need business models. And progressives who often ignore business models and resources and focus on social justice. We need both if we're going to sustainably transform higher education. I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Adam. And please join me in thanking all of the panelists who have joined us this evening. Umio Lonishakin, thank you very much. Brian Kagoro. Firebrand, as usual. Asante Sana. My colleague, Masud. Asante Sana as well. Valerie, are you still here? I believe this may be your last public event as the director at SOA. So allow us to say again, Asante Sana and wishing you all the best going forward at Oxford. I know that there have been conversations that have been going on on the chart. People have answered some of the questions as well. This recording shall be made publicly available so that you can track some of the discussions. Thank you once again and see you soon at some point. Thanks a lot.