RESUMEN
Clay feet are heavy and disabling, sadly in the decolonial scholarly battlefield which otherwise requires all-weather feet suitable for ongoing battles. Drawing on autoethnographic experiences in some African universities and drawing on Melanesian cargo cults, this paper argues that to decolonise Africa, African academics should abate cargo cult mentalities which account for pathological and uncritical intellectual dependence on theories, ideas and models from elsewhere. Similarly, drawing on Melanesian bigmanism and drawing on how some academics seek to control how students and colleagues think and write, this paper contends that those that pose as bigmen and bigwomen in African universities are a serious threat to decolonial critical, creative, innovative and original thinking. Thus, populated with some high-ranking academics who, nonetheless, lack decolonial creativity, originality, innovativeness and critical thinking, African universities are - like in Melanesian bigmen societies - marked by patron-client relations within which students and colleagues are sadly corralled into epistemic clientelism.
RESUMEN
On a continent where Africans suffered crises of dispossession, it is inaccurate to describe such crises as crises in representations. Drawing on Shona (people of Zimbabwe) proverb kukumirwa semombe dzamavhu (being mooed for as if one is a cow made of clay), this paper argues that colonial anthropology did not only generate crises in representations but anthropologists took it upon themselves to 'moo' for Africans. Similarly, emergent futures herald human minds being nanotechnologically scanned and transferred to clouds and into technological substrates. In this sense, crises of dispossession will worsen when humans are dispossessed of their minds, so scanned and transferred from biological brains to clouds and into technological substrates. Contributing insights to the anthropology of science and technology studies, this paper argues that with minds transferred from the biological brains, in the guise of defying mortality, Africans will be dispossessed of their voices and their minds.