We appreciate your support for this open letter which we intend to submit to the editorial board of the ASR Journal next week. This signatory form will close at noon GMT on Monday 23 May 2022. We intend add your signatures only to the open letter and submit to the editorial board in one week.



Dear Professor Benjamin Lawrance and the editorial board of the African Studies Review Journal,


We–7 scholars of African heritage–write to register our discontent with the published paper titled African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography by Kathryn Mara and Katrina Daly Thompson (published 13 May 2022). See article here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/article/african-studies-keyword-autoethnography/CB8CECEDDEC1332B2D14A831CB104FF1. As many others have expressed on social media, we are astonished that such a paper, which presents irresponsible and unethical methods of data collection in African communities in the name of decolonization, passed editorial and peer review and was published. Consequently, we are calling on the journal to retract the paper on the following grounds:

1.     The paper approaches research in African communities using extractive methodologies proposed through ‘autoethnography’ which appears to encourage participation in observation as a means of extracting private or collectively held knowledge under the praxis as a 'privileged near-insider' (p.4).
2.     The poor editorial oversight and double standard that privileges Northern scholars reflexivity while undermining Africans as lacking objectivity. Citing harms caused by proposed autoethnographic and lack of informed consent with often marginalised communities (p.4).

After carefully reviewing the paper, we are concerned that there are possible ethical violations presented in the process of data gathering and the analysis in the paper. *We must remain open as researchers to holding open discussions with various stakeholders starting with the communities themselves and including various regional and international ethics review boards to establish the safest methods to conduct ethical research.*  We also recommend that ASR begins to offer an option at the point of submission to confirm that country-specific ethics protocols were obtained by the authors. We are worried that the scholars' lack of cultural competence in the communities they studied may have caused them to do harm by violating the dignity and humanity of these communities.

Starting with the title, “Africanist Autoethnography”, the authors position themselves as purveyors of a new form of autoethnography: “I finally found a space to talk about being an umuzungu (westerner) in Africana Studies” (p.5). Instead of actually being mindful of power and positionality, the authors instead co-opt autoethnography–a methodology that should be used to advocate empowerment within postcolonial discourses–to grant themselves authority to speak for African people.

We are deeply disappointed at the extent to which this paper promotes harmful and extractive research practices in our communities, particularly through the reconfiguration of autoethnography as a means to undermine informed consent. One of the authors offers an interpretation that dangerously leans towards advocating breaching confidentiality and the fundamental ethics of ethnographic research throughout the article. They use their marital rites into Zanzibari culture to talk to Swahili women whose “information, . . . usually kept private,” as evidenced in this article and fully presented in another [Thompson, “When I Was a Swahili Woman: The Possibilities and Perils of “Going Native” in a Culture of Secrecy”, 2018], is “exposed” for intellectual voyeurism (p.14). It is not clear whether express consent was sought or permission was given in that exercise. Why is the author encouraging the publication of customary knowledge that is not authorised for public consumption unless expressly permitted by the interlocutors? The author speaks of being “equally willing to share” but this erases that their position is not one of equity in relation to Swahili women who do not have access to publish their opinions and analysis of them. This suggests that the work was done in bad faith as using autoethnography to undermine informed consent with communities is poor ethical practice. The origins of anthropology are rooted in colonial extraction: of resources and knowledge, destruction of sacred spaces, and the intentional disruption of language, customs, spirituality, and cultural identity. We cannot resurrect any one of these harmful legacies as this paper does in the name of research innovation.

In addition, the publication of this method also reflects the double standards in the review process.  African scholars are expected to decentre themselves and their epistemic traditions, or risk lacking objectivity. We were incensed by the authors’ declaration that “[African scholars] are often trained to analyse texts in detached ways”, as a means of justifying “outsider” interpretation of their lives (p.4). Conversely, African scholars are not easily afforded entry into privileged, secret, or sacred spaces outside of their own communities to write about other people’s lives in such a manner, reflecting again a lack of understanding and appreciation of power dynamics. While claiming a better mode of self-reflective analysis, the lived experience and scholarship of African people is dismissed. The African Studies Review journal must desist from enabling this structural erasure of African voices and promoting a clear double standard that valorizes European subjectivity, while dismissing African reflexivity.

Of equal importance is the framing of this paper as contributing to decolonizing African Studies (p.16-17). We are disappointed by the lack of critical reflection on the process of decolonization offered in this piece.  The paper demonstrates a weak grasp of its subject matter while declaring that it ushers in new “changes” (p.15). This reflects a growing trend in disconnecting the logics of decolonization from its liberatory praxis to ‘campfire decolonization’, which replaces engaged critique of theory with a warm and safe space under the misappropriation of inclusion and equality frameworks. The authors, in fact, erase a long history of innovative autoethnographic writing that comes from the African continent and that has been consistently ignored by Western-dominated African Studies.

This paper is written for a Global North audience while erasing and appropriating African scholarship and reducing African people to native informants. It propagates odious tropes that have bedevilled the field of African Studies both through methodology and pedagogy such as ‘white saviorism’, and ‘frontierism’. These are themes which have been outrightly spoken against and condemned by scholars of African Studies including past presidents of the ASA, and which sustain the inequities in the field that current and emerging scholars of Africa are compelled to create, work, and live under. We are concerned about what this means for African Studies as a field if such myopic 'decolonial' scholarship is rewarded. This, again, points to a flawed peer review process that does not deliver the rigour it should. The differential treatment begs the question, ‘Who are our ‘peers’ in peer review?

In addition to requesting an explanation of how this paper passed through editorial and peer review, we insist that you acknowledge the violation and harm that accompanies research that encourages scholars to use ambiguous methodologies as a pathway to bypass informed consent with research participants. We believe this paper could pose substantial harm to both prospective interlocutors as unsuspecting informants and to the overall culture of research with African participants, which must remain firmly committed to openness and transparency. The only way forward is a retraction.

We sign in solidarity,
Dr Wunpini Mohammed, College of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Georgia
Dr Chisomo Kalinga, University of Edinburgh
K. Rene Odanga, Department of African Studies and Research, Howard University
Dr Ruby Zelzer, Independent scientist
Chris Olaoluwa Ogunmodede, World Politics Review
Dr Furaha Asani, Public Academic and writer
Dr Ruth Ngozika Agbakoba, Postdoctoral Research Fellow


* 19 May 12:57: We are keeping this process open with our consignees and have amended a sentence after strong recommendation from several academics. Please be aware that we have retracted and replaced the following sentence. "Given that the United States Institutional Review Board was established to ensure that researchers do not do harm to their subjects, this paper must be reviewed again to ensure the authors’ recommendations are in compliance with IRB protocols." We agree with the feedback that communities themselves must remain central in safeguarding the boundaries of ethics, whilst we continue to work with regional and local review boards*