Is it Ethical to Study Somalia?

Studying and researching Africa as a member of the diaspora is fraught with its own ethical challenges.

I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’ This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

—Toni Morrison

During my master’s in African Studies at the University of Oxford in 2018, the first text I read was Professor Amina Mama’s Is It Ethical to Study Africa? Preliminary Thoughts on Scholarship and Freedom which explores identity, location, and the ethical challenges of being an African scholar studying Africa, with all the ‘allegiances and tensions of working in one’s own backyard.’ In this seminal piece, Professor Mama affirms that Africa’s radical intellectuals have effectively pursued anti-imperialist ethics and cultivated regional and national communities of scholars working for freedom. However, she argues that the ‘liberatory promise of the anti-colonial nationalist eras has not been fulfilled.’ In order to do so, she suggests that scholars address the ‘intellectual challenges of Africa’s complicated and contradictory location in the world’ and ‘ensure that our unique viewpoints inform methodological and pedagogical strategies that pursue freedom.’ If ethical considerations are indeed ‘framed around identity, epistemology and methodology’, as Professor Mama asserts, I frequently wondered what responsibility my diasporic identity placed on me as I endeavoured a decolonial liberatory approach to my study of Africa. This question stayed with me whilst researching and writing my dissertation, The Politics of Famine Relief: Diaspora & Local Humanitarian Work in Somalia, and my questions have evolved into reflections every year, since graduating...