"The African Studies Association of Africa: We’re still young – formed in 2013. The thinking behind this was that when African Studies became a discipline in Europe and North America, it wasn’t about centring African people’s lives; it wasn’t about how can we enable Africans to understand each other better. The agenda was how do we understand the natives so that we can better colonize them – to put it crudely, but realistically! The African Studies associations in UK, US, came out of that mould. They’ve changed a lot, but still don’t centre Africans enough – most of their members are not Africans, and the research is often about the researchers’ own interests."