Kingori Patricia
The Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities and the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, UK.
J Afr Cult Stud. 2021 Sep 20;33(3):297-304. doi: 10.1080/13696815.2021.1952405. eCollection 2021.
In this contribution to the special issue on Fakery in Africa, I examine the booming "fake essay" industry and draw on the role and perspectives increasingly occupied by of tens of thousands of young and highly-educated Kenyans. These so-called "Shadow Scholars" are part of a vast global online marketplace, an invisible knowledge production economy, where students and academics in the global North solicit and pay for their services in exchange for confidential and plagiarism-free essays, theses, dissertations, qualifications and publications. This article centres on descriptions of these writers as "shadows" as a means of complicating not only the most popular description of Africa in the global imagination - as existing in the shadow of an infinite number of different entities - but to challenge the notion of the shadow in relation to African knowledge production as being fake. It pays attention to the Kenyan writers' protestations that their knowledge, experiences and labour are all real and that analogies with shadows reduce them and the impact of their work to something that is non-existent and not alive. From their perspective the term shadow is pejorative because it further reduces the intellectual contribution of Africans, presenting them as derivative.
在这篇关于非洲造假问题特刊的稿件中，我审视了蓬勃发展的“代写论文”行业，并探讨了成千上万受过高等教育的肯尼亚年轻人日益占据的角色和观点。这些所谓的“影子学者”是庞大的全球在线市场的一部分，这是一个无形的知识生产经济体，全球北方的学生和学者向他们购买服务，以换取保密且无抄袭的论文、学位论文、学术著作、资质证明和出版物。本文着重将这些写作者描述为“影子”，这不仅是为了使全球想象中对非洲最流行的描述变得复杂——即非洲处于无数不同实体的阴影之下——也是为了挑战与非洲知识生产相关的影子是虚假的这一观念。文章关注肯尼亚写作者的抗议，他们称自己的知识、经验和劳动都是真实的，将他们比作影子会贬低他们以及他们作品的影响力，使其变得不存在且无生命力。从他们的角度来看，“影子”这个词带有贬义，因为它进一步贬低了非洲人的智力贡献，将他们描绘成缺乏原创性的。
