African scholarship and interdisciplinarity

Research, as we all know, is the heart beat of the academy. In this regard, management consultant, Arthur D. Little's comment that "research makes building stones out of stumbling blocks" speaks to the value and importance of scholarly pursuits. The life of a researcher or scholar, while rewarding in so many ways, is often a lonely one, fraught with pitfalls on both the domestic and scholarly fronts. On the domestic front, serious and sustained research requires cutting back on one's social life, sharing research time with that spent with your family, and being away from your family most of the time, among other sacrifices. For these reasons, I wish to thank the scholars who found time to submit their articles for consideration in JGIDA. On the scholarly front, one has sometimes to balance between teaching and research, sacrifice data that is incorrect at its source which affects one's findings, cope with miscalculations, insufficient funding, chasing leads which become dead ends, changes in technology that make previous or, indeed even ongoing, work obsolete, and sometimes endure the humiliation of one's articles being rejected time and time again. Given these and many other challenges, the question that some (especially those outside academia) may well ask is - why do academics continue to work at and interrogate issues and situations that, at first sight, have little meaning or significance to daily life?