by YUSUF SERUNKUMA
Professor Mahmood Mamdani PHOTO/New Vision
To tell whether Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has failed to implement the doctoral programme at Makerere Institute of Social Research requires that one is either a doctoral student, a teacher on the programme, or has done fieldwork at MISR with a research question on Mamdani’s ambition and its logistical requirements. Anything other than that is sheer gossip.
As a fifth year graduate student soon finishing his assignments for the award of a PhD, and proud of the new regime of learning at Makerere Institute of Social Research (having joined Makerere University as an undergrad in 2004, and have never left), commentators claiming that MISR’s PhD project is a failure really shock me. Then quickly, I realize it is all loose talk; to quote an equally shocked Macbeth, it is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. How do they arrive at these conclusions? Have these writers interacted with MISR’s students? Have they visited the place, at least once, and observed the community? Do they actually understand the knowledge production debates and interventions in which the present MISR is steeped? More disturbingly, however, this surge of middlebrow commenters does point to a persistent terrible reality about Uganda’s so-called elite pundits: A general vacancy of imagination, absolute laziness: Gossip. Fantasies. Speculation.
One of these articles recently popped up in African Arguments, excitingly entitled “Decolonizing Makerere: On Mamdani’s Failed Experiment,” by one Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire, who signed off as a fellow at Africa Leadership Centre. Defining Mamdani’s agenda at MISR as “decolonizing the academy,” which he took to mean, “decolonizing the structure and form of the university” and not following “disciplinary modes developed in Western universities” the author is convinced that this project has failed. By whatever yardstick by which he reached this conclusion, we may never know. From where he got the idea that Mamdani’s dream was opposing the local against the global epistemologies, we may also never know. But we can revisit what Mamdani actually argued.
On taking the job at MISR in 2010, Mamdani variously argued that universities needed to “decolonize,” with which he meant, by countering the diabolical consultancy culture, which had eaten into university researches, turning African researchers into “native informers” who only respond to externally given questions. Mamdani noted that, “Faced with a context where the model is the consultant and not the independent researcher, we at MISR think the way forward is to create a PhD program based on significant preparatory coursework, to create among students the capacity to both re-think old questions and formulate new ones.” In this seminal argument for PhD driven research, Mamdani continued that,
“MISR will seek to combine a commitment to local [indeed, regional] knowledge production, rooted in relevant linguistic and disciplinary terms, with a critical and disciplined reflection on the globalization of modern forms of knowledge and modern instruments of power. Rather than oppose the local to the global, it will seek to understand the global from the vantage point of the local” [emphasis added].
At the core of this ambition was the understanding that,
“[The] definition of the research problem should stem from a dual engagement: on the one hand, a critical engagement with the society at large and, on the other, a critical grasp of disciplinary literature, world-wide, so as to identify key debates within the literature and locate specific queries within those debates.”
To tell whether Mamdani has failed on this promise requires that one is either a doctoral student, teacher on the doctoral programme, or has done fieldwork at MISR with a research question on this ambition, and its logistical requirements. That Bwesigye is neither a student nor teacher, and has done no fieldwork on the decolonization question at MISR is a serious handicap to his analysis. Did he read the promise against which MISR should be judged well?
Quickly, it becomes evident Bwesigye lacks basic familiarity with the major debates in the discourse on decolonization that have defined this conversation for quite a long time: Fanon (1963) on national culture, Aime Cesaire (1950) on universals and particulars, Chatterjee (1986) on nationalism as “a derivative discourse,” or more recently, David Scott (2004) on the notion of “conscripts of modernity” and “the tragedy of colonial enlightenment.” Our author clearly harbours an illusory longing for “total liberation.”
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