Mahmood Mamdani
Makerere Institute of Social Research
2011-04-21, Issue 526
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/72782
['We have no choice but to train the next generation of African
scholars at home. This means tackling the question of institutional
reform alongside that of postgraduate education. Postgraduate
education, research and institution building will have to be part of a
single effort,' writes Mahmood Mamdani, in a paper reflecting on how a
market-driven model has affected the nature of research in African
universities.]
My remarks will be more critical than congratulatory. I will focus
more on the challenge we face rather than the progress we have made.
My focus will also be limited, to the Humanities and the Social
Sciences rather than to the Sciences, to postgraduate education and
research rather than to underdgraduate education.
I would like to begin with a biographical comment. I did my 'O 'Levels
at Old Kampala Secondary School in 1962, the year of independence. The
US government gave an independence gift to the Uganda government. It
included 24 scholarships. I was one among those who was airlifted to
the US, getting several degrees over 10 years, BA, MA, PhD – and
returned in 1972.
Those who came with me divided into two groups. There were those who
never returned, and then those who did, but were soon frustrated by
the fact that the conditions under which they were supposed to work
were far removed from the conditions under which they were trained. In
a matter of years, sometimes months, they looked for jobs overseas, or
moved out of academia into government or business or elsewhere.
The lesson I draw from my experience was that the old model does not
work. We have no choice but to train postgraduate students in the very
institutions in which they will have to work. We have no choice but to
train the next generation of African scholars at home. This means
tackling the question of institutional reform alongside that of
postgraduate education. Postgraduate education, research and
institution building will have to be part of a single effort.
I would like to put this in the context of the history of higher
education in Africa. I do not mean to suggest that there is a single
African history. I speak particularly of those parts of Africa
colonized after the Berlin Conference in late 19th century. There is
contrast between older colonies like South Africa or Egypt where
Britain embarked on a civilizing mission – building schools and
universities – and newer colonies like Uganda where they tended to
regard products of modern education as subversive of the existing
order.
HISTORY OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN AFRICA
You can write a history of higher education in Africa that begins a
millennium ago. It is now well known that there existed centers of
learning in different parts of Africa—such as Al-Azhar in Egypt, Al-
Zaytuna in Morocco, and Sankore in Mali— prior to Western domination
of the continent. And yet, this historical fact is of marginal
significance for contemporary African higher education. This is for
one reason. The organization of knowledge production in the
contemporary African university is everywhere based on a disciplinary
mode developed in Western universities over the 19th and 20th
centuries.
The first colonial universities few and far between: Makerere in East
Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa, and so on. Lord Lugard,
Britain's leading colonial administrator in Africa, used to say that
Britain must avoid the Indian disease in Africa. The Indian Disease
referred to the development of an educated middle class, a group most
likely to carry the virus of nationalism.
This is why the development of higher education in Africa between the
Sahara and the Limpopo was mainly a post-colonial development. To give
but one example, there was 1 university in Nigeria with 1,000 students
at independence. Three decades later, in 1991, there were 41
universities with 131,000 students. Nigeria not an exception.
Everywhere, the development of universities was a key nationalist
demand. At independence, every country needed to show its flag,
national anthem, national currency and national university as proof
that the country had indeed become independent.
We can identify two different post-independent visions of the role of
higher education. One was state-driven. I spent six years teaching at
the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. The downside of the Dar
experience was that governments tended to treat universities as
parastatals, undermining academic freedom. The great achievement of
Dar was the creation of a historically-informed, inter- disciplinary,
curriculum.
A later post-independence vision was market-driven. Makerere
University came to be its prime example. I spent nearly two decades at
Makerere, from 1980 to 1996. During the 1990s, Makerere combined the
entry of fee-paying students [privatization] with the introduction of
a market-driven curriculum [commercialization]. The effects were
contradictory: payment of fees showed that it was possible to broaden
the financial base of higher education; commercialization opened the
door to a galloping consultancy culture.
The two models had a common failing. Neither developed a graduate
program. Everyone assumed that post-graduate education would happen
overseas through staff development programs. I do not recall a single
discussion on post-graduate education at either Dar or Makerere.
A PERVASIVE CONSULTANCY CULTURE
Today, the market-driven model is dominant in African universities.
The consultancy culture it has nurtured has had negative consequences
for postgraduate education and research. Consultants presume that
research is all about finding answers to problems defined by a client.
They think of research as finding answers, not as formulating a
problem. The consultancy culture is institutionalized through short
courses in research methodology, courses that teach students a set of
tools to gather and process quantitative information, from which to
cull answers.
Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-
bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have
migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances
and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of
the university. Academic papers have turned into coporate-style power
point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz
words have taken the place of lively debates.
If you sit in a research institution as I do, then the problem can be
summed up in a single phrase: the spread of a corrosive consultancy
culture. Why is the consultancy mentality such a problem? Let me give
you an example from the natural sciences.
In 2007, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation decided to make
eradicating malaria its top priority. Over the next 4 years, it spent
$150 million on this campaign. Even more important were the
consequences of its advocacy program, which was so successful that it
ended up shaping priorities of others in the field of health.
According to a recent study on the subject, WHO expenditure on
eradicating malaria sky rocketed from $ 100 million in 1998 to $2
billion in 2009.
The rush to a solution was at the expense of thinking through the
problem. From an epidemiological point of view, there are two kinds of
diseases: those you can eradicate, like sleeping sickness or smallpox,
and those you cannot – like yellow fever – because it lives on a host,
in this case monkeys, which means you would have to eradicate monkeys
to eradicate yellow fever. The two types of diseases call for entirely
different solutions: for a disease you cannot eradicate, you must
figure out how to live with it
Last year, a team of scientists from Gabon and France found that
malaria too has a wild host – monkeys – which means you cannot
eradicate it. To learn to live with it calls for an entirely different
solution. Eradication calls for a laboratory-based strategy. You look
for isolated human communities, like islands with small populations
and invest all your resources in it – which is what the Gates
Foundation and WHO did. But living with malaria requires you to spend
your monies in communities with large, representative populations.
The Gates Foundation and WHO money was spent mostly on small islands.
A WHO expert called it 'a public health disaster'. The moral of the
story is that diagnosis is more important than prescription. Research
is diagnosis.
CREATING AN ANTI-DOTE TO A CONSULTANCY CULTURE
How do we counter the spread of consultancy culture? Through an
intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful
intellectual culture. To my knowledge, there is no model for this on
the African continent today. It is something we will have to create.
The old model looked for answers outside the problem. It was utopian
because it imposed externally formulated answers. A new model must
look for answers within the parameters of the problem. This is why the
starting point must go beyond an understanding of the problem, to
identifying initiatives that seek to cope with the problem. In the
rest of this talk, I will seek to give an analysis of the problem and
outline one initiative that seeks to come to grips with it. This is
the initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research.]
THE CONSULTANCY PROBLEM
Let me return to my own experience, this time at MISR, where I have
learnt to identify key manifestations of the consultancy culture.
I took over the directorship of MISR in June of 2010. When I got
there, MISR had 7 researchers, including myself. We began by meeting
each for an hour: what research do you do? What research have you done
since you came here? The answers were a revelation: everyone seemed to
do everything, or rather anything, at one time primary education, the
next primary health, then roads, then HIV/AIDS, whatever was on
demand! This is when I learnt to recognize the first manifestation of
consultancy: A consultant has no expertise. His or her claim is only
to a way of doing things, of gathering data and writing reports. He or
she is a Jack or a Jane of all, a master of none. This is the first
manifestation.
Even though consultancy was the main work, there was also some
research at MISR. But it was all externally-driven, the result of
demands of European donor agencies that European universities doing
research on Africa must partner with African universities. The result
was not institutional partnerships but the incorporation of individual
local researchers into an externally-driven project. It resembled more
an outreach from UK or France rather than a partnership between
relative equals.
Next I suggested to my colleagues that our first priority should be to
build up the library. I noticed that the size of our library had
actually been reduced over the past 10 years. I understood the reason
for this when I looked at MISR's 10-year strategic plan. The plan
called for purchasing around 100 books for the library over 10 years.
In other words, the library was not a priority. The second
manifestation of a consultancy culture is that consultant don't read,
not because they cannot read, or are not interested in reading – but
because reading becomes a luxury, an after-work activity. Because
consultancies do not require you to read anything more than field data
and notes.
My colleagues and I discussed the problem of consultancy in meeting
after meeting, and came up with a two-fold response. Our short-term
response was to begin a program of seminars, two a month, requiring
that every person begin with a research proposal, one that surveys the
literature in their field, identifies key debates and located their
query within those debates; second, also twice a month, we agreed to
meet as a study group, prepare a list of key texts in the social
sciences and humanities over the past 40 years, and read and discuss
them.
Over the long-term, we decided to create a multi-disciplinary,
coursework-based, PhD program to train a new generation of
researchers. To brain-storming the outlines of this program, we held a
two-day workshop in January with scholars from University of Western
Cape in South Africa and Addis Ababa University. I would like to share
with you some of the deliberations at that workshop.
REFLECTIONS ON POSTGRADUATE EDUCATION IN THE HUMANITIES AND THE SOCIAL
SCIENCES
The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what
it means to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current
historical context and, in particular, in the post-colonial African
context. What does it mean to teach humanities and social sciences in
a location where the dominant intellectual paradigms are products not
of Africa's own experience, but of a particular Western experience?
Where dominant paradigms theorize a specific Western history and are
concerned in large part to extol the virtues of the enlightenment or
to expound critiques of that same enlightenment? As a result, when
these theories expand to other parts of the world—they do so mainly by
submerging particular origins and specific concerns through describing
these in the universal terms of scientific objectivity and neutrality?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstood: there is no problem with
the reading texts from the Enlightenment – in fact, it is vital – the
problem is this: if the Enlightenment is said to be an exclusively
European phenomenon, then the story of the Enlightenment is one that
excludes Africa as it does most of the world. Can it then be the
foundation on which we can build university education in Africa?
The assumption that there is a single model derived from the dominant
Western experience reduces research to no more than a demonstration
that societies around the world either conform to that model or
deviate from it. The tendency is to dehistoricize and decontextualise
discordant experiences, whether Western or non- Western. The effect is
to devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa. The
global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material
("data") to outside academics who process it and then re-export their
theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly
descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to
collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a
general impoverishment of theory and debate.
The expansion and entrenchment of intellectual paradigms that stress
quantification above all has led to a peculiar intellectual
dispensation in Africa today: the dominant trend is increasingly for
research to be positivist and primarily quantitative, carried out to
answer questions that have been formulated outside of the continent,
not only in terms of location but also in terms of historical
perspective. This trend either occurs directly, through the
"consultancy" model, or indirectly, through research funding and other
forms of intellectual disciplining. In my view, the proliferation of
"short courses" on methodology that aim to teach students and academic
staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing
empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers. But
the collection of data to answer pre-packaged questions is not a
substantive form of research if it displaces the fundamental research
practice of formulating the questions that are to be addressed. If
that happens, then researchers will become managers whose real work is
to supervise data collection.
But this challenge to autonomous scholarship is not unprecedented—
indeed, autonomous scholarship was also denigrated in the early post-
colonial state, when universities were conceived of as providing the
"manpower" necessary for national development, and original knowledge
production was seen as a luxury. Even when scholars saw themselves as
critical of the state, such as during the 1970s at University of Dar
es Salaam, intellectual work ended up being too wedded to a political
program, even when it was critical of the state. The strength of Dar
was that it nurtured a generation of public intellectuals. Its
weakness was that this generation failed to reproduce itself. This is
a fate that will repeat in the future if research is not put back into
teaching and PhD program in Africa are not conceived of as training
the next generation of African scholars.
Someone told me yesterday that Makerere requires every Ph D thesis to
end with a set of recommendations. If true, this indicates a problem.
A university is not a think tank. A university may house think tanks,
even several, but a university cannot itself be a think tank. Think
tanks are policy-oriented centers, centers where the point of research
is to make recommendations. In a university, there needs to be room
for both applied research, meaning policy-oriented research, and basic
research. The distinction is this: unlike applied research which is
preoccupied with making recommendations, the point of basic research
is to identify and question assumptions that drive the very process of
knowledge production.
THE POSTGRADUATE INITIATIVE AT MISR
I believe one of the biggest mistakes made in the establishment of
MISR as a research institute was to detach research from postgraduate
education. The formation of the new College of Humanities that has
brought the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences and MISR under a
single administrative roof gives us a historic opportunity to correct
this mistake. MISR will aim to offer a multi-disciplinary Doctoral
program in the qualitative social sciences and the Humanities.
The initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) is
driven by multiple convictions. One, key to research is the
formulation of the problem of research. Two, 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.
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.
Our ambition is also to challenge the foundations of the prevailing
intellectual paradigm which has turned the dominant Western experience
into a model which conceives of research as no more than a
demonstration that societies around the world either conform or
deviate from that model. This dominant paradigm dehistoricizes and
decontextualises other experiences, whether Western or non- Western.
The effect is to devalue original research in Africa. The global
market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material ("data") to
outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories
back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive
accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data,
collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general
impoverishment of theory and debate. If we are to treat every
experience with intellectual dignity, then we must treat treat it as
the basis for theorization. This means to historicize and
contextualize not only phenomena and processes that we observe but
also the intellectual apparatus used to analyze these.
Finally, 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. The
doctoral program will seek to understand alternative forms of
aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and political traditions, both
contemporary and historical, the objective being not just to learn
about these forms, but also to learn from them. Over time, we hope
this project will nurture a scholarly community that is equipped to
rethink—in both intellectual and institutional terms—the very nature
of the university and of the function it is meant to serve locally and
globally.
COURSEWORK
Coursework during the first two years will be organized around a
single set of core courses taken by all students, supplemented by
electives grouped in four thematic clusters:
1. Genealogies of the Political, being discursive and institutional
histories of political practices;
2. Disciplinary and Popular Histories, ranging from academic and
professional modes of history writing to popular forms of retelling
the past in vernaculars;
3. Political Economy, global, regional and local; and
4. Literary and Aesthetic Studies, consisting of fiction, the visual
and performing arts and cinema studies.
Translated into a curricular perspective, the objective is for an
individual student's course of study to be driven forward by debates
and not by orthodoxy. This approach would give primacy to the
importance of reading key texts in related disciplines. In practical
terms, students would spend the first two years building a
bibliography and coming to grips with the literature that constituted
it. In the third year they would write a critical essay on the
bibliography, embark on their own research in the fourth year, and
finally write it up in the fifth.
INTER-DISCIPLINARITY
Over the 19th century, European universities developed three different
domains of knowledge production—natural sciences, humanities, and
social sciences—based on the notion of "three cultures". Each of these
domains was then subdivided into "disciplines." Over the century from
1850 to the Second World War, this became the dominant pattern as it
got institutionalized through three different organizational forms: a)
within the universities, as chairs, departments, curricula, and
academic degrees for students; b) between and outside universities at
the national and international level, as discipline-based associations
of scholars and journals; c) in the great libraries of the world, as
the basis for classification of scholarly works.
This intellectual consensus began to break down after the 1960s,
partly because of the growing overlap between disciplines and partly
because of a shared problematique. For example, the line dividing the
humanities from the social sciences got blurred with the increasing
"historicization" and hence "contextualization" of knowledge in the
humanities and the social sciences. The development was best captured
in the report of the Gulbenkian Commission chaired by Immanuel
Wallerstein. As inter-disciplinarity began to make inroads into
disciplinary specialization, the division between the humanities and
the social sciences paled in the face of a growing division between
quantitative and qualitative perspectives in the study of social,
political and cultural life. But these intellectual developments were
not matched by comparable organizational changes, precisely because it
is not easy to move strongly entrenched organizations. Though the
number of interdisciplinary and regional institutes multiplied,
collaboration rarely cut across the humanities/social science divide.
The challenge of postgraduate studies in the African university is how
to produce a truly inter-disciplinary knowledge without giving up the
ground gained in the disciplines. The challenge of MISR is how to
reproduce a generation of researchers by joining research to
postgraduate education. Our incorporation into the new College of
Humanities and Social Sciences, and thereby an end to our standalone
status, has created this opening for us – one we hope to seize with
both hands.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* © Mahmood Mamdani
* Mahmood Mamdani is professor and executive director of Makerere
Institute of Social Research (MISR).
* The paper was presented as the keynote speech at Makerere University
Research and Innovations Dissemination Conference, Hotel Africana, 11
April 2011.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
Pambazuka News.
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