by Steve Sharra, Pambazuka
The month of October marks eight months since lecturers at Chancellor
College, University of Malawi, stopped teaching, demanding guarantees of
academic freedom. Despite verbal assurances from President Bingu wa
Mutharika for a win-win solution to the problems that have brought
Chancellor College to a halt, it remains closed.
The latest bone of contention has been the firing of four lecturers,
including Dr. Jessie Kabwila-Kapasula, acting president of the
Chancellor College Academic Staff Union (CCASU). The University Council
has remained steadfast in its refusal to reinstate the four lecturers,
and the union has remained steadfast in its refusal to return to
classes.
Commentary in the Malawian media and online has come to one conclusion:
it is up to President Bingu wa Mutharika, Chancellor of the University
of Malawi, to allow for the four lecturers to be reinstated, and
therefore for normality to return to Chancellor College. But the
president has made no such indication of changing his mind, and there is
no end in sight to the standoff.
Returning to a basic question about what exactly caused this crisis, a
political science lecturer, Dr. Blessings Chinsinga, mentioned the
uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt to illustrate a point during class. A
student in the class reported the matter to the Inspector General of
Police, Mr. Peter Mukhito, who summoned Dr. Chinsinga. Dr. Chinsinga
reported the summons to CCASU, and the union issued a statement asking
for an apology from the Mukhito, and an assurance of academic freedom.
President Bingu wa Mutharika stepped in and declared that the Inspector
General would not apologise. CCASU decided to boycott classes, citing
fear of spies, a relic from the one-party regime that ended in 1994. The
University Council the dismissed four lecturers, including Dr.
Chinsinga. There have been several court sessions on various aspects of
the crisis, but the matter has now come to rest on the firing of the
four, who include the union’s legal advisor, Dr Garton Kamchedzera from
the University of Malawi’s School of Law, and Mr. Franz Amin, General
Secretary of CCASU. In the eyes of most Malawians commenting on the
issue, the origin of the crisis is 12 February, the day Dr. Chinsinga
met with Mr Mukhito.
But one question that has not been asked is whether the roots of this
problem may lie much deeper, in the very nature of the Malawian public
university in particular, and the modern African university in general.
Notwithstanding the contradictory, ill-tempered mishandling of the
problem by the president and the University Council, is it possible that
the events of 12 February and thereafter happened due to the way Malawi
has always envisioned higher education, since independence? Could the
deeper problem lie with how modern, postcolonial African universities
were created, modelled after European systems of higher learning,
managed through borrowed European political structures, and therefore
not entirely relevant to problems of postcolonial Africa?
These and similar questions ought to be at the centre of new ways of
envisioning what universities in Africa ought to look like, as has been
argued by Professor Mahmood Mamdani. They are the types of questions
Africans ought to be asking as they re-imagine the place of the
university in Africa and what role it could play in revitalising the
continent. For Malawian universities, these questions are even more
poignant now, given how the presidency’s political control of the public
university system since independence has led to the current crisis, and
other such crises before. This article takes up Professor Mamdani’s
questions about the nature of the modern African university, and argues
how the crisis in Malawi’s public university system might be better
understood from the perspective of questions about how the modern
African university was established. The article also suggests how unless
addressed, undue political control will continue stifling the role
universities might otherwise play in the production of African knowledge
to address Africans realities.
Professor Mamdani is a Ugandan who is director of the Makerere Institute
of Social Research (MISR), at Makerere University in Uganda. He has
held this position since mid-2010, when he returned to Uganda in 2010
after more than a decade at Columbia University in New York City, in the
United States. He still maintains an endowed professorship at Columbia
University. On 11 April 2011, Professor Mamdani presented a paper at the
Makerere University Research and Innovations Dissemination Conference,
in Uganda. Titled ‘The Importance of Research in a University’, the
paper was published in issue 526 of Pambazuka News.
Mamdani’s key proposal in his paper was that Africa must train its next
generation of scholars in African institutions, rather than in
institutions outside Africa. He argued that this would address the
fundamental problem underlying modern African universities: a model
borrowed from European Enlightenment and out of touch with African
realities. The Enlightenment was a period in 18th century Europe in
which science became a dominant way of understanding the world. The Age
of Enlightenment promoted reason and rationality, and influenced social
changes away from religion and superstition. Scholarly traditions have
since that time promoted Europe as the birthplace of science and reason,
attracting, in the process, other scholarly traditions that critique
the same Enlightenment claims. Mamdani poses a poignant question: ‘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?’
Transplanted onto African soil, modern university systems have been
blighted by several problems. In postcolonial Africa, universities have
been developed as parastatals, an arrangement that has opened the door
to government and political interference, undermining academic freedom.
To deal with fundraising problems, African universities have been
transformed into consulting agencies, with the consequence that
independent research has all but died. Mamdani gives the example of his
time at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. As a parastatal,
academic freedom was undermined, but the university managed to create a
‘historically-informed, inter-disciplinary curriculum’. The University
of Dar es Salaam developed a generation of public intellectuals who
became widely known beyond Tanzania and Africa, but Mamdani cites Dar’s
failure to nurture a new generation of public intellectuals as one of
its weaknesses.
Later Mamdani moved to Makerere University, where he witnessed an
attempt to commercialise the university. He says while the university
was able to broaden its financial base, commercialisation also ‘opened
the door to a galloping consultancy culture’. Neither Makerere nor Dar
developed a post-graduate programme. The assumption was that
post-graduate training would happen overseas.
Mamdani says the consultancy culture at African universities has changed
the nature of research. Consultancy is about finding answers to a
problem presented by a client, whereas genuine research is about
‘formulating a problem’. The ‘NGO-isation of the university’, as Mamdani
calls it, has turned academic papers into ‘corporate-style power point
presentations’, with the result that academics no longer read as much as
they used to. Because of the consultancy model, and because funds for
big research projects come from outside Africa, most research on the
continent today is designed to answer questions that have been
formulated outside the continent.
Mamdani says this happens not only in terms of geographical ‘location
but also in terms of historical perspective’. In other words, the modern
African university operates on a European paradigm, a complete break
from Africa’s own ancient traditions of higher education that occurred
in West and North Africa, in places such as Morocco, Mali and Egypt
centuries before Europe developed its first university. There are no
African paradigms determining the direction of research in Africa and
formulating frameworks to better understand the root causes of African
problems today.
In his paper, Mamdani argued that the solution to problems facing
African universities was to educate a new generation of academics,
researchers and public intellectuals. He said this new generation must
be trained in the conditions they will work in. That is, they must be
trained at home, on the African continent. Mamdani went ahead to outline
a new, inter-disciplinary PhD programme that his Makerere Institute of
Social Research is embarking on. This new PhD programme will, in his
words, ‘challenge the foundations of the prevailing 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 to or deviate from that model.’ It is a model that
‘dehistoricises and decontextualizes other experiences, whether Western
or non-Western’. The new PhD programme at MISR will seek not to ‘oppose
the local to the global’, but to ‘understand the global from the vantage
point of the local’. The idea will be to ‘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.’
It is undisputable that training the next generation of African
researchers and intellectuals at home will be part of a new paradigm to
make African universities relevant to the African context. Amongst the
factors that have worsened the problem of transplanting European systems
onto African soil has been the postcolonial political systems in
Africa, themselves European transplants onto African contexts. This is
not to suggest that borrowed systems are always flawed, no. What is more
important is to handle the borrowing process with enough care so as to
adapt and modify where necessary.
Malawi is planning six new universities in the next ten years, seen as a
solution to the problem of access, quality and relevance that has
bedevilled the country since independence. It is incumbent upon
Malawians to sort out the issue of academic freedom, quality education
and relevance before these six new universities take off, as UDF
parliamentarian, Atupele Muluzi, said in parliament (Malawi News, 18
June, 2011). The key challenge in the intermediate period will be for
Malawi and other African countries to find ways of supporting and
strengthening universities with every resource at governments’ disposal,
without due political interference.
Mamdani explained, in emailed correspondence, that in Uganda direct
government control of public universities was in 2001 replaced with
council governance, although government retained some control over the
council’s membership. The same is true of Malawi. But Uganda went a step
further to make the vice chancellorship, deanships and department
headships elected positions. The government is said to be calling for
new legislation to retain greater control, according to Mamdani.
The issues raised by Mamdani might help us see the events of 12 February
in Malawi, and their aftermath, as being occasioned by the nature of
the university system in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa. To the extent
that breaches of academic freedom in African universities are a frequent
occurrence, the deeper problem does lie with how modern, postcolonial
African universities were created, modelled after European systems of
higher learning and managed through borrowed European political
structures. This raises the issue of the African university’s relevancy
to problems of postcolonial Africa. Post-colonial African universities,
and universities in other parts of the world, routinely face similar
struggles for academic freedom.
For Malawi and other countries in Africa and elsewhere, as long as
divisive and uncalled for political interference continues to be a
determining factor in the running of public universities, the struggle
for academic freedom will continue. The key challenge for African
universities in the long term will be the one Mamdani is posing: the
development of a scholarly and intellectual community able to rethink
and reconceive a different type of African university that seeks to
better understand African problems, and to deal with the ‘global from
the vantage point of the local’.