Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000 (review)

Makerere University today is central both to Uganda's efforts to rebuild after the bad years of Presidents Amin and Obote, and to international efforts to cultivate African professionals, institutions, and expertise. Watching Makerere's rebirth from the ruins of the late 1980s into a functional institution with critical students, a working library, and promising research and training initiatives has been a welcome contrast to recent tales of overwork, massive overcrowding, and collapse in many other African universities, even those with illustrious histories.

This book, the most comprehensive history of Makerere yet written, offers a first-rate starting-point for discussion, debate, and constructive critique. Sicherman's institutional history is important beyond Makerere hill. Makerere does more than educate young people: it has been, and is, at the center of changing visions of how to build East Africa's future.

Sicherman's study depicts Makerere as expressing a dream of progress challenged by problems and disagreements over the sort of institution needed. What should new, modern expertise and leadership look like? Should Makerere seek to offer university education qualitatively and substantively (to the point of similar curricula and shared tests) the same as that offered in its overseeing institution, the University of London or could its faculty and students enrich its curricula by drawing on local circumstances, knowledge, and expertise?

This question lacked simple answers, Sicherman shows, not because of some British effort toward underdevelopment, but because faculty struggled to know what to teach. Should biologists lead students in dissecting imported frogs or, at risk to their dignity as experts, take students out to catch their own subjects for dissection? Should administrators insist on curricula and research adhering to the "gold standard" of the University of London? or celebrate enthusiastic, but sometimes chaotic, work by locally based scholars? These questions permeated Makerere, affecting all programs, from the humanities and social sciences to the sciences and the professional programs. Nor have the questions gone away in more recent years, as scholars have come under increasing pressure to complete doctorates and publish, even as economic concerns have pushed them into focusing their work on paid consultancy work that fits into sponsors' agendas.

The strength of this study is that it goes far beyond sketching the fundamental problems and questions of Africanization and an African university in changing times, and offers detailed case studies of individuals' and programs' efforts to cope. We thus see material on some of Africa's most notable scholars and artists, such as B. A. Ogot, Godfrey Uziogwe, Ali Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Sam Ntiro, as well as Northern scholars whose work at Makerere allowed them to earn doctorates from the University of London and establish themselves in their disciplines as they designed curricula, wrote textbooks, and pursued original studies. And Sicherman is careful to document the scientific training and research that went on, especially at Makerere's Mulago medical school. Sicherman makes few judgments in the various curricular, personnel, and academic conflicts she documents so empathically, but her narratives are no whitewashes: she explicitly offers details of clashing interests, perspectives, and failures, as well as stories of marked successes, and she situates them not simply in an institutional trajectory of change over time, but also in the strengths, values, and skills of various academic actors. She explores, for example, both Margaret Trowell's devotion and success in the art school, which focused the school on European models of art, rather than adapting to local genres and circumstances, and the successes of individual entrepreneurs within the medical school, who developed innovative programs in nutrition, and more recently have established effective partnerships with Northern institutions to study and treat HIV/AIDS.

As institutional history, this book emphasizes administration, faculty, and curricular issues, rather than students. The country's primary and secondary educational systems, with their denominationalism, regionalism, and reconstruction under nationalism, must be sought elsewhere. University students' politics and struggles over resources, pedagogical styles and standards, and national life are hinted at, but...