Scholars in the Marketplace. The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005: The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005

Conclusion - Higher Education and the Public University in an Independent Africa

Conclusion HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IN AN INDEPENDENT AFRICA To appreciate the full significance of the Makerere reform, it is necessary to place it in a wider historical context. That context will allow us to appreciate the extent to which the creation of higher education institutions in the African colonies—particularly those colonised towards the end of the nineteenth century—has been an integral part of the struggle for political independence. In the next section, I sketch that context briefly, before returning to a discussion on the future of the Makerere reform. The Historical Context Anyone studying the modern history of higher education in the colonies will be able to distinguish between two periods. The first was that of the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries when a triumphant and confident empire placed a high premium on S C H O L A R S I N T H E M A R K E T P L A C E 256 ‘civilising’ the colonies, and universities had a pride of place in this mission. But once challenged in the mid-nineteenth century, the empire went on the defensive. Clipping its modernist ambitions, it opted for order rather than modernity, and higher education fell by the wayside. This student would notice a sharp contrast between how higher education was prioritised under early and robust colonialism, the period of direct rule, and how it was shunned during the period of indirect rule that followed the upsurge of anti-colonial resistance in mid-nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, the colonies that suffered most in the sphere of higher education were mainly those that were colonised last, as the twentieth century opened. These were the colonies of middle Africa, the Africa between the Sahara and the Kalahari. Many will remember that world media in the decade of the 1960s was full of stories of how one African colony after another—Tanganyika, Congo, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia—was about to become independent with no more than a handful of university graduates in the population. The colonies of middle Africa were divided into two groups. Most colonies had no universities as they approached independence. When they became independent, just as sure as the national anthem, the national flag, and the national currency, a national university too became an obligatory sign of real independence. Then there was a minority, comprising a few countries, which had one university during the colonial period. This was usually a university meant to serve an entire region, such as Makerere University in Kampala. Higher education in middle Africa really began in any meaningful sense with independence, not colonialism. Take the example of Nigeria.1 One statistic is sufficient to make my point. Colonial Nigeria had one university with 1,000 students in 1961. Thirty years later, in 1991, independent Nigeria had 41 universities with 131,000 students. And Nigeria was not an exception. C O NCLUSION 257 The Developmental University— the University of Dar-es-Salaam If higher education in middle Africa was a fruit of nationalism, nationalist governments built the developmental university, a university whose mission was defined as ‘development.’ The university that symbolised the promise of the nationalist era was the University of Dar-es-Salaam, where I held my first full-time teaching job, from 1973 to 1979. The key achievement of the University of Dar-es-Salaam can be summed up in one word: decolonisation. At the most superficial level, this was the decolonisation of personnel, which went in line with the policy of Africanisation that swept one former colony after another on this continent. At a deeper level, this was decolonisation of curriculum. The transformation of curriculum cut across disciplines . It was spearheaded by inter-disciplinary teams of academics who designed inter-disciplinary courses meant to pioneer the study of development as part of a broader historical study of imperial expansion since the fifteenth century. Every student was required to take a full year course in Development Studies every year. The object was to historicise economic poverty and social backwardness as ‘under-development’, that is, as the outcome of modern colonialism rather than a pre-colonial legacy. The University of Dar-es-Salaam became the home of the new science of nationalism, political economy. But there were also problems. The main problem with the agenda for decolonising the curriculum was that its historical vision was limited to that of the colonial period. Ironically, those who...