Mahmood Mamdani is professor and director, Makerere Institute of Social Research, Kampala and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, Columbia University, New York City. This chapter is adapted from the 2017 TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture given at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Notes
1 For a fuller discussion, see Pollock (2006) and also Pollock (2015).
2 The point was made generally by Yusufu Bala Usman with reference to the relation between the subjectivity of the writer in relation to the ‘objective’ reality the writer seeks to understand. See Usman (2006a and 2006b).
3 See Gubara (2013).
4 See Karioki (1974), African scholars versus Ali Mazrui. For Ali Mazrui’s response, see Mazrui (1974).
5 Rajat Neogy was jailed by Milton Obote on sedition charges in 1968. Transition was revived in Ghana in 1971, and its editorship was taken over by Wole Soyinka in 1973. It folded in 1976 for financial reasons, and was then revived in 1991 by Henry Louis Gates Jr, who brought it to the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University where it continues to be based, dislocated both in terms of its vision and its place.
6 JL Kanywanyi (1989) The struggles to decolonize and demystify university educa-tion: Dar’s 25 years’ experience focused on the Faculty of Law, October 1961–October 1986. Eastern Africa Law Review, p. 15.
7 Unless otherwise specified, the details in this and the next paragraph are drawn from Kimambo et al. (2008: 124, 125, 118).
8 The interdisciplinary PhD programme in Social Studies, introduced at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (Makerere University), required students to combine a set of interdisciplinary core courses with a major and a minor in two disciplinary specialisations: political economy, political studies, historical studies and cultural studies. See Mamdani (2013).
9 The ‘debate’ began with a set of critical comments on the writings of Dani Wadada Nabudere and Shivji, but soon turned acerbic, with a series of interventions. Led by
Karim Hirji, they turned the ‘debate’ into a sharply political exchange devoid of any significant scholarly or even political merit. See Nabudere (1976) and Tandon (1979).
10 In an article that was an earlier version of this chapter, I had mistakenly assumed that Colin Leys had been the principal of Kivokoni College at the time Mazrui wrote
‘Tanzaphilia’. Leys wrote a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books, point-ing out that he had been principal from 1961 to 1962, a year before the University of Dar es Salaam opened its doors. Leys also claims that Kivukoni was not ‘the rul-ing party’s ideological school’ as I had characterised it but ‘a local version of Ruskin College, created by a Ruskin graduate, Joan Wicken’. Leys forgot to add that Wicken was then also Nyerere’s principal private secretary. Leys also complained that my article focused on the part and ignored the whole: ‘the Cold War context, which conditioned Nyerere’s efforts to chart a path out of neocolonialism and avert the risks of the kind of civil conflict that would later cause devastation in so many African countries, including Uganda (it was this, not an abstract idea of what an African university should be that preoccupied most of the left academics at Dar)’. I do not disagree. The article I wrote was admittedly about the university (‘the part’) and not about Nyerere’s rule (‘the whole’). Leys accurately describes the frame of mind of the ‘left academics at Dar’ (among whom I was one). In defining the voca-tion of the intellectual as predominantly political, they ran the risk of divorcing the public intellectual from the scholar and turning the university into the left wing of the party state. See Mamdani (2018) and Leys (2018).
11 For a brief discussion, see Mamdani (2012), chapter 3.
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