Discussing the state of African universities
African teams in the World Cup have not been performing too badly, but their valiant efforts are not reflected on the scoreboards of the various groups so far. Therefore many of us have been watching the games with a mixture of affirmation that ‘African football has arrived and improved consistently to world class professional standards' and doubts that maybe we are not quite there yet or still lacking in the killer focus.
But we take comfort in the universal fact that ‘the boys are playing well’ although we are not quite resigned to the English consolation psychology of ‘it’s not the wining that counts but participating’ which makes them turn ‘glorious losers’ into celebrities. Africans want victories and are hoping that one of our teams will just move beyond the ‘nearly’ club. So we keep vigil in all kinds of public and private places, glued to the box watching every match. If all fail we have the automatic transfer of loyalties to Brazil or any other team (almost all he major ones) with Black players in them!
Like other people across the world, for the next month work can only be partial unless you are in a football related industry. FIFA is our employer for now! When people are not watching the matches they are discussing those that have happened and making all kinds of spirited predictions about those still to take place. Even those who do not like football are forced to participate in the frenzy because those of us who do will never stop talking about it. Media is saturated with stories about ‘the beautiful game’.
Hence it was with a great sense of sacrifice, personal and political loyalty, that I found myself abandoning Togo's match against South Korea Tuesday evening to go and listen to Professor Okello Oculi, speak at the Unfungomano Hall at Nairobi University. It was part of the Public Debate Series of the African Research and Resource Forum (ARRF) for 2006.
Two reasons forced my hand. One, Okello was one of the radical Pan Africanist scholars who had influenced my intellectual and political outlook as an undergraduate student. He was one of those refugee scholars from Idi Amin's Uganda who were lost to Uganda but gained to many generations of African students in other countries.
Unlike the SAP refugees of the '80s and '90s and the current 'kyeyo' academics in the face of globalisation whose destination are mostly in Europe and North America, many of the Ugandans headed for other African countries and rebuilt their lives, some of them becoming adopted citizens of those countries. They were brains lost temporarily or permanently to Uganda but they were not lost to Africa.
Two other Ugandans had a direct impact on me. Firstly, Prof Yolamu Barongo, who was both a mentor and intellectual father to me. Without him I could have joined the army instead of graduate studies. Another one was the literary icon, Okot p'itek, who did not teach me directly but was an intellectual and political influence through writings and an electrifying presence at seminars, workshops and conferences across Nigeria while he was teaching at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University).
Okello never returned to Uganda and he is more Nigerian than many of us whose only claim is that we were born there. Our lives later became interchanged when I became permanently resident in Uganda as General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement. So whenever we meet we have to talk shop, with him sharing with me what is going on in the rough and tumble of Nigerian politics and I feeding him on my take on the up and downs, the zigzags and sometimes motions without movement in Uganda's politics!
So I could not refuse to go and listen to Okello. The other reason was the topic of discussion: ‘Interrogating the Conditions of The African Universities’. It is a topic that should interest anyone concerned about not just the survival of Africa and Africans but in us controlling our destiny. If we cannot own the thinking process of our society we cannot control or exercise autonomy over those societies. And our universities are very central to this. They are much neglected, abused, maligned and marginalized but we cannot use other universities as the engine of our development.
So many sins have been committed against our universities but they have also been perpetrating many sins against themselves. The mad rush for private universities mushrooming across the continent in the name of privatisation and liberalisation in education may produce more people with degrees but cannot produce more educated citizens. Even within the public sector universities, a two-tier system is in place offering apartheid discrimination based on financial resources. Okello called this FTDs (Financially Transmitted Degrees). He also looked at some of the internal weaknesses in the university systems including the process of recruitment, philosophical values underpinning the establishment of the universities during colonial and post colonial societies, the pressures of SAP, the ideological hegemony of elitism and reactionary values. He used his vast experience in East and West Africa and in Britain and North America to identify what the central problems for our universities are. And this is basically ideological: what is the purpose of a university? He identified lack of creativity and creative thinking and creative interaction between our technicians of knowledge and the society. We study as if our societies do not exist and our societies and governments, businesses, make policies as if we do not have local thinkers and qualified professionals. In plain language: our universities are not organically linked to our societies. There were places of excellence in the past like Dar Es Salaam and Ahmadu Bello university, and even the conservative bent older universities like Makerere, Ibadan and Legon. South African Universities have always been more integrated into the power structure, thinking and shaping the future of their societies.
The discussions, especially the robust interventions by the students (a modest turn out given that Togo was playing) were both nostalgic and sad for me. Inspiring because I felt that the tradition of debate is not dead, though sadly not fashionable anymore. I was also sad that though many of them are angry and believe they deserve better, they are no longer reading or having access to books that could make them turn their anger into a positive force for creativity and social transformation. They also reveal a very crude way in which the university has become integrated into the vulgarity that is dominating our societies.
I kept wondering if all present in a church become possessed by the holy spirit, who will shout hallelujah when and if we get to the promised land? When universities merely reflect the vulgar side of society instead of providing original refection on the society they cease to be a universe of ideas and are doomed to become irrelevant. Hence the current attitude in many countries: If you say you are a graduate, people retort: ‘And so what?’
* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa
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