Author: Jacob Katumusiime
Legend has it that the name Makerere derives from eighteenth-century Kabaka (King) Ssemakokiro who used to wake up very early in the morning from his palace at the hill on which the university sits to go and have a clear view of the Lake Nalubaale in a far distance. The Luganda conceptual exclamation at the Kabaka’s fascination with the early morning lake view was often that ‘Kabaka ayagala kulaba mazzi makereere!’ When the Kabaka shifted his palace, the hill immortalized his fascination in taking on the name Makereere. Whatever it is that the king derived from his early morning lake views, the lesson he put across was that whatever one craves, they ought to wake up early for it. Since its establishment on that legendary hill, what has the university been waking up early to do? Listen to how Makerere narrates its history at 100 years.
In recently celebrating 100 Years of existence, Makerere remembered how after over two decades from its inception, it admitted the first female students and changed the university motto from ‘Let us be Men’ to ‘We Build for the Future’. In the decades that followed, the university was to register its potential to reshape the world around it. Apart from world-class professionals, Makerere has produced over five presidents in the postcolonial world including Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, Apollo Milton Obote, Benjamin Mkapa, Paul Kagame, Mwai Kibaki, and Joseph Kabila. Makerere’s products have gone on to write history in both triumphant and tragic ways. Yet Makerere, like any parent would, celebrates all its children. The legacies of the generations from Makerere are not only of those who have graduated from it but also as the university anthem proclaims, all ‘those who have gone through the gates of Makerere.’
The greatest influence of the Makerere generations remains in the period around and after independence with the university becoming a hub for postcolonial thinkers. In 1961, Rajat Neogy launched Transition magazine at Makerere. The magazine became a battleground for ideas from which prolific scholars and politicians were nurtured. It attracted the most important voices in and out of Africa including Nobel Prize winners Martin Luther King Jr, Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka. Bessie Head, Langstone Hughes and James Baldwin also contributed to the magazine. It is little surprise that Makerere hosted the historical 1962 ‘Conference of African Writers of English Expression’ which brought Africa’s eminent and emerging literary intellectuals of the time under one roof. It is where Chinua Achebe met James Ngugi, a student who later changed name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Makerere registered its commitment not only to debates on cultural traditions but also paid homage to anti-colonial nationalism. It, for example, bestowed an Honorary degree on Kenyan liberationist, President Jomo Kenyatta in 1963. The affiliations with Makerere signified the university’s importance to the Pan-African movement.
Makerere has made its mark as a pride of Africa. You hear praise chants such as ‘Makerere is the only university West of the Indian Ocean, South of the Sahara, North of Limpopo, and East of the Congo.’ Makerere’s alumni often boast that in Uganda, Makerere is the hill with the highest IQ per square kilometer. In fact, in popular public discourse Makerere is a metonym for university – mention of ‘Makerere’ and adding ‘University’ is repetition. How has Makerere lived up to its potential to reshape the world we have inherited? Throughout the 1960s, Makerere associates, academics, alumni, and students became invincible. Okot p’Bitek disrupted the colonial literary traditions with the defiant publication of African verses, most remarkably Song of Lawino. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and company brewed chaos at Universities in Africa with a heated campaign for the abolition of the English Departments. Both p’Bitek and Ngugi were to later attempt taking the university back to the community through cultural festivals and open-air theatres in both Uganda and Kenya. In Tanzania, Nyerere was undoing the colonial fragmentation of society and building a vision of equal citizenship. Makerere students were organizing anti-Apartheid, anti-US, and all manner of anti-fascist demonstrations. The university, a creation of the state, was becoming a trojan horse from which an imagination of a reformed state was arising.
However, Makerere scholar Ali Mazrui was skeptical of this character of the university. He guided that in responding to surrounding socio-political issues, the university was losing focus from the fundamental goal of universality and excellence. Walter Rodney at the University of Dar Es Salaam was insisting on the relevancy of a university to its context. If Mazrui doubted Rodney’s idea of the importance of university intellectuals, the resurging dictatorship of the postcolonial state left university intellectuals with no choice, except to enter the political arena. The 1970s and 1980s sent Uganda into civil disorder. The intellectual traditions that were rising from Makerere were punched in the face. Idi Amin Dada’s expulsion of Asians ejected a number of intellectuals. Many Makerereans were exiled or executed in the subsequent turmoil.
Makerere’s centennial celebrations remembered this ruptured history through organizing symposia, public lectures, and oral memoirs. Frank Kalimuzo, Makerere’s Vice Chancellor who disappeared during Amin’s reign was honored through also naming a Central Teaching Facility after him. Another Central Teaching Facility was named after Yusuf K. Lule, the first African Makerere University Principal who became an interim President of Uganda after the fall of Amin. Many Makerereans indeed found themselves in the armed liberation struggle and more soon found themselves at the heart of reconstructing the state. The university was slowly realizing that it could not exist in a vacuum. The intellectual culture of a postcolonial university has to combine excellence with relevance.
No louder call for the university’s relevancy has been as the assault of neoliberal reforms that turned a university into a business. Makerere became the first causality of the World Bank’s privatization of higher education. The university admitted more students than it could adequately teach and faculties that could not admit enough students turned into consultancies to make money. Mahmood Mamdani has summarized this crisis in Scholars in the Market Place. Ugandan markets are prone to fire. The iconic Main Building for which Makerere is world-renowned also suffered a devastating fire and as the university celebrated 100 years, it was under reconstruction. But Makerere is learning the lesson that fees alone are not enough to operate a university and as such, it used the centennial anniversary to revitalize the Endowment Fund so as to aid meet the costs of higher education.
However, a cloud of forgetfulness still hangs above Makerere. The university continues to forget the spirit of decolonization to which it greatly contributed. Of Makerere’s celebrated presidents at the helm of the postcolonial state, none has lifted the decolonization torch that Nyerere lit. Sections within the university are even yet to appreciate the curative legacy of the interdisciplinary MPhil/Ph.D. Program that Mamdani introduced at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR). In restructuring MISR, Mamdani sought to break away from the Western-centered and rigidly discipline-based model of colonial education, the dispiriting very high cost of graduate education, the mediocrity of consultancy, and the miserable situation of research work. He hoped to train a new generation of not only researchers but also intellectuals of decolonization. The few departments within Makerere that have taken on the tradition of interdisciplinarity do it as a flavor to their courses, with no commitment to curricula or departmental reforms. Many others deploy decolonization as a hit song.
Even as the university celebrated its 100 years of existence it continued to forget the legacies of not only the women from Makerere who were robbed of their futures but also those whose stars shone. Dr. Theresa Nanziri Bukenya, a brilliant Mathematician and Warden of Makerere’s Africa Hall was also murdered for contending with the brutality of Amin’s soldiers but her story was silent at the celebrations. Despite some women such as Dr. Specioza Wandira Kazibwe rising to become the first female Vice President in Africa, Makerere’s women are celebrated in passing. When Makerere celebrates Sarah Ntiro, an alumnus who went on to become the first Oxford graduate in East and Central Africa, it forgets the crux of her activism which was a demand for her dignity as a human being not just as a woman. Whereas Makerere seeks to stand on recollections of its past accomplishments in imagining the world ahead, it forgets its most revolutionary lessons. Makerere which was built on the sacrifices of the society celebrated 100 years of existence with the construction of high walls around the land on which it sits, symbolically closing out the society that gave away the hill. Inside those imposing walls of a century-old Makerere, one hopes that there can emerge a rebirth of an intellectual tradition that stands up to the realities of its time. With the power of rising digital platforms such as TRT AFRICA, one hopes Makerereans can still wake up very early and explore their potential to reshape society.
This article appeared on TRT AFRICA, under the title " Uganda's Makerere: A Century of Success"
Jacob Katumusiime is a student at the Makerere Institute of Social Research.