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ABSTRACT
This article takes issue with the account of 'The Decolonisation of the Political Science Curriculum in East Africa' by Mongomemezulu and Hadebe published in a recent issue of this journal. It challenges the bald assertions that (i) expatriate staff at the University of East Africa became the agents of entrenching a Westernised curriculum; (ii) political scientists and historians forged relations with political leaderships and pushed for decolonised curricula; and (iii) Africanisation of the staff culminated in the elimination of the vestiges of colonialism in the curricula. While accepting the broad assertions by Mngomezulu and Hadebe that academic developments which took place in East Africa in the late 1960s and 1970s were influential in shaping the decolonisation of the social sciences curricula, this article calls for more nuance than they offer if we want to understand this history.
Acknowledgement
I would like to record my thanks for comments and material to Opuku Agyeman, Jim Mittelman and Jack Parson
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 My subsequent effort to obtain my MA at Makerere was similarly ill-fated. As part of a Departmental project on the proposed first one-party elections, intended to fortify President Milton Obote’s ‘Move to the Left’, I studied local politics in Bunyoro. But when Idi Amin launched his coup which displaced Obote, my second MA thesis was to become one of his lesser victims, and I fled to Manchester to do a less perilous MA by coursework!
2 I do not dispute that such idealism very often gave way to cynicism, as hoped-for post-independence democracy gave way to authoritarian governance across wide swathes of the continent.
3 The experience of Jack Parson as a postgraduate at Makerere in the late 1960s and early 1970s is worth noting. ‘Once in Kampala I developed a project related to the Africanization of trade and the politics of traders and other middlemen but within a systems functional-structural framework of interest articulation, etc. Once on the ground with this I quickly realised that while it had some descriptive utility, that framework explained nothing of what I was seeing going on and so began a more critical approach fed by the Dar es Salaam school and people like Yash (Tandon). By the end of four years systems analysis had pretty much been beaten out of me replaced with a nascent class analysis that bore some fruit in what we all did in Botswana and certainly in my published work on Botswana beginning with my D.Phil. thesis at Sussex.’ Email to author, 15 August 2018.
4 Professor Opuku Agyeman was kind enough to ferret out a letter for me in which, as a postgraduate student, he undertook a stringent critique of an article in Transition (Issue no 43) by B.D.G. Folson, then lecturing at the University of Ghana, in which the latter had attacked any notion of African based ideologies as having legitimacy (Agyeman Citation1975).
5 Mazrui’s writings from this period were published in two collections (Mazrui Citation1967, Citation1969a).
6 Jim Mittelman later authored a valuable overview of underdevelopment theory (Mittelman Citation1988) alongside numerous other publications. Jack Parson’s publications were to include a Marxist analysis of political economy of Botswana (Citation1984).
7 In his memoir, Bernard de Bunsen, the first Vice Chancellor of the UEA recorded that the initial pressure for Africanisation came not from national leaders (who were keen to establish the University’s status internationally) and ‘certainly not from students’ (who wanted what they deemed to be the best teaching (sic)), but from backbenchers in the newly elected parliaments (De Bunsen Citation1995, 141–142).
8 It is worth noting that The Journal of Modern African Studies was founded in 1963 by David and Helen Kimble while the former was teaching in politics at the University College in Dar es Salaam. David continued to edit the journal when he was teaching, first in Morocco, and later at UBLS in the 1970s.
9 A sweeping assertion, perhaps, but based upon my experiences as an external examiner in political science at a number of universities in southern Africa during the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, of course, with the rise of internet and digital access to global literature, African scholars are less isolated than in the 1980s.