t is striking, in the postcolonial era, along their distinctive paths. The main issue how little the modern African univers The African University for reformers at Makerere was the der acial Iity has to do with African institutions. isation of the teaching body, whose leading It draws its inspiration from the colonial lights were predominantly white. Newly period and takes as its model the discipline Mahmood Mamdani qualified young academics were promoted based, gated community that maintained a under pressure from government-appoint distinction between clearly defined groups: the scholar ‘fascinated by ideas’. Rodney Zambia. By the mid-1960s, Transition was ed senior administrators. Among them was administrators, academics and fee-paying was born in Guyana, first a Dutch and, later, the locus of an ever-widening regional con the young Mazrui: fresh with a doctorate students. The origins of this arrangement a British colony on the Caribbean coast of versation, from Achebe on ‘English and the from Oxford, he rose like a helicopter from lay in 19th-century Berlin, and Humboldt Latin America. He graduated in history African Writer’, through Terence Ranger lecturer to professor in the space of a few University, founded in 1810 in the after from Queen’s, Guyana, and went on to on Roger Casement, to Paul Theroux on years. At Dar, by contrast, the relevance of math of Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia. Soas. By 1966 he was teaching in Dar, and Tarzan, a send-up of expatriate attitudes the curriculum itself was being called into The African university makes its appear regarded the university as a space of activ and an early example of cultural studies in question; there was also a growing demand ance later in the 19th century. At the south ism, in which knowledge was constituted Africa. for interdisciplinary scholarship, especial ern end of the continent, colleges were in the here and now. His best known book, Shortly after Kwame Nkrumah was de ly from faculty who thought ‘disciplinary started from scratch – Stellenbosch, Cape How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), posed in Ghana in 1966, Mazrui published nationalism’ was to blame for the grow Town, Witwatersrand. In the north, exist broke colonialism down to a raw exercise of ‘Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar’, which he ing irrelevance of higher education to the ing institutions such as al-Azhar in Cairo, a power relations and envisaged Africa’s re followed up with a piece entitled ‘Tanza wider discussion of the country’s social and centre of Islamic scholarship, were ‘mod newal within a socialist framework of philia’: a withering critique of the regional political ills. ernised’ and new disciplines introduced. which Mazrui was extremely wary. and international left’s infatuation with The discussion unfolded in the context The Humboldt model aimed to produce In the course of their various encount one -party rule in Tanzania, as Tanganyika of rapid political change, triggered by a stud universal scholars, men and women who ers, in print and at conferences, the rival became in 1964. Both essays were incend ent demonstration in October 1966, in stood for excellence, regardless of context, camps lined up on familiar ground, one iary, reinforcing Transition’s prestige as a protest against a decision to introduce and – in the colonies – could serve as a side mobilising in defence of academic magazine that set no store by orthodoxies. compulsory national service for secondary nat ive vanguard of ‘civilisation’ without re freedom, the other calling for engagement At the same time they sharpened the differ school graduates. Nyerere’s response was serv ation or remorse. The African univers with the social and political issues of the ences between Mazrui and the left at the drastic: his government accused students ity, in other words, began as part of the day. There were early, impressive victories university in Dar. If Mazrui was the most of betraying the nation, withdrew fellow European colonial mission, a precursor of for the broadly nationalist ‘relevance’ camp important liberal critic of Nyerere’s social ships from 334 of them and sent them the one-size-fits-all initiatives that we as which challenged the autonomy of the uni ist model of the new African nationalism in home. The following year he issued the sociate with the World Bank and the IMF. versity, and of its various faculties, which power, Issa Shivji was its most important Arusha Declaration, a clarion call for social And so it continued, until decolonisation. they associated with racial privilege. With critic from the left. Two of his books, The ism that nationalised key sectors of the The first critical challenge came from out a strong role in higher education for Silent Class Struggle (1970) and Class Struggles economy. The university responded with a the ranks of nationalist movements, where Africa’s newly independent states it would in Tanzania (1976), proposed that Tanzan conference in March 1967 about the role it a different kind of product – the commit not be possible to undermine ‘disciplinary ia’s socialism and the big public ownership ought to play in ‘a socialist Tanzania’, which ted intellectual rather than the universal nationalism’ – i.e. the highly patrolled programmes that went with it should be ended with an appeal for ‘relevance’ and scholar – had begun to emerge following bord ers of each discipline – and the instit understood as a disguised form of ac recommended ‘continuous curriculum re the Second World War. The new intellect utional autonomy that propped up the cumulation by a new state-based class. view’: isolated disciplines, it was said, uals were concerned with ‘relevance’ rather authority of the expatriate staff. They also Despite this intellectual brassage, the two were failing to engage with ‘East Africa and than excellence; their preoccupations were argued that the university should be nat institutions – Makerere and Dar – continued particularly Tanzania’s socio-economic grounded in the politics and societies ion al not only in name – Uganda, Tanzania, around them and in that sense no longer Kenya – but in terms of the curriculum. The strictly ‘universal’. During the 1960s, a re imperative of academic freedom was no LORD BERNERS (1883-1950) form movement gathered pace on two very thing more, to their minds, than a defence different campuses: Makerere in Kampala, of the status quo: they called for social just - VIEWS OF ROME - which was founded in 1922, forty years be ice, and a strong state to enforce it. fore Uganda’s independence, and Dar-es- It was in this context that Transition mag A Group of Oil Paintings and Watercolours Salaam, founded in 1961, the year of Tan azine came into its own. It had been found ganyika’s. Makerere was the paradigm of ed in Kampala on the eve of independence the European colonial university, with a by Rajat Neogy, a Ugandan of Bengali orig conserv ative, universalist tradition. Dar- in; by the mid-1960s it enjoyed immense es-Salaam, which began life as an affiliate prestige for its roster of literary figures and of the University of London, had an ambit its willingness to court controversy. Neogy ious, nationalist sense of purpose. In 1963 cast all his writers as public intellectuals, a new arrangement affiliated three camp whether or not they inclined to the uni us es, in Nairobi, Kampala and Dar, as the versalist view of scholarship and letters. University of East Africa. With Portuguese Contrib utors included James Baldwin, and British settler colonies on Tanganyika’s Lang ston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Wole borders, Dar rapidly became the flag-bear Soy inka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, as well as er of anti-colonial nationalism and the a cohort of South African writers who were home of the new, African public intellect wrestling with apartheid, among them ual. Makerere, in the capital of an independ Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Den ent state whose neighbours – Sudan, Tan nis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi. ganyika and, in name at least, Congo and From the start, Transition had commis Rwanda – had also gained independence sioned work from political figures. In the saw no reason to revise its universalist trad second issue, in 1961, Julius Nyerere pub ition. In the 1960s and early 1970s there lished a defence of the one-party system were lively exchanges at conferences in Dar that would soon exasperate so many of the and Makerere, but each was proud of its magazine’s writers: the following year he reputation and stuck to its guns. became president of Tanganyika and went Two scholars embodied the difference of on to outlaw all but his own political party. www.abbottandholder.co.uk approach: Ali Mazrui and Walter Rodney. Tom Mboya, the Kenyan trade unionist, Mazrui was a child of colonial Kenya who published a piece on the press and govern graduated from Manchester and went on to ments in Africa shortly before Kenyatta ABBOTT and HOLDER become a professor at Makerere. He was a appointed him minister of justice; another, 30 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH prolific writer and a towering public intel on ‘African socialism’, appeared a few issues lectual, whose taste for fierce debate was later. Kenneth Kaunda published on the fu 020 7637 3981 | [email protected] accompanied by a strong belief in the clas ture of democracy in Africa at roughly the sical model of the university, as the home of moment he became the first presiden t of
29 london Review LRBof Jan booKs 2018.indd 1 19 july 2018 03/07/2018 14:25 development aspirations, concerns and peal to relevance, seemed to compromise on different regions of the world – which liferated over the years. In 1975, I belonged problems’. the principles of scholarship. An astute re emerged in the US after 1945, with support to five university-based study groups, each Three distinct positions emerged at Dar. view of the programme by a sub-committee from the Ford Foundation, and eventually with between two and eight members. A radical camp, mostly non-Tanzanian, of the university council, appointed at the spread across the Atlantic. Meeting once a week, each required back wanted a complete transformation of the end of 1970, suggested that interdisciplin At Dar, the reform process was not con ground reading of around a hundred pages curriculum and the university’s administ arity was likely to focus on solving prob fined to university structures. Students per session and dealt with a specific theme: rative structure; above all, they wanted to lems rather than understanding method, launched a radical socialist magazine, Das Kapital; the three Internationals; the abolish discipline-based departments. A and went on to ask whether this wouldn’t Cheche, and when it was banned, promptly Russian and Chinese Revolutions; the ‘agrar moderate maj ority, including most Tan produce ‘technocrats’ rather than ‘reason relaunched it as MajiMaji. Activist students ian question’. zanian members of staff, agreed that there ing graduates’. Anyone who still thinks of and academic staff came together in regul We hoped to glimpse the outlines of a should be a radical review of the curric inter disciplinarity as the key to a new world ar discussion groups. A group with an offic world beyond our own reality. It was a ulum but no abolition of departments. A should consider that it has been a working ial imprimatur, known as the ‘ideological per iod of tremendous intellectual ferment, con servative minority resisted any change principle for World Bank teams on the class’, met at 10 a.m. every Sunday, with the but still framed in terms of two opposing in the curriculum and argued for the ground in Africa since the Bank’s inception. aim of offering participants an alternative posit ions, epitomised by Mazrui and Rod separat ion of disciplines. The demand for The same goes for the concept of area stud to church. An informal but well organised ney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a an interdisciplinary approach, like the ap ies – interdisciplinary scholarship focused range of after-class study groups also pro grand excursion in dependency theory,
shaped by the murkiness of Russia and He paints in the nude, and cuts a her which colours gather in a sort of explos Cen tral Europe. Nothing symbolised liber ring in two, reserving the upper part for ion, ignored by the pink-bellied cat paw At the ation more than the ‘free’ bright colour the next day. Perhaps it reminded him of ing the poet from the left, and shows Cha of Parisian painting. Chagall travelled to his father, a herring merchant; in any case gall balancing the fantastical and folkloric Guggenheim Paris in May 1911 and ended up living he was still, in his mind, half in Russia. elements of Russian art with the breezy, in a studio at La Ruche (‘the beehive’), a Couple with a Goat, a raucous fairy tale scene weightless palette of Robert Delaunay, a Bilbao dilapidated, circular establishment divided showing a woman diving across a table to key friend and supporter in his years at La oishe Shagal, later known as into wedge-shaped studios for artists and insert her finger into her bearded hus Ruche. Yet the closer Chagall comes to a Marc Chagall, was raised in the writers, wives and lovers, memorably de band’s mouth, urged on for some reason Parisian style, the more his colour seems Mlast years of the 19th century in detached, arbitrary, edging towards decor Vit ebsk, one of the shtetls in the Pale of ation. He paints with rich unmixed pig Settlement, the part of the Russian Empire ments, thinned to translucency, their com to which the Jewish population had been bin ations often garish. A pure dark blue – confined since the days of Catherine the perhaps ultramarine – is particularly un Great. He is known as a storyteller in paint pleasant, and particularly frequent on Cha ing and a colourist, but in the early years of gall’s palette. You long for him to mix in a his career he was above all a Jewish artist, smudge of white, knock the colour down, which means that his greatest achieve blend it in a little, make it less brash. ment, coming from a background in which Even in these early years Chagall was there was hardly any tradition of the visual drawn more to writers than painters (Rob arts, was becoming a painter at all. ert Delaunay was his only real painter Chagall was lucky: Vitebsk was home to friend). His allegiance is recorded in the the only art school in the Pale, run by the other great work from this time, the hom traditionalist Yuri Pen. But it was while age to Apollinaire – that ‘gentle Zeus’ – studying at the progressive Zvantseva School painted in 1913. Against a Delaunay-ish in St Petersburg, where Léon Bakst was coloured disc stands a geometrically de the drawing master, that he entered the fined figure, split into two upper bodies, avant garde. It was the only art school in St one female and one male, enacting the Petersburg ‘animated by a breath of Eur biblical expulsion from paradise with a ope’, Chagall later wrote, thanks to Bakst firm nod toward Masaccio’s wall painting and his knowledge of Post-Impressionist in the Brancacci Chapel. Numbers on one painting, and his work as a designer for side of the disc reveal that it is in fact a Diaghilev. Bakst was Chagall’s route to large clock, the sort that might be found in modern painting, to the work of Cézanne, a railway station, animated by Futurist Van Gogh and Gauguin with its new swooshes and swirls of colour. The clock knowledge of unnatural colour and form. was ticking for Chagall – his fiancée, Bella Small paintings made after he return Rosenfeld, wrote increasingly anguished ed to Vitebsk hang at the outset of Chag letters from Vitebsk asking for news, won all: The Breakthrough Years 1911-19 at the dering if he would ever come back. ‘Anoth Guggenheim Bilbao (until 2 September). er year, and everything might have been Balancing avant-garde discoveries with a over between us,’ Chagall later wrote. sense of home, they capture the mystery of World events were rumbling. He left Paris shtetl life. His colours are artificial but early in 1914, stopping in Berlin in May for never arbitrary; they are always part of the the first exhibition of his work, mounted fabric and meaning of the image, soaked by Herwarth Walden in his gallery Der in, as it were. In The Yellow Room, a woman, Sturm, before returning to Russia. It was her head inverted, sits by a table on which the last time he saw Apollinaire, who died stand a samovar and three teacups, while four years later of the Spanish flu. It was a faceless man makes for the door, which also the last time he saw Paris in the glory leads to a burning red moonlit scene; the scribed by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine as a by a pink-headed goat, is painted with red days of La Ruche. War and revolution turn room is otherwise occupied by a docile ‘sinister wheel of brie’. Chagall captures and black outlines, and looks more like Lar ed a three-month trip into eight years cow. It is a student painting, but a very its bohemian atmosphere in his memoir: ionov than Picasso or the Cubist hangers- away. good one; the dirty yellows and artificial on who were exhibiting at the Salon. Returning to small-town Vitebsk must green glow adhere to the scene, seeming While an offended model sobbed in the Rus It was at La Ruche that Chagall painted have felt like a huge backwards step after to make sense of the dancing table and the sian ateliers, the Italian studios ran with one of his first great works,Half -Past Three working in a studio at the heart of the upside-down head, a motif that became songs and the sound of guitars, the Jewish (The Poet), a large canvas (the studios at La avant garde. Yet returning to the Pale was ones with discussions, I was alone in my stu Chagall’s signature. dio in front of my oil lamp. A studio crammed Ruche were double-height) showing the also a return to the subject that truly ani ‘When I arrived in Paris I was the colour with pictures, with canvases that were not Russian poet Mazin sitting writing at a mated him – Jewish life – and somehow of a potato,’ Chagall told an interviewer in really canvases, but my tablecloths, sheets table, his green head on upside down. The the imagined colours and the substance of 1967, meaning that he was still largely and nightshirts torn into pieces. picture is built from dynamic lines around the paintings reconnect. The colour begins
30 london Review of booKs 19 july 2018 very much in line with the premises of the fined ‘Tanzaphilia’ as ‘an opium of Afro empiricism. Mazrui was alarmed by the French Marxists are still French in their intel Arusha Declaration, while Mazrui’s dis philes’: Nyerere’s Tanzania had cast a possibility that Dar, too, would become ‘an lectual style. Ideologically, they may have a course emphasised the growing contradict ‘romantic spell’ over the left; its effect was ideological college’ as a result of pressure lot in common with communist Chinese or communist North Koreans. But in style of ion between the promise of Arusha and the ‘particularly marked among Western intel from a ‘superleft’. reasoning and in the idiom of his thought, a reality of social and political developments lectuals’, who were complicit in the drift to Responding to figures like Leys – and French Marxist has more in common with a in Tanzania. Rodney called on intellectuals one-party rule. ‘Many of the most prosaic presumably Rodney – for whom ideolog French liberal than with fellow communists to join the struggle for national indepen Western pragmatists,’ Mazrui wrote, ‘have ical orientation was everything, Mazrui in China and Korea. And that is why a French dence: colonial rule might have ended, but been known to acquire [a] dreamy look un invoked a deeper epistemological reality intellectual who is a Marxist can more easily imperialism had not. Mazrui reiterated his der the spell of Tanzania.’ Mazrui had a which he called the ‘mode of reasoning’. cease to be a Marxist than he can cease to be worries about the temptation of authoritar worried eye on the radicals at Dar, but he Ideological orientations, he argued, are a French intellectual. ianism in newly independent states. He singled out Colin Leys, then the principal both superficial and malleable: ‘Under a Both formulations, ‘ideological orientat was by now the most important liberal of Kivukoni College, the ruling party’s strong impulse one can change one’s creed. ion’ and ‘mode of reasoning’, appear in his critic of nationalism in power and his ideological school (also in Dar). Leys had But it is much more difficult to change the essay in Transition, which came out in 1967, reservat ions soon extended to all left-wing lamented that besides the three obvious process of reasoning which one acquires and if they evoke the work of Foucault it is intellect uals seduced by radical state nation soc ial ills – ‘poverty, ignorance and disease’ from one’s total educational background.’ surely because the two were thinking along alism. In his piece in Transition he had de – Tanzania was also suffering from a fourth: He gave the following example: similar lines about ‘discursive formations’:
to mean something again. In The Newspaper Vendor (1914) a newspaper seller, plying his wares against an acid orange sky, be comes an emblem of provincial gloom and poverty, the darkened greenish spires of the synagogue giving the impression of a forlorn town on the edge of a chemical works. The news is surely bad. In the early years of the war the news certainly was bad for Jews living in the western part of the Pale, who were subject to mass expulsions. Chagall saw his post- 1914 paintings of Vitebsk as documents of a world that was disappearing. He captur ed the ‘very last days [of ] small-town, pre- revolutionary Jewish-Russian existence’, as Jackie Wullschlager puts it in her indis pensable biography of Chagall.* Four large portraits of destitute old Jews dressed as rabbis are among his best paintings from Chagall was an unlikely revolutionary school (he was brought by train from Mos From left to right, ‘Half-Past Three (The Poet)’; the period (they have been brought to but he was caught up all the same by the cow by El Lissitsky, already on the teaching portrait of Chagall by Yehuda Pen (c.1910); gether for the first time in Bilbao). The events in the autumn of 1917. In Septem staff ), the students soon switched their al detail from ‘Introduction to the Jewish Theatre’. dark green face and yellow beard of Jew in ber 1918 Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet legiance. Left out in the cold, Chagall was Green is far from Parisian frivolity, but Cha Commissar for Culture, appointed Chag obliged to leave. set and costumes for three short plays by gall still uses to great effect the new vocab all Commissar of the Arts in Vitebsk. All He returned to Europe in 1922, first to Sholem Aleichem, staged in a cramped ulary of painting, a flattened collage-like he knew of Marx, he later wrote, was that Berlin, then to Paris, where he re-estab auditorium in a Moscow mansion requis technique incorporating text, in this case he was a Jew and had a long white beard. lished himself. The postwar years were itioned by the Bolsheviks. Chagall decid Hebrew lettering. In Over Vitebsk, a figure Chagall established an art school to which marred by bitterness; all the profits made ed to decorate the entire room, and pro with sack and stick drifts above the snowy he recruited anybody and everybody who from Herwarth Walden’s exhibition were duced, in a remarkably short period, eight town: the Wandering Jew of Chagall’s might be able to wield a brush. For the cel swallowed up by hyperinflation, and Wald large paintings on the walls and ceiling, dream world. en refused to reveal where the paintings dominated by the large frieze-like Introduct Chagall often painted his family, but had gone, leaving Chagall unsure if they ion to the Jewish Theatre (all now in the Tret most of all Bella, whom he married in the still survived. He made copies of earlier yakov Gallery in Moscow, except the ceil summer of 1915. He paints and draws her paintings, such as the wonderful One Says: ing painting, which didn’t survive). They with the energy and curiosity of love redis The Rabbi, a painting of a seated rabbi tak were a culmination of the Jewish themes covered: standing by a large window, play ing a pinch of snuff. The second version, and weightless figures of the previous de ing a violin, being kissed, posing for a por painted more than ten years later, repro cade, but also, in their blanched palette, trait. They fly through the air over Vitebsk, duces the original closely – he was clearly an acceptance that the Supremacists were he levitates and twists to kiss her on his working from a photograph – but loses at least in part right about colour: it was birthday, or, in Promenade from 1917-18, much of the gravity and humour of the not just a decorative, but also a moral ele holds her hand to stop her drifting off into original. (The two are shown together in ment of painting, and required control the clouds. These are among Chagall’s Bilbao.) It was a sign of the lesser work and restraint to be effective. On the wall best known paintings, but not really his that was to come. The view that from the opposite the stage hung one of the most most successful. Parisian gaiety returns, mid-1920s Chagall’s work becomes awk intriguing images: a painting that is hard and with it an overburdened palette and ward, illustrative, sentimental and garish ly commented on for being so unlike Cha weak, overwrought compositions. In Pro can be quibbled with, but never entirely gall’s other work. Love on the Stage seems at menade, Chagall depicts himself grinning dismissed. first sight entirely abstract, a large, squar self -consciously and made-up. He was by The elegant hang in Bilbao by the curat ish field of dynamic force lines and tonal most accounts very vain; who else would or Lucia Aguirre, and the keen selection gradations more like something Malevich make a painting such as The Poet Reclining of works by Josef Helfenstein, who origin might have painted. But then the faint (at Tate Modern, though not in Bilbao) on ebration of the first anniversary of the Rev ated the exhibition in Basel, makes the flickering outline of a couple dancing a pas their honeymoon – an admiring self-por olution, he and his students decorated the strongest case possible for Chagall’s great de deux emerges, watched by two small trait with no Bella in sight? He had a good- town with Chagallian images – upside- ness during these early years. But the figures sitting around an oil lamp in the looking, if girlish face, Bella later wrote down cows, flying peasants – in a large Breakthrough Years of the title raises the ob orchestra pit below. For once Chagall goes with twisting candour, ‘but it was like public display of his work that rightly con vious question – breakthrough to what? beyond his origins into a new mysterious bitter chocolate, and, like his own paint fused hardline officials. But it required The answer is unquestionably the large world of painting, a poetry of form, rather ings, slightly repellent’. more than topsy-turvydom to create the paintings Chagall made in Moscow for than mere subject. But then he retreated. image of revolution. When the far cooler, the State Jewish Chamber Theatre, often *J. Hoberman wrote about Chagall: Love and Exile politically more austere and probably very described as his best work. He was first in the LRB of 9 April 2009. irritating Malevich showed up at Chagall’s commissioned in late 1920 to design the John-Paul Stonard
31 london Review of booKs 19 july 2018 L’archéologie du savoir was published two By the late 1980s, the IMF had taken region and throughout the continent. This by Malcolm Hailey in 1938 – and 2000 now years later. charge of the Ugandan treasury, and the largely accounts for the fact that fees were adays, depending on what we take to be a The spread of higher education in Africa World Bank was running Makerere’s plan rising around the same time as ‘independ language or a dialect. The African univers is a post-independence phenomenon. Only ning. The Bank proposed a threefold re ence’ – transition to majority rule – was ity today is still very much what it was from in South Africa, Egypt and the Maghreb can form premised on the assumption that coming into effect in South Africa. And it the start: a colonial project with a monolin the number of universities founded in the higher education is a private good. First, it was no surprise that an expanded entry of gual medium of instruction, framed in colonial period be counted on more than argued, given that the benefit from higher black students into ‘white’ universities was terms of a European ‘universalism’ from two hands. There was only one university education accrues to the individual, that followed by an expanded exit of more and which a large majority of the colonised in Nigeria with 1000 studen ts at the end of individual should pay fees. Today, nearly 90 more of the same students: either they were excluded. the colonial period: by 1990, it boasted 31 per cent of students at Makerere are fee- were unable to keep up payments or they What would it mean to decolonise a uni universities with 141,000 students. East paying. Second, the university should be found it hard to get to grips with the disci versity in Africa? The East African exper Africa had a single institution of higher run by autonomous disciplinary depart plines in which they were enrolled. As ience suggests that one answer would be learning, Makerere, during the colonial ments and not by a centralised administ these students looked for ways to explain the opposite of what is happening in period. Today, it has more than thirty. Hav ration. This was achieved by means of a their predicament, the only answers they American and British universities: reduc ing a national university was considered as simple formula, requiring that 80 per cent could find seemed to lie in rising fees and a ing the cost of a university education, by much a hallmark of independence as hav of student fees go to his or her disciplinary curriculum that bore little relationship to state grants and subsidies, to make it more ing a flag, an anthem, a central bank and a department or faculty. The Bank had man their life experiences, or family and com inclusive. In the first place, therefore, fees currency. The fortunes of the African uni aged, very effectively, to starve the central munity histories. would have to fall. I was at the University of versity dipped at the end of the 1970s with administration of funds. Third, the curric Cape Town from 1996 to 1999; in the years the fiscal crisis that bedevilled African ulum should be revised to make it market- s there an intellectual mode of reason that followed – the heyday of South Africa’s states and the intervention of the Bretton friendly and more professional: the geog ing we can describe as African, in the independence – fees began rising. In the Woods institutions that bailed out count raphy department began to offer a BA in Iway Mazrui spoke of a ‘French’ or a second place, there would have to be multi ries in return for subjecting their public tour ism, and the Institute of Linguistics a ‘Western’ mode of reasoning? Not an an lingual projects designed to provide budgets to a strict disciplinary regime. In BA in secretarial studies. cestral or genetic mode, obviously, but one Westernised education in several languag the era of structural adjustment, Makerere Over the next decade the Makerere mod which weaves together a set of discourses es and to nurture non-Western intellectual became another kind of model university. el was exported to other universities in the communicated in a common language that tradt i ions as living vehicles of public and presupposes – or suggests – an intellectual scholarly discourse in those languages. This community with a long historical format is not a demand for a revivalist project, but ion. Language is our first obstacle here. a call to include the languages of pop Most of those of us who have come out of ular dis course, which in South Africa would colonialism speak more than one. The mean centres for the study of the Nguni lang uages of colonialism are inevitably and Sotho languages and traditions (the lang uages of science, scholarship and oppos ite of area studies), and translation global affairs. Then there are the languages units, carrying the best academic literature of colonised peoples – languages whose – global, regional and South African – back growth was truncated by colonialism. Our and forth between the new linguistic cent home languages remain folkloric, shut out res and the older faculties. Broadening the of the world of science and learning, high referential world of African universities culture, law and government. There are ex means competence in the languages which ceptions. In East Africa, Kiswahili is the embody non-Western traditions. language of popular interaction, culture, In exporting theory from the Western and official discourse, also the medium of academy, colonialism brought with it the primary and secondary schooling, but not assumption that theory is the product of of university education. At East African Western tradition and that the aim of ac WorstofTimes universities, it has the status of a foreign ademies outside the West is to apply it. If language, with departments of Kiswahili the elaboration of theory was a creative act studies. It is not the bearer of a scientific or in the West, its application in the colonies a universal philological tradition. became the reverse: a readymade, turnkey The fate of Afrikaans has been different, project that simply put itself at the disposal evolving from its lowly status as ‘kitchen of academics and students. This was true Dutch’ to become the medium of a vigor on the left as well as on the right; whether ous intellectual tradition in less than half Marx and Foucault were the object of study, a century: a change that would have been or Weber and Huntington, students tended BestofTimes inconceivable without a vast institutional to learn theory as if learning a new lang network – schools and universities, news uage: some remarkably well, others less papers, magazines and publishing houses so. The latter give us an insight into what is – funded by public money. This vast affirm wrong with the notion of the student as ative action programme, begun in 1948 technician, whose learning begins and and driven by apartheid, lifted Afrikaans ends with the application of a theory pro ReadEverywhere from the ‘kitchen’ to the lecture theatre, duced elsewhere: too often it has produced the science journal, the law courts and the caricatures, another group of mimic men To celebrate our ‘sale of two cities’, we’re looking for national media at remarkable speed. And it and women for a new era. The alternative is photos celebrating the best and worst of times. Take did so not by seeking to displace English, to theorise our own reality, and to strike the since the major English-language univers right balance between the local and the a picture or video with the London Review of Books ities like Witts and Cape Town continued global as we do so. The local production of or The Paris Review until the end of August, and you in their old way, but by creating major knowledge unfolds in relation to a complex Afrikaans-language universities like Stel of social forces, and takes account of a could win great prizes, including Aesop products! lenbosch and Pretoria, in a project that soc iety’s needs and demands, its capacities called for inclusion rather than displace and aspirations. The global conversation is Enter on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram using: ment. Afrikaans was the most successful an evolving debate between scholars, with #readeverywhere #BestofTimes #WorstofTimes decolonising linguistic initiative – in this in and across disciplines, in which the play case, against the British – in sub-Saharan of geopolitical forces has less and less Find out more at: Africa. Yet the new government of South relevance. The local conversation gives rise Africa saw no reason to emulate it, perhaps to the committed intellectual, embroiled in www.readeverywhere.co.uk because the weight of colonial linguistics public discourse, often highly sensitive to bears down on Africa as a continent with political boundaries in the society at large; ‘too many’ languages for its own good: the global conversation calls for a scholar anywhere between 700 – the tally reached who takes no account of boundaries. c
32 london Review of booKs 19 july 2018