This article is a critical-theoretical reflection on a graduate programme at Makerere University – the Interdisciplinary PhD in Social Studies at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR).  

Like Uganda’s Amin – but unlike South Africa’s Mandela – Robert Mugabe fully understood that national liberation meant little if it was not underpinned by popular economic emancipation. That is why Amin and Mugabe became enemies of the west, but Mandela was embraced as an icon. The people celebrating Mugabe’s fall do not understand imperialism. Mugabe’s true legacy will be appreciated in the coming days.

Facts are overrated – who has them anyway? World Bank reports, IMF figures, Human Rights Watch narratives, national GDP figures, CIA fact files, entries in the Lancet, government stats, etcetera are not facts in any benevolent sense. As means of control and manipulation, they are instead the most supported (and perhaps most persuasive) opinion of the day.

Many postcolonial regimes are still mired in protracted civil wars and violence, struggling economies, corruption, bad leadership, broken social and economic infrastructure and famine.  It is rather dishonest for a country whose main university could be closed for months by presidential decree, whose professors strike year in year out over emoluments, to complain about an overwhelming European or American presence in their studies.

To tell whether Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has failed to implement the doctoral programme at Makerere Institute of Social Research requires that one is either a doctoral student, a teacher on the programme, or has done fieldwork at MISR with a research question on Mamdani’s ambition and its logistical requirements. Anything other than that is sheer gossip.

The ruckus kicked up by Dr. Stella Nyanzi’s nude protest against Prof Mahmood Mamdani, director of Makerere Institute of Social Research, refuses to die down. Responding to an article by three fellow graduate students in support of Dr. Nyanzi published in last week’s issue of Pambazuka News, another student now offers a different take on the controversial academic and the situation at the institute.