Mahmood Mamdani, the executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research, is not an angel. And certainly the programme is not his fiefdom. MISR’s current mission  takes seriously Frantz Fanon’s resolute plea to the African revolutionary intellectual to not simply revert to our world of yore - the pre-colonial, pre-modern, primordial, etc. - but to rethink it anew.

For Ngũgĩ, in the struggle against capitalist colonialism there is no home left to return to. Whether within one’s own country or outside, home is the place and space of struggle. Like for Frantz Fanon, for Ngũgĩ the struggle against colonialism is linked to the struggle against capitalism. It is a struggle against the bourgeoisie, both national and international.

Theory and practice have been butting heads at Makerere University’s Institute of Social Research, resulting in graduate students decrying the “authoritarian” leadership style of its director, public intellectual and crusader for the decolonisation of higher education, Mahmood Mamdani. Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire chronicles the machinations of a protracted struggle against perceived creeping neoliberalism.