Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000

Abstract

Carol Sicherman. Becoming an African University: Makerere 1922-2000. Trenton N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005. xxii + 416 pp. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Paper. When I first came to Makerere as external examiner in late 1986, the Department of Music, Dance and Drama (MDD) was in shambles. The grand piano rested on empty crates-the legs had been put to better use on wheelbarrows; the lamps, the sockets, the electric wiring had completely disappeared, windows and doors were missing, the floor in the dance rehearsal room was gone. I had brought ribbons for the only mechanical typewriter in the department because the old one had run out of ink long ago and only the carbon copies were legible (I also brought carbon paper). But at the same time, when the structures and the buildings had apparently collapsed completely, the MDD head of department, Rose Mbowa, staged Mother Uganda and Her Children in the Main Hall, the most important theater performance in the country up to the present time. It is exactly this situation, this atmosphere of structural decay and the revival of the Makerere spirit, that provide the central point of reference of Carol Sicherman's history. Her account is rich in detail, based on a myriad of source materials both archival and oral. Since gross violations of human rights-murders, disappearances, detention, harassment and intimidation, mass rape in students' hostels-are all part of the dramatic experiences on Makerere Hill (and missing, of course, from the official documents), the information given by survivors is essential to fill in the picture of all that Makerere and Makerereans have gone through. Their testimonials counterbalance the colonial unbalance in the recorded history, found primarily in the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie archives or in the Public Record Office, the British Library, SOAS, and LSE. The Makerere archive, systematized in the 1990s by a Fulbright scholar, was of minor importance. Sicherman's account reflects the unique historical development of Makerere University: the rise of the colonial college to an institution of international renown in the 1960s, the decay and ultimate collapse in the Obote I and II and the Amin regimes from 1970 to 1986, and finally the almost miraculous resurrection of the university since the 1990s. At the same time, it is a long overdue study of the politics and philosophies of colonial and postcolonial education, overdue because Makerere served for East and southeast Africa as an intellectual beacon attracting students and staff from the whole region and beyond, very much as the University of Ibadan did for West Africa or the University of the West Indies for the Caribbean. Whereas the histories of Ibadan, Nsukka, and UWI were written a long time ago, Makerere's remained undocumented. Some of the important structural patterns have to be read between the lines. One of them is the struggle for dominance between British and American models. …

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