What are mankind’s values and fears, and how should we connect the dots to understand our history and future in the Ugandan context?
Are performing arts simply an expression of the rhythm that comes with music, dance and drama? Or is it a medium for humanity’s contest for power and to assert identity? How has the subject of humanities evolved at Makerere University over the last 100 years? Are the arts a “useless subject” as some top government officials want us to believe?
A group of Makerere University Kampala scholars, in celebrating 100 years of the country’s oldest university, have compiled a book – Historicising the Humanities at Makerere, trends, patterns and prospects – that answer these questions, offering deep analysis about the humanities.
The book was launched at Makerere University. The Makerere scholars draw from a rich body of work of global authors and philosophers while profiling the struggles that the humanities have gone through to take their place among the most prominent courses at the institution.
The 568-page book, split into 16 chapters written by 16 authors, is a collector’s item for anyone who wants to understand the humanities in Uganda, as it weaves beautifully through the country’s volatile history – from pre to post independent Uganda – to make a case for the subject.
Abbas Kiyimba, a professor in the department of Literature, Makerere University, makes a clear introduction of the book, making a case of why we should look to history to understand where we are going.
“…scholars have …concluded that for any communication to carry full meaning, it is always necessary to establish how the present emerges from the past (Rüsen & Templer, 1997; Ohnuki- Tierney, 2010; Schiffman, 2011),” Kiyimba writes.
He further explains that “historicisation, therefore, is a fundamental interpretative approach that one must adopt to understand challenges in their context, and to formulate strategies to address them.”
Kiyimba quotes international scholar Donald Kagan, who wrote that “there are three major branches of knowledge, namely natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, and from these emerge the applied forms. Because of the differences in their methods of inquiry, the humanities and the social sciences on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, disagree on issues of perception and approach.“
He adds that the 14 chapters in this book, which this chapter introduces, tell divergent but connected, stories of the beginnings and evolution of the humanities and social science disciplines at Makerere University.
The book is relevant in Uganda’s current time, especially where the policy-thinking is driven towards the sciences. From an education point of view, the book offers guidance and hope for those who still seek to pursue the arts, and tells why the humanities remain at the centre of understanding why our heritage deserves more attention and support.
In the political space, the book reminds us the wider spaces – especially in regards to humanities – that people can hold those in power accountable. At a time when the political space to hold those in power accountable continues to shrink, the book takes us back in time on how the arts were critical in shaping governance.
The book explores a number of disciplines in the humanities, such as philosophy, literature, history, religious studies, music, and drama, and how they have evolved over the last 100 years at Makerere University.
The book has some few pictures from the past, one of them being President Museveni cast as Julius Caesar in a 1964 Ntare School production, and graphs to explain some bits of data about the humanities.
And yet, it was never easy to have the humanities accepted at Makerere University, and this book brings out that history quite well. Some of the chapters point to colonial times and the post independent periods where the humanities were frowned at partly because of their impact in society.
The World Humanities Report 2015 captured it quite well.
“Not only do the humanities and humanistic social sciences explicate our existence as human beings, but they also contribute to creating “tolerance and understanding between citizens”, which promote social cohesion, and challenge established positions, social norms and traditions through critical thinking, and preserve heritage, cultural memory and identity.”
And this book is critical of one of Makerere’s most prominent scholars, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, whose beliefs of modernisation is thought to undermine the role of the humanities in shaping their society. In one of his publications, Scholars in the Market Place, Mahmood Mamdani noted how students applying for arts subjects was dropping in favour of other marketable courses.
He, then, called for the professionalisation of the arts. This led to the fragmentation of the arts into courses such as development studies, human rights and ethics, etc, and allowed students to pay school fees to be enrolled at Makerere University.
Some of the authors show how this ‘professionalisation’ diluted the arts, and later fuelled the narrative of the arts being “useless” because it was hard for a graduate to get a job.
The book notes that “with the professionalisation of humanities, and the introduction of marketable courses, the focus in the humanities had to change from theorisation and historicisation of long-term knowledge trajectories, to preoccupation with quick-fix approaches. The core humanities – the study of methods and disciplinary traditions – became a rare commodity…”
Then there is the element of literature, perhaps one of the courses that has grown in leaps and bounds to incorporate more innovations.
The book takes us back to the classical times of literature and how that is evolved to effect places such as the department of literature at Makerere. Literature, the book shows, can be a strong medium for influencing policy formulation.
Readers who want to understand how performing arts offer lessons in understanding human behaviour, and the names of the pioneers who created a fundamental change of elevating the subject to attract national attention, then this is the kind of book that has it all.
The book places the story of performing arts at Makerere in the broader post-colonial scholarly context before delving on detailing the beginning and growth of music, dance and drama (later performing arts and film) as a department.
And yet, if one thought that this book is heavy on the post-colonial era, and light on events today, then they could not be farther from the truth. The book comes at a time when Uganda’s government has decided to make Swahili an examinable subject at all levels of learning.
This is in spite of the limited institutional capacity to manage this transition. This transition reignited the debate of what should be the national language.
The book explores the contention of the choice of our national language. The book traces the evolution and practice of teaching language and linguistics at Makerere from the earliest days of the university (to be) to the present.
It commences with a discussion of language theorists, and then proceeds to explain issues of language planning, the genesis of linguistics scholarship and teaching at Makerere.
In the end, the book reinforces the relevance of the arts in understanding where we have come from, and where are headed. This is a book of our times.