Decolonial Reflections on African public intellectual

IT was not an accident but real overdue recognition when in 2008 Prospect Magazine (UK) and the Foreign Policy (US) journal voted Mahmood Mamdani the ninth top public intellectual out of a leading hundred scholars in the whole world.

So far in his long intellectual career, the seventyone-year-old Ugandan of Indian descent has delved in such research areas as identity studies, international politics, colonialism and postcolonialism, the politicisation of culture, political violence and the contentious politics of knowledge production. This long research journey is all the way from his academic beginnings in colonial Uganda as a talented student of physics and engineering. Mamdani, like Edward Said, has been notoriously disrespectful of academic disciplines, political and intellectual boundaries. In his provocative studies he has managed to convincingly link 9/11 to the history and politics of the Cold War and America’s defeat in Vietnam.

The Darfur Genocide of 2003 in Sudan he managed to problematise with the history of the US invasion of Iraqi in the same year. The 1994 Rwanda Genocide has, according to Mamdani, its provenances and genealogies in the colonial history of Africa, a history that violently politicised identities leading to such large scale identiterian conflicts as massacres and genocide in Africa.

In all these studies Mamdani has been making controversial observations and drawing stubborn conclusions that have seen him accused of genocide denialism, defending Arab enslavement of Africans, being an opportunistic African and showing sympathies for African dictators.

For his stubborn intellection and independent political thought Mamdani has endured statelessness, exile, the experience of homelessness and being a political and intellectual refugee and fugitive in the world. Stubbornly, over years Mamdani, who presently heads the Makerere Institute for Social Research in Uganda and is a Professor of Government at the University of Columbia in the US, has refused to give interviews about his intellectual career and personal life.

In April 2015, some determined Chinese scholars managed to squeeze an interview out of Mamdani which remains perhaps the only record of his reflections on his intellectual and life journey, except for bits and dots that can be collected from his many publications. The Postcontinentality of Mahmood Mamdani Physical journeys through the world’s wide geography are frequently linked to intellectual and epistemic growth. Postcontinentality describes those thinkers of the world that have physically and informationally travelled across the world’s history and continents, journeys that earn them a wider and deeper philosophical understanding and sensibility about the globe. Mahmood Mamdani was born in to punish his much unprepared interlocutors and adversaries. In argument, written or spoken, Mamdani left unchecked can be the proverbial oneman majority.

He has a cunning intellectual habit of expanding local issues to world scale and compressing world issues to the local scope, a habit that floors most scholars whose understanding of the world is provincial, disciplinary and therefore narrow. An intellectual debate with Mahmood Mamdani is a real boxing match with a many handed polymath. In condemnation, the formidable Kwesi Praah accused Mamdani of “tip-toeing around contentious issues” and indulging “in technicist sophistry” in debate.

A troubled and Troubling Journey experience of mentorship and supervision has been turned into traumatising hell for the brilliant but unlucky young students whose efforts do not sit well with the fragile egos of the troubling professoriate of the westernised university in Africa.

The lucky favourite disciples have their feelings protected by the prof who cushions them from harsh critiques and comments while the chosen victims, no matter what sterling efforts they make, are told not in so many words that they should not be anywhere near the university, in professorial contempt, conceit, cynicism and skepticism that is a direct heritage from the white racist colonial professor.

Even in the thickness of the decolonial gesture in the university, campuses are still large cemeteries of careers and dreams of young students that are crushed with toxic intellectual prejudices of professors that do not see the irony of competing with Honours and Masters students instead of teaching and cultivating them, who pull rank and install hierarchy instead of teaching and mentoring. The professor’s weight is used not to empower but to bully, scare and demotivate the novice as if the professor himself was born an accomplished expert, when most of the times he has travelled a humble and humbling journey of learning and being taught, of being benevolently empowered by his own seniors.

Being an accomplished Doctor or Professor is elevated to a rare talent when it is a product of opportunity, hard work and empowerment. Not for Mamdani is this toxic intellectual leadership.

The decoloniality of Mahmood Mamdani has not only been in the way he has contributed to curriculum changes in the university in Africa since the sixties, or has it only been in his centering of Africa, African history and Africans in the world academy, but it has also been in the humble way in which he has used his titanic gift to develop young intellectuals. Mamdani’s books, journal papers and public lectures in all their controversy and combativeness are rendered with the tone and humility of a giant intellectual who is prepared to be a student of his students, “oh that is thinkable, I have not thought of it that way, thank you,” is Mamdani’s now famous way of accepting a valid but alternative idea to his, even if it comes from a struggling novice or nameless academic enthusiast.

That way Mamdani has been able to reproduce himself and create other formidable public intellectuals. To achieve this he has not needed to be an angel, he can be irritatingly controversial and lend his good name to infamies and genocides. In the height of antagonism and controversy, Mamdani is forceful but polite, creative and dignified.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail. com