Over the last forty years East Africa has experienced the rise and decline of African intellectuals. What is intellectualism? It is an engagement in the realm of ideas, rational discourse and independent enquiry. Post-colonial African university campuses were once the vanguard of intellectualism. When I was an academic at the University of East Africa in the early years of independence, my colleagues consisted substantially of people who were capable of being fascinated by ideas. Every week there was a range of extra-curricular events on campus. Public lectures at the Makerere campus in Uganda or at the University of Nairobi were often heavily attended. In the case of my own evening lectures at both Makerere and Nairobi, students sometimes gave up their suppers in order to get a seat at one of my presentations. The main halls were packed to overflowing. At that time the University of East Africa was a Pan-African institution with a campus each in three different countries – Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

For its Head of State Kenya had the nation’s first black social anthropologist, Jomo Kenyatta – author of Facing Mt. Kenya . Uganda had for Head of Government a person who had changed his name because of admiration of the author of the great English poem, Paradise Lost. Obote became Milton Obote out of admiration of John Milton. These were badges of intellectual status.  The most intellectual of East Africa’s Heads of State at the time was Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania – a true philosopher, president and original thinker. He philosophized about society and socialism, and translated two of Shakespeare’s plays into Kiswahili – Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice. Nyerere was also a major leader in the efforts to liberate Southern Africa from white minority rule and a leader in the experiment of regional integration in East Africa.

East Africa had vivacious and scintillating intellectual magazines – such as  Transition  magazine based in Kampala and East Africa Journal based in Nairobi. Contributors to those magazines were intellectuals from the campuses, from the wider civil society and from the governing class. The late Tom Mboya of Kenya, one of the most brilliant East Africans of his time, wrote for those magazines from time to time.

Those were the days when it was possible for me, a Kenyan, to be engaged in a public disagreement with the Head of State of Uganda, Milton Obote. It was also possible for a public debate to occur in the Town Hall of Kampala between a Kenyan professor of political science and the Head of Intelligence in Uganda’s Security system.These were intellectual debates under the umbrella of Pan-African tolerance. The campuses vibrated with debates about fundamental issues of the day – nationalism, socialism, democracy,  the party system, and the role of intellectuals in “the African revolution”.

Since then, who has killed intellectualism in East Africa? In Uganda part of the answer is obvious. A military coup occurred in January 1971, which brought Idi Amin into power. Eight years of brutal dictatorship followed. No less a person than the Vice-Chancellor of Makerere – Frank Kalimuzo – was abducted in broad daylight from the campus and never heard of again. A similar fate befell the judicially courageous Chief Justice of Uganda, Benedicto Kiwanuka. The scintillating intellectual voices of Uganda either fell silent or went into exile.The regional university of East Africa disintegrated into three national institutions. The East African Community as a whole was under stress.

In Kenya the killers included rising authoritarianism in government and declining academic freedom on campuses. These were the mid-1970s when Kenyatta was still in power. The fate of intellectualism became worse and worse during the years of President Daniel arap Moi. If the first two killers of intellectualism in Kenya were rising political authoritarianism and declining academic freedom, the third killer was the Cold War between Western powers and the Soviet bloc. The government of Kenya was co-opted into the Western camp, sometimes at the expense of Kenya’s own citizens. Being socialist or left-wing as an intellectual became a political hazard. All sorts of laws and edicts emerged about subversive literature. Possessing the works of Mao Tse Tung of the People’s Republic of China was a crime in Kenya, and people actually went to jail for it.

In Tanzania, intellectualism was slow to die. It was partially protected by the fact that the Head of State – Julius Nyerere – was himself a superb intellectual ruler. He was not only fascinated by ideas, but also stimulated by debates.  But two factors in Tanzania had paradoxical roles – the ideology of Ujamaa  (Tanzania’s version of socialism) and Nyerere’s one-party system. On the one hand, Ujamaa and the justification of the one-party state stimulated a considerable amount of intellectual rationalization and conceptualization. On the other hand, there was no escaping the fact that one-partyism was a discriminatory system of government, and the enthusiasm for socialism in Tanzania intimidated those who were against it.

What this means is that while in Kenya intellectualism died partly because of the Cold War’s opposition to socialism, in Tanzania intellectualism died partly because of excessive local enthusiasm for socialism. On the other hand, it was a measure of Pan-African tolerance that I was respected more as an intellectual by Milton Obote in Uganda and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania than I was by my own Heads of State -- either Mzee Kenyatta or Daniel arap Moi in Kenya. Even Idi Amin, when he was in power in Uganda, wanted to send me to apartheid South Africa as living proof that Africans could think. Idi Amin wanted me to become Exhibit A of the Black Intellectual to convince racists in South Africa that Black people were human beings capable of rational thought. It was Amin’s vision of how to use intellectuals in Pan-African liberation.

But apart from ensuring a climate of academic freedom and the free flourishing of intellectualism, what does society have to do to develop a university before intellectuals and scholars become capable of helping to develop society? Clearly resources are crucial. The society has  to invest resources in the intellectual pursuits great enough to ensure high quality of intellectual recruitment and high quality of intellectual retention of staff in relevant institutions.Resources will also be needed for high quality curriculum development, quality research and general development. Students and staff are human beings whose motivation and sense of commitment need to be sustained by a system of rewards and recognition. Grades for students should be a true measure of achievement; so should promotions for staff.

No university or research organization can be a first class institution of learned enquiry if the training schools which feed into it are all mediocre. Society also has to develop the educational ladder as a whole. Quality of education at the primary and secondary levels needs to be sustained if the final candidates for possible admission to the universities are to be of high standard.  The capacity to be curious and fascinated by ideas has to start early in the educational process. The spirit of intellectualism has to be nourished from primary school onwards, but it can die at the university level if mediocrity prevails.

In relation to the wider world, a university has three crucial relationships.It has to be politically distant from the state; culturally close to society; and intellectually linked to wider scholarly and scientific values of the world of learning. Can a university be funded by the state and still maintain political distance? It has been done in other societies; there is no reason why it cannot happen in Africa as well.

Each university needs to be culturally close to society. This is a much tougher proposition in Africa, especially since African university systems are colonial in origin and disproportionately European in traditions. African universities are among the major instruments and vehicles of cultural westernization on the continent. A contradiction occurs between the university’s duty to be culturally close to its society and the university ambition to be intellectually linked to the wider world of scholarship and science.

In this connection it is worth bearing in mind important differences between the westernization of Africa and the modernization of Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japan’s original modernization involved considerable selectivity on the part of the Japanese themselves (“Western Technique, Japanese Spirit”). The whole purpose of selective Japanese westernization was to protect Japan against the West, rather than merely to submit to western cultural attractions. The emphasis in Japan was therefore on the technical and technological techniques of the West, rather than on literary and verbal culture. The Japanese slogan of “western technique, Japanese spirit” at the time captured this ambition to borrow technology from the West while deliberately protecting a substantial part of Japanese culture. In a sense, Japan’s technological westernization was designed to reduce the danger of other forms of cultural dependency.

The nature of westernization in Africa has been very different. Far from emphasizing western productive technology and reducing western life-styles and verbal culture, Africa has reversed the Japanese order of emphasis. Among the factors which have facilitated this reversal has been the role of the African university as a vehicle of Western influence on African culture.

If African universities had borrowed a leaf from the Japanese book of cultural selection, and initially concentrated on what is indisputably the West’s real area of leadership and marginal advantage (science and technology), the resultant African dependency might have been of a different kind. However, it is not too late. The process of reproducing intellectuals in Africa can still attempt to combine indigenous authenticity with universal rationalism. There is still hope not only for the reactivation of intellectualism in Africa’s orientation but also reinvigoration of Pan-Africanism.

Keynote address for CODESRIA’S 30th Anniversary on the general theme, “Intellectuals, Nationalism and the Pan-African Ideal”, Grand Finale Conference in Dakar, Senegal.