Revisiting Makerere and the life there 27 years ago

The Freedom Square at Makerere University is popular for students' meetings

Last week I visited my alma matter, Makerere University, as part of my photo research tour of Uganda.

It happened to be the week when freshers (or what in the United States are termed “freshmen”) arrive at the university to start their undergraduate studies.

Many were loitering around the campus, looking for their halls of residence, lecture rooms and carrying the A4 manila envelopes associated with naïve freshers.

It brought back memories of my time at the university, most of which are ambiguous and some of which are still bitter 27 years later.

I had joined Makerere in September 1987 from Namasagali College in Kamuli District, a school run by a Catholic priest called Fr Damien Grmes and run more or less like a police state.

The public perception of Namasagali is that this was a school all about dancing, swimming and partying. It was, in reality, a tightly-controlled environment much like North Korea.

We were all required to be at the main hall for certain events like the weekends of dances, video shows, the annual disco-dancing competition, the annual Mr and Miss Namasagali beauty contest and the annual premiere of the school’s famous dance-drama productions.

This iron-fisted discipline and enforced participation in school events in some sense bound us together as a community.

We all witnessed or took part in the same events, unless sick or with official exemption to remain behind in the dormitory.

Every Sunday morning, Fr Grimes gave us a pep talk on life called conference, in the main hall. Some, if not most, of that European philosophy went over our heads.

Namasagali, perhaps, was a police state more in the vein of Singapore than North Korea, when I think about it now: state control, enforced cleanliness, enforced efficiency and enforced entertainment.

Changes from high school
It was a shock to me, then, to come from our Singapore and into the place called Makerere University. The first shock was the total freedom at university.

No roll call before lectures, no lights out, no questions of moral behaviour, boys and girls visiting each other’s halls of residence at almost any time of day and any day of the week.

The theory was that we were now adults and were responsible for the way we lived our lives. I begged to disagree then and still beg to disagree to this day with the notion of total freedom of that kind.

It ruined many a student, especially girls who came from all-girl schools like Namagunga, Nabisunsa and Gayaza, most never having tasted such “freedom” and in short order, falling prey to the cunnings of their fellow male students.

Many “Bad Boys” and “Players” at university and coming from town in the evenings to “bench” at female halls of residence discovered that these bright girls might have scored top grades at A-Level and were enrolled for courses like Medicine, Law, Engineering, Veterinary Medicine and Commerce, but as the American band DeBarge sang in 1985, “The heart’s not so smart.”

As most men know, it doesn’t seem to take much to deceive a girl, even one studying an advanced university degree, and many lives were ruined as a result.

First lectures
Then we attended our first classes. Lecturers appeared before the class and started delivering their first notes of the first papers.

One morning, a professor called Mahood Mamdani appeared before us to teach us Political Science 1.1. He just started lecturing us without sufficient background explanation into why this subject was important and what role understanding it would play in our future public lives.

A few days later, a Professor Byarugaba also appeared to take us through another aspect of Political Science, a Mr Rwabukwali in Sociology, a Mr Kirumira in Methods of Social Research and so on.

Nobody took us through what these courses meant and where, after we graduated, we would fit into Ugandan society.

That is the part I think Makerere University failed us. This historic African university failed to give us a philosophical induction into the philosophy of education, society and the modern nation-state.

Without this anchor, most of us were left with the impression that we were being educated simply to pass and having passed and obtained our degrees, hassle for jobs, buy furniture, cars and “start building” as the end purpose.

There is so much Makerere could have made us see. Some might argue that it was for us to discover new knowledge for ourselves and not for the university to spoon-feed us. They might be right, but it would have helped if our lecturers and wardens gave us just a little guidance.

Some like me and others joined university when we were still teenagers, so we were not exactly trained to search out matters for ourselves.

Makerere University should invite some of us to give lectures to freshers to help them develop a broad understanding of what their degrees will mean for the country and the world, beyond earning one a job.

I feel strongly that this overview, this sense of our purpose, is so crucial and many would have made so much better use of their university years had this been made clear in their minds.

Some of the greatest changes in world history over the last 40 to 50 years have been from American universities, everything from Apple to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and others (albeit that some of these students elected to drop out of college once the global, historic implication of their computer and digital inventions became clear to them.)

There is no reason for us to regard university in Uganda and in Africa as places of boring theory to be endured for the sake of earning the degree that will earn us bread and money.

Universities since their modern character started taking shape in medieval Europe, have always been incubators for world-changing ideas, research and products. Makerere University should return its students to that first sense of purpose at the time it was created in 1926.

So much has changed since the 1980s in Uganda. We used to laugh off those at Makerere who studied music, Dance and Drama as a lightweight course. But today, music, dance and drama is one of the most prominent and highest-paying careers in Uganda.