adminIt 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 seventy-one-year-old Ugandan of Indian descent has delved in such research areas as identity studies, international politics, colonialism and post-colonialism, 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 1946 in Kathiawar, Gujarat in India. At the age of two he arrived with his parents in the Kampala part of Uganda which has remained his home. His family is one of the Indian families that were expelled by Idi Amin from Uganda in 1972.
Being “from here but not of here” is the postcontiental description that Mamdani gives to himself as an intellectual who has been a citizen of America, the United Kingdom, India, Tanzania and South Africa.
It is no accident that Mamdani rejects the idea of Area Studies and even African Studies as nonsensical. It is his belief that knowing and knowledge does not have geographic and epistemic boundaries, where Zimbabwe gets to be known only by Zimbabweans and South Africa by South Africans, for Mamdani the entire world is out there to be studied and understood from anywhere by anyone with the capability, for instance ideology cannot be ID-eology as some narrow South African scholars imagine. Mahmood Mamdani has installed himself as an African scholar of the world with a planetary and postcontinental intellectual and political sensibility.
In his study and publications on the Rwanda Genocide, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Darfur Genocide in Sudan, Mamdani has been able to study these political events and processes as world events not simple African historical episodes, such worldiness is an intellectual and political attitude that comes from a postcontinental philosophical sensibility, a deep and wide understanding of the world. For that reason, nativists, racists, tribalists, some nationalists and xenophobes have not suffered Mahmood Mamdani gladly.
At the University of Cape Town from 1996 to 1999 he developed what became called “the Mamdani Affair” when he as a Professor of African studies designed a course that made the study of slavery and colonialism compulsory, well ahead of Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall, white South African professors from the apartheid era felt directly confronted and the mother of all intellectual debates erupted, a high voltage and charged debate in which Mamdani drew from his world experience to punish his much unprepared interlocutors and adversaries. In argument, written or spoken, Mamdani left unchecked can be the proverbial one-man 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
Mamdani recalls an event in 1963 when the FBI knocked on his room in New York after midnight and demanded to know his relationship with a man called Marx. “I don’t know him, has he died?” the terrified student asked, “he died long ago, stay away from Marxism” cautioned the officers. From there on Mamdani became a Marxist, introduced by the FBI, and Marxism did not stop him from critiquing the limits of Marxism and political economy analysis in Africa.
Through the platform of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Mamdani has together with other veteran African scholars participated in the mentorship of thousands of young African scholars that have in their turn become productive intellectuals.
Mamdani has emphasised the difference between a scholar and a public intellectual, with a public intellectual exemplied by Walter Rodney as one who goes beyond the call of formal duties to pursue social justice for himself and society. Where Mahmood Mamdani has fundamentally parted ways with most senior African scholars of note is in his humble approach to teaching and supervision of younger scholars. Scholarship development, that is the habit of grooming young scholars into successful intellectuals, is for Mamdani a vocation and not a profession, a mission not a job.
He has been rightly accused of turning his students into his disciplines and this has not been by bullying and bludgeoning his protégés into the Mamdani cult; it is by humble tutelage that he has created a dedicated following of Mamdanian thinkers that swear by his name. Not for Mamdani is that arrogant professorship where the prof is the magistrate who passes wounding and harsh judgements on the work of novices.
Those students that do not tow the prof’s line or are seen as competition are bludgeoned with toxic condemnations of their work while mediocre favourites have their substandard efforts commended by the prof who is willing to throw his or her professorial weight in turning nonsense into sense defending the mediocrity of disciples. The 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: [email protected]
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