The Academia is a Marketplace: History, Context and Decolonization at Makerere University

Abstract

I attempt two things in this article: The first is a response to Mahmood Mamdani's framing of African academics who engage in academic‐consultancy as “native informers” who do not engage in “original knowledge production.” Mamdani's framing mobilizes disapproval noting that these native‐informer‐academics pander to the questions set outside the continent by an outsider with an oft out‐of‐context agenda. Thus, they are mere “supervisors of data collection.” After Marx, I argue that African academics do not choose to be native informers, but are conditioned to it by the material conditions in which they live. Indeed, the academia is actually a marketplace. My argument seeks foregrounds an intimate relationship that the academia shares with a country's economy and politics. Secondly, this essay argues against “the conditioning limits of colonialism” in postcolonial studies. Despite being conscripts to a colonial modernity, the agency of the African academic ought to be read as independent. Across human history, empires, religious movements and contacts with powerful movements of different forms‐including colonialism and capitalism—either violently or persuasively re‐ordered the economic‐political conditions in which less powerful actors exercised their agency. However, actors under the new regime of power maintained their agency and were responsible for their actions. Tying into the first fold, I argue that being a native informer is neither a passive engagement, but one that is liberating in the sense that the native informer often remodels the agenda of the outsider to ends otherwise unintended often to suit a local demand/context.