The Long ‘68: African Universities, Decolonization, and the Emergence of a World University System

• In Event: Legacies of 1968: Emergent Transnationalisms and Recurrent Crises

Abstract

If Homi Bhabha’s reading of Frantz Fanon is correct, and an “emergency” is “also always a state of emergence,” then the crises of African colonialism and the struggles for national independence created the moment in which African universities emerged as major locations of world knowledge production. For example, in the years after independence, the University of Dar es Salaam contained an intellectual community comprising of Immanuel Wallerstein (United States), Isaa Shivji (Tanzania), Walter Rodney (Guyana), Mahmood Mamdani (Uganda), Lionel Cliffe (United Kingdom), Giovanni Arrighi (Italy), David Apter (United States), John Saul (Canada), Terence Ranger (Britain), among many others. The focus on the radical potentialities produced within higher education during the decade-long revolution known as May ’68, however, has commonly been framed as centering on European and North American universities. This paper argues, however, that much is gained by taking a longer, and more spatially diverse, view of May ’68—one that includes the political and intellectual struggles made possible within newly decolonized African universities. In looking at the political and intellectual foment that defined institutions such as Makerere University and University of Dar es Salaam, it becomes evident that May ’68 not only drew inspiration from African decolonization, but that this decade long revolution was a trans-continental response to an emerging the “world university system.”

Author

• Isaac Kamola, Trinity College