author	date	title
Mahmood Mamdani	Jan 2019	Decolonization, the Disciplines and the University

Steering Committee

1. Manan Ahmed (History, Columbia University)
2. Partha Chatterjee (Anthropology, Columbia University)
3. Rosinka Chaudhuri (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata)
4. Samer Frangie (Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) - AUB)
5. Dzodzi Tsikata (The Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana)
6. Mahmood Mamdani (Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Kampala)

Funding by: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for US $1,500,000 from Jan 1, 2019 - Dec 31, 2023. Grant # 1808-06062.

Overview of the Project

I. Focus and Themes

The institutional form of the modern African university derives from the colonial modern; the inspiration did not come from pre-colonial institutions. The model was a discipline-based, gated, community with a distinction between clearly defined groups (administrators, academics and fee-paying students). Its birthplace was the University of Humbolt in Berlin, a new type of university designed in the aftermath of Germany's defeat by France in 1810. Over the next century, this innovation spread to much of Europe, then the United States and from there to the rest of the world.

Not only the institutional form but the intellectual content of modern social sciences and humanities is also a product of the Enlightenment experience in Europe. The European experience was the raw material from which was forged the category human. However abstract, this category drew meaning from actual struggles within and outside Europe. Internally, the notion of human was an alternative to that of the Christian. It was a Renaissance response to Church orthodoxy. The intellectuals of Renaissance Europe looked to anchor their vision in a history older than that of Christianity. They found this in pagan Greece and imperial Rome, and self-consciously crafted these into a foundational legacy for Europe. Externally, it was a response to an entirely different set of circumstances -- not the changing vision of a self-reflexive and self-revolutionizing Europe but of a self-assertive Europe, reaching out, expanding, in a move that sought first to conquer the world, starting with the New World, then Asia and finally Africa, and then to transform and 'civilize' this world in its own image. This dual origin made for a contradictory legacy. The modern European university was a site for the study of the human. In their universal reach for the human, the humanities and the social sciences, both proclaimed the oneness of humanity and defined that oneness from a very European vantage point, as a sameness. We may find and study great examples of institutions of learning in the African world before European conquest -- in Timbuktu, Cairo, Tunis, Alexandria -- but these did not shape the contemporary African university, whether colonial or post-colonial. The decisive influence was the European university.

The African university began as a colonial project -- a top-down modernist project whose ambition was the conquest of society. The university was in the frontline of the colonial 'civilizing mission.' Properly understood, this 'civilizing mission' was the precursor, the original edition of the 'one-size-fits-all' project that we associate with Structural Adjustment Programs designed by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s. Its ambition was to create universal scholars, men and women who stood for excellence, regardless of context, and who would serve as the vanguard of the 'civilizing mission' without reservation, or remorse.

The first critical reflection on this colonial project took place in the nationalist movement. From the ranks of the nationalist movement emerged a different kind of intellectual, the public intellectual. If the hallmark of the global scholar was excellence, that of the public intellectual was relevance. Excellence was said to be universal, measured without regard to context; relevance, however, was necessarily contextual, place-specific.

The contest between the two unfolded at two very different campuses East Africa. Makerere University, established in 1922, was the paradigmatic colonial university. The University of Dar-es-Salaam, established at independence in 1963, would soon emerge as the flag-bearer of anti-colonial nationalism. They stood for two contrasting projects: the colonial university as the turf of the universal scholar and the nationalist university as home of the public intellectual.

The different visions were articulated by two different academics: Ali Mazrui and Walter Rodney. Mazrui called for a university true to its classical vision, as the home of the scholar "fascinated by ideas"; Rodney saw the university as the home of the public intellectual, a committed intellectual located in his or her time and place, and deeply engaged with the wider society. One moral of the story I want to tell is that we resist the temptation to dismiss one side and embrace the other. However compelling, these contrasting visions were anchored in two equally one-sided notions of higher education: relevance and excellence. At the same time, each contained something of value. Rather than choose between them, I suggest we identify the kernel of value in each through a dialectical approach.

Does place matter, as Walter Rodney claimed? Or do ideas matter, regardless of place, as Mazrui insisted? Obviously, place matters. If universities could be divorced from politics, if knowledge production can be immune from power relations, then place would not matter. But that is not the case. At the same time, ideas also do matter. If they did not, why have a university at all? This is to say that politics is not all.

The debate began at Makerere University in the early 60s, on the eve of state independence. The two sides to the debate lined up on familiar ground -- one side mobilized in defense of academic freedom, the other called for justice. The first round of change produced resounding victories for the broad nationalist camp which called for limiting the autonomy of the university, and of the faculty in particular, so as to put an end to racial privilege. They said the university should be national not only in name but also in appearance. To undermine the disciplinary nationalism and institutional autonomy which propped up the authority of the expatriate staff would not be possible without a strong role for the independent state in higher education. Dismissing academic freedom as a code word in defense of the status quo, they called for state intervention in the name of justice. It did not take long for the terms of the debate to change, and dramatically so. With the emergence of the single party regime, the university turned into an oasis where the practice of academic freedom allowed free political speech and a critique of the new order. Instead of a defense of racial privilege as at independence, many began to rethink academic freedom as the cutting edge of a critique of nationalist power.

It is in this context that Rajat Neogy founded Transition, a cross between a journal and a magazine, one in which public intellectuals wrote for a public that included both the gown and the town. Those who wrote in it included writers like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Nadime Gordimer, and Chinua Achebe, and politicians like Mwalimu Nyerere and Tom Mboya. In the main, however, Transition made a possible a regional conversation. Paul Theroux wrote 'Tarzan was an expatriate', an understanding of Tarzan and Jane as the first expatriates. Ali Mazrui wrote 'Nkrumah, The Leninist Czar,' an essay on authoritarianism with a socialist tilt and 'Tanzaphilia.' of which I will have more to say. In this latter essay, Mazrui contrasted an apparent 'ideological orientation' with a deeper epistemological reality that he called 'mode of reasoning.'

Compared to intellectual acculturation, ideological orientation is both superficial and changeable: "To be in favor of this country or that, to be attracted by this system of values rather than that, all are forms of ideological conversion. And under a strong impulse one can change one's creed. But it is much more difficult to change the process of reasoning which one acquires from one's total educational background. ... After all, French Marxists are still French in their intellectual style. Ideologically, they may have a lot in common with Communist Chinese or communist North Koreans. But in style of reasoning and the idiom of his thought, a French Marxist has more in common with a French liberal than with fellow communists in China and Korea. And that is why a French intellectual who is a Marxist can more easily cease to be a Marxist than he can cease to be a French intellectual." The year was 1967. If Mazrui evokes Foucault, let us keep in mind that Foucault would write about "discursive formations" in The Archaeology of Knowledge two years later, in 1969.

The Project

This project is the outcome of an ongoing reflection at the outset of the MPhil / PhD program at Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University. The MISR project has gone through a six year reflection based on the question: what should be the mission of the university in a post-colonial context and how should this mission be reflected in the curriculum. We seek not to introduce a separate field of study -- decolonization -- but to think of decolonization as a methodological imperative, a perspective in which to bathe, rethink and reshape all intellectual endeavors in the study of the humanities.

We now seek to expand what has hitherto been a single institution effort into a larger and comparative reflection, one that involves research, writing and curriculum development, involving the following institutions, under the intellectual guidance of particular individuals:

• The Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (Professor Dzodzi Tsikata)

• CAMES, American University of Beirut (Professor Samer Frangie)

• Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata (Professors Rosinka Chaudhuri)

• Ifriqiyya Colloquium, Columbia University (Professors Manan Ahmed, Mahmood Mamdani)

• Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University, Kampala (Professor Mahmood Mamdani)

We have formed a committee of 6, with at least one member from each participating institution, as an informal brain-storming, steering committee. Chaired by the PI, this committee shall continue to function through the course of the project.

The Changing Context

The development of higher education in Africa is basically a post-independence phenomenon. Except in South and North Africa, the number of universities founded in the colonial period can be counted on two hands. From one university in the colonial period, to 41 in three decades after independence, Nigeria has a total of 152 universities. Similarly, in Ghana, the National Accreditation Board's 2015 report recognised 77 Universities, 16 of which were public universities. East Africa had a single institution of higher learning, Makerere, during the colonial period. Today, it has almost a hundred. Having a national university was considered as much a hallmark of national independence as having a flag, an anthem, a central bank and a currency. If Makerere was the quintessential colonial university, Dar-es-Salaam stood as the hallmark of nationalist assertion. The fortunes of the African university dipped with the fiscal crisis of the African state and the entry of the Bretton Woods institutions, to bail out countries in financial trouble in return for subjecting their public budgets to a strict disciplinary regime. In this era of Structural Adjustment, too, Makerere was the model university.

The World Bank took hold of Makerere's planning in the late 1980s, around the same time the IMF took charge of the Ugandan treasury. The Bank's proposed a three-fold reform premised on the assumption that higher education is a private good. First, it argued that given that the benefit from higher education accrues to the individual, that individual should pay for it by way of fees. Today, nearly 90% of students at Makerere are fee-paying. Second, the Bank argued that the university should be run by autonomous departments and not by a centralized administration. This was done by a simple formula: by requiring that 80% of student fees should go to the student's disciplinary department or faculty, the Bank managed to starve the central administration of funds. Third, the Bank said that the curriculum should be revised and made market-friendly and more professional. To give two examples of the changes ushered in at this time: the Department of Geography began to offer a B.A. in Tourism; and the Institute of Linguistics began offering a B.A. in Secretarial Studies whereby a student would be equipped with secretarial skills in more than one language.

The Makerere model was exported to other universities in the region and around the continent over the next decade. In Nigeria, user-fees were introduced (in 1998) for education and health services. In Ghana, the "Akosombo Accord," adopted in 1997 introduced a cost-sharing measure that put tertiary institutions under pressure to contribute 'internally generated revenues' to fund their own programmes, and on students to pay Academic Facilities User Fees (AUF) and Residential Facilities User Fees. Neoliberalism further deepened the alienation of African universities and academics from African societies that was the result of the colonial antecedents of those African universities whose histories lay in the colonial project, and whose practices and curricula contradicted the nationalist commitment to nation-building and development of postcolonial Africa. It also deepened the construction of universities as conservative spaces where heterodox ideas and student activism were either not encouraged or actively squeezed out by direct confrontations with authoritarian governments and/or compliant university leaders. At different times, Ghana and Nigeria experienced such developments. Decades on, student spaces are currently dominated by religious and ethnic activism and a focus on school fees and teaching deficits. In the last few years though, there have been stirrings within student movements that have raised fundamental questions about tertiary education.

The developments in South Africa, that fees were rising around the same time as 'independence' -- transition to majority rule -- resonated with those around the continent. And it was no surprise that an expanded entry of black students into 'white' universities was followed by an expanded exit of more and more of the same students: either they were unable to keep up payments or they found it hard to get to grips with the disciplines in which they were enrolled. As these students looked for ways to explain their predicament, the only answers they could find seemed to lie in rising fees and a curriculum that bore little relationship to their life experiences, or family and community histories. The 'Rhodes must Fall' and the 'Fees Must Fall' movements in South Africa have engaged with topics which are of general interest to universities across Africa- questions such as the purpose of education, the institutional and intellectual cultures of Universities, the curriculum and the racial and gender composition of faculty and student body of educational institutions. To understand the changing face of the Humanities, this study will offer an opportunity for a comparative reflection on different regional responses in the broader context of the changing landscape of higher education.

The Problem

The intellectual in a post-colony has necessarily to straddle two locations, one as a scholar and the other as a public intellectual. The scholar is a member of the global community of scholars; the public intellectual is engaged with issues that concern the public, usually local or national. If the former tends to avail of a scholarly discourse, the latter combines this discourse with a measure of social activism. A product of the modern university, the distinction between the scholar and the public intellectual has been repeatedly challenged in various contexts. We have seen that in East Africa, this distinction was at the heart of several debates, in particular those carried out in the literary/political magazine Transition in the sixties, and that between Ali Mazrui of Makerere University and Walter Rodney of the University of Dar es Salaam in the late sixties and early seventies. In Ghana, these questions came to the fore with the Kwame Nkrumah's intervention in higher education: what should be the purpose of a university in an independent African country? What should be the object of African Studies in an African university? During the leftist moment of the sixties in the Arab world, both scholars and public intellectuals crossed over this moment. In the contemporary period, these questions have been evoked with the inclusion of research into artistic practices. In the South Asian academy, the question has been raised most productively by the Subaltern Studies School. The challenge in a post-colony is to link the epistemological to the political.

With this background in mind, we propose a comparative reflection, research and writing project that will focus on a series of themes while being sensitive to the difference in regional and temporal contexts. Our overall objective is to explore colonization and decolonization as a frame for critical theory and historical research. This would mean not thinking of knowledge as some kind of stable formation on long historical periods but as critical thought that comes out of reflection over historical turning points -- such as colonization and decolonization -- that create space for the encounter of historically different modes of thinking. We shall seek to study critical events in different regional and national contexts. By 'critical' developments we mean developments during which the coming together of different ways of thought may be open to observation and debate.

Though our central focus will be the colonial and the anti- and post-colonial, we shall be concerned to rethink the premodern from this vantage point, not necessarily as precursor to the colonial, nor as a particular against a universal modern, but as a historical resource for (an)other universalism(s). To take one example, recent scholarship on the Indian Ocean is beginning to think of Vasco de Gama's voyages at the end of the 15^th^ century as having a dual consequence: practically, cutting off links that constituted precolonial Indian Ocean trade, but also restructuring the imagination by expunging the historical memory of these routes. The scholarship that is growing around the official Chinese initiative called 'One Belt One Road' is refreshing that memory as a resource for the present and the future. In the Arab world, 1948 and 1967 appear as major turning points for a rethinking of this history. To take another example, the conventional periodization of South and Southeast Asian history into the pre-modern and the modern, with the advent of European colonial rule providing the dividing line, has been complicated by recent historians by the use of the concept of the Early Modern which, in different fields such as statecraft, economy, literature and art, has produced very different chronologies and trajectories of change marking the emergence of something significantly new both before and after colonialism. To take a third example, the comparative study of premodern and modern trans-African slaveries in a research network jointly established by the Ifriqiyya Colloquium at Columbia University and the Makerere Institute of Social Research raises questions about the prevailing tendency to think premodern slaveries through lenses forged during the study of modern, trans-Atlantic plantation slavery. This study raises larger questions about the relationship between slavery and state formation in the premodern context.

Within this larger historical re-think, we shall identify two particular themes for reflection, research and writing. Admittedly, these themes are very broad. We arrived at them after discussion among the five participating institutions. They reflect the range of interests that animate the researchers and doctoral students at our institutions. Our objective is not to address the themes comprehensively but to define two umbrella themes under which doctoral and post-doctoral students will be encouraged to pursue initiatives.

It will be the purpose of the Institutes and Workshops to introduce participants to the relevant literature and debates on decolonization generally and the two themes specifically. The goal would be to guide each participant to adapt their existing or intended research project to address questions raised in the course of each workshop. In contrast, the Institutes will be designed to focus on the research projects prepared by each participant. It is those who go through the workshops and whose proposals are critically shaped by institutes who will comprise the research team.

The University and the Disciplines: The colonial and post-independence histories of the universities have varied trajectories in the postcolonial world. We shall study specific countries, their universities and the attempts to decolonize or nationalize the humanities and social science disciplines. This attempt is marked by two sets of debates: historically, the first is born of the nationalist critique of colonial knowledge forms; out of this is born a subset of debates about what constitutes national knowledge. The second set of debates have developed around two separate but related discussions: one a discussion on inter-disciplinarity that raised questions about disciplinary nationalisms, and the second a specifically post-colonial discussion on the relationship of the university to the post-colonial state. Key amongst these was the university and country-wide academic conference on 'relevance of higher education in a socialist Tanzania,' one that followed the Arusha Declaration of 1967, declaring the country's goal as one of developing 'socialism.' This conference led to a protracted debate on disciplinary vs inter-disciplinary education and the call for a 'continuous' process of curriculum reform.

Earlier debates in the colonial period that juxtaposed 'excellence' to 'relevance' in the context of the relevance of higher education for national emancipation gave way to post-colonial debates around the 'relevance' of higher education to 'development,' given that the university remained deeply embedded within a developing economy and state that required modern skills for new occupations and expansive networks created by modern technologies. The specific forms of the critique of colonial knowledge differed from country to country and region to region. For example, the close association in Africa of the discipline of anthropology with colonial officials and missionaries led to the virtual disappearance of that discipline from African universities after independence, whereas in India an entire discipline of Indian anthropology was created to deal with the supposedly unique institution of caste in the context of equal citizenship in the new republic.

One debate very important to study in the Arab world pertains to the question of the Arabization of knowledge, which did not only imply a linguistic translation, but also opened the way for a conceptual translation, associated mostly with the nationalist and Marxist frameworks, dominant in the fifties and sixties. It is out of this question that the critique of Orientalism, that preceded Said's 1978 book, emerged. And it is one that was related to the question of the historiography of the Arab world, and the stakes of a non-colonial history. Another, albeit more local, example has to do with the emergence of public universities, for instance in Lebanon in the late fifties. The entry of a public university in a field dominated by two universities established by French and American missionaries in the 19^th^ century, led to a debate on the meaning of public university, the question of the language of instruction, the issue of translation, and again in a moment of leftist ascendancy. In a similar moment, non-academic spaces of intellectual production, around political parties, magazines or intellectual figures, were proliferating.

Tracing this history until the present, we can see the demise of the public university and the multiplication of private universities providing services in exchange for high fees, in line with the neo-liberalization of the academic field. This tendency can be observed across the several regions that will be of interest to our study. In the Arab world, we see a renewed proliferation of non-academic spaces of intellectual production, especially around art institutions. The whole question of translation and Arabization has been taken over by the emergence of gulf based universities that are now acting as the funder of a large swath of academic and intellectual production.

University education in the post-colonial world has exploded since independence. In 1947, undivided India had a total of 20 universities; today, the three countries have nearly a thousand public and private universities. In the early sixties, Nigeria (which is home to a quarter of the African population) had one university with 1,000 students; three decades later, it had 41 universities with 131,000 students. Similar figures can be cited for East Africa which too had a single university at independence, Makerere University. Along these lines, we shall study the logic behind Nkrumah's initiative to establish an Institute of African Studies in Ghana, or the establishment of the University of Dar-es-Salaam at independence, or the establishment of Jawaharlal Nehru University in India as an institution of advanced social science research and training for the first postcolonial generation. At the same time, we intend to study how premodern institutions of learning were restructured and rethought under the influence of the discipline-driven, fee-paying, diploma-issuing, gated, modern Western university. One among these will be a study of al-Azhar in Cairo.

A key discipline in the modern university has been that of history. In the post-colonial university, this has presented two research challenges in the study of modes of history-writing with a focus on (a) mythical narratives of origin that have shaped individual cultures, and (b) the articulation of modernity with local histories from a conceptual perspective. The discipline of history has come under considerable stress in the post-colonial university for several reasons. First, the very framing of the modern European discipline of history as primarily the history of nations and the denial of the consciousness of nationhood to the colonized peoples led to the search for nationalist histories in colonial and postcolonial countries. However, in each country, there were often contending versions of nationalist history, reflecting unequal relations of power within society. These disputes were reflected as methodological debates within the historical discipline over the critical evaluation of sources, the establishment of archives, the use of mythical or legendary narratives, the relative value of textual as against oral accounts, etc. Second, even though professional historians located in the university have tried to stamp their authority over the writing of national history, the production of historical narratives has proliferated outside the university. This has forced historians to intervene in public debates where the protocols are not necessarily under their control. Third, since universities in most postcolonial countries are heavily dependent on government funding, history departments in universities often become embroiled in political controversies over curriculum, textbooks and research priorities, leading to serious erosion of the academic autonomy of the university. Once again, the situation is not necessarily the same in every region. In some cases, as in India, the study of history has both expanded and become more contentious; in other contexts, like in Africa, both governments and international donors have tended to devalue the study of history from a 'developmental' perspective: the overwhelming tendency has been to fold the study of history into newly established departments of 'development studies.' Hence, a comparative study of the history discipline in three or four countries will be extremely instructive.

Language, Nation and the University: We begin with the question of the relation between the colonial language (English, French, Portuguese) and local languages, of the standardization of particular dialects as languages in the course of state construction and/or missionary efforts at conversion, both as a way to reflect on the relationship between decolonization and multilingualism. In this context, we shall examine the relation between literacy and orality, folklore and canonical literature, standard language and dialects, rooted languages and lingua franca. A comparative study of Kiswahili, Urdu and Afrikaans that reflects on history and identity in the context of pre-colonialism and colonialism will be fascinating. A study of the development of Afrikaans during apartheid from a folkloric language in the colonial period to a language of high culture, politics, administration and intellectual discourse -- and the relative success/failure of Swahili to follow that same path -- will be instructive.

We have already mentioned the importance of studying the question of the Arabization of knowledge from the vantage point of decolonization. It opens on other questions, such as the relationship between the Arabic language and nationalist (and even religious) ideology. Kurdish, Berber and francophone literature has been some of its victims, with the latter the question of colonialism being more prominent. The varied examples of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh -- three South Asian countries -- in managing multiple languages with instruction and research in the universities are striking. While colonial higher education was carried out in English, universities such as Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Allahabad, Banaras or Lahore were closely tied to the standardization of modern Indian print languages such as Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu. After independence, the spread of higher education has been accompanied by a stratification of higher education. At the upper end, elite universities, both public and private, foster advanced research and post-graduate education in English and seek to maintain close links with global academic networks. Lower down the scale, undergraduate as well as post-graduate education is provided in the regional languages in order to supply school and college teachers, regional bureaucrats, lawyers and journalists, and a large mass of young people seeking upward mobility and social respectability. The stratification of the universities is tied to the social and political process of democratization as well as changing relations of power. This phenomenon will comprise a significant component of our project.

II. Process and Activities

The project will develop around to types of activities, each with a different focus. Workshops and training institutes will be designed with an eye on the needs of doctoral students. Their disciplinary orientation reflects a pedagogical intention. Symposia are designed to bring together participating faculty. We shall have a preparatory symposium (Year 1), three workshops and institutes (Years 2, 3, and 4), and a concluding Symposium (Year 5). If finances permit, we shall seek to have another symposium in Year 3.

Preparatory Conference (2019): The preparatory conference will take place in Kampala in March-April 2019. Each member of the consortium will present an individual program that will take the focus and themes paper as the starting point and propose an institution-specific program of research.

Workshops and Institutes (2020, 2021, 2022): We shall hold three sets of workshops and institutes on three different disciplinary themes: the Historical Method (2020), cultural studies (2021) and Political Theory (2022). Though disciplinary in focus, each workshop will be designed set in a wider inter-disciplinary context that highlights the central challenge of the project: decolonization.

Training Workshops will take place in three different places. Each workshop will include 3 to 5 students from each participating institution and a total of 3-5 seminar leaders / lecturers drawn from different institutions. A further three global scholars will be invited after we have a clear idea of the interests of the students coming to the workshop. This group of around 20-25 persons will meet over three days. Out of the Training Workshop will be selected a cohort of 10 persons who will come together for an Institute of 5-7 days. They will be joined by three scholars of global standing. Training Workshops will focus more on lectures and instruction; Institutes will be more participatory. Participants will (a) present own work, (b) do collective readings for reading seminars, (c) participate in roundtables on particular topics, including pedagogical discussions for people who seek to make programmatic statements. There will be cultural activities and site visits between seminars and lectures, and evening walks with discussions.

Workshops will be held in different locations. All Institutes will take place in Kampala, unless individual partner institutions volunteer to shoulder the responsibility of hosting an institute. Partners will cover some of the local costs.

Research: There will be research funding for students and faculty selected for the Institute on each theme. The students will be registered at four of the five collaborating institutions (all except Columbia University). They will be located in Kampala, Legon, Beirut and Kolkata. They will be registered in five-year doctoral programs. This application seeks funding for only the three-year research component for each student. We aim to secure full funding for all five years for each student. The reason we did not include full funding in this project application is because of the sense that it might inflate the final budget and compromise the entire project.

Year 5 Symposium (2023): Research funding will be for five years for doctoral students and four years for faculty. It will commit the recipient to produce a publishable paper for presentation at the Year 5 Symposium. A working draft will be presented at the Year 3 symposium should it be held. Doctoral students at the participating institutions are usually on a five year cycle, out of which two to three years are committed to research. We would like to ensure the three year research funding to every student and then look for funding for the remaining two years, hopefully from Mellon, if not from other donors.

The five members of this initiative commit themselves to this project on the basis of a shared perspective summed up in the paper titled focus and themes. The research will develop on the basis of loosely connected but separately run research programs. Student researchers will benefit from a joint training and reflection process which will comprise the above mentioned Training Workshops and Institutes. Each institutional participant will present a set of initial research statements at the Preparatory Conference in Year 1 (2019), a progress report at the Year 3 Symposium and the results of the research will be presented at the Year 5 Symposium (2023). We shall invite four scholars with global standing to act as discussants at each Symposium.

Publications: A selection of individual papers will be published in The MISR Review (or other institutionally-based journals) and the final set of papers will be published in three edited and thematically organized books. Participating institutions will at the Preparatory Conference in Year 1 brainstorm the possibility of a more popular literary/political publication, modelled after the hybrid magazine/journal Transition published in Kampala in the 1960s.

What will Success Look Like? We have two responses to this question: one is immediate, from the point of view of all collaborating institutions, and thus the project as a whole; the other is over the medium run, from the point of the view of the lead institution, MISR. Immediately, success would be measured in publications, training outputs, and the development of research networks leading, hopefully, to more exciting collaborative work in the future, exploiting the connections made in these five years. For the lead institution, Makerere Institute of Social Research, the intermediate goal is to develop an Inter-Disciplinary Centre for Decolonization Studies as an institutional base from which to deepen the research program and further develop the international collaboration initiated by this project.