
Imperialism is many things in one. There is social imperialism, economic imperialism, technological imperialism, political imperialism, academic imperialism and intellectual imperialism.
In this article I want to focus on intellectual imperialism.
Intellectual imperialism is the practice of using power to dismiss or denigrate alternative ideas, perspectives and methodologies. It can also refer to the prioritisation of Western knowledge systems over others.
In the context of African studies, intellectual imperialism can be seen in the ‘coloniality’ of knowledge, the cognitive empire and the Africanist enterprise. These factors can influence how knowledge is organised, authorised, and governed.
In the context of Uganda, universities remain, as in the past, the main knowledge centres where knowledge is organised, authorised and governed. Here, our universities have continued to organise, authorise and govern knowledge within units or packets of knowledge called disciplines within which the knowledge workers specialise in small bits of knowledge within each discipline.
At the highest level of specialisation, one is awarded a degree called doctor of philosophy – usually without philosophy, unless a student has done her and his knowledge work in the knowledge field of philosophy.
This means that each knowledge specialist must first prove that she or he belongs to a discipline before he or she can proceed with her or his knowledge work. If his or her work crosses disciplinary boundaries, it will be rejected, first in the department where she or he belongs. The disciplines are grouped under knowledge territories called faculties or schools. Where there is disciplinary cooperation, this will occur within the discipline (intradisciplinary cooperation rather than across disciplines.
Even within the knowledge territories, there is little opportunity for knowledge cooperation between students at all levels of education in the disciplines. At Makerere University, for example, the only time they interacted was during the vibrant intellectual debates of the 1960s, 1990s and early second millennium.
Within the university as a whole, the work of approving who gets a degree is done within the pertinent department, and then, ultimately the university senate. This is how the ‘coloniality’ of knowledge dictated that disciplinarity culture of knowledge production remained supreme and produced disciplinary graduates and scholars academically. This continued to be the case until now when advocacy for interdisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary or non-disciplinary cultures of education is advancing globally, far less so nationally and continentally.
There is need to decolonise intellectualism in the colonially and neo-colonially connected countries such as Uganda to bring an end to coloniality of knowledge, whose production continues to produce for us graduates and scholars we do not need for the 21st of the Worldwide Wide Web and artificial intelligence (AI).
By not decolonising intellectualism, it means we have decided to carry intellectual imperialism associated with disciplinary culture of education well into the future. This implies continued intellectual dependency and cultural imperialism of old. It means we are not challenging the intellectual imperialism of the western paradigm of disciplinarity.
Indeed in recent times, Ugandan universities in particular and African universities in general have in fact recently enacted academic policies to underlie the supremacy of disciplinarity in a century that demands academic and intellectual decolonisation in the face of proliferating accommodation of alternative knowledge production cultures of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity or nondisciplinarity, all of which emphasise, greater interaction between knowledge workers, teamwork, sustainability and the generation of future-ready professionals.
If we continue to glorify disciplinary academic and intellectual processes, we shall continue to perpetuate the coloniality of knowledge structure and function in genial and knowledge production in particular. We shall be in the 21st century but not really part of it. We shall belong to the 20th Century more – a century of disciplinary knowledge production, professionals and scholars, than to the 31st century – the century of new and different knowledge production cultures of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity or non-disciplinarity, Worldwide Web and thinking machines (artificial intelligence).
We need our universities to transform themselves into integrated and integrating universities, so that they are no longer captive institutions with captive minds. Captive minds cannot create and innovate in a century demanding new types of graduates and scholars active in new knowledge production cultures, are employable anywhere in the world in their fields of expertise and can engage in critical thinking, critical reasoning, critical analysis and problem-solving without fear or favour.
Otherwise, our graduates will be increasingly irrelevant to our craze for development, transformation and progress and more relevant to the revamped mind captivity and physical captivity of modern slavery; meaning shall have wasted time, energy and money producing people we don’t need for the 21st century and beyond.
What is important is not ‘massification’ of education to produce “masses” of graduates with academic “paper” qualifications, but people who will be relevantly employed in a diminishing village in a global economy dominated by the World Wide Web and thinking machines. The World Wide Web and thinking machines are questioning the massification of education and demanding graduates who do not have captive minds but can practise critical thinking, critical reasoning, critical analysis and problem-solving without fear or favour.
What is the use of masses and masses of graduates only useful to mind colonisers and slave owners, however, educated they are in their disciplines in which they are actually captives and unable to think and see beyond the rigid walls of the disciplines?
No! We must transit from captive minds and captive universities on the way to real liberation of the Ugandan mind and country! We must free ourselves from intellectual imperialism of a new emerging empire of Uganda (e.g. Serunkuma) being built by President Tibuhaburwa Museveni in which the desired intellectuals are those who engage in conspiracy of silence and cannot engage in critical thinking, critical reasoning, critical analysis and problem-solving.
The Ugandan mind is under the tight control of President Tibuhaburwa from top to bottom – in the universities and the rest of society. He has been helped by his tight control of the country politically and ideologically. He has been able to dismiss his adversaries as political nonstarters, ideologically empty and only interested in the presidency. He has also been able to divide and rule while successfully sowing the seeds of political underdevelopment and political illiteracy across all social strata in the country.
In the universities he has been able to separate the social sciences and the humanities from the natural sciences using money as his tool. He has also been able to exclude intellectual development from the universities, making them concentrate on academicism and/or scholasticism and on the generation and sustenance of a chain of academic jargons, away from the total society whose problems now seem to be only for him to solve without any theoretical support from the universities.
Captive minds, captive universities, captive state, captive politics, captive generation, captive future will not fit us in the century of great changes in knowledge production and communications
For God and my country
- A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.
About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)
The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).
Further reading
Afonso Albuquerque (2024). Media, intellectual and cultural imperialism today. History of Media Studies. https://hms.mediastudies.press/pub/am-de-albuquerque/release/2 Visited on 15 January 2025 at 11:19 am EAT
Chang Da Wan (?). Captive Minds. The Association of Commonwealth Universities. https://www.acu.ac.uk/the-acu-review/captive-minds/ Visited at 11:36 am EAT
Donald A. Clelland and Wilma A. Dunaway (2021). Toward Theoretical Liberation: Challenging the Intellectual Imperialism of the Western Race Paradigm. Journal of Labor and Society 24 (2021) 487–524 https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d984d648-f649-4f68-a30c-b69a4211d5b5/content Visited on 15 January 2025 at 11:45 am EAT
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2023). Intellectual imperialism and decolonisation in African studies. Third World Quarterly, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2211520 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2023.2211520 Visited on 15 January 2025 at 11>05 pm EAT.
ROAPE (2023). What is the role of radical intellectualism in Uganda? ROAPE, February 13 2023. https://roape.net/2023/02/13/what-is-the-role-of-the-radical-intellectual-in-uganda/ Visited on 15 January 2025 at 10:14 am EAT.
Syed Hussein Alatas (2000). Intellectual Imperialism: Definition, Traits, and Problems. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science,Vol. 28, No. 1 (2000), pp. 23-45 (23 pages) Published By: Brill
Svetlana Sharonova, N.V. Trubnikova, Natalia Erokhova and Helena A. Nazarova (2018). Intellectual Imperialism and national education systems. January 2018 XLinguae 11(2):338-351 DOI:10.18355/XL.2018.11.02.27 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325211830_Intellectual_colonialism_and_national_education_systems Visited on 15 January 2025 at 11:15 am EAT
Yusuf Serunkuma (2021). The New Intellectuals of Empire. ROAPE, July 1 2021. https://roape.net/2021/07/01/the-new-intellectuals-of-empire/ Visited on 15 January 2025 at 11:22 am EAT