15/08/2026
In his book Binadamu na Maendeleo, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere argued that there was need for African Universities to actively participate in the growth of society and that of the direction of those institutions.
Nyerere noted that “Universities in Africa must try to deal objectively with the problems they investigate: they should analyse and describe them in a scientific manner; and from their accumulated knowledge they should suggest methods of dealing with them. But objectivity does not mean working in a vacuum. The university, whether it likes it or not, is part of the society. Both in the selection of the problems to be examined, and in the manner of dealing with them, this fact must be taken into account. It is part of that essential truth which a university has to promote.”
What Julius Nyerere observed many years ago remains important for us to take seriously today, because universities have to bridge the gap between its intelligentsia and the common society. The one problem again with relying on colonial models in our schools, which mimicked the social coexistence between the colonizer and colonized. Is that it imbues estrangement between African intellectual populations against their border community.
The ideal of attaining a Degree or Diploma, which to some extent remains rooted in the appealing-to-internal-alienation of European society, also highlights about the Western need to individualize progress by creating socioeconomic strata, which Nyerere feared, whose establishment rationalized the subjugation of the masses and exploitation of labour. This cultural behavior of individualistic progress is nominal to the Western world. In African culture often the habit of individual achievements like acquiring an academic Degree, appears to have antagonized the anchor of our community. This is why Nyerere emphasized that the university, whether it likes it or not, is part of the society in such a way that problems faced by ordinary people were also problems of the intellectuals and vice versa.
Because to the African person, colonial education consciously granted them a direct disconnect from their own villages and towns. Therefore Degrees and Diplomas made the educated African to look toward Europe and America, this is the same behavioral pattern colonialists maintained. African people today share the same colonial reflex, whereas the majority of society is confronted by the indifference of the so-called intellectual classes.
Bro Emma Okello Bro Emma Okello
