Last week we asked why Uganda seems to have many more citizens pursuing advanced degrees from abroad, yet their impact is barely noticeable.

I think the reason our holders of Master’s and doctorate degrees are unable to transform their countries is tied in with the reason, in the first place, that took them to the West for these higher degrees: the fascination with the White western countries is an epidemic all across Africa.

Writing in her 1964 book on the history of Makerere University titled: They Build For The Future, Margaret McPhearson touched on this African “maalo”, this obsession with “further studies” in White, western countries, already significant as early as the 1950s even when Uganda was still peaceful and prosperous:

“The problem of students breaking off studies at Makerere on the offer of an overseas scholarship was not entirely new…[There] had been several cases of students accepting a place and then relinquishing it on receiving a bursary to go overseas.” (Page 99)

All this would be fine if our African societies were built around applied knowledge. But what one senses is that the real value of a Master’s degree or PhD is to offer another rung up the ladder of social visibility and become a symbol of success --- in Africa, as in Uganda, success remains primarily measured in social rather than intellectual terms.

There is a fact that most people simply want to deny, refute, and argue against --- it is the fact of certain distinct and foundational differences between the Blacks and Whites.

Contrary to what the American social thinker Abraham Maslow propounded in his 1950 work on the human hierarchy of needs, human beings are not all the same: the White people live by their heads, the Blacks by their hearts and Asians by their hands.

The Whites start off satisfying the basic material needs en route to the more abstract pursuits, while for the Black people --- be they in continental Africa, Black Europe, Black America, or the Caribbean --- the pursuit of education, ideas, research, money, and business success all climax in our real self-actualisation which is social status.

If this were not so, what explains the fact that most of Uganda’s educated elite, complete with advanced post-graduate degrees, are still generally better known and regarded for the homes they have built, the four-wheel cars they drive, parties they throw or attend, and the people they date than for the books they have published or scientific breakthroughs registered?

Every year on average, 50,000 new book titles are published in Britain, 70,000 in Russia, and 150,000 in the United States. Last week I started compiling a list of all books published by Ugandans since independence and so far, I doubt that the list will get to 1,000 titles since 1962.

As the British management consultant and author Alistair Mant put it in his 1983 book Leaders We Deserve: “In career systems, once you begin to be promoted on the basis of reputation rather than output, you will be difficult to stop…All you then require is a modicum of talent (sufficient to avoid embarrassing blunders) and immense sustaining energy. A lot of talent may be a…hindrance.” (Page 127)

Hence, the basic university degree was read at Makerere or other universities in Uganda, but for a middle class Ugandan to go abroad to the western world for a Master’s or doctorate degree has become a little akin to the trip to Mecca and Medina by Muslims; by attending university in the West, you have now attained a special status, your pilgrimage turning you from mere Hajj into an academic Al-Hajj.

The kind of person who seeks and needs a Master’s or PhD from the western world is no conqueror, no original thinker, no problem solver, no questing and scientific mind but an ordinary soul, content to aim for social and financial security.

I have attended staff meetings, workshops, and conferences of every kind but I never fail to be struck by the fact that we Africans appear not to have been made for advanced thought. So embarrassing it is how ordinary the thought pattern of even the brightest or best paid amongst us is, no matter what schools we attended or how “exposed” we are.

As J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario commented in an essay published on August 12, 2004: “Blacks have a self-assured ‘bright’ talkative personality, which leads many people to over-estimate their abstract reasoning ability.”;

Mediocrity seems to be the preferred basis for promotion to head Uganda’s corporations, government departments and even universities.
The foreign scholarships that are given to Uganda’s “elite” students are simply another facet of foreign aid, and many of us know by now that foreign aid does not transform nations from backwardness into developed societies.

Because of all these elements, Ugandan society --- with droves in the workforce who own higher degrees from abroad --- is actually becoming more mediocre with each passing year, much more even than when in the 1960s the majority of civil servants were O’Level-educated.

timothy_kalyegira@yahoo.com