Dr. Joseph Kasule and Dr. Joschka Philipps on public intellectualism
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this episode, Cluster fellow Dr. Josph Kasule talks with his host Junior Research Group Leader Dr. Joschka Philipps about Kasule’s research in general and the latest book project “Intimate colonialities, public intellectualism and political revolution in Uganda” that he has been working on during his fellowship in Bayreuth.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Dr. Joseph Kasule and Dr. Joschka Philipps on public intellectualism
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
-
Cluster Conversations
- Date
- February 16, 2024
Rights & access
- Extent
- 41 minutes, 12 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 15
Full text
- Transcript
-
[music]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the latest episode of Cluster Conversations. My name is Joscha Phillips. I am a junior research group leader here at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. And I'm here with Dr Joseph Kasule who is an interdisciplinary scholar, lecturer at the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, Uganda, and author of the book Islam in Uganda: The Muslim Minority, Nationalism and Political Power. And it is my pleasure to have been hosting him for the last three and a half months with Sarah Widdig-Bellay as an international fellow on a book project entitled Intimate Colonialities: Public Intellectualism and Political Revolution in Buganda/Burghley. Welcome Joseph.
Speaker 2: Thank you Joscha. Thank you for hosting me all this time. I am very grateful for that.
Speaker 1: It's been a great pleasure. We haven't had the chance to see each other as much as we wanted to. But now that we're here and have the chance to talk to one another, I wanted to enter the conversation with your interest in public intellectualism, but perhaps with a more biographical take. So if you think about the public intellectual and sort of breaking this division between the university and the public, how would you describe your own trajectory as an intellectual, academic or non-academic? How did you become the thinker, the writer, the teacher that you are?
Speaker 2: Thank you. If I may begin with a sort of early history of my immersion into the academy. I studied International Relations at the undergraduate. And after that I went to London to do this master's degree in International Law. It was called a Master of Laws. I was specializing in Human Rights. And I guess I am kind of, you would say, I am fascinated by this relationship between knowledge and practice. I am always interested in how knowledge can be utilized to improve, well not to improve only, but to change from probably, you know, a good situation to a better situation. So after this master's degree in Coventry actually, I was given some more leave to remain in the UK and I took some jobs and I went to some conferences that were really talking about human rights applications. But in there I encountered so many human rights lawyers that were frustrated by this big chasm between theory and practice, between the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the court system in the UK. And very many human rights lawyers talking about against the use of torture in the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I became frustrated too. And I had this thinking that political practice in Europe was fundamentally better than what was said to be in many other parts of the world including Latin America and Africa. And I kind of got this frustration and I had always wanted to be outside the academy doing, actually seeing how I could contribute to this significant change. And I got frustrated. So and then I said, well maybe I should deepen my understanding of why there is this big difference. And that's how I thought that if I understand knowledge, how knowledge is produced and how it is probably claimed to represent some circles, and that's how I came to enroll at Makerere to do this interdisciplinary PhD in social studies. And the literature that we did then, the readers that we engaged, the interlocutors that we really engaged with opened me up.
Speaker 1: To how knowledge sometimes its production, the politics of how it's made, the intentions of those who produce it. You know, it's a very complex way. And while there, I discovered that intellectual debates, you know, have components, have their producers and have target audiences. And the more I discovered that, the more I asked myself, so, is there an intellectualism outside this university space? And that has been my interest to ask. So, how does the non-institutional intellect work? How do masses understand their being, you know, in political subjectivity, for example? Is there an awareness of why they relate to particular forms of power and what kind of politics is possible from among them as opposed to this elitism that the university represents? So briefly, that's how I come to this fascination with intellectualism. And when I look at the political systems that we see all over, they are not really built on a vacuum outside cognition. There has to be a particular definition of what they claim to stand for, the kind of values that drive them. And that's where this paralysis in political practice is arriving at least because we fundamentally see this chasm on what political values claim to represent and how they actually work out in practice. So the claims that are made for knowledge and the political values that build that are really not going to be comprehensively, let's say representative of everyone everywhere. They have to be a particular target and it claims to enforce those targets on a particular space.
Speaker 2: And in your analysis, in the current book project on intimate colonialities, you do this exciting comparison between Buganda and Bergen. How does sort of public intellectualism manifest itself in these different spaces and what does it teach us about public intellectualism?
Speaker 1: I think that we have to lay down some ground principles. And these principles have to be universal. And the big question is, what is politics for? Who does politics? The quick answer to that is human beings, people. And so if we understand the basic makeup of the human being, the basic human qualities, you know, the desire for autonomy, the desire for interaction with others, you know, to love, okay, to correspond, to communicate, et cetera. Unfortunately, those qualities also, you know, have some vices about them. Okay, the human being as being also is prone to hate, is prone to anger, is prone to greed, et cetera. And so once we understand that a particular, you know, way of doing politics everywhere, okay, you know, mutates and becomes pervasive in a particular group, then you have to ask what ways of doing politics in Norway, for example, can be seen in particular parallels in Uganda. And so this need to ask, is there a way to deexceptionalize the African way of doing politics and see what ways of doing politics are similar in Uganda and Norway such that we can ask ourselves the nuances that we can tease out and say, okay, well, this is particular to the other, but we see a generality that comes up. And so, if we think that elitism, for example, has spread globally, then we have to ask how do the masses respond and react to that? Are ways of responses in Uganda probably similar to how the Sami respond in Norway? So...
Speaker 1: I'm trying to understand this need to reconcile forms of oppression that have spread everywhere. What is that uniting aspect that we can say is spread all over the world? And you see particular elitist powers seeking to oppress particular masses. And you say, how can I compare this? And that's what the Ugandan and Ugandan origin experiences can teach us because we see that there is a persistence of a particular form of power that seeks to intervene in so-called autonomous spaces to affect the ways in which they relate such that it can purify itself and therefore entrench its interests. Whether it's over struggles for land or struggles for culture interpretation, especially under these capitalistic impulses that has mestacized globally. So a public intellectualism can help us to move beyond this single-handed interpretation of political processes. If we democratize this space and move outside the structure of the state and go to subjectivity, to the subordinate, the subjugated people, how do they understand what power claims to stand for? And in what ways are they making strategies and tactics to intervene and respond to that coercive element? I think that is the key quality that I think we need to tease out in this comparative aspect. And in that way, we kind of not only destabilize but also resist this impulse to multifacate society. This is not just an African quality or a quality of African power, for example. It is globally spread everywhere. Everywhere we have a particular colonialist power, a power that has a colonialist mentality. The only way it can stand on top of the rest is not only seek tactics that create this big chasm of us, the binaries of us and them, but to segregate that, to multiply its spaces and territories of control so as to multifacate and multiply and therefore reduce that resistance.
Speaker 2: That's extremely interesting and I think you're speaking to a point that a lot of us are struggling with, sort of that almost institutionalized division between the university and the people that many cultural anthropologists but also critical political scientists are actually interested in not only learning more about but also sort of echoing discourses. So Joseph, from your interest in public intellectualism but also your emphasis on being an interdisciplinary scholar, one can see in a way that you're interested in blurring the lines, in bringing things together that are usually set apart. What, if we look for instance at the disciplines, you as a cultural anthropologist but also as a political scientist and probably also many other things more, what is the use of blurring these lines, of bringing things together that were set apart?
Speaker 1: I think that it's a struggle because the university, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, is a colonial institution. It's developed within a particular political project. It is an intellectual project but it is intended to serve a specific political project and that is really how does the colony function? How does the colony function with a lot of research and concentrated knowledge?
Speaker 1: That can help us define our subject, that can help us refine economic extraction, that can help us investigate the labor question, that can help us investigate which communities are evading our economic structure. The pastoralist communities in Uganda have always been mobile, but the capitalistic impulses is sedentary. It seeks to zone people into a particular space and it gives them seeds like cotton and coffee to produce and it extracts. So, it is a contest because we are struggling with defining the role of the university in our time. What does this institution do for us today? And you discover that the university has remained as an institution producing knowledge which can be useful because it has been at the center of very many innovations or renovations or refashions within society. But then you ask, what is the awareness of the masses towards an institution to which they pay tax to, to which they contribute to in many ways? The masses are the informants so-called that give us knowledge that is contained in the archives of the university. So we need to blur these lines because what is at stake is not only relevance but how does the university see itself in society and how does society see itself, especially because very many political aspects are hinged on the success or weakness or failure of an institution like the university. It is culture today nowadays for every family to take their child to university to have a degree regardless of what that would produce in the future. So, but for me, I am interested in this political consciousness of, and this is me trying to ask, what does knowledge serve? The political consciousness that is at stake is, are people intellectually aware of the limits of the knowledge produced in distinction and what it does outside? What does now is that the knowledge that has been produced is entrenching a particular elitism. And that elitism can as be European or Norwegian or German, it can be African as well and South African everywhere. So that is a significant center of power. So in the nineteen nineties and eighties, etcetera, the presidents of many African countries were also the chancellors of the university. So it was a center of significant politics. Revolutions have been undertaken beginning from the university. The largest food strike among university students in Uganda in nineteen fifty-two was dubbed a food strike, but it was a political strike of university students trying to intervene in the colonial debate asking themselves, so we are doing this so-called pseudo-European sciences, etcetera, what are we going to do with them after? Okay, what is their role in a new independent Uganda? So that's a political question framed there and successive political actors strove therefore to, including Idi Amin. Idi Amin went to Makerere University with a military convoy and he called a conference in the university square. He was reminding the academic administrators that he was in charge even though they were in charge of that space, but he was in charge of them. That was the message. And so, what is at stake is we are struggling to blur these lines especially because the question of relevance is implicated. How is so-called traditional medicine for example understood outside the university? What does the university think is its role in trying to engage with people who produce knowledge that challenges what they are? What does the university think in understanding for example belief systems that are outside the canonical religious beliefs of the Quran and the Bible for example? How do political science departments in the university understand other ways of doing politics that are outside the so-called disciplines? And how therefore can we bridge and reconcile these forms of knowledge to...
Speaker 1: To assist harmony, to assist a new form of politics that doesn't seek to subjugate, even though it can, even though it creates a subject, but that subject doesn't become humiliated and humbled. It's okay to be subject to people, but there's particular quality in subjection. And so that's what we're struggling with. And some people are doing it better than others. And it's just not just about opening the university to bring in people to participate in conferences. It's about taking university principles and theories and engage them into the community and ask, so how does the community understand this? What is the community's way of doing something? And so the intellectuals within the community and the university, of course, there doesn't need to be this, let's say segregation or that they cannot be a mutual inclusivity. I don't mean it like that. I mean there are particular fora in which we can think of, and I don't like this word partnerships, but there can be a particular way of engaging, okay? And maybe the university calendars need to be revised to emphasize more communal oriented investigations as opposed to seminar based and institutionally seminar based ways of interactions. And maybe this is one way of creating a course that can, in political science for example, that creates a whole semester where university students are inducted in the field and they go on some sort of camping trip for a whole semester to visit various political communities and ask, so which ways of doing politics work for you, as opposed to being situated in what we would call air conditioned rooms in Kampala, et cetera. So that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: One initiative that you took and that I find fascinating in that regard is you're working on a translation of Mahmood Mamdani's classic book Citizen and Subject into Luganda. What is the idea behind it and what do you hope this book to achieve in sort of bridging some of the gaps, the linguistic gaps, but perhaps also the social ones that are existing?
Speaker 1: So when that book came out, it received significant acclaim. And as you say, it's really a classic. And it's a wonderful book. It's a wonderful book, but one whose meanings have to be interpreted per sentence. And that's the challenge of translating this book. Because the meaning that Mamdani wants to convey is not packed in a page. Everything that he wants to say to us is in every sentence of, you know, in every line, there is meaning packed in there. And that's the challenge of translating that book. But many of the things that he is talking about, of how, you know, the colonial state governed and how resistance to colonial governmentality was always implied in the very form of rule in the first instance, that the form of rule shapes the nature of resistance in the first instance. That's classical Mamdani. But for me as a translator, I'm trying to ask, are people in Uganda, especially Baganda, concretely aware of the ways in which they were governed? That's the question for me as a translator. Because as we know, the material Mamdani has been working with is elitist. That material has been stored away in the archive, in colonial blue books, in reports of district commissioners, these personal exchanges and communications between governors and secretaries, et cetera, et cetera. And much of the colonial archive is still stored away, you know, in London. So how has a Ugandan of today or yesterday growing up understood all that actually, the biggest colonial decisions that were made, you know, their record of that has been taken away, has been transplanted from where it was produced.
Speaker 1: And now it's somewhere else. And so we have this wonderful book telling us how Ugandans were governed. And some people are not even aware of that. So I kind of want to expand outside the English audience, but also to engage this aspect of resonance where the people have this significant awareness that the relationship of their father with the local council was determined elsewhere. You know. So that's what I wanted to ground and concretize, you know, in a translation. Um, the book is going on. I'm happy that I came here, but if I hadn't come, I would probably be finishing that book. But either way, the book is nearly going to be finished. I think it has to be published this year, hopefully. If not this, then the next. But it's, I'm somewhere that I can say it's about to come out.
Speaker 2: Wonderful. Now, if our listeners want to read more of Joseph Kasule, can you talk a little bit about your ongoing book project that you've worked on here called Intimate Colonialities? Maybe summarize a few of the key ideas and what we can look forward to?
Speaker 1: Intimate Colonialities is a very interesting book because it speaks to universal ways of doing politics that cannot be reduced or cannot be, you know, that cannot be attached to, you know, or zoned to a particular place only. And I use this comparative approach in trying to understand how the Sami question in Norway is related to, you know, the Hutu, Twa, Nyarwanda, Bahima, Balala question in Uganda.
Speaker 2: If I can just interrupt you, I don't think many, me for instance, I didn't know what the Sami were until I wrote to you and until I read your proposal and parts of your book. So if you can perhaps explain a little bit what the Bergen case is about.
Speaker 1: So the Sami, the Bergen case is about the Sami people. It's a people of Turkic origin who inhabit various parts of northern, northeastern, northern and northwestern Norway. But they're also located in other parts of Sweden and Finland and Russia. So their occupation generally is reindeer herding. And that's how they've made their culture. And so, for over a long time, the history of the Norwegian state has silenced Samis being in it. And over a hundred years in history, you had this attempt to Norweganize the state. And that means that what were called indigenous minorities could not, you know, were forced to assimilate and integrate into Norwegian culture, whatever that is. And Norwegian culture is presented as having this Germanic origin. And what you see therefore by this forced integration is the use of violence to rewrite what Sami culture is, to deny them access because by their seasonal migration means that they have some lands that are not utilized in some seasons as they shift from one location to the other. So the capitalistic mindset of the Norwegian state is trying to take over those lands and use them for either mining minerals or installing solar winds or damming some rivers or modern fishing, et cetera, et cetera. And so what you see, you have a conquering state intervening in external spaces so that it can capture whatever it seeks to take from without consideration of the cultural ways in which the people who claim affinity with that land are utilizing it. So, but...
Speaker 1: Within this process of Norwegianization, you see Sami people having intermarriages, interactions with other Norwegian people. And so what was hitherto a harmonious interaction has now become a kind of, you know, a coercive. And that intimacy that had been built among these communities, that closeness, is, you know, that proximity to one another, you know, as soon as it is inverted, and as soon as that harmony is spoiled, what comes out is what I call an intimate coloniality. Because there hasn't been a particular consent by these people. And by this consent, I mean they have not bought in, they're not invested into this capitalistic culture that they are being coercively integrated into. So that's my entry into the Sami question. And the response of the Norwegian state is that if there is animosity among the Sami people, let their challenges, whatever they think is wrong, let it be resolved under the institutions of the state. And that state is not Sami. That state is Norwegian. And so therefore, the state is opening up its own institutions to address a question that fundamentally returns to it. And so that is what I'm calling, you know, a cycle of domination and coloniality that is continuing. So that's the Norwegian experience. But my comparison is that in Uganda, the nomadic tribes, all ethnic groups, especially the Wanyankole and Wanyarwanda that found themselves in Uganda, you know, and I talk about, I write about this extensively by detailing the waves of migration. Before the British enter Uganda, Buganda was a separate and autonomous state, as was Ankole. So in southwestern Uganda, what the British do is they create this greater Ankole by merging autonomous units. Some were smaller than others. So to manage them, they merge each. And of course, there is the autonomous set of Bunyoro. So all of these states considered themselves autonomous of the other, and migration could occur. You had diasporic communities settling in the other, especially with these mobile groups, the cattlemen. They would take advantage of these cattle savannah corridors to go look for grass wherever it was. If one group found itself stronger than the other, they would plunder each other's cattle. And the other group was okay with that. It was the political practice. If you think your herds are decimated by rinderpest, you go and plunder someone else's if they are too weak to resist you. That was the practice. But when the British come, they have this thinking that the local economy is not important for them. What is important is what they have for the local people. And this is, look for agricultural land. Nineteen zero three, Hesketh Bell introduces cotton. And so large farms begin to take on. The labor required for those large farming, you know, people have to change their modes of production and wealth management. So cattle keepers are the enemy of capitalism. So we need seasonal labour. When the cotton is ripe, you need labour to harvest that. When the coffee is ripe, you need labour to. So you have this seasonal movement therefore of people from Rwanda, western Uganda, etcetera, to come to wherever the cotton and coffee farms were. And so a new culture is born. And so that's why the Walalo who were the cattle farmers, the nomadic farmers who were hitherto mobile and autonomous, now have to be contained within a particular mentality. So that's when enmity comes up. So that's when negation begins. But in Buganda, the Walalo, the Hutu and sorry, the Wanyarwanda and Himba pastoralists managed always to negotiate this politico-negation. And with nineteen eighty six, that's how Museveni is able to undertake this significant war. And that war is what elevates a hitherto politically marginalized community to attain power.
Speaker 1: But what they have done with that power also is to undertake so many significant revisions that really claim to purify them. And suddenly you have a new form of oppression. So he who oppressed people has become an oppressor. So that's the Ugandan experience is what I relate with the Sami question to tease out these nuances that seeks to deexceptionalize how politics can be done universally.
Speaker 2: Now perhaps there are so many more questions, but let me end with one big question. And that is about the concept of coloniality. Based on the different cases that you've worked on and also the idea of sort of deexceptionalising the African experience, what does the concept of coloniality stand for and how do you approach it?
Speaker 1: Coloniality has been presented as coming out of the significant hegemonic impulses that have spread from Euro America going on to exert themselves in the global south. And so whether it is in law or politics or economy, the assumption is that you have this overbearing impulse from American Europe to go and influence how life should be led elsewhere in the world. And so it is coming onto the remnants of colonization and coloniality is understood as the continuation of the European colonial experience over the rest of the world, exertion over the rest of the world. So one way in which other scholars outside Europe and America understanding this, we have the Latin American subaltern school, subaltern studies group and the South Asian studies subaltern studies group trying to intervene to ask well in what ways has colonialism or coloniality spread itself, spread its tentacles in unique ways because of the unique geographical expanses of these territories in Latin America, Africa and Asia. For me, and you have this discussion that Sabella intervened in. Sabella was trying to ask in what ways can the African experience for example learn from the response of the Latin American and Asian schools. And he was trying to portray the various ways in which epistemologies of the global south for example in Africa have been decimated and they came up with this very wonderful concept of epistemicides. So how do I enter into this? Me, I want to depart from that. Because yes, coloniality is real. But we cannot think that oppression always proceeds from one centre. And me, even though I recognize this vertical relationship of Euro-American coloniality over the rest of the world, I am interested in asking can we expand this to ask what are other various ways, horizontal ways of coloniality that are really affecting humanity, that are producing oppression as well. And so if you ask people, do you know what climate change is in Uganda? The person you ask would tell you, I don't know climate change, but I need water. There is a drought. Rain is not coming to my area. So the idea that a concept like climate change makes sense to someone at the local level is good. But you have to ask them first.
Speaker 1: How do you make sense of the absence of water today, in the now, okay, as opposed to ask, so do you know what climate change means? So if you ask people, so do you know how the Iraqi war decimated a whole generation? The UN regime, you know, human rights regime, all for food programme in Iraq, decimated a whole, you know, generation of people. If you ask people, oh, do you know what the Americans did in Iraq, in Uganda, they say, no, maybe they did all that, but I want food. The government policies in my country are not doing enough to bring food to me. People are really also interested in what's close to them. And so even though there is an international movement maybe to determine that they grow coffee in their farms as opposed, they grow more coffee than food, people will be interested in how that policy is fundamentally implemented by their local government. And so the enemy is not this multinational organisation that is high up there. The enemy is this local councillor that is implementing it. And that's what I think is intimate coloniality.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much Joseph. It's been a great pleasure to listen to you and learn from you. And I hope that even though this talk is over, we'll have plenty more possibilities. Is there anything else that you would like to add from your side to the listeners?
Speaker 1: I'm only grateful that I've been given the opportunity to think and write in Biarritz. I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 2: You're most welcome.
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