The stone unveiling for Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST) in Thyolo is also the official launching of African Renaissance in the country.
Both President Bingu wa Mutharika and (his brother) the Minister of Education Peter Mutharika intimated an Afro-centric vision inclined to restore the pride of Africanness through the new university.
In his book called The African Renaissance, Washington Okumu emphasises the development of African human resources, culture, science and technology in a tailor-made relevance to the continent’s needs. The principle of African Renaissance is the awakening of self-pride in what is African as the starting point of our endeavours.
In their speeches, the Mutharikas vowed their common dream for the university’s unique role in pursuing Malawi’s scientific and technological goals that inspire cultural pride and our self-belief in us as a capable people. If the university is driven to its goals, it will cultivate the spirit of self-dependence and self-pride which constitute the soul of African Renaissance.
Centralising Malawians and rejecting the dependency syndrome, President Professor Mutharika said “I want you my people to take lead in developing our country.” He echoed the assertion that nobody owes Malawians a living and argued that “We have a moral duty and obligation to get out of poverty.”
Rather than waiting for someone else to come and develop our resources on our behalf, the Malawi leader is quick to underline that “development takes place when people take full control of their resources.” Malawians must be seriously thinking of making the most of what we already have.
The new university is expected to plant a spirit of researching into and developing indigenous resources for a science and technology that remains industrial oriented.
Apart from scientific and industrial engineering, the university will include a special faculty in African Tradition Medicine to enhance indigenous resources and inspire the people’s pride in what we locally have. “This is what makes us African,” Professor Mutharika the President argued.
The uniqueness of the new university lies in its philosophy that science and technology is most relevant and meaningful to people when it involve the people’s wisdom and evolves with their culture. That explains why the Malawi University of Science and Technology will have a robust integration of cultural disciplines.
This is a university of science and technology that will have a School of African Arts because liberal arts and sciences achieve more when they complement each other. The President’s assertive thinking contradicts the ill-informed tendency to over-prioritise sciences while brushing aside arts or humanities as non-developmental.
The President realises that it is through stories (literature) and music that you inspire a people’s pride and self-confidence in doing things, if you really mean to cultivate a producing society. The African Renaissance stresses the importance of culture in complementing science and technology.
Therefore, “We must do more research in African music, literature, theatre politics and democracy. We never learnt democracy from the west, by the time they were designing theirs we already had our own African democracy and Malawi democracy,” Professor Mutharika the President.
The Malawi leader’s thinking echoes the famous 1996 Thabo Mbeki “I am African” speech in which this South African champion of the African Renaissance said: “I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines [...] Whatever the circumstances they have lived through, and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.” That is what we are!
Although the heroism and pride of Africa have faded away in our obsession with Western values and history in recent generations, the continent boasts of the longest known culture of great inventions since Egyptian civilisation.
Taking his turn, the Education Minister Professor Peter Mutharika said that it is sad that Africans now rush to Europe for quality education when the world’s first university was built in African. Solution? We must build more universities and develop them to world-class standards. We can do it, we have done it before.
Records show that although schools of advanced learning first appeared in India, it was in Africa where we had the university to offer degrees. This is the continent where the first proper university began.
It was a woman called Fatima Al-Fihri who founded the University of Al-Karaouine at Fes in Morrocco in 859 AD. The Guinness Book of World Records has recorded this as the oldest continuously-operating degree-granting University in the world. It was followed by the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt as the second oldest degree-granting university in the world founded in around 972 AD.
Europe's oldest university was only founded in 1088 in the northern Italian city of Bologna. The United States' oldest university, Harvard, opened in 1636.
Scholars also say some of the earliest great thinkers of ancient Greece, which is now the bedrock of Western civilisation, did their education in Egypt even before these African universities were founded. Now we have used the same Western civilisation to kill our spirit and capacity for civilisation because of an over-dependency syndrome.
We have become copy-cut society and consumers of Western civilisation rather than producers of our civilisation. The more we get our Permanent Head Damages (PhDs) here in the West, the more we risk a cultural genocide.
According to Professor Peter Mutharika, “Some of these degrees that people are getting from oversees are tantamount to academic genocide.” This is an apparent reference to the “cultural genocide” of Western education that has led millions of Africans to assassinate their own values and cultural pride.
Only a people who are proud and confident in themselves are capable of inventing and producing in science and technology. This is the MUST philosophy: the very spirit of African Renaissance at the Malawi University of Science and Technology.
