THE MARCUS GARVEY PAN-AFRIKAN INSTITUTE (MPAI)

There is a vast gap in African higher education, research and learning between the cosmopolitan, western-oriented African elites and the majority of Africans, many of them illiterate and marginalized. The Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute has been established to address this problem and is the first step towards the creation of the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University. The Institute comes out of an idea tested by experience, gained when the Afrika Study Centre (ASC) matched researchers to communities in a research project on problems of pastoral and agro-pastoral communities of North-Eastern Uganda, undertaken with a generous grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for a three year period (1999-2002).

This research involved individuals in these communities--men, women and youths -- in generating and recording information concerning pastoralists’ conflicts with their agricultural neighbours (a common source of conflict throughout the African continent). This research activity began as a project by a sister grassroots organisation – Yiga Ng’okola Folk Institute, [Learn as you Work Institute] in the areas of culture and development as well as in traditional techniques of conflict resolution, and was later taken over by ASC and developed into a full-scale research program under the title: “The Transformation of Agro-Pastoral Conflict and Violence” in North-Eastern Uganda, referred to above. This research resulted in four monographs and a book (now under consideration for publication at the University of South Africa Press, Pretoria, with which MPAI has collaboration.) The findings of the project were also expressed in songs and traditional conceived by the young people from the communities who conducted the research as a way of ‘reporting’ back to the communities the results of the research.

This research experience formed the basis of the “Field Building” research activity initiated and funded by the Social Science Research Council (New York) and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in collaboration with the ASC in 2001, aimed at linking scholars, ‘practitioners’ and indigenous knowledge custodians in a collaborative research activity. It was designed to create pools of knowledge from all these sources that would be accessible to all users of knowledge. Scholars have traditionally restricted such knowledge to academic publications, technical manuals, and diverse and obscure archives and registers of knowledge.

However, this attempt at researcher-community interface produced a cosmological and epistemological confrontation: the empirically based manner in which the scholars and ‘practitioners’ generated and stored knowledge was found to be contrary to the way the indigenous knowledge custodians went about it. For them, the research activity touched on the deep cosmological foundations on which their live were based. It was in the course of trying to overcome this cosmological and epistemological contradiction that the idea of the creation of the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute and University arose.