What should have been a contractual dispute at the Makerere Institute for Social Research has become a public drama, avidly covered by Ugandan media and vigorously debated in “progressive” African intellectual circles.

MISR director Prof Mahmood Mamdani has devoted most of his life to scholarship on Africa’s most pressing dilemmas. He’s been a key member of the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.

At MISR, he’s developed a new PhD programme for young Africans from across the continent — who also participate in MISR’s research programme, again on Africa’s most vexed issues. He’s been named as one of the world’s top public intellectuals.

So how has the situation at MISR degenerated to this extent? Where a research fellow is invoking feminism to justify her public protest of stripping for being locked out of her office?

Where Makerere University’s vice-chancellor has initiated an investigation that MISR has said it will not participate in? Where conflict of interest is being invoked by all sides? Where some of the PhD programme’s beneficiaries have also taken sides?

What’s being lost is the bigger picture.

Long gone are the days when Makerere University and then the University of Dar es Salaam were magnets for scholars striving to contribute to the transformation of newly independent Africa. Not just by debating and generating knowledge.

But also by encounters with intellectuals from across the continent and beyond who put their knowledge at the service of Africa. African thought. African action.

My generation missed out on the headiness of those days. But we are the beneficiaries — and the generation to whom that baton has been passed.

The current MISR experiment is, in its own way, a recreation of those heady days. It has a purpose. A passing on of the imperative to theorise our own experiences and challenge received wisdom from contexts other than our own. To put out our own wisdom.

In that, it joins other experiments across the continent. Also created by African scholars who could’ve instead chosen to sit pretty in academic institutions outside the continent. Like the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town.

Which produces the journal Feminist Africa. Whose members collaborated on creating curricula for the teaching of African feminism, grounded in African women’s own struggles for emancipation.

Whose senior academics include Professors Amina Mama of Nigeria and Sylvia Tamale of Uganda. Who see their purpose as the turning out of a new “cadre” of engaged African feminist scholars. Or like the African Leadership Centre of the University of Nairobi and King’s College London, initiated by Professor Funmi Olonisakin of Nigeria.

What is happening at MISR must be seen in that broader context. These experiments are few and far between. Giving back is not as common as it should be — and trying to do so in African academia is nothing but a labour of love. These experiments are precious and they must be preserved.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.