African Universities and the State: Another View

Abstract

THERE has recently been a good deal of discussion of African universities and their problems, in which both those working within these universities and interested outsiders have taken part. In this country the most interesting contribution to this debate has been made by Sir Eric Ashby, who has followed up his Godkin Lectures, at Harvard, 1) in 1964, with a major work on a similar subject.(2) Some of the central themes of these studies are also summarized in an article, published in this journal in November, 1965. (3 All of us who are interested in this subject are much in Sir Eric Ashby's debt. At the same time I am worried by the sense that in his analysis of the problems of African universities there is a dimension lacking-what one might, I suppose, call the political dimension. This article arises from that worry. It is the kind of attempt at a corrective that will certainly require counter-correctives. In a somewhat unsystematic and wandering way it seeks to raise certain questions, but not to establish any conclusions. The problems of African universities have arisen, in large measure, out of the process of decolonization, of which the most obvious expression is the transfer of political power from colonial administrations to the governments of independent African states. In the initial stages African governments have tended to take universities for granted: that is to say, to regard the existence of one or more universities within their states as desirable, or indeed essential, from the particular standpoint of the contribution which they can make to the training of specialists in all the various fields in which these are urgently needed. It is only at a later stage that attention begins to be given by the politicians (meaning, simply, those who control the political apparatus in a given African State) to the questionsWhat sort of universities do we want ? How should they be organized ? What kind of teaching should they provide ? What types of research should they undertake ? What qualities should we look for in their students ? What should be the basis of their relationship with the State, (and with other institutions within the State)? In other words the problem of decolonization begins to be thought of as having application to universities, since, in their existing form, these have usually been inherited from the colonial epoch (or, if created at the time of independence, have followed the same general pattern). Hence they belong to the category of institutions whose structure and functions need to be reexamined in the post-colonial situation. Thus from one point of view the problems of African universities at this phase of their history, in what might be called the early post-colonial period, can be regarded as, essentially, problems of adaptation. The point of departure is the evident historical fact that, apart from the ancient Islamic universities of North Africa, African universities have come into being as a result of the export of Western (for the most part British, French and Belgian) twentieth-century models. (At a later stage American university models began also to have a certain influence, particularly in the case of the University of Nigeria.) But