Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship

Abstract

Iwas lucky, in preparing for this lecture, come across one of Eric Ashby's books, African Universities and Western Tradition, and a cursory reading brought a sense of recognition. I noticed the irony in the way the book had crossed my life while also embodying a number of my con? cerns. The book was the Godkin lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1964. It was the year I graduated from Makerere College with a University of London honors degree in English. It was also the year that William Heinemann brought out a hardcover edition of my novel, Weep Not, Child, written in English, obviously a product of my five years at Makerere. My novel and I were products of the kind of universities which Eric Ashby was talking about and whose social function was to produce men and women with the standards of public service and capacity for leadership which self rule requires (20), in short a governing elite in the expected new political dispensation following the end of the Second World War. The colleges were established in the fifties, the culmination of a series of committees and recommendations going back the 1925 advisory committee that years later metamorphosed into the Asquith Committee and the Inter-University Council for Higher Education. But the vision of a modern university in Africa did not begin in the twentieth century with these official committees but rather in nineteenth century with James Africanus Beale Horton in 1868 and Edward Blyden in 1872. Both Horton and Blyden were of African descent, both from Sierra Leone, and they clearly wanted the best for Africa. Nevertheless, their two visions were different. According Ashby, Horton wanted introduce into Africa undiluted Western and there was no place in his scheme of higher education for the incorporation of African languages, history or cul? ture. The way African modernity lay by way of the Greek classics and European languages and culture. Blyden on the other hand wanted free higher education in Africa from despotic Europeanizing which had warped and crushed the Negro mind (qtd. in Ashby 13). Writing in 1883 Blyden said: