Leaders For Africa: Postcolonial University Reform

Abstract

As a general rule, the extension of access to higher education tends to widen the gap between the intellectuals who advocate it and the universities that provide it. Africa is no exception. Writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'O and Beban Sammy Chumbow want to see a greater use of indigenous languages in African intellectual life because a sense of history and of identity cannot be constructed from the international media that dominate higher education.1 But those in authority always demur. Intellectuals have African cultural aspirations, while bureaucrats attempt to place their universities in the world of science and the republic of letters. These two books elaborate on the mismatch in Africa between intellectuals and the state. M.T. Sehoole has written a case study of the South African policy process, based to some extent on his own experience during the 1980s as an undergraduate in one of the institutions of apartheid, the 'black' University of the North, and in a 'white' institution, the University of Witwatersrand. He is now a lecturer in the University of Pretoria. Y. G-M. Lulat, of the State University of New York in Buffalo, has written a massive survey of the whole continent, which he sees as an addition to Eric Ashby's