Universities and Polytechnics in Africa. The Twelfth Lugard Memorial Lecture

Abstract

Opening ParagraphMay I say first how much I appreciate the compliment which you paid me when you invited me to address the International African Institute on this, the occasion of the twelfth Lugard Memorial Lecture. I am proud to be one of those to whom Dame Margery Perham referred in the first Lugard Memorial Lecture, one of those who knew Lord Lugard in his later years. As a young civil servant I was the administrative secretary of the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, of which Lord Lugard was a member. As a kind of extension of my duties, I went to Africa as the secretary of Lord De La Warr's commission on higher education in East Africa. That commission's terms of reference charged it to work out a scheme for setting up a university college in Uganda, and of course Lord Lugard was interested because he had played such a leading part in bringing Uganda into the empire—first in commanding the military expedition and thereafter in conducting the campaign in Britain which persuaded Mr. Gladstone's government to proclaim the protectorate. Shortly after I returned from Uganda to London, I was walking in Whitehall when I saw Lord Lugard coming towards me—walking the length of Whitehall from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square although at that time he was 79 years of age. I wore a hat in those days, and in accordance with the civilized manners which young people then endeavoured to preserve, I raised it. To my surprise Lord Lugard recognized me, stopped me, and asked me to tell him about the commission and what it was likely to recommend. The conversation left me with a lively appreciation of Lord Lugard's great personal interest in education in Africa. If we could evoke, as Hubert Deschamps evoked when he pronounced the eighth Lugard Memorial Lecture, ‘cette ombre auguste qui nous est chère’, I think that the august shade would be very willing that this memorial hour should be devoted to a discussion of educational problems.