Ivory Towers in Africa

Students in flowing black gowns about the shaded courtyards. White-thatched dons suck on their briars tutorials on Greek philosophy. Oxford or Cambridge? In fact, the scene is black Africa, where not far from the manicured quadrangles natives still live in baked mud huts. Relics from the years of empire, Africa's 26 colonial-rooted universities (total enrollment: 45,000) have survived independence unprepared and incapable of dealing with the problems of the continent, where the illiteracy rate is 70% and still rising.

Cricket and Rugby. Europeans founded black African colleges on the premise that natives ought to be first Westernized, then educated. Despite the fact that political leaders fulminate against the West and neocolonialism, the universities' goal remains the same. In Uganda (pop. 6,845,000), where per capita income is $8 a year, students at Makerere University College attend Oxford-style "Old Boy" dances, eat in for mal dining halls, and join in such rousing un-African activities as squash, cricket and rugby. Nowhere on the campus is there evidence of Africa's rich musical, artistic and folk heritage.

Curriculums are equally misdirected. Instead of offering nation-building courses in economics and agriculture, Makerere emphasizes such traditional Western disciplines as ethical philosophy and Greek. Although Uganda has a dozen tribal dialects, and the predominant tongue is Luganda, the only modern language taught at Makerere is English. "This place is a country club," says one disillusioned Makerere professor. "It is an anomaly in modern, independent Africa."

In a country with a crying need for technicians, Makerere is turning out more philosophers than engineers. Educators of all kinds are in short supply, but nearly half of the Makerere graduates who have been trained to be teachers refuse to enter the classroom, instead try to join the already ample civil service. In a country where only five in more than 1,000 youths attend college, quantity would seem to be as important as quality, but Makerere maintains a luxurious 8-to-l student-faculty ratio. Uganda's President Milton Obote, a Makerere graduate, has accused the university of being "uninvolved with the needs of our society."

The situation is worse in French-speaking West Africa. In all nine countries (pop. 26 million), there are only two universities, Senegal's University of Dakar, and the Ivory Coast's University of Abidjan, together enrolling fewer than 3,000 students. Though Senegal's economy is almost completely grounded on farming, there is no school of agriculture at the brightly flowered, Dakar campus. In the Congo (Leopoldville), the University of Lovanium proudly displays one of Africa's few nuclear reactors. As a result, it has dozens of black students solving mysteries of nuclear physics, only a handful learning engineering and medicine. Lovanium's classics-oriented curriculum is based on that of its parent school, Louvain of Belgium; thus first-year students plug away at medieval French, studying Le Chanson de Roland.

Special Problems. At least one African university is actively trying to escape from its colonial heritage: Tanzania's modernistic University College at Dar es Salaam, which along with Uganda's Makerere and Kenya's Nairobi forms the tripartite University of East Africa. Scrapping history courses that placed Britain at the hub of the universe, Dar now requires entering students to take a course titled "Introduction to African Development Problems." Courses in classical political thought have given way to management administration. Microbiology aims at some special problems of Africa--food spoilage and water pollution.

The situation at the universities is particularly odd, since Africa's political leaders keep denouncing neocolonialism and demanding Africanization. Inertia is a major barrier to improvements. Most administrators and teachers are products of colonial-era training, and share with many of their students a conviction that any Africanization is a step into the past. Among the few national leaders who pushed for reform was Ghana's ex-President Kwame Nkrumah, who established an Institute of African Studies at the university after severing all ties with the University of London. In French-speaking black Africa, where early missionaries had rigidly emphasized European thought, nationalist leaders have been unable to recruit enough Africa-minded teachers or enact reform for fear of endangering the flow of supporting funds from France, often specifically earmarked for Western-designed programs.

Nonetheless, Africans outside the system see change as inevitable. One proposal is that countries should temporarily forsake universities, instead concentrate on building trade or vocational schools. Such an approach, while damaging to national pride, might well be the only way of producing the expertise necessary to develop an agrarian society. "We must rethink the value of education," concedes one Tanzanian official. "We may eventually find that mass liberal education is detrimental to the goals of our country."

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