Schooling in Africa

If white education awakened black Africa, it mainly awakened a sense of injustice.

Last week something more seemed needed as Africa seethed toward independence (see FOREIGN NEWS). Black men must stand beside white men as physicians, lawyers, engineers--and where will they come from? The average African country is 80% illiterate. Of Africans who begin school, only one out of 100 reaches college. Says Bernard de Bunsen, British principal of Uganda's Makerere College: "We are running a race against time to produce at least a few Africans capable of occupying the key posts they are demanding."

Ambition is no problem. An African boy cheerfully slogs hundreds of miles out of the bush to find the nearest primary school. If he reaches secondary school (10% do), he must persuade his poverty-stricken father to help him stay. He may even face a painful ordeal at the hands of the tribal witch doctor to prove his determination. And if he actually gets through college, all his relatives descend on him for support. Yet able Africans endure any hardship to win a university degree, the highest status symbol they can imagine.

No Students. Why do so few succeed? Kenya's young politician, Tom Mboya, blames lack of higher education facilities. When Mboya got scholarships for 81 Africans at 52 U.S. colleges and universities this year (TIME, Sept. 21), his clincher was that Kenya's Royal Technical College grants only sub-university diplomas. Kenyans with a yen for more than a technical degree must go to Uganda's Makerere College, or somehow find their way overseas. So, too, must students from Tanganyika, third major country comprising British East Africa (pop. 21 million), an area one-fifth as big as the fifty United States. Due soon: a full-fledged University of East Africa, combining Makerere, the Royal College and a new branch at Morogoro, Tanganyika. But the merger may take five years.

Yet Britain has brought more higher education to the African than any other colonial power. Shining example: Ghana's University College, a University of London affiliate due for degree-granting autonomy in 1962. In ten years it has turned out 550 graduates, aims eventually at 5,000 students of all races. Ghana's volatile Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, himself a graduate of the U.S.'s Lincoln University, denounces it for costliness (160 senior teachers for 650 students), frets because the predominantly British faculty holds out for classical education against the practicalities that Nkrumah favors. Yet the college sparks Ghana's drive to uplift education at all levels, a model for Africa to ponder.

In sharp contrast is the French and Belgian record. At the university level, most French Africans have been trained in France. In all the vastness of French black Africa--ten times bigger than Texas --there is only one "university" (Dakar), which is no university by British African standards. Nonetheless, France has tried to educate an African elite (though only twelve French Equatorial Africans are now studying in Paris). But the Belgians have made no such effort: the roiling Belgian Congo has no university graduates capable of running an independent state. Belgium tried, but too late. It sank $9,000,000 into the Congo's five-year-old University of Lovanium near Leopoldville, a glittering campus that even boasts Africa's first nuclear reactor. But this year Lovanium (370 students) will graduate only a dozen Africans, and the newer University of Elisabethville (260 students) will produce even fewer.

No Fancy Colleges. What really ails African higher education is a grievous shortage of primary and secondary schools.

This is no discredit to the pioneering Christian mission schools, which have trained virtually every native leader and are today responsible for perhaps 85% of elementary education in non-Moslem black Africa. But such schools are still too few, and the colonial powers have done little to supplement them. The Belgians, for example, only recently started a secondary school system. Britain's Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland has only three secondary schools funneling Africans into the multiracial University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Though 180.000 African children attend the federation's primary schools, the secondary schools have admitted only 400 qualified students. Of these, precisely 216 passed the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate test at the last sitting--50 with high enough marks to enter college. Current college enrollment (162) includes only 32 Africans.

The average African nation spends an astonishing 20% of its budget on education. Yet the schools turn out so few qualified graduates that places are going begging in universities. Some Africans argue that school curriculums should be changed ("Why study the industrial revolution when our problem is detribalization?"), along with college admissions standards ("Some of our brightest chemistry students score low in English and are disqualified"). But all agree that thousands more schools are needed. Says Allassane Diop, Guinea's levelheaded Information Minister: "Too many African nations want fancy colleges right away as prestige symbols without preparing students for them. In Guinea our first job is to reduce illiteracy and get our children into school--any school. College can wait."

No Western Comfort. Just as short are good teachers (poor ones abound). Africa's best are often wasted; Makerere's topnotch professors often have classes of only six students when they could be teaching 50. The need is all the more urgent as the European teacher supply dwindles. Example: the Sudan's fine University of Khartoum (enrollment: 1,260), where Britons are leaving the faculty and few Sudanese are replacing them. Fearing lower standards, Khartoum hopes to attract U.S. teachers through exchange programs. The hope may be ephemeral: perhaps 300 U.S. teachers are now in Africa, most of them in mission schools, only a handful in colleges. Many U.S. Negroes feel an intense involvement with emerging Africa, but there are only 30 U.S. Negro teachers on the entire continent.

For years to come Africans will still get their best higher education overseas--if they can win scholarships and raise travel and pocket money. But alternatives are developing. Last year Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie set up a 200-scholarship program for all Africans at the University College of Addis Ababa (enrollment: 421).

What makes the Lion of Judah's philanthropy intriguing is the nature of his institution, launched in 1950 with a faculty of cheery young Canadian Jesuits, who teach no religion (by agreement), wear no clerical garb, dress in sports jackets.

The Jesuits are now worried that the Emperor's flirtation with Tito will mean their replacement by Yugoslavs. Worse, the Russians are setting up an Ethiopian technical school for 1,000 students to be taught by an all-Russian faculty. By the time the Emperor launches his projected degree-granting Haile Selassie University, it may be no source of Western comfort.

The worst need not happen--if fast Western aid goes to African education.

"There is so much to be done," says Kenya's No. 2 politician (and teacher), Gikonyo Kiano, 33, product of Antioch, Stanford, and the University of California. Thus far, Kiano has not mixed politics and education. "On education," says he, "my politics are the politics of hope."

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