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Universities and Nation-building in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Wilton S. Dillon
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Extract

This is an exploratory approach to the question of what universities have to do with nation-building in Africa, and to the more general question of how people learn to behave like nationals.

Type
Original Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1963 , pp. 75 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1963

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References

page 76 note 1 When Dr Nkrumah became Chancellor in Ghana, this was interpreted by some critics as a capitulation by the university system to state control. But it should be remembered that political leaders have a functional interest—not necessarily authoritarian—in institutions of higher learning. Thomas Jefferson's interest in the University of Virginia produced speeches and writings about nation-building and the development of an ‘American personality’ which are easily recalled while reading Nkrumah. The ethos of modern Ghana is not comparable to post-revolutionary United States nor to contemporary Nigeria of Britain, but it is interesting to note that Governor-General Azikiwe is Chancellor of the University of Nigeria which he initiated at Nsukka, that Prime Minister Macmillan is Chancellor of Oxford University, and that President Kennedy is a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University.

page 78 note 1 Bigelow, Karl W., ‘Some Comparative Reflections on Soviet and Chinese Higher Education’, in The Comparative Education Review, IV, 3, (New York, 1961), p. 169.Google Scholar

page 79 note 1 Cf. Shils, Edward, ‘The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States’, in World Politics, XII, 3, (Princeton, 1960), pp. 329–33 passim.Google Scholar

page 79 note 2 Ashby, Eric, ‘Patterns of Universities in Non-European Societies’, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1961.Google Scholar

page 80 note 1 Edited by Nevitt Sanford, a Stanford University psychologist, this book contains a controversial essay by David Riesman and Christopher Jenks, ‘The Viability of the American College’, treating the college as an initiation rite for the young, and employing an ethnographic approach to the study of a college as a sub-culture of the larger national culture.

page 80 note 2 See Conference Papers, 1960, East African Institute of Social Research, Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda.

page 81 note 1 I am indebted to David Brokensha, Lecturer in Social Administration at the University of Ghana, for some interesting reflections, in personal correspondence, concerning discrimination between the sexes in Legon Hall.

page 81 note 2 Cf. Chapter 18, ‘The Interrelationship of Institutions’, in Chapple, E. and Coon, C., Principles of Anthropology (New York, 1942), p. 443: ‘The reasons for the inter-dependence of institutions are very simple. Institutions do not exist in a vacuum; they are made up of individuals who, in a complex society, are at the same time members of other institutions.’Google Scholar

page 82 note 1 This is my adaptation of a list first prepared by Conrad M. Arensberg for a community study of a coal-mining town in the Ruhr in Germany. It could be used with variations in studying, say, the interaction between corporations, tribes, hospitals, factories, monasteries, or any other institution which is part of a nation-state. Cf. ‘The Community Study Method’, in The American Journal of Sociology, LX, 2, (Chicago, 1954), pp. 109–24.Google Scholar

page 82 note 2 Cf. Carter, Gwendolen M., ed., African One-Party States (Cornell, 1962), a collection of essays about Tunisia, Senegal, Tanganyika, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Liberia. This could lead to interesting comparative studies about how higher learning in contemporary Africa, with some of its cultures dedicated to ‘total politics’, compares with the medieval societies of Europe supposedly dedicated to ‘total theology’.Google Scholar

page 84 note 1 The packaging imagery, applied to knowledge, derives from Kurt Lewin's studies of the social channels through which food passes from the point of origin to the table where it is consumed. Cf. Siegel, B. J., ‘Models for the Analysis of the Educative Process in American Communities’, in Spindler, G. D., ed., Education and Anthropology (Stanford, 1954), p. 45.Google Scholar

page 85 note 1 The celebration of the centenary of the Civil War in the United States is analogous, to aspects of the preoccupation of modern Africans with history. Rather than using the celebration to open old wounds, for many it meant: ‘We have our own history, our own identity, something we did not have to borrow from Europe; we, too, can have our own battlefields and sacred monuments.’ The Japanese, even with their hoary, past, have had this problem in modern times. ‘During the past century a major concern of a majority of educated Japanese has been the meaning or identity of their nation and its culture, a concern developing out of the attempt to reconstruct Japanese society along the lines of a modern industrial state.’ Cf. Bennett, J. W., Passin, H. and McKnight, R., In Search of Identity (Minnesota, 1958), p. 7.Google Scholar The psychological aspects of the search for identity in the African setting are discussed by Field, M. J. in The Search for Security (London, 1960),Google Scholar and Turnbull, C., The Lonely African (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

page 85 note 2 Mboya, Tom, ‘Tensions in African Development’, in Restless Nations (London, 1962), p. 42.Google ScholarCf. Chapter VII, ‘Cultural Revival’, in Immanuel, Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York, 1961), pp. 121–35.Google Scholar

page 86 note 1 Cf. Fallers, L., ‘Ideology and Culture in Uganda Nationalism’, in The American Anthropologist (Beloit, Wisconsin, 1961).Google Scholar

page 86 note 2 Perhaps this is the work cut out for the new African philosophers, such as W. Abraham of All Souls College, Oxford, and the University of Ghana.

page 86 note 3 However, one part of nation building which smacks of Platonic rationality and philosopher-king wisdom and control is the amount of energy now devoted to manpower planning, suitably the joint responsibility of universities and government. At the meeting of Ministers of Education at Addis Ababa in May 1961, it was agreed that manpower planning units should be established in all African governments. Observing this, Dr F. X. Sutton of the Ford Foundation remarked: ‘One might almost say that manpower development has become a part of the latest phase of African nationalist ideology.’ Cf. his lecture, ‘The Problem of Fitness for Self-Government and Democracy’, Swarthmore College, 11 Feb. 1962.

page 87 note 1 These conventional rubrics from any textbook on human society are pedantically included here again in an effort to look afresh at the tasks of a university without recourse to sacred syllabuses geared to examination systems. For fuller treatment of these categories, Cf. Herskovits, M., Man and His Works (New York, 1949).Google Scholar

page 87 note 2 Cf. a discussion of a classic experiment in industrial sociology, involving introduction of new machines to workers in a factory in Virginia: Coch, L. and French, J. R. P., ‘Overcoming Resistance to Change’, in Swanson, G., Newcomb, T., and Hartley, E., Readings in Social Psychology (New York, 1952), pp. 474–91.Google Scholar

page 88 note 1 ‘Even time is out of date’, she wrote. ‘In this rocket age it is silly to expect nations to grow from their roots by adding rings like trees: they must be fused in a kind of cyclotron like atoms. And it is happening. To question it is to show that you are so buttoned into a coloninal mentality as to be unable to tell the famous wind of change from a gin-and-tonic.’ Cf. ‘What Future for Africa?’, in Encounter, XVI, 6 (London, 1961), p. 15.Google Scholar

page 89 note 1 Knight, Douglas M., ‘The Light and the Dark: Creative Learning in the American College’, Lawrence College, 1962.Google Scholar