Although Africans were among the first creators of human civilization, the modern African university owes nothing to African genius. It is clearly the creation of the colonial state.
In the contemporary world, Africa is far behind in development, whatever indices we use. Writer and broadcaster Ali Mazrui has wanted Africa to be the Garden of Eden in decline, a place that once had everything but has now lost everything, a king yesterday but a pauper today.
In numbers alone, however, African universities have increased tenfold, producing thousands of graduates. But numbers, while important, are not the game here. African universities, such as they are today, betray little of the vibrant traditions that once animated the continent. Despite poverty and backwardness, these traditions still animate rural Africa today. Take the case of the Acholi people of northern Uganda.
The rise of the African novel in Ibadan and the rise of modern African art in Zaria, both events that occurred in the middle of the last century, occurred because the colonial students who shaped the moments found a way to reconnect with their African past and since there he drew strength.
Today’s African university, whether Senegalese or Malian, has routes not into the rich traditions of Africa, but into Africa’s immediate colonial past. This is the problem. Because the colonial past is the past of despair. It represented a period when Africa had lost the initiative and had no idea.
Unlike the universities of ancient Timbuktu or medieval Europe, the colonial university was not an organic institution. It did not come out of the ground. It could not provide a basis for culture and learning to flourish. It was limited in scope and scale. It admitted few students, offered few carefully selected courses taught by colonial professors. Colonial students were cultural refugees, cut off from the treasure of their heritage.
There was little to distinguish between the colonial professor and the colonial administrator. Both were immersed in colonial culture. In colonial times, as a white person, you couldn’t live in Africa except as a colonizer. Colonialism, as Karen Blixen’s life in colonial Kenya demonstrated, was collective. It was a lived experience that absorbed all the people from the metropolitan countries who lived in the colonies.
The colonial university, however, was a complex thing. There was little doubt about its mission, namely the reproduction of the colonial state and the promotion of colonial culture. In Africa there is a tendency to equate colonial culture with European culture. But colonial culture was not and is not European at all. Europe, except in a few places, already had a democracy. In Africa, the European colonies were strong-arm dictatorships, of the kind found in many African countries today.
The colonial university arose in the midst of the debilitating condition produced by colonialism. The colonial university could never have been a marketplace of ideas in the sense that Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne were and still are. But within its framework, the colonial university functioned admirably. The immaculate facade bestowed the grace of a metropolitan campus, radiating serenity, civility, and wholeness. Within its four walls, the contradictions that imperialism was seemed far away.
On the eve of independence, the postcolonial state inherited the colonial university, without understanding its complexity. The inheritance was his most prized possession. So acute had been the hunger for knowledge and learning, and so limited the opportunities. Chinua Achebe has pointed out that the colonial university was the only good thing that colonialism did in Nigeria.
In the immediate post office colony, the new president became the new chancellor of what had become overnight the national university, but was national in name only. Nothing pleased the president more than when he appeared in all his academic garb and presided over the convocation ceremonies. Seen as a symbol of prestige, the colonial university in its post-colonial stage was slipping towards outward appearance and further away from substance. During colonialism proper, the institution knew exactly its purpose, understood its mission, and acted accordingly. Now the new managers of the place did not understand the dynamics at work but acted as if everything was fine.
By the powers that have been conferred on me, I grant to all whose names have been read the degree of Bachelor of Science. By the powers that have been conferred on me, I grant to all whose names have been read the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Those became the litany of the postcolonial institution. Everything in the end became hinged on that. And so the trademark regime took root.
The ceremonies were held in a post-colonial culture saturated with modern pop music and culture. Modern pop was suddenly the new power in the land.
Over time, the neo-colonial state proceeded to multiply its most prized possession. So acute was the hunger for knowledge. There was a need for men and women of learning in all kinds of fields. There was a need for all kinds of technical skills. In the post-colonial state everything was scarce.
The state genuinely yearned for progress and wished for the development and prosperity of the people. But in the old colonial university, everything was as usual. The old colonial teachers continued to do the same things as before.
Although it routinely graduated students, the post-colonial university faced an identity crisis. What did it mean to be a university? What does it mean to be African? On the post-colonial campus the crisis was deep but these questions were not asked. For a society emerging from colonialism and searching for its own routes and place in the modern world, the learning and research program at the post-colonial university was laughable. In the late 1960s, at the post-colonial university in Nairobi, he clashed with certain young professors, led by the then young Ngugi wa Thiongo, to include African rather than European literature in the curricula.
Five decades after independence, the old question now takes on an urgent tone. How have African universities fared since independence? Whats going on there? Is it true what Olugesun Obasanjo once said according to a Nigerian newspaper, that all the teachers were interested in was drinks and beautiful girls?
In the mid-1970s, a famous African statesman declared in Addis, during the Organization of African Unity Summit, that Africa had come of age. But all over Africa, even as he spoke, it was the era of the coup. He himself had earned his way to the Summit by means of the weapon.
How could Africa come of age without its universities? Was that the example of Japan? Is it the example of the new China that we saw at the Beijing Olympics? Without its universities, where would Europe be? In Russia and Poland the intellectual tradition was well established.
There is a little-known novel about the state of the post-colonial university called Marks on the Run. It was published at Ahmadu Bello University (where I taught) in 2002. Written by a professor from Ahmadu Bello University, the book provides an exceptional insight into what is happening in African universities. Of course, it is a Nigerian book, but it can be assumed that it generally represents the African reality.
Although its author is far from a great man of letters and in many ways lacks a writer’s gift, Marks on the Run manages to let the world of the post-colonial university into the world in a way that provides an observer-like experience in the place.
The old colonial campus no longer exists. Without tears. In its place stands a huge building, hastily constructed. Hundreds and thousands of students attend, but many have no idea why they are there. The old colonial professor is gone; There no one talks about spears, bows and arrows anymore!
But there are lecturers and professors on campus who know next to nothing about their disciplines, who represent no body of knowledge, who are devoid of any trappings of culture. To be sure there are exceptions. The living conditions of the students are attractive. Rented accommodation in the city is worse. Really how someone could study and learn in those conditions is beyond imagination.
The old colonial mission of “for the glory of the empire” that once guided learning and curriculum is gone. But nothing has been put in its place. In the void, the regimen of notes and notes, and the final certificate at the end takes center stage. It is exercised through the combined dictatorship of lecturers and professors who invoke out of context the African thing about deference to elders. “Where are your manners?” is a constant refrain on campus.
The university has become a big business. Fake entrepreneurs prowl the halls of learning hunting for bogus contracts to deliver fake equipment and disused reagents. A growing number of readers find here a place to mark time and make quick dough. For most students, the university has become a place for easy grades and unearned diplomas, a far cry from the rigor and discipline of the colonial university. “Where has the good weather gone?”
Not long ago a professor at Ahmadu Bello University told me. Here, nobody wins their titles. We crush them. He pointed to a group of his own graduate students lounging in the shade in the midday heat. Among them were some of his younger colleagues who were pursuing their doctorates. Now rushing into Nigerian terminology is giving away.
In the novel, learning and intellectual things take a backseat; money and sex come to replace ideas as the real mode of academic exchange. In real life, this is imprinted on the postcolonial campus through the attention paid to material possessions and the general lack of reference to scholarly work.
But don’t despair, all is not lost on the post-colonial campus. There is a group of talented teachers and dozens of talented and determined students, young people in love with the idea of a modern and prosperous Africa. There is a raging battle on the post-colonial campus between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Marks on the Run by Audee T. Giwa is a report from the front.