Word: africa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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 (Léopoldville), 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...
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...
...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...