Universities: Ivory Towers in Africa

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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 (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 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.