Education: Africa Calling

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Smartly dressed in bright blue blazers, 23 Nigerians stepped off a Greek ship in Montreal last week and headed toward 19 top U.S. colleges, from Yale to Vassar, with full four-year scholarships. Their scholarships were fully earned: the culling they went through made the U.S. race for college look like a free-lunch counter.

The Nigerians were chosen from 2,000 of the brightest youths in Britain's biggest African colony (pop. 35 million), which is to become fully independent in October. First the number was reduced to 375 with schooling qualifying them for Cambridge and Oxford. They were given probing exams. The 83 with highest scores were then screened for character and ambition. The 35 survivors were further analyzed to judge prospects of future academic success. The elect two dozen, some of them schoolteachers back home, are in no mood for fun and games. What their education means to Nigeria is clear from one statistic: the only university in the country — the University College of Ibadan—turns out 50 graduates a year.

"The United States is just starting, but they will give us the help we need," said Harvard-bound Christian Ohiri, 22. Ohiri's faith is not shared by Kenya's flashy young politician Tom Mboya, who says that the U.S. is "not applying itself realistically" to the problem of educating Africans. Visiting the U.S. to raise plane fare for 250 Kenyans who have scholarships to American colleges next fall, Mboya called on Candidate John F. Kennedy at Hyannisport and said: "What we need is a crash program to train thousands to man our new government."

The U.S. Government spends less on education in Africa ($2,000,000 a year) than it does in any other area. Only now is the U.S. devising plans for scholarships for 150 Guinea students and 300 from the Congo. Mboya argues that such private-scholarship programs as the Nigerian plan are "too little and too selective."

Mboya's activities embroil him with British colonial officers in Kenya, who say that Mboya, by the selection methods he uses, often sends "inferior" students to the U.S., where they often can get into only "inferior" colleges (e.g., small Southern Negro institutions). They are embittered after they get home, say the British, when they cannot meet the higher-education job specifications the British insist upon, based on British models. The British also argue that they themselves are training Africans to run new nations.

In sharp retort, Mboya's American associates say that only two or three of this year's batch of 200 Kenya students in the U.S. dropped out—and even they had gained from going to school in the U.S. Some are also swapping campuses: Washington A.J. Okumu, who began at Iowa Wesleyan, now has a two-year scholarship at Harvard. What counts, says Mboya's men, is that Africans need higher education at all levels—and that the British fail to provide enough of it.

They also inevitably point out that the Russians are offering hundreds of four-year scholarships to Africans, providing free transportation and asking few embarrassing questions about school records.