Ashby Traces Influence of British On African Thought and Education

Last night Sir Eric Ashby emphasized the influence of Western thought and education on Africa in the first of the three Godkin Lectures which he will deliver this week.

Ashby, who headed a Royal Commission on higher education in Africa, explained that African nationalism was "born in America and Britain, in the editorial room of the African interpreter, published by African students in the United States, at meetings of the West African Students' Union in London, in Paris cafes."

The British did not establish universities in Africa until after World War II, Ashby said, primarily because of "a sincere conviction" that "it would be useless to build a university except on the foundation of a sound system of secondary schools" despite the fact that Oxford and Cambridge had "flourished centuries before there was a sound system of secondary schools in England."

Like Oxford

These universities at Lagos, Nigeria, and Accra in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) were patterned carefully after the universities which then existed in England.

They were to be autonomous, self-governing institutions, to concentrate on specialization and professional training rather than a broad, general education, and to be designed "to nurture an elite" with "the standards of public service and capacity for leadership which self-rule requires."

These universities, he explained, as well as those built by the French and Belgians "on the foundations of European culture, are now being invaded by ideas and aspirations which have their source in African nationalism."

In Africa, however, he said, the word "nationalism" has been stretched to cover new meanings. It is, he went on, "an amalgam of three ingredients: loyalty to a race, loyalty to a culture, and a passionate distrust of foreign influence in any form."

Now in Africa, he explained, "we are able to watch universities as they evolve to become viable in a strange and stormy intellectual climate."