ABSTRACT

While tertiary education in Africa has an ancient and distinguished pedigree, going back to eleventh-century institutions of higher learning in North Africa, the story of the modern university on the continent is a recent one. It begins after World War II and is concentrated in the thirty-year period following the attainment of independence by most African countries in the 1960s. It is the story of the importation and evolution of a particular kind of institution and its adaptation by African states to their particular needs and circumstances. 1 It is at first a story of impressive achievement in which usually a single national university became established as a valuable state institution supplying the human resources to run the expanding bureaucracies and provide the guiding ideas of the newly independent nations. Institutionally the achievement involved the development of relevant curricula, the legitimization of research as a valued activity, and the creation of fledgling intellectual communities.