ABSTRACT
The feverish energy with which practically all independent African countries have been sponsoring literary education since attainment of independence, signally underlines their full recognition of the strategic and decisive role which this sine qua non dynamic of social change and progress should play in their programme of modernization. The bewildering fervour of post-Independence Africans in the matter of Western-type education should not mislead non-African observers into thinking that the scales are just dropping from the eyes of Africans, that it is only now that Africans are learning that Western-type knowledge constitutes power, that it is only in this generation that Africans are having a perception of the absolute relevance of Western education to their vision of, and hope for, a modernized continent. For African States are intensely engaged in a ‘soul-catching’ race in the pursuit of literary education at all levels, multiplying Western-type primary schools by the thousands, secondary schools by the hundreds, and university institutions by the tens. Hence the ambition of the Nasser regime in Egypt to build one school every day; hence the fact that Western-type education has been far and away the biggest single item of government expenditure in practically all African States; hence the spectacle of a poor country like Lesotho in which ninety-five per cent of all children are thrown into school.
