The Anglo-American-Nigerian Collaboration in Nigeria's Higher Education Reform: The Cold War and Decolonization, 1948-1960

The question of access to university education dominated higher education policies and politics in colonial Nigeria. In 1948, the first university in Nigeria, the University College of Ibadan (UCI), was established. Until 1960, the British colonial government enforced a restrictive admission policy at the college. This policy denied many qualified Nigerians the opportunity to obtain higher education. Britain had created UCI as an ivory tower dedicated to the training of the country's future leaders. UCI failed to meet the expectations of most Nigerians because of its yearly admission of fewer than 130 students, an unbalanced curriculum and enrollment, and a low turnout of a highly educated labor force for the public and private sectors. Nationalists therefore mounted campaigns against the institution and demanded changes in its admission and curriculum policies to accommodate rising demands for access to university education, yet the colonial government consistently resisted fundamental changes until the late 1950s.

The existing literature has either ignored or underestimated how the complex politics of the Cold War and decolonization intersected in the late 1950s to make a shift in the British higher education policy a fait accompli.³ This study argues that the politics of the Cold War and decolonization motivated the Carnegie Corporation (one of the leading philanthropic foundations in the U.S.), Britain, and Nigeria to collaborate in the late 1950s. These three, for different reasons, reformed Nigeria's elitist British higher education system and laid the foundation for nation building in Nigeria's pluralistic society. Carnegie saw the Cold War as a big opportunity to expand American influence in Africa as a tool in containing the Soviet Union. The imminent independence of European colonies in Africa likewise motivated Carnegie to forge a new partnership with Britain to promote Africa's rapid socio-economic development. The shift in the British higher education policy also emerged in the context of the Cold War, particularly Soviet's expansion in Africa and the decolonization of Africa—and reflected Britain's desire to remain influential in a rapidly changing world. In the late 1950s, the changes occasioned by the intensification of nationalist activities in the British colonies was uncontrollably fast, opening the minds of British administrators on the importance of working in partnership with nationalists or jeopardizing future relations with Nigeria after independence.⁴

Further, the process of decolonization offered Nigerian nationalists the opportunity to reconfigure the elitist British higher education policies in educating Nigerians for socio-economic advancement as well as addressing the often-divisive educational gap between the Christian South and Muslim North. This paper illustrates how politics of the Cold War and decolonization helped to unite the domestic and external interests for educational reform in Nigeria in the late 1950s and thus laid the foundation for the Anglo-American-Nigerian initiatives in Nigeria's postcolonial educational expansion, economic development, and nation building.

Access to Higher Education

The British resisted the calls from nationalists to establish higher educational institution in Nigeria until 1934 when a vocational institution, Yaba Higher College, was established. The college, however, did not award degrees; it only trained a few Nigerians to meet the need for a subordinate level of officials in the colonial civil service. Admission at the college was limited, determined largely by the availability of civil service positions rather than the number of Nigerians seeking admission. Nigerians yearning for university degrees were disappointed, and as Kenneth Dike stated, they did not regard Yaba "as an adequate answer to their higher education aspirations."⁵ Subsequently, a nationalists' campaign for a degree-awarding institution in the country came to fruition in 1948 when UCI was established.

The Elliot and Asquith Commissions, set up by the British colonial government to advise it on the higher education needs of the colonies, fashioned the principles that shaped UCI. The reports of these commissions—released in 1945—formed the outline for developing universities in the British colonies in Africa. The Asquith commission outlined broad principles to guide university development in all the British colonies, insisting, among other things, on high academic standards in student admissions. The...