Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship

I was lucky, in preparing for this lecture, to come across one of Eric Ashby’s books, African Universities and Western Tradition, and a cursory reading brought a sense of recognition. I noticed the irony in the way the book had crossed my life while also embodying a number of my concerns. The book was the Godkin lectures he gave at Harvard University in 1964. It was the year I graduated from Makerere College with a University of London honors degree in English. It was also the year that William Heinemann brought out a hardcover edition of my novel, Weep Not, Child, written in English, obviously a product of my five years at Makerere. My novel and I were products of the kind of universities which Eric Ashby was talking about and whose social function was “to produce men and women with the standards of public service and capacity for leadership which self rule requires” (20), in short a governing elite in the expected new political dispensation following the end of the Second World War.

The colleges were established in the fifties, the culmination of a series of committees and recommendations going back to the 1925 advisory committee that years later metamorphosed into the Asquith Committee and the Inter-University Council for Higher Education. But the vision of a modern university in Africa did not begin in the twentieth century with these official committees but rather in nineteenth century with James Africanus Beale Horton in 1868 and Edward Blyden in 1872. Both Horton and Blyden were of African descent, both from Sierra Leone, and they clearly wanted the best for Africa. Nevertheless, their two visions were different. According to Ashby, Horton wanted to introduce into Africa “undiluted Western education” and “there was no place in his scheme of higher education for the incorporation of African languages, history or culture.” The way to African modernity lay by way of the Greek classics and European languages and culture. Blyden on the other hand wanted to free higher education in Africa from “despotic Europeanizing which had warped and crushed the Negro mind” (qtd. in Ashby 13). Writing in 1883 Blyden said:

All our traditions and experiences are connected with a foreign race. We have no poetry but that of our taskmasters. The songs which live in our ears and are often on our lips are the songs we heard sung by those who shouted while we groaned and lamented. They sang of their history, which was the history of our degradation. They recited their triumphs, which contained the records of our humiliation. To our great misfortune, we learned their prejudices and their passions, and thought we had their aspirations and their power.

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He wanted a system of education which rejected all the errors and falsehoods about the African and, while he wanted the Greek and Latin classics as part of the curricula for his visions of an African university, he also wanted African languages to be an integral part of it. J. E. Casely Hayford of Ghana, then Gold Coast, was to go further than Blyden and in his Ethiopia Unbound of 1911 he too articulated a vision of an African University in which the medium of instruction would be an African language and to meet the needs of the relevant material scholars would be employed to translate books into African languages.

When eventually Universities were set up in Africa following the recommendations of the Asquith committee—Ibadan in 1948, University of Gold Coast in 1948, Makerere University College in 1950—it was the Horton vision which triumphed, except that where Greek and Latin had been envisioned as the foundation of excellence, English took over as the foundation of that excellence. At the risk of simplification I shall call this the Horton-Asquith model to contrast it with the Blyden-Hayford model.

What divided the Horton-Asquith model and the Blyden-Casely Hayford Vision were clearly not their disagreements about the need for excellence in the pursuit of higher education but rather the way of achieving it and the question...