Page 59 - Afrika Must Unite

44 AFRICA MUST UNITE

Kenya Teachers’ College at Githunguri, where Jom o K enyatta
later became Principal. Not surprisingly, these Kikuyu schools
turned out keen nationalists, and they were suppressed by the
British after the M au M au outbreak in 1952. In 1955 there were
only 35 high schools in the entire country for 5 J million Africans.
In the whole of French Equatorial Africa there were about 850
elementary schools, and most of them were badly equipped and
staffed. O f the children of school age, only about 18 per cent
went to school at all.
As for higher education, until the foundation of the University
College at Salisbury incorporated in 1955, Makerere College,
founded in 1922, was the only school with university rank in the
whole immense distance between K hartoum and Johannesburg.
In all the British colonies put together, there were only three
other colleges similar to M akerere: Achimota in Ghana, then the
Gold Coast, Ibadan in Nigeria, and Fourah Bay in Sierra
Leone. In French Africa, south of the Sahara, there was one; in
Portuguese Africa, none. The Sudan had Gordon College, and
the Belgians opened a small Rom an Catholic University outside
Leopoldville, at Lovanium.
In the Union, where little more than 30 per cent of African
children go to school, there are now very few opportunities for
higher education, because the Afrikaner nationalists fear
African progress. There were once four universities which
accepted Africans, though the total num ber of graduates every
year probably did not exceed 400. But in December 1953 Dr
M alan, pursuing the policy of apartheid, announced that the
Universities of Capetown and W itwatersrand would no longer
accept Africans. In M ay 1955 the all-African College at Fort
Hare was closed down as the result of an alleged ‘secret authority’
among the students.
The problem of education was uppermost in my mind and in
the minds of my party when we had our first meeting after taking
office under the colonial administration. The fact that most of my
colleagues had, like me, been trained as teachers reflected their
faith, too, in education as the key to our liberation and advance.
Before we could embark on our plans, we made a review of the
situation as we found it. It was not heartening. The picture had
changed little since a foremost British authority on colonial