Page 60 - Afrika Must Unite

THE INTELLECTUAL VANGUARD 45
affairs, M r Leonard Barnes, writing in the nineteen-thirties, had
this to say about education in the Gold Coast:

In 1913 education there cost £25,000: in 1931, the peak year,
it cost just over a quarter of a million. This is ten times as much,
and there can be no objection to calling it such, or to calling it an
increase of 900 per cent, if you prefer. The same fact can be
stated, though less impressively, by saying that educational
expenditure took eighteen years to rise from 3 per cent to 7 per
cent of Government revenue. Both forms of statement omit
another fact, which is equally relevant, namely, that even in
1931 four Gold-Coast children out of five were receiving no
schooling of any kind, and less than half per cent got past the
primary stage.... Authorities have calculated that at our present
rate of progress it will be 700 years before the natives of even the
Gold Coast can read and write their own language. Note: Or
3,500 years, if the natural increase of population is taken into
account.1

It is difficult to appreciate from these observations that the
educational system in the Gold Coast was considered to be one
of the most advanced in tropical Africa. O ur prim ary education,
in fact, goes back as far as 1752 and was begun by missionaries
and continued by them for a very long time. After a long period,
they received grants-in-aid from the local government, but a
good part of the money was used for purely religious purposes
and in paying for the salaries of European missionaries. U n­
fortunately, too, they paid the local teachers irregularly and
enforced upon them the purely religious duties of lay preachers,
catechists and Sunday school teachers. These faults aside, it must
be adm itted that we owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the
missionaries for the contribution they made to such education as
the country received. O n their side, however, they did not lose,
for in addition to the grants received from government, they
charged school fees, and some of them set up bookshops for the
sale of religious literature and school text-books. A few, like the
Basel Mission, even branched out into trading and have
developed into not inconsiderable business concerns. Today the
mission bookshops more or less control the im portation and
1 Leonard Barnes: Empire or Democracy? Victory Gollancz, Ltd, 1939, p. 141.