Page 61 - Afrika Must Unite

46 AFRICA MUST UNITE
distribution of school books, and my Government is faced with
the task of establishing other means of getting text-books to our
school population which will not be subject to the kind of
m anipulation which now creates a scramble for these books and a
too heavy financial burden upon parents.
There did come a time when colonial administrators found
that it was too expensive for the local budget to import British
officers for the lower grades of the service, and when the Euro­
pean trading communities discovered a need for African workers
with some degree of literacy. The colonial administration then
took a hand in providing facilities at prim ary and secondary
levels, though they were niggardly, especially in regard to
secondary schools. Little attention was given to technical
training, and as a result educated Africans have acquired a bias
towards clerical work and a contempt for m anual labour.
A fateful consequence of this accent upon a literary education
has been the denial to our country of a skilled labour force. I do
not refer here to highly qualified specialists, but to our general
body of workers. There were no university facilities in the Gold
Coast until the college started at Achimota in 1948 and later
removed to Legon. Those of our young men who could collect
the resources to enable them to pursue higher studies in the
United Kingdom in the main went in for law. Apart from the
fact that they found an attraction in the wig and gown which are
the emblem of this profession, the industrial backwardness of our
country, coupled with the reality that they could not find places
in the administration - the almost sole employer of such skills - as
engineers, doctors, pharmacists, agronomists, accountants,
architects, and the rest, discouraged them from training for these
professions. O ther considerations were the higher cost and
increased length of study required for these professions as
compared with those required for training in law.
This lopsided state of affairs has created for us one of the
biggest of our problem s: that is, how to create a skilled labour
force and a body of trained technicians in the many fields of
modern agriculture, industry, science and economics in the
quickest possible time.
W hen my colleagues and I came into office in 1951, we found
some government schools in the principal towns of the country.