Penda Mbow, an activist, teaching history in a packed and dilapidated
lecture hall. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
Africa's once-great colleges are overcrowded and crumbling
*By Lydia Polgreen<http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=By+Lydia+Polgreen&sort=publicationdate&submit=Search>
*


*DAKAR, Senegal:* Thiany Dior usually rises before dawn, tiptoeing carefully
among thin foam mats laid out on the floor as she leaves the cramped
dormitory room she shares with half a dozen other women. It was built for
two.

In the vast auditorium at the law school at Cheikh Anta Diop University, she
secures a seat two rows from the front, two hours before class. If she sat
too far back, she would not hear the professor's lecture over the two tinny
speakers and would be more likely to join the 70 percent who fail their
first- or second-year exams at the university.

By the time class starts, 2,000 young bodies crowd the room in a muffled din
of shuffling paper, throat clearing and jostling.

"I cannot say really we are all learning, but we are trying," Dior said. "We
are too many students."

The best African universities, the grand institutions that educated a
revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and
engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. They are victims of
overcrowding, too little money, mismanagement and trends in international
development that have favored primary education over higher learning even as
a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the
already strained institutions.
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The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across
Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of
countries of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of
poverty.

The Commission for Africa, a British government research organization, said
in a 2005 report that African universities were in a "state of crisis" and
were failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the
poorest continent.

Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a country's
hopes for the future, African universities have instead become warehouses
for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can
expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents.

"Without universities there is no hope of progress, but they have been
allowed to crumble," said Penda Mbow, a historian and labor activist at
Cheikh Anta Diop who has struggled to improve conditions for students and
professors. "We are throwing away a whole generation."

As a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of discontent,
occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of politics and crime.

In Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a large role in stirring up
xenophobic sentiment that led to civil war.

In Nigeria, elite schools have been overrun by secret societies that have
become violent criminal gangs.

In Senegal, the university has been racked repeatedly by sometimes violent
strikes by students seeking improvements in their living conditions.

In the early days, post-colonial Africa had few institutions as venerable
and fully developed as its universities. The University of Ibadan in
southwest Nigeria, the intellectual home of the Nobel laureate writer Wole
Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the best universities in the
Commonwealth. Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of
Africa, and it trained a whole generation of postcolonial leaders, including
Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of Dakar,
drew students from across French-speaking Africa and transformed them into
doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered in every
way equal to those of their French counterparts.

The experience of students like Dior could not be further from that of men
like Ousmane Camara, a former president of Senegal's highest court, who
attended the same law school in the late 1950s, in the feverish days before
independence. A cracked, yellowing photograph from 1957 shows the entire law
school student body in a single frame, fewer than 100 students.

"We lived in spacious rooms, with more than enough for each to have its
own," Camara said.

The young men in the photo went on to do great things: Camara's classmate
Abdou Diouf became the second president of Senegal. Others became top
government officials and businessmen, shaping the country's fortunes after
it won its independence from France in 1960.

Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000
dormitory beds.

The disarray of African universities did not happen by chance. In the 1960s,
universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive
development in the young countries of newly liberated Africa, and
postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses, research facilities,
scholarships and salaries for academics.

But corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept
much of Africa in the 1970s, and in the retrenchment universities were among
the first institutions to suffer. As idealistic postcolonial governments
gave way to more cynical and authoritarian regimes across Africa,
universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and
elitist airs, became a nuisance.
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