The African Experience with Higher Education

"The universities are in a state of crisis. Those teachers who can, flee abroad, while students crowd into slum-like institutions that can no longer teach them adequately. It is a crisis the authors foresee lasting into the next century. But they still feel there are strategies of reconstruction that can save the universities, notably by persuading their governments that they can be agents for national development, offering particularly the communications and managerial skills still in short supply in Africa. But they insist that academic freedom and university autonomy must be restored." Christopher Fyfe, THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT

"...a judicious overview of a large, if depressing subject, by eminent scholars who are not afraid to criticise their own colleagues as well as governments and outside agencies." JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY

"It has...the great merit of placing the history of African higher education firmly in its international context. It is well written and manages to present a vast amount of information, including statistics, in an interesting and meaningful way. It is, finally, a book with a strong pedagogical bias where the lessons of history the reader expected (a firm condemnation of the imperial era and its neo-colonial sequel) are complemented by higher considerations derived from an objective assessment of the workings of the African academic world." Aline Cook, FRANCOPHONE AFRICA