Michael Crowder

East and Central Africa

Hi gh er ed uc at io n Pr iv at e no npr of it Ab ro ad Botswana 0.26+2 37.8+2 109.6+2 5.8+2 73.9+2 12.6+2 0.7+2 6.8+2 Burkina Faso 0.20-2 2.6-2 – 11.9-2 9.1-2 12.2-2 1.3-2 59.6-2 Burundi 0.12 0.8 22.3 – 59.9-3 0.2-3 – 39.9-3 Cabo Verde 0.07 4.5 17.3 – 100 – – – Congo, Dem. Rep. 0.08-2 0.5-2 2.3-2 – 100 – – – Ethiopia 0.61+2 8.3+2 95.3+2 0.7+2 79.1+2 1.8+2 0.2+2 2.1+2 Gabon 0.58-2 90.4-2 258.6-2 29.3-2 58.1-2 9.5-2 3.1-2 Gambia 0.13 2.0 59.1 – 38.5 – 45.6 15.9 Ghana 0.38-1 11.3-1 108.0-1 0.1-1 68.3-1 0.3-1 0.1-1 31.2-1 Kenya 0.79-1 19.8-1 62.1-1 4.3-1 26.0-1 19.0-1 3.5-1 47.1-1 Lesotho 0.01 0.3 14.3 – – 44.7 – 3.4 Madagascar 0.11 1.5 13.3 – 100.0 – – – Malawi 1.06-1 7.8-1 – – – – – – Mali 0.66-1 10.8-1 168.1-1 – 91.2-2 – – 8.8-1 Mauritius 0.18+1 31.1+1 109.3+1 0.3+1 72.4+1 20.7+1 0.1+1 6.4+1 Mozambique 0.46-1 4.0-1 60.6-1 18.8-1 – 3.0-1 78.1-1 Namibia 0.14-1 11.8-1 34.4-1 19.8-1 78.6-1 – – 1.5-1 Nigeria 0.22-4 9.4-4 78.1-4 0.2-4 96.4-4 0.1-4 1.7-4 1.0-4 Senegal 0.54-1 11.6-1 18.3-1 4.1-1 47.6-1 0.0-1 3.2-1 40.5-1 Seychelles 0.30-6 46.7-6 290.8-6 – – – – – South Africa 0.73+1 93.0+1 113.7+1 38.3+1 45.4+1 0.8+1 2.5+1 13.1+1 Tanzania 0.52-1 7.6-1 110.0-1 0.1-1 57.5-1 0.3-1 0.1-1 42.0-1 Togo 0.22+1 3.0+1 30.7+1 84.9+1 0.0+1 3.1+1 12.1+1 Uganda 0.48-1 7.1-1 85.2-1 13.7-1 21.9-1 1.0-1 6.0-1 57.3-1 Zambia 0.34-3 8.5-3 172.1-3 – – – – – -n/+n: data refer to n years before or after reference year *Whenever data do not add up to 100% for this indicator, it is because part of the data remain unattributed. Note: Data are missing for some countries. Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, April 2015; for Malawi: UNESCO (2014) Mapping Research and Innovation in the Republic of Malawi (p. 57) Figure 19.7: Researchers in sub-Saharan Africa per million inhabitants (HC), 2013 or closest year

Pan-Africanism Since 1940

In 1940, Pan-Africanism seemed to be in a state of decay, yet was germinating new growth. One generation of leaders and organisations was fading. There had been no Pan-African Congress since the unimpressive New York Congress in 1927. The organiser of the four congresses between 1919 and 1927, W. E. B. DuBois, later acclaimed as the ‘Father of Pan-Africanism’, appeared to look back on them as a completed episode. His semi-autobiographical book, Dusk of dawn , published in 1940, showed minimal interest in Pan-Africanism. However, DuBoiss contribution to Pan-Africanism was not only as the organiser and inspirer of occasional congresses, but also as an intellectual, making known the contribution of black people in both Africa and the African diaspora to humanity. In this respect, he was still fruitfully active. His Black folk then and now , published in 1939, was a lively and penetrating collection of essays on African and diaspora history and culture from ancient to modern times. It continued a genre he had pioneered as far back as 1915, with his book The Negro , and which he was to return to in 1947 with The world and Africa. In these works he showed himself capable of stimulating the intelligent general reader on vast, little-known themes. In spirit, these books were profoundly if not explicitly Pan-African. They dealt with Africa as a whole, defended the creativity and validity of African culture through the ages (as had the great nineteenth-century proto-Pan-Africanists, such as E. W. Blyden), and treated the history of the diaspora as a vital part of the history of Africa and Africans.

Social and cultural change

The history of most African countries since 1940 seems to revolve around a single event: their gaining of political independence. But this climax of nationalism must be set within those social and cultural changes of which it was so much the product and which were, in the main, confirmed in their course for at least a decade or two thereafter. The Second World War boosted a whole variety of social changes: the intensification of cash-crop production, the acceleration of migration of all kinds and the rapid growth of cities, the diversification of the occupational structure and, eventually, the movement of Africans into its upper echelons, and the expansion of modern education at all levels. All these implied changes in areas more immediately constitutive of ‘society’, namely in how people identified themselves and in their patterns of social cooperation and conflict. Now the concept of ‘social change’ is more than a mere umbrella for several parallel, probably somehow-related changes in diverse aspects of social life; it denotes the systematic transformation of a particular society. But at what level do we set ‘society’? The difficulty was that, though the prime source of these changes did not lie within them, it was still much easier, as late as the 1940s, to speak of local social systems like those of Asante or the Luo as being societies than whole colonies like the Gold Coast or Kenya. Thus the pioneering study, G. and M. Wilsons The analysis of social change (1945), took as its units of analysis these small-scale societies, even though the features of change which they described resulted from the progressive incorporation of these societies into wider units, of which the colonial social system was the most important.

The Second World War: prelude to decolonisation in Africa

By 1939 the European colonial powers were as firmly in control of their African territories as they ever would be. During the preceding ten years there had been few major challenges to their authority. Africans had come to accept the new political order and to obey the rules laid down by the colonial administration. The lesson had been learned that, although the colonial administration was thin on the ground, in the last resort it had overwhelming resources of power. Attempts to take advantage of the weakness of some colonial administrations during the First World War and to return to an independence based on pre-colonial political structures, though temporarily successful, had failed. Such challenges to the colonial authorities as did take place during the 1930s were made within the framework of the colonial state and were by and large limited to protest against obnoxious features of the administration; such protest took the form of riots against taxation or strikes to obtain higher wages or better conditions of service in the small colonial industrial sector. With the notable exception of French North Africa, there were few violent demonstrations of a modern political character, that is, aimed at securing greater participation by Africans, and more specifically the small educated elite, in the governmental processes of the colonial state. Nevertheless it was clear that if the educated elite accepted the status quo it was a passive not an active acceptance: they hankered after an independence, but, like the British, they saw it as a goal whose realisation was distant.

Monarch of all I survey : Bechuanaland diaries, 1929-37

These diaries are a candid record of eight years of triumph and frustration in the reform and development of an African colony. They also reflect wider events: the struggle between British imperialism and Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, the impact of the depression and the shadow of the coming war. North America: Lilian Barber Press; Botswana: Botswana Society

Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi

The apocalypse, an influential Belgian magistrate wrote at the end of his colonial career, was due in 2026. University graduates, mutinous soldiers, and messianic religious figures would sweep away the massive colonial edifice constructed by Belgium in Central Africa. Nationalism and Pan-Africanism were the ineluctable consequence of education and modernisation; the achievements of the colonial system, to our satirical jurist, contained ‘the germ of their own destruction’. Elements of this prophecy were to find their echo in the momentous transformations compressed into the third of a century from 1940 to 1975. A series of shock waves totally altered the political landscape: a nationalist explosion in Zaire that engulfed the prudent calendars and Eurafrican visions of the coloniser, the turbulent eddies of which finally gave way to the would-be leviathan state of Mobutu Sese Seko (Joseph-Desire); an ethnic revolution in Rwanda, and a precarious ethnocracy in Burundi, with the liquidation of the historical monarchies in both. As the Second World War began, however, virtually no one had any premonition of the sea changes in store. The formal structure of the colonial state was in many respects the logical prolongation of the absolutist Leopoldian state. The centralised personal control the monarch aspired to achieve had as its counterpart the pronounced concentration of powers in the metropolitan colonial organs in Brussels. Executive authority was vested in the Ministry of Colonies, whose staff – and usually minister – tended to be recruited from Catholic and conservative milieux. The royal family also maintained an active interest, political and economic, in colonial affairs.