Copyright 2014 Zachary Daniel Poppel
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Copyright 2014 Zachary Daniel Poppel FROM THE SOIL UP: SIERRA LEONE AND THE RURAL UNIVERSITY IN THE WAKE OF EMPIRE BY ZACHARY DANIEL POPPEL DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Antoinette Burton, Chair Assistant Professor Tariq Ali Associate Professor Teresa Barnes Associate Professor James Brennan Professor Kristin Hoganson ABSTRACT After the formal end of empire, African academics, students and campus laborers worked to upend enduring British authority over urban and rural higher education in Africa. In Sierra Leone, British professors and their families remained on the campuses after independence in 1961 and maintained a high level of residential and administrative privileges. To translate persistent inequalities into new forms of African autonomy, Sierra Leoneans sustained an everyday campaign to protest the racialized division of resources, and at the same time recruited American personnel in order to dislodge British academics and delink African universities from British universities. Amidst these conditions, challenges to the uneven distribution of scarce campus resources—from housing to piped water—aided wider campaigns to level the material conditions of international development. And the local agendas of campus workers, from their dislike of British food to their preference for ginger farming, impeded some of the agendas of a postcolonial state and its Anglo-American partners. The widespread effort to reclaim local control of African universities ultimately changed institutions in Britain and the United States, and yielded new forms of African influence on American expansion in the wake of British decline. ii CONTENTS Introduction Education, Development, and African Influence on Anglo-American Relations………………...1 Chapter 1 Competing Possibilities in the Last Years of the Njala Training College, 1961-1964…………..25 Chapter 2 The Making of an Agrinaut: Professor Joseph Kastelic and the Land-Grant University……..…80 Chapter 3 Disciplining White Academics in Town and Country……………………………………….…124 Chapter 4 The Roots Under the University: Ginger Farming and the Model Village in the Njala Area….168 Conclusion Education and Development between Independence and War, 1961-1995…….……………...211 Bibliography……...……………………………………………………………………………221 iii INTRODUCTION Education, Development, and African Influence on Anglo-American Relations In British West Africa the colonial college was a critical site in the struggle for and against imperial control. The Colonial University Colleges—a label signifying affiliation with a university in the United Kingdom—were subject to European institutional standards and to a foreign curriculum that was overseen primarily by expatriates.1 From the 1930s onwards these urban colleges pulled African students and teachers into the hierarchies of colonial governance, while at the same time exposed the mechanisms of colonial rule to new forms of critique and contest.2 While West African postwar social movements pushed for reforms in labor relations and civil service polices, students-turned-faculty tried to undo colonial conditions at Achimota College in Ghana, Ibadan College in Nigeria, and Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone.3 These academics, along with staff and students, aspired to transform a system that let them work as teachers but not as advocates for Africanization. And while high-level talks were underway to decolonize the state, they led movements to decolonize the colleges and organized educational agendas that remain alive today.4 1 Amina Mama, Teresa Barnes, “Editorial: Rethinking Universities I” in Feminist Africa Issue 8 (2007); p. 2. As of September 2014, accessible at http://agi.ac.za/journal/feminist-africa-issue-8-2007-rethinking-universities. J.F. Ade Ajayi, Lameck K.H. Goma, G. Ampah Johnson, The African Experience with Higher Education (Association of African Universities/James Currey, 1996) pp. 67-70; and J.D. Hargreaves, “The Idea of a Colonial University,” African Affairs 72 : 286 (1973). 2 Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain: 1900 – 1960, Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (Lawrence & Wishart, 1998). 3 Ajayi, Goma, Johnson (1996) pp. 69-70. 4 Tade Akin Aina, “Beyond Reforms: The Politics of Higher Education Transformation in Africa,” African Studies Review 53 : 1 (April 2010) p. 28; See also, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Nantang B. Jua, “African Universities in Crises and the Promotion of a Democratic Culture: The Political Economy of Violence in African Educational Systems,” African Studies Review 45 : 2 (September 2002) pp. 1-26. 1 Yet the movement to Africanize established colleges was not confined to the city. As this dissertation argues, the tradition of reforming institutions inherited from the colonial-era while advancing postcolonial educational agendas also has a rural history. The history of postcolonial education in West Africa, I argue, is one deeply intertwined with the local and international politics of rural development in the wake of empire. For example, initiatives for new rural education institutions reflected how West African academics, students, workers and farmers navigated competing developmental agendas and used new international relations to disrupt old ones. The pursuit of African autonomy and the Africanization of higher education in rural West Africa, however, ran up against obstructions in the form of British and American determination to reproduce colonial relations through projects of international education. In the process, universities in rural West Africa emerged despite local and global constraints, and generated, in turn, new rural avenues for the pursuit of postcolonial education. Though this is a story about American and British ambition in the region, it is first and foremost a story of attempts by Africans to control the terms upon which education and rural development emerged as twin sites of national and regional advancement. In Sierra Leone, in particular, the desire to develop new schools distinct from the Colonial University Colleges led some working on Fourah Bay College to seek out the promise of higher education in the rural parts of their country. The possibility of transforming colonial education to meet the needs of rural postcolonial West Africa preoccupied Sahr Thomas Matturi, a Sierra Leonean professor of botany. Matturi knew the colonial education system from the inside out, having traversed the local and international network linking West Africa to the U.K. and beyond.5 Like other children of influential families in rural Sierra Leone, Matturi attended 5 Adi, (1998) pp. 120-50. 2 the Bo School for Boys. A preparatory academy on the outskirts of the largest city in the rural interior, Bo School fed students into the Colonial College system in West Africa and the U.K. After a successful undergraduate program at Ibadan, Matturi moved to east-central England, where he studied and taught at the University of Hull, eventually earning a doctorate in mycology in 1961.6 Matturi’s journey from Bo to Ibadan to Hull led him to Fourah Bay College, where he found that the local features of the Colonial College system—privileged conditions for British academics and the repression of Africanizing initiatives—remained intact as part of a larger legacy of the formal end of British rule. Shortly after, he decided to leave Fourah Bay to work as first principal of a rural university he believed might disrupt a British imperial culture which continued to restrain Sierra Leonean educational aspirations. Writing a letter in his hillside Fourah Bay College office atop Mount Aureol in Freetown, Matturi contemplated plans for higher education in Sierra Leone that “might be considered sacrilegious up on these heights of ‘Olympus.’”7 The heretical thoughts Matturi had in mind was a partnership with Americans whom he believed could help transform an existing rural campus into a school radically different from the one on ‘Olympus.’ Writing to his American interlocutors, Matturi explained that their plan to expand the Njala Training College into Njala University College was driven by “excellent economic reasons.” A new school at Njala built with American resources might improve agricultural research capacities and aid rural development initiatives. But possibly of greater urgency—“what is even of tremendous, immediate importance,” Matturi explained—“[is] to re-orientate our ideas and entire thinking from Victorian or even Medieval England to local problems and pressing needs in Modern Sierra 6 C. Magbaily Fyle, “Sahr Thomas Matturi,” Historical Dictionary of Sierra Leone (Scarecrow Press, 2006) p. 126. See also Hull City Council website, hullcc.gov.uk, section on “twinning” of Freetown and Hull in the “About Hull” section (accessed September 2014). 7 S. T. Matturi, Letter to Karl Gardner, May 30, 1963; University of Illinois Archives, Chancellor’s Office, Office of International Program and Studies, Njala University College Subject File, 24/7/2, Box 4, K.E. Gardner File. 3 Leone.”8 As Matturi and his Sierra Leonean colleagues would repeat throughout the 1960s, Americans needed to put developmental resources in Sierra Leonean hands in order to aid an anti-British, locally orientated form of higher education. The recruitment of American resources generated new possibilities as well as new constraints within the campaign for an alternative base of educational