Unless it can improve its universities, Africa risks losing out in a globalised knowledge economy. Yet many African universities, including South Africa's, are under threat with policies and management styles too frequently inimical to academic quality. Focusing on recent developments at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), RW Johnson is scathing about 'nationalist fundamentalism' and the 'Big Man' syndrome. A hard-hitting look at the state of African and South African higher education.
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RW Johnson. Tafelberg Short: The African University?
The African University? The Critical Case of South Africa and the Tragedy at the UKZN
African universities in a global context
The fall of the African university
Lost in translation
The view from the World Bank
The critical country
The challenges facing South Africa's universities
A free-for-all?
The key benchmark case: UKZN
A different starting point
UKZN: an African nationalist future?
Social closure and the race to the bottom
A parochial academy
UKZN a harbinger of the future?
A high-stakes game
About the book
About the author
Tafelberg Short books
Imprint page
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RW Johnson
The same contrast exists if one compares scientific publications and patent applications. In 2002 East Asia and the Pacific region accounted for 25 391 and 65 506 of these respectively, while the comparable figures for sub-Saharan Africa were 3 696 and 101. Such data and those on university rankings are, as we know, just a shorthand indicator of intellectual life. And Africa's backwardness has great meaning. This is the world's fastest-growing continent, both economically and demographically. There are already over a billion Africans, and soon there could be two billion. If the whole world is going to be globalised into a knowledge economy, this means that Africa has to catch up. The alternative is a globalised world in which Africa alone remains as the Third World.
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The results have been catastrophic, particularly since 45% of the population speaks Berber, not Arabic, while even most Arabs are not conversant with literary Arabic, and there is a huge shortage of competent Arab teachers, not to mention key academic books in Arabic. Webometrics, an Internet firm that ambitiously tries to rank universities way beyond the conventional top 500, ranks the two best Algerian universities, Abu Bakr Belkaid University and the University of Batna, as numbers 4 132 and 5 559 respectively.
Morocco illustrates the opposite. By 2006 it offered over 40 relocated French university programmes up to master's level – and at an entirely acceptable standard. The results have been dramatic. The number of Moroccans studying abroad has fallen from 59 000 to 42 000, as students flock to these internationally recognised degree courses, while there are now over 5 000 foreign students studying in Morocco, usefully paying fees to its universities. If you want a good French degree at lower cost in a warmer climate, Morocco's the place.
