A History of African Higher Education from Antiquity to the Present A Critical Synthesis

Subjects:

• Education » Higher Education
• History » African History

Reviews:

• Lulat has compiled a great amount of information on African higher education (interpreted in the broadest sense) across history. The result is an encyclopedic compendium of data that complements for the contemporary period editors Damtew Teferra and Philip Altbach's African Higher Education (2003) and for the colonial period Eric Ashby's Universities: British, Indian, African (CH, Dec'67). The author is sensitive to and knowledgeable about Africa's cultural diversity, and critically engages with the historiography and politics of education in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. He presents useful summaries of the history of and issues surrounding important African educational institutions, and devotes considerable attention to Islamic (100 pages) and Anglophone (124 pages) regions and the premodern period (66 pages)....[t]here are few other works of such breadth. Recommended. General and undergraduate readers.
  —Choice April 2006
• Lulat's purpose is not to find ways of overcoming what he calls "the current awful predicament" of African universities. Rather, he wishes to correct the errors of other writers, particularly those whom he sees as Eurocentric.
  —Minerva Journal 2007
• In this topically comprehensive and analytically dense work, Lulat....produces an important and timely work of over 600 pages, a work achieving an inclusive and critical perspective on the history of African higher education....[t]his is a well-researched and excellent work in the historical and actual locations of African higher education; it should be widely read and could become a primary reference for researchers, students, and others who are interested in this increasingly important area of study.
  —Comparative Education Review August 2007
• Lulat's work fills an important gap by providing the first comprehensive overview of the subject, beginning with Pharaonic Egypt and Axum in "premodern Africa" and continuing through to the early twenty-first century. Contained within this thick (529 pages of text) and expensive volume is a wealth of valuable information and analysis that will serve as a guide and reference for all future studies....[L]ulat deserves the highest praise for his meticulously researched, comprehensive survey of African higher education over five millennia and across the entire continent.
  —American Historical Review June 2006
• [O]nly the second full-length, unified, continent-wide historical survey of African higher education. His account differs from the other, Ashby (1996), by a longer temporal and wider geographical scope, by being critical rather than an apology for British colonial policies, and by placing the history of universities in Africa in a global context.
  —Reference & Research Book News November 2005

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• Introduction
• Pre-modern Africa
• Afro-Arab Islamic Africa
• Anglophone Africa
• Anglophone Africa--II: Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa
• Europhone Africa
• Thematic Perspective: The Role of Foreign Aid
• Conclusion: The Colonial Legacy
• Appendix I: An Exploration into the Provenance of the Modern African University
• Appendix II: The Historical Antecedents of the Disjuncture Between Pre-Modern and Modern Africa
• Appendix III: The European Colonial Empires in Africa on the Eve of Political Independence
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index