Background Paper
Second Corning Conference

# DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN EDUCATION IN NIGERIA

By Kenneth O. Dike

## I

In Nigeria, as in all the other West African countries, Western-type education originated with the Portuguese adventurers to the Guinea Coasts in the Fifteenth Century. It must be admitted, however, that during the first four centuries of their contact with the West Coast the European adventurers confined their activities almost entirely to trade; education, in the formal sense, was merely incidental to commerce. In the Fifteenth Century, when crusading zeal was ever-present in Europe, commercial and religious issues were one and indivisible and in the early years of the West Africa trade, the Christian priest invariably traveled with the trader, either to check the advance of Islam - at that time the hereditary foe of Christendom - or to extend the Christian message to unknown lands.

From the earliest years of Portuguese enterprise in West Africa education was regarded by both ecclesiastical and civil authorities as being of fundamental importance to the spread of Christianity. A certain amount of instruction in the Christian faith was obviously essential to genuine conversion, while only the ability to read could make possible a deeper and truer

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understanding of the new religion. Missionary education also had
an obvious secular value in facilitating commercial contact between
Portuguese and African.

A few examples will suffice to indicate the type and
content of education then prevalent.

On October 29, 1553, a Jesuit father, Cornelio Gomes, wrote
from the capital of the Congo that he had made it a rule not to
baptize children unless he was sure that facilities were available
for their instruction in the Christian faith. He had baptized
one child whose father, he knew, lived near a school where the
boy could be taught. Father Gomes had gone to the Congo planning
to establish a college for between five and six hundred boys who
would be chosen from the sons of chiefs. Within the college would
be a school for catechists, the best of whom would be taught Latin
and then more advanced subjects, with the object of training them
as priests and legists. Soon afterwards the King of the Congo
wrote to the King of Portugal asking for three hundred copies of
a book to be used in this college, but a little later he withdrew
his support and it is uncertain whether the project was carried
through. It was revived, however, by a later King Alvaro II, in
whose reign some books of Christian theology were translated into
the Congolese language for use in the missionary schools.

In accordance with the decrees of the Council of Trent,
a seminary was established on the island of Sao Thome (off the
coast of Nigeria) in 1571 to train boys from the diocese which

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included the coasts of modern Nigeria for the priesthood. Some members of the Itsekiri tribe (in Western Nigeria) were trained in this seminary during the course of the following two centuries. It is also clear that missionaries who visited Warri (the Itsekiri Capital) from Sao Thome in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries taught many inhabitants of this coastal kingdom to read, so that Portuguese books were in demand there.

The missionaries who went to the Kingdom of Benin in 1515 obtained the Oba's (King's) permission to teach his son and the sons of some chiefs the rudiments of the Christian faith, as a prelude to baptism. At the same time they taught the boys to read. When another mission visited Benin in 1539, they found a Christian Negro, held prisoner by the Oba, teaching boys to read.

These examples indicate that missionary schools were first and foremost the instrument of evangelization; and these schools spread throughout the West African Coastlands, from the area of the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, to the Kingdom of the Congo. Secondly they helped to facilitate trade contacts with the natives. The few literate African traders were products of these schools and it was through their activities in the commercial sphere that Africans began to learn the business methods of the West. On the whole, then, the early Christian missions and their schools declined in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries when the transatlantic slave trade was at its height. Once again West Africa

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clung to its age-old system of religion and education. Even in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries it must be emphasized that Western education, or whatever there was of it in the early years, was confined to a few widely scattered trading posts on the Atlantic seaboard; with the possible exception of the Kingdom of the Congo, the schools' influence hardly touched the tribal interior.

The modern impact of western education on African society dates from the political conquest of West Africa by Western European Powers in the last quarter of the last century. Once again the missionaries were the pioneers. In the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century a new enlightenment swept through Europe. This enlightenment originated, in part, with Christian and humanitarian groups, and in part with the American and French Revolutions. All of these forces preached the brotherhood of man and all worked toward the same end - namely, the abolition of the iniquitous traffic in men. One of the main results of the Abolitionist movement was that it altered the European attitude not only toward the slave trade but also toward the peoples of Asia and Africa. Already, with regard to British rule in India, Edmund Burke had put forward the theory that political relations involve moral obligations. The American and French Revolutions, which occurred around this time, insisted on the "rights of man" everywhere, and incidentally on those of the "noble savage." The Evangelical movement gave new life to the Church of the day and made the emancipation and regeneration of

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distant peoples the duty of Christendom. Its activities resulted
in the formation of missionary societies. Thus the Baptist Mission
was founded in 1792, the London Missionary Society in 1795 and the
Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) in 1799.

From the point of view of educational development the
missionary movement coincided with the European attempt to penetrate
the interior of Africa politically and economically, and hence the
aims of the new educational pioneers went beyond the sphere of
evangelization. In fact, missionary propagandists of the time
insisted that commerce and Christianity, 'the Bible and the Plough'
were both essential for the regeneration and the redemption of the
'Dark Continent.' The missionaries still led the way in education,
but where possible they collaborated with traders, explorers and
government agents. The schools which grew out of the Nineteenth-
Century movement for African penetration were intended to supply
clerks for the emerging European government offices and commercial
houses, priests and schoolmasters for the schools and churches.
This paper is concerned with this more recent impact of Western
education upon the Federation of Nigeria.

The history of the introduction of European education in
the Nigerian interior may be briefly stated. In the Western Region
of Nigeria the Wesleyan Methodists first established primary schools
in Badagry in 1842 and moved to Lagos in 1852. The Church Missionary
Society landed in Badagry three years later and moved on to Abeokuta

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and Lagos in the 1860s. In the Eastern Region the Presbyterian Church of Scotland established their first Church and School at Old Calabar in 1847. The C.M.S. followed them in 1857, establishing themselves not only at Onitsha but in many other towns on the banks of the River Niger. The first Catholic mission was established in Lagos in 1868, and during the 1880s the Catholics extended their activities to the Southern Nigerian hinterland. From then until 1899 all education was under the control of missionaries. These missions depended on their home churches and gifts from friends for their sustenance. It was after nearly half a century of missionary educational activity that the Government founded its first school in the country - a school for Moslem children in Lagos.

It was not until 1877 that the Lagos Administration provided the first grant of 200 pounds for each of the three missionary societies carrying on educational work in Lagos. Thus from the very beginning education in Nigeria was a virtual monopoly of the missionary societies, and in fact it has remained so. As late as 1942 the missions controlled 99 per cent of the schools in Nigeria, and more than 97 per cent of the students were enrolled in their schools. Even in 1960, the year of Nigerian independence, the Voluntary Agencies (as the missionary educational agencies came to be called) controlled in the Western and Eastern Regions and in the Federal Territory of Lagos something between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of the existing schools. What has been the significance

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of this missionary predominance for Nigerian and indeed for African
education?

As Professor Victor Murray pertinently remarked in his
book, "The School in the Bush," "To all intents and purposes the
school is the Church. Right away in the bush or in the forest the
two are one, and the village teacher is also the village evangelist.
An appreciation of this fact is cardinal in all considerations of
African education."

It is this close identification of education with evangeliza-
tion and in turn with Western culture and civilization that led
African nationalists to attack missionary-sponsored education as
an arm of European imperialism. The mission schools taught young
Nigerians to aspire to the virtues of white Christian civilization,
and to emulate European culture; and consciously or unconsciously
the schools implanted in most of the students a deep contempt for
African culture and way of life.

Products of mission schools tended to view African culture
as 'pagan' and 'heathen;' education was designed to emancipate
them from the supposed evils of tribal thralldom. Briefly, then,
some missionaries saw the African as a "tabula rasa" upon which
could be written a completely new civilization. One direct consequence
of this philosophy of education was that a new class of Africans
arose who, although they may have understood tribal life, were not
of it; who, having imbibed the learning of the whiteman, fought

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to share in the liberties and rights which it preached. Viewed in
this light, missionary education did help to prepare Africans for
the new nationalism of the Twentieth Century.

Missionary education has also been under attack not only
from the Africans whom it sought to benefit but from dyed-in-the-
wool imperialists such as Lord Frederick Lugard and his school, who
attribute to missionary education the African revolt against
colonialism. Such critics insist that Western culture (as introduced
by the missionaries) undermined and in some instances destroyed
African customs, beliefs, family life and the institution of chiefdom.
They allege that the mission schools were a little too academic and
the system of education they introduced was not adapted to the
Nigerian background. This criticism is summed up by Miss Perham
in her book "Native Administration in Nigeria:" "The missionaries
confused Christianity with Western civilization or even with English
social habits; and there was little in the educational theories the
teachers brought from home to show how education should be adapted
to the environment and especially to the civic duties of the
recipient."

There is much truth in this criticism; but it is by no
means the whole truth. A nodding acquaintance with the missionary
records of the last century will reveal that Miss Perham's cri-
ticisms were by no means new. Missionary bodies subjected their
own educational policies to constant criticism along the lines
suggested by the above quotation. They sought for the right

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educational policy and strenuously tried to practice it. Records of Nigerian missionary societies show that they consciously tried to devise a system of education suitable for the country, and particularly one geared to encourage industrial and commercial development. For this reason the teaching of English was encouraged at the primary school level, while at the secondary school level the emphasis was on industrial, technical and agricultural training. For instance, from the Nineteenth Century to the early years of the Twentieth there were missionary industrial schools and other institutions at Abeokuta, Lagos, Onitsha and Calabar in Nigeria, teaching how to clean and pack cotton and other agricultural produce for the European market, as well as brick and tile-making, carpentry, masonry, tailoring, printing, and so on.

In other words, the ideal of most missions operating in Nigeria was to found self-supporting institutions combining education with industrial labor. It is what came to be known in mercantile and government circles as the "Basle method." This was the system by which the Basle missionaries in Ghana attempted to make their mission stations self-supporting by cultivating farms, training and employing carpenters and masons, and having a trade section to dispose of their surplus produce and, incidentally, to provide a considerable source of revenue. The Governors of Lagos, the leaders of thought, and commercial agents throughout the country never tired of expressing their preference for indus-

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trial education, and at every opportunity admonished the missions to follow the Basle method. This was largely the position as it existed in the closing years of the Nineteenth Century.

On the whole, and in spite of the emphasis laid on technical and industrial education by the missions, it was the seminaries, the teacher training colleges and the secondary grammar schools of the purely literary type that survived into the Twentieth Century. Why was this so? To begin with, industrial education was much more expensive than the missions could afford. Rarely did the budget of the C.M.S., the biggest mission in Nigeria, exceed 5,000 pounds a year. It was natural that the missions should channel their meagre funds where the best results could be obtained.

On the other hand, schools of a purely literary type cost much less to run, and encouraged as they were by the commercial expansion in Nigeria at the time, they proved much more successful than the industrial institutions. This point is important. Today we rightly criticize the shortcomings of a wholly literary type of education, and we see its inadequacies for our present needs. But we tend to forget that the missionaries had such spectacular success in the early years because they came to a country largely anxious for contact with the outside world. The first demand was for education to establish this contact, largely through trade. The schools mostly provided the much-needed clerks. It is not without

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significance that the Lagos government, after criticising the
missionary emphasis on literary education for over thirty years,
in the end bestirred themselves not as one would imagine, to start
a technical school, but rather to start another literary grammar
school - in 1899, called King's College. The fact was that the
clerks were needed in even greater numbers than they were being
produced. Indeed, the missionaries were wrong in their basic
conception that the country could be industrialized before a greater
commercial expansion had taken place. Thus all the theories about
putting industrial and technical education first were, to put it
briefly, against the grain of reality.

Finally, even in the earliest days, the Africans to
whom this European education was offered knew what they wanted.
The demand for literary education, the urge to acquire the ability
to read and write, came from the Africans themselves. And many
of the African leaders never confused education with religion and
culture. In Bonny (a port in Eastern Nigeria) in the 1860s, the
chiefs who had to pay for their school told the missionary
teachers that "they did not want religious teaching, for that the
children have enough at home; they teach them that themselves;
that they want them to be taught how to gauge palm oil and other
such mercantile business as soon as possible." In other words,
the African authorities of Bonny made it clear that they sent
their children to the whiteman's school to learn the business

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methods of the West. The African had an educational system of
his own inherent in the family life. There was moral and religious
training with clear precepts reinforced by taboos. There was
training in the etiquette and conventions of society. As Dr. Ade
Ajayi put it, "There was intellectual training, too, as the child
learned to count ears of corn or learned the answers to conundrums,
or tried to tell the fables he had heard last, or listened to the
old men tell their family (and tribal) history. In the moonlight
he played games and learned alliterative verses. And as he grew
older he might be apprenticed to a job or be initiated into further
mysteries of life." The child was therefore sent to school to
acquire additional arts - the art of reading and writing, the art
of piloting steamboats or of manufacturing gunpowder. The possession
of these unaccustomed techniques conferred great powers on the
whiteman. To Africans, knowledge was power. It was knowledge that
had raised Ferguson, a black man, to be Governor of Lagos. It was
the excellent education which the ex-slave boy Samuel Adjayi Crowther
had received which enabled him to be the first Nigerian Bishop of
the Anglican Church and in the Nineteenth Century. Men such as
these wielded great powers in Church and State. The mission schools
therefore supplied the African society of the time what it needed:
clerks, schoolmasters, administrators, lawyers and doctors. The
emphasis on literary education was therefore not so much the
result of the mistakes of the missionaries as of the demands of

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the society in which they worked. As Dr. Ajayi pertinently remarked, "The humble clerks...made a valuable contribution to our national economy. They did jobs which without the mission schools would either not have been done, or would have been deferred till a European could have been got to come...and do it. We often say that the main difference between East and West Africa at the turn of the century was the climate, the one favoring European settlement and the other not; I suggest that the existence of an economy based on African peasants, with a large and growing staff of African clerks and agents ready at hand before the coming of the British Administration, was a very important difference. Towards that mission schools made a significant contribution."

## II

Why, then, was this system of education which met the needs of Nigerian society in the Nineteenth Century so bitterly attacked by Nigerian nationalists in the Twentieth? Why did the missionaries, once the object of admiration, incur the wrath of many nationalists in this century? To begin with, the European penetration of the Nigerian hinterland from 1885-1914 had carried the trade frontier from the Atlantic seaboard to the tribal interior. The coming of the trading Europeans opened the eyes of the tribal Africans (as it did those of Africans on the Coast) to the vistas of a new world in which the magic of the whiteman's power could be

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learned only through their schools.

The Nigerian discontent was concerned not so much with the contents of education. To a great extent the argument as to whether there should be more of industrial and technical than of literary education did not very much concern the majority of Nigerians. The overriding complaint was that there was not enough education - of any kind - for the masses of people. The key to the understanding of the whole problem of education in Africa is the appreciation of the fact that the whole region thirsts for knowledge. The wealthy and the poor, the aristocrats and the lowest peasants, Christians, Moslems and the "Pagans" cry out for it. This demand for education has not been artificially induced by the nationalist agitators or by the West African Governments. It is the genuine and spontaneous response of a people who have come to realize that they cannot hold their own in the modern world without the rapid advancement of knowledge on a wide front. This statement requires qualification. In addition to the demand for _more_ education there was increasing disquiet that the education, such as existed, was aimed at keeping the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria economically backward; in fact, that education in the days of British rule was designed to enable the Imperial Power to tap cheaply and speedily the raw material of the Nigerian forests. To this end, it was alleged, literary education was perpetuated at the expense of the industrial and technical arts.

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Again, some leading Nigerians opposed colonial education because they believed it was designed to serve a small elite. The Nationalist realized that no impression can be made on the colossal ignorance of the country until education, of all types, permeates every sector of the community, and until it is available to the majority of the people.

The Nigerian discontent with the 'status quo' in education at the beginning of this century was therefore the result, first and foremost, of the British Government's unwillingness to recognize that the demand for education was insatiable and that no government which ignores this force can continue to enjoy the people's confidence.

For reasons which cannot be fully entered into here, the British Government throughout the period of their rule in Nigeria gave low priority to education. During the years 1877 to 1882, Government spent only 200 pounds on education. From the years 1898 to 1923, Government expenditure on education was less than 2 per cent of the revenue. For instance, in 1923 while the total revenue of Nigeria was 6,509,244 pounds the expenditure on education was 100,063 pounds, or 1.5 per cent of the revenue. From 1925 to 1939 educational expenditure was under 5 per cent. In 1936, whereas the total revenue was 6,585,458 pounds, 231,983 pounds, or 3.5 per cent of the total was spent on education. Despite the sustained African agitation for more schools, it is noteworthy that at the outbreak of World War II only 12 per cent of the Nigerian children

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of school age (350,000 out of 3,000,000) were receiving instruction. Again, the fact that elementary education was not free, as it was in French and Belgian colonies, was an additional source of grievance.

Another aspect of the question is the fact that Africans believed, rightly or wrongly, that the kind of education offered under the British Colonial regime prepared them only for subordinate positions in all walks of life. Little or no emphasis was laid on higher education, or for training in the higher grades of the professions or the civil service. In Nationalist parlance, therefore, Nigerians were being educated by the British overlords to fill the role of "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Even when a university institution was founded in the years 1930-34, in the form of the Higher College, Yaba, its graduates were rated inferior, in terms of salary and status, to graduates of British universities. Admission to Yaba Higher College was restricted in two respects. In the first place, the number admitted was largely conditioned by the existing vacancies in the technical departments of the Government. For instance, only eighteen students were admitted in 1934, and in the following ten-year period the highest entry for one year was thirty-six even though the number of qualified applicants for entry averaged 150 annually. Those who gained admission were drafted to courses according to the needs of the Government and the training was almost entirely vocational. Of the first 181 graduates of the college, thirty-eight became either medical, agricultural or

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Forestry Assistants; nineteen graduated as engineers, and six as surveyors. The rest were absorbed into educational, administrative and technical services as subordinate technicians and clerks.

In short, the Yaba Higher College was attacked by Nigerian Nationalists on many grounds and was never regarded by them as an adequate answer to their higher educational aspirations.

On account of this dissatisfaction, Government gradually modified its long-standing opposition to education abroad, and inaugurated a program of awarding Government scholarship for study in British universities. From 1937 to 1945, sixty-nine awards were made to Nigerians to study in the U.K. These scholarships were, however, grossly inadequate, and did not cover fields of study in which Nigerians were interested and which they believed would enable them to occupy eventually responsible positions in the professions and in the political service - spheres which were at the time the preserve of British officials.

It has been indicated earlier that the Christian missions assumed the greater part of the burden of education in Nigeria.

In the Thirties and Forties the Government welcomed this state of affairs and not only encouraged missionary preponderance in education but later gave the missions financial subsidy for running their schools. The Government argument in favor of mission schools were:

(1) they were more cheaply run than Government schools,

(2) missionary education placed great emphasis upon moral and character training,

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(3) their curriculum, which concentrated heavily upon the four R's (religion, reading, writing and arithmetic), produced the much-needed evangelists, clerks and teachers for the colonial society of the time.

This marriage of convenience between the missionary societies and Government in education emphasized the latter's indifference to education as a function of the state, and rendered the missions more and more suspect of colluding with the Government and, in the eyes of Nigerian nationalists, with imperialism itself.

It must be stressed that during the period under review, the indigenous inhabitants of Nigeria were not merely content to attack Government's indifference to education or to point out the inadequacies of the existing schools. They took the initiative in founding schools, in sending their sons and daughters for study overseas. During the Thirties secondary schools owned and managed by Nigerian proprietors arose. The first of these, Aggrey Memorial College, Arochuku, was founded in 1933, to be followed by five others between 1935 and 1936. The growth of these schools gained momentum with the end of the war. Two factors largely stimulated that growth. First, the demand for education was so great that the existing Government and mission schools could not cope with the situation. Enterprising businessmen and educators began to invest in what appeared to be a paying concern. The hope of

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reward was not, however, the only motive behind this movement.

The growth of nationalism clamoured for a philosophy of education that would emancipate the masses from the colonial-type mentality which, it was alleged, was propagated by the mission and government schools; and which, it was believed, retarded the rise of a strong Nigerian nationalist movement. Before the attainment of independence, schools of this type greatly increased and, as with mission schools, the best of them received financial subsidy from the state. Indeed, most of the schools now commonly known as mission schools in fact owe their origin to community effort, and in the late Thirties and early Forties when Government contribution to higher education in Nigeria was negligible, improvement unions collected funds and awarded scholarships tenable in Europe and America. In 1945, of the 193 Nigerian students studying in the United Kingdom only forty-four were Government scholars; the rest were private students sponsored either by their families or by town and tribal unions.

What has been written so far applies almost entirely to education in Southern Nigeria; that is, in the Eastern and Western Regions. The position in Northern Nigeria, which has been under the dominance of Islamic culture for many centuries, is very different. In 1900, when the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria was proclaimed, Lord Lugard estimated that there were some 20,000 Koranic schools in which no less than 250,000 pupils were receiving instruction. These Islamic institutions helped to keep the torch

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of Moslem civilization burning for centuries before the advent of British rule. When Western-type education was introduced by the British early in this century, it was many decades after it had become established in the South. The disparity which exists in the educational facilities of the North and South has been the result of the differences in the timing and intensity of impact of modern education on the two sections of the country. This gap is noticeable at all levels of education, but particularly so in primary, secondary and teacher-training education. Thus, although the North possesses nearly twenty million people - that is to say, more than twice the population of the Eastern and Western Regions put together - it had, in 1958 only 230,000 pupils in primary schools as against 2,258,658 in the East and West.

These differentials in educational facilities can be explained in part by geography and in part by difference in historical developments. Proximity to the coast meant earlier contact with the influence of missionary societies. But the more important factor was the hostility of the natural rulers of the North to Christian teaching and the Western type of education, and the British policy of supporting them in this opposition. Lord Lugard agreed, at the inauguration of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria on January 1, 1900, to maintain all the pledges which had been given the Northern emirs by the Royal Niger Company, including that of not supporting the planting of Christian missions in the Moslem

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North. This continued for many years to be the main official excuse
for excluding missionary activities from Northern Nigeria. Actually,
there were other reasons for this policy. It was feared that because
of the opposition of the emirs, missionary evangelization would be
dangerous to political tranquillity. Secondly, Lugard was convinced
that Christian ideas and Western education would militate against
the successful development of his system of Indirect Rule. In one
of his first annual reports on Northern Nigeria, he said: "...the
premature teaching of English inevitably leads to utter disrespect
for British and native ideas alike, and to a denationalized and
disorganized population." There were, however, some exceptions to
the policy of barring missionary enterprise from the North.

Missionaries were at liberty to work in the pagan Middle Belt and
were in fact encouraged to do so. Secondly, they were granted
authority to open schools in the Moslem emirates on invitation by
the chiefs. It was under this provision that C.M.S. opened a school
in the Nupe country in 1903, and also, under Dr. Walter Miller, at
Zaria in 1905.

Since the introduction of Western-type education in the
North, its development has been very slow when compared to the
position in the South. World War II and the sense of urgency
which it generated in the educational advancement in the South made
little impression on the pace of education in the North. In 1947
there were still only three secondary schools and just over 1,100

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primary schools in the whole of Northern Nigeria as against forty-three secondary schools and nearly 5,000 primary schools in the South. Official attitude of British authorities remained conservative. A policy statement prepared in 1928 by the education officer for Kano province epitomizes official attitude and policy during this period: "Students ... should as a rule follow in the occupation for which they were destined. The standard should be low so that the boys will not be alienated from their friends and parents by too great a sense of superiority. After a generation or more, the standard might be raised."

In the years following the end of World War II, Nigerian nationalists felt and expressed strongly that Britain's program of education for Nigeria was designed to keep the African "in his place," that Britain's primary interest was economic exploitation rather than educational emancipation, and that this very fact dictated its own imperatives: territorial self-sufficiency, balanced budgets and stringent economy. There was some substance in the above views. The under-developed and precarious nature of the Nigerian economy meant that there was insufficient revenue for costly programs of educational expansion. Again, since British rule as understood and applied in Nigeria was the maintenance of law and order, the Government deliberately avoided any expensive schemes in education that might lead to the introduction of unpopular taxation or that might provoke riots and disturb the

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peace. Hence the Government's conservative approach to educa-
tional questions can partly be explained by the character and
policies of the Colonial period in Nigerian history.

III

It was to be expected that with the coming of independence
or the imminence of it in the 1950s the African nationalists,
now in power, should give great impetus to educational development.
Unlike the British Administration, the nationalists had always
recognized that education is a great political force in Nigeria.
During the campaign for freedom they had promised the masses
compulsory free primary education and they had also promised to
alter the character of Colonial education by relating it more
closely to the needs of the country. Another factor which
stimulated educational expansion after independence was that
the exodus of foreign personnel created gaps which had to be filled
if the machinery of government was not to be seriously impaired.
Above all, the implementation of the ambitious economic, agricultural
and industrial programs demanded the expansion of training facilities
at all levels. How far did the nationalists abide by their own
propaganda when they assumed power? How high a priority have they
given to education in their development plans?

The first nationalist Government to take office in West
Africa did so in Ghana in 1951. Effective power came into the hands
of indigenous governments in Southern Nigeria; i.e., in the Eastern

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and Western Regions, in 1953. One of the first major acts of these Governments was to launch accelerated plans for education. The educational programs formed part of the general development plans. In Ghana, 10 per cent of the plan funds was allocated to education; in Nigeria, 20 per cent. It is noteworthy that whereas the number of children in schools in Nigeria was about 350,000 in 1940, in 1958 when the expansionist programs of the indigenous governments had begun to take effect the number had risen to over two and a half million children at some 17,000 schools. Today in the Western and Eastern Regions, over 40 per cent of the budget appropriation is for education. Clearly, then, education is regarded by the new Nigerian Governments as the golden key to success. Everywhere education is looked upon as the most potent instrument for equipping the people at large for their new responsibilities. This emphasis on education is indicative of the growing concern of the governments of under-developed countries to reduce poverty and to narrow the gap between themselves and the more advanced countries. To that end many of them have launched development plans the implementation of which calls for the expansion of manpower training at all levels.

It is quite clear that in Nigeria the coming of independence has created new upsurgings of demand for education in the public mind. This desire for a better-educated people is a common expression of vitality and confidence in newly independent communities, and properly harnessed, it can lead to great things. But it carries

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its dangers too, and one of these is that enthusiasm may outstrip
resources. In the Eastern and Western Regions of Nigeria there
is a danger that educational expenditure, which as already
indicated is about 40 per cent of the total revenue, is already
too high. Most authorities consider that, in an agricultural
economy (Nigerian economy is over 80 per cent agricultural and
primitive agriculture at that), the government should budget
for no more than 50 per cent of the children of school age to
receive primary education and for 4 per cent entries into secondary
schools. The view is held that education "cannot realistically
exceed 20 per cent of the budget, however great popular pressure
for it may be."

Apart from the rather disproportionate amount spent on
education in Southern Nigeria, and to some extent, in Ghana, there
is a lack of balance both in the structure of the educational
system and in its geographical distribution. In an ideal educa-
tional system there is a balance between primary, secondary and
post-secondary education. In Southern Nigeria over two-thirds of
the educational budget is spent on primary education, leaving very
little for the needs of secondary, technical, agricultural teacher-
training, and higher education. The geographical distribution
of these primary-school children is uneven. Attempts at introducing
universal primary education have been made with varying degrees
of success in the Eastern and Western Regions and in the Federal

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Territory of Lagos. It is fairly certain that in these three areas the majority of children will complete primary education. In the Northern Region, on the other hand, only about one in eleven of children of school age is at school, and in some areas the proportion is as low as one in fifty. To put it differently, whereas well over 50 per cent of the children go to school in the South, in the North of Nigeria only about 9 per cent of the children are at primary schools, and in many districts the percentage is as low as 2 per cent. In the Moslem parts of the North, therefore, the foundations of a European educational system are only beginning to be laid; and this uneven spread of education is one of the gulfs dividing the Northern and Southern peoples socially as well as politically.

Another important lesson which has emerged from the recent educational experiment in Nigeria, and indeed in West Africa, is that an under-developed territory, which seeks to provide universal primary education, or to expand other sectors of the educational pyramid, without an adequate supply of qualified teachers stands in danger of undermining standards. This is the position in which Nigeria finds herself today. The few trained teachers who were adequate for the narrow educational pyramid of the days of Colonial rule have been swallowed up by the unexpected swell in primary school enrollment. The result is that the proportion of untrained teachers remains very high. Most of the 80,000 teachers in Nigerian

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primary schools are pitifully unprepared for their task. Nearly three-fourths of them are uncertificated, and among those who are certificated, two-thirds have had no more than a primary education themselves. In brief nine-tenths of the teachers in primary schools are not properly trained for the job.

The situation is very similar in the secondary schools. Because of the sudden expansion of the educational pyramid at the base, there are now many more pupils wishing to enter secondary schools than there are places. Moreover, there is a gravely inadequate supply of trained and educated teachers in this sector of education. Of the 4,378 secondary school teachers on the rolls in 1958, 3,470 (about four out of every five) were not graduates, and 1,082 (about one in four) were neither graduates nor trained teachers. This emphasizes the urgent need for strengthening and expanding the teacher-training colleges. At present, primary and secondary education are insecure, so long as the majority of teachers have had enough of neither general education nor professional training. In fact, under existing conditions Nigerian teachers are among the worst-paid workers in the country, and as a result the profession is not attracting the best of the nation's manpower. No educational system can be stronger than its teachers, and until this fact is appreciated by those in a position to effect changes, not much headway can be made.

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The weakness is not only in the number of trained teachers. The pupil population in the first year of secondary school was 12,344, while that in the first year of primary school was 648,748. At the same time only about 553 pupils in the whole country were doing sixth form work - that is, were being prepared by the secondary schools for entry into universities. These facts illustrate graphically the weakness of the foundation on which higher education rests. It must be admitted, however, that many students - as many as about 500-800 a year - prepare themselves privately for the General Certificate of Education which is the recognized entrance examination for the universities. It is, of course, impracticable that everyone who completes a secondary school course should go to university; but there are at present many able children who performed creditably in secondary schools and who find their further education blocked for lack of opportunity for more advanced study.

This brings us to one of the weakest links in the educational structure of Nigeria. As we have indicated earlier, the first Western schooling brought to the country was a literary one. This literary tradition and the university degree have become the indelible symbols of prestige in Nigeria; by contrast, technology, agriculture and other practical subjects have not won esteem. The reason for this state of affairs is fairly obvious. Practically all West African countries entered upon independence with political and other institutions taken over more or less intact from their old

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overlords. These institutions, which were transplanted with hardly any modifications from Europe to Africa, may have served Europe well; experience is proving increasingly that they may not be suited to the African environment to which they have been imported. In no field is a reappraisal of such a legacy more vitally necessary than in the field of education. Even now, in most parts of West Africa, the man of the classics has traditionally been thought a more respectable person than a farmer or a technologist.

Whatever the reasons for the perseverance of this undesirable phenomenon, it is certainly not a good thing to perpetuate it in countries where the most insistent need is for improved farming and more advanced technology. Technical and vocational education must be accorded a prestige and priority in keeping with their importance in the country's economy. This neglect of technical education is clearly reflected in the existing budgets on education.

In one region in 1959, while 66.7 per cent of the amount allocated for education was spent on primary education, and 7.2 per cent on secondary schools only 1.4 per cent was reserved for technical schools and handicraft centers. What applies to the technical sector applies with equal force to agriculture. In spite of the fact that three out of every four Nigerians work on the land and that seventeen shillings out of every pound earned from Nigerian exports come from agricultural products, the traditionally literary schools continue to educate the youngsters away from the needs of the farm and the

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village. There is obvious need for a rapid development of technical and vocational schools and of in-service training in the existing industries to meet the serious manpower shortage in this vital sector of the Nigerian economy. But over and above the needs of vocational education, immediate steps should be taken to introduce technical and agricultural "streams" to the existing literary grammar schools. Only thus can the academic tradition so firmly planted in the educational structure of Nigeria be modified to meet modern needs.

The provision of facilities for practical education in senior primary and secondary grammar schools should be regarded as a necessary part of the general education of every Nigerian schoolboy. It is absurd to suggest that no boy receive instruction in woodwork or metalwork except with the idea that his future occupation is likely to be that of a carpenter or worker in metal, and that the training which girls receive in domestic science be considered strictly vocational rather than as a natural preparation which any girl might expect to receive for domestic life. The instruction in practical subjects generally should be regarded as a normal part of any child's general education, and can be just as valuable to those who will later enter "white collar" occupations as to those who may become craft workers, engineers, cooks, nurses or work on the land.

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IV

During the past ten years, 1951-1961, it will be evident
from what has been written above that the new governments of
Nigeria have been giving much thought to the future of education;
above all they have been trying to alter the character of the
existing system. In the enthusiasm for reform, many mistakes have
been made. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that educational
policies and practices in Nigeria during the past decade have been
little more than a series of improvizations. To describe the
situation thus is only to recognize the speed at which major
changes in education were required by events. In the long run,
the educational changes of the past ten years will be regarded as
bold and progressive if the developments of the next ten years
are soundly guided and resolutely undertaken. It is broadly true
to say that the governments of the Federation of Nigeria recognize
that the "crash" programs in education which characterized the
years immediately following independence cannot go on indefinitely.

Since 1958, three out of the four governments of Nigeria
have appointed commissions of inquiry to examine the existing
structure of education and to make recommendations for a balanced
and orderly advance. The first of these commissions investigated
the educational system of the Eastern Region covering the primary,
secondary, teacher-training, commercial and technical institutions;