Gold Coast nationalist reaction to the controversy over higher education in Anglophone West Africa and its impact on decision making in the colonial office, 1945-47, The

Journal of Negro Education, The, Spring 1997 by Charles Peter Emudong

(1) the urgent need to reconcile policy differences apparent in the growing clash between the Lugardian system of indirect rule and the Westminster model of government, the latter of which the African intelligentsia preferred;

(2) the centralist colonial policy, which the British Government adopted in 1932 in response to the Great Depression and which exacerbated unrest in the colonies because it denied colonial subjects access to cheap luxury and basic goods from countries other than Britain; and

(3) the fear that riots in the British West Indies between 1937 and 1938 could easily spread to the British African colonies, especially as the outbreak of World War II led to a further tightening of the already unpopular imperial economic policy. According to Flint (1979), most officials of the CO responded negatively to these factors, "almost totally reversing" their 1920s and 1930s attitudes about sociopolitical change in

Africa (p. 3). They grew increasingly critical of the old-fashioned system of indirect rule through "natural" rulers, in preference to one that channeled authority through the new generation of Western-educated Africans whom they felt were better equipped to implement the new and more demanding centralist economic policy. More significantly, toward the end of the war, certain pressing considerations-notably the weakness of the British economy (Gardiner, 1956), external pressure from the United Nations and the then-two world superpowers, and the feared eruption of violent colonial unrest in the postwar period-literally forced the CO to begin planning comprehensively for the inevitable transfer of power to colonial peoples without fundamentally sacrificing British interests.

New members joining the CO's Advisory Committee on Education in the early 1940s renewed the internal debate over establishing colonial universities in British West Africa. These new members were determined to sweep away the colonial gubernatorial resistance and establish an imperial university system whose development would parallel that of the British system (Flint, 1979). Subsequently, in April 1941, the CO established another subcommittee under the leadership of H. J. Channon to propose specific recommendations for the development of such a system. From the outset, Channon vehemently attacked the colonial governors' opposition to the idea, arguing that though the colonial universities might breed nationalist agitators, it was better to begin breeding them in time to better control them for future use after the inevitable withdrawal of direct British rule from the colonies. This, indeed, was a conception with neocolonialist foresight. Channon s subcommittee therefore advocated, among other proposals, the establishment of university colleges of London in Africa.

Again, the CO readily welcomed the recommendations of its advisory group. Hence, in July 1943, then-Colonial Secretary Colonel Oliver Stanley appointed two commissions to lay the groundwork for the subcommittee's proposals. The first of these, the Asquith Commission, was to delve into the relationship between the projected colonial university colleges and its British counterparts. The second, the Elliot Commission, was charged to produce a plan for British West African university development. Both commissions published their reports in July 1945. The Elliot Commission, however, produced two reports whose conflicting recommendations triggered a controversy of considerable proportion.