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

The proponents of the Minority Report therefore argued strongly against emphasizing merely the considerable increase of students passing the secondary certificate examinations as a justification for developing university institutions in Britain's West African colonies. In their view, student eligibility for university education should be primary and determined by the soundness of the secondary education the students received. If officials tolerated anything short of this standard, the report warned, the result would turn out to be nothing but "a continuation school" preoccupied "with the task of making good the deficiencies of a secondary school" (CO, 1945c, unnumbered page).

The Minority Report also delineated the tasks defined in its educational policy platform, which included not only extending "literary and elementary knowledge to the masses of the people [and] the production of professionally trained men and women" but also raising West Africans' "standards of living, health, ... and economic development for . . self-government" (CO, 1945c, unnumbered page). These tasks, they maintained, could be realized only through adoption of their proposal, which assigned three crucial functions to the territorial colleges: (a) to provide courses to the intermediate level, (b) to train teachers for primary and secondary schools as well as social welfare workers, and (c) to act as a center from which extramural activities throughout the area should be organized. The Minority Report defined "extramural" in the widest possible sense to include at least two major aspects of adult education-namely, vocational courses and what was termed in the United Kingdom at the time as "extension work" or postsecondary vocational education (i.e., lectures and tutorial study groups conducted in clubs, cooperative guilds, and other centers of adult activity). Stressing the importance of this particular point, proponents of the Minority Report noted that they placed great emphasis on this latter function, convinced as they were that it was vitally important "that higher education should not be divorced from the masses of the people" (CO, 1945c, unnumbered page). The Majority Report, they contended, gave a "misleading picture of the issue" by tending to "stress the view that the prime aim of post-secondary education is preparation for university entrance" (CO, 1945c, unnumbered page).

The CO's Response

The coalition government led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with Colonel Oliver Stanley as Secretary of State, immediately welcomed and readily approved the Elliot Commission's Majority Report when it was submitted in mid-June 1945. However, soon after, the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, and the CO cautiously identified itself with the Minority Report, which was championed by Commission member and Labour Party spokesman Arthur Creech-Jones. At a meeting of senior colonial officials held on August 14, 1945, the CO unanimously endorsed the Minority Report. However, before advising the new Secretary of State of its decision, the CO asked O. G. R. Williams, the head of its West African division, to ascertain the opinions of the governors of the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone on the matter, given that their two colonies were the sites of the most likely opposition to this decision. Though Williams reported that both governors were in favor of the Minority Report's conclusions, he noted that the governor of the Gold Coast suspected resistance from African nationalists there who had aligned themselves with the Majority Report (CO, 1945d).