AFRICA: Will the humanities survive?

In the heart of the University of Ghana's Legon campus, in a gully alongside a road, sits a one-story building, three basketball courts long. More recently constructed than the surrounding structures this building, divided into three equal spaces, houses lecture halls built to accommodate an explosion in the student population. On any given weekday, up to 1,000 students crowd into each room - sometimes spilling out onto the grassy knoll outside, where they have to strain to hear the lectures, writes Kenneth Walker in The Carnegie Reporter.

This scene represents a microcosm of the trends at many African universities - especially in the study of the humanities, which can be said to embrace the entire record of human achievement and includes the study of history, anthropology, language, culture, philosophy, literature, fine and performing arts and religion, among others. Based on this sweeping array, it might be easy to assume that the humanities would be at the core of any major university.

But this is not the case at many institutions of higher education in Africa, where there is serious debate about whether the humanities can thrive or even continue to exist. One key reason for this concern is that like much else at African universities, humanities faculties have undergone tremendous hardship following their heyday in the years after colonisation. Back then, many European-trained African professors, flush with the nation-building inspiration of independence, produced a generation of internationally acclaimed scholars.
Full report on the Carnegie site