Book Reviews and Studies

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Notes

1. Perhaps following in John Gay's footsteps, this reviewer served a mission service semester at Cuttington University College from March–July, 2005, as part of ongoing institutional redevelopment work with the College's founding agency, the Episcopal Church of the USA.

2. One wonders of the symmetry of fortunes and purpose that this very idealism of education idealistic promise infused both Africa and UNESCO in their heyday, and how the great challenges of discovering a new unifying purpose, more grounded and realistic (if less alternatively idealistic cum cynical), unites the continent and the UN agency today.

3. In his analysis, Gay credits using the Report of the United Nation's African Futures Project of 2002 as a model.

4. In advancing this thesis, Gay parallels the classic work of Ronald Dore, The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification and Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), even if he does not directly quote it. This is especially evident in Gay's chapter on “alien education systems” and especially the university sector. As he states:

In the African countries, where I have lived and worked, failure to succeed in the [formal, Western‐oriented] school system leads to a harsh life. Such people must do the dirty work of society and be content with low recompense. Furthermore, the standard a person must reach in order to comfort and security has varied over the years. When I first went to Liberia … a scholar who had finished six years of school was considered a member of the intelligentsia and could command a good job … The situation had changed when I left Liberia in 1974. By that time, having a high school diploma was not enough to guarantee a person a good job. College graduates had to hunt for employment, and when I returned to Liberia in 1997, I met Cuttington University College graduates who were running small grocery stores in order to survive (p. 109).

Hence the need to encourage training at needed skills, such as mechanics and plumbing (of which Africa has a very low supply due to the prestige draw of nevertheless declining white collar positions) or even of the traditional ‘bush schools’, Gay argues.

5. In a ‘personal postscript’ to the book, Gay tries to deal honestly with the African complaint that missionary Christianity has a lot to answer for in the history of that land. He states:

Two friends who read this section in a draft claim that what I am about to say is discontinuous with and undercuts what I have written up to this point. They say I now reveal openly what had hitherto been a partly hidden Christian missionary agenda. They assert that Christianity, just like every other Western ideology, has harmed Africa … I respectfully disagree … [but] I understand that all too often those of us who preach the gospel have denied its basics in our lives and words. … We who are Christians can begin by confessing our own sinfulness, which is a theological way of saying that we did things – some of them right and some of them wrong – for selfish reasons. We rarely gave full respect to the evidence of God's presence in Africa, and we often ran roughshod over beliefs and life styles which were well rooted in Africa before we came. … Some of us, even up to the present, used our Christian faith to promote Western economic and political objectives. … We have forgotten that much of what is good in Africa has been due not only to Africans themselves, but also to secular and even militantly anti‐Christian outsiders (pp. 261–62).

6. Bohannan, P. and Curtin, P. Africa and Africans, Revised Edition. Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1971, p. 3.