History of African Higher Education from Antiquity to the Present

Y. G-M. Lulat teaches Africana studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the coauthor of Research on Foreign Students and International Study: An Overview and Bibliography(Praeger, 1985), and he is currently working on a book on U.S. relations with South Africa.

• PrefaceIntroductionPre-modern AfricaAfro-Arab Islamic AfricaAnglophone AfricaAnglophone Africa--II: Ethiopia, Liberia, South AfricaEurophone AfricaThematic Perspective: The Role of Foreign AidConclusion: The Colonial LegacyAppendix I: An Exploration into the Provenance of the Modern African UniversityAppendix II: The Historical Antecedents of the Disjuncture Between Pre-Modern and Modern AfricaAppendix III: The European Colonial Empires in Africa on the Eve of Political IndependenceGlossaryBibliographyIndex

Lulat has compiled a great amount of information on African higher education (interpreted in the broadest sense) across history. The result is an encyclopedic compendium of data that complements for the contemporary period editors Damtew Teferra and Philip Altbach's African Higher Education (2003) and for the colonial period Eric Ashby's Universities: British, Indian, African (CH, Dec'67). The author is sensitive to and knowledgeable about Africa's cultural diversity, and critically engages with the historiography and politics of education in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. He presents useful summaries of the history of and issues surrounding important African educational institutions, and devotes considerable attention to Islamic (100 pages) and Anglophone (124 pages) regions and the premodern period (66 pages)….[t]here are few other works of such breadth. Recommended. General and undergraduate readers.