In Times Higher Education:
With Africa’s campuses beset by religious zealotry, Wole Soyinka suggests universities provide a year of materialist induction to free students of dogma and extremism
A few years ago, I had reached the stage of despair over the deterioration of the university system in my own country, Nigeria, under successive regimes of both civilian and military orders. Even the basic, campus social life had broken down, a condition that I tried to summarise in the title of a public lecture that went: “Descent of barbarism and end of the collegial”. Educational standards had plummeted so low that the word “illiteracy” had become current within – not only outside – the ivory towers, leading Unesco to classify Nigeria as one of the nine countries that together accounted for 70 per cent of the globe’s illiterate population...[more]