A chemistry student at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar uses a broken test tube, a sign of the collapse of Africa’s great universities.



By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: May 20, 2007

DAKAR, Senegal, May 19 — Thiany Dior usually rises before dawn, tiptoeing carefully among thin foam mats laid out on the floor as she leaves the cramped dormitory room she shares with half a dozen other women. It was built for two.





Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a generation of leaders and professionals, are collapsing. Penda Mbow, a historian, teaches to several hundred students in a dim, dilapidated lecture hall. “We are throwing away a whole generation,� she said.


Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the best universities in the British Commonwealth. Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa, and it trained a whole generation of postcolonial leaders, including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.



And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of Dakar, drew students from across francophone Africa and transformed them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered equal to those of their French counterparts.

The experience of students like Ms. Dior could not be further from that of men like Ousmane Camara, a former president of Senegal’s highest court, who attended the same law school in the late 1950s. A cracked, yellowing photograph from 1957 shows the entire law school student body in a single frame, fewer than 100 students.

“We lived in spacious rooms, with more than enough for each to have its own,� Mr. Camara said. “We had a minibus that drove us to and from class.�

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/wo...mp;oref=slogin