The purpose of this paper is to put on the scale of history the recommendations of what is commonly, though unofficially, referred to as the Ashby Commission and to weigh the importance of the Commission in the light of educational developments in Nigeria since September 1960 when the Commission submitted its report to the Nigerian Government. The end of 1971 made proposals in the report more than ten years old; and it is perhaps time for the historian to hazard an evaluation.

An initial problem is how to ascertain the specific role which the Commission's recommendations have played or failed to play in the developments which have taken place in Nigeria's educational scene within the last decade. Obviously it cannot be argued that the Commission's recommendations were the only determinants for the features of Nigeria's educational growth since the past ten years even when such features bear resemblances to the recommendations. The very fact that the report of the Commission was accepted and acted upon by the Nigerian Government is evidence enough that ideas contained in it were shared in Nigeria at that time by a larger number of people than the nine members on the Commission. That a considerable number of the proposals in the report have been adopted as part of the basis for educational planning in the country, in my thinking, owes more to this popularity than to any assumption of extraordinary wisdom on the part of the Ashby Commissioners, whose recommendations have in certain respects been anticipated by actual developments.

The notion of a subordinate African international system is widely posited and accepted. Political scientists have debated the means to, requirements for, and amount of political development in African states but have left largely unstudied the question of whether or not the African international system is developing--by which we mean developing a capacity to cope, by adapting to internal and external challenges. Our purpose in this essay is to study the development of the African system by examining the Organization of African Unity (OAU), with particular reference to its early years.

The focus on the OAU is easily justified. As the sole continental body to which each black African state belongs, its own development is a necessary, and almost sufficient, precondition of the system's development, if this system is also to be construed as subordinate in world politics. The possibility that an African system could develop through the creation of some other body seems remote, although it is not logically precluded. One could, of course, argue that an African system would be developing, were the states to continue the present trend of advancing their interests through more or less cohesive subregional or subpolitical groupings, such as the East African community or OCAM; but it would not be an African international system that was developing.

Serious consideration of ideology and economic progress is singularly appropriate at this stage in East Africa's history, in relation to the Uganda coup and the current difficulties between Tanzania and Uganda. Both events have a crucial ideological dimension and have already had deep repercussions on the economy of the two countries and of the East African Community as a whole. That the subject is appropriate, however, does not render it any easier to deal with adequately. At the outset, I encountered four basic problems.

First, the very definition of “economic performance” is itself an ideological decision, in that ultimately it requires a value-judgment on the relative importance of various possible indices of achievement. Whether rapid expansion in per capita income is more significant than the creation of a slower-growing but more regionally and sectorally balanced economy; what division is appropriate between current consumption and investment for future consumption; what economic value is attached to a certain pattern of ownership of the means of production, or to a particular policy of distribution of the economic surplus--all of these basic questions about the economic objectives of a society can only be answered ultimately by reference to ideological values. This interdependence between the terms of the topic is an index of its complexity.

On January 25th, 1971, after approximately eight hours of continuous nondescript music which accompanied the stacatto of rifle, machine gun, and anti-tank fire that even seemed to threaten us in our Makerere University preserve, the voice of Warrant Officer Sam Wilfred Aswa was heard on Radio Uganda announcing that elements of the Army had deposed President Apolo Milton Obote. Aswa listed eighteen grievances which had led the Army to take this action. The eighteen points included a number which related directly to Obote's economic ideology and policies (Uganda Argus and The People, January 26, 1971). Beginning in October 1969 Obote, a friend and disciple of Nkrumah and Nyerere, a man whose personal dedication to socialism was widely accepted in Africa, began to define a strategy which would move Uganda to the left. Whether or not a causal relationship can be shown to exist between the Obote government's attempt to embark on a socialist program and the January 1971 coup, it is instructive to examine this program. This may serve to reveal pitfalls to be avoided if a viable socialist system is to be constructed in Africa.

In relating ideology to economic performance, it might be noted that an official statement that sets forth the ideology to be followed in developing and directing a given society can have a significant impact on economic performance, or it may simply be another example of bureaucratic rhetoric. The content, the degree to which specific policy proposals are enunciated as well as the ability and dedication on the part of those charged with translating documents into action programs will determine the significance of the ideological statement.

The term “social history” has not generally been used by historians of Africa. We all read anthropology, but until recently most anthropologists working in Africa have eschewed the time dimension, while historians have often avoided social questions. If we believe with Benedetto Croce that all history is contemporary history (Theory and History of Historiography), that it is concerned with explaining the world we live in, then the social questions are too important to be consigned to another discipline. In discussing African social history, I am not trying to create a new subfield, nor do I expect to review all of the disparate work that can be labelled social history. Instead, I hope simply to comment on certain questions which have been studied or can be studied more fruitfully.

Social history can be defined as the study of changes in the ways people relate to each other and perceive those relations. It is frequently closely related to economic history because social groups can often be best defined in economic terms. The social historian differs from most sociologists in that he approaches social phenomena by studying how they evolved and in that he starts with the study of the particular event or community. He is usually more concerned with general statements than are his fellow historians--he might well talk about comparative history, and he is usually more conscious of the uniqueness of every historical event than the sociologist.

Historical writing about Africa in the last decade has undergone a quantitative, if not always qualitative, boom. This is particularly true in the realm of political and, to a lesser extent, economic history. But little work has been completed in the area of African intellectual history, surely one of the most fascinating and ultimately rewarding fields into which history can be divided.

One obvious reason for this dearth of work is the elusiveness of intellectual history in general--the immense difficulty involved in researching and writing about it well. Intellectual history, according to its broadest definition, deals with the history of thought. But thought, unlike so-called “hard,” verifiable evidence used by social scientists--such as statistics, carbon dating, chronologies--is a nebulous phenomenon to isolate and define. Thought can be nonverbal as well as verbal. It can be symbolic or “unmethodical,” as in poetry, fiction, art, or music, or quite definite and “methodical,” as in science and philosophy.

Ideally, an intellectual historian would study all of these types of thought, not for their accuracy or logical consistency (as would a, scientist or mathematician), not for their value or aesthetic satisfaction (as would a critic or philosopher), but for their relation to each other in time, how and why they appear and spread at a particular time, and their effect on concrete historical situations. In other words, it is the intellectual historian's job to delineate or describe thought in a given historical epoch and to explain the changes which this thought undergoes from epoch to epoch.