Leney, Katya

About the author: After reading Law at the University of Athens, Greece, Katya Leney completed an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, she was awarded a Cambridge PhD in History, which was followed by the Rouse Ball post-doctoral senior research studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Kirk-Greene Research Fellowship in Tropical African Studies at St. Antony’s college, University of Oxford. She later went on to work for United Nations peace-keeping missions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

Decolonisation, Independence and the Politics of Higher Education in West Africa

2003 0-7734-6853-6
Recently declassified documents and new interviews with academics and politicians throw light on the foundation and early history of the colonial universities in Ghana and Senegal. British and French policy seeking to mold African elites is shown to have been subverted by the rising generation of African intellectuals who fought to access the best education and utilized their education to legitimize their claims for national independence. With extensive comparative treatment of Francophone material not addressed elsewhere, the book also details African student experiences in the European capitals, the influence of metropolitan anti-communist policy on African higher education, and perhaps most centrally, the influence of the struggle for higher education on the culture of political dissent in Francophone and Anglophone West Africa.