Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  The press began to devote more space to attacking the University as a “centre of subversion,” and one journal asserted the doctrine that it would be better to have a university with no professors at all than one that harboured subversives. The students returned to the campus at the end of the recess on February 3 and 4, and it soon became clear that there was considerable unrest among them as a result of the recess itself, the detentions, the deportation orders and the press attacks. Reports reached the President that a big student demonstration against the Government would be held on February 8, the day on which the deportations were due to take effect. It was clear that there was some danger of matters getting out of hand, with the University becoming a political storm centre and a wide variety of possible results, the most likely of which would, in my opinion, have been the closing down of the University for a prolonged period, the alteration of its constitution in such a way as to deprive it of the degree of autonomy that it enjoys, and its reopening on a new footing. With the support of the academic body I therefore decided, while continuing my representations on behalf of the members affected by deportation orders, also to do everything possible to prevent any kind of student demonstration, or even retaliation to provocation.

  I addressed the students to this effect at 8:00 A.M. on the morning of February 8, the day when the deportations took effect. I warned the students that in my opinion some of the attacks by extremists in the press and elsewhere were intended to goad students into some gesture which would be the pretext for remoulding the University and entirely changing its character. I therefore urged that all students who wished to uphold the existing character of the University, and academic freedom at the University, should in this excited time exert rigid self-control even in the teeth of severe provocation. I had no sooner finished this address than word reached me that a mass demonstration was on its way to the University. The vanguard arrived between 9:30 and 10:00 A.M. There were between two and three thousand demonstrators of all ages and both sexes, including a number of school children. They were led by Nathaniel Welbeck, organizing secretary of the Convention People’s party, who had with him other prominent members of the party. Most of the demonstrators were orderly and good-humoured, but a fringe of activists did some damage to property, broke doors and windows of the halls and committed two minor assaults. Subsequently, the damage having been assessed, I sent a bill to the party for £130, 14s. 6d., which was not paid. The object of the demonstration, as was later confirmed to me on good authority, was to overawe the students and prevent, or blunt the effect of, the student demonstration which was anticipated for that day but which never took place as the students, without exception, obeyed the injunctions of the University authorities. If the student demonstration—which had been seriously discussed—had taken place together with the party’s demonstration or if the students had responded to provocation, there would have been an obvious risk of serious violence.

  I sought out Mr. Welbeck and pointed out to him that no student demonstration was in progress or intended and that therefore his manifestation was unnecessary, and that I hoped he would disperse his followers. Mr. Welbeck, however, directed a part of his followers to “occupy” Commonwealth Hall with orders not to withdraw until I had summoned the whole student body to hear addresses from himself and his colleagues. I then left the campus and went to the Government officers at Flagstaff House, where I saw the Secretary to the Cabinet and told him how matters stood at the University. He was most distressed by these developments and left to inform the President, then residing at Christiansborg Castle, and to ask him to have the demonstration called off. I then returned to the University where I found Mr. Welbeck and his associates seated round the table in the University Council Chamber engaged in discussions with the Pro-Vice-Chancellor and the Registrar, who were attempting to explain the University’s position. Mr. Welbeck repeated his demand that the students should be convened to be addressed by him and his colleagues. I pointed out that we should be happy to offer him facilities to speak at the University, in the ordinary way and on an ordinary day, to any students who wished to hear him, but that I could not convene the student body to hear him under such circumstances, and in the presence of a quite unnecessary and undesirable mass demonstration. After much further discussion and after the arrival of the Chairman of the University Council, Nana Kobina Nketsia IV, who added his authority to the request of the other University officials that the demonstration should disperse, the demonstrators and their leaders departed from the campus.

  On this day some of the deportees left Ghana, and the remainder followed within a few days.

  In the weeks that followed, press criticism and other forms of pressure continued and it was evident that an influential section of opinion wished to continue what it considered to be the good work accomplished in January and early February, to force politically trusted people into key posts, and to put an end to the University’s autonomy. It was also evident, however, that other influential sections of opinion in and close to the Government regarded these developments with apprehension and displeasure. This was the background to the delivery of the Address to the Congregation which follows and which was delivered on the occasion when the University of Ghana conferred for the first time its own degrees. Those parts of the Address which dealt with the basic principles of academic freedom were received by the student body and graduates with unmistakable marks of approbation which were heard by a large audience, including many people prominent in public life. The solidarity and discipline shown by the student body and by the academic body at this difficult time enabled the University to survive this particular crisis, battered indeed, but in essentials intact. The public attacks on the University soon slackened in volume and finally ceased altogether; they have not, at the time of writing, been renewed.

  When I read over the Address I realize that parts of it may seem to some readers, in more tranquil settings, rather platitudinous. I can only say that, at the time and place of its delivery—Legon, March 14, 1964—it did not sound platitudinous to its hearers.

  It is the custom, on these occasions, to give a review of the work of the various departments of the University. Such a review would be interesting, for there has been no lack of constructive achievement at the University during the past year. I propose, however, on this occasion to cause a review of the work of departments to be reproduced and circulated, so that I may devote my present remarks to some general considerations which seem to me of importance in this phase of the University’s history.

  I have said some perhaps ungenerous words, from time to time, about the architects who designed and built our University, and it therefore gives me a special pleasure to pay them a deserved tribute today. We know that the buildings which make up our University are earthquake-proofed, and the architects have been widely criticized for having taken this expensive precaution, since it was believed that Legon Hill was not in the earthquake belt. When I felt the floor of my office heaving the other morning, I must say I felt a surge of unaccustomed gratitude to the prudence of our builders.

  The vibration which shook our campus was a reminder—of a kind which it is said academics need from time to time—that we stand on the same soil as the rest of the community. Just as physical changes in our environment affect us, so must all other changes, including political change. All Africa is going through a process of revolutionary change, and this country in particular has been living through a time of national emergency which has produced, among other effects, a drastic intensification of security measures. It would have been idle to expect that these changes would not have affected the University and they have, in fact, affected it. In a university, changes should be a stimulus to thought, to re-examination, to self-criticism, and this University has responded to this stimulus. Our Convocation has been in special session, members have proposed certain reforms in our customs and practices, and a special ad hoc committee has been set up which will, I understand, shortly present me with a progra
m of recommended changes. I not merely welcome this development; I have helped to promote it. It is right that the academic body should cast a critical eye from time to time on our customs and practices, and that habits which are outmoded, or misleading, or simply inessential, should be dropped. It is, for example, not essential to the life of a university that students should wear gowns, or be waited on at table, or that dons should sit at high tables. These things are not essential; they may even in some small way be harmful because of their implications. I personally would welcome a simplification of our life here. I believe that such a simplification would be quite as much in concord with the true purpose of an academy as with the manners and ideals of a socialist society. It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate the importance of these externals. What is important at a university is not the colour of the piece of cloth that a student wears on his back; what is important is what is going on in the student’s mind. This—the process of learning—is for the university the domain of the essential. Changes that would affect this domain would require careful and anxious scrutiny by the academic body. A time of rapid change in our environment, in the social and political context in which we live, must certainly challenge us to re-examine our own ways; but it also demands of us that we be true to our responsibilities, faithful to the values of teachers and of scholars. Such fidelity is put to the test, in the most advanced societies, in some very subtle ways. We who live in a rapidly developing society are in a sense fortunate, in that the tests are more readily recognizable.

  The slight seismic shock which interrupted our trains of thought on Wednesday morning was not the first shock our peaceful community has experienced during this term. The question which must occupy us is this: can we emulate the success of our builders? As they, in their caution, reinforced our fabric even against what seemed a very remote danger, will we also find, in time of trial, that the moral and intellectual fabric of our University is such that it too will stand proof against shock, so that those values which are more important to us even than the University’s organization, or its physical fabric, will be handed down to future generations in all essentials intact?

  Much depends on the answer to this question: much, not only for Ghana, but for Africa. There are now a considerable number of universities in Africa, but there are few—perhaps not more than four others—comparable to this one. We are able to draw upon a more developed secondary-school system than is available in most other parts of Africa, and we can therefore maintain exacting standards in relation both to entrance qualifications and to degrees. The Government’s enlightened policy in relation to scholarships means that no student who can meet our minimum entry requirements need, at that stage, be debarred by lack of money from continuing his studies. This is a feature not matched in some other African universities which are, in many other ways, comparable to ours. We have been fortunate enough, up to now, to be able to attract a diverse and highly qualified staff, and we have enjoyed all the advantages which are requisite to the growth of a university. None of this could have been accomplished without the financial support of the Government of Ghana and the Ghanaian taxpayer. In this again, our position is unlike that of some of our sister universities in Africa, some of which depend entirely, and many to a considerable degree, on subventions from outside Africa. In our case, outside contributions, welcome as they are, have been statistically negligible in comparison with the massive contribution which Ghana itself has made.

  When we adhere, as we try to do, to what we regard as essential in the life of the University we do so not, as some have suggested, with indifference to the sacrifices of the Ghanaian workers and farmers who have made all this possible: we do so in order that their sacrifices shall not be in vain: in order that this place shall be not merely an assemblage of bricks and mortar and educational functionaries, but a real university in mind and spirit. That, surely, and nothing less than that, is what the people of Ghana want for their children, and it is therefore our duty not to be content with anything less than that.

  Nor is it only a matter affecting the next generation; it has a bearing on Ghana’s plans and problems here and now. The Seven-Year Plan, which rightly calls for such great efforts from the whole nation, expects the universities to make their special contribution. This University is eager to play its part in helping on the success of this great Plan. It can help in many ways—the University’s Volta Basin Research Project may have, for example, a significant bearing on the success of the Plan—but of course what is chiefly expected of us is to provide the graduates, on whose availability the planners’ assumptions often turn. Now it is important not only that these graduates be available in sufficient quantity, but that they should meet a required standard of quality. Only a university where well-qualified teachers can work freely in congenial conditions can produce such graduates, and the existence of such a university is therefore an assumption of the Plan. This assumption is a welcome one; all of us must do our best to see that it is realized.

  Some of our detractors assert, or imply, that when we use such language—when we speak, for example, of “a real university”—what we intend is the perpetuation of colonialist and neo-colonialist values, subtly alienating our students from the rest of the people and imbuing them with loyalties to countries and systems of government not their own. Now it is certainly true that servants of a withdrawing colonial power may desire to leave behind them such an institution as that, and that some have even been successful in this. It is, however, simply not true to suggest that this University today is a colonialist or neo-colonialist institution, or that, behind a screen of concern for academic freedom, it seeks to promote colonialist or neo-colonialist purposes. Those who suggest that this is so have not produced any evidence in support of their allegations. Nor can they produce such evidence, for it does not exist. It is sad, and it is wrong, that the people of Ghana should be told that this University, for which they have sacrificed so much, is working against them. I should like, if my voice could reach them, to tell them that it is working to give them that for which they have made their sacrifices: a better future for their children.

  The values to which we adhere have nothing in common with colonialism or with any other system of oppression, nor have they anything in common with neo-colonialism or any other system of deceit. They are forces of their nature hostile to such systems as colonialism and neo-colonialism, and they have served to bring about the downfall of the first system and the exposure of the second. Respect for truth; intellectual courage in the pursuit of truth; moral courage in the telling of truth: these are the qualities essential to the life of learning and teaching; these are the qualities of a real, of a living university. Since the days of Socrates in Greece and Mencius in China these values have been asserted, and have been attacked. None of us, alas, is Socrates or Mencius—and philosophy seems to have fallen on evil days—but no member of an academy can forget, without being unfaithful to his calling, how Socrates lived and how he died. A teacher may, in the eyes of the world, be a rather battered and insignificant sort of person, but he knows, if he is a good teacher—as he so often, almost inexplicably, is—that he carries responsibilities, and must try to live up to examples, which are on the highest plane of human achievement. This is not, as is sometimes suggested, curiously enough, by both colonialists and some of their adversaries, a question of “introducing European values into Africa.” These are not European values; they are universal values. Mencius taught in China very much in the same spirit as Socrates taught in Greece. They were almost contemporaries. The geographical and cultural gap between them was the widest possible, yet it is clear that they would have understood one another.

  In Europe, and in America, these values have had at least as many enemies as defenders, as the names of Dr. Goebbels and Senator McCarthy remind us. This ancient continent of Africa, which gave the world one of its first and richest civilizations, has the right to share in and contribute to the universal intellectual heritage which we as
sociate with the names of Socrates and Mencius. The University has the duty, not only to transmit intact that heritage, but to provide intellectual conditions in which a modern African genius can make his own fresh and unpredictable contribution to the development of the human mind. We are here to provide, in Yeats’s phrase:

  … not what they would,

  But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest.

  Is this idea of the teacher’s role too lofty, too high-flown, to be relevant? There are certainly those who think the teacher’s role is not, essentially, different from that of the plumber: a specialist technician whom you call in to do a particular job, and whom you expect to get on with his job and keep a civil tongue in his head. A speaker said the other day that if a teacher takes money for his teaching “then he cannot in honesty say that he will not teach what we want him to teach.” This is certainly true in the sense that if you engage a teacher to teach elementary mathematics, and he insists on teaching Sanskrit instead, you will have the right to get rid of him. But there is another sense—a sense which I hope was not intended by the speaker—in which the words are not true. It is not true if it means that he who pays the teacher has the right to determine how he should teach his subject. Few would maintain that he who pays the mathematics teacher can oblige him to disseminate the doctrine that two and two are five—or that the historian’s paymaster can exact acquiescence in the theory that the battle of Waterloo took place in 1923. Yet in many countries, at various times, the doctrine of “paying the piper and telling him how to play his tune” has led to distortions scarcely less gross. Thus, in South Africa, the government which pays the teachers requires teachers in return to acquiesce in, or at least not to challenge, its disreputable and unscientific racialist theories. Yet the South African Government would have a right to do this if we were to accept the theory that the teacher’s paymasters have a right to whatever kind of teaching they want to pay for.