By NDUBI MVULA –
IT was on July 12, 1966 around 15:00 hours (3.00 p.m.) that Zambians and the international community witnessed the colourful and flamboyant installation of the country’s first chancellor of the newly-established University of Zambia (UNZA) at a temporary campus in Lusaka.
The venue of the temporary campus is what today is called the School of Medicine at the Ridgeway Campus situated opposite the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka.
Witnessed by multitudes of Zambians and over 2, 000 invited guests from more than fifty other universities from all over the world, the ceremony is described as having been a milestone in the unprecedented development of the university which legally came into being only in November 1965.
The order of proceedings for the installation of the chancellor of UNZA read “and it is time for the special guest of honour to deliver his speech. This is no other than Tanzanian President Dr Julius Kambarage Nyerere.”
Dr Nyerere, who was also Chancellor of the University of East Africa, posed a question which required an answer as to whether Africa shall maintain its internal separation as it defeats colonialism or whether the earlier proud boast “I am an African” shall become a reality.
“I do not believe the answer is easy. Indeed I believe that a real dilemma faces the Pan-Africanist. On the other hand is the fact that Pan-Africanism demands an African consciousness and an African loyalty, on the other hand is the fact that each Pan-Africanist must also concern himself with the freedom and development of the nations.
These things can conflict. Let us be honest and admit that they have already conflicted,” he said.
Dr Nyerere observed that the establishment of a university college in Dar-es-Salaam and a university in Lusaka meant that Africa had two extra centres of higher education for its 250 million people.
He said every extra hospital means more health facilities for Africa, every extra road, railway or telephone line means that Africa is pulled closer together.
“Schools and universities are part of an education system. A national education system. They promote and they must promote a national outlook among the students,” he said.
Dr Nyerere, with much emphasis on the need for the promotion of Pan-Africanism, said he deliberately chose the subject because he believed that the members of the new university and other universities in Africa have a responsibility in the matter.
He said the present leaders of Africa then were grappling with serious and urgent problems within their own States and they had to deal with dangers from outside.
Dr Nyerere said the time available to seriously think about the way forward on Pan-Africanism was limited in the extreme, and when leaders took steps in the direction they were always assailed for “wasting money on conferences”, or being “unrealistic” in their determination to build roads or railways to link our nations.
“Who is to keep us active in the struggle to convert nationalism to Pan-Africanism if it is not the staff and students of our universities? Who is it who will have the time and ability to think out the practical problems of achieving this goal of unification if it is not those who have an opportunity to think and learn without direct responsibility for day to day affairs?” he asked.
Dr Nyerere challenged the universities to move in the direction of fostering unification of the continent as they individually serve the needs of their respective nations and also called for exchange programmes where Tanzanian students graduate from Zambian universities and also Zambians do the same under the spirit of unity.
“Why can we not exchange students, have Tanzanians getting their degrees in Zambia and Zambians get theirs in Tanzania? Why can we not share expertise on particular subjects and perhaps share certain services? Why can we not do things which link our intellectual life together indissolubly? Let the universities put proposals before our governments, and then demand from us politicians a reasoned answer on the basis of African unity if we do not agree!” he said.
And in his acceptance speech as Chancellor, Dr Kaunda said the establishment of UNZA had not come any too soon because in nearly twenty years, there were men of vision who dreamt and planned for a university in Lusaka.
He said in 1948 the old Central African Council appointed a special committee to investigate the need for “a college for the higher education of Africa”.
“This committee decided at its first meeting, not only that a university college should be established as a matter of urgency, but that it should be located near Lusaka where hospital facilities could be provided for students in the medical faculty. Unfortunately, the recommendations of the committee, while supported by the Government of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, were vetoed by the Government of Southern Rhodesia which insisted that any university established should be under its full and exclusive control,” he said.
He said early in 1951, the scheme was revived following the decision of the South African Government not to admit any more Africans from outside that country to educational institutions in the Union.
The move, he said, increased difficulties in finding university places for the growing number of Northern Rhodesia students at Fort Hare and Makerere and triggered the immediate promotion for the creation of the Committee on Higher Education for Africans in 1949.
However, six months later the project was killed by the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, thereby confusing the plan for the university college for Africans with a parallel proposal by Rhodesian Europeans to build their own university.
But this later became the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a multi-racial institution which became a showpiece for the federation’s professed policy of racial partnership.
Dr Kaunda said the first informal discussions on the possibility of UNZA took place in hotel rooms in Tananarive in the Malagasy Republic on the occasion of the UNESCO Conference on the Development of Higher Education in Africa in September, 1962.
“After a secret meeting in Lusaka, it was agreed to appoint the Lockwood Commission with a minimum of publicity to survey the situation and advise on the establishment of a university. Its report, in the dying days of the Federation, represented a landmark in the educational development of Zambia and Africa,” he said.
He later observed that economically, Zambia was one of the most developed countries on the continent but educationally, it was one of the least developed.
“It is a harsh fact of life that, at the time of independence, we had only about 100 university graduates and, what is perhaps even more depressing, only 1,500 Zambians with school certificates and 6,000 with as much as two years of secondary school.
“The first UNZA graduate is the minister of Education, and the minister of Agriculture was the first science graduate. Even now we have only two graduates in agriculture, one in engineering and five in medicine,” he said.
Dr Kaunda did not mince his words in attacking the former colonial regime: “As far as education is concerned, Britain’s colonial record in Zambia is most criminal. This record is even treasonable to mankind when it is recalled that in the seventy years of British occupation, Zambia has never lacked money, and except for a year or two, her budget had never been subsidised by the British Treasury”.
He said financial exploitation was preferred to human development.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you will bear with me for my high feelings on this matter, but they are the embodiment of the bitterness of my people in this regard. Educational injustice is a crime against the nation and those now ruling Britain must accept a moral obligation to redress this. A moral obligation which must be superior to pecuniary considerations and political juggling,” he said.
In the quest to promote the motto ‘One Zambia, One Nation’, Dr Kaunda pointed out that education was a great boom but that it could also be a great curse if it raises up an elite of black gentlemen, remote from the masses, conscious only of what society owes them, not what they owe society.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a great day for Zambia, the university and me personally, but it is only the beginning. Your presence here, and the messages of goodwill from sister institutions all over the world, have fortified us for the tasks that lie ahead.
With God’s help, we will not fail,” he said.
These are but just excerpts from the two Presidents during the installation of the new and first chancellor of UNZA.
In the next series of the Golden Jubilee of UNZA memory lane, we will look at the laying of the foundation stone at the university site on the Great East Road Campus.