Abstract
Higher education plays a major role in shaping the values that allow the ‘middle classes’ to play a political role in society, in addition to providing aspiring members of those classes with the skills and intellectual capital which allow them to enter the professions and economic sectors that define ‘middle classness’ (such as business, law, healthcare and education, and politics). Since the 1990s, a wave of private universities has transformed African higher education and has helped shape a new generation of Africa’s middle classes, by (for example) promoting new political paradigms of support for multi-party liberal democracy. This chapter examines the case of the University of Makeni, Sierra Leone’s first private university, where politics and political values found various forms of expression in the months preceding the Sierra Leonean presidential election of 2012. Complex relationships between the university’s internal culture and the country’s wider political situation shaped the selection and dissemination of political values on campus, in ways that imply the primacy of local conditions in shaping the political values, behaviours, and identities of African middle classes. Material, economic conditions make the emergence of classes possible; non-material factors shape the values of those classes in unpredictable, locally determined ways.
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Notes
- 1.
I must emphasize here that there is no question of UNIMAK being a de facto arm of the state or the APC, as some in Sierra Leone have perceived (Anita Schroven, personal communication). The university, and the community gathered around it, are, I believe, sincere in their pursuit of political independence. This makes the intrusion of politics into the campus, described in this chapter, even more significant.
- 2.
I conducted research on UNIMAK in 2011 and 2012, inspired by an interest in education policy in post-civil war Sierra Leone.
- 3.
The similarities between the emergent middle class of nineteenth-century Freetown and the middle classes of Europe and North America lie not only in their assiduous pursuit of commercial and professional activity, but also in their staunch adherence to a particular tradition of Christianity and the notions of civilization that went with it.
- 4.
Paracka Jr states that ‘limited in access, colonial education bestowed elite status, although Africans rarely advanced beyond mid-level management positions ’ (Paracka 2003, 76).
- 5.
Some of the earliest anti-colonial activists in West Africa emerged from Freetown, such as I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson (Denzer 1982).
- 6.
UNIMAK’s mission might well be seen as continuing to emphasize ‘love’ through education . Learning did not only comprise of educational opportunities, such as courses in business or agriculture , but also of the introduction of new ‘audit’ techniques for internal management (O’Kane 2014). Learning also was to be achieved by making the university campus a centre for the formation of network connections, both local and global, through which social and cultural capital could be accumulated (O’Kane 2017).
- 7.
Sierra Leone has a largely deserved reputation for positive interfaith relations between the 40 per cent of its population who espouse Christianity and the 60 per cent who adhere to Islam (these rough percentages follow Berriault 2013, 89). It is not remarkable or surprising that Muslim students would attend a Christian university.
- 8.
The use of ‘Mohammedan’ as a synonym for ‘Muslim’ is usually considered improper, as it implies a divine status for the Prophet Mohammed in Islam , one analogous to that given to Christ in Christianity—in the Muslim faith, however, the prophets are not considered as divine. The term is used here only because it was the self-description employed by Minister Kanu himself.
- 9.
Previously, in 2011, there had been severe controversy and violent protest (largely against property, not persons) when the Roman Catholic Church decided to appoint a member of the southern, Mende ethnic group as Bishop of Sierra Leone’s northern province.
- 10.
Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was the first western -style university in Sierra Leone, and the first of its type in West Africa, and its reputation as a centre of learning inspired the trope of the ‘Athens of West Africa’ (Paracka 2003, 27).
- 11.
It was also an assertion that was questionable at best. While Sierra Leone has seen significant improvement in its human rights situation since the days of the one-party state and the civil war , that situation remains highly imperfect.
- 12.
The precise name of this report was not made clear. It appears to have been a reference to the United Nations Development Project report on Human Development Indicators.
- 13.
Marda (2015), however, provides a critique of the election’s conduct and an assessment of the extent to which Sierra Leone has been ‘democratized’.
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O’Kane, D. (2018). Thinking Sierra Leone and Building a New Middle Class: Political Expression and Political Values at the University of Makeni. In: Kroeker, L., O'Kane, D., Scharrer, T. (eds) Middle Classes in Africa. Frontiers of Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62148-7_9
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