"The University of the Village": The University of Nigeria, Nsukka and the Making of Post-independence Nigeria
General Material Designation
[Thesis]
First Statement of Responsibility
Stevenson, Russell Wade
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Achebe, Nwando
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Michigan State University
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2020
GENERAL NOTES
Text of Note
488 p.
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
Michigan State University
Text preceding or following the note
2020
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
This dissertation examines the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN, the first indigenous university in Nigeria and the first land grant university in Africa. This dissertation argues that UNN represented an innovative experiment in African higher education by expanding higher education to the general populace rather than the colonially privileged elite. However, its construction drew upon patronage politics and taxation regimes that expropriated funding at the same time other regions faced education taxes. Resistance to the University's construction reflected local sentiments of inequitable distribution of tax resources throughout Nigeria's Eastern Region. The University also served as a mechanism in post-independence Nigerian geopolitics: as a mechanism for removing the influence of the British-established University College, Ibadan and British educational models more generally. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka would be, as Taiye Selasi and Achille Mbembe have phrased it, an "Afro-politan" institution-porous and all-encompassing of knowledge systems throughout the globe. During the Nigeria-Biafra war, UNN faced sustained wartime damage-damage from it could not easily recover. The Nigeria-Biafra war laid the groundwork for a period of sustained infrastructural decay and internal resistance, even as the Nigerian federal government enjoyed larger access to oil revenue. This dissertation examines what makes African institutions "indigenous" and how UNN represented the halting transformation from coloniality to indigeneity in the post-independence Nigerian nation-state.