This article contains text from the lecture, "Gender and African Universities," delivered on April 22, 2008 at Barnard College.

Introduction and Background

African universities are key sites for examining questions of citizenship, democratization, and social justice. There are over 5 million young Africans enrolled in the continent's universities, making them a major training ground for the next generation of politicians, policymakers, public officials, and corporate and civil society leaders. From a feminist perspective, the gender relations prevailing in the intellectual and institutional cultures of universities are important because of their implications for national and regional development. The central gender question can be summarized thus: Do African universities sustain or transform the region's conservative legacies of colonial and nationalist patriarchal cultures? Many African nations have made enormous progress with regard to inscribing commitments to gender equality in the constitutions, laws, and policies since independence. Universities might reasonably be expected to be at the vanguard of pursuing gender equality as an integral aspect of the development and democratization. But do they actually practice and promote the advance of gender equality, or do they tacitly or actively operate in ways that perpetuate the unequal status quo that characterizes the societies in which they are located?

This key strategic question can only be addressed by carrying out gender research in the higher education sector. To date, the empirical profile, though incomplete, suggests strongly that universities—not just in Africa but around the world—remain deeply imbued with inequitable gender dynamics that are reflected in the profiles of achievement, output, and the administration, and in the institutional cultures that continue to privilege masculine norms of behaviour, academic prowess, and status. While these features may be common all over the world, there are grounds for taking this especially seriously in societies that regard universities as socially-responsible public institutions with a key role to play in social and political development. In the African region, there can be little doubt that universities have been expected to uphold identifiable social and political agendas, even though these have changed over time. Although the initial colonial colleges were set up to advance imperial interests and groom a subservient class of public servants, the majority of Africa's universities were actually set up after independence and tasked with decolonisation and intellectual development of the emergent nations. The fact that this agenda is shifting, having become increasingly contested with the displacement of national development agendas by crisis and economic liberalization, does not mean that the questions of social responsibility have ceased to exist. On the contrary, the university's role in national regional development may need to be re-articulated and defended in the context of globalization and higher education reform processes.

There are several areas that need to be assessed to answer the question of whether universities play a conservative or transformative role with regard to gender equality. The first and most obvious is that of the employment and student profiles which, as I explain below, remain broadly unequal, albeit with some variability across locations and academic fields. Secondly, there is the matter of the institutional procedures and practices, most of which are assumed to be gender neutral; close analysis, however, points to various ways in which apparently neutral policies actually work to sustain inequalities, and this is the subject of a growing pool of research on institutional cultures and practices. Finally, there is the question of the curriculum, both formal academic and the so-called hidden curriculum, through which gender-biased knowledge, values, and assumptions can be transmitted or challenged. It is here that gender and women's studies advocates have sought to intervene, both by developing specialized courses and by integrating gender analysis into existing disciplines and fields of study.

The Gender and Institutional Culture in African Universities (GICAU) project that forms the basis of this brief presentation was designed and carried out by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, with the support of the African Association of Universities between 2004 and 2006. I designed and directed the project on behalf of the African Gender Institute, working closely with Dr. Theresa Barnes (from the University of the Western Cape) and a small team of researchers located within the institutions participating in the study.[1] In designing a project constrained by limited resources but intended to open up the field for further work and gender advocacy, we opted to conduct case studies on five selected national public universities, thus excluding private and other higher education and research institutions from consideration. This was appropriate given our focus on the public responsibility of universities with regard to gender equality.

The GICAU project therefore carried out in-depth studies of University of Chiekh Anta Diop in Senegal, University of Ghana, University of Ibadan Nigeria, University of Zimbabwe, and University of Addis Ababa, with the full co-operation of the university administration in each instance. Each project was led by a local researcher who recruited assistants and participants from within the institution to address the overall profile and key manifestations of gender in the particular institutional contexts.

The study used qualitative methods—various modes of interviewing and participant observation—to document and analyze the operation of gender dynamics inside the target institutions. In this way, we set out to gather the information to support analysis of the dynamics sustaining the observed numerical gender discrepancies. We hoped that qualitative documentation and analysis of gender in the everyday work, social interactions, and the institutional practices, habits, and assumptions (in short, the daily life) of those working and studying in universities, would help to explain why gender inequalities were persisting, even though African post-independence universities have never formally excluded women. Finally, we hoped that in documenting and conceptualizing the workings of gender dynamics within institutions, we would be able to lay to rest the oft-repeated assertions of university administrators and researchers that the sources of gender inequality in higher education are not their responsibility because they are generated outside the institutions themselves—in the schools, homes, and indigenous cultures of African nations. We took the view that even though gender inequalities do exist outside in the wider society, the universities, as premier educational institutions, have an opportunity to effect change, and more than this, a responsibility to do so as a matter of public interest, in keeping with national and international legal and policy commitments.

In other words, we started out problematizing the assumption that universities are liberal, gender-neutral spaces. We also questioned the notion that the numerical inequalities are caused by women "dropping out" to marry and have babies, and to investigate the possibility that women might actually be pushed out by the less-than-supportive gender cultures of African universities. If this were indeed the case, then the policy implications could be addressed—there would be identifiable strategies that could encourage more women to remain in universities to pursue graduate studies, research, and academic careers.

The conceptualization of the universities that we proceeded from was thus not limited to formal academic training function but included an understanding of universities as institutions that produce and transmit culture—and shape political and moral values, including gender ideologies and identities. Universities do not simply turn out engineers, computer scientists, architects, social scientists, historians, philosophers and so on. Through what is often referred to as the hidden curriculum, universities also produce men and women schooled to be particular kinds of citizens and to uphold particular norms, values, and assumptions.

Modern universities have only relatively recently begun to take seriously their responsibilities to provide equally to both women and men. Initially, the colonial colleges that preceded Africa's universities were not designed to accommodate women in equal numbers, even though they did not specifically exclude them. So it was that only a handful of women attended the case study institutions during their early years. There was little residential provision and few of the necessary facilities. To name only the most obvious, women's toilets and childcare facilities were often not provided, while recreational, dining, and drinking facilities clearly reflected male sports and leisure habits. While women's residences have been built and housing policies adjusted in some cases, there are still many institutions at which equal numbers of women could not be accommodated in the basic structure and layout. Indeed, the ongoing struggles for more and better accommodation, improved security lighting, sexual harassment policies, maternity provision, childcare facilities, and for women faculty to be given equal rights to campus accommodations, bear witness to this fact.

Women who attended the Universities of Ibadan, Ghana, Addis Ababa, and Cheikh Ant Diop from the 1950s to the 1970s described being treated as "special"—rather like rare birds, with courtesy and chivalry. They were not seen as posing any real threat to men's clear dominance, and they were not always taken seriously as scholars. For example:

While there was never any doubt that the University of Ghana would be co-educational, both its antecedents and early practices marked it as a profoundly male space concerned with the creation of modern African masculinities. The low numbers of female faculty have improved slowly (Tsikata 2007, 30).

. . . These institutions have been places "of the new-men for the new-men." In this way, African universities should not be seen as static, gender-neutral spaces to which women have been benignly and invisibly added. Rather, these spaces and places are intricately marked with codes for man-as-thinker, man-as-aggressive-debater, man-as-athlete, boys-becoming-men, etc. The addition of women to this men's club is thus not only a statistical but also an extremely meaningful social and symbolic exercise—which is by its very nature, dynamic, challenging, and likely conflicted. It cannot be a coincidence that the dominant position of men remains a quantitative fact of life in African higher education (Barnes 2007, 12).

During the latter part of the twentieth century, the higher education sector expanded across Africa as government responded to public demand and increased the number of institutions from a handful of colonially-bequeathed colleges to over 600 universities, not to mention polytechnics, colleges of nursing, and other higher education institutions. The "massification" of higher education meant that the overall numbers of women on campus increased, and the disparities in provision became more evident. Women began organizing to demand improved conditions of service and more equal treatment during the 1980s (Bennett 2003). The push for gender equality in the universities did not occur in a vacuum but was part and parcel of the rising feminist consciousness across the developing world. Women's roles in African development were increasingly articulated by the growing networks of gender activists, in the context of the development crisis. The United Nations decade for women was a product of this international movement that served to further stimulate gender activism in scholarly arenas, including the establishment of the initial women and gender studies courses and research projects in Nigeria and Tanzania, respectively.

However, following the development crisis and the ensuing imposition of structural adjustment programmes that constrained public spending, the capacity and quality of African higher education has been severely compromised, even as gender activism and scholarship have taken root on campuses.

The African continent has entered the 21st century with the lowest gross enrolment rates in the world and persisting gender disparities in enrolment, staffing, and graduation statistics. In effect, the continent faces the emergence of the "knowledge society" severely short of highly-trained personnel, with the key institutions that might produce them in a dire condition—and still characterized by the long-standing patterns of gender inequality that we set out to investigate.

Findings

I. Gender Disparities in Enrolment and Employment

During the 1990s, over three decades after independence, one key source suggested that only 3% of Africa's professoriate were women, and that women made up only 25% of those enrolled in African universities (Ajayi et al. 1996).[2] Today, it is estimated that only about 6% of African professors are women. The gender profile further suggests that the majority of the women who work in African universities are not academics and researchers but rather the providers of secretarial, cleaning, catering, student welfare, and other administrative and support services.

The gross enrolment data is patchy and can only be interpreted with great caution. However, it is unequivocally apparent that across the continent women's overall enrolment is far below parity, averaging around 30% of total enrolment.

Table 1: Percentage of Women Enrolled in Select Countries[3]

Ethiopia         16%
Ghana            35%
Nigeria           35%
South Africa   51%
Zimbabwe      37%

(Culled from Tefera and Altbach, 2004 and ASHEWA, 2007)

There are a few exceptions to this overall deficit, notably Swaziland and Libya, along with some arts and humanities faculties in certain South African institutions, but there are not yet any proper investigations or analyses of the factors giving rise to these.

When it comes to the employment profile, the gender gaps are even more marked than those in student enrolment. The overall picture is one of gross under-representation of women. This gender disparity is most severe at senior academic and administrative levels, which remain heavily male-dominated.

Women make up just 29% of Africa's academic staff, compared to the global figure of 41%. The available figures for the proportion of women hired as academic staff in the case study institutions ranged from as low as 6.1% of academic staff for University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia[4] to 12% for University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal and 21% at the University of Zimbabwe. Nigeria's national data indicate only 12.4% of academic staff are women, but the University of Ibadan has 24.8% women academic staff, similar to the University of Ghana's 24% women academics.

These figures present a pyramidal picture, with women concentrated in the lower ranks and only a very small proportion of women making it up through the system into senior academic and administrative positions anywhere in Africa. University of Zimbabwe, for example, has only a single woman at the full professor level. At Ibadan, 14% of the full professor/reader-grade are women, as are 30% at the senior lecturer grade, while as many as 41% of the junior lecturer and research assistant grades are women. Ghana has seen an increase in women professors from none at all during the 1970s (following Africanisation) to 19 % currently. In terms of their roles within the university, women who do make it into senior administrative positions are most commonly employed in positions that relate to student welfare, human resources, and other aspects of administrative work deemed to benefit from a "feminine touch." The interview data indicate a clear expectation that women in the professional space of the university act in accord with the conventional domestic and nurturing roles.

The under-representation of women, combined with the fact that the majority of people in universities are not fully conversant with gender as an analytic concept, impacts the knowledge production, too. This is reflected in research and publication outputs of the institutions, as has been discussed elsewhere (Imam and Mama 1997 and Pereira 2003). The small numbers of women remaining in academia as senior academics, and thus contributing to knowledge production through research and writing, may well be the most pernicious consequence of all, as it produces an intellectual culture that remains deeply andro-centric. In sum, rank-related gender inequalities remain pronounced in African universities, and are likely to affect the quality of knowledge production (See Imam and Mama 1997 and Pereira 2002).

Rethinking the universities means going beyond these rather bleak statistics to ask deeper questions about gender relations within. What gender dynamics are working to sustain these persistent inequalities? What is the quality of women's life in Africa's universities, and how does this differ from that of men? How can gender cultures inside universities with profound resource constraints be changed so that universities resist and challenge historical inequalities instead of perpetuating them?

II. Inequitable Institutional and Intellectual Cultures

The GICAU project followed up on the compilation of statistics using career history and experiential interview and observation methods. These generated a vast body of rich and detailed findings (initial reports are available in two special issues of the continental gender studies journal Feminist Africa, issues 8 and 9).

All five studies provide detailed qualitative evidence that no matter what the mission statements may proclaim, universities operate in ways that sustain and reproduce unequal gender relations in both the social and the intellectual life of those inhabiting it. Although there are often explicit expressions of negative attitudes toward women as scholars and academics—and some blatant practices of harassment and intimidation (directed especially at women who are junior faculty and students)—the more invidious manifestations of gender are implicit. Gender dynamics often operate "below the radar" in the informal assumptions, behavioural practices, institutional habits, and pedagogic and learning practices of students, faculty, and administrators. As such, they are embedded in other ongoing struggles that have specific manifestations in each locale. Common to all, however, are the conditions of economic decline and resource scarcity, along with the various postcolonial cultural contradictions. Gender dynamics reflect the broader political climate of each national context, manifesting through class and ethnic and ideological aspects of culture.

Across all of the campuses studied, researchers observed that precarious institutional conditions lead to new levels of violence and insecurity. These create a climate of fear that impinges on the freedom and mobility of staff and students, particularly those who are women. This leads to serious implications for intellectual culture and the free expression of ideas. The observed resurgence of patriarchal values, expressed, for example, in restrictive dress codes and regulations, and more broadly in the policing of social behaviour, has an impact on women's self-confidence and can work directly and indirectly to hamper their career advancement.

Student Life

For students, the campuses are key institutional sites for the production and reproduction of contemporary gender identities, sexual cultures, and practices. In the context of unquestioned heteronormativity, the widespread belief that women are on campuses to attract and find suitable husbands has persisted. With the "marriage market" becoming increasingly competitive, many women students perform domestic services such as ironing, washing clothes, and cooking for eligible male students. However, marital "success" is widely understood to be conditional on women not "over-qualifying" themselves on the academic front. High academic performance is viewed as "unattractive" to prospective male partners, as has also been reported by previous observers (see also Gaidzanwa 2001, Pereira 2007, and Manuh et al. 2007). The majority of women students also tend to avoid any kind of association with women's groups, lest they be stigmatised as feminists and damage their prospects. Economic insecurities—not to mention intellectual and psycho-social insecurities—are implicated in the reportedly widespread sexual transactions occurring between young women and their senior male students and/or faculty members.

Faculty-student relations are imbued with gender dynamics that often include sexual overtones. Attention has been drawn to the commonality of sexual transactions between female students and male faculty, and the associated tensions. Sexual harassment and abuse appears to be commonplace on African campuses, whether or not it is named as such.

The prevalence of harassment—particularly of women refusing advances and invitations—also affects women. Interview data reveal that women students are subjected to verbal intimidation by their male counterparts, especially if they are regarded as being "too talkative"—if they dare to shine in the lecture halls and seminar rooms. The simple act of walking unescorted across campus, for example, to use the libraries in the evenings, is experienced differently by women than men.

The University of Addis Ababa has a history marked strongly by national political changes that are reflected in the gender and ethnic profile of the institution. Women students are subjected to labelling, sexual stereotyping, and sexual harassment that often traverses ethnic and class lines. The effect has been to induce fear in female students, who daily face the possibility of sexual assault, rape, and the threat of dismissal (or actual dismissal) from the university (Tadesse in African Gender Institute 2007). Sometimes refusal to accept sexual advances ends in disastrous situations. For instance, a girl by the name of Sosina Berhe was killed by a male classmate when she refused to go out with him (Tadesse in African Gender Institute 2007, 10).

The Ethiopian researchers estimate that over 90% of incidents go unreported. Women students fearing reprisals prefer to seek protection from male students sharing their ethnic or regional background. The interplay of class, ethnic, and sexual politics is manifest in the attrition rates experienced by women students, and exacerbated by male students derogatorily referring to all women students as "the five P's" by which they mean "poor, peasant, preparatory programme participants."

There has been concerted policy activism on sexual harassment on several campuses in recent years, and this has illuminated the difficulties of developing and implementing effective policy strategies for the time being; women who attempt to resist harassment are likely to be threatened, humiliated, and stigmatised (Bennett 2005).

In the context of neoliberal economic policies that reduce subsidies to students, the income disparities between richer and poorer students are intensifying rather than diminishing, with gendered consequences for student livelihood options.

Other challenges that particularly affect women arise from the pervasive and often deeply conservative religious discourses arising from the Islamic and Christian fundamentalist movements currently dominating many campuses. Odejide (2007) details the way in which religious associations have replaced the previous secular tutorial system on the Ibadan campus, to such an extent that not being part of one fellowship or another is likely to impact academic performance.

The case study of the University of Ibadan looked at the gender implications of the growing prevalence of religious fellowships on the campus. This is a reflection of a wider national context in which transnational religious movements have flourished in Nigeria, with large swathes of the populace joining either Islamic fundamentalist or Christian evangelical movements, deepening religious divisions and conflicts in recent times. At UI, over 37% of students are currently registered with religious bodies. These not only serve evangelical and pastoral functions but have grown to fill the gap left by the collapse of the tutorial system—and largely displaced more secular forms of student association and academic support. The study found that the religious associations on the University of Ibadan campus not only espouse highly conservative gender ideologies but also serve disciplinary and social regulatory functions that see their members exercising surveillance over women's behaviour and comportment, including their dress styles.[5] Religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic, has taken root in the associational life of students, it takes the form of deeply conservative gender norms that exclude women students from leadership and infantilize them.

Women students continue to be widely perceived as "quarrelsome, less academically gifted than the male students; as shallow thinkers, and as malicious . . ." (Odejide 2007, 54).

Faculty Experiences and Academic Culture

The hierarchies of power and divisions of labor among faculty in all five institutions were found to reflect conservative gender ideologies. Women are readily moved out of academic and into administrative and service tracks. Those who remain within the academic tracks still find themselves positioned in "maternal" and "nurturing" roles. As such, they are required to attend to the health and welfare of students and subordinate staff, and quite normally expected to provide secretarial and other services to their departments alongside their academic duties. In other words, the ideology and practices of "female domesticity" is seamlessly transferred from the home and wider society into the professional space of the campus, unchallenged.

Faculty gender differentiations also arise within a dominant academic culture that privileges disciplines and fields of scholarship over others. It so happens that women are concentrated in the areas of lower status and fewer resources (arts, humanities, and particular social sciences), and that their under-representation is highest in the high-status fields (natural sciences, engineering, and architecture). There is not space to enter into a detailed discussion of how the African situation diverges from the global pattern, as it does in the fields of law and medicine, in particular. Suffice it to say that overall, gender stratification is both vertical and horizontal.

The career tracks of women differ from those of men, in part due to the real interruptions in research and graduate study created by childbearing. However, there is evidence that there are also additional constraints that result not from the actual years lost but from the expectation that women will bear children, which works to marginalize them further. Women who do not conform either behaviourally (in terms of being willing to carry out care work, getting married, or being the "mother" of the department) are often unpopular and stereotyped as "tough" and uncooperative.

The informal routes to career success are also heavily gendered. Women who comply with the available prescriptions for women are less likely to be regarded as threatening, but at the same time may not be taken seriously as academics, whereas women who unapologetically pursue their careers, remain unmarried, or fail to behave in a nurturing manner tend to be viewed as threats. Successful male academics often note the value of networking and fraternizing with senior colleagues to learn about valuable opportunities to advance their careers. When women attempt to engage in networking—for example, by visiting the faculty club or frequenting the campus bar—they are more likely to harm their professional reputations than to be appreciated for their drive and ambition. Whereas a young man will be perceived as someone who "will go far," the same behaviour may lead a woman to be perceived as being "on the make."

Gender Activism in Pedagogy and Research

African women faculty and students have engaged in various forms of activism that seeks to transform both the institutional and intellectual gender cultures within their institutions over the last several decades. These have yielded a scattering of affirmative action policies (e.g., at Makerere University), sexual harassment procedures (on many of the Southern African campuses), mentoring programs, and scholarships to support women in science.

On the scholarly front, women have set up curricula strengthening initiatives (exemplified by the work of the Nigerian Network for Women's Studies in the 1990s African Gender Institute since 2003, and later by the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy at University of Ghana). African gender research has taken root in many campuses, even where the administration has resisted efforts to set up a centre, as was the case at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop. Even here, we found that a growing number of students and faculty have conducted dissertations and research projects that take gender seriously (Diaw 2007). The successful establishment of the continental journal of gender studies in 2002 was the realization of a collective understanding of the value of home-grown gender research and the need to disseminate this within the region, as well as to make it available to the rest of the world through the Web. Now in its twelfth issue, Feminist Africa is used to support teaching and research in gender studies by the community of feminist scholars in the region, as well as being widely consumed in the West.

There are now gender studies units on more than thirty of Africa's universities, many of them engaging in advocacy and policy work and research and teaching. While this does not compare to over 600 such initiatives in the USA, it does signify a concerted effort within the African scholarly community. The scholarly output, the scope, and the institutional and political conditions that have framed the growth of gender studies in the context of scarcity have been discussed elsewhere (Mama 2006 and 2009). The work of such centers is often transdisciplinary—and transformative in its intentions. Gender scholarship seeks to engage with policy makers, movements, and communities that exist both within and beyond the campus. Furthermore, many of these initiatives have drawn on international networks and external support to develop courses, training programs, and new research. This partly explains how they have managed to proliferate despite the parlous economic condition of universities and limited research funding raising the profile and credibility of their institutions (Mama 2006 and 2007). In this way, while the field of gender studies has often not been adequately supported and institutionalized in a manner that would guarantee their long-term sustainability within universities (in terms of the general operating budgets and secure appointments), they have, perhaps ironically, been able to withstand the cutbacks better than more conventional academic departments.

Rethinking . . .

We can reasonably conclude that, as demonstrated in the institutions studied, marked gender inequalities have persisted in African universities. Overwhelmingly, patriarchal gender cultures are sustained through unquestioned everyday procedures, practices, and values. The academic hierarchies of privilege and patronage are imbued with dynamics that disadvantage women. These dynamics characterize relationships between students and lecturers, and between and within the ranks of both, making it harder for women to succeed and limiting the extent to which they can benefit from the formal and informal collegial relationships that play a key role in academic life. Women remain vulnerable to actual sexual pressure and to the even more pervasive perception of women in terms of their sexuality. They also experience more generalized discomforts arising from andocentric discourses on gender that permeate academic culture. Beyond this gross overall picture, there are wide national and institutional variations in the overall picture of historically-entrenched and hierarchized gender differentiation, along with variations due to age, era, policy climate, disciplinary hierarchies, facilities, class, ethnicity, marital status, and other dimensions of status.

Public universities, while they seem clear about their role in producing generations of well-educated citizens, seem to have remained largely oblivious to the challenges of gender inequality. By not acting to facilitate some level of redress, they end up perpetuating an unequal status quo. Thus far, the university administrators seem to remain reluctant to acknowledge that gender inequality is in fact an intrinsic feature of university life. Correspondingly, they also remain resistant to the idea of supporting and committing resources to taking concerted action against it. Most still believe that gender inequality is not the responsibility of higher education, and, therefore, most do not see the need to take any action to address the perpetuation of inequality within the institutions they lead.

In this context, the implications of globalization are far from simple. The preliminary analyses that are available suggest that contemporary trends in higher education financing and governance may well run the risk of curbing the greater access gained by the proliferation of African public universities since independence. The inclusion of higher education services in General Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATTS), for example, is likely to exacerbate a status quo in which the U.S. dominates the provision of "higher education services" and further marginalizes African institutions from national and local interests and agendas as they struggle to compete in an unequal market (AAU 2004). As universities become less accountable to the local public and more accountable to the global market, longstanding social justice agendas, including those of gender equality, need to be defended anew.

The evidence discussed suggests that universities in Africa will need to rethink the manner in which they discharge their responsibilities, if they are indeed to be re-vitalized in a manner that sees them become institutions that advance the democratic and social justice agendas that the African people are once again embracing as they move beyond the legacies of our difficult history and struggle to become peaceful, democratic, and just societies. Gender justice lies at the heart of these aspirations, and public universities have a responsibility to take this a great deal more seriously than has so far been the case.

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Endnotes

1. The university case studies were carried out by senior researchers working on the key institutions selected for their respective national contexts: Aminata Diaw (Senegal), Rudo Gaidzanwa (Zimbabwe), Abiola Odejide (Nigeria), Zene Tadesse and Rahel Bekele (Ethiopia) and Dzodzi Tsikata (Ghana). Related research was carried out by Lesley Shackleton (South Africa). [Return to text]

2. Excluding North-of the-Saharan countries and South Africa. [Return to text]

3. The detailed statistical picture is likely to be far more complicated and diverse than these global figures indicate. Proper analysis is hampered by the fact that the available statistical picture of Africa's tertiary institutions is so incomplete. [Return to text]

4. It is curious that this figure is presented alongside a very similar figure for the number of expatriates employed in the same university. [Return to text]

5. Indeed, dress codes have since generated nation-wide controversy, as a result of a woman Senator's attempt to introduce a bill that would have inscribed these in law, had the women's movement not put up public resistance this year (2008). [Return to text]