If one takes the list of the world's 400 leading universities compiled by the Times Higher Education Supplement, one can see all too plainly the enormous disparities not only between the developing world and (especially the Anglo-American) developed world but between Africa and Asia/Oceania. Five of the top 50 (Hong Kong, Melbourne, Australian National University, Singapore and Beijing) are Asian; indeed, so are twelve of the top 100, with no answering African counterpart. In fact, Africa has only four universities in the top 400 – Cape Town, Wits and Stellenbosch from South Africa, and Alexandria (Egypt). Asia has 69 – 25 Anglophone (Australia 17, New Zealand 6, India 1, Singapore 1), 23 Sinophone (China 10, Taiwan 7, Hong Kong 6), 14 Japanese, 6 Korean and 1 from Thailand. Africa is thus outgunned massively, not just 17:1 overall, but, more important, the entire continent has not a single top 100 entrant.

      The same contrast exists if one compares scientific publications and patent applications. In 2002 East Asia and the Pacific region accounted for 25 391 and 65 506 of these respectively, while the comparable figures for sub-Saharan Africa were 3 696 and 101. Such data and those on university rankings are, as we know, just a shorthand indicator of intellectual life. And Africa's backwardness has great meaning. This is the world's fastest-growing continent, both economically and demographically. There are already over a billion Africans, and soon there could be two billion. If the whole world is going to be globalised into a knowledge economy, this means that Africa has to catch up. The alternative is a globalised world in which Africa alone remains as the Third World.

      In some ways Africa's lag is surprising. Alexandria has, after all, been a major city longer than almost anywhere save Damascus. It was founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, and quickly came to have the world's largest Jewish community; Euclid worked in its great library, though of course by then it was already possible to look back thousands of years to the extraordinary achievements of ancient Egypt. North Africa was an enlightened Christian civilisation when the Britons were still painting themselves with woad, and later Arabic learning spread right across the Maghreb. Of all that, effectively little or nothing remains.

      Even so, by the late colonial period there were a number of other universities of quality scattered around Africa: Natal, Rhodes and Pretoria in South Africa, Makerere (Uganda), Nairobi (Kenya), the University College of Rhodesia, Algiers (Algeria), Ibadan (Nigeria) and Dakar (Senegal), though Lovanium (in Leopoldville, today's Kinshasa, in the Congo) was often lauded as the best on the continent. An offshoot of the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), the university was set up in 1954 with copious aid from Belgium, the United States, Ford and Rockefeller. By 1958, under the Atoms for Peace programme, it had acquired Africa's first nuclear reactor – an acknowledgement of the fact that the uranium for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had come from the Congo.

      Many other African universities had links to parental institutions in London or Paris and these served not only to maintain standards but to provide a steady interchange of talented faculty. Moreover, the era of African independence saw a number of top-class radical academics cluster first at Accra – including such names as Conor Cruise O'Brien, David Caute, Thomas Hodgkin and Alan Nunn May, the former Soviet spy. Later a somewhat similar galaxy of talent was to be found at Dar-es-Salaam, and later still in Lusaka, as first Tanzania, and then Zambia, displaced Ghana as the great black hope. However, once that hope was thoroughly extinguished by Kenneth Kaunda, the circus left town.

      The fall of the African university

      There then followed a period which can only be called an age of regression. In many cases dictators and warlords who would not have been out of place in feudal Europe simply laid waste to all around them, universities included. Makerere had no chance against the depredations of Milton Obote, let alone Idi Amin; the University of Addis Ababa – founded only in 1950, despite Ethiopia's ancient independence – had similarly little chance against Mengistu. Liberia, independent since 1847, had no university until 1951, and that too had little chance against first Samuel Doe and then Charles Taylor. Over 90% of university facilities were pillaged, more than three-quarters of the two-million-book library was destroyed, and the number of staff fell by 80%. A similar fate met the University of Sierra Leone in the civil war of the 1990s there. We are not talking here of the freezes and squeezes common in Western universities but of burning, looting and mass murder.

      Amazingly, the University of Bangui in the Central African Republic somehow survived the reign of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who would beat offending schoolchildren to death himself and sometimes eat them. Similarly, Lovanium split into three but somehow survived Mobutu. It even acquired a second nuclear reactor though there was acute international concern over security matters there, as well there might be, with academic salaries down to $15 a month and facilities getting looted and sold off as a result.

      But it is important to realise that the one-party regimes of Nyerere, Kaunda and countless others were equally inimical to academic freedom, university autonomy and all the other conditions for the growth of a healthy higher education sector. In Nigeria the universities were all but wiped out by high inflation and collapsing university income and academic salaries, which saw virtually all top- level academics leave for other shores. If one puts together such disasters with feudal monsters and one-party ideologues, a great deal of the African continent in the 1960s-1980s is covered.

      Essentially, the conditions for proper university life – which must always include a dissenting academy – simply did not exist throughout most of the continent in that period. The fact that several South African universities actually improved through this period – the 1980s are now seen as a golden age in campus terms – merely illustrates the peculiar contradictions of the colonial period, both reactionary and yet also progressive in a sense that Marx would recognise.

      Lost in translation

      In addition, of course, many Third World countries underwent a revulsion against the old colonial culture, a process with dangers of its own because one of the strongest colonial vestiges was the former oppressor's language, which had the crucial advantage of connecting to a world culture. North Africa, for all that it harbours the University of Al-Karaouine (Morocco), established in 859 and the oldest continuously operating university in the world, displays all the varieties of this negation.

      Libya, which boasts fourteen universities, has been an educational desert: how could it be otherwise in the era of Gaddafi's Green Book? Egypt enrols no less than 30% of the young age group as students but at least half drop out from the public universities, whose educational level is described by The Economist as ‘abysmal’. But it also boasts private American, British, French, German and Russian universities.

      Tunisia, which had no universities before independence in 1956, now has thirteen of them and devotes a large 7.2% of its budget to education, more than any European or North American country. After independence it ushered in a partial Arabisation, which basically means that Arabic is used for all post-primary education but French still reigns supreme in maths,

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