13 JANUARY 1939, Page 14

It must be very strange for Lord Lugard to reflect

upon these matters, and to explore the corridors of his memory from that now distant time when he also took part in the scramble for Africa until this present day when his doctrine of trusteeship and the dual mandate has been almost uni- versally accepted and when the Master of Marlborough goes out to Makerere to teach the Buganda how to become B.A.'s. Not that the educational system of East Africa is going to produce a crop of unemployable and discontented graduates. The De La Warr Commission were careful, at every stage, to avoid making the mistakes committed by Lord Macaulay in India. The whole scheme has been devised with the idea of rendering the Africans capable of raising and maintaining their own standard of living, and is carefully related to employment demands. Yet some con- cession had to be made to the passionate desire of the Africans to obtain a liberal education. They did not really want to learn about cotton cultivation, or the preservation of yams, or the methods of combating soil-erosion and the tse-tse fly. They wanted (passionately, earnestly, almost angrily) to learn Latin. • We never discovered the true reason for this their dumb longing for the humanities. It may well have been that they interpreted our obvious disinclination to add this dead tongue to their curriculum as an attempt to withhold from them the inner secret of the white-man's magic, and to retain within our own grasp that mysterious language, the possession of which had alone enabled us to replace the medicine man by the hypodermic syringe and to bring the aeroplane to Entebbe.