The University of Ghana: Legon's Legacy

The University of Ghana owes its existence to two wartime British commissions that would reshape higher education across the colonial world. The Asquith Commission on Higher Education in the Colonies, established in August 1943 under Justice Cyril Asquith, recommended the creation of university colleges in association with the University of London. Its West African sub-commission, chaired by Rt. Hon. Walter Elliot with Gold Coast jurist Sir Arku Korsah as a member, went further: it debated whether a single university should serve all of British West Africa, located in Nigeria. The people of the Gold Coast rejected this proposal decisively. Dr. Frederick Victor Nanka-Bruce, a member of the Legislative Council and distinguished physician, delivered a pivotal Radio Station ZOY address to the people of the Gold Coast in October 1947 that, as historian Francis Agbodeka documented in the university's commissioned history published in 1998, was largely instrumental in influencing the Secretary of State for the Colonies to consent to a separate Gold Coast institution. On 11 August 1948, the University College of the Gold Coast was founded by Ordinance, with the stated purpose of providing for and promoting university education, learning and research. Its first principal was David Mowbray Balme, a Cambridge-educated classicist who had served in the Colonial Office. The institution began with 90 students in temporary quarters at Achimota School before moving to its permanent 2,600-acre campus on Legon Hill, 12 kilometres northeast of central Accra, where the University Avenue, ornamental fountain, and the Balme Library named in his honour would become the physical symbols of Ghanaian intellectual aspiration. The founding curriculum emphasized liberal arts, social sciences, basic science, agriculture, law, and medicine, following the British university tradition of producing well-rounded graduates rather than narrow specialists. The Elliot Commission's majority report had envisioned exactly this kind of institution: a place where the Gold Coast's brightest minds could receive a world-class education without leaving their homeland.