A week in Gabon: The Association of African Universities Conference

The elevator door opened to the eighth floor of the Okoumé Palace Hotel in Libreville, Gabon.  It was my first morning there and I had fifteen minutes for a quick breakfast.  I passed by two women with ID tags letting me know they, too, were attendees of the Association of African Universities Conference.  A moment later, one of them called out to me.  I turned.

“We have to go!” she said.  “But I’m just going to eat breakfast.  We have fifteen minutes.”  “No, we must leave now!”  “Where are we going?”  “To meet the President!”   Apparently, I wasn’t to have breakfast, and we hurried down to a bus that would take us to the Ministry of Finance for the Opening Ceremony.

As we drove to the opening ceremony,  ”What am I doing here?” crossed my mind. Surrounded by a consortium of pan African academics and university administrators, World Bank officers, and other NGO representatives, my head spun with the scale of what the MF is attempting as we search for a new partner university in sub-Saharan Africa.

All week, I mingled with Ugandans, Ghanans, Ethiopians, Canadians, Finns, and Americans.  Essentially, the message was: Africa is growing!  Let us meet the challenges and excitement of tomorrow!  Indeed, nine of the world’s fifteen fastest growing economies are in Africa, and the population is extraordinarily young.

These statistics place Africa in a position similar to countries like South Korea or Singapore, the so-called Asian tigers that experienced such tremendous growth and prosperity in the latter twentieth century.  The president of Rwanda recently said that Africa has its own big cat, and welcomed the lions of Africa to the world stage.

It was hard not to be caught up in the excitement, while at the same time, the challenges facing higher education on the continent, especially the explosion in the number of students enrolled in universities during the past decade, grounded the conference proceedings in an urgency that we all feel in our fast-changing world.

As the conference progressed and my horizons expanded and I talked to a man from Benin about the fiftieth anniversary of the African Union, chatted to Jon Ssebewufu, the former president of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and sipped the local beer in the evenings.  I thought: my world is larger yet more familiar than I imagined.  Libreville was efficient and dirty, humid and austere, decrepit and beautiful—words I could equally use to describe my hometown of New York.

It will be exciting to find the right university for the MF to work with in Africa, and that university, along with its students and host country, will bring their own unique experience of globalization and, by turn, global citizenship, to the MF.  The Melton Foundation is going to Africa, and why I was in Gabon became clearer: because it is part of our world, as new and familiar as any destination where a global citizen might venture.  As if to confirm this impression, during a conversation with some journalists from Nigeria and Kenya at the closing dinner (having told them nothing of what the Melton Foundation does), the Kenyan said in response to a question, “why yes, I’m a global citizen.”

Micah Trippe is the Resource Development Coordinator for the Melton Foundation.  He is a former Grant Writer for the New York African Film Festival and is a member of the Melton Foundation’s African Campus Search Team.