The purpose of this article is to give some evidence of the kind of understanding we can win through reading African prose writers, and of the misconceptions we can clear up in so doing; and to make some suggestions as to what authors and what books we might begin by reading. A good deal of the prose writing done by Africans is biographical, either directly or derivatively. One of the best known examples is Camara Laye’s autobiography The African Child. In it he tells the story of his childhood and youth until the time he leaves Guinea, his home country, to go to France for higher studies. The extract below, which must be about a time when he was six or seven years old, shows the warmth and charm of the book. At that time he lived in Kouroussa, a large up-country town, and the incident described is a visit to his relatives at Tindican, a small village to the west of Kouroussa.

The way of teaching any set of ideas must depend upon the context within which they will be understood. If this context is very different for teacher and taught, deep misunderstanding is almost bound to arise. Christian doctrine can hardly be got across to Africans who have not received any appreciable amount of western education – and that is even now the great majority – if the missionary has not first understood something of their own thought world. In some ways the missionary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was actually more likely to arrive at such an understanding than his successors of forty years later. The early missionaries could not open and busy themselves with loads of schools and hospitals. They were almost completely isolated from Europe and were forced to share closely in African society, once they abandoned the attempt to create independent Christian villages. Very probably there was quite a long period before any considerable number of converts was obtained. In this period they had the opportunity to acquire a fine knowledge of the local language, customs and thought forms, and many of them did so, both Catholic and Protestant. In areas and tribes where evangelisation began much later – during the last forty years – this has often not happened. Missionaries have rushed straight into the provision of social services and an extensive catechumenate without any adequate prior initiation into the local tribal mind.

Education is a subject which should engage our keenest interest, our most careful provision, our deepest thoughts. Yet one of the most depressing aspects of education in Britain at the present time is that it is not doing so.

Professor Castle writes about education in East Africa. As he is concerned with education in its widest sense – clearly formulated in ancient Greece as that which makes a man – his enquiry is not only into existing educational institutions but also into the whole nature of the societies in which African children are growing up in East Africa today.

He is uniquely well-qualified for his task. After spending most of his life in education in Britain – as teacher, headmaster, and Professor – he went in 1961 to Makerere in Uganda, as Visiting Professor of Education. From 1961-65 he was in East Africa travelling widely, visiting all types of schools and colleges. In 1963 he was chairman of the Uganda Education Commission, whose Report is likely to form the basis for educational planning in Uganda for the foreseeable future. Here is no fly-by-night ‘expert’, but a man whose knowledge about educational institutions in East Africa is probably unparalleled at the present time. To these highly professional qualifications one must add that extra quality of an author who has a deep personal sympathy and concern for his subject.

The result, in this book, is a picture of education as it is in East Africa today, clearly presented, acutely observed.

Such a wide and general subject is fraught with obvious complications.

I was teaching in a secondary school in ex-British Africa for fifteen months. The following article is written from notes I made while in Africa. The situation may have changed in the two years which have elapsed since I left. I would imagine that if anything, relations between white and black nuns will have deteriorated still further with the growing African sensitivity to racial undertones in white endeavour among black people.

When I arrived at the Mission, on the first evening, one of the teachers said as he showed me around, ‘There is the convent for the white sisters and that other building is for the black sisters’. My immediate reaction was to be shocked that there should be two separate establishments, one white, one black. But there were several reasons for this separation. The African sisters formed a diocesan community under the local bishop. The Missionary sisters were directed from Europe, and theoretically were working for their own replacement by converting the Africans. Also there was the argument that the African sisters would never develop responsibility and independence if they joined an established European community. And it would be detrimental to the growth of the African church to have Africans in missionary orders, ready to move on to new fields, instead of staying after the Missionaries had left to consolidate the Church among their own people. I was also told that Africans were bashful and inhibited in front of Europeans. So the ‘separate development’ made good theoretical sense.

I should like to record something of the result of an experience which I had from 1961-1964. I was working as a schoolmaster in Ghana for that time. The school was in routine and academic syllabus an imitation of European, mainly English, practice but we were fortunate in being far removed from the main centres of European expatriate concentration. To be precise we were 130 odd miles from Accra and 70 odd from Akosombo which were the nearest and most accessible European centres. In a town of 10,000 inhabitants throughout our stay at most 40 were expatriates, at the least 20. They included from two to four priests, the Presbyterian missionary and his wife, the two mission doctors and their team of from four to six nurses. This situation could mean virtual isolation in a tiny social world where contacts with Africans and adaptations of ways to theirs were kept to a minimum, or it could provoke a more or less natural interchange between African or expatriate which the circumstances made easy and spontaneous, rather than condescending, folkloristic or exotic. It would be untrue to say that it did not involve a conscious decision, but the decision was an easy one.

Old attitudes die very hard even in so out of the way a place. Many of the Europeans did choose to huddle together to lick over each other’s sense of isolation endlessly; contacts with Africans were kept to a minimum, formality of occasion was encouraged, any crossing over of racio-customary lines was seen as daring and by no means habit-forming.

In view of the Church’s divine mission it is not surprising that some of her moral teachings are not self-evident to secular man. However she has usually offered supporting reasons for her position and no disloyalty is involved in questioning whether these are really valid. In the case of direct sterilisation Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, presents the classical argument for prohibition (frequently to be repeated by Pius XII) and specifically states that his conclusion is one that ‘the light of human reason makes most clear’. In this article I want to suggest that there are many good men, even within the Christian tradition, to whose reason the prohibition of sterilisation is far from clear and, furthermore, that even the classical arguments may need to be reviewed in the light of new developments. I am not going to discuss the various medical, psychological and economic factors involved, since their bearing on the central moral problem is indirect.

The argument that secular man might put forward to support direct sterilisation could take the following form: There are many instances in which a married couple would have reasons of conscience to refrain from further conceptions; such possible reasons are in fact suggested by Pius XI in his encyclical. They could be of such gravity that the only way in which the risk could be responsibly avoided would be by permanent abstention from sexual intercourse or by sterilisation. The first solution, it would be readily admitted, carries certain dangers such as the straining or even breakdown of the marital home with consequent damage both to the existing family and to society at large.