Student connections with Africa

Glasgow to Africa

From the 1870s the emigration of University of Glasgow students to African countries to work as teachers, medical officers or engineers added to the University's growing reputation and began to attract people from Africa to study at Glasgow.  Graduates who went to these countries were often drawn to service with the Presbyterian missions in Malawi, Kenya or Nigeria.

The President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, paid tribute to the work of Scottish graduates when he addressed the Scottish Parliament on 14 June 2001. He spoke of Lovedale College built by the Glasgow Missionary Society in 1824 which focused on the need to create a non-racial South Africa. Throughout the political upheavals of the 20th century, he said, the College preserved that ethos "because Scottish missionaries were still teaching there". The impact on South Africa of Lovedale graduates, he concluded, was "incalculable in terms of helping us to get to where we are today".

The first principal of Lovedale College, which opened in 1841, was William Govan, a Free Church missionary who had studied in the Arts Faculty at Glasgow University in the mid 1830s. The second principal, Rev James Stewart, was awarded a MD degree from Glasgow in 1865 and joined the staff at Lovedale in 1866, becoming principal in 1870. He was a firm believer in the character-building qualities of education, industry and religion. He organised his students to build roads, watercourses and dams. When he was in London for the burial of David Livingston in 1874, he launched the scheme for founding the Livingstonia mission in Malawi.

Many of the medical and religious missionaries who served in Livingstonia had trained at the University of Glasgow, including Dr Robert Laws, the head of mission for 50 years and the Rev Donald and Dr Agnes (Robson) Fraser who established Embangweni Station.  In 1902, Agnes Fraser began a clinic on the shores of Lake Malawi which later became Embangweni Hospital. It now serves a rural population of 100,000, treating 4,000 in-patients a year for malaria and malnutrition, AIDS and anaemia.

Africa to Glasgow

Initially most students who came to study from Africa intended to study medical degrees.  One of the first to graduate was Abdullah Abdurahmann, a member of Cape Town’s Muslim community and a key Cape Town political leader, who graduated MB CM in 1893. His son, Ismail, also studied medicine at Glasgow just before the outbreak of the First World War.

Many of those who came to study prior to 1900 chose not to graduate. One of these was Tiyo Soga, the son of a Xhosa-speaking chief and one of the first African ordained ministers in South Africa. He attended Lovedale College in 1844 and accompanied William Govan, the principal, back to Scotland in the same year.  Govan paid all his expenses in Scotland while he attended the Normal School in Glasgow.  He returned to the Eastern Cape in 1848 but came back to Scotland in 1851 to study at the University of Glasgow.

Soga married a Scot, Janet Burnside, and two of their sons studied at the University of Glasgow.  The younger of these two Allan Kirkland Soga, went on to become one of Africa’s leading political and legal thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was editor of the newspaper Izwi Iabantu and founder of one of the political movements which was a forerunner to the African National Congress.

Modiri Molema a key political figure in South Africa in the 20th century studied medicine at the University of Glasgow from 1912, graduating in 1919.  He became President of the African Races Association of Glasgow (ARA) in 1917 and entered into the heart of the debate about the future of South Africa and Race relations.  One key issue that he made his mission whilst in Glasgow was the health care of black South Africans.

The post WWII expansion in the African economies, brought African students to Glasgow in significant numbers. By 1958 there were enough East African Students at various educational institutions in Glasgow to establish their own society, the Simba Club, which in 1963 became the East African Students Association.

One student who studied at Glasgow University in this period was Dawda Jawara from West Africa, the son of a Mande trader.  He was born in Barajelly in Gambia in 1924 and gained a place to study veterinary medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1948. Graduating in 1953 he returned to Gambia and became involved in politics.  As leader of the People’s Progressive Party he went on to become Prime Minister of Gambia in 1962, leading the country to independence from the UK in 1965 and winning six successive elections later as President.  He was knighted in 1966 and his links with the Vet school were recognised by the University with an honorary degree in 1992.