Future is in the balance

By ROBERT NOWELL
AN uncertain future feces the Catholic University of Lovaniurn in the Congo, founded only six years ago. Whether it will be able to continue in anything like its present form depends on whether M. Lumumba stays in power and, if he does, whether he will allow his anticlerical and anti-Belgian feelings In get the better of him.
This is all the more tragic in that the Lovanium represents the summit of one of the achievements in the Congo of which the missionaries (and the Belgians) have most right to be proud: their record in education. it is claimed that the Congo has the lowest illiteracy rate of almost all African territories.
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WHAT is unfortunate about education in the Congo is that no account was taken of the speed with which change was coming to Africa: the first concern was to build up an adequate network of primary education and to let higher education come later, rather than risk forming an elite cut off from the rest of their fellow-countrymen.
The exception was in training students for the priesthood: as early as 1886, in the first decade of the Independent State of the Congo founded by King Leopold H and H. M. Stanley. Louvain set up an African seminary.