| This dissertation examines the beginnings and early years of five libraries set up with the stated aim of serving the public in British and ex-British Africa, and argues that the beneficiaries of library and information policy have not been the public at all but only a small minority: the elite and the would-be elite. It suggests a pattern from the 1920s and 1930s to the present: from the fee-charging whites-only leisure reading libraries of the settler colonies to the computerized information services recommended for the use of the black "policy-makers" and "decision-makers" of today.;Five episodes from Kenya, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria are used to support the argument: the fee-charging whites-only service that the Carnegie Corporation of New York--the champion of the free public library--sponsored in Kenya Colony in the 1930s; the fee-charging service for the white and black educated elite of Lagos, Nigeria, that Carnegie money helped bring into being around the same time; the fee-charging service that the British Council introduced for the white and black educated elite of the Gold Coast and Nigeria in the mid-1940s; the Northern Nigeria Regional Library, set up in 1952, which with time concentrated more and more on the capital and less and less on the rest of the region; and the National Library of Nigeria, established with Ford Foundation help in the 1960s to assist in the "responsible conduct of modern government." Accounts are based on Carnegie, Ford, and British Council archives, and on published sources. South African, Rhodesian, and other examples are also mentioned.;The dissertation attempts to show that librarianship and information science are very much part of the political context in which they operate; that only a small percentage of the African population has benefitted from the western-style libraries and information services that have been introduced; and that the study of such matters adds one more dimension to what is known about cultural and other forms of dependency. |
