Testing freedom: A history of the West African Examinations Council, 1952--1979

This dissertation traces the history of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the educational testing agency for Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. WAEC was created in 1952 on the eve of independence from Britain. This dissertation studies the transition of the function of examinations from the British based testing bodies to the creation of WAEC as an independent testing agency. WAEC began to take control of its own testing enterprise through opening three bodies under its auspices, the Nigerian Aptitude Testing Unit, the Objective Testing Unit, and the Test Development and Research Office. Making use of archive materials, personal interviews, and published and unpublished primary documents, the dissertation argues that WAEC played a crucial role in determining who would be eligible for post-primary education and therefore, who would have access to elite positions in the newly independent nations. The dissertation research was guided by three hypotheses: that changes in the structure and policies of WAEC reflected larger debates regarding the transition from British colonial rule; that WAEC had a significant impact on elite formation in its member countries; that WAEC was part of a larger, worldwide testing “movement” which occurred in the U.S., Britain and parts of Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Of these three, the second hypothesis regarding WAEC's role in elite formation has not been discussed in-depth due to the fact that research materials regarding WAEC's role in elite formation were difficult to uncover in the field. Instead, this dissertation studies WAEC as a case study of the pace, process and extent of decolonization of West African education. It finds that Africanization of WAEC staff occurred much more rapidly than Africanization of the school curricula and that foreign training (particularly in the United States and Britain) played a significant role in enabling WAEC administrators to create their own examinations.