Sidney Poitier epitomized dignity. During the racial turbulence of the 1960s, he portrayed characters with middle-class values who radiated goodness.
He earned his first star billing in 1958, in “The Defiant Ones,” and six years later won the Oscar for best actor in “Lilies of the Field.” His on-screen success was rivaled only by his off-screen commitment to the civil rights movement. As Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked about Poitier, he was “a great friend of humanity.”
Biographer Aram Goudsouzian, a University of Memphis historian, captures the full life of Poitier and the racial complexities of his times.
Colonialism left in its wake a highly unequal and skewed education system. Centred on networks of missionary schools, inequalities in educational access increased the higher up the educational ladder one climbed. In particular, access to university education was extremely limited and highly distorted.
In the first two decades after independence African countries made progress in rebalancing the inherited regional inequalities. But then inequality remained stagnant or worsened as urban metropolises pulled ahead.
Rebecca Simson unpacks her research into how regional distribution still plays a major role in access to education in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
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