new rwcord to be entered

Abstract

This article traces the establishment and development of the tripartite University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS), attempting to explain why it failed and the timing of that failure. I argue that the root causes lay in the nature of the Royal Charter that established it, its evolving governance system and disagreements about its direction of development. Issues such as racial conflict and the renewal of the vice chancellor's contract, which some observers have used to explain the break-up of the institution, were intended to conceal the real areas of conflict. This article places the discussion within the broader comparative context of higher education in the immediate post-independence period and concludes that the UBLS failed because of the strong insular nationalism of the BLS countries (i.e., Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) combined with the absence of a spirit of regionalism similar to that found elsewhere in newly independent regions such as the Caribbean and the...