Special Reports/Images - Africa's Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling

Images - Africa's Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling - May 20, 2007 (The New York Times)

Photographs, Ruth Fremsom/The New York Times

Penda Mbow teaches history to several hundred students in a dim, dilapidated lecture hall. "We are throwing away a whole generation," she says.

A severe chair shortage at Cheikh Anta Diop means that every seat is filled or reserved and some students sit on cinderblocks in the aisles.

Corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept much of Africa in the 1970s, and universities were among the first institutions to suffer. At Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, students walked through the campus.

students who want to be sure to have a place to study line up outside the library before it opens at 8:am. Cherikh Anta Diop University was built in the 1960s to accommodate about 5,000 students but now enrolls close to 60,000.

Classes and dormitories are overcrowded and many students simply fail out of school after the first or second year. Students waited for a class to begin in the Humanities building.

A chemistry lab in a science building poorly equipped. Most of the buildings are in dire need of repair and updating.

With just 5,000 dormitory beds, and renting a room in Dakar being so expensive, students pack themselves in to tiny dorm rooms by the half dozen. Firmin Manga, center, wearing red shirt, socialized with his roommates.

The graffiti-scared dormitories look more like housing projects for the poor than rooms for the country's brightest.

Ibrahim Thiam, 19, ate lunch with fellow students in the university dining hall. Meals, each, costs less than 50 cents but many students depend on their "Bourse" or stipend, to be able to afford them.

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A crowded, graffiti-scared dormitory at Cheikh Anta Diop, a university built for 5,000 students that now enrolls close to 60,000.