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AFRICA'S DILEMMA
THE UNEDUCATED AND MISEDUCATED
Chike Daniels learned the importance of being literate the
hard way. For fifty-eight years, he had muddled through life
well enough without being able to read and write. Twenty-five
years ago, he and a friend bought seventy acres of poor, eroded
land in the village and divided it between them. They worked
their farm, growing cassava, beans, plantain and maize for
their own families and Kola nuts for the market. Life was
hard, but Chike managed. He still lived in the one-roomed
bamboo and mud thatched-roofed house, but he could afford
a crate of Coca-Cola every now and then. He even bought a
tractor, though his land was so fragmented by cliffs, gullies
and streams that there was only a few fields he could use
the tractor on, and he regretted the purchase. A smart salesman
from the city had persuaded him he needed it, and as he could
not read the brochures himself, he had not been able to check
properly.
Then out of the blue, some twenty years later, he received
a legal document, hand-delivered and sealed in red wax. He
had to get a friend to read it to him. It was from a powerful
local businessman, claiming possession of Chike's land. It
seemed there had been irregularities in the old contract by
which Chike and his partner had divided up the land they bought.
As they were both illiterate they had not checked the documents.
His partner died, poisoned by some tablets which was sold
to him by a self appointed village doctor as antibiotics,
which in fact, were pieces of chalk in a bottle. Also, he
had died without a written will, and the son and heir had
fallen into debt and mortgaged his land to the businessman,
thus giving up the deed as security. But as he could not keep
up with the payments, the land was forfeited, and the deed
also covered Chike's land. Chike contested the case and lost.
He is about to lose the land he had spent a lifetime tending
and on which the sustenance of his family depended.
The only alternative left for him was to find another job,
which was near impossible. A few years back, while visiting
the city, he had lost his papers. Without his military service
booklet, he could not get a regular job, and without his birth
certificate, he does not even exist. Chike went to a back
street lawyer who gave him some replacement papers for US
$50. It was only when he showed them to a prospective employer
that he discovered they were irregular. The military service
booklet was a school exercise book. He managed to see a properly
qualified lawyer who charged him the equivalent of US $150,
almost five months wages. As he can only get casual work 2
or 3 days a week because he couldn't prove military service,
he had no idea how he would raise this money. He is trapped
in a limbo of official nonexistence.
Illiteracy is not only a disqualification from a better paid
employment in a white or blue collar job. Nor is it only a
cultural deprivation, an exclusion from natural life, and
in some countries, even from voting. It is also a political
fact, a handicap for the disadvantaged individual and groups
in the bitter struggle for advantage and survival in Africa.
To be illiterate is to be helpless in a modern state, run
byway of complex laws and regulations. The man who cannot
read and write is at the mercy of those who can. He is a sitting
duck for exploitation and fraud. He may be to count his small
change, but he can be cheated out of his inheritance. Illiteracy
is a person tragedy in Africa. A powerful force in preserving
inequalities and oppressions. Its extent in the modern world
is one measure of ground African education still has to cover.
Since independence, most African states had made tremendous
efforts to combat this scourge, and the overall proportion
of illiterates in the adult population, fell from 59% to 41%
in the 1980's. But as of now, due to population growth, the
number if illiterates in this millennia, has actually increased,
and is expected to rise. In Africa, illiteracy is simply the
most acute expression of a more deprivation; the lack of education
among the poor, either in an academic kind that would provide
an equal opportunity in the employment race, or, of the practical
kind that would enable them to improve their land and general
well being. If education has failed in Africa as a tool to
aid development and equal opportunity, it is not because governments
did not expand it far enough. Education has been a boom industry
since independence, and the achievements in numerical terms,
has been considerable. Rather, it is the mis-education of
the continent that raises concern.
Colonial Africa was buried in an educational curriculum that
was totally irrelevant, and this made it difficult for societies
past and present to readjust to the changing reality and to
have a cultural lag; in almost any other sphere except religion.
In the the earlier period of colonial contact and even later,
education was dominated by the Christian Church. The Papal
Ball of 1493, authorized Spain and Portugal to subjugate the
world, but they were also instructed ''to dispatch virtuous
and God fearing men, to instruct the natives and to imbue
them with the Christian faith and sound morals''. Hence the
missionaries pioneered western education in Africa. But far
from respecting local traditions and cultures - however sophisticated
- they did their best to stamp out, convinced that they were
the works of the devil or at best, the products of benighted
Ignorance. Their purpose in setting up mission schools was
not to impart the necessary skills and knowledge that could
be useful in the workshops and the fields; but to preach faith,
to teach the natives the colonial language and to teach them
to read it so they could study the Bible. The African Times
of July 1880 proclaimed; The educated elite, more or less
under the influence of Christian faith, are and will be indispensable
as a vanguard of the great army civilization that must must
be projected upon the ignorant barbarism of heathen Africa.
The essential function of missionary schools them was to alienate
their pupil from the native society and culture, to make them
scorn it, and indeed, to influence their people with the foreign
culture.
Colonial administration became interested in education much
later. Their problem was that, as colonial government and
economy expanded, they needed more and more junior staff to
help them run things, and as it was expensive to import Europeans
for such humble purposes, they set out to train from among
the laboring masses, elite who as technical assistants, foremen,
employees or clerks, will make up for the numerical insufficiency
of Europeans and also, satisfy the growing demands of colonial
agricultural, industrial and commercial enterprises.
The products of this government-backed education had to be
loyal and disciplined and literate in the colonial language,
so as to carry out the administration chores required of them.
Education for the masses, was neglected as unnecessary, and
a native elite was created in the image of the European to
help dominate and exploit their own countrymen like Chike
Daniels. Although political independence was achieved, the
lack of cultural independence meant that the new African elite
were inclined to teach their children in very much the same
way as before.
Africans have been miseducated. The style and content is
largely on European lines and has nothing in common with our
environment. Education was oriented in theory and distant
facts and impractical to the lives and cultures of the people.
Even in our Universities, the Humanities outweighed the Sciences,
and the balance in student output seemed to bear little relation
to the needs of the countries. In most of Africa, more law
students are produced than medics, when in fact, an increase
in scientific research and development are in desperate need
so that societies would be less dependent on western technology.
Students of natural sciences are outnumbered by the social
sciences, and agriculture, which employs two-thirds of Africa's
population and therefore the foundation stone of development
is pathetically ignored.
In our primary and secondary schools, English and French
literature dominate the classrooms. The gap between the curriculum
and real life experiences is an abyss into which the pupil's
confused minds fall headlong.
I remember years ago in primary school, one very enthusiastic
teacher subjected us to Mark Anthony's speech in Shakespeare's
Julius Ceaser and Coleridge's 'Rhime of the Ancient Mariner'
which we had to learn by heart. We were taught in a language
we only partially understood, the writings of poets from distant
lands...''And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances
with the daffodils''. Sir! Please, what is a daffodil?'',
one bold pupil asked. So the teacher had to draw one on the
blackboard since none of us had seen one before, none could
be found in the environment.
The balance of education in Africa is either, one is illiterate
like Chike Daniels or one is mis-educated. A learned friend
of mine, Richard During, once asked a question that, ''How
has education helped Africa or, the Africans?'' When one compares
the impact of education on western societies, with respects
to our attitudes and mentality and the fact that after all
these years, we haven't been able to change our societies,
then one is inclined to agree with the above question. The
nature of education given us has done little to improve our
lot. We still depend on the west for every technical support
and until the entire curriculum is reversed, education in
Africa will continued poverty for the many. An alienation
machine, distancing young people from their cultures and making
them turn their backs on the villages that so desperately
need their promise, vigour and adaptability.
Instead of turning out enough people with the skills that
the modern sector needs, it rather produces and will continue
to produce a large class of half-baked intellectuals, disorientated
drones and impractical mandarins.
by Kwasi Osei- Kuffour, London
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