|
Article Excerpt
Abstract: Critique of colonial and postcolonial education in Africa as perpetuating cultural and intellectual servitude and devaluation of traditional African cultures has led some African intellectuals to call for a re-appropriation of pre-colonial forms of education to rediscover the roots of African identity. But precisely how can African traditional forms of education be re-appropriated for this purpose while at the same time responding to the requirements of living successfully in postcolonial and global times? The author of this article posits that re-appropriation of African traditions should not be an appeal to an allegedly "better" past to which we nostalgically return instead of responding to the world as it comes to us. Tradition, it is argued, exists only in constant alteration; tradition can be rethought, transmuted, and recreated in novel ways in response to the meanings and demands of emergent situations. Drawing on the Akan concept of Sankofa (meaning "return to the past to move forward") and the postcolonial notion of hybridity, the author creatively re-appropriates some indigenous educational traditions of her ethnic group, the Mende of Sierra Leone, to theorize curriculum and pedagogy for Sierra Leone in postcolonial, post-war, and global times.
INTRODUCTION
Since the decade of independence in the 1960s, much has been written about how best to facilitate nation-building in Africa after European colonization. As education is generally regarded as the key to national development, proposals for nation building have included the reform of inherited educational systems which were erected to maintain the colonial social order and which continue to function to foster neo-colonial dependency, promote elitism, and inadequately prepare individuals for living successfully in their communities and in a rapidly changing world. Paramount among these reform proposals has been the call to re-appropriate African indigenous educational traditions that were marginalized or dismantled during colonial rule in Africa. Proponents of this call over the last forty years have included: Kofi Busia, who criticized colonial schooling in Ghana for separating students from the life and needs of their community; Ali Mazrui, who links contemporary education in Africa with a rural-urban divide; and more recently Elleni Tedla and Apollo Rhomire who describe both colonial and postcolonial education as perpetuating cultural and intellectual servitude and the devaluation of traditional African cultures. [1] But precisely how can African traditions be re-appropriated for education that is grounded in the continent's past while at the same time meeting the demands of living successfully in postcolonial and global contexts today?
In this article I attempt to address this question in the case of Sierra Leone. I draw creatively on the Akan concept of Sankofa (meaning "return to the past to move forward") and examples from the Mende ethnic group to re-think and re-appropriate some traditional African educational values and social organizations that were neglected or dismantled during the height of British colonial administration in Sierra Leone. This period is generally understood as spanning the late nineteenth century until the late 1950s when, for reasons of military and economic exploitation, British imperial grip on her African colonies tightened and education (curriculum and pedagogy) assumed greater significance as an arsenal in this exploitation. Sierra Leone and the Mende are the very country and ethnic group that comprised the cornerstone of British educational experimentation in Africa.
Sierra Leone was founded as a settlement for freed slaves in 1787 after the demise of legal slave trading. It was taken over as a British crown colony in 1808 but British control did not extend into the hinterland of the country until the closing years of the nineteenth century when a Protectorate was declared in Sierra Leone in 1896. Thereafter formal education, which had been left largely to Christian mission societies, was taken over by the colonial civil government and used as a systematic and measurable tool for economic exploitation, reduction of local resistance to white rule, transformation of indigenous outlooks, and meeting the limited needs of the colonial civil service. Unlike French colonial education in West Africa, total assimilation of the African "natives" does not stand out in the historical literature as an active goal of British colonial education in West Africa. [2] However, British effort to transform native outlook through "the provision of gradual means of developing a higher form of civilization," meant that many indigenous forms of education in the West African colonies were dismantled or allowed to lapse through neglect and marginalization. [3] This was the case among the Mende who comprised the largest indigenous group in Sierra Leone. According to Caroline Bledsoe, the proximity of Mende speakers to the coast as well as their distance from the Islamic influences of the North made them logical targets of educational and missioning efforts. [4] Bledsoe writes that these efforts sometimes involved the physical removal of Mende children from their families and placing them in boarding schools to increase geographical access to school but also to decrease the 'contaminating' influence of parents and elders on the children. Education, whether for the 'altruistic purposes' of the missionaries or the naked exploitative strategies of the colonial administration, was used to engineer the production of the minds and souls upon which to erect a new society in Sierra Leone. In the process, Mende indigenous educational traditions were rendered meaningless.
Sierra Leone gained political independence in 1961 after one hundred and fifty years of British rule. Historical research by Donald Stark reveals that politically the country inherited a divided population mainly because colonial strategies, such as 'indirect rule' through local chiefs or pitting the Creole freed slave communities against indigenous ethnic groups, accentuated differences among the various ethnic groups, making it difficult for the people to see themselves as Sierra Leoneans first and foremost. [5] The economy was poor and undeveloped as colonial economic efforts had concentrated mainly on the extraction and exportation of Sierra Leone's raw materials for the benefit of British companies. Colonial social programs such as education (schooling) had been made available to only one-third of the population even though Sierra Leone had a proud history of higher education in Fourah Bay College which had been founded by the Church Missionary Society in 1827 as the only degree granting college in British--governed West Africa. In the forty-five years since independence, Sierra Leone has suffered from political instability, economic stagnation, and social upheaval, leading to much borrowing of money from international financial institutions to survive. In return, these institutions have imposed their own economic conditions which successive governments in Sierra Leone have had to fulfill in order to secure the financial loans.
In this environment, a brutal civil war developed in Sierra Leone in 1991 and lasted eleven years, killing an estimated 75,000 Sierra Leoneans, injuring well over 200,000 people, and forcing half a million others to flee to other countries as refugees. This war formally ended in 2002, and since then the country has experienced an influx of foreign agencies and organizations with ideas about educational reconstruction in post-war situations. Concurrently, there is much talk among the international financial community about how low-income countries like Sierra Leone can tap the gains of globalization by investing in their human capital through educational reconstruction. Discourses about educational renewal not only in Sierra Leone but in post-independence Africa as a whole have recently rekindled the argument among African intellectuals that for education to be meaningful in Africa today, it has to be based in the wisdom, teachings, and traditions of the continent's ancestors, particularly in light of the irrelevance of colonial education to the lives and needs of Africans. [6] It is in this context that I attempt to creatively re-appropriate some Mende indigenous educational traditions, in the spirit of Sankofa, to theorize curriculum and pedagogy that realistically respond to the ambiguous cultural contexts that characterize postcolonial, post-war, and global times in Sierra Leone. Before doing so, however, I provide some note guides to help the reader to understand some of the terms that undergird my discussions in the paper. After that, I briefly describe the concept of Sankofa, positioning it as a critical lens for examining the present and for recovering tradition creatively.
Definition of terms
Colonial: This term is used here in reference to colonialism defined as both the physical conquest and control of African territories by the Europeans, and as the domination and control of the minds of those conquered. From the perspective of the colonizer, the colonial imperative is to 'civilize' the conquered and keep them in a perpetual state of psychological subordination. In other words, although the physical occupation and control of territories may end, the processes of colonial cultural production and psychologization persist.
Postcolonial: 'Postcolonial' is conceived here in reference to three conditions: as the period after independence which marked the physical departure of the European powers from their former African colonies; as the political and cultural movement which seeks to challenge the received histories and ideologies of former colonial nations to allow insurgent knowledge to emerge; and as a position that calls for a major rethinking of pre-given categories, histories, and traditions in order to be able to live successfully within the cultural ambiguity that characterizes many African societies in the wake of European colonization. [7]
Identity: Historically, this construct has direct connections with how individuals think of themselves and others. The concept has its roots in the nineteenth century conception of the human being as a unified individual whose 'centre' consisted of an...
|
