Education can be defined as teaching or giving a systematic instruction to those who do not know – an enlightening experience.
Education has its roots in ancient times. It is as old as the human world itself, and it survives to this day. All human societies have systematic ways of imparting knowledge to their members.
It is through education that pre-colonial African societies carried out their initiation rites, welcoming boys and girls into adulthood when the time was right. It was through this system that children learned the basics of various trades by being schooled through apprenticeship. This helped society to regenerate and become more sophisticated.
Unfortunately, the African process of educational development was truncated by the Arabs and the Europeans when they invaded. They planted their own systems of education – which had adverse effects on Africa’s growth and development.
Foreign educational methods using foreign languages may well be one of the reasons why Africa failed to develop.
As Ngugi Wa Thiong’o rightly puts it, developments in science and technology are tied to a people’s mother tongue. So, denying them access to their indigenous languages is bad.
Learning using indigenous languages creates a window through which people see themselves and their environment, and denying them this opportunity is tantamount to linguicide. It also disrupts people’s natural process of growth and development.
This is the area in which most African nations failed. They did not translate colonial education manuals into their own indigenous languages so that their people could forge ahead.
This is what the Asian tiger nations did after the Second World War – they domesticated foreign technologies by addressing them in their indigenous languages. Even though some educational manuals in colonial languages became familiar to Africans, language barriers created walls which excluded many people from the colonial education system.
Governments often failed to create hybridization between colonial languages and indigenous ones. This held their people back.
As Leon Damas once said, languages provide oxygen to each other. Exchanging the linguistic repositories of different cultures enriches both parties when optimally utilized. This is one area in which African nations failed to do what was necessary to advance their education sector – among other challenges.
It is often said that an educated society is a developed one. Human capital development is higher in countries that place a premium on education.
In Africa, Zimbabwe under the late Robert Mugabe holds the record for being the most educated country on the continent. This feat was not achieved overnight. Money from the budget was allocated to education and teachers were trained in order to achieve this.
But this success was not hybridized with the indigenous education system, so it did not snowball into scientific and technological development. Moreover, basic infrastructures need to be put in place to ensure effective hybridization, but this is not possible for a society marred by insecurity. Both government and other stakeholders need to create the necessary environment for success.
Hybridized education is pivotal to any African society that wants to develop, because uneducated citizens result in a dysfunctional society. Governments cannot drive their policies and programs forward if the majority of their citizens do not understand their policy directions.
UNESCO advises developing countries to allocate 26% of their annual budgets to education thus creating human capital which will enable them to close the gap between themselves and developed countries.
Unfortunately, African leaders do not see education as an investment which will yield fruit in the long-term. African governments should invest more money and more resources in the hybridization of educational materials so that their countries catch up.
In conclusion, Africa’s leaders need to muster their courage and copy what other colonized countries have done. Hybridization of the educational sector is the only way to achieve the growth which will lift people out of poverty and dependency.
By Zacham Bayei