The Crisis of Education Systems in Africa: A Reply to a WhatsApp Post on “The Disappearing Whites”

A WhatsApp post has been circulating lately titled “The Disappearing Whites: A Hidden Lesson about Education and Power in Zimbabwe”. The thrust of the article is that “white” Zimbabweans educate their children to be owners of businesses, while “black” ones prepare them to be employees. The author calls for a change of mindset among “black” parents to enable their children to compete with their “white” counterparts. The author applies his/her observations and inferences in Zimbabwe to education systems around the continent, solely blaming them for the poverty of “black” people.

 

I do not wish to defend the education systems in contemporary Africa, because there is a lot that is wrong with them. For example, Kenya has changed its education system two times since its independence in 1963, the first time around 1985, and the second in the middle of the second decade of this century. Such frequent changes result in many problems, not least the cost of developing new learning materials, preparing teachers to facilitate learning, and, worst of all, destroying institutional memory which is key to the improvement of any system. Nevertheless, any critique of these systems that does not address the class dimension of education is dead on arrival.

 

The author of the article observes: “… because education in Africa is mostly designed to produce workers, not owners, it unintentionally favors those who already have something to own.” However,, it is not “unintentional” – it is the design of capitalism. Indeed, education systems are designed to preserve the status quo, in our case to retain the capitalist hierarchies that colonialism established to ensure that a tiny minority perpetually exploits the vast majority. Remember Paulo Freire’s observation that the education system reflects capitalist hierarchies? Let me quote an extract from my feature article titled “The Politics and Economics of Knowledge Production”:

“In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire memorably highlights the distinction between “banking education”, in which the learner is a docile and passive recipient of knowledge from the teacher, and which therefore reflects the capitalist power hierarchy, and “problem-solving education” entailing a dialogical approach in which both “teacher-students” and “student-teachers” teach and learn. Tragically but not surprisingly, six decades after formal independence, most schools and universities in Africa continue to deploy banking education in line with the capitalist power relations characteristic of the societies in which they function.”

 

In Social Science as Imperialism, Claude Ake observes that “The West is able to dominate the Third World not simply because of its military and economic power, but also because it has foisted its idea of development on the Third World through the institutions and activities of knowledge production.” Similarly, Samir Amin, in his “Understanding the Political Economy of Contemporary Africa”, asserts: “Current academic programmes in social sciences for African Universities have been prescribed by the World Bank and allied authorities in order to destroy any capacity to develop critical thought. Unable to understand really existing systems which govern the contemporary world, the brain washed cadres are reduced to the status of 'executives' implementing programmes decided elsewhere, unable to contribute to changing that world rejected by their own people.” I must add that the humanities are not doing much better, as many scholars in that field take great pride in their thorough acquaintance with Western canons and disdain efforts to research and apply the knowledge systems of our various peoples. For example, several of our own scholars of philosophy seem to disdain the late Prof. H. Odera Oruka’s Sage Philosophy project in which he set out to research the philosophical thought of individuals in our villages with no training in Western philosophy: they would rather display their prowess in explicating Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, among many other Western philosophers.

 

Later the author of our WhatsApp piece writes: “We want to find a job in someone else’s dream factory instead of building our own.” This, again, is misleading. Building a factory requires capital; and through slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism Western imperialism has concentrated the capital in “white” hands for almost five hundred years now, as Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa graphically illustrates. Reforming education systems without addressing this historical fact cannot possibly be a game-changer.

 

Yet the author gets quite close to hitting the class nail on the head when he/she writes: “While the black student is perfecting academic theories, the white student is perfecting inheritance systems.” However, he/she sadly goes on to sing the praises of “white” post-high school training, oblivious of the fact that such training is enabled by access to capital for “whites” and made impossible for “blacks” due to lack of that very capital. Nevertheless, he/she later comes back to historical reality: “And the young white employer? He may not even have a degree but he has land, a workshop, capital, and experience.” Where, pray, did he get land in Zimbabwe if not the land of native Zimbabweans that his grandparents stole from the Zimbabweans?

 

However, the author later gets it terribly wrong when he/she writes about the “black” individuals who “suddenly” find themselves under the hire of “white” former schoolmates who may not have even gone to college: “The difference was never race it was training, timing, and mindset.” In this, he/she fails to see that capitalism is racist – it is a system designed by “whites” to rob other races. He goes on to assert that “… the real world doesn’t pay for how well you memorize it pays for how well you monetize.” He fails to see that “the real world” is not an objective fact, but a creation of Western capitalism from the age of mercantilism, slave trade, classical colonialism, and the current neo-colonialism.

 

Then he gets it right again: “The tragedy of African education is that it equips us to serve systems we didn’t create.” He/she goes on to admonish us:

“Until we shift our mindset from “I want a job” to “I want to create jobs, we will continue producing black graduates to work for white teenagers.”

The false assumption here is that good education will enable us compete at par with “white teenagers” – something that will not happen en masse as long as the “white teenagers” continue to hold the proceeds of imperialist pilferage.

 

All in all, the author of that article has fallen into the Western imperialist trap of keeping us busy hating ourselves, disparaging ourselves, all the while thinking we are engaging in constructive self-criticism, while we provide a totally undeserved alibi for the misdeeds of Western imperialism. As Steve Biko memorably observed, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Scholars must resist intimidation from Industry: A Reply to Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu

My attention has recently been drawn to an article by Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu making the rounds on social media. It is titled “African Professors must stop counting publications - And start building nations”. While I appreciate Dr. Asiedu’s concern that we all do all that we can to improve the quality of life on our continent, I have real problems with his approach to the issue.

First, what Dr Asiedu calls “nation-building” is properly referred to as “national development”. The former has to do with creating a sense of solidarity in a country, while the latter is about improving the quality of life in such a polity.

Second, Dr. Asiedu’s view that academics should be promoted on the basis of their innovations rather than their publications might appear impressive, but it reduces academia to the servant of industry. Dr. Asiedu’s disdain for theory is manifest, as he articulates the trendy idea of “market-driven courses” thus: “Each paper should be the beginning of a product. Each thesis should end with a tool. Each classroom should be a workshop.” However, such an outlook is a cheapening of academia spearheaded by wealthy college dropouts, many of whose wealth is the result of inheritance and fraud rather than genuine hard work. Tragic that even academics will listen to such while dismissing colleagues offhand.

Third, Dr. Asiedu needs to reflect further on the relationship between theory and practice, and to appreciate that there is often substantial innovation in the formulation of theory. Remember the Roman myth of the two boys who made wings for themselves and had successful flights? It took over two millennia for the two Wright brothers to step into history and invent aircraft. I know that the myth was not theory in the strict sense, but whoever came up with it did some theorising in the wider sense of contemplating a possibility and attempting to identify the means of turning it into reality. Be that as it may, the history of science is replete with theories that seemed impracticable or only minimally useful for centuries, only for them to eventually be put into phenomenal use. The ancient Greeks wrote about atoms, but the atomic bomb only appeared in the twentieth century; Aristotle, and the ancient Egyptians before him, theorised the laws of logic that are the foundation of contemporary computer science; the work of earlier physicists provided Einstein with a basis for working towards his even more all-encompassing relativity theory.

Fourth, how do scholars of the humanities and social sciences relate to Dr. Asiedu’s call to innovations that “change lives”? Does it mean they have no role in society if their work does not yield immediately tangible results? Is this not the thinking through which subjects such as literature, history and philosophy are dismissed as useless simply because they are perceived not to be immediately applicable to “the market”? Is life only about “the market”, and therefore devoid of emotional and social intelligence? Is this piece not simply a diluted latter-day articulation of pragmatism, with all its inherent weaknesses?

Fifth, Dr. Asiedu’s aspiration is for the countries of Africa to “industrialise”, meaning he/she subscribes to the idea that “development” means playing “catch-up” with the West. In this he fails to appreciate that there is substantial literature attesting to the fact that it was the Western imperialists who fabricated this very “development” narrative as part of their exit plan, so that they would re-brand themselves from “colonisers” to “development partners” in the current neo-colonial era.

This philistine narrative about the need for academics to churn out “innovations rather than publications” that address our immediate problems is now choking almost every aspect of our lives – public health, conservation, gender studies, human rights, etc. Even the disgusting question now posed to academics during promotion interviews as to how many grants they have brought to their universities is a manifestation of this sacrilege.

So let academics labour in theorising, and provide immediate solutions when they can identify them, but refuse to be intimidated by so-called “captains of industry” and their facilitators who threaten to send genuine scholarship to its grave.

Poor Leadership, Bad Followership, and Western Imperialism: The Three Sources of our Woes

Quite often, we are told that the problems in the countries of Africa are solely due to bad leadership. However, more recently, others have asserted that our problems are due to bad followership, since it is the followers who elect bad leaders. What if both those elected and those who elected them are not wholly to blame? What if there is a third factor that is seldom highlighted?

I have seen people condemn politicians for corruption, only for they themselves to act terribly corrupt in their own spheres – civil servants stealing stationery at work, teachers and lecturers sexually exploiting their students, middle class families grossly underpaying their househelps, etc. I have seen many people vote for a grossly incompetent and corrupt politician simply because he is from their own community. I have seen people maim or even kill their compatriots simply for holding contrary political opinions. I have heard them say that it is alright for their own to be declared winner even when all the evidence points to the fact that they actually lost but used state power to get themselves declared "winner".

Yet the high primium often placed on electing the right leaders is itself problematic because of the grossly flawed nature of our elections - an exercise riddled with red tape and outrageous requirements for big cash to run for office, reducing the masses to mere voting pawns. I have said much about this in "Elections: A Major Obstacle to Democracy in Kenya" ( https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2022/09/30/elections-a-major-obstacle-to-democracy-in-kenya/ ).

Most crucially, I disagree with the "leaders-people" dichotomy. I have read theories of leadership and theories of followership, each of them claiming it is the solution to our morass. Nevertheless, both groups of theories ignore neo-colonialism which Kwame Nkrumah explicated in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Phase of Imperialism. Nkrumah pointed out that a neo-colony has all the trappings of sovereignty, but due to its economic dependency, its laws and policies are determined by the erstwhile colonisers. Neglecting to lay blame on neo-colonialism is partly due to the conflation of "independence" and "liberation" which is fuelled by the Kiswahili word "uhuru" used to translate both.

As scholars of decoloniality have pointed out, independence simply gives a country a flag, a national anthem, national anthem national currency, a national coat of arms, and a seat at the United Nations (note, for example, that traditional political formations in Africa had no flags and national anthems).

On the other hand, liberation enables a country to decide whether or not it wants a flag, a national anthem, a national currency, a national coat of arms, and a seat at the United nations, etc. In short, many analyses on leadership and followership ignore current geopolitics dominated by the West. For example, we have repeatedly seen leading candidates in presidential races in various countries on our continent dashing to Chatham House to “validate” their candidature.

Yet it is true that if we were more politically conscious, we would put a lot of shenanigans to a stop. Nevertheless, however committed to high political ideals we as citizens were, if the structures of Western imperialism remain intact in the realms of economics, politics, education, religion, etc., we will never get out of the woods. Remember Thomas Sankara telling an OAU meeting that if all countries in Africa rose up against debt slavery they would succeed, but if he alone tried to do it he would not even be alive to attend the next OAU meeting? Point? Western imperialism is always ready to eliminate those of our people who exhibit true, liberating leadership.

So let us be tough on ourselves and on those who hold political offices, demanding the highest standards of ethics from ourselves and from them, but let us not exonerate Western imperialism for the major part it has played, and continues to play, in our woes since the fifteenth century through four hundred years of slavery, about seventy of classical colonialism, and now more than sixty of neo-colonialism. Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an excellent text in this regard.

In sum, it is not only bad leadership or bad followership or even both to blame for our woes, but rather leadership, followership, and, above both, Western imperialism.

Intellectuals and Academics: What is the Relationship?

We in Kenya live in a society in which titles are over-rated and misapplied, probably because we were colonised by the highly feudal British with their “majesties”, “Dukes”, “duchesses”, “Lords”, “Ladies”, “baronesses” and “Sirs”. In all kinds of contexts (from football matches to funerals, neighbourhood meetings to open air garages among many others), many people want to be addressed as “Professor”, “Doctor”, “engineer”, “Commissioner”, “Bishop”, “Reverend”, among many others. The strange thing is that even the British from whom we learned the hype have moved on, and prefer to work with first names even in contexts in which we would be extremely careful to acknowledge titles. Over thirty years ago, someone who had just graduated with a Ph.D. degree wrote to his contacts, myself included, informing us how he wished for them to address correspondence to him henceforth, with “Dr.” as part of it: I was not impressed at all, although I now realise that correspondence, and particularly addressing postal mail that was dominant in those days, was a very formal affair. A friend recently called me to vent her frustration. She, a professional in her own right, had attended a training curve for pension trustees to hone her skills. Among the trainees were two persons with the title “Professor” and another with the academic title “Doctor”. Yet they were attending the training to be taught, not to teach. However, some of the trainers were dazzled by their titles, and kept on giving them undue attention, holding on to their every word and frequently saying to the class “As Prof. has said, …” and “As Doc has said, …” – and the dons seemed to be enjoying it all the way. As a result, the other trainees were made to feel “small” and their participation less significant than that of the dons. I wholeheartedly agreed with my friend that my dear colleagues, whoever they were, from whatever universities they came, should have borne in mind that they were there to be taught, not to teach, and thus in that context they were equal to all the other trainees; for if they already knew it all they should not have attended as trainees but as trainers. Yet the fawning behaviour of some of those pension trustee trainers is rampant in our society. It is based on the false assumption that those holding the academic titles “Prof.” or “Dr.” are highly knowledgeable and are thus points of reference in every gathering in which they appear. My friend went ahead to wonder if the three academics thought that their titles matched their incomes (a yardstick by which people tragically but frequently measure each other). She pointed out that despite the flamboyance of the three dons, most of the other trainees, working in the private sector, were probably earning more than double the best paid professor in their company. Yet what is really worrying is the failure or outright refusal of such professors and doctors to acknowledge that the positions they hold obligate them to be servants rather than “bosses” of society. What is more, those who shower them with excess admiration are as guilty as they are, for they help reinforce their ill-conceived sense of importance. I sometimes remind people that when someone dies, the maggots never ask who was professor, who doctor, or who sweeper: to them just the arrival of more food. The excessive deference to people holding the academic titles “Prof.” or “Dr.” that made that training curve nightmarish for my friend is partly based on the erroneous view that all intellectuals are academics and all academics are intellectuals. However, things are much more complex than that. How so? The late Prof. Ali Mazrui famously defined an intellectual as “a person who has the capacity to be fascinated by ideas, and has acquired the skill to handle some of them effectively.” While this definition is helpful in highlighting “capacity”, “skill” and “ideas”, it allows people who are not actually active in the processing of ideas to claim to be intellectuals by dint of their “capacity” and “skill”. Thus a person who earned a doctoral degree ten years ago, but who has done close to nothing to keep reading, writing and engaging orally with those around him on the subject of his/her Ph.D. thesis and way beyond it would still fit Mazrui’s definition. Indeed, Prof. Mazrui himself correctly observed that “People can be very intelligent without being actively intellectual. Intellectualism is an engagement in the realm of ideas and rational inquiry.” It is for this reason that I seek to improve Prof. Mazrui’s definition by proposing that an intellectual is anyone who consistently engages deeply with ideas, seeking to understand what they mean, how they relate to one another, and trying to determine the extent of their applicability to real life situations. To do so, one does not need certification from anyone else – one just has to have the ability and interest to pursue knowledge and insight. This means that there are many intellectuals in all manner of places – urban neighbourhoods and rural villages, large and small business outfits, among many others. On the other hand, an academic is someone with post-graduate degrees pursuing a teaching/research career in a university or working in a research institute. Tragically, many of those in such places have been in the academic echo chamber for so long that they genuinely believe that they are the crème de la crème of society by virtue of their degrees and their publications, the waning status of universities in this era of neoliberalism notwithstanding. I was recently discussing this very issue of the relationship between academics and intellectuals with some colleagues, when one of them wondered if academia was not a cult: I replied that it actually is. I pointed out that one of the core elements of a cult is the conviction among its members that "We are the only ones who know and who are right." This is the very attitude which makes many academics believe that there is know intellectual activity outside academia, never mind that most highly influential ideas and innovations were and are still spawned far away from the corridors of universities and research institutes. The fact is that some intellectuals are academics and some are not. Besides, there are many essentially non-intellectuals in academia – people preoccupied with academic activity only so that they can be promoted by their universities. Talk to them about emerging issues such as pandemic politics, enhanced digital surveillance, debates on “climate change”, or the quest for alternative models of governance, and they will exhibit boredom, if not hostility. Happily, there are also academics who understand that the ultimate goal of their learning is service to humanity at large, but this recognition is not limited to academics. Consequently, the concept of the public intellectual is growing in popularity, anchored on the appreciation of the fact that anyone who engages the public in seriously thinking through the pertinent issues of the day fits the bill, whether or not he/she is a career scholar. To be sure, there are situations in which titles are not just permissible but actually appropriate. For example, it would be utterly improper for a master of ceremonies to use first names to refer to the Vice-Chancellor and other dignitaries officiating a graduation ceremony. It would also be improper for students to refer to their lecturers by their first names due to the teacher-student relationship. Besides, in many instances, lecturers are the age of the students’ parents, so in our cultures it would be awkward for such students to refer to them by their first names. Similarly, the “Professor” or “Doctor” titles are relevant when the people holding them are submitting a book proposal to a publisher or bidding for a consultancy because the skills signified by the title are relevant to the matter at hand. However, there is absolutely no reason except an unhealthy ego for such people to require a gentleman who takes care of their home, or their mechanic, or the lady who sells vegetables in their estate to refer to them as “Professor” or “Doctor” because the relationship does not demand it. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, long before the pressures of performance contracting and ISO certification invaded our public institutions, the University of Nairobi, where I am privileged to serve, was well known around the globe for highlighting the fact that intellectual activity is not limited to its corridors, but is also to be found in abundance in our villages. This recognition gave rise to pioneering work in oral literature, oral history and sage (oral) philosophy. Such work only flourishes when the professors and lecturers engage the non-academics all over our country with a demeanour of genuine respect for them instead of tacitly or overtly demanding preferential treatment because of the Western-type certifications that already afford them affluent lifestyles at the expense of the tax-paying masses. Only then will people like my friend at the pension trustee training appreciate that academics have something to offer society.