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.”