Paper presented at the Codesria Conference on 50 years of African independence, Legon, September 2010
By Chinweizu

“The major function of education is to help secure the survival of a people”
--Amos Wilson, “The Sociopolitical context of Education”, in Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children, 2nd Edition, New York: Afrikan World InfoSystems, 1992, p.1.

“Know yourself, know your enemy; and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated”
--ancient Chinese military adage

“Our youth from the primary schools, through the secondary schools to the universities and higher institutions of learning, . . . must be taught to know the workings of neo-colonialism and trained to recognize it wherever it may rear its head. They must not only know the trappings of colonialism and imperialism, but they must also be able to smell out the hide-outs of neo-colonialism.”
--Nkrumah, [Revolutionary Path: 190]

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I wish to make some observations and raise some questions that should, I hope, help us to design an education system that would help us to build a Black Africa that is liberated from imperialism, neo-colonialism, powerlessness, and from the world’s contempt—a Black Africa that has a technologically robust culture; is autonomous in its economy, culture and politics; and is prosperous and Afrocentric.
For a people to be truly liberated, they must be independent: they must be powerful, and powerful enough to deter or defeat any attempts, by anyone whatsoever, to impose on them in any way. In other words, they must be truly sovereign; i.e. they must be able to act independently, without outside interference. For Back Africa to be truly liberated, it must have at least one superpower among its countries.

Some questions to ponder

1] Is Black Africa liberated?
The short answer is no! Let me explain by commenting on some key aspects of our far-from-liberated situation of today.
We are not politically liberated: we belong to their “Commonwealths,” their “Communities,” and especially to their UN which was set up, and still operates, as a syndicate of imperialisms led by the USA. Our national budgets are heavily subsidized by western donors, thus giving them the controls to dictate our policies. Our NGOs and CSOs are also funded by the imperialist “donors”, thus compromising their autonomy.
We are not socially independent: their NGOs have unfettered and unsupervised access to even the remotest villages in our rural areas.
We are not culturally or mentally independent: we are ruled by their ideologies and religions; their music, ideas and images dominate our airwaves and our minds. Their cultural missionaries, and the evangelists of their religions are everywhere--on TV, on radio, in schools, in village meetings--instilling in our minds the subversive and anti-African idea that anything African is inherently inferior, degraded and evil. Their books, their movies, their newspapers and media shape our values and desires; our parrots echo their fads and denounce patriarchy, homophobia, circumcision, etc; our languages, our architecture, our literature, are becoming more and more Europeanized; our governance institutions and norms imitate the European models; our discourse is saturated with Neo-Liberal concepts, prescriptions and jargon like transparency, public private partnership, global best practices, training in entrepreneurship, NGO, CSO, Freedom of Information, stakeholders, human rights defenders (i.e. missionaries), HIPCs, MDGs, and poverty alleviation; yet we lie to ourselves and say we have become free from Europe. But are you free from the person who thinks for you and controls your mind and aspirations? Like Dessalines mockingly pointed out to the Haitians in 1804: “our laws, our customs, our cities, everything bears the characteristics of the French –and you believe yourselves free and independent of that Republic!”

2] Should Black Africa be liberated?
Why not? Why must we remain forever under the thumb or boot of others? Why must we allow ourselves to suffer the contempt of the other races of humanity? Why should we deny ourselves the material and psychological benefits of being a powerful people? We must understand that, without liberation, Black Africa will not achieve prosperity or power or self-respect, let alone the respect of the world. And Black Africans will not savor the material and psychological satisfactions that only prosperity and power can give.
For example: why should each Black person not gain self-respect as a member of a powerful race; or lose the inferiority complexes and insecurities that undermine the confidence and life performance of black people? And why should we not experience the quiet confidence that comes with knowing you can defend yourself and your loved ones against all comers? Others sense this confidence without any immediate proof. If they know there are people in your race with that capacity, they automatically wonder if you are one of them, and give you the benefit of the doubt. Their caution is warranted, for your weakness can then not be taken for granted, as it presently is, and will continue to be for as long as your black skin is indisputably a badge of chronic powerlessness.

3] What should a liberated Black African society be like?
A liberated Black African society is one in which the Black population is in full charge of all its affairs, internal and external—from growing enough food to feed its population to making the armaments that enable it to defend its territory. The people should not feel subservient to any other people on earth, and should have no inferiority complexes. They should feel confident that their prosperity and autonomy cannot be destroyed by any other people.

4] Have we significantly de-Europeanized and re-Africanized our institutions?
Not at all. After 50 years, our laws, our customs, our cities, everything bears the characteristics of European colonizers. Our administrative, judicial, military, educational institutions and procedures have not significantly deviated from those implanted by the colonizers. We have followed the European fashion in every aspect of life. When they sponsored military government, we went along. When they changed their mind and demanded electocracy, we went along, and dutifully imported constitutions and legislative institutions that imitated those in Paris, London, and Washington. In popular culture, we have imitated the break dance, hip hop, sagging pants, and whatever else we saw was fashionable in Europe or America. Hence we are, on the whole, drowning in European culture more deeply than 50 years ago. Just as Fanon predicted, our lumpen-bourgeois “caste has done nothing more than take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought, and the institutions left by the colonialists.” [Fanon, Frantz The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p.176.]

5] Have we significantly de-Europeanized and re-Africanized our colonial education systems and curriculums? Let us find out through answering a few questions:
Do our schools make us proficient in our African mother-tongues? Do they ground us in our African heritage? Do they steep us in the myths, legends, proverbs, ethical and aesthetic values bequeathed by our ancestors? Or in the cosmological and philosophical assumptions of our ethnic groups? Do they teach and commend the African architectural, agricultural and ecological wisdom that our ancestors harvested in the course of millennia of living in Africa? The obvious answer to each of the above questions is NO! In not doing these things, our education is still colonial. In 50 years, no conscious campaign has been made to change the colonial character of our education. If anything, change has been in the other direction. For example, within the last decade, European and American universities have opened branches in Black African countries, and are disseminating their view of the world among us. So we still produce Black Africans who are fascinated with European ways, who are mindlessly obedient servants of Europe; who are filled with inferiority complexes; who are culturally de-Africanized, Europhile and Afrophobic, just like those produced by colonial schools.

6] What kind of education must we institute to re-Africanize our cultures?
If we claim we are still African, then how are we relating to our African heritage? Are we shaped by it through an education that, in the words of the 17th century Songhay scholar es-Sadi
“tells men of their fatherland, their ancestors, their annals, the names of their heroes and what lives these led."
—Abderrahman es-Sadi, quoted in Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, p.226
Furthermore, if indeed we are still Africans, we need to teach and dialogue with our pre-colonial African heritage. For our lives today, we need to draw inspiration from the entire African legacy. We need to learn from all extant African works: starting with works from Ancient Egypt and on through the epics, proverbs and wisdom texts of non-Islamic, non-Christian 19th century Africa. Are we constantly dialoging with African culture? What do I mean by that? Let Maulana Karenga explain:
“For us, Africa, more specifically ancient Africa, is our moral ideal, the foundation and framework on which and within which we understand ourselves and the world, conceive our purpose and obligations in life, ground our hopes and forge our future in effective and expansive ways. We take seriously [Malcolm X’s] teaching that even if we can’t or don’t go back to Africa physically, we should go back mentally, spiritually and culturally. And this is not to escape into the past or to neglect the real challenges of the present or avoid decisions that will determine our future. Rather, it is to ground and center ourselves in our own culture and to extract from it models and messages of human excellence and achievement and to use them to confront and solve problems and to enrich and expand our lives. It is not an uncommon practice for persons to consult ancient texts for grounding and guidelines for how they live their lives. It is only with ancient African texts that some question the value and validity of the practice. Indeed, every day people read ancient texts of Greece, Rome, Palestine, Israel, Arabia, India and elsewhere for insight, inspiration and grounding. And we have read and read them too, but with Cheikh Anta Diop we ultimately ask what does Africa have to say about this or that critical issue? . . . In Kawaida philosophy, we call this dialoging with African culture, asking it questions and seeking from it answers to the fundamental concerns and issues of humankind.”—Dr Maulana Karenga, Los Angeles Sentinel, 04-15-10, p. A7
Unless our education introduces us to these African texts—and they don’t-- we will not be in a position to dialogue with them and harvest and apply their wisdom.
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7] We have talked much about unity but done little to forge it. How do you unite people?
What kind of education forges a sense of one-ness in a population?
According to Cheikh Anta Diop, you give them a shared history, a shared culture, a shared language and values. If you don’t do that, you can put them under one government and they’ll still be disunited. Look at Sudan. It is under one government, but its different sections have been fighting to get away, some for more than 50 years. Why? Though all are black, some accept they are culturally African; others deny they are African and claim they are Arabs, because they have imbibed Arab culture. Hence there is no proper cultural basis for unity in Sudan.
In addition to a shared culture, you give them a shared historical project working together at which gives them a feeling that they are one team.

8] What are the flaws of the neo-colonial education we have entrenched?
These are the same as the flaws of colonial education. A primary flaw was that colonial education was focused on producing clerks and auxiliaries for the colonizers, and not focused on providing creative economic producers of necessary goods and services for the colonized Africans. Furthermore, under colonialism Africans were educated so that they could be better enslaved and Europeanized. As Governor Cameron of Tanganyika put it in the 1920s, the intention [of colonial schooling] “was that the African should cease to think as an African and instead should become ‘a fair minded Englishman’” . . .
—quoted in Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, (London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1988), p.248
Likewise,
“a French ordinance of 1899 indicated that the purpose of schooling in Madagascar was: ‘.. . to make the young Malagasy faithful and obedient subjects of France …’ [and] in 1919, Henry Simon (then Colonial Minister) outlined a program for secondary education in Africa with a view to ‘making the best indigenous elements into complete Frenchmen’”
—Walter Rodney How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1988, p.257
“the colonial education corrupted the thinking and sensibilities of the African and filled him with abnormal complexes”—Abdou Moumini, quoted in Walter Rodney, ibid. p.249
Accordingly,
“those who were Europeanized were to that extent de-Africanized, as a consequence of the colonial education and the general atmosphere of colonial life.. . . the colonial school system educated far too many fools and clowns, fascinated by the ideas and way of life of the European capitalist class. Some reached a point of total estrangement from African conditions and the African way of life, and like Blaise Diagne of Senegal they chirped happily that they were and would always be ‘European.’”
— Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, (London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1988), pp. 248, 249.
In the colonial period, “being educated meant, in the eyes of the populace, an escape from the visible and perceived backwardness of traditional life and society.” –[Kwesi Prah, The African Nation, p.94] As Samuel Chiponde of Tanganyika put it in 1925, " to the African mind, to imitate Europeans is civilization."
---Quoted in Ralph A. Austen. "Notes on the Prehistory of TANU," Makerere Journal #9 (March 1964), p. 2.; [See Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, p. 86]
Now, 50 years from 1960, we have achieved neither the disappearance of colonialism nor the disappearance of the colonized African. Our task remains to achieve both. And the job of disappearing the colonized African belongs primarily to our education system.
However, and unfortunately, till today, our education does not question the beliefs fostered among us by imperialism, does not liquidate the ideas put forward by imperialism to influence us in its favor. Our education induces uncritical admiration for everything White (European or American or Arab); our education, through the school, the church, the mosque and the media, teaches reverence for whites and their culture; it subliminally teaches that the white man is the true man; that the white man is god; that Arabic is the language of god. As the Fanti saying, from colonial times, expressed it: “Bronyi ara na oye nyimpa”; literally “the white is indeed human”, which is to say that the white man is the model or archetype of humanity and, by implication, that the blacks are not quite it, don’t measure up. We behave as if we still believe in this tenet from the colonial era. We seem to have “no greater desire than to resemble the white man as far as possible”—culturally, and even physically. [Prah, The African Nation, p.126]
Furthermore, our neo-colonial education does not teach us how to face the perils of today; does not teach us to create our own future; does not prepare us to face the perils of the future.
Our worldview is still pro-imperialist. We still talk of the “Slave Trade”. We still think that colonialism brought us the gift of civilization. Our youth don’t know our enemies. They think colonialism is over. They think of the imperialists as our generous and benevolent ‘development partners’; they think that race doesn’t and shouldn’t matter; they are desperate to escape to Europe and America in search of golden opportunities...MORE

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