Africa illiteracy, contribution of Europeans.

Africa illiteracy, contribution of Europeans. Part 1 Education is the most important thing in any type of society as the lives of its members revolve around education and also preserve the culture and promote social change. The major part of education is informal, being acquired by the young from the example and behaviors of elders in society. Among the Bemba of what was then Northern Rhodesia, children by the age of six (6) could name fifty to sixty species of plants without hesitation, but they knew very little about ornamental flowers. The reason been that knowledge of trees was necessity in the daily lives of “cut and burn” agriculture and in situation where numerous house hold needs were met by tree product. Indeed, the most crucial aspect of pre-colonial African education was its relevance to Africans, nin sharp contrast with what was later introduced. The following features of indigenous African education can be considered outstanding; it links with the social life, both in a material and spiritual sense; its collective nature; its many sidedness; its progressive development in conformity with the successive stages of physical, emotional, and mental development of the child. There is no separation of education and productive activity or any division between manual and intellectual education. Although through mainly informal means, pre-colonial African education matched realities of pre-colonial African society and produced well-rounded personalities to fit into society. Some aspects of African education were formal; that is to say, there was a specific education program and conscious division between teachers and pupils. Formal education in pre-colonial Africa was also directly connected with the purposes of society, just like informal education. The programs of teaching were restricted to certain periods in every individual life, notably the period of initiation or “coming of age”. An example of such is the initiation school held by the Poro brotherhood in Sierra Leone, in the Yoruba state of Keta in the 19th century, there existed a school of history, where a master drilled into the memories of his pupils a long list of kings of Keta and their achievement. Along North Africa, Nile, Ethiopia, East Africa and Western Sudan, a minority of the Africa people became literate, producing a situation comparable to Asia and Europe before the latter part of 19th century. Literacy was connected with religion, so Islamic countries had koranic education and in Christian Ethiopia the education was designed to train priest and monks. Muslims education was particularly extensive at the primary level, and it was also available in the secondary and university levels. Example is the Al-Azhar university in Egypt, the university of Fez in Morocco, all a testimony of the standard of education achieved in Africa before the advent of colonial intrusion. Europeans did not introduce education into Africa; they only introduced a new set of formal education and institution which partly replaced those which were there before. The colonial type of education also introduced values and practices which amounted to new informal education. The colonial school system was to train people to help in the local administration at the lowest rank and to recruit workers for the private business Europeans in Africa. The European-type school system hardly operated during the first forty (40) years of colonialism. In that period, missionaries gave schooling to their own Christianizing purposes, by the 1920s the colonialist carried out investigation into the educational possibility of Africa, thereafter, colonialist education became systematic and measurable, though it approached its highest peak only after second world war era. Despite the rich nature of Africa, as at late as 1958, the British Colonial Office of Northern Rhodesia said; Until more money becomes available for the building of schools, no rapid progress can be expected and the practical prospects of providing full primary education for all children therefore remains fairly remote. It is amazing that despite the immense rich in copper wealth, Rhodesia did not have enough money to educate Africans. As whether the colonial official as at that time were either deceiving the people of Rhodesia or were fooling themselves. They consistently argued that Africans did not pay as much tax as Europeans pay per head and therefore should not expect education, this is the fundamental failure to perceive that a country’s wealth comes from not taxes but production. African soil and Labor in the Northern Rhodesia produced vast wealth, but Africans children under colonialism had little access to that wealth for schooling. In every colony of Africa, the budget for education was extremely small as compared to the amount spent in capitalist Europe itself. In 1935, of the total revenue collected from taxing Africans in French west Africa, only 4.03% was utilized on education. In the British west Africa especially Nigeria, it only 3.4% was into education. By 1960, those percentages had gone up by two, three or four times but it was still small, so remains insignificant. A UNESCO publication on education in black independent Africa said; Of this population (of around 7 million), a little more than 25 million are of school age and of these nearly 13 million have no opportunity of going to school-and of the privileged 12 million less than half complete their education. Only three out of 100 children see the inside of a secondary school while not even two of every thousand have a chance of receiving some sort of higher education in Africa itself. The overall estimated illiteracy rate of 80 to 85% is nearly a twice that of the average world figure. The imperial whites used this evidence to snigger at Africans for being illiterates forgetting they were the same people who exploited Africa and deceive the African people of not paying much taxes to help build schools and also educating Africans to be part of the machinery government at the lowest rank. if independent Africa is still without education the benefits of modern education as it is, then 75 years or more of colonial exploitation undoubtedly have something to do with the state of affairs; and the quality of education in Africa. Dr. Kofi Busia, a former prime minister of Gold Coast, some years ago made the following admission; At the end of my first year at secondary school (Mfantsipim, Cape Coast, Ghana), I went home to Wenchi for Christmas vacation. I had not been home for four years, and on that visit, I became painfully aware of my isolation. I understood our community far less than the boys of my own age who had never been to school. Over the years, as I went through college and university, I felt increasingly that the education I received taught me more about Europe and less and less about my own society. Eventually, Busia knew so little about African society that he proposed that independent Africans should ‘dialogue’ with fascist white minority that maintains apartheid in South Africa. On a hot afternoon in some tropical Africa, students would be in a class room with black shining faces learning Geography and listening to lessons on the seasons of the year which is not about Africa season, you can imagine sitting in that hot afternoon taking lessons about Summer, spring, autumn and winter, they would learn about Alps mountain and the river Rhine but nothing about Atlas Mountains in North Africa or river Zambezi. The contribution of Europeans towards the down fall education in African has contributed to the high illiteracy rate in Africa, though some colonialist in one way or the other had proposed the study of indigenous culture and tradition that is to say sir Gordon Gugisberg of the then Gold coast by establishing an anthropological department. Yet Europeans refers to Africa as a dark continent, it is definitely no doubt as their system of education which was introduced in Africa did not give the African man the chance to study it own culture, values and history and also the researchers of Europe who came to African did not investigate the hinderlands before drawing such a conclusion. It is clear and undoubtable that Europeans had contribute significantly the greater portion of the illiteracy rate in African despite the aids been sent and the schoolarships opportunities for Africans still the illiteracy rate is high and the blames still and would remain on the Europeans no matter the interventions put in place. Readers should note that it is the view of the writer and not exactly what Walter Rodney wrote or published. References How Europe underdeveloped African Walter Rodney 1975 Author; Azuraa Bukari Ayuba UDS, Wa campus. B.A IDS.