EDUCATION

PART OF THE ANCIENT UNIVERSITY OF TIMBUKTU IN MALI

The basic requirement in the education of the African child is the inculcation of consciousness of a belonging to the African Nation in the first instance. This consciousness necessitates a world outlook that instils in the African child the spirit of African fraternity. That outlook suggests the child’s primary interaction with other Africans across the continent. This intra-Africa mind-set compels a thirst in the child for knowledge of other Africans and for the desire to live among them in the first instance. The inculcation of this orientation in the child is the prerequisite for all training in other fields of learning – technical and otherwise.

The current outward-looking mind-set of the African projects primary interaction not with other Africans but with peoples outside the continent. This begins with innocent suggestions in early childhood to the young African mind of the greatness of other people to the disadvantage of the African image. Not only is the desire to live and prosper in the Western world instilled in the young African as the ultimate attainment in life. A sense of deep and debilitating inferiority complex is as well created in the child at the sight of the non-African. This sets the scene for the domination of the African whose resources – human and material – are then taken out of Africa.

Today, each African country consequently sees its relations with Western and other non-African countries as its primary relations. This brings African countries in competition with each other for Western and other outside attention – a situation that facilitates the manipulation of Africa against the best interests of its people and renders each of its unviable states a hapless and helpless pathetic miserable entity. And yet Africa as a united whole holds the promise of the greatest nation that ever lived on earth. The true history of African civilization attests to the fact of this African potential. To realize this potential the current section addresses African education.

In this respect, we go down memory lane in testimony of the great educational resources that Africa once independently built up and utilized – human and material – across the continent. It is our hope that the studies here will throw light not only on the African past and potential but also the integrative processes that point the way to the resolution of Africa’s Dual Identity for the emergence of the homogeneous African Personality. And this is not as if the African Personality is yet to emerge. It is, in fact, already emerging in the African definition and interpretation of the outside influences in Africa’s history in the construction of the new African.