The Virtues and Challenges in Traditional African Education

This paper examines the virtues and failures of traditional African educational systems, in the context of continental Pan-Africanism, and argues that traditional African educational systems must be complemented by a Pan-African educational system that transcends confocalisms and micro-nationalisms. The process of traditional education in Africa was intimately integrated with the social, cultural, artistic, religious, and recreational life of the ethnic group. That is, 'schooling' and 'education', or the learning of skills, social and cultural values and norms were not separated from other spheres of life. As in any other society, the education of the African child started at birth and continued into adulthood. The education that was given to the African youth fitted the group and the expected social roles in society were learned by adulthood. Girls were socialized to effectively learn the roles of motherhood, wife, and other sex-appropriate skills. Boys were socialized to be hunters, herders, agriculturalists, blacksmiths, etc., depending on how the particular ethnic group, clan or family derived its livelihood. Because there were no permanent school walls in traditional African educational systems, as in the case of the Western countries, some European writers on African education tended to be blinded by their own cultural paradigms and viewed traditional African educational process as mainly informal. Some early European writers on Africa in general went to the extent of saying that Africa, especially south of the Sahara, had no culture, history or civilization. Murray (1967: 14), for instance, states that "... outside Egypt there is nowhere indigenous history. African history has always been 'foreign' history." Laurie (1907), in his Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education, did not even include Sub-Saharan Africa in his scheme of analysis or exposition; he started with Egyptians and ended with the Romans. He equated education with civilization and culture as he knew them and, by implication, Sub-Saharan Africa was primitive. Boas (1983: 180) defines "primitive as those peoples whose activities are little diversified, whose forms of life are simple and uniform, and contents and form of whose culture are meager and intellectually inconsistent. Their inventions, social order, intellectual and emotional life should be poorly developed." Boas goes on to justify a civilized culture by using technical developments and the wealth of inventions as yardsticks. The types of technology he singles out as making a culture civilized are those which go beyond merely satisfying daily basic needs; thus, Eskimo techniques are primitive since they do not greatly reduce the Eskimo's daily physical preoccupation with livelihood. One sees that Boas is favoring West European culture as a measure of civilization; however, the academic tradition of putting Europe at the pinnacle of civilizations has now largely been addressed and refuted by both Western and non-Western scholars and other people of ideas. Brickman (1963: 399) goes beyond Laurie's, Murray's and Boas' conceptions of civilizations and primitiveness by continuing with the Egyptian origins of African education to state, at least, that "African education dates back to ancient times in Egypt, to the establishment of Muslim mosques in the centuries following the death of Mohammed, to the University of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, and to the missionary schools in the nineteenth century." Brickman goes on to concentrate on the May 1961 Addis Ababa Conference of African Ministers of Education, UNESCO representatives and the other observers concerned about the development of education in Africa. What is apparently missing in Brickman's survey is the education provided African youth before the coming of Islamic religion into Africa, especially south of the Sahara. Even with the case of Egyptian civilization, some historians have ascertained that Africa south of the Sahara affected north Africa considerably. …