Re-orientation of African education

 

Reported

December 6, 1999

 

In Johannesburg, South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki opened two key meetings on African Education on Monday, with a call for the re-orientation of the continent's education systems to enable the development objectives for the continent to be achieved.

 

"It is of enormous importance that we do not falter to provide an education appropriate to the long-term needs of our context and in order to equip us fully to meet the many challenges of the 21st century," he told African ministers of education, experts and representatives of international organizations.

 

He was addressing the joint opening of the biennial meeting of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa and the EFA-200 (Education For All-200) south of the saharan Africa conference in Johannesburg.

 

Delegates from 49 countries, mainly in upper Africa (south of the sahara), are attending the December 6 to 10 conferences. Both meetings are to deliberate on the current state of education in Africa and come up with effective and realistic approaches, which Mbeki said, must be factored into the overall social, economic and political goals of the continent in the coming millennium.

 

"If the next century is going to be characterized as a truly African century, for the social and economic progress of the African people, the century of durable peace and sustained development in Africa, then the success of this project is dependent on the success of our education systems,"

he said.

 

Attributing the weaknesses of the existing systems to the colonial legacy, Mbeki said that the domination of African peoples by various ways has resulted in divorcing the African child from his

or her experience and environment.

 

It has also resulted in the decline in productive capacity, increasing poverty and the destruction of traditional agriculture. This further reduced the capacity of Africans to feed themselves, thus turning them into producers of primary products instead of becoming entrepreneurs and industrial producers.

 

Given this scenario, Mbeki said that African education institutions must collectively effect change. "In this way through the strengthening of relations between different countries in the area of education, we are cementing African unity and becoming actively engaged as educationists in a continental offensive for African social, economic and cultural development," he emphasized.

 

Mbeki also spoke on the need to develop and re-orient African intellectuals, saying that the present phase of development requires the growth and consolidation of intellectuals who must focus more on the economic and social areas.

He added that the development of entrepreneurship also calls for the building of the intelligentsia.

"An integrated approach to development tells us that those who have technical skills and expertise must be complemented with those who have experts in economics, in arts and culture, in the sciences, and those who are directly involved in economic production," he stressed.

 

Mbeki further called for an all-embracing and meaningful co-operation of the African states, education departments, entrepreneurs and academics in enduring partnerships based on
shared visions and goals for better lives for all and not as just competitors for wealth, monopoly or power.

 

These goals, he said, can only be achieved by devising a new agenda for education, which should lay emphasis on the sharing of ideas and intra-African studies and research into its creative and cultural past to set the stage for the younger generation to engage in new development and discovery.

 

This approach would also involve use of new information technology in education to bridge the gap between urban and rural areas, improving science education, and making education accessible to women and the poor.

 

According to Mbeki, "our intellectuals must not become intellectual elite who build cocoons in which they reside in relative comfort and complacency safe from the problems of the outside world, but they must actively build a humane society based on values of caring and
co-operation."

 

"The African child must no longer be subjected to the mental domination that Ngugi Wa Thiong'o has spoken about. We are liberating ourselves and now reside in mental inverses of our own making, for our own progress and prosperity," he said.

 

 

*Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer living in exile from Kenya, is the author of many books and plays. He was jailed in 1976 by the Kenyan government because of his writings, and after his release in 1978, he left Kenya in 1982. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.

 

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