HomeOld_PostsTariro mudariro: African education model for convergence

Tariro mudariro: African education model for convergence

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By Tafataona Mahoso

In what was taught,

African thought was allowed no part,

When what began

As a smart division of labour

Degenerated into stark divisions

Of neighbour from neighbour.

In the same factory hall

They call Higher Education,

A concrete wall of protocols cut off

Science from art.

(from Body and Soil, poetry book in progress, by T. Mahoso, 2020)

IT is paradoxical that African parents today feel that education has stopped for their children because schools, colleges and universities have shut down their gates and doors on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Moreover, what is touted as alternative on-line learning is hardly practical in the current Zimbabwe situation and it actually worsens the inherent ‘separate development’ nature of linear neo-colonial learning. 

This is so because solving the technological and logistical challenges of education alone does not answer the question of the reason for existence of the curriculum, schools and the whole education system. 

In many respects, setting up on-line learning infrastructure without asking and answering underlying philosophical questions will entrench the linear notion of education as a series of packaged commodities on a conveyer belt to be sold to the highest bidder for profit.

In terms of the philosophy of the African dariro as a model for education, learning for children and adults should actually be intensified and strengthened during a life-and-death emergency such as that posed by COVID-19.

It is a modernist scandal of design and concept therefore for the school system to have to shut down when civilisation’s very existence is under threat. 

All we seem to be able to offer are physical barriers and sanitisers that seem to reduce human life to its minimal animal physicality.

We can get a glimpse of the African Relational Philosophy of life, of human liberation and of education from the pungwe as a dariro and as an education model in liberated zones during the Second Chimurenga of the 1970s. 

The very fact that people’s lives were in constant danger from the murder and scorched earth policy of the settler regime was no reason to stop educating children and adults alike. 

Even in refugee camps under the frequent threat of bombing raids, education was intensified, not stopped.

Linear model of education

The neocolonial school, college, university and even hospital is a product of capitalism, modelled after the Fordist factory. 

That is why all these institutional structures have proven to be disfunctional and even dangerous in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The coronavirus does not obey linear rules. It is radial.

But the hospital under capitalism was/is a linear factory intended to produce for profit a class-based commodity called health. 

The school was/is a factory for producing primary and secondary schooling, often for profit as well. 

The college and university was/is also a factory for producing separate specialties under conditions of separate development and fragmentation for profit often driven by the values of poorly understood institution called ‘industry’ . 

But corporate industry’s main reason for existence is to make profit at all costs. 

What COVID-19 has shown is the scandalous reality that the price of education for profit demanded and enforced by industry for centuries is higher than the price paid for education for life. 

Likewise, the price paid by capital for medicine and health for profit is far much higher than that which capital (industry) is willing to pay for medicine and health whose purpose is first to save, heal and enhance human life.

That structure is dangerous because, through its linear reward systems, the school of medicine produces its own whiz kids who cannot speak to the whiz kids produced by the law school; who also cannot speak to the whiz kids produced by the graduate school of electrical and electronic engineering; who also cannot speak to the whiz kids produced by the specialist school for space engineering; who also despise the whiz kids from the school of environmental science; and so on and so on.

It should be obvious to anyone capable of asking what the late Professor Mary Daly called ‘First Questions’ why such a system would become dysfunctional and dangerous in the wake of an environmental pandemic which does not follow or obey linear rules of modernist ‘progress’ and separate ‘development’. 

COVID-19 has violated demarcations such as North-South, Third World, Second World and First World. 

Its control, defeat and eradication demand convergence in a human world currently fragmented by niche markets, by the obsessive struggle for domination and by greed for profit as well as by aggression.

Dariro prototype

The prototype for the African worldview is the dariro

In that dariro, Yeukai, whose totem is Mbizi, and is pursuing biochemistry at university, may sit facing Garikayi, whose totem is Humba. In addition to facing Garikayi, Yeukai faces East and sees what Garikayi cannot see, while Garikayi, who is pursuing literature and history at university, faces West and sees what Yeukayi does not see.

In the same dariro, Tariro, whose totem is Soko, may also sit facing Nyemudzayi whose totem is Zhou. 

Tariro is facing North and seeing things coming from the North behind Nyemudzayi who faces South and watches things coming from behind her colleague who is studying mechanical engineering while Nyemudzayi herself is pursuing agricultural sciences at the same university.

All this is meant to say the factory-like school or university requires an interdisciplinary dariro for civilisational learning for all students from all the specialties as one community. 

What the dariro as a relational model of education implies is the melding of different texts and perspectives reflecting the gender, age, totem, geographical position, academic discipline and family background.

This analysis therefore is not against specialisation. 

It is against lack of clarity concerning the purpose of specialisation. 

It is against the failure to accept that 

the current crisis of education, innovation and production is that there is a premium put on profit which is far much higher than that put on human life and the quality of livelihoods for all.

Depending on the number of students gathered and the space(s) available, the dariro can be reduced or enlarged according to occasion and purpose. 

But it, in essence, contains the principles and assumptions of kuonesana, kushaura nekutsinhira, kuenzanisa, and kubatanidza, which when put in English roughly mean: watching each other’s back; enabling the other to perceive and understand what one perceives and understands, which that other left alone in his/her cubicle may not readily perceive or understand; call-and-response; as well as convergence of perspectives and reconciliation of originally divergent dispositions such as that of the hare and the elephant, the ant and the cow, the fish eagle and the mountain goat, the baboon and the mangoose, and so forth.

The pungwe and education for convergence

In the liberated zones of the Second Chimurenga, the following elements were self-evident:

λ Pungwe education and conscientisation were for human liberation and the protection and advancement of life in the community under threat from settler armies. It was not for profit.

λ Pungwe education and conscientisation were intended to bring together into one circle those youths who had left the country to receive military and other training abroad and had come back to fight the settler regime; those youths who had remained in the country and, in many cases, had continued with schooling within the colonial education system; those youths who were unable to go abroad or to attend colonial schools; and the older generation producing subsistence goods as peasants or still employed within the settler economy and able to share useful knowledge of that economy.

In addition, the pungwe as dariro demonstrated convergence as an imperative for all sectors or disciplines. 

As a matter of life-and-death, the pungwe could not afford to leave out any sector or specialty: midwives, medicine men, farmers, transport operators, teachers, nurses, those trained in intelligence gathering and analysis, political commissars, choirs, singers, composers and choir leaders, runners, cooks, and of course liberation soldiers trained in using weapons, repairing weapons and dismantling and disguising them for easy camouflage and transportation.

Indeed, there is much evidence, including songs performed at the pungwe, which shows that the African relational and ecological perspective resonated with Chairman Mao’s view that the relationship between freedom fighters and the larger community was like that between fish and water. 

The fish depended for their very lives on maintaining the utmost respect for the water as ecology. 

It did not matter what expertise and firepower the liberation fighter was bringing from abroad. 

His/her relationship with the larger community had to remain as optimal as possible in order for both to survive and ultimately triumph.

Zimbabwe: Education 5.0 as a successor to STEM

Education 5.0 is the successor to STEM, which stood for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and which elevated these subjects and the students pursuing them to a status superior to the arts and social sciences and to those students pursuing them, respectively.

The thinking behind this separate development approach to education was reported for instance in The Sunday News for October 8 2017,as follows:

“(Twelve) 12 varsity degrees to be made redundant (to make way for STEM)… It has emerged that at least 12 degree programmes offered by the country’s universities might be made redundant in Zimbabwe by 2040 due to technology disruption.

Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Deputy Minister Dr Godfrey Gandawa said the degree programmes that risk going under include Media and Society Studies, Political Science, Paralegal (Studies), Tourism and Hospitality  Management, Psychology, Accounting, Business Administration, Marketing, Economic History, Heritage (Studies), Pharmacy and History.”

The list of subjects to be devalued or dropped changes depending on the particular demagogue speaking or writing and depending on the particular country or university being represented. But the basic ideas are the same:

λ There is a linear obsession with a singular idea, such as the reification of the boundary between the Humanities and Sciences.

λ There is presumed and assumed a posture of aggression and anti-intellectualism arising from the obsession, based on the either/or linear approach in which the failure to develop an organic Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics establishment and legacy must be blamed on those pursuing and defending the Humanities and those pursuing an integrative convergence approach.

λ There is a deliberate muddling of cost and price with value, which leads to the assumption that if the pursuit is not immediately profitable ‘for industry’ it must be worthless.

λ The history, values and structure of the revered ‘industry’ remain an unquestioned given, even though this ‘industry’ is expected to validate and purchase the products of research and development as well as those resulting from so-called innovation by the universities and colleges.

In reality, however, the obsession, aggression and anti-intellectualism reflect insecurity and mediocrity on the part of the campaigners. 

They need to blame someone else for their failure to achieve organic resonance with the values and needs of society.

Philosophers from other cultures who echo the African relational approach to science, technology and humanities

The dariro experience I described at the start of this installment means not only that African thinkers have always been global in outlook, but also that there are philosophers from other cultures whose ideas agree with African Relational Philosophy on Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Humanities.

In his book Technology As Symptom and Dream, Robert D Romanyshyn writes:

“Indeed, stated in the most radical way, ‘the arts and humanities are higher physics’. The physicist and painter envision a common reality but in different ways, and at different levels of complexity. The images of art and the events of science converge.

Technology is, I believe, a strong force in this convergence, and indeed in technology the separation of image and event is all but erased.” (page 5).

In Development of Cultural Policies in Europe, Phillip C Ritterbush wrote:

“The conclusion to which I was led was that students not seeking degrees in the sciences could best understand science as part of culture. If our universities have failed to convey such an understanding it is because scientists have too little understanding of culture…There is a well stated theory of general education that postulates that students can better contribute to solving problems of society if they can relate scientific claims and certainties to the concerns of lay political or civic leadership. This is to say that the problem-solving capacities of society reside in general culture rather than solely in the sciences…” (pages 141-142).

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