PRESENTLY, stakeholders in the education sector are engaged in efforts to transform the country’s curriculum. The country’s education system was inherited from our former colonisers.
It was designed in a manner that benefitted the coloniser.
Sadly, attempts by the current Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Dr Lazarus Dokora, to implement the new curriculum have oftentimes hit a brick wall as some people, churches and pressure groups have resisted the change.
The groups that have resisted appear, interestingly, to have some Western ties.
In the book An introduction to the study of African languages, Carl Meinhof states that to influence the African people and their languages, ‘they must be penetrated by European knowledge, filled with the spirit of Europe and become the vehicle of European thought…’.
The imperialists, after destroying the African religion, also went on to destroy the country’s education system.
According to Dr Caiphas Tizanaye Nziramasanga of the University of Zimbabwe’s Teaching and Learning Centre, the colonial Government introduced a policy which has been perpetuated for a long time.
“The colonial Government introduced a racially biased education, which favoured white children.
“The education for the white child was so as he could be the ruler of this country while that given to the African child was meant to make him semi-literate so that he would not compete with the white child on the labour market and this is (partly) why we went to war,” said Dr Nziramasanga.
“The British Parliament determined and controlled the kind of education and so, over the years, the curriculum given to the African was based on the colonial terms which were reading, writing and arithmetic, of course with the intervention of the missionaries who argued that it was necessary to teach the African so that he could be able to read.
“Of the two types of education systems, white Euro education had the white Government paying teachers while the African schools had to find their own resources to put up buildings and buy schools (books).”
Robert Moffat, a missionary, wrote about Mzilikazi and the Ndebele (Zimbabwe) in 1857: “His Government is one of tyranny and intrigue, lies and blood. I feel melancholy…. I often feel willing to suffer anything or die any kind of death if it would only result in the moral renovation of the Matabele, their deliverance from their present awfully degraded condition.”
Missionaries came with the attitude that all things European were superior to all things African.
Most missionaries, like David Livingstone and Fabri of the German Missionary Society in Namibia, believed that once Africans were colonised by European countries, they would be more likely to seek Western education and Christianity, which the missionaries controlled.
It was their mission to do anything necessary to convert Africans who were viewed as uncivilised and barbaric.
Missionaries often failed to distinguish between Christian principles and those of the colonialists.
They misused biblical passages to further the causes of their colonial friends.
The article adds: “European missionaries, especially from Portugal, France, Britain and Germany, went to Africa under the premise of going to convert the locals to Christianity. Some of them stuck to their mission, others however, aided in the colonisation of Africans by Europeans.”
Clive Whitehead in The historiography of British Imperial education policy, Part II: Africa and the rest of the colonial empire Volume 34, 2005 – Issue 4 writes: “Up until 1920, the British Government took far less interest than in India, in the development of schooling in Africa and the rest of the colonial empire and education was generally left to local initiative and voluntary effort. British interest in the control of education policy in Africa and elsewhere lasted only from the 1920s to the 1950s, as territories assumed responsibility for their own internal affairs as a prelude to independence. Nevertheless, critics were not slow to attack British direction of colonial education in the 1930s and thereafter. In retrospect it is clear that colonial education policy was fraught with much confusion of purpose and lack of resources, apathy and hostility.”
The book also states: “Indigenous people were brainwashed to discard their own cultures and embrace Western cultures which were supposedly superior, a situation which resulted in a culture of dependency, mental enslavement and a sense of inferiority. By altering the history and culture of Africa, the coloniser created new values for the African. Education, which was implemented by the colonisers, is important in facilitating the assimilation process.”
Internal journal of English and literature Vol. 2(9), pp. 190-194, December 2011 also highlights that: “Colonial administrations deliberately neglected education for both political and economic reasons and the British were accused of not extending the benefits of European civilisation, including education.”
Zimbabwe Heritage Trust (ZHT) chief executive officer Pritchard Zhou says teaching the African in the colonial era was to make him literate not for his or her benefit but to serve the colonial agenda: “The first schools were built by missionaries to inculcate the Western culture because when people are literate, it is easier and faster to spread Christianity.
“Education was not in the interest of Africans at all.”
Jason A. McGarvey, in his article ‘Conquest of the Mind’, writes about a Tanzanian man, Semali, who had a Masters and PhD.
Semali said: “The colonial school I attended did not teach me to be a member of Chagga society. Although I had certain knowledge system as a member of the village, I read, wrote and spoke things at school that did not fit into village life. I always wore two different hats.”
Director for Curriculum Development and Technical Services Dr Arthur Makanda said the education given to Africans during the colonial era was meant to perpetuate white supremacy.
“The commissions, such as the Judges Commission and other education commissions, were crafted to perpetuate white supremacy and ensured the education given to the African people turned them into semi-skilled labourers,” Dr Makanda said.
“It built an attitude that we were going to school to get better jobs and become like the whiteman.
“It made us aspire to be in offices and forget to link our education system with our economy and our natural resources and this drove us far away from the means of production.”
Dr Makanda laments: “Even as we train as engineers today, we want to perpetually be employed.
“We are quick to learn about other people’s innovations but do not promote our own innovations and our universities, which should be used as standard bodies, are not used and we find ourselves sending our intellectual properties elsewhere for authentication.”
By altering the history and culture of Africa, the coloniser created new values for the African. Education which was implemented by the colonisers is important in facilitating the assimilation process.
“Western education was considered ‘too European’, and therefore, ill-suited and irrelevant to African needs and that, in the process, the indigenous values of love, community relationships and profound spirituality were being lost (Omolewa, 2006).
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, in the book Decolonising the Mind, displays his anger toward the isolationist feelings colonial education causes.
He writes: “The process annihilates people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves.”
Munene Mission School, Driefontein, Chishawasha, Inyati Mission, Dadaya, Kutama, Tegwani, Empandeni Mission and Morgenster, among others, are some of the mission schools built by missionaries.
It is, however, heartening that efforts are being made to have an education system that reclaims our identity.