EVOLUTION OF AFRICA EDUCATION
If we want to find reasons for Africa’s poor performance in education, we need to look at our history. It is important to know that formal education – children going to school and to university–began only quite recently on this continent.
In Ancient Egypt (between 2500 and 500 BCE), men were formally taught to become scribes and administrators, that is, people who could write and people who could govern. But in those early days most other African societies lived just above subsistence levels, which means that they produced little more than the basic goods they needed for daily life and their economy did not advance. So they had very little need for education.
Generation after generation, children in Africa learned their skills and gathered their knowledge from their parents and relatives and their community. These skills were mostly to do with farming, and the knowledge was mostly about their environment and their social and cultural traditions. An economist would say that Africa’s human capital was low in these days, because their very basic level of education did not give them the skills to advance their economy. Of course, this was how most of the rest of the world lived too. Formal education existed only in India and China and in the Mediterranean civilisations of Ancient Greece and Rome. A famous early example is the Platonic Academy of Athens, a school that was founded in 385 BCE. But we should note that formal education in these countries was not for everyone – it was mostly for the elite, in other words for the rich and powerful.
How does education evolves in Africa?
1. The influence of the Christian missionaries
Islam spread mostly to those countries at the top of Africa that were conquered by North African warriors or were part of the North African trade network. The rest of the African continent, particularly the Central Africa, East Africa, the southern parts of West Africa, and all of southern Africa continued their traditional lifestyle without access to written texts. The arrival of Europeans dramatically changed this picture. Europeans began to settle in Africa, most noticeably at the southern tip of Africa. They brought with them printed books and the ability to read and write. Printing had been invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in around 1450. This technology had brought a large increase in literacy – and economic growth – to Europe. Now, 200 years later, its benefits spread to Africa. The settlers built schools for their children where they could learn to read and write, and for some slave children too. Formal education, and with it a more advanced economy, had arrived in southern Africa.
These early schools were small and served only a small part of the African population. But something else that arrived with these Europeans began to transform African societies across the continent: the Christian religion. At the end of the 18th century, missionary societies began to set up mission stations in areas outside the border of the colony. The aim of these stations was to convert Africans to Christianity.
But their work also had another – and very important – result. To become a Christian, a person must be able to read the Bible. So missionaries had to teach Africans to read and write. Just like the Islamic schools at the top of Africa, Christian mission stations at the other end of the continent were the main reason that southern African societies became literate.
Literacy leads to higher productivity, more freedom and greater equality. Christian missionaries therefore made a strong contribution in many African countries not only to formal education but also to the economy and to the creation of a free and equal society.
2. The influence of Islam
The introduction of Islam in North Africa and parts of West and Central Africa set off a rapid growth of formal education in this continent. Timbuktu, in modern Mali, was the centre of Islamic learning. Timbuktu’s economic success attracted many scholars to the town, further strengthening the teaching of art, science and religion. With Emperor Askia Mohammad’s support, thousands of manuscripts were written. About 700,000 of these manuscripts still survive in Timbuktu libraries today, and scholars are busy restoring,
translating and digitising these valuable documents, so that we can learn more about the politics, economy and culture of this early Africa civilizations.
The arrival of Islam introduced more formal models of education to Africa. The Muslim conquerors and traders brought with them written texts. This meant that Africans who adopted Islam and learned Arabic could now read, write and deepen their knowledge of philosophy, religion, science, medicine and many other subjects. Now Africans could share in the knowledge of great thinkers and philosophers who came before them. They could study mathematics, science and medicine by reading what generations of scholars had written on these subjects. In the old days Africans had only the elders in their own villages to learn from. Now that they could read and write, they could make progress by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ – as the physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton (1642–1727) said. Written language gave them access to the works of great scholars. And with their influence, Africa could now produce its own internationally famous scholars. Ahmad Baba al Massufi, for example, studied at Timbuktu and by the time he died in 1627 he had published more than 40 books, becoming one of Africa’sgreatest scholars.
3. The influence of colonizer
The Republic of Ghana was colonised by the British. These colonisers brought new technologies and other improvements such as formal education to Ghana. They helped Ghana to develop an advanced market economy that could become part of the global trading network.
Education is the key to prosperity. History shows that countries prosper when they are part of the advanced market economy, integrated into the world economy. The key to integration is a well educated workforce. If the next century is to be the African century, it will be because students know the history of education in Africa and the problems we face today and are determined to get a good education not only for themselves but for future generations.
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