EDUCATION AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CULTURAL DEFOLIATION:

A MULTI-VOICE REPORT

 

Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Jo-Ann Archibald, Edouard Lizop and Majid Rahnema

 

Five voices are heard in this presentation. They come from very different parts of the world, Although they have all been ‘schooled’, they seem to share similar views on the ways the new imported educational systems are now focused on trans­forming their users into becoming ‘developed’ versions of an uprooted homo oeconomicus.

 

Ki-Zerbo was the first to use the terms ‘insular’ and ‘culturally defoliant’ to describe the imported colonial school. For him, this institution could also be compared to a sacred wood where only a few initiated people would enter to perform esoteric rites beyond ordinary people.

 

 

JOSEPH KI-ZERBO is a well-known educator and historian from Burkina Faso. His book Histoire de l’Afrique Noire, published by Hatier in 1978, is already a classic. He was a major contributor to the UNESCO-sponsored General History of Africa (7 vols), and director of the first volume, Methodology and African Prehistory. He was also a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO in the late l970s.

 

CHEIKH HAMIDOU KANE is from Senegal. He is an economist by profession and a former Planning Minister. However, it is through his penetrating autobiographical novel, L’Aventure ambiguè, that he established himself as a great African writer.

 

JO-ANN ARCHIBALD is the director of the First Nation House of Learning at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her research interests include First Nations’ education curricula, higher education and story-telling.

 

EDOUARD LIZOP, who died in 1995, was an educator of great imagination and integrity. He was the principal founder of the Schools for Collective Promotion (Ecoles de Promotion Collective), an initiative launched in Africa in the 1950s, which aimed at finding a creative alternative to the imported model of schooling. Like the Gandhian Nal Taleem, it was warmly welcomed by the first generation of African educators, but nipped in the bud by the bureaucrats within the ministries of education.

 

MAJID RAHNEMA was Minister for Science and Higher Education in Iran from 1967 to 1971. He is the co-author, with Edgar Faure, of the UNESCO Commis­sion Report Learning to Be (Fayard/UNESCO, Paris, 1972), and was a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO from 1974 to 1978.

 

 

Modern Education and the Creation of Discontinuities

 

Primitive education was a process by which continuity was maintained between parents and children ... Modern education includes a heavy emphasis upon the function of education to create discontinuities — to turn the child of the peasant into a clerk, of the farmer into a lawyer, of the Italian immigrant into an American, of the illiterate into the literate.

 

— Margaret Mead, from ‘Our Education Emphases in Primitive Perspective’, in Education and the Cultural Process, reprinted from the American Journal of Sociology, XLVIII, May 1943, p. 9.

 

 

JOSEPH KI-ZERBO

 

The ‘insular school’ is a dangerous cyst and a ‘soul-eater’

 

[School] is a temple of knowledge accessible only to the neophytes, and those who enter there are to accomplish a sort of interplanetary voyage: they encounter a strange decoration, scenery composed of travel agency leaflets.... Here, it is a beech tree in its autumn sumptuousness, which contrasts cruelly with the shaggy and easy-going baobab tree that one stares at distractedly through the window. There, it is a cow from Brittany sitting enthroned on a wall, apparently the first to wonder at its presence there.

 

It is also a school for uprooting ... a dangerous cyst, a tumor which might only too often prove to be cancerous... [It is socially uprooting, for] once you are selected [to be part of it], you are considered by your own parents as a sort of raw material destined to come out of the process as a very clean-looking and well-esteemed clerk. And the mentality of the pupil himself changes similarly...

 

[The modern school tends to rob the student of his historic memory. There, one is trained to lose one’s personality, no longer being able to recognize one’s father or mother or home.] As children are cut off from their historic roots, entire populations risk losing their personality... One learns the dictionary by heart, perhaps to read Tacitus in the original text, but one becomes unable to speak naturally to one’s own mother... [They become] ‘cultural proletarians, victims of zombification’, to use Depestre’s words. The ‘zombi’, in Haitian Creole, is a person whose soul and spirit have been stolen from him, leaving him just his body and his labour power. In Africa, too, we know of ‘soul eaters’ [mangeurs d’ames]. This process of depersonalization is such that many an African academic whose mind has been moulded by the training country’s camp out amongst their own people as agents of technical assistance... For one Senghor, how many millions of obscure zombies! For one Césaire, how many a zombi who will never write or, even less, live the experience of the Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal…1

 

[On another plane, the imported school leads to an economic dead-end and a social powder keg.] One wonders whether school does not create more problems than it solves. It is the origin of this general exodus which is common to all underdeveloped countries, particularly in Africa... The student with a primary school certificate goes to the little town, the one with a high-school diploma to the capital, the graduate and the postgraduate to rich countries. Rural zones which have paid for the expenses of education thus end up by being punctured, with their vitality, their capacity to progress and even to survive pumped out of them. Living in the cities, they are nothing but wrecks. They become like uprooted trees which cannot be replanted elsewhere. They are literally cut off, carried on a river that often has no port.

 

Finally, school tends to be increasingly anti-democratic. Perceived as a source of upward social mobility, it is desired by everyone, but it actually serves people who are already ‘educated’, thus becoming the preserve of a small minority.2

 

CHEIKH HAMIDOU KANE

 

The New School: The Cannon and the Magnet

 

A hundred years ago our grandfather, along with all the inhabitants of this countryside, was awakened one morning by an uproar arising from the river. He took his gun and, followed by all the elite of the region, he flung himself upon the newcomers. His heart was intrepid, and to him the value of liberty was greater than the value of life. Our grandfather, and the elite of the country with him, was defeated. Why? How? Only the newcomers know.  We must ask them: we must go to learn from them the art of conquering without being in the right. Furthermore, the conflict has not yet ceased. The foreign school is the new form of the war which those who have come here are waging…3

 

[But] the country of the Diallobé was not the only one which had been awakened by a great clamour early one day. The entire black continent had its moment of clamour.

 

Strange dawn! The morning of the Occident in black Africa was spangled over with smiles, with cannon shots, with shining glass beads. Those who had no history were encountering those who carried the world on their shoulders. It was a morning of accouchement: the known world was enriching itself by a birth that took place in mire and blood.

 

From shock, the one side made no resistance. They were a people without a past, therefore without memory. The men who were landing on their shores were white, and mad. Nothing like them had ever been known. The deed was accomplished before the people were even conscious of what had happened.

 

Some among the Africans, such as the Diallobé, brandished their shields, pointed their lances, and aimed their guns. They were allowed to come close, then the cannon were fired. The vanquished did not understand...

 

Others wanted to parley. They were given a choice: friendship or war. Very sensibly, they chose friendship. They had no experience at all.

 

The result was the same, nevertheless, everywhere.

 

Those who had shown fight and those who had surrendered, those who had come to terms and those who were obstinate — they all found them­selves, when the day came, checked by census, divided up, classified, labelled, conscripted, administered.

 

For the newcomers did not know only how to fight. They were strange people. If they knew how to kill with effectiveness, they also knew how to cure, with the same art. Where they had brought disorder, they established a new order. They destroyed and they constructed. On the black continent it began to be understood that their true power lay not in the cannons of the first morning, but rather in what followed the cannons.

 

Thus, behind the gunboats, the clear gaze of the Most Royal Lady of the Diallobé had seen the new school.

 

The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of cannon and magnet. From the cannon it draws its efficacy as an arm of combat. Better than the cannon, it makes conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body, the school bewitches the soul. Where the cannon has made a pit of ashes and of death, in the sticky mold of which men would not have rebounded from the ruins, the new school establishes peace. The morning of rebirth will be a morning of benediction through the appeasing virtue of the new school.

 

From the magnet, the school takes its radiating force. It is bound up with a new order, as a magnetic stone is bound up with a field. The upheaval of the life of man within this new order is similar to the overturn of certain physical laws in a magnetic field. Men are seen to be composing themselves, conquered, along the lines of invisible and imperious forces. Disorder is organized, rebellion is appeased, the mornings of resentment resound with songs of a universal thanksgiving.

 

Only such an upheaval in the natural order can explain how, without either of them wanting it, the new man and the new school come together just the same. For neither of them wants the other. The man does not want the school because in order that he may live — that is, be free, feed and clothe himself — it imposes upon him the necessity of sitting henceforth, for the required period, upon its benches. No more does the school want the man because in order to survive — that is, extend itself and take roots where its necessity has landed it — it is obliged to take account of him…4

 

It is certain that nothing pervades our lives with such clamour as the needs of which their school permits the satisfaction. We have nothing left — thanks to them — and it is thus that they hold us. He who wants to live, who wants to remain himself must compromise…5

 

The chief [of the Diallobé] remained silent for a moment. ‘If I told them to go to the new school,’ he said at last, ‘they would go en masse. They would learn all the ways of joining wood to wood which we do not know. But, learning, they would also forget. Would what they learn be worth as much as what they would forget? I should like to ask you: can one learn this without forgetting that, and is what one learns worth what one forgets?’…6

 

‘The school in which I would place our children [concluded the Most Royal Lady] will kill in them what today we love and rightly conserve with care. Perhaps the very memory of us will die in them, When they return from school, there may be those who will not recognize us. What I am proposing is that we should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free.’7

 

JO-ANN ARCHIBALD

 

The Effects of Schooling on the First Nations of America8

 

During the 1900s, First Nations leaders throughout British Columbia voiced their concerns about the negative effects of education upon their children, families and communities. Children were returning home as strangers to their cultural ways, and critical of the family and community way of life. The late George Manuel condemned the residential schools for devastating the family unit and denigrating the students’ culture:

 

Our values were as confused and warped as our skills. The priest had taught us to respect them by whipping us until we did what we were told. Now we would not move unless we were threatened with a whip. We came home to relatives who had never struck a child in their lives. These people, our mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles and grandparents, failed to represent themselves as a threat, when that was the only thing we had been taught to understand. Worse than that, they spoke an uncivilized and savage language and were filled with superstitions. After a year learning to see and hear only what the priests and brothers wanted you to see and hear, even the people we loved came to look ugly.9

 

 

School as a Factor of Division and Disintegration

 

European school, which was perhaps a factor of national union and unification in Europe, appears to be a factor of national division in Third World countries. Its role is to separate and to select. While it was a means of social integration in Europe, it has proved to be here a means of disintegration. While this same school had participated in the creation of a identity and of national conscious­ness, here it leads to the imitation of the identity and of the national con­sciousness of other peoples.

 

— Jean-Pierre Lepri: Quelle Ecole pour Ia Guinée-Bissau?, mimeographed report for UNESCO, June 1985, p. 63 (translated by Majid Rahnema). Jean-Pierre Lepri was a UNESCO consultant in Guinea-Bissau in the 1980s. In close collaboration with his Guinean counterparts, he developed an intimate knowledge of the country’s educational questions, which were reflected in his reports to the government and to UNESCO. Most of them remained in the drawers of their respective archives. See, in particular, his highly illuminating book: Education et Nationalité en Guinée-Bissau: Contribution a l’étude de l’endogenéite de I’éducation, Se Former+, Lyon, 1989.

 

 

EDOUARD LIZOP

 

Schools as Instruments of Humiliation

 

The people of Africa are endowed with a grace of communication and participation that our younger generations seek, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with happiness, sometimes bordering on the grotesque... One can finish a long and brilliant university training without ever having been provoked to dance, to sing, to paint or to talk... As soon as a school is opened, it creates around itself a zone of cultural depression, as it were. Ask an African school teacher what the cultural resources of his village are. He will answer: the school — and nothing else... Maybe the missionary, but often because he, too, is imported. But the market, the palaver tree, the dance, the song, the language of the tam-tam, the tales and the proverbs, the historical and legendary stories, the potter, the blacksmith, the weaver are not for him sources of culture. School acts as an instrument of humiliation. It establishes its empire upon the destruction of whatever it is not, whereas its mission should be to reveal to everyone all the riches and gifts they represent...

 

A missionary was no longer wanted by a village. Bishop Zoa of Yaoundé was entrusted with a mission of reconciliation. He explained to the population that, by opening his school, the missionary was only inspired by a spirit of devotion to the population. An old man intervened: ‘It is not a service that the Father has rendered to us. On the contrary, he has done us the greatest wrong. Because, when there was no school here, we could go to our plantations with our children: now they cannot come, and they have nothing to do.’

 

This anecdote impressed the Lord Bishop of Yaoundé to such an extent that, long after the old man had spoken to him, he said to me: ‘Imagine if the old man had been able to talk like that to a Minister of Education... Something wonderful might perhaps have happened.’10

 

MAJID RAHNEMA

 

The Excluding Processes of the School System’11

 

The school system, introduced by colonialism in countries under their rule, was soon co-opted by the emerging nation-states. It became one of the most important vehicles of development strategy, being presented to the excluded as the answer to all the problems of their ‘underdevelopment’, the redeeming genie which could henceforth save their children from misery and shame.

 

In reality, schools served other purposes. They acted as a rather efficient channel for sieving out, into the Power Establishment, their most ambitious customers. They sometimes did serve as a cultural medium for some exceptionally bright individuals who succeeded in taking advantage of the learning resources for liberating ends. Yet, as a whole, they fostered unprecedented processes of exclusion against the poor and the powerless, despite their claims to serve as a new instrument of democratization.

 

These excluding processes operated at a number of levels. In relation to the society at large, they destroyed all previously established systems of cul­tural reference. As the only recognized providers of education, they systematically discredited all previously established mechanisms that different cultures had created throughout their histories for fostering knowledge and culture. The old days described by Julius Nyerere, when ‘every adult was a teacher’, were over. Now, only those certified by the school system, according to its self-devised criteria, had the right to teach; and only those whose abilities were recognized by the latter could be admitted to learn.

 

Education thus became a scarcity. And the same system which had created this scarcity was asked to deal with it. The management and the further production of this scarcity reinforced the new economistic perception of reality, entailing a broad range of new exclusions. Literacy campaigns often turned out to be campaigns against the non-literate, rather than helping the oral populations to educate themselves and learn as they had always done. For, on the one hand, the adoption of one or two official languages at the national level — either that of the former colonial ruler, or that of the larger dominant ethnic group — excluded all the vernacular and spoken languages that had hitherto served as the main instruments of learning. On the other hand, the absence or the scarcity of any useful printed material in such languages (these often being reduced to propaganda publications by the authorities) further marginalized the non-literate and the unschooled. On the whole, such campaigns ended up creating new classes of social drop-outs.

 

As to the imported ‘modern’ schools, they acted as yet another instrument of exclusion by allowing only a small minority of their clients to acquire social recognition. Besides their own army of drop-outs (2-10 per thousand students in the case of Guinea-Bissau), all adults, peasants, women, working people of all ages, and all other learners who, for some reason, could not afford to spend long periods of their life at school, were equally excluded.

 

Another aspect of the schools’ excluding and divisive action has been extensively analysed: the separation of students from their parents and their cultural milieu. The instilling in them, in homeopathic doses, of new alienating values, attitudes and goals, drives them gradually to reject or even despise their own cultural and personal identity. They acquire a false sense of superiority, which turns them away from manual work, from real life and from all unschooled people, whom they tend to perceive as ignorant and under­developed.

 

Thus, a ‘cultural gap’ develops fast between the newly schooled ‘elites’ and the rest of the population, a phenomenon that has been largely responsible for the well-publicized rural exodus. The most ‘successful’ students abandon their village folk and leave, often for good, first for the big cities, later for foreign lands, fostering the process known as the ‘brain drain’. As a result, the poor and the excluded pay the cost of an educational system that not only deprives them of any possibility of educating themselves but also severs them forever from some of the most potentially valuable elements of their community, from people who could have acted as their best teachers and friends in all matters concerning their liberation. As to the ‘uprooted’, they are set adrift, in many cases without ever being able to find new roots for themselves.

 

As such, the newly reformed ‘national’ school followed, in terms of its societal goals, the same as those assigned to the old colonial school. According to Albert Moumouni,12 one Brevie, then governor general of France in French Africa, had summed up these goals as follows:

 

Political and economic interests have imposed a two-fold task on our work in edu­cation. On the one hand, we must train indigenous cadres to become our auxiliaries in every area and assure ourselves of a meticulously chosen elite. We must also educate the masses to bring them closer to us and transform their way of life. From the political standpoint we must make known our intention of bringing people to the French way of life; from the economic viewpoint we must train the producers and consumers of to-morrow.

 

This consistency of the producer/consumer approach to education, con­ceived as an instrumental commodity, is seen in all the ‘educational strategies’ inspired by the development discourse. In such a context, one can better understand the statement of a former US ambassador and president of the American University of Cairo, when explaining his idea of what constituted an educational ‘success’. In his memoirs,’13 he mentions that he regards one of his AUC students as ‘a great success because he ended up practically owning the Coca Cola concession in Khartoum’.

 

NOTES

1.                    The last part of this paragraph is translated from Ki-Zerbo’s article, ‘L’Education permanente et l’Afrique’, in Orientations (Essais et recherches en education), no. 43, July 1972, p. 16.

2.                    Excerpts translated in the last three paragraphs are taken from a speech Ki-Zerbo made in Paris on 5 December 1969, as the secretary general of CAMES (Conseil Afticain et Malgache de l’Enseignement Supérieur, Upper Volta — now Burkina Faso).

3.                    Excerpts from Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, trans. Katherine Woods, Heinemann, London, 1972, p. 37. The ‘collage’ that makes up this presentation has been taken from parts of the book where Cheikh Hamidou Kane talks about the traditional and the new school.

4.                    Ibid., pp. 49-50.

5.                    Ibid., p. 10.

6.                    Ibid., p. 34.

7.                    Ibid., p. 46.

8.                    Extracted from a mimeographed paper entitled, ‘Educational Perspectives, Challenges of First Nations Education in the Year 2000’, delivered at the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

9.                    George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, Collier-Macmillan, Toronto, 1974, p. 65.

10.                 Extracted from Edouard Lizop, Chroniques, CODIAM (Comité pour le Développement des Investissemersts Intellectuels en Afrique et a Madagascar), Paris, 1973, pp.49-50, 21.

11.                 Excerpts from a lecture at Stanford University (16 April 1985), entitled: ‘Educa­tion as Participation or Exclusion?’ The full text of the lecture was published in Spanish in El Gallo, Mexico, 25 August 1985.

12.                 Albert Moumouni, Education in Africa, trans. Phyllis Nauts, Praeger, New York; André Deutsch, London, 1968.

13.                 John Badeau, The Middle East Remembered, The Middle East Institute, Washington DC, 1983.