By Francis B Nyamnjoh (Journal of Asian and African Studies 2012 47: 129).
Abstract
This paper draws on Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and other
critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a
resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of
science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the
resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with
rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is
often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and
an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion
for Africans to ‘lighten their darkness’ both physically and
metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of
colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more
attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger
than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like
p’Bitek’s Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of
emasculated elite.
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