By Aribino Nicholas (Writing in my own capacity)
Colonialism in Africa is not over, rather it is all over. One of the things that has given colonialism this staying power is the education system in Africa that largely mirrors the virtues of imperialists. Before the coming of the Whites in Africa, there was a sound traditional education system that extolled the moral economy of interdependence. The traditional education system in Africa before the 15th century celebrated the communal -self at the expense of individual liberties. There were no formal classrooms before the advent of the whites in Africa, rather education was imparted through families, community gatherings, folklores, inscriptions on caves, traditional leadership and its council. When the whites came to Africa, they found human rights as part and parcel of the cultural properties of Africa. In Africa, human rights were enjoyed through a sense of collectivism, co-creation, co-production and co-decision. The African communities resembled the tapestry of a basket, diverse but coterminous in being mutually constitutive and reinforcing. The whole village would be alive to its collective responsibility of socializing the young ones into socially acceptable adults that would live to promote ideas and ideals of their communities. It is the purpose of this opinion piece to float the polemic that Zimbabwean universities have failed to help Zimbabweans to find themselves as a people, rather they have served as the colonial conveyor belts for the consumption of European and Western epistemological values and aesthetics.
Zimbabwean universities need to be rejigged in terms of their funded mandates, curricula, assessment and evaluation focus. The European and Western epistemic values mark and punctuate the content of Zimbabwean universities at the cost of indigenous knowledge systems. In Zimbabwe quite a number of universities have made foreign languages such as Mandarin, French, Portuguese and German among others, compulsory for students. The 64-million-dollar question is: Is globalization just for Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular? My understanding is that globalization should be a function of hybrid dynamics where good values from both Africa and Europe/ West should merge to represent a panoramic worldview. This way we should also see African languages being taught in the global North. Zimbabwe has gone on to embrace additional foreign languages when locally its own citizens are not conversant with the16 official languages. Some of the official languages in Zimbabwe like Sign Language and Ndebele are not even compulsory in the education system. Universities in Zimbabwe should take it upon themselves to offer these languages and should also influence their acceptance at the lowest level of education through a language policy. I say universities because they are leaders in research and development, they are the torch bearers in the country in terms of knowledge and wisdom, they should therefore, advise the government accordingly.
Psychologists argue that human beings think clearly or form ideas in their minds through their source languages. Source languages are therefore, by extension, the fulcrum of all innovations and inventions. Source languages should pepper the school system from ECD to higher education. To continue putting a premium on foreign languages as vehicles of instruction is to fence out the gains of colonialists at the expense of developing own local languages. Language cannot be separated from development, because it is the means through which thought patterns are developed.
When the whites came to Africa, they attacked our centre of gravity- our languages and indigenous knowledge systems, by creating an education system that pooh-poohed us as a people. They introduced their languages as being key to communication, business, international relations and human relations. African languages and traditions were written out of history, Africans began to be obsessed with speaking French or English through the nose. African universities should rethink their thinking through re-examining their content and assessment procedures. African universities ought to disentangle themselves from quantitative epistemic values that are associated with the West. They should develop programmes that aim to rewire the mindsets of Africans in such a way that Africans take pride in being who they are. Today the spirit of ubuntu is gone, there is more of individualism as compared to interdependence.
The whites hit us where it hurts most by defining and ruling us according to their own tastes that had little respect for our cultural practices like polygamy, seniority and by introducing gender into our psyche, rubbishing our oral history and prizing quantitative knowledge systems. African universities should wake up to cause epistemic violence by defining epistemic truth for Africa. Africans need an education system that would retain the identity of Africans as a people. Although African countries are not a homogeneous entity, they converge on cultural rights that give them a common identity. Cultural rights are enjoyed collectively. African universities should reflect on their educational menus with the view of producing graduates that are proud to be Africans out and out. For example, the complexion complexity that we see of our black sisters with fanta faces and coca-cola legs is not pleasing at all. Everything rises and falls on education; African universities need to work hard to deconstruct coloniality in order to reconstruct epistemic values that are in -keeping with our own values.
