Question 1

How valid is the assertion by Rodney (1973) that a combination of power politics and economic
exploitation of Africa by Europeans led to the poor state of African political and economic
development evident in the late 20th century

In the final blog for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf celebrates Walter
Rodney, the scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana who was
murdered 37 years ago this week. She writes how he was influenced by Marxist ideas
and remains central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left. His book How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by
activists and scholars today.

A number of African economies have experienced a massive boom in wealth and

investment over the past decade. Yet most ordinary Africans live in dire poverty with
diminished life expectancy, high unemployment and in societies with low-levels of
industry. For the roots of these conditions of “under-development,” one historical
account stands alone in importance: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa (1972).

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana.
Influenced by Marxist ideas, he is central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the
left. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney situates himself in several
theoretical traditions: the writings of Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon, the
dependency theories of Andre Gunder Frank and others, the Pan-Africanist tradition
including George Padmore and C.L.R. James, and African socialism as popularized by
national leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Kambarage Nyerere  and Guinea’s
Ahmed Sékou Touré. As Horace Campbell describes, “His numerous writings on the
subjects of socialism, imperialism, working class struggles and Pan Africanism and
slavery contributed to a body of knowledge that came to be known as the Dar es
Salaam School of Thought. Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, Claude Ake, Archie Mafeje,
Yash Tandon, John Saul, Dan Nabudere, O Nnoli, Clive Thomas and countless others
participated in the debates on transformation and liberation.”[1]

Rodney’s scholarship and leadership in the working-class movement thus had a long
reach, including within the revolutionary movement in his native Guyana. He was
assassinated on June 13, 1980, likely by agents of the Guyanese government.  The
Nigerian novelist, Wole Soyinka, in noting Rodney’s legacy, wrote how “Walter Rodney
was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or international radicalism. He
was clearly one of the most solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look
colonialism and exploitation in the eye and where necessary, spit in it.”[2]

Rodney’s work has assumed a foundational place in understanding the legacies of

slavery and colonialism for the underdevelopment that unfolded, over centuries, on the
continent. The core of his analysis rests on the assumption that Africa – far from
standing outside the world system – has been crucial to the growth of capitalism in the
West. What he terms “underdevelopment” was in fact the product of centuries of
slavery, exploitation and imperialism. Rodney conclusively shows that “Europe” – that is,
the colonial and imperial powers – did not merely enrich their own empires but actually
reversed economic and social development in Africa. Thus, in his extensive account of
African history from the early African empires through to the modern day, Rodney
shows how the West built immense industrial and colonial empires on the backs of
African slave labor, devastating natural resources and African societies in the process.
As he emphasizes throughout How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “[i]t would be an act
of the most brazen fraud to weigh the social amenities provided during the colonial
epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed
the bad.”[3]

For Rodney, underdevelopment is a condition historically produced through capitalist

expansion and imperialism, and very clearly not an intrinsic property of Africa itself. He
thus situates underdevelopment within the contradictory process of capitalism, one that
both creates value and wealth for the exploiters while immiserating the exploited.
Rodney writes:
 The peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world)
paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profit from the human labor that
always lies behind the machines…. There was a period when the capitalist system increased
the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a
few, but today the quest for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that
their material and social needs should be fulfilled.[4]

As Rodney describes, African trade was central to its growth, most importantly through
the slave trade from approximately 1445 to 1870, transforming Africa into a source of
human raw material for the new colonies in North America and the Caribbean. It was to
the three major powers involved in the slave trade – Britain, France and Portugal –that
massive profits accrued. Trade with Africa was closely tied up with the growth of
European port cities such as England’s Liverpool, with the exchange of slaves for cheap
industrial goods established as the primary motor for profits of European firms. Drawing
on the work of Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944), among others,
Rodney concludes that the slave trade provided England with the capital for the
Industrial Revolution to take off and with the dominant edge over its rivals.

Yet as Rodney shows, the “development” of African societies was thwarted in this
process of capital expansion, first and foremost through the lost labor potential due to
the slave trade. From its economic foundation in slavery, the range of exports from
Africa narrowed to just a few commodities, undermining the development of productive
capacity in Africa itself. These trade relations meant that technological development
stagnated, creating a barrier to innovation within Africa itself, even in regions not
directly engaged in the slave trade, because of the distorting influence on relations
overall.  The result, concludes Rodney, was “a loss of development opportunity, and this
is of the greatest importance…. The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade
were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive.”[5]

The nineteenth century “race for Africa” broke out, with European “explorers” seeking
out access to raw materials. By the 1870s, colonial powers had expanded into new
African territory, primarily through the use of force, further consolidating imperial
powers and rivalries.  By 1876, on the eve of the “scramble for Africa,” European powers
controlled only 10% of the continent, namely Algeria, Cape Colony, Mozambique and
Angola. Yet after the infamous Berlin Conference of 1885 and the partition of Africa,
“The number of genuinely independent states outside of Europe and the Americas could
be counted on one hand – the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia and
Afghanistan.”[6]

Racist ideology justified and facilitated European imperialism in Africa as a “civilizing

mission,” or as Rodney remarks, “Revolutionary African thinkers such as Frantz Fanon
and Amilcar Cabral …spoke of colonialism having made Africans into objects of history.
Colonised Africans, like pre-colonial African chattel slaves, were pushed around into
positions which suited European interests and which were damaging to the African
continent and its peoples.”[7] Nonetheless, Africans met European expansion with great
resistance, targeting forced labor schemes and taxation, restrictive land ownership laws
and later, imposed forced conscription during World War I. Workers went on strike and
engaged in boycotts, and nationalist organizations – many of them illegal – were
formed from the earliest days of colonial rule.

Yet African resistance during that period was caught between larger forces. The
European “scramble for Africa” subjected independent states to colonial rule,
transforming peasant and trading societies within a short span of time into a wage
labor and cash crop system. The increasingly intense economic competition in
European capitalism that eventually exploded into World War I likewise spilled over into
military clashes in Africa. Alliances between and against the various powers attempted
to block each other’s rivals, with France and Britain seeking competing axes of control
over the continent.

Colonial brutality was the standard practice across virtually the entire continent, with the
chief aim of leveraging force to subdue resistance and to extract profits. Turning Africa
into a conveyor belt for raw materials and industrial goods required transportation and
communication systems and, as Rodney describes, a pacified – and minimally educated
– labor force. The major powers on the continent set up administrative apparatuses
that in some cases utilized local rulers, but, as Rodney writes, in no instance would the
colonizers accept African self-rule. Infrastructure such as roads were built not only to
facilitate the movement of commodities and machinery, but also that of the colonial
armies and police relied upon to discipline the indigenous population, whether the
expulsion of people from their land or the forced cultivation of cash crops. Industrial
development was thwarted in Africa itself because manufacturing and the processing
of raw materials happened exclusively overseas.

Europeans divide-and-conquer tactics won a tiny section of African rulers to back the
annexation by one power versus another. As Rodney puts it, “One of the decisive
features of the colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as economic,
political or cultural agents of the European colonialists…. agents or ‘compradors’
already serving [their] interests in the pre-colonial period.” Following Fanon on the role
of local elites, Rodney is scathing in his contempt for the “puppets” of “metropolitan”
capitalism, where “the presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of
underdevelopment.”[8]  

For Rodney, “The colonisation of Africa and other parts of the world formed an
indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological
transformation of the base of European capitalism.” Copper from the Congo, iron from
West Africa, chrome from Rhodesia and South Africa, and more, took capitalist
development to unprecedented heights of what Rodney calls “investible surpluses.” The
tendency within the drive for profit towards innovation and scientific advancement built
a “massive industrial complex,” as Rodney described it.[9] African trade not only
generated economic growth and profits, but created capacity for future growth in what
he called the “metropoles,” meaning the global centers of political and economic power
located in Europe.

Colonial policies heightened exploitation, such as those preventing Africans from

growing cash crops drove workers into forced labor like the building of infrastructure to
facilitate extraction. Thus, capital accumulation was derived at the expense of greatly-
weakened African states and economies, effectively reversing previous development.
These two processes were dialectically related. As Rodney writes, “The wealth that was
created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist
countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African
capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential.”[10] This process of
underdevelopment only intensified over time: as Rodney points out, investment and
“foreign capital” in colonial Africa was derived from past exploitation and provided the
historical basis for further expansion. “What was called ‘profits’ in one year came back
as ‘capital’ the next…. What was foreign about the capital in colonial Africa was its
ownership and not its initial source.”[11]

Rodney argued that development in the so-called “periphery” was proportional to the
degree of independence from the “metropolis,” a central tenet of the dependency
theorists. He looked to state-directed, national development in the post-colonial period
as a template for growth, a model proven – particularly in the years after Rodney’s death
– not to be viable. National development in Africa, as elsewhere, proved unable to
overcome the legacy of colonialism and weak economies. The wake of such failures
and the onset of global crisis pushed many African states into the vice-grip of neo-
liberal structural adjustment “reforms” that brought only austerity and crushing Third
World debt.

These ideas had a distinctive imprint on Rodney’s variant of Marxism and that of many
leftists of his day. For Rodney, independence in Africa rested on “development by
contradiction,” by which he meant that the contradictions within African society were
only resolvable by “Africans’ regaining their sovereignty as a people.”[12]  In his view,
the disproportionate weight and importance of even a small African working class
offered potentially a more stable base of resistance. But, he emphasizes, that possibility
cannot be fully realized as in the “developed” world because production in Africa
proceeded on a different path than in Europe. In the latter, the destruction of agrarian
and craft economies increased productive capacity through the development of
factories and a mass working class. In Africa, he argues, that process was distorted:
local craft industry was destroyed, yet large-scale industry was not developed outside of
agriculture and extraction, with workers restricted to the lowest-paid, most unskilled
work. “Capitalism in the form of colonialism failed to perform in Africa the tasks which it
had performed in Europe in changing social relations and liberating the forces of
production.”[13] So, concludes Rodney, the African working class is too small and too
weak to play a liberatory role in the current period. Instead, somewhat reluctantly, he
identifies the intelligentsia for that role:

Altogether, the educated played a role in African independence struggles far out of
proportion to their numbers, because they took it upon themselves and were called upon
to articulate the interests of all Africans. They were also required to … focus on the main
contradiction, which was between the colony and the metropole. …The contradiction
between the educated and the colonialists was not the most profound. …However, while
the differences lasted between the colonizers and the African educated, they were decisive.

Thus, while Rodney sees the “principal divide” within capitalism as that between
capitalists and workers, the revolutionary role for the African working class was
nonetheless a task for another day. On this score, Rodney was mistaken: mass
upheavals by workers across the continent have shown the capacity for struggle, from
the colonial period up to the present day.

Yet, however contradictorily, Rodney’s ideas on political leadership and liberation

indicate the potential for resistance under today’s conditions. First, as we have seen,
Rodney – following Fanon – was keenly aware of the class contradictions embedded in
the new African ruling classes, tensions bound to be thrust to the surface with greater
clarity. He writes: “Most African leaders of the intelligentsia… were frankly capitalist, and
shared fully the ideology of their bourgeois masters…. As far as the mass of peasants
and workers were concerned, the removal of overt foreign rule actually cleared the way
towards a more fundamental appreciation of exploitation and imperialism.”[15] This
dynamic has only been accentuated over time. Furthermore, Rodney implies,
internationalism on a class basis lay in the historical development of capitalism and
solidarity as a crucial “political” question. “European workers have paid a great price for
the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table,” he
writes. “The capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the metropoles to the
point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep,
European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists.”[16]
Rodney’s characterization of European workers “led like sheep” may be too simplistic a
description of workers’ understanding of capitalism. But Rodney is correct in stressing
that racist ideas undermined their own liberation. The “crumbs” Rodney describes are
the products of divisions sown by ruling class ideology, and not of insurmountable
material barriers. Actually realizing this (future) possibility – that of an international
movement of workers of Africa and the West – has much to be gained from Rodney’s
invaluable research and analysis.

Rodney was not a person rigidly bound to some idea. He was a scholar who applied
Marxist theory in a creative fashion to the African condition. In addition to the economic
exploitation of the African people, Rodney also dealt with the anti-imperialist and anti-
racist political struggles in Africa. In the process of critiquing the works of some
influential African scholars of today who ignore basic economic factors and focus on
legal and cultural issues, Hirji presents a strong case for the continued relevance of
Rodney and his major work. He notes that the predictions implied by How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa as to the economic domination of Africa today are ‘stunningly
accurate.’ Rodney’s method of social analysis which combined theory with practice is
essential for analyzing the African and global societies.

Some critics accuse Rodney of over-emphasizing external forces and neglecting the
agency of Africans. Hirji points out that such criticisms are flawed because Rodney’s
analysis integrated external and internal factors.  And the core role that imperialism
plays in the underdevelopment of Africa cannot be overemphasized. The liberation of
Africa from the clutches of imperialism has to be led by Africans. African masses have
to take control of state power in order to halt the underdevelopment of Africa by the
West and their African class allies.

The apologists of neo-liberalism say Rodney was too polemical and mixed the role of
the scholar with that of an activist. Yet, it is a misguided view since history abounds with
cases of exemplary scholars and scientists who were also prominent activists in their
days. In sum, Rodney does not offer a simple binary choice between hope and struggle
to Africans and others but an integrated emphasis on hope and struggle.

Walter Rodney was assassinated by local reactionary forces working in conjunction with
imperialism in 1980 in his home country, Guyana. Yet, his legacy as a revolutionary and
public intellectual survives. Despite the concrete and ideological reversals since his
times and the erasure of anti-capitalist texts from syllabi in Africa, Australia, Asia,
Europe and America, some prominent scholars continue to refer to How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa as a foundational text. His major book still commands a global
audience.

In this special issue of Africa Update, we have invited eminent scholars to evaluate the
continuing relevance of Walter Rodney to Africa and the rest of the world in line with
the Enduring Relevance thesis of Hirji and in accordance with the Postscript to the
original publication by Rodney written by A.M. Babu. We are fortunate to include the
piece by Kimani Nehusi, The Walter Rodney Professor of History, University of Guyana
and Professor of Africology at Temple University. He updates the relevance of Rodney
by indicating the attention paid to his work today by top theorists and by popular
musicians alike and concludes that the themes of unequal exchange that Rodney
theorized in the dialectical relationships between Europe and Africa persists today. Also
included is a piece by the editor of this special issue of Africa Update, Biko Agozino,
Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, with a focus on the enduring
relevance of the analysis of education for underdevelopment and education for
development in Africa by Walter Rodney. Finally, Nigel Westmaas, Associate Professor
of Africana Studies at Hamilton College, completes the special issue with an overview of
the contemporary relevance of Walter Rodney’s popular education work against
imperialist domination and to Marxist historiography, innovation of world system
analysis and the application of dependency theory to Africa.

Guest Editor (Special Edition of  Africa Update)

Professor Biko Agozino

Rethinking Education for Underdevelopment and Education for Development in

Africa
Professor Biko Agozino

 
In this article, I will focus on the importance of education as a tool for domination and for
ending the underdevelopment of Africa in appreciation of the book that I was assigned
to read and review by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and colleagues who co-taught my elective
course on Introduction to Political Science at the University of Calabar in the early
1980s. I have continued this tradition by always requiring my students to study How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa as the main text in my Introduction to African Studies
classes.

Bemba children of Zambia knew 50-60 tree and plant names by age 6, according to
Walter Rodney in chapter 6 of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.[3] Colonialism was
imposed and the very little education provided mainly by missionaries replaced the
indigenous knowledge systems by teaching the Bemba about daffodils, roses, and other
ornamental plants in Europe that were irrelevant to the slash and burn system of
agriculture which required Bemba children to learn the plants that were medicinal,
necessary for crafts or for food enough to be spared when preparing the farms for
cultivation. The result has been that educated Africans were effectively mis-educated as
Carter G. Woodson would put it. They saw education in terms of distancing themselves
from African culture and mimicking European languages, names, mannerisms, dressing
styles, religion, food, cars, houses, skin color, entertainment, patriarchy, chauvinism,
elitism, individualism, militarism, genocidism, gangsterism, etc., as the indices of normal
civilization.[4] They saw Africa as characterized by the gap that needed to be filled by
banking in their tabula rosa heads the deposits of what Soyinka dismissed in Season of
Anomy as ‘erudite irrelevances’ (from sociologists who kept silent about the genocide
against the Igbo in Nigeria).[5] Both the quality and the quantity of education provided
by colonizers in Africa were so derisively poor that Rodney concluded that we should
not put education in the plus column of the so-called balance sheets of imperialism
because he saw colonialism as a ‘one-armed bandit’ with the only thing good about it
being when it was forcefully ended by Africans.

The question that Rodney indirectly posed for Africa is why, after decades of
decolonization, both the quantity and the quality of education provided by neocolonial
regimes are still less than satisfactory with the result of enduring technological
weaknesses? It may have something to do with the fear by colonial and post-colonial
authorities alike that education is a breeding ground for sedition, a law against critical
free speech that the colonizers imposed on Africa but which neocolonial regimes
continue to enforce even after Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo won the celebrated case that
deleted the sedition clauses from the Nigerian Criminal Code in 1983, long before the
abolition of sedition in the UK in 2009, though it is still retained across Africa. [6]

 
According to Samora Machel, colonialism is extremely contrary to humanity; ‘No a
colonialismo democratico, no a colonialismo humano’. [7] Therefore, decolonization is
not an act of charity or the transfer of power from a benevolent colonizer, it is the
precondition for the emancipatory education of Africans. FRELIMO, the Revolutionary
Front for the Liberation of Mozambique under the leadership of Samora Machel, was
quoted by Rodney as stating that any education provided for the enslaved by the
enslavers is designed to sustain slavery. Think about this briefly and see if you agree
with it completely. The statement of FRELIMO comes from the conventional definition of
education as a systematic means of transmitting a society’s traditions and cultures from
the older to the younger generations. The irony is that many of the leaders of the
liberation struggle for the restoration of independence in Africa (including Rodney
himself, as George Lamming once) were educated by the colonizers for the purpose of
what Paolo Freire called ‘massification’ or domestication and not for liberation; [8] yet
they exercised the basic human agency to choose to resist imperialism while others
chose to become compradors. In other words, education is not simply a conduit for the
transmission of knowledge but also a field of struggle where the old Africa and
the Renascent Africa of the future, according to Azikiwe, struggle against the legacies of
imperialism or struggle to maintain those legacies for the benefit of the phantom
bourgeoisie.[9] Azikiwe also called for the application of scientific methodologies in the
struggle for liberation but Awolowo published a rejoinder in Liverpool and stated that
Africans use juju as science to kill one another.[10] General Olusegun Obasanjo sided
with Awolowo when he called for Africans to use juju to fight apartheid. [11] Even
professors of natural science disciplines are more scared of juju than anything else
today.[12] Fanon observed that African peasants were more scared of spirit forces than
of the police and the armed forces and, like Azikiwe, he called for us to innovate new
concepts and make new inventions rather than mimic Europe or return to superstition.
[13] In the struggle to decolonize education in Africa, the dialectics allow us to take what
is valuable from the past while challenging what is oppressive in order to empower us to
actualize the vision of a progressive and prosperous Africa of the future. Cabral was
outraged that one of the cadres in the national liberation struggle tried to gain promotion
by offering to sacrifice his son for success in a battle because a spirit told him to do so.
[14] Cabral asked him to show him where the spirit was so that they could fight and
defeat it first because it must be the spirit of the Europeans, alluding to the fact that the
Greeks sacrificed the daughter of their leader for victory in the Trojan wars and
Abraham decided to go along with the test to sacrifice his only son in obedience to God
who later sacrificed his only Son in a story strikingly similar to ancient African narrative
about Isis, Osiris and Horus.

Santos in Epistemologies from the South warned against the imperialist preference for
epistemicide or the destruction of indigenous knowledge systems by European
colonizers to make way for the globalization of apartheid as the universal epistemic
standard.[15] The Malaysian sociologist, Hussein Alatas also identified the captive
minds of the colonized to indicate that imperialism is not only political and economic in
nature but also intellectual to the extent that Bob Marley called for us to emancipate
ourselves from mental slavery because none but ourselves can free our minds. [16] This
was the point that Claude Ake made when he dismissed western Social Science as
Imperialism in Africa because they serve to sustain the domination of Africa by Euro-
Western systems of thought and value systems by, for example, promoting corruption
as a necessary evil, to the detriment of Africans.[17] ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me
Nonsense’ was how Fela Kuti put it. But the question remains why the masses of the
people with little or no education in music have been able to originate captivating
musical genres across Africa and the African Diaspora while the highly educated
Africans with doctoral degrees from around the world have failed to innovate a single
original theoretical framework, invention, discovery, or start-up firm unlike their peers
from other parts of the world and despite the foundations laid for us by the likes of
Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Diop, James, Fanon, Rodney, Cabral, First, Hall, Babu, Toyo,
Onimode, Ousmane, Amin, Ngugi, Chinweizu, Soyinka, Achebe and currently being
built upon by the likes of Adichie, Mammah, Jeyifo, Mamdani, Mbembe, and
Madunagu?

CLR James pointed out in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution that one outstanding
achievement of Nkrumah was his education initiatives especially when the colonizers
started expelling students and teachers who supported the nationalist struggle.
[18] Nkrumah launched the National School Movement that developed a chain of
schools that were independent of the colonizers. Azikiwe was forced to visit the
Northern Regional Assembly in 1947 to warn that it was a mistake to oppose schooling
simply because educated children tend to be critical thinkers less likely to be obedient to
parents.[19] Azikiwe advised the Northerners to ensure that their children go to school
and then teach them obedience at home but the current Boko Haram campaign is an
indication that many in the North still believe that schooling is forbidden when books
should be regarded as Halal rather than Haram in accordance with the intellectual
traditions of Uthman Dan Fodio.[20]

Bagele Chilisa, author of Indigenous Research Methodologies, concluded that a big part
of the answer to the question of why Africans are still enslaved mentally is that Africans
are still educated in the alien and alienating languages of their colonizers and so their
minds remain captive and incapable of originality. [21] Chika Ezeanya agrees that it is
high time we developed teaching and learning in Indigenous Knowledge Systems by
recognizing that African indigenous methods of irrigation and agriculture, for instance,
may be more effective for scarce water management than techniques developed for
water-rich industrialized regions of the world.[22] Her TedTalk also showcased her
efforts to develop picture books for her daughter and for other children to teach them
about the promise of thinking as Africans and not only in terms of their hometowns.

 
I once wrote a paper in Igbo language and sent it to a scholarly association that
specializes on the study of the Igbo for possible publication in their journal. They turned
it down on the basis that the journal policy required all submissions to be written in
English because some well-educated Igbo scholars were not capable of reading or
writing in Igbo and so it would be difficult to subject my paper to peer review. I sent the
paper to a community journal in Lagos and it was published as the very first ever
scholarly paper written and published in Igbo language. [23] By coincidence, Adiele
Afigbo also published in the same issue of the Igbo Journal, calling for a Museum of
Igbo History and Culture to be established, though he made the call in English
language. I have nothing against the language of colonizers and I have published the
bulk of my work in English but since Africans say that no palm is big enough to hide the
sky, there is ample room in scholarship for indigenous African languages to make
original contributions alongside other modern languages.

Language sovereignty is the invariant law of socio-economic development and there

has never been a culture that achieved increased capacity and material well-being by
relying on the language of the colonizers while neglecting indigenous languages. The
colonizers held African minds captive by imposing the language of the colonizers
throughout Africa as the language of instruction in schools and as the official language
for policies. The only exceptions are in East Africa where Swahili was briefly adopted
and abandoned, North Africa where Arabic language has been indigenized and South
Africa with strong survival of indigenous languages where the socio-economic
development records show medium to high levels on the Human Development Index of
the UNDP. Almost all the countries in the low Human Development Index are black
African countries that have been forced to retain the language of colonizers as the
language of instruction and governmentality. They shamelessly call themselves
Francophone, Anglophone or Lusophone when they should all be called Bantuphone if
resources are made available for the development of teaching and learning in
indigenous languages.

This is not only the responsibility of the neocolonial governments in African states but
also the responsibility of individual scholars and writers who can write in the indigenous
languages and allow translations to follow in line with the strategy of Ngugi wa Thiong’o
for the decolonization of the African mind, though Ngugi still writes all his critical essays
in English and they are not yet translated to Kikuyu. [24] Achebe said that he preferred to
allow writers to write in any language that they are comfortable with and allow
translators to do the rest but it is a shame that Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart is yet
to be published in his Igbo mother tongue.[25] Come on, African educators, what will it
take for us to teach mathematics and science in our indigenous languages to avoid the
ridiculous situation where textbooks from France forced West African children to parrot
that their ancestors were the Gauls with blond hair and blue eyes, contrary to the
Negritude of the world cup winning team in 2018? [26] Let textbooks blossom in the
2000 indigenous languages across Africa and let our legendary creativity in music and
the arts be translated into the STEM disciplines urgently. Let more research grants be
made available in Africa.

Eskor Toyo challenged African social scientists to show what are their original
contributions to theory and methods in their fields. [27] African natural scientists may
claim that they lack adequate funding for laboratories and research but the only
laboratory that sociologists or economists need is the one between their ears and yet
they have allowed their minds to be held captive by intellectual imperialism. Chinua
Achebe also dismissed the Cargo Cult mentality of African educators and policy makers
who beg for technology transfers whereas technology is not a juju in anyone’s pockets
waiting to be transferred to the sorcerer’s apprentices. [28] Technology is a way of
thinking and doing things and Africans have demonstrated that in times of necessity
with an activist government, say in Biafra, they are capable of making awesome
inventions. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo says that the African genius found in Biafra is
still around waiting to be mobilized even though there were also examples of corruption
and mediocrity in Biafra to be avoided in the future. [29] Nwankwo leads by example
through his Fourth Dimension Publishing Company in Enugu that has commissioned
and published thousands of scholarly books by authors from across Africa, including a
mathematics textbook in Igbo language.

Bassey Ekpo Bassey said it all when he stated that only the people can develop
themselves through the struggle for a progressive future for all Africans. By this he
meant that education should not be seen only as textbook education in classrooms.
[30] Rather, the political struggle for the restructuring of Africa beyond colonial
boundaries should be seen as a practical school through which the people will educate
themselves and make new discoveries that will empower them to change Africa for the
better as Frantz Fanon concluded in The Wretched of the Earth.[31] Bassey implemented
this vision by leading the Directorate for Literacy in Calabar in the 1980s with Eskor
Toyo and with the support of university scholars like Akpan Ekpo, Princewill Alozie,
Yakubu Ochefu, Bene Madunagu, and myself in Calabar and with Edwin Madunagu
from Lagos. The effort led to the formation of the Labour Party in collaboration with
organized labour with the aim of winning power for the working people to replace the
military dictatorship in Nigeria. As Municipal Government Chairman who was elected
twice in a rerun election against the opposition of the military government to his
candidacy, Bassey immediately abolished tuition fees in primary and secondary schools
and constructed more school blocks to accommodate more children in Calabar. The
Directorate for Literacy also published a free literacy journal and ran weekly literacy
classes for the workers in addition to monthly public enlightenment lectures. Making
education publicly funded and tuition-free is a necessity at all levels in Africa as I
concluded in a paper about equity and quality in post-apartheid South Africa that was
published in a journal edited by Professor Ngozi Osarenren. [32] The government of the
African National Congress appears not to have heard about the recommendation but I
forwarded a copy to the office of the presidency when students started demanding that
the rising fees must fall in addition to their decolonization campaign that Rhodes Must
Fall. Traditional African education never charged tuition fees at any level of learning.

Amilcar Cabral, in Resistance and Decolonization, identified culture as part of the

struggle for liberation from colonial domination contrary to the colonial anthropological
definition of culture as a way of life.[33] The poor under capitalism, women under
patriarchy and Africans under racism did not choose to live that way since those were
the conditions that they struggle against with the creativity of the culture of struggles
and resistance. Edwin Madunagu exemplified the revolutionary theory of education by
running a conscientization program for male students in Calabar while his wife, Bene
Madunagu, did the same for girls. The boys were being taught that it was all right to
think in ways different from their fathers by taking more responsibility for domestic
chores and by treating their girlfriends with more respect, as reported by Girard. [34] The
girls were being educated to take more responsibility for their sexual and reproductive
health and to be more assertive in the defense of their interests. The Human
Development Index shows that the poor countries are the ones that do not allow their
girls to enter or complete secondary education and Africans can solve this problem by
insisting on the higher education of more of our sons and daughters by, for instance,
ending childhood marriages for girls and child labour.

Agozino and Agu have also produced a draft manual that they presented at the
Headquarters of UNICEF at an international conference that focused on gender equity
in education.[35] Our presentation on Progressive Masculinity urged the participants to
extend to boys the successful methods that were used to raise the participation of girls
in education because boys were falling behind in many countries. We suggested
successful study skills that could be taught to boys and girls to help them to enjoy
learning in order to achieve more success. It is true that Africa still has low participation
rates for girls in secondary education and this may be the major factor determining the
low rating of most African countries in HDI but many African boys are also dropping out
of school before reaching the secondary level. We have offered that manual to many
states in Africa for possible implementation but there are no takers yet.

Systems theory suggests that poor inputs into education result in poor outputs; or
rubbish in, rubbish out. I beg to differ because human beings are neither rubbish nor
just inputs and outputs. Once motivated to learn, even with poor infrastructures, many
students will excel while the best inputs might produce low achievements in some
students who do not value education enough or who are not equipped with effective
study skills. Even with poor inputs, Africa has managed to educate hundreds of
thousands of highly qualified professionals who go on to provide technical foreign aid to
industrialized countries where they work as doctors, nurses, engineers, managers,
sports professionals, professors, researchers, and writers; as Ali Mazrui once put it.
Achebe reminds us in There Was A Country that the infrastructures and contents were
not that great during colonialism for his class often sat on the bare earth under the
shade of a breadfruit tree to listen to lessons on the geography of Britain. [36] On one
occasion, the village mad man intervened and seized the chalk from the teacher and
started teaching the history of the town which the students found more relevant. If that
were to happen today, the teacher is more likely to call the police and the army to come
and restore order by shooting the mad man dead if necessary. The traditional Igbo
democratic tendencies may have allowed the mad man to have his say and move on as
is expected under the tolerant roof of Mbari communal sculptures. Rodney recognized
the independent yearning for education among the Igbo (he called them Ibo) who built
and equipped schools without waiting for the government and he condemned the
genocidal war against the Igbo in post-colonial Nigeria by saying that it was not a tribal
war given that there is no such tribes as Shell BP and the UK government that
orchestrated the genocide, later validated by Achebe and by Ekwe-Ekwe. [37]

Finally, the Peoples Republic of Africa United Democratically will leverage resources
that Africans could invest in education to raise the level of funding to the 26%
recommended by UNICEF as the minimal standard. There is a role for corporations that
make huge profits across Africa to be required to dedicate a portion of their profits as a
tax to support education given that the graduates are the future employees of the
companies and similar corporations endow funding in universities outside Africa.
Parents and the communities have a role to play too by volunteering to help build school
structures with community labor so that the students will learn the importance of
education once they see their parents helping to build the schools with pride. For
instance, most schools in Africa lack toilet facilities and lack sports play grounds. These
are not too difficult to construct with community labor if the government and
corporations provide the funding to support community volunteers. Students and their
peers should also be able to take responsibility for their own learning by watching less
Nollywood movies, getting enough sleep every night, eating breakfast and reading more
books every day and by volunteering for community projects. Before or after families
buy television sets, let them buy book shelves and stuff them with books and let them
make time to read and learn as a family daily.

With the reunification of Africa and the decolonization of our educational systems, we
will be able to educate more nation-builders and also attract back some of our brain
drain from the thankless task of providing foreign aid to industrialized countries and
redeploy them to help solve many of the technological weaknesses in Africa that made
it possible for a handful of Europeans to divide and weaken us in order to exploit us for
more than 600 years and counting. For instance, we can mobilize to banish illiteracy
across Africa within four years the way that Cuba did by deploying those who can read
and write to teach those who cannot. We can educate thousands of doctors and
agricultural extension officers and deploy them across Africa to tackle tropical diseases
and help to increase food security. We can offer huge research grants to scientists,
writers, artists, athletes, farmers, cooperatives to innovate technologies that would
make Africa more just, healthier, more prosperous, happier, more learned, more loving,
and more united.