History of Education in African Societies. Appropriation, Negotiation, and Struggles. Part 1
Pierre Guidi
université Paris Cité, IRD, France
Chair(s): Pierre Guidi (Ceped, université Paris CitéIRD)
The panel "History of Education in African societies" will focus on the history of educational institutions, their actors, and on the social dynamics of schooling from colonization to nowadays. The communications will aim to understand the ways in which educational policies and practices are closely bounded with the building of African societies and states. Questions related to education were instrumental to the construction of colonial empires. At the interface of colonial powers and colonized populations, schools are relevant places to understand the colonial "encounter", its violence, conflicts, contradictions, negotiations, and processes of domestication. As such, they are privileged sites for observing the many ways in which African societies have developed creative strategies to cope with authoritarian and segregated political and social orders imposed by colonization. While recognizing the "power of the Europeans in the colonial encounter" we call for a focus on "the importance of African agency in determining the shape the encounter took" (Cooper 1994). African students, teachers and families need to be regarded as “agents who appropriated schooling as a domain of struggle with which they could further their own (often diverse) social and economic ends” (Kallaway 2019). How did colonized actors struggle and negotiate with missionaries and colonial administrations for control of schools and knowledge taught? How did they mobilize school knowledge and educational capital in order to adapt to colonial pressure? (Summers 2002). Moreover, despite their imperial objectives, educational institutions were focal point for claims to equality, and they trained future nationalist elites, leaders of political parties and trade-unions. While the products of colonial school systems may have worked for colonization, it is also among them that we find the most famous critics of the colonial enterprise. Schools were key sites in the fight against colonization in which school students participated actively. Therefore, how did school education contribute in the shaping of anti-colonial movements? Finally, after independence, while education was considered as one of the main instruments of new state-buildings, how did the relations between societies and the school institutions evolve? Contributors will not be limited to sources produced by the colonizers, the African states or international organizations, who have long dominated the writing of the history of education. A wide variety of sources can be used to write the history of education in Africa from an African perspective: oral sources, for instance have been very early, and still are, of crucial importance (Prins 2001). Written productions from the private sphere, such as personal diaries, have only recently been investigated (Barber (ed.) 2006). Autobiographies can also be fruitfully analyzed. Press sources have also become increasingly important in recent African history either as a means of accessing the voices of the colonized or as a way of filling the gaps in postcolonial archives (Peterson, Hunter and Newell (eds.) 2016). Novels, such as The River Between by the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1965), or Nervous Conditions by the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988) are of particular relevance to study schools as institutions to observe the contradictions, conflicts, negotiations, and domestication processes at work both in colonial encounters and in state-society relations in post-colonial Africa.
Presentations of the Panel
Conceptualisations of Citizenship among Educational Stakeholders in newly Independent Madagascar
Ellen Vea Rosnes1, Helihanta Rajaonarison2
1VID University, 2University of Antananarivo
After independence from France in 1960, there were different views on how to educate Malagasy citizens of the newly independent country. This paper analyses conceptualisations of citizenship among educational stakeholders during this important period of Malagasy history. The paper is part of a larger project Transloyalities in Citizenship Education (TranCit) (VID Specialized University, 2023-2026) funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN-334299). TranCit’s main hypothesis is that citizenship education in many contexts is impacted by embedded conceptualizations of citizenship promoting certain loyalties of the majority group or of powerful elites partly inherited from the past. This paper asks: Which kinds of citizens were to be promoted in this specific context of independence and to whom should Malagasies learn to be loyal as citizens of their village, the newly born independent nation and a global world? It starts with a general history of education in Madagascar. Further, it analyses, with the help of a framework for critical citizenship education (Johnson & Morris, 2010) and perspectives on citizenship (e.g. Andreotti, 2006; Masemula, 2015) and (trans)loyalities (Ludwig, Rosnes, Haga, Wang, & Pereira, In press), national and international, public and private (religious) conceptualizations of citizenship and citizenship education after independence. The analysis is based on four main reports: a 1960 report of a Protestant conference for their school principals with the aim to discuss the future of Protestant schools in the new nation, a 1963 UNESCO report about education in Madagascar, a government document on the development of primary education in Madagascar from 1964 and a 1968 report of a conference arranged by the student organisation Fédération des associations d`étudiants de Madagascar (FAEM). The analysis reveals that different stakeholders within education in Madagascar at independence promoted different conceptualizations of citizenship, some more critical than others.
Bibliography
Andreotti, V. (2006). Soft versus critical global citizenship education Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, 3(Autumn), 40-51.
Johnson, L., & Morris, P. (2010). Towards a framework for critical citizenship education. The Curriculum Journal, 21(1), 77-96. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/09585170903560444
Ludwig, F., Rosnes, E. V., Haga, J., Wang, M. X., & Pereira, J. L. (Eds.). (In press). Transloyalties, Connected Histories and World Christianity during the Interwar Period: 1919-1939 (Vol. 1). New York: Routledge.
Masemula, M. B. (2015). Whose Knowlege is Transmitted through Public Education in Africa. In A. A. Abdi, L. Shultz, & T. Pillay (Eds.), Decolonizing Global Citizenship Education (pp. 173-178). Rotterdam: SensePublisher.
VID Specialized University. (2023-2026). Transloyalties in Citizenship Education (TranCit). Retrieved from https://www.vid.no/en/research/forskningsprosjekter/tranciteng/
Learning and Teaching to Get Through. The School Set Up by Ethiopian Political Prisoners During the Red Terror (1976-1984)
Pierre Guidi
Ceped, université Paris Cité
Between 1976 and the mid-1980s, more than 5,000 political prisoners from Ethiopia's Marxist-Leninist student movement were held together at Kerchele Central Prison, in the heart of Addis Ababa. These survivors, who were secondary school students, higher education students, or university graduates, ended up there after surviving the mass violence (tens of thousands of young people were tortured and killed) orchestrated by the military who seized power during the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Detention conditions were terrible. Prisoners were crammed into large halls, food was inadequate, hygiene was deplorable and ill-treatment was the norm. Malnutrition and disease were compounded by spatial and temporal disorders. After the emergency and the accelerated time of repression and clandestinity, the prisoners found themselves, without transition, in a time stopped and without perspectives. Most of the prisoners were locked up without trial; they didn't know how long (months? years?) they would be incarcerated. To survive in these conditions, the prisoners organised themselves by mobilising the skills and attitudes acquired during their schooling and years of activism. They set up committees: a health committee, a food committee, a sports committee, a justice committee etc. One of the most important of these committees was the school committee. Inside the prison, the political prisoners carried out a literacy campaign and set up a complete academic school system up to grade 12, as well as a technical school, which they managed to have officially recognised by the government. From 1978 to 1983, the Kerchele school achieved the best results in the country in national examinations. Based on activist autobiographies and interviews, I will analyse: 1) the material conditions of teaching: how classes and teaching aids were organised; 2) the way in which education enabled prisoners to regain possession of prison time and give meaning to their lives, which had been traumatised by political violence. Ultimately, the aim is to show how struggling to implement a school system has enabled prisoners to get through their years of incarceration while maintaining their mental sanity and refusing to let themselves be annihilated by state repression.
Bibliography
Burton Antoinette (2013). An Assemblage/Before me: Autobiography as Archive. Journal of Women's History, 25 (2), 185-188.
Hiwot Teffera, Tower in the Sky, Addis Ababa, Addis Ababa University Press, 2012.
Tadelech Haile-Mikael, ዳኛው ማነው (Who Should Judge?), Addis Ababa, self-published, 2020.
Tadla Derese, ሕይወቴ ከቆቆ እስከ ከርቸሌ (My Life from Koko until Kerchele), Addis Ababa, self-published, 2020.
Abera Yemaneab, ለውጥ ናፋቂው ሕይወቴ (My Life for Change), Addis Ababa, self-published, 2022.
***CANCELLED***Black Souls Matter: Indigenous Voices, Education and Power in Colonial Mozambique
N N
.
|
