ABSTRACT
This chapter examines post-independence teacher education reforms in Namibia as an educational development project and in relation to teacher education reforms in other Third World countries. Despite the tensions, contradictions, and resistance associated with the implementation of these reforms, it will be argued that teacher education reform in Namibia represents a fundamentally different approach to teacher education and educational development in Africa. In discourses about national development, education invariably plays a key role. "Development" not only indicates that some type of improvement or positive change will take place, but it also implies that new practices, new skills, maybe even different attitudes and ways of thinking will be required by the newly developing conditions of social and economic life. At independence in 1990, most Namibians hoped to see drastic changes that would replace decades of oppressive social and economic regulation intended to suppress the rights and narrow the opportunities of the majority of the black African population.
