ABSTRACT
Some of us in Africa may not understand the antagonism in education those who went to school 30 years ago had to face. On one hand, the elders in their villages encouraged and taught them to look from within the communities for solutions to problems that were endemic among them. They lived in societies where the knowledge of elders, the herbalists, the craftsmen, the birth attendants, and others were the “fuel” of the community, and, from these indigenous institutions they learnt by doing (or in real life) that which was essential for survival. On the other hand, the teaching systems inherited from the pre-independence periods were detached from their daily lives, and destroyed their cultural, social, and ecological roots. They were based on rote memorization and regurgitation and had low retention rate. Very little was done to raise awareness of the importance of local resources, local histories, values, and indigenous modes of production and management. Nyerere (1967) noted this devaluation of traditional authority and in his book Education for Self-Reliance warned of what is evident now, 30 years later. Policies and programs implemented by African governments have brought community members to believe that their traditional indigenous knowledge or initiatives are primitive relative to those of the educated in “formal education”. Small-scale cultivators (who use local knowledge and methods) are officially referred to as “peasants”, as opposed to “farmers” (who use chemical fertilizers and produce crops for official markets), and the indigenous institutions have been weakened; women’s economic and social power has weakened. The process of creation of new knowledge was cut and most of the knowledge that existed has eroded or degraded. Unfortunately, rarely do the African scientists, create new knowledge that is adaptive to the local situations or that which produces sustainable solutions to our daily lives. This is because we use “models” and “frameworks” of knowledge generated from elsewhere and rarely examine their relevance to our context of history, ecology, culture, political systems, and economic resources.
