For most of my life, I did the 8-4-4 curriculum which is Kenya’s national curriculum. It is made up of eight years in primary school, four years in high school, and four years in university, albeit the number of years you spend in university is dependent on how many strikes occur that year, I digress. It was compulsory one took Social Studies & Religious Education, Mathematics, Kiswahili, English, and Science. After eight torturous years, we were subjected to sitting for national examinations which determined which high school you went to and consequently your life trajectory, at least according to my teachers.
I had a keen interest in Social Studies and Science. I did not exactly enjoy the content we learnt in Social Studies e.g. being able to name the major roads in Africa but I enjoyed the more historical aspect of Social Studies and I also liked my teacher. He was a gem, most of our lessons were spent on questioning whether the Kenyan government was ethical; tribalism which is the discrimination of one based on tribe which has been a pandemic in Kenya since the 1960s. I don’t quite recall the name of the topic, however, I recall the content. We talked about the explorers, the missionaries and traders who came to Africa also known as the colonizers. I liked the fancy names we branded them with. Moreover, a question that came up in exams was who was the first person to see Lake Victoria or Mount Kilimanjaro. At the time, I saw no issues with these questions.
Every time I recall that I wrote notes on the advantages and disadvantages of colonialism, I feel my body recoil. My ancestors must be quacking. Did the Kapenguria Six fight for freedom for me to say John Speke was the first to discover Lake Victoria? Did my ancestors have fishing as their main economic activity for millennia for me to say John Speke discovered Lake Victoria? (The original name for Lake Victoria was Nam Lolwe) What pains me more is that I actually knew the names of the servants of David Livingstone. The truth of the matter is that colonization was painted as something that Africans needed. One advantage we tend to describe is that it led to the civilization of Africa, we completely disregard the existence of empires in Africa before colonization such as the Kingdom of Kush. I did not study any of these empires within the 8-4-4 curriculum, this is the beginning of the misinformation of the African child. We were taught to view those who collaborated with the British as wise and those who resisted colonialism as daft. We mocked the Majimaji rebellion and those that faced a similar fate. Without my knowledge, Social Studies was able to misinform me but also encourage a colonial mindset.
I have grown up surrounded by people who are in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) field, and consequently, I too ended up liking science and one thing we have always claimed is that science is objective. I could have bet on my life that science is not biased, the truth is the truth. However, this so-called truth was dispelled as I asked questions. The 8-4-4 system does not encourage those who like questioning and for this reason, I was a pain to have as a student as I would ask numerous whys especially in science. I was fascinated by the human body, how such complex systems worked together to produce a sophisticated result. But how did we discover what is in the human body? How did we discover everything we know? Slavery. Colonialism.Imperialism. Even my favorite field, psychiatry, is not innocent. The so-called father of psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, developed a diagnostic theory called negritude and the only treatment was to become white. In a blog post, Sofia Akel talks about how tropical medicine came to be. Sir Ronald Ross believed that the success of imperialism depended on the microscope. The history of the sciences we praise to date are not innocent. The truth was hidden from me.
The curriculum I studied was as white as they could. It was as colonial as it could be.
Wandia Njoya, an educator, discusses how the curriculum encourages violence and it is in the trenches of colonialism. This is the misinformation of the African child. In the misinformation of the African child, we have taught them that they are the problem if they question authority. We have taught them that physical abuse is necessary to ensure discipline.
As I started a new chapter in my life, I was introduced to African Studies. This was a blessing as it allowed me to question what was wrong with my curriculum. However, African Studies too has colonial roots. We must acknowledge the truth of African Studies, it has been subjected to perverse uses by those with colonial mindsets. African Studies is simply not to study Africa. If African Studies does not aim to serve the African people and the diaspora, it is not decolonial.
Decolonizing the education system and African Studies means challenging the hierarchy and monopoly of knowledge. I believe the Fallist movement in South Africa was able to challenge the colonial ways of knowing. The protests against the increase of fees and removal of colonial monuments, e.g., Cecil Rhodes, remain a historical moment. Students challenged the status quo; furthermore, they wanted education to be accessible to everyone. Amina Mama suggests that African scholarship is poorly equipped to address the challenges posed by gender, ethnicity, class and other divisions. To decolonize the education system and African Studies, we must address these issues.
Moreover, we must tackle the history of the sciences. The minute we remove information or twist information to fit a narrative that propagates the colonial agenda. Our education system needs to ensure that students feel empowered and do not feel like second-class students. Additionally, African Studies needs to ensure that as we study Africa in the past, the present, and the future, we should never compare our development to that of Western countries. We do not need an industrial revolution. We must be conscious that we, as a continent, have faced a completely different set of challenges. We need to encourage children to question. They must examine the so-called truth. That is when education will be decolonial. We must stop the misinformation of the African child.
The Uncaged Spirit 