Back to Your Roots: Devise an African-Centered Syllabus- Why not?

This question has been posed throughout several Black/African generations—How do you know where you are going if you do not know where you come from? Or it has been stated—If you do not know your history anyone can teach you anything (especially your enemy).

In the 2020s, Ghana devised a new primary and JHS Basic 7-10 syllabi. Within that syllabi much is needed. African learners must be provided a means to gain an understanding of their beginnings, various African cultures on the continent and throughout the African Diaspora. Remember? – African returnees centuries ago; ‘repatriation’ during President Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, decades later President Mahama’s group of 34, and President Addo’s ‘Year of Return’ and his economic citizenship for about 200+.

The history of Blacks/Africans spans time and continents, further beyond this area known today as Ghana.

The history is neither just about tribes nor a distorted history of J. B. Danquah and dismissing Paa Grant and Rebecca Aryeteey or uselessly equating Danquah to the first prime minister and first president of the Republic of Ghana-- Kwame Nkrumah.

And the teaching of history is neither about Africans learning via Eurocentric indoctrination and bogus “positive effects of colonization on Africa” nor efforts to appease the British Commonwealth by glorifying their yesteryear colonial, and neo-colonial monarchs.

The concept of Pan Africanism is absent from Ghana schools’ syllabi, but GES (Ghana Education Service), NaCCA (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment) and textbooks writers are either unaware, dismissive (for whatever reason) or have forgotten it— hence, many need to rise above ‘selective remembrance’, journey back to their roots and recognize the fact that the Fifth Pan African Congress led by President Nkrumah, George Padmore, W.E.B. Dubois and other African leaders is what catapulted African nations to gaining independence from European Colonial rule.

Teachers are the major players in helping us to return “back to our roots”; and they need to be well trained on how to research, analyze and present to learners what is to be studied in African-centered lessons, books and other educational materials.

Of course, GES and NaCCA could not just throw African-centered pedagogy and terms written in English in front of numerous undertrained and untrained teachers who have yet to master Ghana’s European official language, including swiftly overnight discipline themselves to read, unlearn and relearn, and completely understand what it is to “decolonize their African minds”.

Decolonizing is not easy, especially when there is little support from Ghana government --a lack of well-shelved high-tech public libraries in Ghana where teachers (and youth) can borrow books (even learn basic library science); and such circumstance makes it difficult for teachers to become well verse in African-centered materials. What seems to not be understood by government politicians is teachers need to be able to access books and university databases that would help them in training learners how to critical think through African-centered lessons and apply it to everyday life.

[Side note: Libraries are not a European thing. The first library was built in the ancient African/Kemetian city of Ra-Kedet, today called Alexandria, which is Greek].

Questions—Why isn’t Ghana syllabi, be it GES and/or International Curriculums and school textbooks reflective of an African-centered education? Why isn’t youth learning about African inventions (African contributions to the world) and taught about Africans and African Diasporan revolutionaries who fought against chattel slavery?

Is Ghana Education Service not in Africa? Is not the mission of GES to teach Black/African youth who they are, their history? Youth in Ghana and throughout the African Diaspora must find their own identity with the right resources, from the works of Black/African scholars-- first.

Youth must learn how to uncover and then grasp an understanding of their enormous past that spans beyond when Europeans came into existence; define themselves within the present global scheme of things; learn what the struggle against white supremacy and ‘white-washing’ is all about; be able to “do for self” and strategize for the future. “Forward Ever…”

References:

African-Centered Education: Theory and Practice Edited by Kmt G. Shockley & Koft Lomotey

Ghana’s year of return: Citizenship without political rights by Professor Kwaku Asare, cddgh.org

Inscope Social Studies by K.D. Twumasi & C. Adade; and Flamingo Social Studies by Ahmed Ibrahim

Decolonising the African Mind by Chinweizu

_____________

Dr. K. Makeda Muhammad is a ‘Repatriate’ a returnee to Africa via Ghana in 2011. Dr. Makeda’s field of study is Black Studies; she is an educator, writer, Pan Africanist, community activist, and social media freedom fighter.

   Comments0