Africa: The Education That Enslaves Us

I know this is getting repetitive, but we'll never stop asking the uncomfortable questions on this blog. The need to question what we call education in Africa became even more urgent after my recent short trip to China.

I have written extensively about both China and Iran, two countries I have expressed both fascination and admiration for in many of my writings.

My trip to China was bittersweet; it confirmed most of what I have written, but China's scale, a country that gained independence about a decade before us, left me devastated with envy.

I must confess.
The scale was so hugely embarrassing that it’s not even funny. There is no basis for comparison.

In China, I saw confident, highly educated, and highly skilled citizens building their future. At the same time, we in Africa remained mired in inanities, with political leaders playing stupid games with our destiny while we, especially the so-called educated class, applaud.

So, we must, once again, return to the question every African must learn to ask without flinching: What exactly is the purpose of our education in Africa?

We have built schools and universities across the continent with a zeal bordering on worship, and every year we send forth millions of young men and women clutching certificates to their chests like magical charms against reality.

Yet seven decades after ostensible independence, Africa remains what it has been for centuries: a warehouse of raw materials extracted at thieving prices and shipped to foreign factories; a marketplace for other people's finished goods; and a begging bowl at the door of the very powers that plundered its resources.

In Africa, we have degree-holders everywhere, but no solutions to any of the problems confronting us.

Yet, unashamed of the conditions on our continent, we continue to wear silly academic costumes to celebrate shambolic scholarship and academic prowess that remain unproductive and are apparently geared to no other goal than awarding useless paper degrees.

If our education produced what it promised, our continent would be a paradise by now.

Instead, we have mass-produced something else entirely: an elite class that is polished, credentialed, and hopelessly alienated from the people who produced it.

The first thing that we need to understand is that the colonial-era education system we inherited and refused to reform in Africa, which teaches our children to despise the soil that fed them, is not education at all.

It is miseducation of the highest, and we must have the courage to call it so; otherwise, things will remain as they are.

The contrast with those nations that deliberately built education to serve society could not be starker.

China took a civilization battered by a century of humiliation and made education a national weapon aimed squarely at national, even civilizational rejuvenation. Within a single generation, the country lifted a billion people out of poverty. This was no accident, but the deliberate design of tying every classroom to a national purpose. The remaining 400 million are receiving serious attention to bring them up to par.

Cuba, blockaded and strangled by Yankee imperialists for over sixty years, turned its universities outward into the countryside and its clinics toward the poor, and today that small island trains more doctors per capita than almost any nation on earth - doctors it sends to the barrios of Latin America and the villages of Africa.

After tossing out the Shah, Iran went back to its roots and successfully indigenized every aspect of its national life, so much so that history will record the country as the one that successfully humbled Uncle Sam despite decades of crippling sanctions imposed by Western Hegemons.

In those three countries, education is a social instrument for the public good.

Here in Africa, it has become a private ladder to personal enrichment and, worse, an escape plan, the mechanism by which we train our brightest children to flee our land.

The ever-inventive Nigerians even have a name for it: Japa.

The Chinese student knows she studies for Zhonghua's glory as much as for her own personal development. The Cuban doctor signs up to serve the barrio. Our own graduate queues at the foreign embassy, praying for a visa to serve somebody else's economy.

We refuse to see tragedy when we confront it.

What our universities mass-produce, year upon year, is a peculiar African type that Kwame Nkrumah foresaw and Frantz Fanon dissected with his typical surgeon's knife: the native intellectual who returns to his people not as a son but as a stranger.

This educated African elite speaks English or French better than the English and the French, and looks down on its own people with the contempt of a colonial district officer.

To it, speaking Yoruba or Twi or Zulu is a mark of backwardness; wearing our own clothes is "local"; eating our own food is "bush."

In 2026 Africa, we still tell our children not to speak vernacular, meaning our languages.

The tragic and pathetic graduate we produce can quote Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes but has never heard of Cheikh Anta Diop or Frantz Fanon. He can diagram the British parliamentary system but would struggle to explain the governance of the Oyo Empire or the councils of old Ghana.

Woodson, in his “The Miseducation of the Negro, warned us long ago that when you control a man's thinking, you need not worry about his actions, and John Henrik Clarke put it just as bluntly: a people who do not control their education do not control their future.

We, educated Africans today, are living proof of both propositions.

The colonizer did not merely occupy our land; he occupied our history. He taught us that civilization began in Greece, that so-called Greek miracle, and that Egypt, the mother of civilizations, was somehow not African. It remains the only country in the world called upon to defend its geography.

The Egyptians themselves called their land Kemet, the Black Land; Herodotus, the father of Western history, described them as black-skinned with woolly hair; and the Greeks of Europe openly confessed that their sages, Pythagoras, Solon, and Thales, sailed to the Nile to learn.

Europe admits that Greece drank from Africa, and yet Africa is taught that it drank from Greece!

Cheikh Anta Diop spent his life dragging the truth from the archives, the melanin dosages, and the very bones of the pharaohs: the Old Egyptians were Black Africans, and their science, mathematics, medicine, and monumental architecture are part of our inheritance. He emphatically told us that our history shall remain suspended until we can link it to Egypt and draw sustenance from it.

Chinua Achebe told us that when the hunter writes the lion's history, the lion will forever play the villain; when Europe writes Africa's history, Africa is forever the dark continent of slaves and savages.

Sadly, after seven decades of misgoverning ourselves, this remains our school curriculum. That is the poison in our children's heads.

Consider what this type of miseducation does to a child. From Lagos to Accra to Nairobi, she spends twelve to twenty years learning everything about Europe and almost nothing about Africa - European wars, European rivers, European poets. Ask her about the Battle of Isandlwana, where African spears shattered the myth of British invincibility, and you meet a blank stare.

Ask her about Timbuktu, where African scholars were copying manuscripts and teaching law, astronomy, and mathematics at a time when Oxford's finest were debating whether bathing was sinful, and there is nothing.

We have raised a generation of Africans who are foreigners in their own homes, and we wonder why the African Personality Nkrumah summoned has not materialized.

It cannot materialize, because the entire pipeline is engineered to prevent it.

Anta Diop taught us that a people without collective memory is a people without collective destiny, and Clarke taught that while history is not everything, it is the compass that tells a people where they are going by telling them where they have been.

Europe smashed our compass long ago and replaced it with one that points only north. Unfortunately, the plantation supervisors, inheritors of the neocolonial order, do not see anything wrong or shameful in continuing with the colonial project.

The remedy, as far as we see, is not reform but demolition.

The African Union should convene an emergency Continental Education Summit with a single mandate: tear down the colonial educational architecture and rebuild it stone by African stone.

Strip the colonial epistemology from the curriculum as one strips rotten timber from a house before it collapses.

Put science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and vocational training at the beating heart of everything.

Tie every research grant to a practical national and continental need - not a single naira or shilling for the mating habits of Antarctic penguins while our own rivers die. Judge engineering faculties by the bridges they build, agricultural departments by the yields they multiply, medical schools by the lives they save in the villages rather than by papers in journals nobody in Osogbo or Mzuzu will ever read.

Let African industry and university fuse into one engine of development, as Zimbabwe has begun, however haltingly, to dare.

The lazy objection will come, as it always does: do not politicize education. But all education is political.

The British knew this perfectly well - which is why they built our schools to produce clerks and interpreters, never deep thinkers or engineers of independence.

The question was never whether education serves a purpose; the question is whose purpose it serves.

Nkrumah warned that education without character and social purpose is a dangerous weapon, and that our independence would remain meaningless until our learning reflected African realities and African aspirations. Fanon told us each generation must discover its mission and fulfill it or betray it. Clarke told us that power is never given freely - it must be taken, and the first territory to conquer is the mind.

The proverb says the child who refuses to learn from the elders will learn from the scars on his body.

Africa is covered in scars; how many more do we need? The choice stands before us, and there is no neutral ground.

We repeat: it’s either we continue mass-producing alienated Africans who will finish what the slave ships began, or we build an education that serves our people, heals our memory, and arms our children for the great work of continental rebirth.

We repeat, our education must serve our people, as it does in China, Iran, and Cuba, or it will continue to serve our enemies, as it does today.

The choice, as always, is ours.
Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com