# Whose Education for All: The Recolonization of the African Mind


![ book](http://images.addall.com/Images/SHOW/0815334788.jpg)I have known
about [Brigit Brock Utne](http://folk.uio.no/bbrock), a professor in
international education at [the University of Oslo](http://www.uio.no),
for several months, since I came across her
[homepage](http://folk.uio.no/bbrock), which has a very impressive CV
and a [list of “Where is Birgit in
2006″](http://folk.uio.no/bbrock/2006.html). [Her
CV](http://folk.uio.no/bbrock/CV.html) reads like a list of all the
things that I would like to study, and do; and it is also reassuring in
that she definitively did not go “the direct route” to where she ended
up, but rather went through a number of different courses and jobs. This
is reassuring to someone like myself, who has been all over the place. I
finally picked up her book “Whose Education for All, the Recolonization
of the African Mind”, and I loved it.

The book starts out by criticizing the international consensus on
“Education for all”, as shifting significant resources within developing
countries from higher education to primary education. Part of the
impetus for this is a World Bank study that showed that primary
education had a much higher ROI (return on investment) than any other
form of education. This study has later been challenged on purely
economical terms, but Brock-Utne also asks us to consider whether return
on investment is the only measurement of education; it is a very
utilitarian view, seeing education as a tool to achieve a goal
(development), rather than as a goal in itself (as in, people have the
right to education).

Why she considers higher education becomes apparent in the subsequent
sectors, where she discusses what is actually taught in elementary
schools in Africa. The history of their school systems in most cases
began with colonization, and this has left an important legacy,
compounded by the current system of inequalities in the world. During
colonialism, children were taught about English geography and French
history (depending on their colonizers), and not of their own countries
or regions. They were also taught *in* French, English or Portuguese,
often from the very first year of schooling. This is something that has
to a large part continued, due to many factors. The teachers at the
takeover were already trained in teaching through a foreign language,
there wasn’t the necessary vocabulary in the indigenous languages, there
were to many indigenous languages to be accomodated by a school system,
there was no local capacity to provide school books, etc.

All these statements are disproven both in her book, and in several
other books I have read on linguistics, language policy etc. The fact
that none of the universities in Africa today, except for in the Arabic
countries in the North, use an African language in teaching courses is
staggering (this does not include courses in indigenous literature and
language, which are taught in for example kiSwahili in Tanzania). The
lack of research on countries’ histories, culture and language leads to
a little girl taking a multiple choice test (how appropriate is that to
traditional African forms of learning?) in English (not the native
language of more than a few percentages in her country, and a language
that not even her teacher speaks well), asking her about the
“discoverer” of a certain waterfall. She is given four options, all
European males, and she chooses the fifth - “None of the above”. And
despite the fact that her family has lived in a village by that
waterfall for many generations, her test comes back with a big red mark
- wrong.

Brock-Utne makes a compelling case for how African education systems are
failing African youth through provision of inadequate and inappropriate
knowledge through a language that is poorly mastered. When performing
poorly in international standardized tests, the language issue is seldom
taken into consideration. While many studies show very significant
impacts on learning, international donors often press for the continuing
use of colonial languages, and both the British Council and the Alliance
Francaise lead an almost neo-colonial policy of donating equipment and
textbooks on the condition that courses be taught in their languages,
even at the first levels of primary schools.

The book is well written, easily read, with a wealth of ideas and
sources, I noted down quite a few. Sometimes during my reading, I would
get so upset that I would almost destroy the book, because ideas of
linguistic equality or justice are dear to my heart, and the arrogance
showed over and over by the “international donor community” was
mindboggling, if sadly not surprising. After reading this book, I was
even more interested in the issues of African education, especially
higher education, and language politics in general.

Before reading this book, I was familiar with the colonizing origins of
the Alliance Francais from a book by John DeFrancis on development of a
written language in Vietnam (which started out using Chinese
characters). Recently, I have also read books about the use in education
(or lack thereof) of kiSwahili in Tanzania, about language politics
after the fall of the wall in the Central Asian republics, an article on
the “re-Arabization of the Maghreb countries”, and lately I have been
reading a number of books/articles on the history of Chinese and Russian
education. All highly exciting stuff (to me), and something that
reaffirms my desire to study international and comparative education.