EDUCATION AND CULTURE FOR THE
DEVELOPMENT OF AFRICA TODAY:
A Conceptual Statement
Your Excellency, Mr Chairperson of the Assembly of the African Union, and
President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria;
Your Excellency Mr Omar Hassan Ahmed el Bashir, President of the Republic of the
Sudan;
Your Excellencies, members of the Assembly of the African Union;
Your Excellency Mr Mohamed Sahnoun, Representative of the Secretary General of
the United Nations;
Your Excellency, Prof Alpha Oumare Konare, Chairperson of the Commission of the
African Union;
Your Excellency, the Director General of UNESCO;
Your Excellencies, Ministers, members of the Executive Council of the African
Union;
Your Excellency Mr Patrick Mazimhaka, Deputy Chairman of the African Union
Commission, and Your Excellencies, Commissioners of the African Union;
Your Excellencies, Ambassadors, Permanent Representatives of member states to the
African Union;
Your Excellencies, members of the diplomatic corps;
Distinguished delegates, honourable guests, ladies and gentlemen:
I can only guess that it is not a common thing for Africa’s heads of state
and government gathered in summit to deliberate on the weighty issues
affecting our Continent, to invite one like me to address them. I have
accepted the honour to be guest speaker at this august assembly in all
humility because I am excited that heads of state and government desire
to pause from the formalities and business of the Assembly to consider
and deliberate on a topic so critical for the existence and well being of our
Continent. I believe that this Assembly carries with it the hopes and
aspirations of millions of our people across all 53 member states of the
African Union. The nations of our Continent acknowledge that which is
universally attested to that culture is the “common heritage of humanity”,
and that education is the necessary means by which citizens mark
progress, acquire and disseminate knowledge, and by which civilisations
are formed and shaped. It is no longer necessary for culture to be
associated with conservative backward practices, nor education, with
class elites, far distant from the hurly-burly of common life. Education
and culture, I submit, define “true humanity”, to use Steve Biko’s apt
phrase.
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I stand before you as Chairperson of the newest grouping of African
institutions, the African Council for Distance Education, dedicated to the
promotion of open learning and distance education across the Continent.
And from the University of South Africa, Africa’s premier open learning
and distance education, and South Africa’s dedicated distance education
and comprehensive institution, privileged to serve the educational and
professional needs of students from across the Continent. I therefore
bring you greetings from that community of innovators and forward
looking practitioners in the field of education, many of whom are to be
found across our states. We are truly inspired that our heads of state and
government have deigned to pause to consider the field in which we
humbly labour, toil and sweat.
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How shall we measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many
heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the
lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning of the day?
mused WEB du Bois, one of the early Pan Africanist intellectuals who
ended his life in Ghana in the Continent he knew his forebears once
dwelt. In this essay, On the Meaning of Progressi, du Bois was recalling
his early years in the rural Deep South where he first toiled to bring
learning to the eager, opportunity to those whom destiny sought to
consign to the fate of the unknown. Whatever the challenges and
contradictions, he could still perceive in the darkness, the “flush of some
faint-dawning of the day.” Such are those who are to make a difference to
our world, many of them unheralded but present and faithful, driven by
an inner spark of genius and inspiration. Today these are the educators
and academics, the intellectuals in all walks of life who are shaping a
future for our nations.
III
Culture and education are words that are often placed side by side in any
order of preference. The sequence of the words belies the truth that these
are interchangeable and mutually reinforcing expressions of meaning.
There is therefore the recognition that “education” and “culture” are
interlinked and it is truly not possible to have one without the other. One
presumes that this topic is of pertinent interest to the African Union and
its programmes for the advancement of the Objectives set out in the
Constitutive Act of the African Union, 2000. In particular that the AU
should achieve greater unit and solidarity among African nations and
peoples, accelerate socio-economic and political integration, promote
sustainable development and advance research especially in science and
technology (Article 3). The purpose of this address is to explore the
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linkages between culture and education and examine the processes of
knowledge formation and developments from an African perspective.
It is noticeable that the view of culture in many international instruments,
especially those of UNESCO posits a view of culture that is formalist and
denuded of its radical character. For example the Unesco Declaration on
Cultural Diversity (2001) refers to culture as the “distinctive spiritual,
material, intellectual and emotional features of society or social group,
and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways
of living together, value systems, tradition and beliefs.” The value of the
Declaration, I submit, lies in the extent to which it makes the connections
between culture and education explicit: that it is “at the heart of
contemporary debates about identity, social cohesion, and the
development of a knowledge-based economy”.
There is also the developmental approach to culture that the declaration
espouses: “Cultural diversity widens the range of options open to
everyone; it is one of the roots of development, understood not simply in
terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more
satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence” (Article
3). Unesco has gone further. In its latest Convention on the Protection and
Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions adopted by the
General Assembly of Unesco at the 33rd Session in Paris in October 2005,
Unesco emphasises the interrelationship between education, culture as
preconditions for sustainable development.
It has been suggested that Antonio Gramsci, Franz Fanon and Amilcar
Cabral write from the perspective of revolutionary cultural theory as they
assert the transformative character of culture rather than the conservative
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impulses of some culture practitioners. Fanon sees the role of culture as
the “awakener of the people … to speak to the nation, to compose the
sentence which expresses the heart of the people and to become the
mouthpiece of a new reality in action.” Antonio Gramsci states that
“every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of social
criticism, of cultural penetration and diffusion…” Finally for Amilcar
Cabral culture “enables us to know what dynamic syntheses have been
formed and set by social awareness in order to resolve these conflicts at
each stage of evolution of that society in search of survival and
progress…” The essence of these reflections is to note that culture is a
necessary tool for discovery, advancement and change.ii It best expresses
itself and has lasting value when it transcends the past and the presence
while building on them in order to better understand the present and
shape (or take responsibility for) the future.
IV
There has been a resurgence of scholarship on Amilcar Cabral not least
among African scholars both in Africa and in the Diaspora. That, for
good reason. For Cabral cannot be confined to the achievements of the
liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau and the Ilha Cabo Verde. Largely
during the course of that struggle, he has bequeathed to critical
scholarship in Africa and the world social and political theories that can
now be applied to analyse and model social transformation. It was after
all Cabral who perceived and articulated the link between revolutions and
theory when he stated that “nobody has yet made a successful revolution
without a revolutionary theory.”iii Speaking in the context of national
liberation movements he drew attention to the evolution of societies and
their distinctive features in the production cycle, to the dynamism and
mutative character of classes, “In fact in the general evolution of
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humanity and of each of the peoples of which it is composed, classes
appear neither as a generalised and simultaneous phenomenon throughout
the totality of these groups, nor as finished, perfect, uniform, and
spontaneous whole. The definition of classes within one or several human
groups is a fundamental consequence of the progressive development of
the productive forces and of the characteristics of the distribution of
wealth produced by the group or usurped from others…” (1966:3).
In this way he developed a more nuanced and fluid theory of the class
structure in African society which was not as deterministic as that in
Marxist orthodoxy at that time advanced. In this way the responsibility
for revolution could be owned by a wider set of social forces who would
be responding to their social circumstances. And so he concluded: “… the
level of productive forces, the essential determining element in the
content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force
of history”. For him the abiding history of peoples will outlive any class
determinants, and man will “continue to produce and make history, since
he can never free himself from the burden of his needs, both of mind and
body, which are the basis of the development of the forces of
production.”
That is an extract from Cabral’s celebrated essay National Liberation and
Culture (1970), in which he also offers more than the primordial,
backward view of culture but more essentially opens up the possibility of
societies creating their own culture with each generation:
The liberation of productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the
mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of liberated people. Necessarily
opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by
returning to that society all its capacity to create progress (1970:5).
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Surely such a cognitive openness to new styles of living, new and
different understandings of one’s world, and new instruments of aesthetic
and intellectual engagement opens up the possibility of culture being a
helpmate of education than merely a hindrance.
Among the more significant Cabral scholars one must count Carlos Lopes
and Carlos Cardoso but new work is emerging from a younger scholar
like PLE Idahosa and I cite his seminal essay, Going to the People:
Amilcar Cabral’s Materialist Theory and Practice of Culture and
Ethnicity (Lusotopie 2002/2: 29-58). The essence of Cabral for our topic
today is stated by Idahosa as “knowledge in the service of liberation.” At
issue was his recognition of sound theory for practice and of culture for
revolution. Of essential import in Idahosa’s view is that Cabral sought to
“develop people’s self- consciousness and an awareness of their power to
make their own history…” He had a unique trajectory towards
development and revolutionary change; and that was a set of values based
on theory and social context, and on a moral calculus that would be an
abiding compass for the post-independence conditions.
I have dwelt on Cabral and his theories because I wish to make a point he
may never have made and that is that culture is the means for prizing
open the sources of knowledge; and education will lead to a deeper
appreciation and value of culture. I therefore now turn to the relationship
between culture and education.
V
Education, it is now widely acknowledged is a necessary resource needful
to human existence by which nature endows us with the power of
inquisitiveness, a desire to expand our knowledge base and to discover
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the new, to exercise our intellectual capacity to extract meaning to our
world, to expand one’s social and intellectual horizons, and to gain
insight, skills and knowledge which in turn can add value to our
surroundings as we found them. Education is the beneficent factor in
human relations and in humanity’s relationship with their natural
environment. So understood, education, formal and informal, is a
fundamental human right, the irreducible essence of human nature.
Education therefore must be exploited, nurtured, valued, advanced or
developed, shared and disseminated freely as a common good.
Scholars now gradually acknowledge diversities in science as knowledge.
We can no longer speak of a homogenous science any more than we can
speak of the prince of the sciences. What has emerged says Hans N
Weileriv is a ‘conception of knowledge that is at once more differentiated
(in the sense that it differs by the objects of knowledge and the
circumstances of generating it) and more contingent (in the sense of
statements that are valid only under certain conditions). Weiler then talks
about the casualties of this development but I prefer to refer to the
benefits. Under this rubric now, ethics, moral understanding and artistic
expression can no longer be dismissed as “unscientific” Social scientists
can now acknowledge the “cultural” attributes of knowledge. There is
recognition that societies have cultural sensitive ways of knowing and
understanding, something which historically has been denied. That has
meant that there are also culture specific notions of epistemology. This
has made it possible for indigenous knowledge systems and other culture
oriented knowledge systems to be affirmed as valid systems of
knowledge.
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The Beninoise philosopher Paulin J Hountondjiv can therefore confidently
conclude that “The Third World today has structures of scientific and
intellectual production where an extremely important work is done, a
work the results of which sometimes has a resounding impact worldwide. It is out of question here to minimise that production or to ignore its
value. The only problem is to know how it functions, how, by whom and
in whose service it is exploited, what position it holds in the general
knowledge economics world-wide, in other words, are those structures
henceforth truly autonomous?...” Hountondji makes the case for the
legitimacy of knowledge produced in the South in non-cartesian models
of knowing and being. He observes that the creation of knowledge was
always perceived to be the preserve of Western academies and the rest of
us mere consumers.
The interrogative character of culture, as Cabral presents it, means that
society may have to live with uncertainties because, as Hans Weiler is
quoted as saying “New ways of knowing bring with them a profound
doubt about established conventions in the production of knowledge and
an exhilarating sense of a new beginning.”vi Armed with Cabral’s view of
culture, I believe that the stage is now set for us to examine how a culture
oriented education system can deliver a liberatory system of education.
Cabral sought to develop people’s self-consciousness and an awareness
of their power to make their own history. He also provided for us an
abiding compass informed by values based on theory and social context,
as well as a moral calculus. Liberation, Franz Fanon observes, is always
preceded by the “renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the
imagination.”
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In similar vein other great African minds have since exhorted Africans to
take up that power of which Cabral speaks. Most of the strategies,
tactics, aims and goals formulated and expressed in the plethora of
policies, declarations, frameworks and partnerships such as Education For
All, UNESCO instruments and programmes, the OAU/AU initiatives
especially NEPAD and the APRM, to name but a few, articulate quite
poignantly a very lucid understanding of what such power should and
indeed, must achieve.
It remains one of the mysteries and indeed
tragedies of our time, that despite this understanding, and despite one
well intentioned educational initiative after another, launched by one
august body after another, the intellectual capital seems to remain trapped
in the vacuum of the debate so generated, unable to ignite effectively that
spark that will galvanise Africa in to committed and concerted action en
masse. We need to intensify our efforts if we are to bring to fruition the
wonderful plans for this continent and do justice to its enormous
potential. And so it would be remiss of me were I to neglect to impress
upon this eminent assembly the urgency and importance of our
educational mission in Africa, and the important role that governments
can and must play in this regard.
On a more positive note, what has emanated from recent years of debate
and interrogation of African issues is an increasing awareness and
acceptance of the need to work together as a continent and an African
community in addressing our education needs. It also makes good sense
to use this strategy when dealing with the international community. One
strong articulate voice articulating a very clearly defined message will
surely be heard more clearly than a chorus of discordant noises.
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VI
Throughout this address I have argued for the centrality of education and
culture in our development programmes. That is as it should be given
that, under the influence of Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen, the Human
Development Report, has taught us that human development is the
process whereby people are able to expand their (with an echo of Cabral)
real freedoms and life choices. I have also drawn extensively from
Amilcar Cabral in order to make the point that any true culture must
facilitate human liberation. Development takes place under the free
agency of people who pursue their common interests and shared goals.
It is no wonder therefore that in recent years, the international community
has elevated development to the extent that the United Nations’
Millennium Development Goals have become the yardstick by which
nations assess the extent of their development. In Africa we began with
the OAU Decade of Education in Africa (1997-2006) and by common
consent, a decade that hardly made an impression on Africa’s education
development. The Dakar Framework of Action for Education for All
(2000) provided some lofty ideals but the results, it must be said, can
hardly be said to be successful. This suggests to me that it was time to
think and act differently.
I observe from the activities of the Conference of Ministers of Education
of the African Union a renewed political will. For a start programmes of
mutual cooperation among African nations are a necessary beginning
towards success. Frankly, I am not convinced that mere importation of
technology from India or Europe will address the essential need for
African states to stand up and utilise judiciously available resources, and
to draw on the human capacity that Africa is so rich in. Some of that
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richness resides among Africa’s intellectuals and academic institutions
that need to be conscripted to become agents for development, as
Celestous Juma of Harvard University puts it.
I am proud to report that the NEPAD Programme of Action for Distance
Education and Teacher Development in Africa driven by a consortium of
African institutions which includes Unisa, the National Open University
of Nigeria (NOUN) and the Vancouver-based Commonwealth of
Learning, has the possibility of producing mass teacher education to
countries with an acute shortage of professional educators by distance
education means. This programme must, if it is to be relevant to Africa’s
pressing needs, incorporate the training of educators in the teaching of
science, mathematics and technology in the modern technological age.
Such a programme must necessarily incorporate an accelerated ICT
facility through cooperation in Africa which could reduce the costs of and
access to broadband connectivity and affordable telephony including
cellular telephones. While conscious of the many drawbacks of the digital
culture today, and its internal contradictions, one cannot ignore its
capacity to level the playing field of globalisation, as Martyn Hall of the
University of Cape Town puts it:
Previously, time and space were major barriers in the defence of privilege and
position: the cost of travel, distance from the workplace, penthouse apartments,
exclusive shops and clubs. Digital technology is the Trojan horse of such privileged
spaces and their cultural markers, and digital information is infinitely mutable,
transferable from machine to machine without change to its quality…vii
And, I would add, without mediation.
Finally, Africa must join the crusade for the renewal of Africa’s
universities. This is a crusade which now has the support of the World
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Bank, its previous detractor, and has been given added impetus by the
Report of the Commission on Africa, Our Common Interest. The place of
the university as a central platform for national development can no
longer be gainsaid. This suggests to me that the AU must accelerate its
partnership with the Association of African Universities and the African
Council for Distance Education. The proposed Second Decade for
Education in Africa must surely incorporate at the minimum the above
programmes, and ensure sufficient resources to accomplish them.
VII
To end my address, I once again revert to another son of this Continent
for inspiration. Franz Fanon, a native of Martinique in the Caribbean,
adopted Africa as his own native land. He became to many of us the
voice of the liberation struggle of Algeria, and a critic of the postindependence lethargy and anti-revolutionary malaise that set in, as it
often happens to many of our countries. In his speech, The Reciprocal
Bases of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom, published in his
celebrated book of essays, the WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, Fanon
ends his address with these words:
If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the
intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say, if it
interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then
the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and
encouragement of universalising values.
That, I submit, is the challenge of education and culture, properly
understood.
ends
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N Barney Pityana, PhD
Professor of Law
Principal and Vice Chancellor
University of South Africa;
Chairperson,
African Council for Distance Education
Keynote Address: 6th Ordinary Session
Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union,
Khartoum, The Sudan
23 January 2006.
i
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK; New York; Dover Publications, 1903.
A full discussion of the various theories of culture can be found in my “BEYOND TRANSITION:
The Evolution of Theological Method in South Africa – A Cultural Approach”, an unpublished
doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Cape Town (1995); pp67 ff.
iii
The Weapon of Theory, an address delivered to the First Tri-Continental Conference of the Peoples of
Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana, Cuba, January 1966 –
http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm
iv
Hans N Weiler: Challenging the Orthodoxies of Knowledge: Epistemological, Structural, and
Political Implications of Higher Education; Unesco Forum on research and Higher Education Policy,
1-3 December 2004.
v
Globalised Knowledge: Imbalances and Current Tasks; Unesco Forum Colloquium on Research and
Higher Education Policy, Paris, December 2004.
vi
In Homi K Bhabha: Global Pathways to Knowledge: Narration and Translation; Unesco Forum
Colloquium on Research and Higher Education Policy; Paris, December 2004.
vii
Africa Connected; “Journal on the Internet”; www.firstmonday.org/issues/issues3_hall/
ii
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