3_01 Desmond Ikenna Odugu - Education in Africa: A Critical Historiographic Review

To accompany the 50th Anniversary special edition of the History of Education Journal, we spoke to some of the contributors.  These podcasts focus on two of the themes in the journal:
Geographical historiographies of education and
Thematic intersections with the history of education.
Episode 1 - Geography
In this episode, Desmond Ikenna Odugu, Associate Professor of Education at Lake Forest College in Illinois presents a comprehensive discussion of the context for his article, Education in Africa: A Critical Historiographic Overview.  
Themes include post-colonialism, oral history, schooling, epistemology, language, and  culture.  
Recorded in conversation with Michael Donnay in 2022 and produced by Syeda Ali, May 2023.

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Podcast Desmond Odugu May 2023

‘African Historiography of Education’

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Education, Africa, history, continent, work, historians, formal schooling, African, instance, North Africa, 

SPEAKERS

Michael Donnay (MD), Syeda Ali, Desmond Odugu (DO)

MD  00:06

This is passing notes from the history of Education Society.

Syeda Ali  00:09

Welcome to the first episode of the series of four to accompany the May special edition of the history of education journal. Michael Donnay speaks Desmond Ikenna Odugu about his article education on Africa, A critical historiographic review. I'll hand you back to Michael for the podcast.

MD 00:33

Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you here and to be talking about your article today. 

DIO: Thank you, I'm delighted to be here as well. 

MD: So I think maybe the best place to start today's conversation, and I imagine also probably the most challenging place to start, is with the question that you open the article with, which is, is it possible and appropriate to be writing about the history of education in Africa? And then the article, you lay out a couple of the sort of specific challenges inherent in that framing? And I was wondering if we could start by just walking through a couple of them, sort of what do you see as the philosophical or historical challenges with framing the question, the history of education in Africa in that way? 

DIO: Thank you, Michael. You know, when the journal editors invited me to contribute a piece to this adversarial issue, I started enthusiastic, yes. Because I've been working on a project that's related to, to this subject. So I was really delighted to have the opportunity to work on this. But then after I had a moment passes enthusiasm, moment after this enthusiasm. When I started thinking about what I had just accepted to do, I started to think to myself, What have you done? Like, what have you gotten yourself into? Because, you know, I started thinking about these fundamental questions, and the implications for any attempt to make sense of the history of education in Africa, put this inquiry history of education in Africa, because then you realise that this as a departure point, one might must ask, what history? What education? What Africa? You know, I don't engage in these questions thoroughly in this piece, because they are far beyond the scope of the immediate project. You know, what I attempt to do is just to raise questions about I mean, to remind any reader that these are valid questions to ask, and that asking those questions have, you know, has very serious history geographic implications? 

You know, like you suggest, one of the questions I raise about history itself, you know, has to do with one of the thorniest issues, but historians have to deal with, you know, the question of objectivity. You know, of course, this is not a new a new question. And the linguistic term, you know, has litigated the epistemological implications for decades, I'm thinking of the works of EH Carr, for instance, Alun Munslow, and so many others have, who've wrestled with, with this for quite some time. And this is material to talk about people who have been dealing with this for more than a century now. But as historians, you know, do we have an obligation to explore a variety of possible and sometimes incompatible interpretations? Beyond the conditions of one true narrative or one true interpretation? And what does that do to our concept of truth? What does that do to that referential obligation that people assume the history and has to represent reality the way truly and truly happen or represent the past, that will truly happen? So I think just to understand history, from that philosophical standpoint, gives me a pause, it makes me want to hold off before you jump quickly into a conversation, say, Hey, this is a history of anything, or to review any history of anything. 

And to raise a similar question about education. And this is where I was approaching this, I think you have an asset of Harry challenges to deal with. You know, when we talk about education, I think that the I think most historians of education might find it compelling to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on Western style, formal schooling, that dates, you know, to the era of empire building. But, you know, are these the only educational interventions since and within that time period? Even if we set aside questions about education in the period before us, empire building era, and I don't think we should, right, I think we should not set aside you know, what education was happening before, you know, the 15th and 16th centuries coming forward. But if even if we set aside that is homeschooling The only thing that was happening, education wise, I don't think so. And this is a very basic anthropological, you know, question or question that one can address quickly with some basic access, access to political data. So if you want to talk about the history of education and the ways that people have wrestled with that, and you recognise that there's more to education than what's been happening in the four walls of the classroom with a teacher in front, and some desks and students, guided by some text, and the nation state institutions, that superintendents overlays, if you realise that's just one very small part of a larger picture, how do you engage with a subject, right. And again, this is also not to even engage with the distinction that people often make between multiple levels of education.

And and even the thing we're calling formal education here in distinction from non formal or informal education portmanteaus, for handling very complex and varied phenomena. And again, these are fundamentals that were developed within a particular historical period, and from a particular historical vantage point. So if you throw those vantage points into question, then really what is education and what is not? If I use John Dewey, and I think I point to John Dewey, in this space, if I use John Dewey as a reference point, to think of education as fundamentally experience and move from that perspective, how do you make a distinction between what is education and what is not? Right? How do you end up not making this a history of everything, but attempting to review the history of everything?

I don't think this is meaningless question, I think it perhaps should be of concern to an historian and a thought the thought piece, and I spent a bit a bit of time on this, because it's been a subject, but I have had occasion to engage with us, as a student myself, the question of what Africa is, you know, it's difficult to figure out where to start addressing that, because, you know, geographic contiguity, and to think in cartographic cartographic terms isn't always very helpful. You know, places that are considered one single unit are not often geographically, geographically contiguous, and we have plenty of examples about this. Otherwise, you know, Europe and Russia, in throughout most of Asia, all the way to China would from one continent, if you think of a place, you can just travel on land from place to place, you will get to the other end. You know, there are places that are disconnected, but are part of, you know, a particular geographic units in ways that we define that. So, how do we define Africa geographically, one of the simpler, but also more striking elements here is that, you know, Africa as a continent, the geographic unit, is often cut into sub regions, right. And one of the obvious ones is to think of North Africa versus versus Sub Saharan Africa. And many people in the world of comparative and international education group, North Africa together with the Middle East, to form what is often called the Middle East and North Africa as a trans continental across continental sub region, and then keep Sub Saharan Africa separate. And I think that's striking, because, again, you would want to think of North Africa as part of the continent of Africa. But when it comes to education, programming, and the history of education, you find people that consider it more meaningful to group, the continent and part of the continent together with a different part of a different continent. So is Africa still one thing, if we think of the educational developments across a particular time period, even if we don't consider all time periods, so geographic delineations is not very helpful in figuring out what is inside or outside of Africa. 

Notice here that we're not even talking about the sources of educational interventions on the continent, or places where education developments in Africa have shaped development. 

9:06 So if you think of the movement of people who might have started their lives on the African continent, but ended up elsewhere, the educational implications of all of that that we're not talking about all of that, right, it's just the basic delineation of the geographic itself. You know, while I was working on this space, I was reminded, that even the term the word Africa itself, which has several origins, one of which are from, from Africa itself, has sort of changed its meaning from its original application to North Africa. So initially, it was applied to North Africa, in its original term, or a different term. I think it was a Greek or Egyptian that we use the word Libya that was in reference to North Africa. Over time, and more recently, that word would be applied. To suit the sub Saharan region, to the point that today, many people will consider a sub Saharan region as the real Africa. And that extension of the term to the southern part of the continent has also come with some increasing pejorative use of that term. So it, it began to sort of suggest a movement toward deficit, that the continent of problems of needs, that's different from the way that that term originated. And I think there are many people today who would suggest, you know, to abandon the word Africa entirely and use some of the time that is indigenous to the continent. And there are so many ways you can ask this question. That points to the fact that as a continent, the identity of Africa is a question, you know, within the A when within there, for instance, you know, raises that question about how Africa was, was constructed in his work at the invention of Africa, but I find very useful to understand that is there is nothing obvious about this continent, so to speak, at least at least the way we look at look at it. If we were to ask a question about what Africa is, from a demographic standpoint, for instance, then we get to a different set of challenges. 

You know, how do you consider, you know, Africans in the diaspora, as Africans, and I'm not just talking about those who were moved, or who moved voluntarily from Africa to other parts of the world, myself included, but people who were forcibly removed from the continent on the slavery and can find their way back home to their ancestral homelands anymore? Right. In the US, for instance, there is development, a cultural development to think of African Americans as blacks instead of African Americans, but in notes to say there is nothing African about them, you know, the same way that someone will use the term white to describe people of European descent. Right. And the idea here is, you know, if we call some people whites, why do we call others African Americans instead of blacks? Right, although I find those terms, so mind bendingly absurd. But the question is, how can you also exclude African Americans from the corpus of what it means to be African this is just to use the US as an example, you can say something about ad, or the Dominican Republic, or wherever else you go? Or how can you include such a person in what it means to be African when the person has had no personal lived connection to the continent, except that there is a trace of genetic link in the history to indicate what the trace looks like where it's come from? Right. 

12:50 On the other end, you think of places like South Africa, where you have a significant population, that are not of African descent, that is are of European descent, or Asian descent to now identify as African I'll tell you a quick story. I was at a conference several years ago, and was at dinner table after the sessions with a group of people that I was meeting for the first time. And when we're going around to introduce ourselves, someone introduced himself, as I think they were from among the set from Malawi, or I think they introduced themselves Zimbabwe. And I would have thought of this person as a European because they looked racially European. And, you know, this was many years ago, early in graduate school, and I asked the person, how come you I say, but what I would have thought of is that when as a country of black Africans, and they were very insistent that they were Zimbabweans, like they had no author lived connection to Europe, except that racially, they look like what we call white. Right, but from lived experience, my cultural experience, they come from the country Zimbabwe. 

14:01 Now, how do you include such a person, or exclusive the person, by the way, from what it means to be African and South Africa presents a very interesting case, for instance, because if you follow our recent South Africa, South African politics, you know that a lot of South Africans continue to be upset and demand, you know, a reform of land ownership in South Africa because even Well, after Mandela and Mandela's effort to, to engage in land reform, the majority of South African lands remain in the hands of a handful of people of European descent and to some extent, people of Asian descent and the majority, one 80% of the population, you know, have been displaced. So how do you consider people whose African business or its origin to an effort to overrun or one might even argue to destroy Africa? How can you consider such a person an African How can you exclude a person from being an African when they have an African country's passport. So to me, these things present the real, very serious issues that can be easily overlooked. So any historical inquiry efforts to engage with a review of any history of anything with regard to Africa, I think has to deal with these questions. 

Again, I do not engage with these issues thoroughly in this data. What I do attempt to do, however, is to suggest that whether we engage with them has taught and telling consequences for what we call history, the questions we choose to pursue, what we search for our sources, including the modalities of sources, whether they are written, oral, social, and so forth. The nature of our interpretations and the assumptions and diverse interpretations, and importantly, how we represent or present those interpretations, who our audience is, and how we share, share information, all of that have some connection to the ways that we ask these very basic questions about what it what it is, to think of history, or to think of education to think of Africa, all together as one. 

MD 16:02And I think I so appreciated us opening the article with those questions, because I think it does exactly that It unsettles the assumptions we might bring in when reading an article about sort of what we are coming to inspect what we're coming to think about. And then what I really love is you then transition. And having asked those questions, and having unsettled those assumptions, go and sort of looking at the historiography, look at a couple of what you call lessons sort of thinking about how academic historians, particularly those working in sort of Eastern European and North American contexts have in the past thought about education in Africa. 

And I'm sort of listening to you sort of talk about the ways we think about audience, I would love to maybe start with the lesson about language and how different spheres of language and their relationships to colonialism still shaped the way that scholarship on Africa is written. So we want to maybe we can talk about that as sort of the first lesson to dive into. 

17:10 And like that, because when I started developing my ideas for that piece, one of the things I had to wrestle with, especially in coming to terms with the fact that I was working on this project, is that I had to recognise that I was talking to very specific audience. If I was having a conversation with my father, or with a group of elders in my hometown, the way I engage with the question would be radically different from the ways that I was trying to engage with engage with it in this case, and that sort of opened up the broader question to me about who's engaging with history of the history of education in Africa? And in what context and who are their audiences? So I think one can address this at two general levels. On one level, I think it's the recognition that we are wrestling with an academic subject. And by academic I mean, a particular presentation of what it means to be academic. So the western style, scholarly engagements that often come out in journal publications and monographs, and so forth. That's a very small group of people, when you think of the number of people that inhabit this planet, and people who, by the way, have daily reasons to engage with similar questions that historians ask, you know, what is education? Where does it start? What is the purpose and so forth? Who makes a decision? Or whose impulse interest for what purpose? Right? And when we think about that particular community, that small community of experts, there are divisions, there are silos, if you want to think about it as such, that I think one can raise questions about that is why those silos exist. But perhaps, you know, might find some tentative explanations, even if those are speculations about why do silos exist, you know, but I think, on the other hand, this is the other side of the of the of the questions that one can can raise here is that when we leave the academic world, the academic world of the student and in turn in a different direction, the compositions people have the historical or history historical, historically grounded conversations that people have about education are directly in conversation with realities on the ground that they live with. And if we have done I can speak a little bit more to that it's coming out of the other project. I have been working on. But what is striking is, but I don't think that there is also enough conversation between those two groups as the academic historians and these other historical enterprises. Right. And in some ways, I think that's actually the larger problem. Because among historians who occupied different sides of these siloed penances, one can see some continuities, one can sense some see some similarities, you can see, for instance, people drawing from similar sources, people are wrestling with similar similar questions, people engaging in some sort of interpretive or discussing discursive practices, and so forth. So there are some similarities there. And even when there aren't any explicit direct conversations or engagements across the board, you can see those similarities exists. But when you think of, you know, the engagement between academic historians, and the rest of the people who they often are, who someone might think they speak for all the realities they tend to represent. That's where I think, I don't speak personally, it's happening somewhere that I don't see, but I don't know that I've seen enough of an engagement there. 

21:13 Now, so to go back to the academic side of things. I'm, I function, primarily my scholarship in the English language. Okay. But English, the English language is not the only language I have access to. And this is part of how I get to know that there are other conversations happening elsewhere. But as I was reading, you know, the English conversation, the English work, and the history of education in Africa, as large and complex as, as they can be. Although, as I note in this piece, the majority of them are obsessed with colonial education. You know, what I find by just by by its own, what I find interesting on its own, I kind of like it, I think there's something to be explored there, that the majority of works on education in Africa, that's published in western journals and scholarly output, Scotland spaces on colonial education, right, you know, I suggest in this space, I don't explore this as actively, but I suggest in the space, that this might be, you know, Western education seeking images or seeking to represent him or reproduce images of itself elsewhere. Right. But, again, to focus on the scholarly side of things, as I was reading this, I noticed that there isn't enough coverage of the African contexts that are not English speaking, that is outside of the Anglophone African context. And I will say, the Anglophone with a lot of hesitation, because I don't know of a truly Anglophone African context. I think one can call it Anglophone. If you're looking if your parachute from, you know, a Western standpoint, and look, look at that, and all you see is the English language or if you say Francophone, yo, this is French, but in a way, not to go into that final body ambiguities that I started asking myself questions about, How do you capture what's happening in the so called French speaking African context? So the Spanish speaking African context of Portuguese significant context? 

23:31 How do you capture educational realities? Historically, from this context, it became clear to me that with the exception of a few authors, I'm talking about very few of those who have attempted to run a comparative historical analysis of an Anglophone and Francophone context. There are many walks that speak directly to the other side of things. And I decided at that point to look for journals in those languages. And I started with French. And it was quite striking to me that, you know, there are federal French history of education journals, that published actively. Now I am not a fluent French reader or speaker, I did have some, some exposure to French and in my attempt to read these, these pieces, I was delighted to realise that there are also translations of us publications for many of those journals, I think, the French, like history, or do the Gaussian, I think it's called has for virtually all its publications, I could see an English translation of the full article, not just the abstract, that makes it easy for you to read what is happening in that journal. Right. And I realised when I started looking at these that many of them are journalists in other languages, not just French, but Spanish, Portuguese do precisely the same. They all have an English, for the most part have an English translation of their publications, I didn't see a French translation of an English article in any history of education, journal in the English language. Now, one can speculate about why that is the case. And, you know, tag on to such speculations, whatever notions of linguistic or cultural hierarchy might be at war in Europe or elsewhere. But my sense is that would likely exist at a time where the technology for translating works or perhaps even the capacity, if we are recruiting translators exist in such a way that if there is an interesting of priority over engaging in these conferences across language spaces there, won't publish should do that. I think, you know, it's it. If I want to think of this as an invitation, you know, I would make this as an invitation to all journals that publish pieces on the history of education, not just in Africa, but anywhere to consider translating those in other languages and publishing those other translations. So that people who are more comfortable in those other languages can have access to them. That might be an increased access, where people can read more things, cite more things and expose themselves to a wider range of conversations. Now notice, again, that we're talking about English and French and Spanish and Portuguese, or European languages. We aren't talking about genres that publishing African languages, for instance, and I couldn't find it, I did have some conversations with some some people who mentioned there might be some local journals in East Africa, I think, Kenya, or Tanzania, but I couldn't lay my hands on anyone. Right? These are places I've actually set up some, some fieldwork, but I haven't found those publications myself on any of my trips. So they aren't as popular. Right? So it will be interesting to figure out how you engage in the conversation about history, education, continent as fast and complex as the African continent by bringing into conversation, these very different communities of scholarship. 

And again, we're talking about Western style, academic scholarship, bringing all of this of this communities into closer conversation, I think a lot more can be learned about the varieties of issues that accurate happening. I think this is also interesting. Because, you know, one of the lessons I pointed to is that, while the Predict the majority of publications are remain on colonial education, what historians of Egyptian are doing with those publications have shifted from, you know, what one can call broad stroke, you know, blueprint historiography, right, you know, this, the idea that one is thinking of the colonial versus colonised, you know, categories as monolithic or unified categories. You know, historians have shifted away from that, to look at nuances to look at some of the details and the lived experiences of imperialism. And if you want to engage a process and that history, fruitfully there might be need to ask those questions from the roots from the perspective of those who have lived those, those experiences. And my sense is that that, that makes a case for engaging with people who often don't have the resources published in major European journals. Right, and that there can be, there can be other conversation to happen. I think, if I were to turn to the other side of that equation very briefly, one of the things I find striking is that anytime we anytime I attempted to go outside of the immediate scope of what's published in English speaking, history, education journals, it's not just that I found a different set of conversations, but even the nature of evidence that people use the purpose of engaging in historical inquiry and the audience seem to be quite different. Right, what people are doing with history seems to be different than what I find with with some of the other journal publications, in our context. So I do hope that going forward, there will be increased access and increased conversation and perhaps even increased collaboration where people are truly genuinely interested in the conversations that other people are having that they don't have access to. It's so interesting to hear you say that Because in my field in digital humanities, it's a similar conversation happening about like, particularly given the the baked in dominance of English into a lot of contemporary technologies, it is often like, even more difficult to do sort of technology driven work in other languages, because the assumption is if you're using a computer system that the language that system is going to be written in is English. And there's been a couple of really successful DH projects that work multilaterally, and they're the but but their constant feedback is it's even more challenging than you would think. Because just as you said, it's not just a language barrier. But like, culturally, there's just different reasons for engaging inquiry, different questions, different sources, all of that really shapes the work that people are doing. So it's not just a matter of like, oh, yeah, we made this programme in French now. So it does everything you needed to do, but sort of much more fundamental questions. So it's so fascinating to see that across fields. I will tell you a quick story. You know, several years ago, I think it was 2009. I was in India, I was having a conversation with Professor CG that Swanee and one of India's erudite scholars, he had a lot of work on on language and multilingualism. And we were talking about the dominance of English, English language. And he said, he told his story, I don't remember now, if he did, you know, this, this event, but he said, There was a time when the British British Royal Society was meeting in London, and someone was complaining that scientists do not publish the scientific treatises in English, they were publishing in French. And when this person, you know, raise these concerns, many people at this meeting said, Well, you know, that's just the way things are done the English language that is equipped to handle these scientific processes, you have to publish in these other languages. And he said to them, if the English language is not equipped to do that, then you develop it, you make it happen. And for someone who grew up in a world where it seems like the English language is the de facto language of communication, in the sciences and beyond, it was since unbelievable to think that there was a time when the English language was not that. So if we don't have the tools to get that work done, I think human beings can create those tools. If there is any evidence we have from history, it is that we are capable of doing so we are capable of function across what might seem like linguistic divides. And as a matter of fact, it might also seem that doing so is unavoidable, we would not be able to survive as humans if we were not capable of functional across linguistic, cultural, and even epistemic divides. So that's a task a task one can embrace approach problem probably should embrace more intentionally than try to try to avoid No, and I think it's such a good reminder that it is not, you know, an inherent dominance, that English is not necessarily there's nothing predetermined about it, but that there can be those kinds of historical shifts. And I think it sort of is it's really interestingly connected, I think, with the call you make near the end of the article, to sort of expand beyond this sort of Western academic understanding of sources as well, and sort of framing that as a challenge to expand the limits of what can be both uncovered and narrated about education in Africa. And I was wondering if you could sort of explain sort of what your hope is behind that call and what you would be, you know, excited to see historians embracing if they embraced expanding those limits. Michael, thank you for asking that question. So there are two very specific things I can't think of right away. But I imagine there are so many authors. So one of the projects I've been interested in, came out of an earlier publication, I think it was 2016 publication in the history of education quarterly, where I was engaging, I was trying to explore the original of British education in a particular part of the south eastern Nigeria. This is within the Igbo context, but I wasn't trying to explore the entire Igbo context, because the entire Igbo context is a very large and diverse context. And missionaries did not get to every part of that it will context at the same time. There are some parts and places they arrived earlier and other places. They arrived much later. And I was focused on a particular area was among the most build the latest contests they got to it's actually in many ways the meeting point between the spread of Christianity from the south and the spread of Islam Probably not. Okay. And in exploring that, you know, it struck me that the majority of publications on the source relied nearly exclusively on European archives. Now, there's a lot to be learned from archives that were developed by Europeans who were directly involved in the surgence, of empire building. And, like many historians, I'm very glad that we have access to those archives, because they tell us plenty today, you know, I was just recently reading a lot through the look at, you know, writings, one of his earlier writings, where he was trying to explore the idea of, of the, I think it called this a trustee ship, the trustee ship idea that guided the efforts to explore the rest of the world, especially, you know, what they call the tropics and to extract raw materials to inform the, the development of Europe and in North America. And in that piece, you know, he was making the argument that the development of industry, which, by the way, was the product of this sustained multiple centuries of engagement with Africa, right, and even the rest of the world, the industry would not have been what it is in Europe without that larger trans continental engagement. But it has created a lifestyle in Europe and North America that can no longer be sustained using local resources. And there was a need to explore those resources elsewhere. So if you were to follow look at justification for colonialism, for instance, I mean, there's a lot to be learned from those archives, it tells you plenty. But it's also striking to me that we don't seem to focus enough attention on the other stories that are not in those archives. I won't go into this in details right now, because I don't think that we have, we have all the time. But I bet in my own identity, my person might name my experience is the imprint the direct influence of those missionary explorations, my own father, who is still alive today, lived for many years and worked with many missionary priests, many European missionaries who were in that part of the country. For decades. No historian has ever talked to him to understand his perspective on those experiences, perhaps accepting me that I just asked him, because I know he's a ready source for you. And I can tell you that what I've learned from him directly, has been so helpful in reading in understanding the archives. And so there's no way I would have been able to read those archives in in quite the same way. If I did not have the likes of my father, and he's not alone. He is one of so many people who are still alive today. So if there is one thing that I'm hoping that historians will do, is to spend a lot of time in the archives. But then at some point, get out of the archives, get out of the library, get out of the museum, go to the people themselves, perhaps there might be a thing or two to learn from them. Many of them are no longer here. But if there is anything I know of parents, it is that they transfer stories to their children. The children still eat, you know, who are the the new generations of the first catechists and the first court clerks? And I mean, the list goes on of people who worked with the Europeans who were in that part of the world. Right? What are the stories they can tell? If we take that step of engaging this as a very important source, I think you would make a lot of progress. I think Felix, he, for instance, or one of Nigeria's most prominent historians, has spent some time exploring this idea in developing a clear argument about why oral histories are the fact that they're essential to any history of Africa, and, by extension, any history of education in Africa. As a matter of fact, he makes the argument, but the question is no longer. Whether all resources are important or helpful, is whether anyone can ever write anything meaningful about the history of Africa without full resource I don't know that it's possible. So that's one of the key things I'm hoping one can take, from what I would like to see happen for that to no longer be any publication on the subject that relies nearly exclusively on colonial archives. And I think that's the, that's the dominant practice today. In 2022. There was - and I reflect on this briefly in this piece, that was a book, an edited volume by Peter Kallaway, and Rebecca Swartz that I reviewed. Not long ago, I think this is Empire and Education in Africa, the setting of the comparative perspective in this piece, and by the way, I'm not, I probably shouldn't have mentioned the full title, because I don't want to be advertising. The book do you make this, you use this however you see fit. But it's also said this, because I'm critical of some of the things that I find in this book, you know, the, the key departure point of this book is to engage in the details of, you know, the the colonial encounters with education, to understand things from the grassroots perspective. So I was very excited when I first started reading this book. But it was interesting that from the beginning till the end, the focus remains on European actors. And what they have to say, I mean, we learn not just their names, but the details of their lives. And nothing about any African in the process, no African is, is explored as an individual human being whose name we know, and whose experiences we can explore. And I think that's tragic. And if my father's own experiences is anything to go by, I do think that there are people who remain alive today, who were still who were there when European standard ly arriving, or were part of the story, that books like this are talking about, are some of the explorations are in this will go all the way to, you know, the first half of the 20th century. Right. And there are people who were, who are still alive and such as that they are live, they are very sharp, they have decent memories, and maybe some records to that one can can rely on to develop a more, a clearer and more comprehensive story. Anyway, so that's one key thing we'll get will happen. The second key thing, and this is probably a bit more challenging, but also perhaps would be among the most productive is to recognise that when we say education, we don't mean schooling, by default. Now, this is the way that the scholarship sort of carries on the conversation. The history of education in Africa is predominantly the history of western style formal schooling. Now, there is a lot happening, education wise, and I'm talking about organised education, that has nothing to do with the four walls of a western style, formal school. You know, I did mention some examples. But the more familiar ones, at least in my south eastern Nigeria context and the Igbo context, that news is spread now across not only Nigeria, but around the world, is in what someone can liken to I don't want to call it exactly the same thing, but likened to an apprenticeship process that goes in at least in two different directions. One is, you know, trade apprenticeship. The other one is business apprenticeship, where someone either learns a trade or lends a business and is mentored over a six or seven year period, by someone and take the specimen through the beginning part of just understanding the basics on a particular field to becoming an expert. And by the end of that process provides the person with an investment capital to set up their own business or whatever, obviously, they need, and then continue to mentor the person. You know, it is only recently that some people have started paying attention to what is happening in that sector, as you know, a viable venture capital model. But even to call it a venture capital, an attempt to subsume it under the rubric of capitalism is questionable, because that's not what capitalism does. If we function in, in the in the competition in the competitive atmosphere of capitalism. If I had a business that I want to try, and it is in my interest to make sure that the trends over years, I don't have an interest in promoting my competitor in such a way that I can be thrown out. business. But that's essentially what's happening in this particular context, someone who's grooming, young professionals are doing so to set up what would be, technically their competitors, the only thing is that their sense of well being is so bonded, that they are not thinking exclusively in terms of how to make money for yourself. They're trying to they're thinking of how to generate resources for the community. This person who has helped to train these people, if they have any need, say, for instance, he takes ill needs to go to the hospital, he probably doesn't have to think about his medical care, because all these people he's helped, will be there. He doesn't like to have to think about doing certain things in his community, because he's now you know, helped to produce people who are capable of solving community problems that he himself benefits from. So there's a sense of social responsibility of community responsibility, that is at the foundation of what we're talking about. It's very different from what you get with formal schooling context, where you have an individualised effort to learn as an individual and get a grade, that is a time assigned to you as an individual, and you get a job and get paid. So in a sense, you know, that your social responsibility, depending on how you think about it can stretch as far as your as a tax policy goes, once you extract the tax from the person, there is really no other obligation, except if the person chooses to engage beyond that. So the point here, then, is that there is a lot more to be explored beyond the four walls of schooling. And I think there is a lot to benefit from not treating those as the unfortunate fringe space of those who could not make their way into the formal schooling process, which is really the norm. If we think of formal schooling, as just one part of the larger picture. And these other parts are equally viable, equally important. I think historians might be painting a much more comprehensive, even more complicated picture of what's happening. I will say one last quick thing about this. There are many Africans today, who, like their ancestors have to wear a range of options in making the decision about whether to send their child to school or not. In that previous publication in the history of education quarterly. One of the things I found in exploring our resources was that a lot of parents who send their children to school, at the earliest stages of missionary schooling in the part of the culture of the country, did so because they were trying to reclaim political and cultural control over what seemed like a destabilisation of their world by the presence of Europeans who were coming in with a range of forces that were new and unique. They were not interested in European education because they thought it had anything superior to provide. And they were very clear about that. They were interested in sending their children to that school because they recognise as some of the people who were getting that education are people who you did not want to entrust common the commodity. In their hand, there were people who did not want to be leaders in the community based on a range of things that were already happening before Europeans showed up. So the effort here was to stabilise the community. Right. And I think parents are still doing that nimble dance today, before they send their children to school, they are looking around and assessing the worth and the value of that schooling. You know, I was just having a conversation this, this earlier this summer, with a parent who had sent four of his sons, four of their sons to the apprenticeship in ...  or in ... a process that I was mentioning. And I was asking them why they made that choice because the the boys seemed like they were doing well academically, otherwise in the elementary school. And they were quick to point out to me, people in that local community who had gone all the way to the university level. And not only did they not have any useful jobs, they had become a nuisance to the community. And they said, We don't want our children to turn out like this. We knew those kids when they were little boys. They were good kids. The only tragedy that happened to them was schooling. The only thing that's different is that they went off to school and a couple of years. Now they are a thorn in the flesh of the community. And my sense is for anyone who just looks at formal schooling as the dominant practice it might make sense because there are many people who do that even on the African context. But I think you will also be ignoring a lot of people who look at the same set of data and come to a different conclusion. And there are educational resources that such people explore exploit, that are still viable today, they're still alive. But we don't often think of them as such, we'd simply just consigned them to an informal or non formal space. That seems that that receives only secondary attention after we we explore the dominant things. Well, thank you so much for that, like incredibly robust overview of the article. I think people really should go take the time to check it out and to read it.

Syeda Ali  50:54

Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society, UK.  Our executive producer is Heather Ellis. And this episode was written by Michael Donnay and produced by me Syeda Ali, you can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences on our website historyofeducation.org.uk