Discuss Education As Alienation
by Fringe Magazine • 09.14.2009
Please use this as a forum for discussion about Fringe Issue 20’s Education As Alientation by Reshma Melwani.
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Fringe: it’s the noun that verbs your world, and the magazine you’re reading. We publish work that is political or experimental in form or content and define both “political” and “experimental” broadly. “Political” can mean work that incorporates or comments on current events or it can mean literature and art that further personal dignity and advocate human rights. We regard “experimental” work as work that breaks with the canon, takes formal risks, or explores a strange or impossible point of view.
I subscribe to the idea that to a certain extent our minds still
remain colonised. It is as though our colonisers just reliquished
thier hold on us in just a practical way while theoretical they still
rule us. Perhaps the problem is that they foisted on us diverse things
which have finally been adopted by us such that we feel we can rarely
operate without them. Just imagine this: Here in Malawi, we adopted
the British constitution which is still being used in the judiciary.
Our honourable judges continue citing British cases in thier legal
proceedings. To me this implies that the West dominance on Africa is
still huge. And may times I have asked myself whether African states
are really independed. I conclude that just like Kwame Nkrumah said,
we are just undergoing a sophisticated kind of colonialism where our
colonial masters have given us the illusion that we are free.
REGARDS,
ANANIYA…
This essay was posted in 2009 Sept before I found Fringe but it interests me very much Reshma Melwani and I was hoping to find a very dynamic discussion here. I am happy to find the comment from Ponje and I wonder if we can re ignite the dicussion.
I agree with the points made about colonialism and Africa. It is disastrous to stand on a culture of a people and educate them to under estimate themselves and to admire what is far. In his first novel, The River Between, Ngui wa Thiong’o dealt with religion in his character Joshua as a very alienating factor. Many people who never went to school in Ngugi’s world which I know quite well, did convert to Christian faith. This was a tool used very effectively to train peoples’ mind on the security which belonging to a church offered. What bothers me is how such a threatening religion … in the sense that a lot of it was preached in the hell and brimstone style…took over from relatively more peaceful ways of dealing with the supreme powers which they believed in.
I remember hearing Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai saying and it is true that the missionaries told us everything about us was bad, our clothes too.. our entire lives were to be changed.. but then today I ask myself why are many Africans in a position to do things like decolonised beings freely under the sway of the west? You see it in dress, manner and etc?
I admire Ngugi for going back to his mother tongue to write his novels and that makes me ask what African education would have been like if economists, architects, mathematician had all gone back to their local languages to deal with their subjects. But then there would have arisen national confusion… since not all nations followed the trend of Tanzania in having Kiswahili as a national and official language. In Africa we are gifted with many languages in each region some of them completely different and thrust into one country by the booundaries made by the Berlin Conference Scramble for Africa 1884-
But then now coming to home to certain realities, I wonder if we should not also agree that all people think and all people can see through education that is meant to blind them to their own beauty..and rebel setting up their own ways? Is that happening in current literature?
@Ananiya,
With much appreciation. I meant to add this earlier.. just what keeps an us people who have done abstract thinking maths, philosophy and etc.. reading under a law like that.. using a British constitution? Where are the rebels?