By Biko Agozino
“It was part of the independent movement that there should be education. Chief Awolowo and his colleagues ensured free education at all levels. Education was seen as a very fundamental part of the liberation. We have over 13 million children in Nigeria who are not in school. I mean that’s a crime. All children should be entitled to schooling up to a certain level. We have hundreds of millions taken away for all kinds of processes and not educating our children. I just feel like we’ve got some fundamental work to do. If the children are not being educated, what’s the prospect of them going forward? It is a loss to the society if they cannot function at a certain level. I wouldn’t be here in front of you if it was not for an insistence on education.”
– Richard Joseph (2022).
The above statement was made by a Trinidadian, Richard Joseph, at the Toyin Falola Interviews Series in March 2022. He was echoing the astonishing importance that people of African descent placed on learning especially in the Diaspora where it was made a crime fort the enslaved to learn to read and write. As Du Bois reported:
“The mass of the slaves could have no education. The laws on this point were clear and severe…All the slave states had such laws and after the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia, these laws were strengthened and more carefully enforced.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935, p. 570.
Eric Williams, the Father of Trinidad and Tobago, characterized education ads the inner hunger that he tried to quench with scholarships all the way to Oxford University before he came to abolish school fees in elementary and secondary schools, later extended by his party, Peoples National Movement, to the university level in Trinidad and Tobago. Fees Must Fall, South African students demanded during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign.
Another Diaspora African, C.L.R. James, also emphasized the importance of education in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. The colonizers had expelled students and teachers who were suspected of supporting the nationalist movement. They went to Nkrumah and asked him what to do. He told them to start the National School Movement to educate the people. James concluded that if any regime succeeds only in providing education for all, it would be most welcome. Ghana may be reaping some of the benefits today as they produce highly educated leaders compared to most other African states. Yet all African countries are in desperate need of the education of the young and the education of adults too, not only in reading and writing, but also in sports, arts and culture, and in entrepreneurial activities.
This view looks at the multiplicity of youth policies across Africa to indicate that the problem may lie in the implementation or non-implementation of policies. Yet, in Africa, it should not be forgotten that the colonizers were suspicious of education and it was up to the people to build their own schools as Walter Rodney observed in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The education system in Africa should be decolonized further by teaching the history of Africa more than the teaching of European history, by teaching critical thinking and study skills, by teaching more about the African environment and technology in use. It is a failure of the educational system that our farmers still use the hoe and the cutlass for hundreds of years while the rest of the world has mechanized agriculture, partly because the colonizers kept Africa underdeveloped according to Rodney.
No wonder the youth are shying away from farming and are risking their lives crossing the Sahara and drowning in their thousands in the Aegean Sea to reach fortress Europe and seek work to care for the aged or to do anything to support their families back home. Surprisingly, the countries that they are migrating to do not always have a youth ministry nor a ministry of women’s affairs but are benefitting from centuries of the unequal exchange between Africa and Europe. ‘In A Letter to the Youth of Africa’, Frantz Fanon (1967: 117) stated as follows:
‘The future will have no pity for those men who, possessing the exceptional privilege of being able to speak words of truth to their oppressors, have taken refuge in an attitude of passivity, of mute indifference, and sometimes of cold complicity.’
The youth of Africa should ask themselves what kinds of truth they are speaking to their oppressors today or are they passive and mute, indifferent or even in complicity with their oppressors. When Azikiwe returned to lead the nationalist movement in West Africa with his chain of newspapers, he was still a youth man just like those he inspired to pursue further education in preparation for leadership across Africa. The military officers who seized power across Africa to truncate the decolonization and democratization processes were also young officers. It is not the chronological age that matters but also the courage to speak truth to power. The #EndSARS protest demonstrated that our young women and young men are effective leaders when organized.
The key to effective youth policies is in education for all Africans, starting in early childhood and continuing to university at public expense for those who are qualified and who desire advanced education. This is something that can be attained in a short while even if there are not enough jobs for the graduates. It is better to be educated and unemployed than to be uneducated and unemployed. The Nollywood industry that is run by young people shows that with education, some of the youth can become self-employed in different industries and also can create jobs for others. Education will help to hone the natural talents that abound in different areas of life to prepare our youth for leadership across Africa.
To be effective, youth policies (education) should be implemented as if there are no colonial boundaries dividing and weakening Africans. Just as in China, India, or USA, any student in Africa from home or abroad should be able to travel across the United Republic of African States to study, work, trade, run for office as a free citizen.
One question I wanted to ask Dr. Joseph when he started dancing to Femi Kuti’s Bang Bang Bang is this: ‘Where your rag is?’
- Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. He is the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, and of Counter-Colonial Criminology, among others.
