Schools and innovation in Africa

Contemporary Review, April, 2005 by Garreth Byrne

AFRICAN parents make huge financial sacrifices in order to send their sons and daughters to school. In the straggling townships, children will work after school hours and at weekends selling trite goods on the streets in order to scrape together enough funds to pay for school uniforms and school fees. Members of the extended family--siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents--also help the younger generation to go to school. If a man settles into a steady civil service career he is considered to be of ample means. Enormous family pressures build up and the disposable income of a modestly paid state servant soon shrivels. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, deals with this theme in his second novel, No Longer at Ease, where the civil servant main character succumbs to the temptation to accept bribes in order to meet mounting obligations.

Primary schooling started tentatively in West Africa in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Elementary primary schools emerged when missionaries taught new converts to read the Bible and pass on their knowledge of the faith to others. By 1899 in Nigeria only 33 of the 8,154 primary schools were government-run, and only nine of the 136 secondary schools. Government sponsored secondary education began only after 1930 in the Gold Coast (Ghana), in 1933 at Makerere College in Uganda, and only after 1935 in Nigeria. Missionaries in the French and Belgian colonies of Africa took the initiative in schooling a fraction of the African population, and efforts were sporadic, inhibited by scarce missionary financial resources.

In the first decades after independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s several governments in Africa made great strides to establish UPE or universal primary education. Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Botswana, and Francophone countries such as Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire, made varying levels of progress. In a few of these countries the education was free but parents or relatives had to find money for school uniforms. As government funding diminished due to debt and shortage of foreign currency, thousands of primary school buildings experienced shortages of textbooks and writing materials. Phased cuts in educational expenditure as part of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS) left buildings in a tatty, dangerous and unsanitary condition.

In a country like Zambia children enter Grade 1 at the age of seven and complete their Grade 7 national examination at the age of fourteen. Primary schooling is similar in other parts of the continent. About two-fifths of Grade 7 students make it to Form 1 second level in Zambia, which is higher than in several countries. Some children cannot take up the offer of a secondary school place due to poverty in the extended family network. Such children in rural areas help their parents on subsistence farms, while in the shanty areas of towns school dropouts engage in petty street vending, with the ever present risk of drifting into crime and vice. Africa needs to widen access to second-level education and expand socially appropriate third level vocational training. But what kind of second and further level education for those who drop out of the system at primary level? Politicians in post-independence Africa over the past forty years have responded to a groundswell of electoral opinion that believes widely available second-level schooling to be the key to social prosperity. They have made election promises that they could never keep.

A short time after independence some politicians and radical educationists began to question conventional academic models of first and second-level schooling. As state employment, university places and other outlets for professional training shrank in circumstances of economic decline, it became painfully obvious that many secondary school leavers were being offloaded onto a society that could not employ them, and where they lacked effective self-employment skills. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, himself a former schoolteacher who had translated Macbeth into Kiswahili, wrote a lengthy essay called Education for Self Reliance (1967) in which he asserted that primary schooling in contemporary Africa was preparing pupils for nothing practical. A fraction of the brightest pupils who scored well in the Grade 7 exams might get to secondary school but the vast majority would have to stay at home or take their chances in the distant towns. As Tanzania was a predominantly peasant society, schooling had to be oriented towards rural development and food production. Education and work were to be united in the school curriculum. Every rural school was to have a farm or garden for practical implementation of agricultural science learning. Income, derived from the sale of produce, was to subsidise maintenance and extension of school buildings and the purchase of teaching materials. The same policy was applied to secondary schools.

The education and production idea had mixed results. There were abuses of the system, involving the exploitation of free pupil labour by unscrupulous teachers who had their own plots of land adjacent to schools. In some schools food was produced in traditional ways that taught no new farming skills. There was excessive manual labour to the detriment of intellectual development. In Zambia in the mid-1970s President Kaunda launched a policy requiring all first and second-level schools to have production units. They were successful in some schools but disastrous in others: it all depended on teacher leadership and local factors such as soil fertility and climate. Parents damned the policy with a sullen silence and teachers and pupils for the most part wished to stick to the traditional academic model of secondary schooling, i.e. preparing students for the examination lottery. It became clear also that second-level schooling had the effect, even if unintended, of filtering the most ambitious students away from the rural areas. The underachieving school leavers stayed in rural societies to try their luck with slim pickings. The towns sprawled out of control, while rural mediocrity fed on itself.