Although generalizations are difficult on this most diverse
of continents, it is clear that the impact of the West
has been greater on urban and educated Africans and
more limited on their rural and illiterate compatriots. After
all, the colonial presence was first and most firmly established
in the cities. Many cities, including Dakar, Lagos,
Johannesburg, Cape Town, Brazzaville, and Nairobi,
are direct products of the colonial experience. Most African
cities today look like their counterparts elsewhere in
the world. They have high-rise buildings, blocks of residential
apartments, wide boulevards, neon lights, movie
theaters, and traffic jams.
The cities are also where the African elites live and
work. Affluent Africans, like their contemporaries in
other developing countries, have been strongly attracted
to the glittering material aspects of Western culture.
They live in Western-style homes or apartments and eat
Western foods stored in Western refrigerators, and those
who can afford it drive Western cars. It has been said, not
wholly in praise, that there are more Mercedes-Benzes in
Nigeria than in Germany, where they are manufactured.
The furniture of their minds has become increasingly
Western as well, in part because of the educational system.
In the precolonial era, education as we know it did
not really exist in Africa except for parochial schools in
Christian Ethiopia and academies to train young males in
Islamic doctrine and law in Muslim societies in North
and West Africa. For the average African, education took
place at the home or in the village courtyard and stressed
socialization and vocational training.
Traditional education in Africa was not necessarily inferior
to that in Europe. Social values and customs were
transmitted to the young by storytellers, often village elders
who could gain considerable prestige through their
performance. Among the Luo people in Kenya, for example,
children were taught in a siwindhe, or the house of
a widowed grandmother. Here they would be instructed
in the ways and thinking of their people. A favorite saying
for those who behaved stupidly was “you are uneducated,
like one who never slept in a siwindhe.”6
Europeans introduced modern Western education into
Africa in the nineteenth century, although some Africans
had already become literate in one or more Western
languages by taking part in commerce. The French
set up the first state-run schools in Senegal in 1818. In
British colonies and protectorates, the earliest schools
were established by missionaries. At first, these schools
concentrated on vocational training with some instruction
in European languages and Western civilization.
Most courses were taught in the vernacular, although
many schools later switched to English or French. Eventually,
pressure from Africans led to the introduction of
professional training, and the first institutes of higher
learning were established in the early twentieth century.
Most college-educated Africans, called “been-to’s,” however,
received their higher training abroad.
With independence, African countries established
their own state-run schools. The emphasis was on the primary
level, but high schools and universities were established
in major cities. The basic objectives have been to
introduce vocational training and improve literacy rates.
Unfortunately, both funding and trained teachers are
scarce in most countries, and few rural areas have schools.
As a result, illiteracy remains high, estimated at about
70 percent of the population across the continent. There
has been a perceptible shift toward education in the vernacular
languages. In West Africa, only about one in four
adults is conversant in a Western language.
One interesting vehicle for popular education that
emerged during the transition to independence in Nigeria
was the Onitsha Market pamphlet. Produced primarily
by the Ibo people in the southeast, who traditionally
valued egalitarianism and individual achievement, the
pamphlets were “how-to” books advising readers on how
to succeed in a rapidly changing Africa. They tended to
be short, inexpensive, and humorous, with flashy covers
to attract the potential buyer’s attention. One, titled
“The Nigerian Bachelor’s Guide,” sold 40,000 copies.
Unfortunately, the Onitsha Market and the pamphlet
tradition were destroyed during the Nigerian civil war of
the late 1960s, but they undoubtedly played an important
role during a crucial period in the country’s history. Recently,
Onitsha has become the largest producer of video
movies in sub-Saharan Africa.
Outside the major cities, where about three-quarters of
the continent’s inhabitants live, Western influence has
had less of an impact. Millions of people throughout Africa
(as in Asia) live much as their ancestors did, in
thatch huts without modern plumbing and electricity;
they farm or hunt by traditional methods, practice timehonored
family rituals, and believe in the traditional
deities. Even here, however, change is taking place. Slavery
has been eliminated, for the most part, although there
have been persistent reports of raids by slave traders on
defenseless villages in the southern Sudan. Economic
need, though, has brought about massive migrations as
some leave to work on plantations, others move to the
cities, and still others flee to refugee camps to escape starvation.
Migration itself is a wrenching experience, disrupting
familiar family and village ties and enforcing new
social relationships.
Nowhere, in fact, is the dichotomy between old and
new, native and foreign, rural and urban so clear and
painful as in Africa. Urban dwellers regard the village as
the repository of all that is backward in the African past,
while rural peoples view the growing urban areas as a
source of corruption, prostitution, hedonism, and the destruction
of communal customs and values. The tension
between traditional ways and Western culture is particularly
strong among African intellectuals, many of whom
are torn between their admiration for things Western and
their desire to retain an African identity. “Here we
stand,” wrote one Nigerian,
infants overblown
poised between two civilizations
finding the balancing irksome,
itching for something to happen,
to tip us one way or the other,
groping in the dark for a helping hand
and finding none.
World History
