HOW FAR SHOULD WE GO WHEN SELECTING, ADOPTING AND ADAPTING WESTERN EDUCATIONAL SYLLABI FOR OUR SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES? Commentary.

We do not need a Niagara of heartfelt words or million dollar ones to tell you that you are wrong when you take certain decisions to digress from the norm for your political or philosophical gains that are ephemeral. An African aphorism goes that if you do not accompany a neighbor to their farm you have to attend to yours. What happens when you do not have yours? You will be bound to seal your mouth when capable farmers are discussing burning farming issues. We do certain things in compliance with our jurisdictions or beliefs but we tend to forget that the authors who propounded them were for their cohorts of their era. Applying some of  them today verbatim with Teutonic or Spartan rigidity would appear like forcing square pegs into round holes. They put us at disadvantaged positions in our apparently homogenized and harmonious world of today. They need to be revamped for the contemporary users as they are already démodé. We assume or strive towards monoculture in our world and that is awry. Some intelligentsia tend to ignore the harm this is inflicting on minorities or those whose cultures cannot raise their heads above the sea-level to glimpse at the approaching yardarm. Oftentimes the values of these minorities are eroded and they come in stack naked in their birthday suits as go-go dancers who strip to entertain muzzy men after which they are hollow and are looked down upon as a horde of ner’-do-wells who cannot offer anything beneficial under normal circumstances.

Far from it! Those danseuses are not vacant. In their natural world they are queens and divine but when we drag them into ours they are found wanting not because they are born that way but because they have to adopt and adapt to our ways. Whatever we conceive them to be; in some special cases we have to adapt if not we are sent into oblivion. We will see below where there is that need to learn others’ values, let us call it knowledge or wisdom that might not have emanated from our original homes and has nothing to do with our philosophy then and in the future. However with time they might be beneficial. When welcoming or supplanting them with ours, care must be taken not to throw away the bathwater and the baby.

We find ourselves in some climatic regions that are different from what we have at our homes. The only way to be comfortable is to adopt and adapt if not we live in isolation and banish ourselves. When it comes to health as having money, many of us could do the impossible to have them: We have seen the crippled walk stalwartly, the blind seeing and mermaids turning into mermen and vice versa just to get what they want.  We are going to substantiate with the treatment of certain diseases. There are some that are confined in certain climatic regions because the climatic factors there are ideal for the growth of certain bacteria or vectors of those harmful bacteria. In that case the doctors or scientists of those regions, though not educated to our expected standards are more than qualified to handle special diseases than apothecaries in those regions where they are not inherently their homes.

A Caucasian Quebecker who was working in Gabon in Central Africa died from malaria he contacted while working over there. The locals some of you still call natives were used to it and he could have been cured in less than two weeks. Instead, he got agitated and bore in his mind that he was not to be treated efficiently in Gabon. His immediate desire was to be evacuated. Evacuated he was. On reaching Quebec his home town in Canada, he was rushed to a hospital and the local doctors who were not used to treating malaria had to take samples, fluid specimens from his body to ship to laboratories away where malarial microbes were analysed. By the time all the tests were done and results returned to the doctors the malarial microbes had spread in him enormously as those of the most dreaded Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). By the time drugs were ordered to be administered, this man went into coma and eventually died.

What happens when malarial patients show up at any tropical hospital? Their temperatures are taken and if it is above certain Celsius, his or her blood is examined not in the laboratory. How? His eye lids are simply opened by a nurse and the amount or red blood corpuscles or color tells him or her that the patient has contacted malaria. The patient is immediately treated for malaria with its drugs without necessarily waiting for laboratory results. In this way death from malaria are minimized. Thence the chances of anyone dying from malaria once it is detected at its early stage of development are slim. It goes to reason that if our Quebecer had been allowed to be treated in any hospital in Gabon he would not have died. Many North Americans on secondment in the tropics are efficiently treated this way in Africa and return home after their ordeals to tell their tales..

However the previous allusion is not our cardinal point of discussion. It is our insinuation that sources of knowledge are not to be minimized or prejudiced. Eventually all are found to be beneficial not necessarily because they could not be applicable in the regions where they are not required. In some North American classification of languages, they often ignore African languages which they minimize by calling them dialects. When it comes to some vital communication, a modicum of these dialects could mean a matter of life and death to field scientists and even others for intelligence gathering.  It tells us that it would be beneficial for Russians, North Americans and Europeans to study malaria and its repercussion not necessarily because they would one day have conditions favorable for the spread of anopheles mosquitoes but because they could have their citizens working in the tropics where assorted malaria are prevalent. They could be there for visits, military maneuvers as during the Vietnamese War with America (1959-1975), work or for other emergency contingencies. As such they could be exposed to malarial parasites as any other inhabitant of the tropics. Their foreknowledge would be beneficial.

Therefore should we be bothered teaching out students tropical medicine, geography, history or any other sciences or knowledge that is generally beneficial to those living under tropical conditions? It will be prudent to teach all subjects that may be more beneficial to people far away from us than to discriminate on the assumption that we would one day not visit those regions or have nothing to do with them since we were not a megalomaniac colonial master with colonies around the world or having future colonization ambition.

It is a fact that there are countries in Africa that have taken away the teaching of glaciology (glacier and glaciation) from their syllabi as being immaterial. Is it? It is not only glaciology but they have taken away histories of other European, American and Asian countries from their syllabi. The irony is that they teach Chinese, American English, and English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and other European languages. How do you draw a rigid boundary between sciences and dictate with rationales that others should not be studied as they have no positive influence on the progress of your countries? So when you see Boko Haram and all those repulsive men associated with a philosophy called Mohammedanism barring the teaching of Western type of education you have a feeling that they are short sighted, if not deranged. Here we have some third world states rejecting their bucketful of multitude of economic, social and other panacea for their vistas of woes.

We will tell them a story that will make them wonder and think if at all they could. There are ever some jokes of a ‘Swiss navy’. The reasoning is that Switzerland is landlocked and needs no navy as Great Britain, Canada, America, Brazil, South Africa or Malaysia where they have access to the seas. It does not hold as Swiss interest is not only confined within its borders. If their interests are attacked, in say Indonesia, the only solution would have to be using their frigates to fight as no other nation state is going to relinquish theirs when there are eminent treats of wars.

Furthermore we have another case where many Europeans even ethnographers casually ignored an African script for being insignificant as many still look at some African languages as moribund and not worthy of being studied. You will be surprised to find out that many learn Japanese and would never touch Hausa whose native speakers are numerically more than those who speak Japanese. Why won’t they study Hausa bakwai? They put financial remuneration to be derived from such studies above all. If there is none in the study of Hausa it is dropped. Are they following the right path?

We will proceed with another illustration, script that gainsays motive for others studying your language. The language script of interest here is that of the Vai in the Ebola riven Liberia of today. This is often compared with Bamum script in Cameroun Republique, Africa (see the plate below). These rank among the few scripts that Africans had used comparable to well-known ones as Arabic, Roman, Russian, Hindi, and Greek scripts.

Sample of Ba-Mum script, a ka uku mfe mfe. Route map from the the capital to the sovereign's estate in 1909. Primitive this script may look but it is a gem of a genius. (c) Viban Viban NGO. 2014.

The Allied Forces during the Second World War had ignored the study of Vai. The French instead imprisoned Chief Njoya of Bamum who invited the script, aka u ku mfe mfe for being recalcitrant after having learned nothing from it. The Germans who were the first colonial masters of Kamerun in 1884  who stumble on it in 1909 started learning it before being chased out when they were defeated there in 1915 by the Allied Forces. It might have been primitive to other Europeans but the primitive Vai the Germans learned gave the Germans a relative advantage over the Allied Forces during the outbreak of the Second World War, 1939-1945. While others were looking at Vai script in askance, the German Government had sent specialists who mastered it avariciously. Hitler’s navy was aware of the fact that their cousins had also mastered German and could intercept coded messages sent to their submarines, and war frigates in the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. With this knowledge they sent information around that was intercepted by Americans, British, and the French but they were Greek to them.  

The Germans went on that way and were able to inflict untold mayhem to the Allied troops. They torpedoed, lay mines and sank ships in places where they were least expected and could slip through the Allied ambuscades with ease.  We are not talking of the damage of the Soames and above all Gallipoli the Turks inflicted on the British navy during the First World War. The Germans were way ahead of the rest of their cousins and had previewed the progress of the Second World War. Before the Allied could discover that an African script was being used for communication, the damages had been done and what could have been curtailed at its bud was deadly spiraling out of control.

Why are we concerned with the alluded example? It is to demonstrate that no knowledge is useless. Come to think of it, there are few Americans who know of the Kumbo Blue Plateau reputed to having most probably the best climate in the world where spring conditions in North America are replicated as in no other place on earth year in year out. The point is that most American generically subsumes Africa under terra incognita for spurious reasons as Ebola, and other diseases. This ignorance is accentuated by charities that pay hefty sums to advertise Africans on Western televisions and other media by using skeletal kwashiorkor ridden sea of Africans children to engender sympathy and get money for their projects.  Additionally, pharmacies who want to sell their drugs and often tell them if they had been to countries or a country where there are fungi or infectious tropical diseases. The picture of the tropic is like those of the 16^th to the 19^th century when man had not discovered bacteria and diseases and sicknesses were attributed to witchcraft that bring the hearts to the mouths of most rank and file North Americans.  It is all wrong for those who are interested as modern colonialists as the Chinese and Indians quietly come and even settle to exploit. Europeans and Americans who started and even carved out colonies have to reason fast if not they may one day have not a trading inch in the vast Sahara and parched Namibian Desert not to mention the tropical jungle of Central and Western Africa.

There are people who don’t bother but learn what is considered to be primitive. They send along experts to live with the locals and learn their ways and what others may consider as primitive. Even if they are stricto senso primitive by their standards of today, it should be borne in mind that there is no single community in the world that never passed through the Stone Age and never lived in caves or some wilderness. The Americans discover anthropological studies the French had carried out prior to the beginning of the US-Vietnamese War once considered being primitive to be gems of intelligence.

Rare do we find what we have to teach to be so attractive to our students that they come to wait for the teacher in class hours before the teacher comes in. I recalled teaching GIS, Remote Sensing and Cartography. Some of my students remarked that everything was so important that ten minute of not being attentive made one felt as if one had missed a month of lecturing. Others told me that they glued to my lessons for they could preview their relevance in their future lives and that I was intelligent. On intelligence, I explained to them that I was never ever satisfied with what I had learned in class and it was ever my ambition to find out more. Owing to reading avariciously and taking note of details, I was able to be comfortable in the company of lawyers, economists, political scientists, anthropologists at my international Universities and did not find myself wanting. Others claimed that I was studying political science and not environmental sciences we will refer to below. Moreover, I believed that I did not know enough of what others thought I was an expert in and that catapulted me the more to go deeply into them. Nevertheless, I felt flattered but encouraged them too.  Whatever their perception of my teaching, not all they would come across in their lives would be dazzlingly enchanting and challenging. They might ignore them as being boring and they would turn out to be the most important in their lives.

When I first visited London and was using the Senate House Library of the University of London, I discovered that the CIA had written country book of all nation states conceivable on earth. Similarly, I discovered that the UK War Office or the Admiralty was also writing and drawing maps of countries that were not even related to the British Government during the Second World War. When I left LSE, my first paid assignment was to write a country profile of an African country. I began to know why country reports were valuable sources of information. They were objective and written by foreigners who were not prejudiced. You will remember now that at the time of writing we do not know the true population of a good number of African countries. It is because the government of the day dishes out amenities based on population of districts, regions, provinces or states as they variously call them. The tendency is for the censor officials to be bribed to falsify results, data and that is academic dishonesty. They are usually inflated. Similarly when one is reading information in national atlases they are falsified for propagandistic reasons. As such if big powers as France, Great Britain, the USA and others want to get information they do not rely on that provided by the government of the day but by their private informants. If Americans and British had ignored such regions as not beneficial to them they would not have written valuable country reports [see Google for them].

I ratiocinated why on earth those countries sent diplomats abroad where money was sunk into bottomless pits.  There were disasters in those countries and media would be broadcasting wrong information extracted from old secondary sources.  No one from the embassy would opt to rectify the wrongs. They were not of use as they had not mastered the history and geography of their countries prior to leaving for their foreign appointments. Therefore, it was usually a waste of time for foreigners to approach them for certain information. Missions relied on their information they have collected rather than on their embassies or high commissions who often painted bogus rosy pictures of their states when they were not so. The question was how they were to compare and contrast the growth of their economics when they did not even have an economic index?

When we have the likes of Taliban in Africa, Boko Haram and Al-Sahbaab that are bent on wiping out younger generation from central Africa because they were being schooled in Western Ways, you will think that it is because they are naïve and following some archaic philosophies of the Arabs in their Koran. No! When African intellectuals are advancing that African school and college syllabi should expunge North American and European history and geography from them, you are bound to question how different their thoughts are from the infamous deranged Boko Haram and ISIS?  If the ISIS as Saudi Arabia and others belonging to that Arc of Evil are bent on expunging Westernization, and education and African intellectual naively do away with glaciology, European History and Geography, what are the difference between them and the Taliban, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram and ISIS?

How do you engage in environmental scientific studies of tropical climate in isolation of the temperate and tundra climatic conditions because they are not related to Africa or because they are in Europe or Argentina thousands of miles away? You cannot scientifically talk of the formation of tropical climates without referring to those of the temperate lands, then that would be a travesty. The cold weathers in the temperate lands are affected by the tropical conditions and vice versa. Similarly, tropical conditions are affected by the winds, jet streams or high and low pressures in the temperate zones. The ice fields or glaciers have roles to play in the movement of the winds, the effect on the ocean currents that conversely affect the climate of the tropical zones. Therefore you cannot study the tropical conditions effectively and sufficiently without studying the climate in the northern and southern hemispheres. In consequence, if educationists who propounded syllabi for the tropical schools leaving out temperate and tundra zones, will only get a naught from me. It is because they are talking of a complete man minus his limbs. They forget that science is still science wherever it is studied in the world and even in the outer space.

It is not ironical that Boko Haram would massacred on 10 November, 2014,  47 students  and injuring 79 at a school in Potiskum in Yobe State of Nigeria as their way of stamping out Western Education and instilling the Koranic philosophies in the minds of innocent Africans. It is surprising that Boko Haram elements are Western educated and use Western military arsenals to massacre innocent people. In the same vein they employ Western tools of communication for their propagandistic aims yet denounce Western education. What are their intentions? Are they to turn able people to potatoes so as to ride on them? They naively believe as Pol Pot that they are making the world a better place. Did the Soviet Union succeed with their doctrine of Communism and the exclusion of Western free economic thinking and operations, capitalism? 

It woefully faltered. Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev then president of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) with his doctrine of glasnost and perestroika who was augural and brought about a change leading to the pulling down of the infamous Berlin Wall built to separate the Western capitalists from the communists Eastern Europe. The remnants of the Soviet Union had since then been gradually reverting to be a better place even though President Vladimir Boris still singly wants to appear tough. China is similarly emulating free economy. The reward is glaring as their economy is burgeoning and rivaling the giant, United States of America for the first time in its modern history.

In a way, the Arab or Islamic fundamentalists in Arabic or Muslim influenced states are under developing their countries economically and culturally. For them to believe in a “god,” that should rightly be called Devil who advocates the denial of education from the society, wanton killing of the innocent peoples is preposterous.  The economic growth and peaceful progress in the world after the Second World War (1938-1945) have been attributed to peace and education. So, we are inclined to conclude that Islamic fundamentalists are embodiment of evil and should not ever be given an inch by any level headed person on earth. Their open animosity for the state of Israel and the Christian world in toto should not be taken lightly as given the slightest opportunity the world could see an incomparable pogrom by these individuals who show not remorse when decapitating even children. With this their attitude, belligerency, which person in his right frame of mind could invest in the Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, Taliban, and ISIS controlled parts of the world? Only devils like them could deal with them.

The call is for those advocating evil or supporting it to revert to an educational system that will bring peace and progress in the world now before it is too late. The Western sort of education is scientific and it is and has never been out to put down Islam or any other religion or old philosophies. There might have been the knighthood of the crusaders in the past but we are in the 21^st century and those using violence to push forward their agenda will not succeed. Their illusionary view to fly the black flag of evil dowers over the White House, Champs Elysee and the over Buckingham Palace and on Nelson's Column at Trafalgar Square in London, UK is a hollow cry of a moribund philosophy. America, Europe and their allies will not enter to be the ombudsman of the world but if they are going to be cornered by these elements, arcs of evil, there will be no choice other than facing the brunt even when President Barack Obama is still in office irrespective of his downy approach.

I once frowned when I read that St Augustine of North Africa, the writer of Confessions had said that he rather was with his dog than with someone whose language he did not understand. He might have had a point base on the society he was in. Mankind has since evolved and there are means now that we could learn a language within a short space of time and there is no question of isolating ourselves because we cannot communicate. St. Augustine might have meant ideologies that were diametrically opposing. Then human intercourse was not as fluid as what we have today. Similarly there are questioned phrases in what we see as holy books that cannot be taken with the pinch of salt as they were written based on the traditions of the day that had since changed or evolved to synchronize with modernity. We have cited a few lines here from the Quran for you the reader to judge for yourself if you would today Friday, November-14-2014 the year of Our Lord approve:

"O believers make war on the infidels (non-Muslims the authors expansion) who dwell around you, let them find harshness in you” - Quran 9:123

“When the sacred months are over, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them” – 

Quran 9:5

“Fight against Christians and Jews that believe neither in Allah nor in the last day…and do not embrace the true faith” - Q 9:29

“Fighting is obligatory for you (Muslims), even if you dislike it” - Q 2:216

“Do you think you would enter Paradise before Allah knows the men who fought hard and steadfast?” – Q 3:142

“Believers take neither Jews nor Christians for friends or helpers” - Q 5:51

“Let not the believers take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers.” - Q 3:28.

“Our Prophet (Mohammed), ordered us to fight you (non-Muslims, again our expansion) till you worship Allah alone or pay us Jizyah (extortion) in submission…Whoever amongst us is killed as a martyr shall go to Paradise…and whoever survives shall become your master” – Sahih Bukhari 4:53:386

“Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…” - Sahih Muslim 19:4294

It is for that reason that some of what the Quran preaches today is decadence. How many of you will inculcate the above into your students or children?  Inciting killing in the name of religion cannot be accepted. As such when the Saudis decapitate foreigners for having stolen with the rationale that they are following the holy Quran we look at them as gaudily dressed barbarians. Should they not be ostracized from the society of civilized people if they stoically refuse to change, modernize their Quran? Have they ever heard of a disease of pilfering called kleptomania? Have they never sinned? If they have never, let them throw stone the person they claim is a sinner in the name of Allah. Of course all of them are sinners and kill as their ways of covering up their sins. How do you clean a home by putting dirt under your carpet? In this disease of kleptomania, the thief has what he is stealing in abundance yet goes on to steal. It is because he is sick and needs treatment and not being killed…. There are many in the Arab worlds who believe that an American cannot be friendly with an Arab. One of them elaborated that (12/11/2014) that the Americans’ friendship with the Arab countries was based on economic gains, fossil fuel and not natural. Friendship of convenience! So as it stands they could only be punished when the oil wells would be dried out. How long shall we wait for this to happen? It is only then that economic sanction could work when they are cordoned off from the rest of good people provided others cooperate. If the Soviet Union that is far larger could be forced to kowtow for better, what more of smaller Middle East States?

We saw above that the veracity of language learning. We do not learn a person’s language for the sake of communicating with him or her without any emoluments. When we learn French, German, Zulu or Kishwahil we do not only learn those languages, we learn the speakers’ cultures, history, philosophies and many more. Those spur us. The word ‘la nourriture’ to the French man brings to memory plenty of things: wine, sitting down of a family and friends around a table to eat, chat, exchange ideas, planning and many more. So when you learn that word, it is tagged with plenty of uncountable events or things associated with the French ways of life, now and in the past. Therefore, to restrict anyone from learning such a language is cruel and infringement on his human right or learning right we believe contradicts UNESCO’s motives.

You will observe that in librarianship, knowledge be it in book format, be it analogue or electronic, pictorial, vocal, or volumetric cannot be denied anyone if they have reached the rightful age to have access to them. If Boko Haram and ISIS are out to deny people access to knowledge because it is alleged to be Western when some of them are Westerners, it should never ever be accepted. If some naïve third world states want to deny their citizens from learning Western history, environmental studies, and glaciology as in some states in Western Africa, it should not be allowed. It is the right of all students to be inculcated with what others are learning in other parts of the world. After all they are citizens of this world and should not be denied knowledge of any part of the worlds as it is assumed that they would never have anything to do with those parts of the world.

You will see that Information Technology (IT) is highly developed in the Western world and its working language is essentially English. Students in French, Spanish and Portuguese Speaking worlds know this so well and often admit that to master IT sufficiently and effectively, it is imperative to master English. Consequently are the Boko Haram, ISIS, Al-Sahbaab followers’ right when they want to deny their people this free knowledge that is proven to be good as a teaching and working tool for the rest of mankind? Some non-English speaking countries in Europe had admitted that it were cheaper for their students to learn English as most scientific papers were first published in English before they were translated into other languages. Even when they are published in other languages other than English, it took so long before they were translated into their languages before they had that information. Then they were often late. The Dutch Government and other European nation states even including Rwanda in Africa that was under Belgium in the past that used French as it colonial language now ruled by a great tactician President Joseph Kigame agreed with me and included English as a leading teaching national language in his country. The benefits are enormous now and in the future.

Kigame’s attitude takes us to late Dr. Hasting Banda, President of Malawi (1896-1994) a graduate of a Scottish school. He set up an elite school, the Kamuzu Academy to emulate Eton of England and that had a multiplier effect. Irrespective of the fact that he was scathingly criticised for his open diplomatic relation with South Africa and the racist white regime of Ian Smith, P.M., when there were sanctions imposed on them for their despicable apartheid policies. Banda’s educational bases did have a profound positive effect on his country. My study with some students from that school who ended up studying in renounced schools as LSE and Witwatersrand University in South Africa was proof of its success. Whatever some of us still question if it were necessary to instill Latin and Greek classics in the minds of budding Africans and what good they were to be in the development of Africa. On the whole most are bases of the erudite upon which Western education is buttressed. At least he left a better system of education to his Africans and respect of women whom he stressed where not objects of dalliance as often portrayed by their revealing dressing styles and tight pantaloons which he banned from Malawi.

Having advanced some of these points, we are not endorsing the fact that there are no flaws in the Western sort of education. That is why we have all the time been advocating adoption and adaptation to meet our tailored requirements. Let us shelf that as a subject matter for a separate piece. Western education has to be welcomed as it has been proven to be a harbinger of success in Africa and elsewhere though some left wingers and Africanists may contradict our generalization. If so, let them go to their farms and prove to us that they can fend for themselves and outdistance European and others’ knowledge. However we are not going to entertain teaching Africans history of France with a beginning of a history text meant for African students starting with a ridiculous sentence: ‘We the Gauls (Gaulois)…..” The Africans who were under the French colonial regime were never Gauls or French per se and were not even, when sadly thoroughly assimilated. So, there was no question of force-feeding them with such absurd information. It is for this reason that hawkish proponents of Boko Haram and those who are not for the teaching of glaciology, temperate physical geology and European history in African schools should learn to adopt and adapt. It should be crystal clear that the content of any discipline is still the same wherever it is taught or studied.  Furthermore, it should be known that not long ago, Oxford History of Africa glaringly stated that Africans had no history until the coming of the White into Africa. That was far-fetched as the head can never be taller than the shoulders. If civilization started from Egypt, Africa before proceeding to Europe, Europeans could not have been ahead in history.  To them, if it was not recorded in written form it was not history. That is awry for oral sources withstood the test of time too. Were they right or were their reasoning prostituted by racism or another black man’s burden? That was downright a hug of patronizing-academic arrogance that cannot be accepted today without duels. Those are statements that had to be vehemently refuted.

© Dr. Viban Viban Ngo, 2014.