During Africa’s colonisation, the West brought many foreign educational ideologies of which some were irrelevant to the African indigenous masses. The Africans were downgraded and equated with animals driven by instincts instead of being given an education which deserved human beings. This culminated in a debate about whether an African mind is capable of logical thinking. Rodney (1973) maintains that the colonisers did not pioneer education in Africa, but only introduced a new set of formal educational institutions which replaced those which were there before. He argues that the crucial aspect of pre-colonial African education was its relevance to Africans in sharp contrast to European education. According to him, indigenous African education had close links with social life, both in a material and spiritual sense, collective nature, many-sidedness, and progressive development in conformity with the successive stages of physical, emotional and mental development of the child. African education matched the realities of pre-colonial African society and produced well-rounded personalities to fit into that society. Lamb (1990) also asserts that before colonialism, the Africans devised political, economic and social systems which worked very well for them. It was only when they were thrust into a Western-oriented world that these systems started to break down. Like in Freire’s (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the colonisers and missionaries penetrated the cultural context of the indigenous people, by disrespecting their potentialities to lead and practise their culture. The invaders imposed their view of the world upon those they invaded and inhibited their creativity.
The invaded lost their originality as the invaders become masters in the process and responded to the values, the standards and the goals of the invaders. For a cultural invasion to succeed, the invaded must feel inferior to the invaders. The invaded were alienated from the spirit of their culture and themselves, and wanted to be like the invaders and hence walked like them, dressed like them and talked like them. The conqueror imposed his objectives on the vanquished and made them his possession.
In this regard, the colonial and missionary masters and prominent politicians went further by imposing their view of the world of white supremacy on the Black masses. The invaders become authors and actors in the process while the invaded remain objects the churches were implicated in the humiliation and slave trade of Africans as Pieterse (1996) maintains that for centuries some churches took part in slavery by keeping black slaves in large numbers on sugar plantations and as domestic servants.
For centuries, the stipends of the bishops and the ecclesiastical establishment were paid from the slave trade. When slavery was abolished in 1839, the church remained aloof. What is important to note is the absence of providing education to slaves by the church during that time. The explorers regularly gave evidence of racism as David Livingstone reports of the Kgatla in 1844 (in Botswana) as creatures of low character, who have fallen low on the scale of humanity. He went on to merge the images of the savage and heathen in a Christian vision of fallen creatures (Pieterse, 1996). For many years the Dutch Reformed Church (now the Uniting Church) and many churches in South Africa and Namibia have pursued and supported the South African government policy of racial segregation in education and even in places of worship. All mentioned cases illustrate the ill-treatment and perception of Africans by the Europeans, who never displayed their people as mere objects. This led Mazrui (1986) to question the civility of Europeans who first came to Africa to civilize and educate Africans. He emphasises that it was Europeans who were supposed to be civilized and educated instead of the Africans, because of the heinous crimes they committed against Africans in their own countries. Although the imperial masters differed from many countries in Africa according to their specific policies and overall approach to colonial development (Tordoff, 1984), the aims of the colonial education system remained analogous; which was to humiliate the indigenous Africans. In Francophone Africa, the education system was designed to make an African become an assimilee; one who could be assimilated or incorporated into the so-termed superior French culture. The Belgians called their educated Africans evolues, meaning Africans who have evolved from primitivity to White civilisation. In Portuguese colonies, the colonisers introduced the policy of assimilados or civilisados, meant to assimilate the
so-called educated Africans into the European civilization stream. In English colonies, the colonial educational system adopted indirect rule, separate development and inferior education for the Africans (Rodney, 1973). Tempted by greed which was created by the illusive Western education systems, many African leaders started stealing enormous resources from their countries and their people and stashed those resources in foreign countries like Europe. Instead of benefiting the children of Africa by upgrading their education systems, the resources went to benefit the children of the colonisers.