7 1.7 WEAKNESSES AND STRENGTHS OF AFRICAN TRADITIONAL EDUCATION

A major shortcoming of African traditional education is that it focused almost exclusively on the clan or tribe and hardly prepared its recipients for outside contact. Practically, this meant that the skills and knowledge possessed by a given ethnic group could not be easily transmitted to another tribe (Tiberondwa, 1978). Moreover, the absence of literacy implied that the accumulated knowledge and skills could not be preserved in a written form. This prevented the transfer of the same from one locality to another and from one generation to the next. Many wise Africans have died with their own wisdom.

A close examination of traditional methods of teaching further reveals that customary education was wanting or deficient in this area. Tiberondwa (1978) has rightly observed that among some tribes in pre-colonial Uganda, for example, there was too much reliance on inculcation of fear and punishment as a means of teaching. Among the Ankole, “slow learners and offenders were killed to discourage slow learning and scare young people from committing similar offences” (Tiberondwa, 1978, p. 10). This means of teaching could only produce learners who, out of fear, were obedient and submissive. They committed to memory ideas that they did not understand and the values they had no right to question. Indigenous education thus tended to kill the spirit of initiative, innovation and enterprise, all of which are (or should be) promoted by modem education in Africa.

In spite of its shortcomings, traditional education was an effective way of preparing young people for their future. The reasons for saying this are as follows:

• It was a successful means of maintaining the economic, social and cultural structures and stability of the societies in which it was practiced. Without doubt, indigenous education prepared both boys and girls to come to terms with the physical, social and spiritual world of their time; it also prepared them for the world of work. Children were trained in skills that made them become productive and useful to themselves and to the society.
• Similarly, the absence of social tension (which today manifests itself in various crimes and divorce rates) points to how successful indigenous education was in promoting and enhancing sound human relations within pre-colonial African societies. Through traditional education, young people acquired a communal rather than an individualistic outlook.
• Education was instrumental in helping people to subordinate their personal interests to those of the wider community and to appreciate the values, norms and beliefs of their society. Thus, indigenous education prepared children to play their roles in the family, clan and the tribe as a whole.
• Pre-colonial education should further be credited for its enormous capacity to preserve cultural heritage. In precolonial Africa, education served as an important tool for preserving and passing on time-tested skills, customs and knowledge from generation to generation. It was indeed through their education that young people learned to appreciate and value the heritage of their forebears: their language, norms and such attributes as chastity, honesty, diligence, valour, hard-work, generosity and hospitality. Once children understood and appreciated their cultural heritage, they too passed it on to their offspring who in turn did the same to their own children. In this way, the continuity of the tribe’s pattern of life was assured.

Indigenous education has continued to exist side by side with Western schools. The informality of the processes should not blind us to the deliberate manner in which the education of the child was undertaken, or the extent to which society relied for its survival and sustenance on the individual human factor of ingenuity and innovation and took steps to foster them.

Because of the contempt that those with Western education developed for the indigenous systems of education the spread of Western education has contributed little to the knowledge of agriculture, health sciences, crafts and traditional manufacturing processes that continue to sustain life in rural areas. The worldview, the basic aesthetic values and explanation of good and evil, sickness or health, continued to derive from the traditional culture.

A review of education’s roots, provided one avoids falling into the trap of retrospective idealization, may be fertile for pedagogic thought and enrich present day education with unduly neglected values and experience.