Essay On Post-Colonial Education

In the colonial period the medium-of-instruction problem was created by colonial powers that imposed for economic and cultural reasons their own languages as media of instruction in the territories that they occupied. In the post-colonial era, the search for effective solutions to medium-of-instruction problems in Africa is constrained by the desire among African elites to maintain their social status and power based on mastery of official languages and by economic power of western international development policies. Prior to colonization, each ethnolinguistic group in Africa used its own language for children’s education was linguistically and culturally contextualized in order to respond to the needs of the population. In Hausa land of Niger and Nigeria, for example, the Hausa language was used for both for intragroup communication among the different Hausa people and for all types of initiation activities. Children were socialized and initiated in their mother tongue, Hausa. Because the majority of Hausa became Muslim prior to colonization, they also used Arabic for religious education. The main goal of education provided in the Makaranta students who were able to develop advanced literary skills in Arabic used their newly acquired skills to write in their mother tongue. That is,

Coercive measures included physical punishment and public shaming of children who spoke their mother tongue in the schoolyard or their own neighborhood. Upward mobility in school and access to jobs in the colonial administration were strictly tied to mastery of French. The impact of colonial language policies on children is well described by NgugiwaThiong’o who laments that, “the language of an African child’s formal education was foreign. The language of the books he read was foreign. Thought in him took the visible form of a foreign