Malcolm X, the African Diaspora and Education
“Education is the passport to our future,” Malcolm X reverberated to the world that statement. Throughout centuries and throughout civilisations we have seen education being implemented in its different manifestations respective of those civilisations’ cultural and social needs. As a by-product, the children who came out of those systems drove their cultural and social heritage forward with considerable zeal that led to the perpetuation of those civilisations. When one observes the educational institutions of the Ancient Greeks, one is confronted with the type of education that reflected the needs of that society that venerated reason and contemplative thought, which was the basis for its governments. In the Great Civilisations of West Africa, The Songhay in particular, the educational systems reflected those societies need of, first and foremost, to inculcate in its generations the need for moral excellence which was believed to be an important ingredient in a just and harmonious social environment. All of the civilisations that existed since the dawn of time had this important element governing the scheme of things- an education for its youth that imbues that society’s traditions and values and hence carrying those elements forward to their future generations.
When the colonialists started to invade our territories the first thing they did was to dismantle our educational institutions and replace them with their own. Even though they militarily removed the existing chiefdoms and other local forms of governments they had always faced resistance and hence the need for an ideological ‘brainwashing’ of the African societies which was made possible by the establishment of an education which propagated and promulgated the colonialists values and worldview. The curriculum carried the viewpoints of the colonialists, which did not by any means, reflect the social and cultural heritage of the native peoples. It enforced ideas which indoctrinated the pseudo-inferiority of the black people and geared the populace to the legitimating of the colonial rule. The colonialists had a reality principle which needed to serve the perpetuation of its power. What they did as Wilhelm Reich in his ‘Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis’ explicates was to bring the proletariat ‘to accept this reality principle’ which means ‘an affirmation of the proletariat exploitation […] as a whole.’ This process led to the students being made to internalise this reality principle and consequently develop a false conscious amongst the populace of the proletariat’s position in the world around him. By falsifying his conscious activity, as Frantz Fanon says, the black man wears a white mask. The colonialist’s education teaches him to be non-white is to be inhuman and he wishes to be human. Consequently, he starts hating himself and hence the result is a deeply hammered inferiority complex. Therefore he premises all his principles and self-governing laws as postulated by the white man-explicitly or implicitly.
