DEEPENING CRISIS IN THE EDUCATION OF AFRICAN PEOPLE
Abstract: Education fundamentally means the accumulation of
knowledge that will enable the possessor to lead him/herself out of
a low state/condition to a higher one. Such an education benefits
the recipient. Throughout Africa and the Diaspora the world-wide
system of European centered education, established over the past
500 years following the fall of Granada and the coming of Columbus
to the New World, has not and is not providing this kind of education
to the masses of the people. What the masses are receiving is an
education which does not benefit them, but which conditions them to
acquire attitudes toward the glaring inequalities of life so that
they can adjust themselves thereto with the least possible
difficulties; and when this fails, especially for the males, the
uneducated are placed under the control and supervision of the
vast prison system. Presently this latter is occurring on an ever
increasing scale, thereby deepening the crisis in the proper
education of African people and consequently denying them the kind
of education that will give them upward mobility and the kind of
mathematics, science, engineering and technology necessary for
the maintenance and building of a nation.
As Dr John Henrik Clarke repeatedly taught, oppressors know well that
they cannot oppress a consciously awake people. Thus, they developed
and erected the world-wide system of white supremacy, based upon the
false concept of race, giving rise to the five so-called races of
mankind-the European (white), the Mongolian (yellow), the American
(red), the Malayan (brown), and the Ethiopian (black), in descending
order of worth. This system was born of force, massive killings of
human beings, slavery, colonization, segregation/apartheid,
discrimination, rape, robbery, distortion of history and outright
fabrications, and operates in all areas of people activity: economics,
education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and
war. To maintain and justify such a system the oppressors by way of
massive pseudo-scientific propaganda defamed Africa and her people.
Over time this relentless all pervasive and ubiquitous system robbed
African people of the true knowledge of themselves, their sense of
self-worth, their sense of nation-ness, and of the sense of
their historic destiny.
Without any doubt, one of the principal barriers to the proper
education of African people is the everywhere presence of the color
line, which underscores the all-pervasive presence of white
supremacy and black inferiority. This problem is still with us, but
it is solvable by massively teaching the truth-the truth that humanity
is one, that all human beings are descendents of Africans, that all
the arts and the sciences originated in Africa, that the oldest book
in print is an African book, that the oldest mathematical texts are
African, that all languages originated in Africa, that religion
originated in Africa, that we must become self-reliant without
expecting the oppressor to solve it for us. We must, therefore,
systematically replace the false concepts of race, white supremacy and
black inferiority with the truth in all our schools and in all our media.
With the acquisition of the essential knowledge of mathematics, science,
engineering and technology we can return to nation building. By so
doing we shall be able to build strong communities in America and in
Africa. Then and only then will justice and respect come to us
all-Africa and her people. (By Abdulalim A Shabazz, PhD)
DrAAS.info