Issue 11 | ...Celebrating the world’s richest continent | http://www.nomadafricamag.com | 47cally produced. The textbook industry in
the country is booming because mate-
rials produced from outside can’t be
used to teach the new curriculum. Thus,
where John Speke would have been
praised as the one who discovered the
River Nile, the Primary Five textbook
says that the river was called Kiira by
the Basoga, who live around it, and John
Speke was the first European to see it.
African-centred education
An African-centred education is defined
as education designed to empower
African people. A central premise is that
many Africans have been subjugated by
limiting their awareness of themselves
and indoctrinating them with ideas that
work against them.
Beyond these confidence-building val-
ues, the creativity of the African child
must be unleashed in schools, to culti-
vate a focus on solving problems and
creating, making and selling stuff to the
whole world. For, after all, when the
Gross National Products of countries are
measured, it is precisely about the har-
nessing of the human resources of that
country to deliver goods and services.
The natural resources are just an en-
abler.
As ideas about the ideal global educa-
tional paradigm shift like the desert
sands of Qatar, so must African policy
makers rethink education, ensuring that
it is in the best interests of the conti-
nent, and resist influences and pres-
sures designed to entrench a status
quo. Anything short of that will be slow
suicide. That is why there is an urgent
need for disruption in education, and
also why teamwork involving all Africans
on the continent and in the diaspora is
vital.
Unleashing the African genius
Let us stop for a moment and look at
how innovation and technological
progress has refocused our approach to
the business of education. Can it be said
that the digital age has projected our
way of thinking in a way that many
would not have imagined half a century
ago?
This immense giant leap into the future
sometimes passes us by since we are liv-
ing and breathing it, from simple texting
and skyping to printing 3 dimensional
objects, there is no turning back some
would say. With online interactive par-
ticipation to tablets at your fingertips,
the business of education has acquired
a whole new weapons arsenal that can
and should be unleashed on those will-
ing to participate.In Africa, these innovations are happen-
ing and many countries already have
superfast internet facilities, not to men-
tion the mobile giant that woke up
some years ago resulting in Africa being
one of the fastest growing mobile
phone markets in the world. As the fa-
mous ad says – but wait, there is more- the growth has not yet stopped and
saturation point has yet not been
reached.
Mobile learning platforms are playing an
integral part in the education teaching
chain. New mobile interactive applica-
tions are being implemented every day,
from publishing books on phone reader
apps to social media platforms such as
Africa’s largest homegrown mobile so-
cial network MXit. Currently, the South
How is Africa going to harness its vast human
and natural resources in the direction needed, as the
Pan-African icon Kwame Nkrumah put it, “To allow the African
genius full expression”?