The persisting economic hardship in the country and our slow pace of development and building a nation really call for Afrocentric education and disobedient, disruptive and breakaway thinking and thinkers. It is given that a desperate situation requires a desperate solution. And Americans would say when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. In ‘As You Like It,’ William Shakespeare posits that ‘sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.’ Robert Schuller in his book, ‘Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do,’ espoused the temporariness of adversity or suffering.
Arising from the foregoing, it has become obvious that resolving Nigeria’s problems, whether political, economic or social, require disobedient and disruptive thinkers. It also requires imaginative thinkers as well. It equally requires great dreamers, people who can see glory out of our present gloom. It requires people who can see hope in a situation of seeming hopelessness. Nigeria’s adversity is not beyond redemption. No matter our challenges, there is hope. The promising New Year offers us great hope. Let’s suspend our unbelief as they say in literary circle while ravaging the pleasure of reading fiction.
I believe that Prof. Ndukaeze Nwabueze’s thought-provoking 2024 inaugural lecture at the University of Lagos, entitled ‘Afrocentricity: The Power of Weakness’ spoke to the need to reform our political and educational thinking to develop our country. He urged his readers to use Afrocentric and disobedient thinking to free Nigeria and other African countries from the received education models, which are still subjugating us to imperialistic domination and dependence.
His radical proposition is that we should jettison the received Western education and replace it with Afrocentric education. In other words, he wants us to domestic our education and use it to solve our peculiar problems. His views are not entirely new, what is novel about them is the manner of speaking. Nwabueze’s inaugural, which he describes as unusual, is resonating in so many ways.
Apart from what he says, I am more interested in the manner he says those things. The tone and texture of the inaugural appear magical, arresting and challenging to the dictates of our times and how we can wriggle out of the situation. I like reading inaugural lectures, but this unusual one has compelled me to read it and read it again and again. The writing is dense and layered in deep thought and sense. It requires close reading and re-reading to decipher the message of the writer. The inaugural lecture is loaded with meanings and new ways of thinking in a challenging world and environment.
His Afrocentric disposition and disobedient thinking reminds one of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s ‘Teacher Don’t Teach me Nonsense.’ It reminds one of what Chinua Achebe has done with the African novel alongside JP Clark and Wole Soyinka. It reminds one of what Kenneth Dike has done with African History alongside other compatriots. Nigeria’s reigning Afrobeat came from disruptive thinking. Biafran Ogbunigwe, mass killer, is a productive of breakaway thinking. I entirely agree with Nwabueze that ‘unusual problems beget unusual solutions.’
Nwabueze says that ‘Afrocentricity is an idea, a theory, a method, an analytical framework, an ontological tradition, an epistemological fountain, a fresh pool of traditional, as well as, contemporary African cosmology waiting to be harnessed. If Africans embrace it, research into it, extend and expand it, apply it, critic it and cure it of its shortcomings, they will become truly triumphant.’
He wants us ‘to terminate relationships predicated on continued colonization in the mind of the people, in the way they think and act in society and our relationships with the rest of the world.’ He lamented that ‘education policy in these societies, especially in Africa simply continues with the colonial education legacy without the essential, deterministic, and patriotic zeal to assess it for fitness for purpose and the inescapable change consequent that evaluation given the mandatory emancipator duty of education in the new society.’
He goes on to assert that ‘the extent to which ‘universal’ education inherited as a colonial legacy is adequate for the huge task of nation-building and wealth creation to free the peoples’ minds and guarantee them a high standard of living, constitutes some of the critical parameters by which the acquired education system should be measured.’ According to him, ‘it might therefore be necessary to ask if the education system thrust on Nigerians by the British impostors has served our national purpose optimally. The obvious answer to this question in our case is a loud ‘no.’
The inaugural lecturer let’s know that education, especially colonial education, is not ideologically neutral. It is a form of politics. Religion is not ideologically neutral as well. Even stories are also not ideologically neutral. Achebe’s close reading of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ unmasked the racist undertones of that European classic on colonialism. Nwabueze wants us to move away from the pedagogy of the oppressed to pedagogy of freedom using disobedient thinking.
He firmly believes that fixing the State (country) will spearhead fixing the education sector. He also claims that fixing the State entails focusing on the people and government. Fixing Nigeria requires the active participation all the people, the rulers and the ruled, ordinary people and civil society organizations. Despite our oil wealth and other endowed resources, Nigeria is still classified as one of the development-arrested economies, which are typically and typologically, sellers of raw materials and importers of manufactured commodities. He submits that ‘the respective European powers took undue advantage of their subject satellite countries to grow their economies back home at the expense of the people in the colonies.’
Our education is not yet where it should be. We are still engrossed in rote learning and memorization of what the teacher says and not what we think. There is urgent need to democratize education and teaching. Teaching is not a one-way traffic. Both the teacher and the learners are teachers and learners at the same time. We also need to redefine the universalism of knowledge and educational products. We must question the patterns and universalism in writing academic papers.
We must review our academic curriculum to meet our needs. Of what use is learning that cannot solve our problems, cure illnesses and take us to the moon or El Dorado? We can use our education to solve poverty, hunger, unemployment and insecurity, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies. We can use education to improve our election and governance. We can use education to fasten our nation-building, which is taking us a fairly longer time to actualize.
However, we need disobedient and disruptive thinkers to solve these problems. Although Nwabueze spoke from the vintage point of his sociology background as a teacher and scholar, no doubt his ideas has been fertilized by his knowledge of history, economics, law, education and even journalism. I recommend his inaugural lecture to our political leaders at all tiers, those in charge of policies, including education and economic matters. I have no doubt that his views will impact positively in the way we do things in this country.