ALI A. ABDI

CHAPTER 9

CLASH OF DOMINANT DISCOURSES AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHIES AND EPISTEMOLOGIES OF EDUCATION: ANTI-COLONIAL ANALYSES

INTRODUCTION The main concerns of the philosophy of education usually look into issues that pertain to the rationale as well as the ways we educate people, the select learning methodologies we deploy to achieve such education, and the reasons the project of education is undertaken in the first place. As such, in all the locations where human societies manage their lives, interact with their ecologies and prepare the situation for future generations, the expansive presence of the fundamental questions of philosophy of education has to be naturally present. In their work, Ozmon and Craver (1998, p. 2) define “philosophy of education as the application of the fundamental principles of philosophy to the theory and work of education.” With this understanding, philosophy of education should then be both general and specific to all locations of formal and informal platforms of learning. With the advent of colonialism, though, Western mainstream discourses assumed a situation where people who were being colonized were devoid of any viable philosophical pointers, and were, by extension deprived of any philosophies of education. Attached to these problematic assumptions was a situation where the development, the uses as well as any modifications to the philosophical were all gifted to Europeans and their progenitors. If, as Alfred North Whitehead said, all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, should we then assume that those who are not either culturally, linguistically or historiographically attached to the Greek philosopher’s world and intentions, would be located outside of the overall enterprise? Perhaps a simpler observation/question: with philosophy basically about and responsive to our critical and selectively systematic engagements with our social and physical realities, shouldn’t all humans be accorded a portion of the philosophical pie? The thinking responses to such pointers might not too complicated to see, but, alas,

A.A. Abdi (ed.), Decolonizing Philosophies of Education, 131–145. © 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. ABDI that was not to be the case. Indeed, with the advent of the expansive colonial project and immediately prior to some of its most important undertakings, those in the European metropolises who should have known better, including some of the most prominent thinkers and philosophers including Hegel, Kant, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Hobbes, all immersed themselves, not in learning and scholarly relating to Africa and its peoples with some integrity, but in the shallow scribbling of so much misinformation about the continent. As Okot p’Bitek (1972) and V.Y. Mudimbe (1994) noted, the processes of de-philosophizing and in the process, de-epistemologizing Africa, was attached to the overall project of the descriptive construction of an ‘ahistorical’ place that was fit for colonization and that needed the civilizational interventions of ‘caring and benevolent’ Europe. The ‘mission civilsatrice’ thesis has been extensively discredited (Said, 1993; Achebe, 2000), and we need not delve too much into it here, but the extensive de-naturalization of people’s ontological locations and historical achievements to justify their existentialities and lands as worthy of colonization should be quite astonishing, and the enlisting of the colonizing entities’ so-called ‘best and brightest’ hides, or actually clarifies the de-rationalization of human dispositions that continuously respond to the underside of tribal affiliations that once the blood enemy is constructed (in this case the colonized non-Europeans peoples of the world), the subsequent steps of de-personalized otherizations of the ‘Other’ and their attached dehumanizations of the new subject, seem to become routine. In teaching Europeans about Africa (without a single line of qualification), Hegel (1965, p. 247) who may be described as the conscience of modern European philosophy, somehow fully knew that “[the old continent] was not interesting from the point of view of its own history… [And that] Africa was in a state of barbarism and savagery which was preventing it from being an integral part of civilization.” Hegel, was of course, hardly the only prominent European thinker who was willing to, willy nilly, philosophize about Europe’s relationship with the emerging terra nullius. Others including the so-called French thinkers and promoters of liberty and freedom were not either kinder to Africa. While a detailed foci may not warranted in this chapter, one can indeed, consult the works of the ‘brilliant’ and prolific François-Marie Arouet (more popularly known in his pen name of Voltaire) (1826), which emphasized the human differences that separate Africans from Europeans. Voltaire’s observations were, of course, very bad guesswork, and some knowing from today’s advanced genetic evidence would have helped him. As Michael Cook (2003) cogently noted, because the species-based differences between people wherever they are in the world is so sub-measure that separating humans from other humans on biologically non-tenable, race base (read racist) assumptions is tantamount to separating yourself from yourself, and in the process exercising racism against yourself. Voltaire’s contemporary and another enlightenment thinker Charles-Luis de Secondat, popularly known as Montesquieu (1975, p. 332), seems to have gleefully anticipated Hegel’s above stated musings,

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