Education Marginalization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policies, Politics, and Marginality (by Obed Mfum-Mensah

Abstract

Reviewed by: Education Marginalization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policies, Politics, and Marginality by Obed Mfum-Mensah Jamaine Abidogun Education Marginalization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policies, Politics, and Marginality OBED MFUM-MENSAH Lexington Books, 2018, 240 pages. Obed Mfum-Mensah brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and insight to his book, Education Marginalization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policies, Politics, and Marginality. The book is organized in two parts: theory on marginality and education; and education policy and practice regarding marginality. He provides a synopsis of human capital (education for production) and human rights (education for all) theoretical and philosophical arguments. His work falls squarely within a human rights framework as he defines the need for an education structure that advocates equity and provides the structures and policy to ensure equity in education to everyone in the wider society. The chapters are designed to defend and promote the argument of education for all to fulfill what has been touted as a global education mandate. This noble mandate resonates in most teacher education programs today as the accepted or expected goal for national education programs. Mfum-Mensah positions this mandate against the historical and contemporary realities of national education systems across sub-Saharan Africa that simultaneously seek to educate all students as they also supply trained labor for the nation-state. These two theories, human capital and human rights, represent a global struggle within education. His specific mission in this work is to demonstrate the need to better identify how to engage marginal groups across sub-Saharan Africa in national education. His work contributes to the development and restructuring of sub-Saharan African education systems to ensure full participation of presently marginal groups. Chapters 1 to 3 describe the historical and contemporary (colonial and postcolonial) common structures of national education programs found across sub-Saharan Africa. In this work, Mfum-Mensah provides a generalized account of colonial and postcolonial education structures. He posits that colonial policy and later postcolonial policy purposefully favored some African groups, i.e., those who serve the colonial or later postcolonial political and economic agenda, to the disadvantage of other African groups. He identifies the benefited groups as male, able-bodied, urban, and primarily Christian as the educated elite, who historically benefited from colonial education and later, postcolonial education policy and practice. The colony and later the nation-state maintained an education system that was top-down in nature with a [End Page 149] curriculum designed to benefit those in power. He does make the distinction between colonial and postcolonial periods, to note that one’s ethnic identity fluctuates as favored or marginalized based over time and political context. From this simplified, but generally accurate historical context, Mfum-Mensah effectively draws from a range of sub-Saharan African countries to identify marginalized groups and documents the disparities in their education access and participation. These groups include disproportionately female students; Muslim students (especially Muslim students residing in Christian or Christian-dominated localities); students with disabilities; rural students; nomadic students; and refugee students. He also includes marginalized ethnonational groups, who are most often, but not always, the minority in the nation-state population. Notably they are always the ethnic or racial group not in political or economic power. He demonstrates through intersectional analysis (which includes students who belong to more than one marginalized group) the extraordinary impact marginalization can have on a student to effectively block them from access and participation in schools that do not consider their structural or curricular needs to support their success. Within Mfum-Mensah’s work is consistent emphasis on the role of religious identity that in most areas historically marginalized access for Muslim students. Historically, some of this, at least in the Anglophone regions, was explained by British indirect rule, which left Islamic education systems intact in return for non-interference with the British colonial economic mission. Mfum-Mensah describes this as neglect of their education. It is agreed that Muslim students rarely participated in colonial education outside of the urban center. Still, based on his argument where he cites the imposition of European culture as a major disadvantage of colonial and later postcolonial education, Islamic groups may have fared better across sub-Saharan Africa...