Rethinking Contemporary Sub-Saharan African School Knowledge: Restoring the Indigenous African Cultures

Abstract

Sub-Saharan African countries have been politically independent since the late 1950s but they have not done much to free their school curricular from remnants of colonial education. The current postcolonial African school curriculum ignores the voices, indigenous knowledges (IKs) and cultures of African indigenous populations. Students, in Africa, experience barriers in learning because of the dissonance between the school curriculum and their cultural experiences. What the schools teach, and how teachers disseminate and transmit knowledge does not reflect the cultural symbolic conventions (collaborative and participatory learning) and representations (knowledge constructs, symbols and cultural beliefs) of the students’ cultural experiences. This paper calls for a revisiting of school knowledge and advocates using indigenous African knowledges and cultures as philosophical and epistemological foundations of postcolonial school curriculum in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that it is through the implementation of IKs in schools that communities can reclaim their voices in the education of their children. The paper advances a decolonizing cultural critique and discourse that contend that IKs are tools that help students to conceptualize knowledge and enhance their school performance and academic achievement.