How Africa can use its traditional knowledge to make progress

Brock-Utne explores how aid targeted at developing Africa's education end up entrenching dependency and a disregard for authentic African experiences among learners.

The author encourages African government to take urgent steps to improve education relevance by ensuring the mainstreaming of indigenous knowledge in curricula and research agenda. She calls on Ministries of Education to seriously tackle the challenges of the quality and quantity of African-produced educational resources and encourages governments and interested stakeholders in Africa's education to build indigenous or local knowledge-based capacity among local authors and to support the local publishing industry.

The author establishes a connection between the level of appreciation of indigenous knowledge in any society, and the level of research-based innovation obtainable. This is because innovation is often a product of in-depth knowledge of a field and locale, an advantage lost too many in Africa where local knowledge is still often considered inferior.

Paulo Freire's classic book provides a rare insight into the pedagogic nature of education constructed by oppressors towards the oppressed. Freire unravels the challenges faced by formerly oppressed people in trying to break through this pedagogy. For Freire, the sort of education that can generate advancement among formerly oppressed people must be founded on the concept of freedom, "freedom to create and to construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine" (Freire 1968, 55).

Mazrui provides a rich source for understanding how African universities are culturally dependent on other continents for generation of thoughts, ideas and research agenda. He provides possible solutions that could assist in setting African faculty on the path to independent thinking.