Why and how the African child is miseducated in

[Black Man]

By Hort, September 2007

As African children head back to school to face another school year I would like to make
an attempt to explain to our community and particularly to young parents why and how
the African child has been systematically mis-educated in the western world during the
last 500 years, so that they can better understand the root causes of some of the
aberrations and self destructive forms of behaviour they see in our community and to help
them realize that if they want a brighter future for their children and for our community,
then it is imperative that they no longer leave the education of their children solely in the
hands of the western educational system, but rather to follow the advice of Malcolm X
who told us years ago that “the black child’s education starts when the school bells rings
at 4 p.m in the afternoon.” (This may vary depending on what time school ends in your
country) We didn’t follow his advice then and today our youth are suffering the
consequences. The situation of African children around the planet has considerably
deteriorated since the days of Malcolm X, so that we are now forced to follow the advice
of Dr Asa Hilliard one of Africa’s great educators who died recently and left us these
parting words. "The education of African people is an urgent necessity. It is a matter of
life and death. We cannot abide another generation of children who have no identity and

who are ignorant about Africa."

[Black Man]

The late Professor Amos Wilson, another one of Africa’s foremost educators of the 20

th

century, posed a crucial question that all African parents and our community need to ask.

What is the purpose of an education?

according to Dr. Wilson, they are seriously mistaken, because the purpose of an education is to

improve and further the interests of one’s own group and to ensure its survival.

Yet, when we study
African civilization we can clearly see that it was well organised and group oriented and

there is even an African proverb which states “it takes a whole village to raise a child.”

[Black Man]

Our ancestors therefore never left the education of
their children to chance because the cohesiveness of their society was of prime

importance.

[Black Man]

When slavery and later colonization took place the vision that our ancestors had of
educating and raising African children was taken out of their control and a new way was
imposed on African people. Worse, this new system of education ran counter to the
interests and needs of Africans. As a result, today, as Prof Wilson has again pointed out,
African people have never had so many talented and educated economists, educators,
sociologists, doctors, lawyers, artists, etc, yet we suffer the worst health, housing, and
education on the planet because our education was never designed to promote our

interests but rather the goals and the interests of our oppressors.

[Black Man]

Furthermore, our people hold advanced degrees from some of the most prestigious Ivy
League schools and universities and can solve any myriad of problems for other groups
but since they have not received an African centred education when it comes to their own,
all their knowledge is null and void. Sometimes the more educated they become, the
more alienated they are from African culture and more of a menace to our group, because
in their zeal to promote the interests of others they often end up doing harm to their own

people.

[Black Man]

If African leaders allow the West to take their
wealth to feed Europeans and leave Africans to starve and face death, it is because they
too have been taught to work against their own interests. For example, at the end of
apartheid instead of putting reparations and land redistribution as a top priority for South

Africa’s black victims, reconciliation with whites, the criminals, became the main goal.

[Black Man]

This new manner of raising and educating black children however has always posed a
problem in the western world. Once again, Dr. Wilson gives us an explanation. It is
problematic he says, because African people were not brought to the West to be educated.
They were brought to be the slaves and servants of the people who enslaved them, in

other words, to work.

the first question we asked the children was the reason for our people’s
presence here in the West. None of them ever responded by saying that African people
were here to work as servants for white people. In fact, most black people will answer
this question by a vague “we were brought here as slaves

.” Have you ever noticed that
anything meant for African people is often vague? For example, “Jesus is coming back
soon” or “we are going to reduce poverty in Africa” or “we want to help Africa” What
date specifically is Jesus coming back? By what date exactly are they going to reduce
poverty and by how much? or what specific area of activity are they planning to focus
on? We don’t know. The language is vague because it’s not meant to be taken seriously
and they know that our people will not demand anything more specific. In return, we are

asked to blindly believe, watch and pray and hope for a better day. Also very, very vague.

[Black Man]

Yet what black people actually do is very specific. We serve our white masters. In sports
and in music all the owners are white and the players and singers are black. This

imbalance exists even in countries where the majority of the population is black.

For
example in the Caribbean most of the business and hotel owners as well as the tourists are
white, while the workers are mostly black. In Africa, our people extract the diamonds and
gold from the ground while Indians, Jews, Lebanese and Western businessmen sit in their
offices all day and reap the benefits. This inability to understand the real reason for our
presence in the West has led our community to the false assumption that we are here to
‘live in peace and harmony with whites.’ How many times have we heard black people
say “they don’t see colour” yet when they move into a white neighbourhood, the whites
move out, so obviously they do. If we are so mistaken about why we are here and our
relationship with its inhabitants, is it any wonder that our children and our community are

so confused and have so many problems in their daily lives?

[Black Man]

In 1888, Ernest Renan, a racist French philosopher described Europe’s economic vision
of our world when he said, “Nature has given us a race of workers, they are Chinese, a
race to till the soil, they are Africans and a race of rulers and soldiers, they are
Europeans”. This is exactly the world we live in today. Yet, this racially organized
economic system has existed for the last 500 years but sadly African people are totally
unaware of this fact because they are kept ignorant and uninformed the world over. It is
also this racially segmented economic system which is responsible for the persistent
poverty and underdevelopment in Africa and the other countries where our people reside,
but because of our ignorance western propaganda has made us believe that it is because
our leaders are incompetent and corrupt

. We are meant to transfer our hatred to our
leaders rather than to the racist economic system that Europeans have wilfully put in
place to impoverish Africans. Luckily, the masses of poor people are passive if not there
would be thousands of revolts every day, everywhere on this planet. To keep African
people impoverished the West intentionally bypasses Africa and the ghettos where many
of our people live and invest in the Asian countries. The reason Chinese investment in
Africa today terrifies the West is because they fear it may actually help lift Africans out of
poverty and thus threaten their racially segmented economic system. To punish the
Chinese, the West has simply mounted a propaganda campaign accusing them of selling
tainted products and of ignoring human rights in Africa, but when and where in Africa
has the West ever respected human rights? In fact, most of the anti democratic leaders in

Africa are still in power because of the West.

[Black Man]

Corruption in Africa therefore is not the cause of poverty but a consequence of it. People
in Africa are corrupt because they do not earn enough money to live decently and
therefore must resort to illegal methods to make ends meet. In fact, where ever you see
crime take a good look, you will usually find high unemployment and intolerable living
conditions because it is a consequence and not the cause. Improve the living conditions
and corruption and crime will quickly disappear. It’s a very simple equation but of course
no one is interested in this option because the capitalist system, which is really the old
Roman slave system under a different name, cannot survive without access to a large
number of unpaid workers or people who are barely paid. Under globalization, its modern
name, 80% of the world is still exploited by the 20% who still continue to own all the
wealth. Changing the name periodically (feudalism, industrialisation, capitalism,
socialism, communism and now globalisation) is simply a strategy that the West uses to
make us, the ignorant masses believe that there is genuine change taking place in society.
Now you understand why every country you visit and in every area of activity the owners
and those who make money are always white or are close to white, while those who
work, serve and are exploited are always black or close to it. This is what African parents
must begin to understand so that they can explain to their children why African people

are consistently at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.

[Black Man]

Now that we know that African people were brought to the West exclusively to work and
serve whites, and not to “live in peace and harmony” with them, where did the rationale
behind the education of black children come from? After Europeans had succeeded in
making our ancestors almost as ignorant as the animals they said they were after years of
chattel slavery, some of them began to realize that in order to further their commercial
interests, it was better for the ‘negroes’ to have at least a minimal amount of education. A
few continued to believe that “negroes should continue to be worked like beasts of
burden and be kept in total ignorance,” however they finally agreed that it was in their
best interest to educate our ancestors. In their original plans Europeans had had no
intentions of educating African people. The education of the black child in the western
educational system therefore was never designed to develop the individual personality or
the intellect of African children and to help them reach their fullest potential. The
decision to educate was strictly based on the economic requirements of the day which

needed a number of educated Africans in order for the West to achieve its goals.

[Black Man]

We would still be uneducated today if Europeans had not deemed it a necessary
requirement. In fact, one of the reasons that African children are doing so badly in the
educational system is precisely because their education continues to depend on the needs
of the western economic system. If you listen to propaganda however you may easily
believe it is because they are intellectually inferior and lazy. The stark reality is that the
business world is linked to education and therefore whatever happens in the economic
sphere will have an impact on education. The educational system works like a bottleneck
to control the flow of students entering the workforce. So, if the economy is experiencing
a boom, more students will graduate from college and university in order to enter the
work force and if there is a recession, it will do the complete opposite. i.e. fewer students

will graduate and thus fewer will enter the workforce.

[Black Man]

If we accept that in the western system an individual’s importance depends on their
financial worth, then it is clear why African children have become a liability rather than
an asset and are underachieving in school. Knowing the kind of social disruption that able
bodied, young men of working age unable to find a job can create in society, the West has
decided to channel them into prisons as a solution in order to prevent the kind of revolts
that occurred in the French suburbs 2 years ago. This is why ‘tolerance zero’ was
introduced and why a 15 year old African American youth who stole a simple chocolate

bar would receive a 15 year jail sentence from a US court.

[Black Man]

After the Europeans had finally decided to educate African children, they had to deal with
the problem of the content of their education. What were they to teach these ‘negroes?’
All of the aberrations and self destructive behavioural patterns that we see in our
community can be traced right back to this moment when Europeans had to make a
decision about the kind of information they were going to transmit to African people.
When African children entered the western school system for the first time, there was
great fear among the slaveholders that if Africans were taught ‘the wrong’ information,
(the truth) they would lose complete control over them especially since our ancestors
numerically outnumbered whites in the new world at that time.( African people have

since become the minority.)

[Black Man]

To understand why Europeans were so afraid of the content of African education we must
go further back into our past. Before they had even set foot in Africa, Europeans had
heard about its glory and its extraordinary civilization. Philip of Macedonia, like the
typical warmongering European megalomaniac, decided that as he was the most powerful
person in the West he had to conquer Egypt, the most advanced African civilization at the
time and own it for himself. Fortunately, he was killed while waging another one of his
numerous wars. Unfortunately, his son Alexander, who only a twisted mind could call
great, decided to fulfil his father’s dream and did eventually conquer Egypt. When
Europeans entered Africa for the first time and saw the tremendous civilization our
ancestors had methodically collected, stored and preserved from millennia they were
mesmerized. They were overwhelmed by its organisation, its opulence, its style, its
architecture, its creativity, its intelligence, in short, everything but most particularly, its

tremendous wealth.