Answer to Question #303125 in History for Gundi

Question

How did colonisation and missionary education change pre-colonial societies?

Answer 1

The learning of the use of words and gestures to deliver messages in the most eloquent manner was encouraged and praised by both the traditional leadership and village elders. As stated by Emeagwali (2006) Africans in diverse sections of the continent employed a vast variety of symbols and patterns for communicating thoughts. It is vital to emphasize that the learning did not follow any complete and official curriculum, which in most instances resulted in significant information and skills becoming lost when the custodians of such knowledge and skills died or lost their cognitive faculties, such as going mad. The African continent underwent its own sort of teaching and learning before it was colonized and even before the advent of the missionaries.

The training systems of Africans such as the traditional schools did exist, but most significantly, the family unit functioned as a vital framework for knowledge supply and acquisition.

It is clear that the learning that was introduced into African communities became organized in such a way that people could not completely identify with the continent's ideals. Colonial education fostered and encouraged individualism, saw money acquisition as a measure of life success, conditioned those who got it to resent those who did not, taught receivers to dislike physical labor, and taught victims to embrace everything European as the ideal of greatness. Boateng (2015) also asserts that education's traditional function of bridging the divide between adults and young are progressively losing way to the formation of the so-called creative person who is divorced from his or her heritage. Western education actively opposed Africans' attempts to influence it and to recognize their contributions. As Emeagwali (2006) notes, there are similarities between Egyptian mathematics and the so-called discoveries that elevated Greek scientists such as Archimedes and Pythagoras to celebrity status. African institutions did not teach written sources of African history such as Hamadhari, Al Masudi, Al Bakri, Al Idrisi, Al Umari, and Al Muhallabi. Significant African historical writings from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were similarly impacted.