From the Temples of Egypt to Emperor Haile Selassie's Pan-African University: A Short History of African Education

This article represents an attempt at a general history of African education from ancient times to the modern day efforts made at institutionalizing 'Pan-African' education (Marah 1989). As all general history, emphasis is placed on sweeping, Pan-African experiences of African people in Africa and the United States of America; such an effort necessarily leaves out parochial or particularized interests or subsets of African people's education. This general historical treatment of African people's education, as far-reaching as it is, has its own merits; it allows us to see Africa from a global perspective and it affirms that African people's educations have not always been in the hands of Arabs, Europeans, and Americans; it substantiates further that African people themselves have always had unabated interests in their own educations, from the temples' of Egypt to modern day popularized educational systems. Furthermore, this Pan- African treatment of African people's education could motivate a 'few' scholars and students to examine how and where their own peculiar interests in African people's education fit .into the longer picture. Lastly, as nations begin to gather into larger and larger economic and political units (U.S.A., Mexico, and Canada; China, Hong Kong and Macao; United Western Europe, etc.), African people must also (begin to) see themselves from a Pan-African 'perspective; this is why this attempt is not without merits. From a Pan-African perspective, African people's education could be said to have gone through seven major stages: 1) Education in the Egyptian Temples; 2) Tribal or Traditional Education; 3) Islamic Education; 4) European Missionary and Colonial Education; 5) Colonial Educational Adaptation imported from Europe and America; 6) Neo- Colonial education from Europe and America (1940's-1970's); 7) African Nationalists on African Education (1950's- 1990's); and 8) The attempts to institutionalize Pan-African education, which has not yet been accomplished. We now turn to a 'brief description of each of these stages and argue for the institutionalization of Pan-African education. 1) African Education in the Temples of Egypt If Europeans and white Americans begin the history of 'their' education in Greece and Rome (Thompson, 1963), African people's educational history must begin with Egypt (Weiser, 1988); (Bernal 1996: 448); (Hilliard, 1995), and Ethiopia (Hansberry 1960: 357- 387). To begin from the 'beginning', Hansberry (1960: 365) tells us that ...when Didodorus Siculus was traveling in Egypt in the first century before the Christian era, he was informed by 'envoys from Ethiopia' that it was in their country and among their remote ancestors that mankind first learned to practice the arts, to create laws, and to render worship to the gods; it was also from their country, the envoys contended, that ancient Egypt's oldest cultures, earliest civilized peoples, and most ancient kings were derived. ...It is true that long after the 'glory that was Greece' and the 'grandeur that was Rome' were no more, it was still widely believed in learned circles that it was the Ethiopians of remote antiquity who laid the foundations upon which all subsequent civilizations were built. ... 'Ethiopia was the earliest established country on earth and the Ethiopians were the first to introduce the worship of the gods and to establish laws. It is of further interest to note that Akhenaton, the Egyptian (Aton Devotee), was a black man that embodied monotheism, a monotheism now attributed to Christianity and Islam (Rogers, 1972: 59). Akhenaton's poem, Hymn to the Sun remains a classic, in terms of its singular devotion to the praise of his one and only God. We take a few lines from that masterpiece: Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of the sky, O Living Aton, beginning of Life! When thou risest in the Eastern horizon, Thou fillest every land with thy beauty. …

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