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Humanities
- ISSN: 2155-7993
- Journal of Modern Education Review
Colonialism and Education in Africa: Echoes of
Paulo Freire’s Voice in Africa
Orlando Daniel Chemane
(Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Abstract: In the 1970s, Paulo Freire advised some African governments in the newly independent countries, mainly the former Portuguese colonies. From that time until the beginning of the 1990s, these countries put into practice experiences that can be considered socialist, single-party that, even though they were authoritarian, subordinated participation to a single political ideology, they presented values such as the commitment of the State with the interests of the people, the right to education, and health (Ngoenha, 2004), which can be valid today to re-found the new society at a time when our states, which adopted new democratic and multi-party constitutions in the early 1990s, face liberal policies, savage capitalism and colonialism, in which the populations are abandoned by the state, public services are commodified like education, health; corruption became widespread, and violence settled, etc. (Ngoenha, 2004). Convinced, on the one hand, that the situation lived in our country can be explained, along with other factors, by colonialism, on the other hand, understanding that the voice of Paulo Freire can be a theoretical basis for educators to work colonial mentality in Africa, we intend with this article to enhance the voice of Paulo Freire who participated in the construction of the education of the first republic (1970–1990) and interrogate him in relation to his equation of colonialism and education in Africa. For this we have done a bibliographical review of his works on Africa and not only and analyzed its formulations and what can be found under these formulations on colonialism in Africa and organized categories that allowed us to systematize what we consider to be his discourse on colonialism in Africa. Without going directly into Paulo Freire’s conceptual discussion of colonialism, we simply seek his ideas about colonialism such as his understanding of the colonial invasion by force, the use of a certain mode of production, desafricanization and its relation with education and its result and re-africanization.
Key words: Paulo Freire, colonialism, desafricazation, reafricanization
