African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Society
Home›African Arguments›Society›How Africa is misrepresented in UK schools and how to start to fix it

How Africa is misrepresented in UK schools and how to start to fix it

By Paul Boateng
March 22, 2022
591
0

According to a new parliamentary report, Africa is still treated as poor and backwards in the UK curriculum.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Britain’s long and close relations with Africa, representation of the continent in its school curricula remains outdated and sometimes problematic.

A report released today by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Africa, in partnership with the Royal African Society and Justice to History, finds that many British children leave school with little knowledge or mistaken impressions about Africa. This can be damaging – to the children, to Britain’s diverse society, and to UK relations with Africa – and needs to be corrected. But the report also makes clear that this can be easily remedied with some simple actions taken by those most concerned – schools, teachers, exam boards, publishers, the regulatory body Ofsted, and the government.

The problems with the current curricula involve both a view of Africa – one that highlights poverty, slavery, and backwardness and leaves intact the image of the continent as an exotic and primitive place in need of Britain’s support – and the sidelining of the experience of Britons of African heritage in this country. Further, Africa is often discussed only in terms of its relationship with the West, and very rarely in its own right.

It is important for pupils of all backgrounds to have a more accurate picture of Africa, past and present, and a fuller understanding of the relationship between Britain and the continent in order to build a sound basis for relations in the future, both with the countries in Africa and – even more – within communities in the UK.

A proper understanding of the long and complex relationship between Africa and the UK needs to be consciously built into the curriculum. It is, for example, often thought that Africans arrived in Britain with the Windrush generation. In fact, Africans have been active members of British society since at least Roman Britain. Teaching in schools should include figures such as Joseph Emidy (1775-1835), the leader of the Truro Philharmonic Society who was a formerly enslaved Guinean, and the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor from Croydon, who had star status in Victorian England and was of mixed Sierra Leonean and English origin. The contribution of African musicians to the musical culture of Britain long predates Osibisa in the late 1960s, including Henry VIII’s court trumpeter and the work of Fela Ransome-Kuti’s father, the Rev JJ, who recorded in London in 1922 on the Zonophone Record Label.

To explore these issues and present practical suggestions for educators and policy makers, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Africa established a Committee of Inquiry, which I chaired, comprised of Parliamentarians from all the main UK parties. The Inquiry took oral evidence from experts and received dozens of written submissions from teachers, academics, students, policy experts, and activists. This evidence identified two key issues: that many people of African descent feel the present curriculum overlooks their perspective on Britain; and that people still have an outdated and incomplete image of Africa and its links to the UK.

Education is key to shaping and reshaping the relationship, and improvements have started to be made.

The report identifies many positive examples of innovative programmes run in a number of British schools. Institutions too have come a long way. Until 2001, the British Museum’s African exhibits had been on display separately in the Museum of Mankind as “ethnographic material”, whereas now they have been integrated into the museum with galleries devoted to African art and artefacts, and learning about African cultures and histories is being actively promoted. Existing projects for primary schools are being supplemented by new initiatives for secondary age students. Today, for example, the British Museum and Royal African Society will launch a workshop on teaching African history in schools through new teaching resources on pre-colonial African Kingdoms.

This is one way that institutions can help build teachers’ confidence and knowledge of Africa and make changes to the curriculum exciting and enriching rather than risky and unnerving. This should also involve teachers, scholars, and communities working together to prepare new curriculum programmes for the study of Africa and the Diaspora in schools.

A wider range of ready-made resources needs to be available so that teachers can access better information about Africa and on the African experience in the UK more easily. Publishers themselves can promote innovation by commissioning new textbooks on African history and geography for Key Stage 3 (when pupils are 11-14 years old). Public funds should be unlocked so that institutions can expand the resources available for teachers in the classroom beyond those currently available.

One simple but symbolic step would be to remove the citizenship requirement for authors in all English Literature GCSE courses to be from the British Isles, allowing some of the rich and remarkable literature in English from Africa to be included. Teachers should be able to choose novels and plays written by authors in English from any time period or region. Government and examination boards should also reform examination frameworks in Geography and History, including Africa in the “modern world” section of GCSE and A-Levels History courses and not confining it to be an aspect of “development” in Geography.

All these recommendations from the report are simple and practical to put into action. All that is needed is the willingness and determination to do it on the part of teachers, schools, examination boards, government, and publishers. Everyone will benefit, so we must get on with it. The APPG for Africa will remain engaged to ensure that words are followed by action.

I and Bim Afolami MP met with the UK Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, in the course of the publication of this report to share its emerging findings. The Secretary of State clearly understands the crucial role of his department if the UK’s stated commitment to both equality and global Britain agenda are to be effectively delivered. The government has since published  “Inclusive Britain” which gives welcome recognition to the importance of enhancing the teaching of shared history.

The classroom experience of all our nation’s youth and their encounter with the great African continent needs to reflect its richness, diversity, and the complexities and challenges of its interaction with Britain.

This report, with its call to action on the part of a range of partners in academia, publishing, teachers, schools, government, exam boards and communities, offers some practical suggestions as to how this might be achieved. They are readily implementable where there is the will to do so and to make some modest resources available to underpin them. The APPG on Africa intends to remain closely engaged with following it up.

The story of this ancient relationship is an ongoing and exciting one. Hopefully for both Britain and Africa the best is yet to come.


 

Previous Article

We need to get the campaign to ...

Next Article

Zambia’s democracy is still under attack

mm

Paul Boateng

The Rt Hon The Lord Boateng DL is a civil liberties lawyer, politician and diplomat. He was brought up and educated in Ghana and the UK. He was the MP for Brent South 1987-2005 and served as a Minister in the Labour Government 1997-2005.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    President Mugabe’s “˜ambiguous revolution by political default’ — by Takura Zhangazha

  • Politics

    BZS Research Day 2014: Politics, Culture & Identity in Zimbabwe – By Diana Jeater

  • A woman and her children outside their home in one of Lobito's residential neighbourhoods in 2014. Credit: Jess Auerbach.
    AngolaCovid-19Society

    Writing about “that kind of country” in a time of coronavirus

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • The unaccountability of Liberia’s polluting miners
  • Africa Elections 2023: All the upcoming votes
  • “Poking the Leopard’s Anus”: Legal Spectacle and Queer Feminist Politics
  • Introducing Parselelo and a new climate focus
  • The ‘Hustler’ Fund: Kenya’s Approach to National Transformation

Editor’s Picks

Editor's PicksSociety

How white are the newsrooms working on Africa? We asked them.

All the international outlets that responded agreed that diversity is important, but do they practice what they preach? International newsrooms that report on Africa are often full of white journalists, ...
  • Members of the Sangwe cooperative of Rugazi Hill, Burundi, collecting goats they bought with their government loan. Credit: Jimbere Magazine.

    The (surprisingly political) cost of a goat in Burundi

    By Lorraine Josiane Manishatse
    April 5, 2022
  • Tunisia's President Kais Saied meeting with then US Defense Secretary Mark Esper at Carthage Palace, Tunisia, in September 2020. Credit: DoD/Lisa Ferdinando.

    Is Tunisia’s democracy slipping away?

    By Raed Ben Maaouia
    June 16, 2022
  • In 2015, thousands in Burundi took to the streets to protest against President Nkurunziza running for a third term. Credit: Igor Rugwiza.

    I cry, not for Nkurunziza, but for the lives he broke

    By Ketty Nivyabandi
    June 10, 2020
  • A road in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Credit: abdallahh.

    The genocide that never was and the rise of fake news in Côte d’Ivoire

    By Jessica Moody
    January 21, 2022

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu