Critical Analysis of the Production of Western Knowledge and Its Implications for Indigenous Knowledge and Decolonization

Western Knowledge Production in Colonial Contexts in Uganda

In Ugandan society, Western knowledge production was entrenched through formal education. The introduction of Western education in Uganda was first started by White Christian missionaries for the purpose of enhancing the evangelization of Africans as converts to Christianity. The provision of Western knowledge through Christian education was presented by the missionaries as civilization. Since the main objective of the missionaries was to convert Africans to Christian religion, young Africans were taken away from their homes to seclude them from indigenous knowledge and traditional education (see Akena, 2010).

The need to train Black clergy, who would become agents of the missionaries among their own people, led to the establishment of formal schools. The main source of their training knowledge was centered on the Bible, and the inculcation of biblical knowledge was thought to liberate Africans from their tradition, spirituality, and knowledge. This kind of knowledge was not designed to free Africans, and in particular, Ugandans, from backwardness. Its central purpose was to convert Africans who would further the missionary enterprise and later consolidate colonial rule (Akena, 2010). The disparaging of traditional education negatively affected traditional knowledge, which had sustained humanity for time immemorial and had been the source of remedies for multiple societal anomalies. With the disparagement, African creativity for liberation from intellectual dependence and oppression was difficult.

Christian Missionary Education Policy

The first European Christian missionaries arrived in Uganda in 1877. These were members of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) from England. Two years later, Roman Catholic missionaries, in particular, the Mill Hill Fathers, followed. However, attempts by European missionaries to get a foothold in Uganda from 1877 to 1894 suffered severe setbacks from the political upheavals at the royal court of Kabaka (King) Mutesa of Buganda and the subsequent religious war in Buganda (Akena, 2010). The conflict arose principally because Kabaka Mutesa was not interested in the Christian religion for most of his life until his death in 1884. When his son, Mwanga, was enthroned as successor, he inherited a faction-ridden court among traditionalists, Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants. The divisions led to war between the main European factions, the Wa-Ingreza (English) versus the Wa-Franza (French Catholics).

Captain Lugard, a British army officer employed by the Imperial British East Africa Company, tilted the outcome of the war in favor of the Wa-Ingreza by arming their fighters and throwing his weight behind them with the Maxim gun. A truce was reached between the main religious factions in 1893, and the need for stability forced the British colonial authority to declare protectorate status over Uganda in 1894. This empowered the Protestant missionaries to proceed with evangelization work in Buganda (Adyanga, 2011, p. 15). European Christian evangelization was predicated upon a negative and evolutionary view of non-Western cultures by Europeans. This led them to presume that Africans needed change. Westermann (1937), in Africa and Christianity, writes,

These pagan Africans are more easily convinced to adopt a new faith, because in his own religion he has little to lose than people adhering to a higher religion, and the adoption of Christianity included for him membership in a higher social class. . . . The missionary is—and must be—inexorable in trying to exterminate everything connected with the old religion, because his experience has taught him that any form of syncretism is the death of genuine Christian life. (p 134-135)

The conviction among Christian missionaries that African indigenous knowledge and religious values were inferior led them to try by all means to purge Africans of their spiritual and knowledge grounding. In the process of facilitating evangelization, they followed a classic and favored conversion paradigm that had been used before, dating back to the 20th century. This was known as concentration versus diffusion. The proponents of the concentration paradigm proceeded from the perspective that in their work, they needed to isolate and to protect converts from backsliding to their traditional belief systems. They recognized their work as a gradual but sure means to the establishment of a coherent Christian community. In East Africa in general, and in Uganda, in particular, Christian missionaries built many elementary and industrial schools and churches. The main aim of the schools was to create an institutional environment that was conducive to imparting Western culture, initially to sons and relatives of chiefs from the kingdoms of Buganda, Ankole, Bunyoro, and Toro. The graduates from these schools would then be used to impart Western cultures, knowledge, and religion in their communities (Adyanga, 2011, p. 17).

The boarding school’s curriculum was centered on imparting rudimentary Bible literacy among aspiring African converts. The other subjects taught included basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Pupils aspiring for baptism were expected to demonstrate competency in the Bible by persuasively reading at least two Gospels; and for confirmation, a higher literacy standard was to be achieved. Those aspiring to train as low-grade catechist leaders were required to demonstrate basic reading, writing, geography, and scriptures as deemed necessary for furthering evangelical work. They trained for a period of 1 year in Gospel, three of four Epistles, and some selected books of the Old Testament; the Prayer Books; Thirty-Nine Articles; and necessary secular subjects. Their training was so poor, according to Tom Tuma (1978), that as late as 1953 in Busoga, as elsewhere in Uganda, the catechist leaders could not adequately explain the Gospel. Whether this was done on purpose or by omission is not clear. Nonetheless, the emphasis was really on piety, which encouraged Africans to shun their traditional beliefs and customary practices and instead commit themselves to live in a Christian community. In all of those, academic education took second place to piety. In fact, the focus on religion and religious life was so intense that deviation by pupils risked punishment by excommunication (Adyanga, 2011, p. 17).

Missionary education was geared so much to systematic indoctrination that when the younger pupils completed their school term, the missionary educators were not eager to send them home for vacation. Missionaries often maintained, among other considerations, that if African convert students returned home, they would be exposed to evil influences embedded in African culture and homes, thus diluting Christian influence. With collaboration from leading chiefs in Buganda, they proposed two approaches to seclude African pupils from their cultures and knowledge system. The first was for students to live with chiefs chosen for their piety. The second was for students to go to camps. Both approaches were adopted because they allowed for close monitoring, supervision, and control of daily lives of African converts. Such total control of converts in the 20th century, according to Bengt Sundkler (1960), created Christian villages on a theocratic ideal, where Christians could form a new tribe of Christ under the missionary or the African catechist as chief.

From such intensely religious control, the missionaries expected that when the African pupils became chiefs or functionaries of the colonial system in the future, they would live piously and further embark on proselytization of other Africans by outlawing traditional religion and belief systems. According to C. W. Hattersley (1908), a White CMS missionary, this was a successful approach. He observed that when a young chief from a district in Busoga went home for Christmas holidays, he was welcomed with great rejoicing, feasting, and dancing. But the young chief, who had received good Christian training at Mengo, immediately rejected African traditional celebrations, asserting them to be obscene (Adyanga, 2011, p. 20). To the Christian missionaries, the disavowal of African traditional values and knowledge system was a remarkable indication that the influence of Christianity was increasing among African leaders.

It is apparent that European Christian missionary exclusion of converts from their cultures produced Anglophiles who lived in a more or less artificial world of their own, as they were confused whether they belonged to the African or the European world, which did not quite fully accept them. Cut off from the mass of the African population but always looking to their newly acquired colonial masters for instruction and guidance, the disoriented and alienated African pupils from their traditional cultures were left without proper anchors. In traditional African societies, the elder chiefs in each society were expected to teach young boys the history of their ancestors: the customs and the laws of their communities. However, with missionary education, African values were simply denigrated, often characterized as savage, primitive, brute, and evil. McGavran (1970), a missionary himself, decried the deliberate attempts to promote a picture of benighted misery, ignorance, and cruelty in traditional African life. Yet encouraging stereotypes of Africans was a pliant propaganda tool that resonated with Christians in Europe who had to support mission work by providing monetary donations for evangelization. The intense method of indoctrination was tantamount to cultural engineering, to fashion new and different Africans (Adyanga, 2011, p. 18). In a sense then, the missionary schools and camps became factories to produce African converts who facilitated most effectively the control and subjugation of indigenous people and knowledge. This miseducation of Africans by missionary schools produced ill-trained graduates who failed to produce, claim ownership of, and exercise control over public resources and social services. Elsewhere in America, Shockley and Frederick (2010) criticized the miseducation of Blacks and attributed it to the contemporary problems in the United States. Within the Ugandan context, the providers of formal education failed to grasp that developing curriculum for the education of African children needed to be skewed to the African cultural ethos of the respective community.

It is ironic that in the Christian communities, African converts were not taught the English language. It appears that White Christian missionaries feared that teaching African converts English would expose them to broader secular ideas that could undermine Christian and colonial ideological control (Temu, 1972). Experiences from India in the 1890s and West Africa, where English was taught, indicate that the educated class from among indigenous Africans became conscious of the contradictions and exploitation by missionary and colonial authorities. In India, graduates formed organizations for fostering political awareness, such as the Surendranath Banerjee’s Indian Association and the Indian National Congress, which later threatened the political position of the British Raj. The British government response was to cut off aid to schools teaching English and to encourage indigenous Indian languages to be used in elementary and industrial schools. This method of obstructing the expansion of academic horizons of indigenous people became the official policy in most parts of the empire. Similarly, in West Africa, Sir William MacGregor, the governor of Lagos in Nigeria from 1898 to 1902, accused educated Africans as a class of mission-educated young men who lived in villages, interfered with the native councils, and acted as correspondents for a mendacious native press. A quality education of Africans was thought to have “brought to such men only discontent, suspicion of others, and bitterness, which masqueraded as racial patriotism and the vindication of their rights unjustly,” denied by the colonial authorities (Lugard, 1965, p. 438). In the 1930s, Ben N. Azikiwe, a Nigerian nationalist, explained the reasoning that had anchored such an opinion. He wrote,

So long as the African would be content at menial tasks, and would not seek complete social, political, and economic equality with the Western World, he is deemed to be a “good” fellow. But let him question the right to keep him in political and economic servitude, and let him strive to educate himself to the fundamentals of these modern problems, he is immediately branded as an “agitator.” He becomes a “bad” fellow for failing to stay in his “place,” which, of course, is the background. (Azikiwe, 1934, p. 146)

Azikiwe felt that it was fair and just for Africans to challenge the inequality of the colonial system and to aspire to governance, economic independence, free thinking, and questioning of ideas (Adyanga, 2011, p. 39). This did not resonate with the colonial masters who brought formal education. To them, education of the Africans was meant to make them take instructions from their colonial masters and also purge their traditional knowledge and belief systems.

To guard against “agitation” by educated Africans in Uganda, the colonial authorities encouraged a mediocre education with Luganda as the lingua franca. Apparently, the thinking was that teaching English would expose Africans to foreign political events and widen their horizons, hence creating trouble and jeopardizing ideological control (Akena, 2010). This view, which retained its currency until the late1930s, was shared by Sir William Gowers, governor of Uganda from 1925 to 1938. He wrote that as long as the function of the missions in education is limited to teaching up to the standard regarded as necessary prior to baptism, that is, reading and writing in a vernacular language, they are doubtless rendering useful service to the community. The focus of missionary education continued to be basic literacy in vernacular languages, evangelism, and demeaning African indigenous knowledge systems.

The Christianized African leaders, having been poorly trained, became the local agents who disparaged their own cultures as shameful and backward in their efforts to spread Christianity. The contempt of African culture undermined their cultural self-confidence. Their weak cultural self-confidence was in turn used by White Europeans to propagate a negative stereotype of Africans as childlike, brute, savage, emotional, heathen, and uncivilized, hence perpetrating the myth that Africans are inferior to White Europeans. Thus, the Christianized African leaders’ disdain of their own cultures undermined their own self-confidence; and for their communities, the means to regain self-esteem and humanity were achieved by renouncing traditional knowledge, spirituality, and customary practices. Obviously, the trading off of African values and practices for those of White Europeans was a powerful tool of ideological indoctrination and control that greatly undermined African indigenous knowledge and its production.

In the industrial schools in Uganda, missionary training followed the policy of focusing mostly on menial work and religious training as a guiding principle. The Special Reports on Educational Subjects (Great Britain, 1905) spelled out that the first, and by far the most important, principle of the industrial schools was to educate the head, hands, and heart with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. An overall emphasis was placed on obedience to Christ, the Church, and colonial authorities. The CMS drew on its experience in India and adapted it to Africa, emphasizing that Christian truth is the basis of all that is taught and Christian morals the basis of discipline. Thus, before African converts were taught any other subjects, they had to show that they had absorbed the basic tenets of Christian discipline. Once that was accomplished, the students in the industrial schools would be given instruction in house carpentry, joinery, wood turning, printing, bookbinding, brick making, bricklaying, and house building.

Western knowledge production in Uganda through colonial education was aimed at indoctrinating indigenous Africans to accept their subjugation to the colonial order. The mission education system disparaged African education because the colonists wanted African converts who could be easily controlled. The early African graduates were educated in biblical studies that had nothing to do with the reality of African problems. Since its purpose was to advance evangelization, the African graduates remained in a subordinate position to advance the interests of missionaries to the neglect of their own. The dependence upon the missionaries for theological authority meant that they were easily controlled. With the emergence of colonial administration in the field of education, the African graduates were hardly trained seriously to address African challenges of development and improvement of their citizenry’s welfare. They were to become intermediaries in advancing colonial rule. This is pitiable because colonialism never cared about the interests of Africans but used them as cheap laborers to produce primary crops for European industries.

The neglect of education that could promote African interests was functional within the colonial context of control and domination. The African graduates who were indoctrinated in the values of colonialism and Christianity began to despise their own culture and values as savage, backward, and benighted. Instead of trying to improve their own communities with their traditional knowledge system, these elite became caricatures of Europeans. Within this context of existence, they were indoctrinated to accept their subordinate position within the colonial hierarchy and were often dependent on the colonial administration. This sad trend continues today because the postindependence elite leaders look toward Europe for authority and knowledge when they should be producing knowledge to meet the challenges of African social, political, and economic existence.

This social organization of ideas opens our eyes to the fact that knowledge produced in society by the dominant group is subjective and requires more verification to arrive at objective fact. Yet it is not easy to recover the objective truth, because society limits certain objective truths deemed indigestible, or the power-elite may impose sanctions through fear of harm to society. The limitation is partly due to politics and economic considerations that cloud rational thinking. In the same way, knowledge produced by the colonial agents during encounter and imposed on indigenous people through formal education and Western religions is repressive and destructive to the indigenous knowledge that has held society in peace and harmony for centuries. Knowledge produced by policy makers at a higher level without consulting groups of people or systems on which such knowledge is to be implemented is not healthy for any society and is thus skewed and oppressive. The comprehension of subjective and objective knowledge is thus important for the progress of indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples’ progress should be based on indigenous knowledge or a hybrid of knowledge systems that is produced by people who use it or by the educational system responsible for the consumption of such knowledge. Educational sites should consider infusing relevant indigenous knowledge with relevant nonindigenous knowledge for better cross-fertilization of ideas and best practices. Within indigenous contexts, parents, students, community members are bearers of knowledge and should be used as resources by schools. Home and community knowledge must be accessed and the community reconceptualized as a site of knowledge production (Dei, James, Karumanchery, James-Wilson, & Zine, 2000). When elders or parents are given the opportunity to produce and integrate indigenous knowledge in the education system, education sites become reinforced with two systems of knowledge (Western and indigenous), which can coexist and augment the learners’ understanding of their cosmology. However, the production and integration of both Western and indigenous ways of knowing into the academe ought to be done with scrutiny. In other words, anyone producing knowledge in a society or education system should investigate the knowledge with a higher sense of neutrality, without personally influencing the outcomes.

Similarly, the imposing of colonial education on the colonized society fashioned Western ways of knowing that proved disparaging to indigenous knowledge and culture. One of the strategies of Western European models of schooling was to universalize education (Wane, 2009). However, what the promoters of this grand idea did not spell out was that the internationalization of curriculum would be skewed toward Eurocentric paradigms, particularly, British and French paradigms. There was no consideration of local knowledge or local people’s everyday experiences. Such knowledge was seen as either nonexistent or of little value. The dominance of Eurocentric knowledge over indigenous ways of knowing undoubtedly creates inequality, which results in conflict and failure of the education system, since any questioning of the dominant ways of knowing is seen as primitive and uncivilized. To remedy the inequality in knowledge production, societies need to decolonize from the dominant system of knowledge. The key question remains: How do we decolonize from the dominant knowledge system entrenched in our society and education system?

Uganda is currently attempting to integrate traditional knowledge in its curricula by introducing native languages in the education system as a tool to improve learning and decolonizing from the colonizers’ dominant language and ways of knowing. Since it is too early to make an informed opinion of the Ugandan education school reforms, it is proper to acknowledge that we cannot have indigenous knowledge survive either in the educational system or in the community without the presence of indigenous language. This does not, however, negate the relevance of embracing Western dominant languages, for they are required for reaching out to a wider audience globally in the decolonization project for indigenous ways of knowing to gain recognition. Indigenous languages are repositories of customs, values, and cultures of the indigenous communities. By keeping them in the education system as a course of instruction and also a means of communication, the learners’ conceptions and application of concepts are widely reinforced.

The advocates of Western-dominant ways of knowing, however, argue that the notion of truth is subjective due to individuals’ interpretation and society of abode. We will never get rid of subjectivity based on the context and education. However, we must also realize that foreign-imposed knowledge is not objective and universal. The best way to negotiate this difficult challenge is to approach each knowledge system with humility, ascribing to it the value it deserves for improving human welfare (Dove, 2010). The conveyance of indigenous knowledge is best achieved through promoting indigenous cultures and languages. This implies that education systems should not embark on mandatory assimilation of dominant knowledge over indigenous knowledge. The caveat we need for the realization of an informed integration of knowledge systems is that knowledge production and reproduction depend on individuals and societies in which they live. Therefore, to assume that knowledge producers can remain neutral without any personal interest is too much to bargain for in any society or educational system. To effectively introduce indigenous knowledge as a decolonization tool from the dominant Western knowledge, society and educators have to decide whether it is a cultural fair that they are choosing to display for their students or whether they seek to develop a pedagogy that will allow students the broadest academic possibilities for understanding the multiple histories and ways of knowing that continue to propel humanity toward a higher level of social and cultural development. Any study of indigenous knowledge must allow for its evolution and ever-changing relationship to Eurocentric knowledge. However, essentializing indigenous knowledge undermines this relational dynamic, since it encodes indigenous ways as nature and Eurocentric ways as reason. This is problematic because the authentication of Eurocentric knowledge over indigenous knowledge relegates indigenous knowledge to a lower echelon of knowledge production, validation, and dissemination.