Who is afraid of History?

Posted by Uche Ezechukwu | 8 years ago | 2,769 times



If you want to understand today,you have to search yesterday. - Pearl Buck More and more Nigerians are getting very worried over what they feel is a criminal sleight of the hand and conspiracy, by Nigeria’s political leaders and educational planners, who have thrown out the study of History from the curriculum of our schools. Sadly and suddenly, and without any coherent explanation, our children in the primary and secondary schools are no longer taught history of any sort, while in its place, they are offered a watery soup called Social Studies, which merely skirts around issues that are neither deep nor pertinent.

There is no space here to dwell on the tortuous routes that led to the elimination of what used to be a very important and favourite subject from our schools. Yet, suffice it to state that more than what many are suspecting was an effort by political overlords, not only to rewrite the past of our nation, but to also obliterate it, the elimination of History from the school curricular was majorly a handwork of educational ‘experts’ that formulated the recent policies in education, which have manifestly been richer in confusion than in substance or in intended utility. They have put forward all manners of theories – from the fact that the study of history brings about divisiveness among the different strands of the polity, to the excuse that there is a waning interest in the subject by more and more students. In propounding the second excuse, those ‘experts’ have conveniently forgotten that Mathematics remains the most abhorred and dreaded subject by students, yet that apathy has not reduced its encouragement in schools. Those who argue, as mostly US-trained ‘experts’ have done, that Social Studies can conveniently replace History are clever by half, as they refuse to acknowledge that a nation like Nigeria, which is in dire need of forging unity among its diverse nationalities, needs to educate its young on the strands of their past and to appreciate how those strands have been tied together to bring them to where they are today.

The type of inferiority complex which assails our younger people today and which makes them aspire only to things that are foreign is a result of the fact that they do not understand that we have a past with great legacies. Do you wonder why just 20 years ago, a match between Enugu Rangers and Kano Ranchers would attract an audience that would overflow the stadium, but today, the teams of choice for our youths are English and Spanish teams and stadia are empty at local league matches? Nobody has ever taught them how Nigerian teams like the Enugu Rangers had once easily overcome such great European teams as Borussia Mönchengladbach. When. as children in our primary schools, we learnt had European History, our fertile young minds were exposed to wild and wide vistas, which we could only imagine, but not readily relate to. For instance, as children, when places like Jerusalem were mentioned, we had thought it existed somewhere in the heavens and never on earth. But when later, our educational planners introduced the history of West Africa, it became domesticated in our psyche because we could relate with the realities – even if they were in the past – which they told.

For instance, in Eastern Nigeria, the variant of History we learnt in those schools, which were owned by the different denominations of the Christian faith, transplanted and reflected the types of animosities that existed between the patrons of those denominations at home. For instance, because, the Irish which brought Catholicism in Nigeria did not see eye-to-eye with the English that brought the Anglican faith, what each taught the children were heavily tainted by those almost irreconcilable prejudices.

The government take-over of schools after the civil war coincided with the start of the teaching of West African and African History in schools, just like the study of Geography equally shifted to the study of things that were closer to us, rather than the study of the geography of North America, which discouraged many to no end. The greater emphasis on the study of our own history brought better life and greater interest, and to those who are sentimental, the study of homebred heroes and villains excited their mind. Students could understand and identify with the names and places that were mentioned rather than the places in foreign history books that sounded and felt like fairy lands.

The study of our own history creates a feeling of self-worth in our students and stayes with them long after they had left school. I recall with pride, when as a student in Germany, the different nationals were called up, one day in class, to tell an aspect of their national history. I remember that an American student had tried to rewrite history by telling how African chiefs used to sell their ‘lazy subjects’ to the Americas as slaves.

I had countered him with deeper perspectives (as much as my faltering German language would allow me) to indicate how the wicked and armed European marauders had raided African coastal communities and snatched away innocent and defenceless African youths as slaves. I had deeply been taught that aspect of West African history. The fact that History is no longer taught in our school has produced a generation with half-baked appreciation and who do not have the benefit of knowing where they came from, and are, therefore, not likely to know where they are headed.

A presenter on a Channels TV morning programme, last Saturday, lamented her experience with a 30+ year old Nigerian, who had gone to school in Nigeria, but who did not know who Nigeria’s former head of state, Yakubu Gowon was. According to Ms Alero Edu, the man he had met in the United States had asked her whether Gowon was a footballer! One cannot say enough about the harm that Nigeria is causing itself and its people by the obliteration of History from its school curriculum. As the former German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer posited, “History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided”, it is clear that if many Nigerians had been well appraised of our recent national history, many people would not be hastening to cause a repeat of many of those unpleasant aspects of our history. Just as the young would not be hurrying to recreate the horrors of the last civil war, the older ones should have been more adept at trying to avoid the repeat of the causative factors of that ugly past. While President Buhari is always in a hurry to reprimand the youths who were not born when the civil war took place, he should be reprimanded to stop embarking on policies that could stoke the repeat of the ugly past. After all, it takes two to tango. After all, history instructs – or should.

The fact remains that even if the educational planners had erred in jettisoning history – as they obviously had – the mistake needs to be corrected, even if not from the front door. People who are able to write should not be tired of documenting in book form, epochs, episodes and events in our distant and recent history. Those do not always need to be pleasant. Those that are pleasant should give us cause to jubilate and sustain; those that are unpalatable should point out to what to avoid as Chancellor Adenauer had stated. Education is on the concurrent list, so, what stops state governments from re-introducing the study of History into the curriculum of their primary and secondary schools? Let us, like other sane society of the world allow history to be our guide.

Otherwise, we would continue to repeat the sad aspects of history which should have served as deterrents. For, as Georges Santayana warned, “those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them”. The question is: how can we not ‘forget’ or ‘remember’ the lessons we never


Readers Comments

comment(s)

No comments yet. Be the first to post comment.


You may also like...