Knowledge, Education and Social Structure in Africa

By Shoko Yamada

In searching for the potential that lies in African societies, the chapters of this volume consider relationships between knowledge, education and social structure from multiple angles, from a macro-continental scale to national education systems, schools and local communities. The themes that cut across the chapters include education as a mode of transmitting values, the contrasting effects of school credentials and knowledge for use, politics and interactions among people surrounding a school and knowledge acquisition as a subjective process. The rich empirical analyses suggest that the subjective commitment of, and mutuality among, people will make the acquired knowledge a powerful 'tool for conviviality' to realize a stable life, even given the turmoil created by rapid institutional and environmental changes that confront African societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
• Release date: Mar 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9789956553150

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Series Preface

African Potentials for Convivial World-Making

Motoji Matsuda

1. The Idea of ‘African Potentials’

The African Potentials series is based on the findings since 2011 of the African Potentials research project, an international collaboration involving researchers based in Japan and Africa. This project examines how to tackle the challenges of today’s world using the experiences and wisdom (ingenuity and responsiveness) of African society. It has identified field sites across a variety of social domains, including areas of conflict, conciliation, environmental degradation, conservation, social development and equality, and attempts to shed light on the potential of African society to address the problems therein. Naturally, such an inquiry is deeply intertwined with the political and economic systems that control the contemporary world, and with knowledge frameworks that have long dominated the perceptions and understanding of our world. Building on unique, long-standing collaborative relationships developed between researchers in Japan and Africa, the project suggests new ways to challenge the prevailing worldview on humans, society and history, enabling those worldviews to be relativised, decentred and pluralised.

After the rose-coloured dreams of the 1960s, African society entered an era of darkness in the 1980s and 1990s. It was beleaguered by problems that included civil conflict, military dictatorship, national economic collapse, commodity shortages, environmental degradation and destruction, over-urbanisation and rampant contagious disease. In the early 21st century, the fortunes of Africa were reversed as it underwent economic growth by leveraging its abundant natural resources. However, an unequal redistribution of wealth increased social disparities and led to the emergence of new forms of conflict and discrimination. The challenges facing African society appear to be more profound than ever.

The governments of African states and the international community have attempted to resolve the many problems Africa has experienced. For example, the perpetrators of crimes during times of civil conflict have been punished by international tribunals, support for democratisation has been offered to states ruled by dictators and despots and environmental degradation has been tackled by scientific awareness campaigns conducted at huge expense.

Nonetheless, to us – the Japanese and African researchers engaging with African society in this era – the huge monetary and organisational resources expended, and scientifically grounded measures pursued, seem to have had little effect on the lives of ordinary people. The punishment of perpetrators did not consider the coexistence of perpetrators and victims, while the propagation of democratic ideals and training to raise scientific awareness was far removed from people’s lived experiences. Nevertheless, while many of these ‘top-down’ measures prescribed to solve Africa’s challenges proved ineffective, African society has found ways to heal post-conflict communities and to develop practices of political participation and environmental conservation.

Why did this happen? This question led us to examine ideas and practices African society has formulated for tackling the contemporary difficulties it has experienced. These were developed at sites where ordinary Africans live. ‘African Potentials’ is the name we gave to these home-grown ideas and the potential to engender them.

2. African Forum: A Unique Intellectual Collaboration between Japan and Africa

As the concept of African Potentials emerged, it required further reflection to develop ideas that could be applied in the humanities and social sciences. The context for these processes was the African Forum: a meeting held in a different part of Africa each year where African researchers from different regions and Japanese researchers studying in each of those regions came together to engage in frank discussion. The attendance of all core members of the project sympathetic to the idea of African Potentials ensured the continuity of the discussions at these African Forums. The core members who drove the project forward from the African side included Edward Kirumira (Uganda and South Africa), Kennedy Mkutu (Kenya), Yntiso Gebre (Ethiopia), the late Samson Wassara (South Sudan), the late Sam Moyo (Zimbabwe), Michael Neocosmos (South Africa), Francis B. Nyamnjoh (Cameroon and South Africa) and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi (Ghana). The researchers from Japan specialised in extremely diverse fields, including political science, sociology, anthropology, development economics, education, ecology and geography. As they built creative interdisciplinary spaces for interaction across fields over the course of a decade, project members have produced many major outcomes that serve as research models for intellectual and academic exchange between Japan and Africa, and experimental cases of educational practice in the mutual cultivation and guidance of young researchers.

African Forums have been held in Nairobi (2011), Harare (2012), Juba (2013), Yaoundé (2014), Addis Ababa (2015), Kampala (2016), Grahamstown (now Makhanda, 2017), Accra (2018) and Lusaka (2019). These meetings fostered deeper discussion of the conceptualisation and generalisation of African Potentials. This led to the development of a framework for approaching African Potentials and its distinguishing features.

3. What are African Potentials?

The first aim of African Potentials is to ‘de-romanticise’ the traditional values and institutions of Africa. For example, when studying conflict resolution, members of African Potentials are not interested in excessive idealisation of traditional means of conflict resolution and unconditional endorsement of a return to African traditions as an ‘alternative’ to modern Western conflict-resolution methods, because such ideas fix African Potentials in a static mode as they speak to a fantasy that ignores the complexities of the contemporary world; they are cognate with the mentality that depreciates African culture.

Rendering African culture static displaces it from its original context and uses it to fabricate ‘African-flavoured’ theatrical events, as we have seen in different conflict situations. Typical of this tendency is the ‘theatre’ of traditional dance by performers dressed in ethnic costume and the ceremonial slaughter of cows in an imitation of the rituals of mediation and reconciliation once observed in inter-ethnic conflicts. In our African Forums, we have criticised this tendency as the ‘technologisation’ and ‘compartmentalisation’ of traditional rituals.

Naturally, a stance that arbitrarily deems certain conflict-resolution cultures to be ‘subaltern’, ‘backward’ or ‘uncivilised’ needs to be critiqued and it is important to re-evaluate approaches that have been written off in this way. This does not mean that we should level unconditional praise on a fixed subject. With globalisation, African society is experiencing great changes brought about by the circulation of diverse ideas, institutions, information and physical goods. African Potentials can be found in the power to generate cultures of conflict-resolution autonomously under these fluid conditions, while re-aligning elements that were previously labelled ‘traditional’ and ‘indigenous’. In the African Potentials project, we call this the power of ‘interface function’: the capacity to forge combinations and connections within assemblages of diverse values, ideas and practices that belong to disparate dimensions and different historical phases. In one sense, this is a kind of ‘bricolage’ created by dismantling pre-existing values and institutions and recombining them freely. It is also a convivial process in the sense that it involves enabling the coexistence of diverse, multi-dimensional elements to create new strengths that are used in contemporary society. The terms ‘bricolage’ and ‘conviviality’ are apt expressions characterising the ‘interface functions’ of African Potentials.

Following this outline, we can identify two features distinguishing African Potentials. First, African Potentials comprise not fixed, unchanging entities but, rather, an open process that is always dynamic and in flux. To treat African traditions and history as static is to fall into the trap of modernist thinking, in which Africa is scorned as barbaric and uncivilised, and the knowledge and practices generated there treated as subaltern and irrational – or a diametrically opposed revivalist mindset that romanticises traditions unconditionally and imbues them with exaggerated significance.

The second feature of African Potentials is its aspiration to pluralism rather than unity. For example, a basic principle of modern civil society is that conflict resolution should occur in accordance with law and judicial process. This principle is deemed to be based on common sense in our society, which means that any resolution method that runs counter to the principle is regarded as ‘mistaken’ from the outset. This constitutes an aspiration toward unity. It supposes that there is a single way of thinking in relation to the achievement of justice and deems all other approaches peripheral, informal and inferior. The standpoint of Africa’s cultural potential, however, renders untenable the idea of a single absolute approach that represents all others as mistaken or deserving of rejection. Here, we can identify a pluralist aspiration that embraces both legal/judicial approaches and extrajudicial solutions.

An aspiration to unity, reduced to the level of dogma, can find eventual culmination in beliefs about ‘purity’. In other words, thoughts, values and methods can be regarded as an absolute good, while any attempt to incorporate other (impure) elements is stridently denounced as improper behaviour that compromises purity and perfection. In direct contrast, African Potentials affirm the complexity and multiplicity of a range of elements, and attach value to that which is incomplete. This signifies a more tolerant, open attitude to ideas and values, one that differs from those of the more developed world. African Potentials are grounded in this kind of openness and tolerance.

As we have seen, African cultural potentials are distinguished by their dynamism, flexibility, pluralism, complexity, tolerance and openness. These features are completely at odds with the notion that there is a perfect, pure, uniquely correct mode of existence that competes with others in a confrontational, non-conciliatory manner – one that repels, subordinates and controls them, and occupies the position of an absolute victor. African Potentials can lead us to worldviews on humans, society and history that differ from the hegemonic worldviews that dominate contemporary realms of knowledge.

4. The African Potentials Series

In this way, the concept of African Potentials has enabled researchers from Japan and Africa to organise themselves and pursue activities in multidisciplinary research teams. The products of these activities have been classified into seven different fields for publication in this series. The authors and editors were selected by and from both Japanese and African researchers, and the resulting publications advance the research that has grown out of discussion in the African Forums. The overall structure of the series is as follows:

Volume 1

Title: African Politics of Survival: Extraversion and Informality in the Contemporary World

Editors: Mitsugi Endo (The University of Tokyo), Ato Kwamena Onoma (CODESRIA) and Michael Neocosmos (Rhodes University)

Volume 2

Title: Knowledge, Education and Social Structure in Africa

Editors: Shoko Yamada (Nagoya University), Akira Takada (Kyoto University) and Shose Kessi (University of Cape Town)

Volume 3

Title: People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa

Editors: Takehiko Ochiai (Ryukoku University), Misa Hirano-Nomoto (Kyoto University) and Daniel E. Agbiboa (Harvard University)

Volume 4

Title: Development and Subsistence in Globalising Africa: Beyond the Dichotomy

Editors: Motoki Takahashi (Kyoto University), Shuichi Oyama (Kyoto University) and Herinjatovo Aimé Ramiarison (University of Antananarivo)

Volume 5

Title: Dynamism in African Languages and Literature: Towards Conceptualisation of African Potentials

Editors: Keiko Takemura (Osaka University) and Francis B. Nyamnjoh (University of Cape Town)

Volume 6

Title: ‘African Potentials’ for Wildlife Conservation and Natural Resource Management: Against the Images of ‘Deficiency’ and Tyranny of ‘Fortress’

Editors: Toshio Meguro (Hiroshima City University), Chihiro Ito (Fukuoka University) and Kariuki Kirigia (McGill University)

Volume 7

Title: Contemporary Gender and Sexuality in Africa: African-Japanese Anthropological Approach

Editors: Wakana Shiino (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) and Christine Mbabazi Mpyangu (Makerere University)

Acknowledgements

This publication is based on the research project supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16H06318: ‘African Potential’ and Overcoming the Difficulties of Modern World: Comprehensive Area Studies that will Provide a New Perspective for the Future of Humanity.

Introduction

Knowledge, Education and Social Structure in Africa

Shoko Yamada, Akira Takada and Shose Kessi

1. Metaphysics of ‘African Potentials’ and African Phenomena

What is ‘African Potentials’? As the series editor mentioned in his preface, we should abstain from falling into a simplistic definition. On the one hand, it has been necessary to examine colonial mentality critically, which accepts Western modernity as being superior to ideas and practices rooted locally. While on the other hand, simple rejection of Eurocentricity and praise of African-ness do not lead to a better grasp of African Potentials. Both attitudes rely on the West– Africa dichotomy, which places the diverse and fluid realities of Africa into a unified category.

Then, how do we theorise African Potentials while avoiding the pitfalls of generalisation and fixation? This task would prove highly metaphysical. Meanwhile, most research consisting of area studies are field-oriented, which aim to construct an understanding of the culture and social dynamics through the viewpoints of the people in context. Similar to other volumes of this series, the research sites and topics that are the focus of the authors of this volume are diverse. Geographically, the chapters focus on people, communities and institutions in different parts of East, South, and West Africa. Some are historical studies, while the majority deal with contemporary issues. Overall, given the diversity, it is difficult to identify particular empirical features as the source of African Potentials. To overcome such difficulty of developing the common ground, the authors went through a process of sharing their theoretical bases by jointly reviewing key literature and commenting on each other’s works. For example, we discuss the concept of ‘conviviality’ and its implications in relation to the theme in this volume, namely, education and knowledge.

Conviviality is the concept proposed by Ivan Illich (1973) as a departure from a highly institutionalised and technology-dependent perspective to one through which autonomous individuals could regain self-reliance. The dictionary definition of the term is ‘friendliness’ or ‘merry company’, originating from the Latin word convivium meaning ‘banquet’ (Oxford Dictionary 2013). Illich used this uncommon word to propose a novel approach, based on multi-faceted human relationships to overcome the restrictions imposed by the excessive standardisation of values in the modern industrialised world. This concept became particularly relevant to us because Francis Nyamnjoh, a philosophical stalwart of the African Potentials project, extended Illich’s notion to comprehend the constant flux of relationships in Africa, not only among people but also between humans and nature, animals and supernaturals (Nyamnjoh 2017). According to Nyamnjoh, what we see as reality is a snapshot of a temporal state of being, which keeps changing from moment to moment. Since it continues to flow, there is no point of blaming its ‘incompleteness’. Africa has been victimised by European colonists and by technocrats from aid-providing agencies, for being underdeveloped and requiring modernisation. However, such a static and distant view of the state of development does not allow us to grasp the real nature of human existence and the relationships in African societies. Nyamnjoh’s interpretation of conviviality appears to be more communal and relational than that of Illich, who emphasised the autonomy of individuals, although they both seek the potency of the society in its dynamic. Nyamnjoh also considers a broader scope of the relationships than Illich, as traditional African epistemology does not draw a clear boundary between the world of humans and that of plants, animals and, even, ancestors.

There is a fundamental challenge to applying the concept of conviviality, and particularly that of Nyamnjoh, as a framework for empirical analysis. According to Nyamnjoh, ‘Everyone can act and be acted upon, just as anything can be subject and object of action, making power and weakness nimble-footed, fluid and situational, and giving life more a character of flux and interdependence than permanence’ (Nyamnjoh 2017: 260–61). If this is the case, the realities that scholars attempt to illustrate through observations and conversations with subjective agents are mere temporalities, which may or may not, have existed in the past. Such is the inherent discrepancy between the metaphysics of conviviality and the phenomena that are to be described. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult for empirical analysts to avoid the pitfall of simplification. In other words, they tend to reduce this concept to label anything that seems to be communal, African or traditional, rather than individualistic, Western or formal. This convenient use of the term ‘conviviality’, and probably also that of ‘African Potentials’, ends up returning us to the static dichotomy of the West and Africa, from which we have aimed to move away.

Even with this difficulty, an understanding of these philosophical works helped the authors of this volume to examine the research more profoundly at the theoretical level. In the following part of this introductory chapter, we describe some underlying themes – both conceptual and empirical – that cut across the chapters. These themes allow us to view the findings and implications of each chapter from multiple angles and, in doing so, we are able to describe the wide range and great depth of African Potentials at this crucial turning point when the world is facing a global pandemic.

As the title describes, this volume aims at considering the relationships between knowledge, education and social structure from multiple angles. Most people would agree that education and knowledge are the keys to understanding the characteristics of both an individual and a society.

As stated by existentialist philosophers of education, human beings are born to learn (Kauka 2018). From birth, if not before, a baby starts to acquire new knowledge through interacting with his/her intimate circle of people and surroundings (Takada 2020). According to this intuitive concept of learning, there is no restriction on when and where a person learns. Also, learning is entirely dependent on the self-motivation of the learners in terms of what they want to learn and how they make sense of this acquired knowledge. At the same time, to maintain unity and order, societies are oriented to educate their new members – either children or adults who have joined from elsewhere – of the values, norms and information that constitute the basis of their collective identities.

For postcolonial scholars in Africa, education studies have had a special meaning, as the colonists are said to have used education as an effective means to consolidate their rule over the colonial subjects. On the one hand, they developed the school system to equip the people with the skills needed for governing the colonies. But on the other hand, they carefully managed the development of personalities at the schools so as not to alienate the educated Africans from the masses and to be willing mediators between the Europeans and Africans (Yamada 2018). There is a common struggle for many postcolonial scholars and writers. Once they were trained to think using the language and logic of the colonisers, the minds of the Africans were also governed by colonisers. Then, it was difficult for them to break away from this way of thinking (for example, Ngugi 1986; Appiah 1992). Given such fundamental importance of education in shaping the mind of people, the studies on it were among the major approaches to elaborate on what it means to be independent in post-independence Africa. At the basis of this approach lies a thirst for understanding the unique African self and identity that is devoid of colonial bias. Given this background, it is no coincidence that contemporary African educational institutions, and particularly universities, have often become sites of controversy over the boundaries between different identity groups such as gender, race, ethnicity and class.¹ The dialogue on post-coloniality continues to re-emerge in Africa and is inseparable from concepts and practices in education.

2. Education as a Mode of Transmitting Values

Although the chapters in this volume highlight the considerable diversity of the topics and geographic foci, we can traverse them using four main perspectives.

The first perspective is the attention paid to the role of education in shaping the collective imagination of society and individuals’ sense of identity. As mentioned above, this perspective has a historical basis. It is often suggested, not only during the colonial period but also in contemporary contexts, that powerful elites knowingly manipulate these functions of education to control the minds of the general public. At the same time, more frequently than not, education ends up contributing to value formation without overt intentions. For example, it is often the attitudes of teachers and peers that transmit the values of the greater imagined society. Children from minority backgrounds, either ethnically, linguistically or socially, may be treated as inferiors, not because of their cognitive capacities, but because of their lack of exposure to the dominant values and their inability to behave ‘properly’ according to these values. While the absence of such ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1984) disadvantages those minorities, the school has the effect of transmitting the social norms associated with cultural capital and indirectly drives the learners to conform to them; this is known as a ‘hidden curriculum’ (Jackson 1968). Whether it is through formal schooling, informal apprenticeship or interactions with families or communities, the inherent nature of education is to prepare the members of a society to fit into a cultural and normative framework, although the values that constitute the collective identity are not static, as argued by Nyamnjoh.

To strengthen the people’s collective identity, which is believed to be important in the process of nation building, politicians have often relied on a vernacular concept. Tsubura (Chapter 1 of this volume) focuses on the concept of ‘ujamaa’ (meaning ‘familyhood’ in Swahili), which was promoted by Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, as the fundamental principle of African socialism. As Nyerere considered education a means of promulgating ujamaa philosophy and practices in building the newly independent country, ujamaa was positioned at the core of education policies and practices during the socialist period between 1967 and the mid-1980s. However, after Nyerere retired from the presidency, the government began promoting political and economic liberalisation which minimised the emphasis on ujamaa in schools. Against this backdrop, Tsubura examines how young Tanzanians who have no lived experiences of the socialist period have become familiar with ujamaa and how they perceive it in relation to political and socioeconomic conditions in Tanzania today. Through analysis of interviews with academics and students at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Tsubura’s study suggests that, while knowledge of ujamaa acquired from textbooks in schools is relatively limited, students at UDSM have had opportunities to learn about ujamaa from school activities, their families, communities and various media. Without standardised formal education on ujamaa, their views on the relevance of ujamaa to Tanzania today – more broadly, their ideological beliefs – are varied and mixed and cannot necessarily be categorised into orthodox ideologies. Nevertheless, Tsubura argues that ujamaa still holds as a reference point for the country’s educated youth in reflecting on the characteristics of contemporary Tanzania.

Based on the above considerations, some chapters in this volume have attempted to capture the shifting boundaries between social groups within an imagined community, such as a nation state (Anderson 1983), or the changing attitude of individuals toward values transmitted through education. Takada’s longitudinal study (Chapter 2) discusses the politics of identity, which are closely linked with the teaching methodologies at schools in South Africa and today’s north-central Namibia. Under the apartheid regime, South Africa implemented the ‘Bantu education’ policy, which stipulated Afrikaans as the medium language of instruction for most non-white people, as an attempt to favour Afrikaners, who had been suppressed by the predominant Anglophone residents. However, this led to resistance from black South Africans and international communities and, eventually, to the government being overthrown. South Africa also applied the Bantu education policy to Namibia (known as South West Africa at that time), where the context of school education differed considerably from that in South Africa. This practice resulted in a number of Ovawambo people, who were educated in mission schools, taking up central roles in the liberation movement against South African control. Their memorable victory shaped the narratives of those who played central roles in the liberation movement as being the legitimate memories of ‘national heroes’. However, it should be remembered that there were also a significant number of San living in north-central Namibia. The history of the educational policy applied to the San in Ovamboland differed significantly to that applied to the Ovambo. In this chapter, Takada reconsiders regional history from the perspective of the oppressed people and pursues the African Potentials of education in restructuring social organisation. Takada’s study indicates that, in the historical context of southern Africa, education has been a major device for creating and maintaining social and economic disparities among the diverse peoples.

In South Africa, particularly, a number of black South Africans believe that the structure of colonial rule persists and remains embedded in various spheres of society. Cornell, Kessi and Ratele (Chapter 3) focus on the ‘spaces’ – both physical and mental – at the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT). In South Africa, the higher education system is characterised by persistent inequality. As a result of the enduring legacy of colonialism and apartheid, as well as processes of neoliberalism and globalisation, students with certain identities are marginalised, whereas others are privileged. Intersections of identity, such as race, class, ability and gender function as the axes of the power dynamics in differential experiences of space. Students’ experiences of spatialised belonging and exclusion at the UCT are examined through a multimodal discourse analysis of their reflective mind maps of the campus, which was historically a ‘whites-only’ South African University. The analysis illustrated that students experience class, race and gender alienation in particular campus locations, but that they also successfully created their own places of affirmation, connection and belonging. These particular affective constructions of the campus were shaped by salient elements of the students’ intersecting identities and, in turn, enabled or undermined the performance of specific student identities. Examining how students experience the campus space helps to illuminate the processes of privilege and exclusion on campus and highlights students’ agency in the complex, contested and ongoing transformation process.

3. School Credentials versus Knowledge for Use

While we have carefully avoided equating schooling with education, it is essential to examine the school as an institution that is part of the national public system. Above, we discussed how education ensures that members of society follow the rules and the ways of thinking, highlighting how education affects the minds of learners. Even so, however significant the education may be, it cannot coerce individuals into adopting particular attitudes. Meanwhile, school forms a part of the national education system that is accredited by the national government, and it follows the national curriculum by employing teachers who were trained to teach this curriculum. Therefore, even though variations in educational experiences exist in each classroom and school, caused by the contexts and subjectivities of the students and teachers, its impact as a formally authorised institution, cannot be overlooked.

Two years before publishing Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich published his book Deschooling Society (Illich 1971). He argued that the school serves as the mechanism of authorising knowledge that is selected to be taught while sidelining other kinds of knowledge. Furthermore, the more society is systematised, the more the professional workers require licences and specialised knowledge, which precondition the learning at specific types of schools. At the same time, the discrepancy between those who are privileged and the rest increases, caused by inequality of opportunities to learn through the school system. Therefore, Illich claimed that knowledge and learners should be freed from school, and that learners should be matched with those who have experience and knowledge of the things that they would like to learn. This argument proposed by Illich anticipated his theory of conviviality as an analytical tool, which offers a perspective antithetical to that of the over-standardised industrialised societies.

Lave and Wenger (1991) also indicated that school education has two values; namely, those of exchange and use. For example, the type of school from which a person graduates significantly impacts his/her employment opportunities and positions offered post-school. It is a matter of the exchange value of the education credentials, which is independent of the knowledge learned in the course of school education and how useful such knowledge is (use-value).

In this volume, several authors are interested in the differential impacts of knowledge and the credentials of school education in students’ lives after graduation. For example, Yamada’s (Chapter 4) analysis of the strategies adopted by students in four Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions is particularly pertinent. In the mid-2000s, the Ghanaian Government undertook a major reform of the TVET system, shifting the emphasis from theoretical learning to practical experience in the industry to cultivate learners’ competencies in problem solving in work and real-life settings. Students taking automotive-related courses found different exchange and use-values at the four TVET institutions in Kumasi: Kumasi Vocational Training Institute (KVTI), Kumasi Technical Institute (KTI), Kumasi Senior Technical High School (KSHS) and Kumasi Polytechnic (KP). The KSHS is more of an academic institution and provides more options for continuing education, leading to university and the KP. The KTI awards its graduates the senior technical certificate, which leads only to the KP. Meanwhile, the KVTI is not linked to a specific route for post-secondary education. The analysis also shows that the paths chosen by the students are not linear; instead, they are formed of multiple trajectories as the students move between the workplace and school, and back again. In Kumasi, there are diverse routes to learning the skills needed for a career in vehicle repair, and the learners assign various roles to the schools. Although the learners perceive the aims of the governmental TVET reforms as unrealistic, they make their own decisions about their career development based on their assessment of the environment, their aptitude and their self-esteem. This study provides a firm basis in the search for African Potentials, and as a way to understand the diversity of learners’ subjectivities and experiences.

Kaneko and Shigeta (Chapter 5) also aimed to investigate the effect of school education – either certificate or knowledge – on the life course of graduates at South Aari woreda in the South Omo Zone, which was relegated to the periphery in Ethiopia’s education policy. Since formal schooling was first introduced in the 1970s, the social situation in terms of school education has changed drastically in this region. The Aari began to accept the written knowledge in the textbook as the new type of knowledge in contrast to the operational knowledge acquired through the direct interaction with the real world. Consequently, people start forming unique life trajectories. The authors analysed the life history of two men, Mr Y and Mr A, who established an agricultural association in village D, to examine how their school experiences influenced the establishment of this association. The analysis revealed that their experiences of school education guided them to relativise their cultural practices as the Aari, and to explore their own way of life after graduation. In this regard, the activity of association, such as raising poultry, and the relevant knowledge accumulated among the members can be regarded as a new form of local knowledge that realises African Potentials to reorganise pre-existing social relationships and create novel communities.

The exchange and use-values of school education are sometimes realised in an unexpected manner, not envisaged by politicians. Almost 30 years after regime change and the end of the civil war in Mozambique, entrepreneurship and employment in the informal sector are increasing among highly educated young people, such as university students and graduates. This contradicts the conventional assumption that people aspire to go on to higher education to gain better formal-sector employment. Aminaka (Chapter 6) investigates the causes of this unexpected trend. As a result of the post-war reconstruction of the society and the people’s desire for educational opportunities, the number of highly educated people greatly increased in Mozambique. However, due to the lack of posts in the formal sector, the question arose as to whether they could find jobs that were commensurate with their educational backgrounds. The case of Maria, a young woman, highlights this situation. Although she attended university, she quit after two years and concentrated on working in the informal cross-border trade (ICBT) as a trader. The underlying reasons for this were the disparity between the expansion of higher education institutions and the ‘jobless growth’ of economy in Mozambique, forcing Maria to seek economic independence as a young entrepreneur in the informal sector. However, Maria’s academic career worked in her favour, because today’s