[Forwards] Professor David Weir's forward to "Journey Out Of The African Maze: Indigenous And Higher Education In Tandem"

If there is to be a future for mankind it is obvious that mankind will have to change its ways. The collective assurance that has accompanied us since the mid-twentieth century that a future based on growing economic prosperity would spread inexorably from the West as it shared its secrets with what we called "the developing world" has been relentlessly dissipated as the new century opens.

If there is to be a capitalist future it is not clear that it needs to be or will be on the Western model either. The spread of globalisation has created new alternatives as the Japanese, South-East Asian and now Chinese and Indian models have moved into centre stage. So what seemed certainties now appear only as possibilities. What seemed inevitable is now merely one dream amongst a plethora of nightmares. Even the conquest of infectious disease has succumbed to the onset of MRSA, AIDS, SARS, Chikungunya and Avian influenza. The question is not how quickly shall we all get rich, but on who will survive the multiple threats posed by global warming. Above all then, it is the belief in Progress itself that has come under attack.

 

For Africa these questions are not academic. A continent that started from behind in the development race has slipped even further off the pace. Phenomena that act as relative weaknesses in economic potential in stronger economies operate as absolute drains on available resources in Africa. Is there to be a way out for the world's second largest continent? And can this story have lessons for the rest of us?

 

Francis Bartels thinks so and in his important new book he makes the case for a new resolution of the role of education in the development process. He argues very cogently that indigenous and higher education can be considered as two strands in the development process. This is by no means a new idea and one looks for precedents in other attempts to weld old and new wisdom in the writings of Eric Gill, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Ghandi and Lewis Mumford among others.

 

Bartels analyses the post-independence history of Ghana and in particular the periodic recourse of military administration to conclude that it has proven a failure in two vital respects "for building, in the first place, a sustainable pattern of institutional processes, and developing, in the second place, the relevant decision-making structures within the existing indigenous socio-political system which the majority of its people knew and could apply to their daily lives."

 

One of the implications of military rule has been "comfort with mediocrity and dependence on external financial institutions for ideas as well as loans." In this respect Bartels speaks the same language as Joseph Stiglitz: it is when the West has offered assistance tied to its own geo-political interests that the recipient cultures have suffered, in Asia, Latin America as well as in Africa. But the loss is mutual and the obverse of temporary economic gain has been long-term immiseration of indigenous cultural competencies.

 

Bartels wishes to promote a new paradigm that builds on the historical realities of Ghanaian culture; in particular, to rebuild on some bases like the oral tradition that balanced individual and communal voices in a homeostatic symbiosis. As he says "So long as cultural values were largely transmitted and perpetuated orally, so long were the individual or solo voice and the thought it expressed as important as the chorus of the community. If anything, the opportunity available to the individual in the group to express himself and to contribute to the debate enhanced the element of consultation." And he quotes Bernard Crick as arguing that this was in the best tradition of an "activity by which differing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in proportion to the welfare and survival of the whole community."

 

When Bartels draws on indigenous Akan traditions like those of “silent participation” and “directed participation” he echoes contemporary themes in management and organizational development. And in his description of the utility of ‘the tradition of withdrawal for reflection and for drawing the threads together, and reaching a consensus” he describes negotiate on tactics that have a wider utility.

 

Bartels identifies the special role of those “social groupings with the vitality of youth and a common political style that has been fashioned out of common experiences with its own behavioural impact” In other contexts it is these groupings, whether as Al Quaida or as Shining Path, or as National Front Skinheads that is rejecting in a destructive manner the acceptable solutions of the previous generations. But their youthfulness will find a voice, their vitality will find a way. They master technology as a life-style accessory. Unless they can be incorporated, outcomes could be apocalyptic.

 

Education is the answer, mutter the elders, shaking their heads regretfully. But hoe applied, how administered and how owned, and to what ends? When everyone has an MBA will we be any the wiser? And whose education will prevail? Bartels offers a tactical as well as a strategic answer.

 

The older generation has its role in this model. Bartels draws again on a traditional model of Akan decision-making to describe the elder thus “known for his unimpeachable qualities of character and intelligence, the retired elder qualified to be a guardian of tradition. It was through him that the family history and expected standards of conduct as well as communal wisdom was transmitted and learnt. In short, he was the Guardian of the Akan Way. He acquired an honoured place in the innermost ring of the socio-political structure.”

 

The Akan system is not seen by Bartels simplistically as rooted in an  unambiguously Golden Age in which individual tribulations were taken care of by a wise and beneficent collectivity, arguing convincingly that these were always aspirations in the context of the realities of subsistence economists. And he is open about the aspects of tribal life that gave the slave-trader and the colonialist.

 

But he draws on the Akan experience to model a situation in which “the power to move was supplied by the conscious and awakened people, the much-needed cream of an intellectual community. They were in the final analysis that heroes and ideal of the young, the embodiment of education by example. They placed a premium on personal relations on the one hand and on participation by all and alienation of none as a method with which to achieve them on the other hand. They thereby produced a social conscious strong enough to guarantee a reasonable degree of social justice in conformity with the value-system in operation within the structure. “It is to the implications of these ways of balancing the needs of individual and society that Bartels leads us.

 

He reviews the French, Japanese and British models of participation in the light of his own experience as an educationist. But he concludes that the importation of alien models from different cultures however objectively superior of advanced in economic terms they may appear to be cannot be the answer to development needs. Thus “reaching our for a form of participation which is cast essentially for an individual and literate society with a place for study, committees and shop stewards as well as the high-powered executive” is not going to work. Is my own work in studying emerging paradigms of management decision-making in the Arab Middle East, I have come to the same conclusion. It is the dtwaniah, based on existing familial structures and wasta, rooted in tribal and clan networking, rather the  formalities of the boardroom, that underly business and management decision-making in these contexts.

 

In these models every individual can find his or her place and the request “what part do you sing?” is logically and psychologically prior to the interrogative “can you sing?” As Bartels puts it “the choir is not African. The chorus is. “But these stories and examples are not just about the Akan, Ghana more generally or Africa as a continent even; for the implications resonate also for other cultures. When he speaks of the “trickster” we are reminded of Maccoby’s example of the “Gameman."

 

Against the implied certainties of the absolutes of Christianity and Islam, duality of good and evil, the inclusiveness of the Ummah and the rejection of the unbelievers. Bartels proposes the virtues of balance, the question remains of how these virtues of balance are to be compactable with the perceived advantages of modernization and not a reversion to an afavistic cultural stasis. Where is the forward motor power of a developing society to come from? How can we unschooled to manage change”?

 

As Bartels states the supreme current task is “to rediscover a frame of references which, it is maintained, is essential lodged within such an African hierarchy of values …. As well as the socio-political schemes in which they were reared and nurtured; to bring it into the mainstream of  explaining and understanding the world in order to establish its place within the larger body  of knowledge, and to be willing to find from it what guidance it can give”. In other words to find an African path forward, based on African spiritual and moral ties.

 

He does not see it unambiguously in the kinds of education, particularly of higher education of which arguably Africa has had too much experience that discredits and devalues indigenous values, knowledge-patterns and spiritual intimations in favour of imposed frameworks based on alien experience. In matters of faith the western models have not proved unambiguously inspiring and rather that to absolutist models Bartels recommends that attention be paid to the tradition of pragmatic and “skilful interviewing of the desirable and the possible” that has marked the African tradition.

 

Above all in this inspirational work, Bartels urges the reader to remember constantly in the words of the Waziri of Sokoto that “a person has one face, and the stuff of his scholarship is but the stuff of which the lives of the members of his community is made…… Knowledge is certainly universal and timeless, but it has a social cultural stamp. It also has a purpose and a commitment to particular world view.”

 

The future for Bartels depends on the ability of the emerging social structures of education to promote a new alliance between the three dynamic elements ‘the young men’- the pool of people who were active in the economic life of their community and its defence force while undergoing a political apprenticeship; the jural community including the judiciary and jury and the retired elders and guardians of the way. “The new African Universities will deliver to the extent that this triadic dynamism proactively liberates societal energy. But it cannot do this passively: it must conform in its performance expectations and tactical professionalism to the best standards in terms of capacity to generate innovative, entrepreneurial, effective and efficient management. They will have to draw on hitherto relatively underused resources of self-critique, reflexivity and administrative competence. But Bartels believes this can be done and must be done. The task is urgent. The needs are great. Where there is no vision the people die, and they are dying. Education has a serious job to do.

 

But there are enemies within and Bartels is scathing about ‘the disease of unbridled power that festers in unseemly cosiness with mediocrity in high places. It uses rabble-rousing megaphone pronouncements to shore up its imaged legitimate. It responds to reasoned convictions with assertions. It invokes authenticity, pride, cultural assertions, and defiance of liberal values. It employs patronage politics to destroy opposition. “Of course such institutional deformities are not unknown in the corridors of power, even in the places of higher learning in other societies that should by now know better.

 

In sum, Bartels has laid down a serious challenge. It is that of “searching for the sources of strength within the indigenous decision-making structure of ‘young men’, jural community and guardians of the way of which the three-generational structure of postgraduate, current professors and retired academics are but a modern version; defining the separate potentials of the old and modern versions and turning them into mutual reinforcing capabilities for promoting a creative engagement between the life of learning and the life of humans – within and outside the African University and outside the Africans and, most important, putting to use those potentials in converting the vicious circles in which they are trapped into spirals for promoting knowledge acquisition and application, innovation and development.”

 

Bartels message is historically-specific but of universal importance, positive but critical, cultural-sensitive yet ubiquitously challenging. This book demands attention.

 

David Wier

Foundation Professor of Intercultural Management, Liverpool Hope University, U.K Formerly, Professor of Management, University of Bradford; U.K. and Professor de Management, Ceram Sophia Antipolis, France.

Source: Professor David Weir