The educational system here is getting to me a little more than I expected. We are now finishing the fifth week of classes, and readings still aren't ready and hard to access. Everything is always “go to the department” to get something, sometimes even for a course outline. Then after walking a half an hour to get to that department, you’ll probably discover there are no more course outlines left or you'll have to wait another week to come back and get your course readings.
This has been my experience for the majority of my classes: The professor will go to the podium, look at a piece of paper, and talk sentence by sentence (usually repeating each sentence twice) so that you can write down what he/she says verbatim. To make things even better, a lot of the things you're writing down can probably be found on wikipedia (which I hear can be used here as a source).
There is one class that I have that is much better and it is taught by a Ghanaian woman. She had her whole reading packet ready to be bought on the first week, and she knows what she is talking about in class. Often times I didn’t feel confident that other professors knew what they were talking about which makes it much harder to focus and take class seriously. But this professor presented information on a theory and then gave her own specific examples to back it up—and off the top of her head. She didn’t read from a paper and she moved around the lecture hall and asked questions to consistently engage the class.
The one thing that upsets me almost more than the inefficiency I see is their view of the West. I have consistently heard people, (including professors) comparing Ghana to the Western countries so that they can figure out what they’re doing “wrong”. Even in classes where we learn about different theories, we always seem to reference Western philosophers and I was actually impressed by how much they know about many Western countries; particularly the U.S. It’s the same idea for anyone with privilege, because I come from a country of privilege, I’m not required to even know that Ghanaians exist, but they are required to learn about how to think like me, know my history, and in some cases, be a complete imitation of me. I was beginning to wonder if there was such a thing as “Ghanaian” sociology, etcetera. In class, as the teacher quotes the Western theorists, you can spend an entire two hours copying down “Marx says this, Stalin also says this, he also says this, he believes this because” but I don’t even know what Kwame Nkrumah says. I come to West Africa to learn about West Africa, and I’m still only taught about it from Western eyes.
We were enslaved here in America and therefor think, often that the African is in a better position to rise than we. The truth is he was enslaved in his own home and taught to "serve" others. like us they think they have a degree of freedom from there enslaver but like us they are mistaken as well. The slave masters hand is still felt everywhere he's ever been.
ReplyDelete