The colonial legacy in schools

“When Europeans came to Africa, they saw that Africans were lazy. To make them work hard they knew that they would have to use the stick to teach them about how hard work is important. Somehow, that is why we use the stick today. Our students are lazy, and we must help them work hard.”

As with my previous posts, this quotation does a poor job of capturing Tanzanian English usage, but this story is one that I have heard from three of my fellow teachers, two of whom teach history and civics. One of whom studied politics at university. As an American who studied African politics and history, this is a surprising thing to hear said by a Tanzanian. Indeed, if one of my fellow students in college had said something similar, justifying the use of beating, I would absolutely have accused him or her of having a neocolonialist (or just straight colonialist) attitudes.

Indeed, to assert that Africans were lazy prior to colonialism is ludicrous. First, we must examine what the word lazy means. We think of laziness in opposition to hard work: people who work hard are not lazy. So, what did hard work mean in a pre-colonial context? It means working hard enough to provide for your family. Often, this entailed long days of work on farms, hunting, gathering, or herding. Survival itself was hard work.

In a colonial context, hard work meant working for the colonialists, building their buildings, roads, and railways; working on their farms; or taking care of their children. All work that, to use a marxist term, alienated Africans from the fruits of their labor. They had no incentive to work hard, because they were being paid close to nothing to do work that had no real importance for them. If they worked harder on the farmland that had been stolen from them, land that they now worked as sharecroppers, they would not get paid any more. And, on top of that, the land had been stolen from them, appropriated to colonial settlers (this example is specifically drawn from the Kenyan colonial story, but similar things happened throughout Africa). So, to force their African workers to work harder, to keep their workers controlled, Europeans beat them.

Certainly, in pre-colonial Africa there were those people who worked hard, and those who did not, but that is undoubtably true for everywhere in the world. It is only when people begin to work directly for other people that the employers (the people who we might call capitalists), begin to worry that their workers are not working as hard as they can. This is a justified fear, because if their is no incentive for hard work, why should the vast majority of people work hard?

There are two ways to approach this problem. First, you can negatively incentivize laziness, and poor work. This is the colonial approach to labor problems. You beat workers who are not working hard enough, and you coerce your labor using fear tactics. Or, second, you can positively incentivize hard work – you can give workers something to buy in to. You can reward hard work with wage increases and a stake in profits, and you can encourage your workers by treating them with respect and dignity.

One could, probably accurately, say that colonialists had no choice – they had to adopt the first approach, because they were already aggressors, and Africans would have had no true incentive to work them without negative incentives, because they already had lives and traditional systems that worked for them. However, in Tanzanian education there is a choice. Students, by in large, want to learn. Laziness is no more a problem here than in America, and many students here work much harder than their American counterparts. Certainly there are lazy students, but now teachers have two real options for dealing with students: they can negatively incentivize what they see as laziness (which, actually, by in large is not even laziness), or they can try to positively incentivize hard work, by supporting their students, encouraging them, and trying to teach them tools to help them succeed.

One of the real sources of laziness in Tanzanian schools actually comes from the teachers themselves. Admittedly, most teachers have class loads that they cannot realistically handle, but many teachers approach this problem by not going to class at all, or presenting lessons that consist wholly of students copying the notes they write on the board. Perhaps the real solution for laziness in Tanzanian schools is to have the headmaster beat teachers who are not living up to the expectations of their job, to “help them work harder.”