Remembering West African indigenous knowledges and practices in citizenship education research

Abstract

Democratic citizenship education is of key concern in many societies, particularly with the adoption of global citizenship education in the United Nations’ Education First Initiative. There have been particular critiques that current frameworks for understanding citizenship fail to account for civic understandings and practices in both African and African Diasporic societies. In this paper I share examples of indigenous civic knowledges and practices from societies within West Africa, the main nexus of the African diaspora. To illustrate the rich contexts societies have related to rights and political participation, I examine Adinkra symbols from the Akan in Ghana, and the Mande Charter of 1222, from what is now Mali. I then illustrate including indigenous knowledges in empirical research via a study of citizenship education in Liberia that included questions about traditional justice in a survey instrument, demonstrating varying access to traditional justice systems by gender.

Keywords:

• Citizenship education
• post-colonial theory
• indigenous knowledge
• emancipatory research
• Africa

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Serhiy Kovalchuk and Anatoli Rappoport for feedback on this work.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2016 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) Conference in Vancouver, B.C.

Notes

1. Although the terms are complex, for the purpose of this paper, the terms Eurocentric and Western are used interchangeably to indicate ideas or practices originating in Europe and spreading throughout the globe via imperialism and colonisation (Pieterse 2009).

2. Local civic practices also include learning and activism via cyber and mobile technologies, an important part of youth practice that is discussed in more detail in other scholarly work (Ratto and Boler 2014).