The choice of the language of instruction in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a fundamental educational issue with ramifications for educational access and effectiveness and ultimately national development. Indigenous SSA languages have suffered devaluation in colonial and post-colonial SSA education, and this devaluation alienates the majority of SSA…

This article presents a story of how an American teacher in Berlin tried to reach out to her Muslim high school students. She relates how her students were always gracious to her but when they found out she was an American, they tend to avoid talking to her. She explains that the reputation the United States has earned over the past three years…

Pre-colonial traditional societies in Sub-Saharan Africa were mostly oral societies whose languages were not written. In the African context, especially, it was clear that the mostly oral traditions of these societies' languages were neither being appreciated nor promoted as media of communication, or means of education by the invading Europeans.…

The author's examination of Indigenous Theology and the indigenous pastoral is based on several periods of research over the past ten years in both rural and urban areas of Oaxaca state in Mexico, including participant-observation in several different kinds of church-directed settings and activities, and extensive interviews with clergy and…

The general understanding of epistemological questions is that they focus on questions that examine the theories of knowledge and ways of knowing. As such, different epistemic (knowledge) traditions should be expected to develop diverse trajectories of knowing and constructing select bodies of knowledge. Hence, the importance and increasing…

In this paper the author looks at what it means to tell, live with, and learn from stories of painful losses resulting from traumatic histories, the most recent history being apartheid. The author's examination centers on the concept of "inkumbulo," a Zulu word that embraces several concepts crucial in studies of historical memory and its…

Professor George Sefa Dei has written and taught extensively in the fields of anti-colonialism and anti-racism. His latest work on the subject is "Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance," co-edited with Arlo Kempf for Sense Publishers (2006). Dei and Kempf are also co-authoring a forthcoming volume on anti-colonial theory. Arlo…

In this paper, the author attempts to sketch out both an argument for and the outlines of what might be termed an African cultural studies of education. This formation would actually be composed of several fields and discourses that are often taken up as quite distinct, namely critical approaches to education, cultural studies, and African…