Let us bring back African educational values - Prof Edu-Buandoh

Professor Dora Francisca Edu-Buandoh, the Immediate Past Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), has called on Africans to rethink practices, attitudes and values that swallowed their identity.

She said it was time Africans reclaimed their identity and shunned away from foreign cultures affecting their way of life and having a negative impact on the educational sector.

“We claim we are Africans, but we respect those who speak English fluently in our schools, describing others as local, when the language is not our birth language, " she lamented.

Prof Edu-Buandoh made the call at the fifth West African Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (WAACLALS) International conference at UCC.

The three-day conference on the theme; “Reflections of Post Coloniality in Education, Literature, Media and Communication Discourse” is aimed at stimulating and advancing the interaction of researchers, scholars, writers, artists, and critics who are engaged in the aforementioned areas of interest.

It also seeks to explicate postcolonial Africa’s advancement or retardation after over six decades of postcolonial disengagements.

She called on all to reflect on how Africans could make education, literature and media speak for them instead of speaking for other nationals.

Prof Edu-Buandoh called on the media to promote the core values of themselves instead of instilling identities of colonizers in the young generation.

For his part, Professor Marcel Okhakhu, the Chairman of WAACLALS stated that repositioning the literature of Africans after the colonial era, was critical in the socio-economic advancement of the Continent.

He said language played key role in development and was critical in shifting paradigms and facets of human development.

Literature, according to the Professor, had been used as a tool to mimic society, depict the perspective of human dignity or indignity, security or insecurity and socio-cultural development across Africa.

He noted that the attitude and character of literature and language academics must promote a common platform of ideas, research, artistic and creative discourse.

Prof Okhakhu, said local language usage in the formative stages of children were critical for their development and entreated societies to endeavour to expose and instruct children in their local languages.

He said the African Continent could boast of hundreds of local languages that must be effectively utilised to harness growth and development.

The Chairman pointed out that language development must be taken seriously as the basis for identification and growth.

Prof Okhakhu underscored the need for a conscious attempt to revisit and revise some relevant Literature and Language for sustainable development while a growth and development plan for the Africa must be done collectively to guarantee a better future for the Continent.

The Professor said literature must be utilized as an academic tool to fully promote a new thinking in the African context from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives.