The Planned Obsolescence of Borrowed Culture in Africa
Abstract
School programmes designed for examinations rather than social continuity place African learners inside the short life cycle of imported objects and ideas.
Education, culture and intellectual sovereignty · Full reading edition
Education governed by short-lived programmes
African school programmes rarely follow the continuity of learning. They behave like technical objects discarded after examinations, qualifications or entrance competitions, without producing a lasting social purpose.
Drawing on Jean Baudrillard, the article argues that the dominance of objects makes people inhabit the discontinuous time of things they watch being born, completed and destroyed. Pupils and students likewise live through the rapid succession of programmes whose destination remains unclear.
The wager of the Most Royal Lady
In Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, the chief of the Diallobé foresaw the fragility of the new knowledge. The Most Royal Lady nevertheless sent Samba Diallo to the white school, hoping its seasonal character would be compensated by practical usefulness—the knowledge that helps win and improves collective life.
Her wager resembles Descartes’s desire for knowledge able to employ the forces of nature for human use, health and material well-being.
Samba Diallo’s dispossession
The new school gave Samba Diallo neither mastery nor possession of nature. He returned mastered and dispossessed—separated from himself, his land, his culture and his future—while Demba remained rooted and capable of resisting modern change.
Education had become a market for recycled products of Western cultural industry rather than a place where African societies could define the knowledge they needed.
A market for obsolete goods and ideas
The same logic appears when used vehicles and other exhausted commodities reach Africa at the end of their useful life, transferring pollution elsewhere. Cultural representations may likewise be exported only after they have become obsolete where they originated.
These supposedly generous goods conceal African questions beneath misleading humanism. Africans often have little power over what they buy, read, learn, apply and loudly defend.
Leaving the culture of imitation
Africa must cease treating inherited school programmes as categorical cultural imperatives and stop imagining that whatever it lacks must be copied from the Other.
The conclusion of Ambiguous Adventure is not that Western knowledge has no value, but that yesterday’s West cannot constitute Africa’s necessity. Repeated commentary on an imported intellectual past cannot replace the production of thought grounded in African purposes.
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