By Morris Wambua

I do not write this as a cynic, nor as one disillusioned with learning. I write as one who sat at the front of the classroom, raised his hand with confidence, answered questions fluently in a
foreign tongue, passed national exams, and earned praise for precision. I write as one who excelled within the very system I now interrogate. I write not to cast stones, but to raise a mirror, to hold a long, difficult gaze into the soul of our education system and ask: what did it really teach me?

What did I become?

I remember the smell of chalk. The reverence we held for our teachers. The pride of receiving exercise books. I remember the discipline, the uniformity, and the structure. I remember copying notes word for word from the blackboard into notebooks that seemed more sacred than Scripture.
I remember the silence of exams and the thunderous applause that followed good grades. But I also remember the quiet questions that began to trouble my soul.

Why, I ask now, was I taught to recite the parts of a grasshopper’s breathing system: spiracles, tracheae, air sacs, while children elsewhere were learning computer programming, robotics, and quantum theory? Why was I asked to draw and label the parts of a maize seed when, across the globe, my peers were exploring neural networks and building prototypes?

Why did my curriculum give such reverence to the digestive system of a cow, and the four parts of a ruminant's stomach constituting the rumen, the rectilum, the omasum, and abomasum, but silence the glorious civilizations of Mali, Songhai, and Great Zimbabwe?

Why do I, an African child, know so much about Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Queen Elizabeth I, but so little about Shaka Zulu, Nzinga of Ndongo, and the resistance of the Mau Mau?

Most hauntingly, I ask: Why was I punished for speaking my mother tongue in school, but celebrated when I spoke English without a stammer? The very language that connects me to my lineage, my elders, my ancestors, was condemned. And the language of the empire that subjugated my forebears was praised as the highest standard of intelligence and civility!

Was this oversight?

Was this merely an administrative gap?

Was it a bureaucratic accident?

Or was it deliberate?

We must dare to confront an unsettling possibility: that the African child was not simply overlooked but was deliberately miseducated. That the system he entered, still largely intact from colonial scaffolding, was not designed to liberate him intellectually, culturally, or economically, but to domesticate him.

To train him for subservience.

To rewire his cognitive landscape so he would revere foreign knowledge, parrot foreign theories, and disown his native intellect. To put it plainly, the African child was taught what to think, not how to think.

The architecture of this miseducation was brilliant in its subtlety. On the surface, it appeared rigorous; syllabi full of content, examinations full of questions, and schools full of activity. But it was a hollow rigor. The kind that rewards memorization over analysis. The kind that glorifies compliance over creativity. The kind that confuses fluency in a foreign language with intellectual competence.

Our teachers, often themselves victims of the same system, became transmitters of this conditioned ignorance. They meant well. They always did. I truly honor them. But they were navigating an inherited curriculum that was not designed to empower. It was crafted to subdue.

Historically, this makes sense. The colonial project, in all its variations, required not just the conquest of land but the conquest of minds. The missionaries brought literacy, yes. But it was literacy in the language and logic of the empire. Indigenous knowledge systems were declared
inferior. African spirituality was framed as witchcraft, and our languages were seen as impediments to progress.

Thus, schools became sanctuaries of subtraction; places where children went to unlearn their names, their accents, and their stories.

We learned about “explorers” who “discovered” lands already inhabited.

We were taught that Christianity civilized us, that the British gave us order, that the French gave us art, that the Portuguese gave us trade. Colonialism, in our textbooks, was development in disguise.

Meanwhile, our heroes were footnotes. If they appeared at all, they were often presented as troublesome agitators. We never truly met Lumumba, Nyerere, Nkrumah, Biko, or Cabral within our classrooms.

Their visions were not debated. Their writings were not studied. Their warnings were not heeded.

Instead, we were invited to internalize European philosophers, memorize European treaties, and analyze European poetry; all while our own cultures were deemed too informal, too oral, and too uncivilized to warrant academic space.

So we passed.

We graduated.

We wore gowns and received certificates.

But deep inside, a hollowness persisted. We could quote Shakespeare, but we had not read Achebe.

We could recite Newton’s laws, but we had never heard of the mathematical systems of ancient Egypt or the astronomy of the Dogon people. We learned to use a slide rule, but not how to speak our own language in the grammar of confidence.

And then we were unleashed into a modern world that demanded innovation, self-awareness, and cultural literacy; all things our education had failed to provide.

So again, I ask: what did we truly become?

We became consumers of foreign ideas.

Worshippers at the altar of Western validation.

Our engineers build from borrowed templates. Our economists quote foreign theorists while ignoring indigenous models of wealth distribution. Our filmmakers mimic Hollywood. Our lawyers
uphold colonial legal codes. Even our universities, proud as they are, still carry the scent of the imperial lecture hall.

We have learned to function, yes, but not to flourish.

The greatest tragedy of miseducation is not that it fails to inform, but that it informs wrongly,persistently, and persuasively. It creates in the student a warped mirror, in which the self is always inadequate and the foreign is always superior.

So what must we do?

First, we must admit that, for all our schooling, many of us were not truly educated. We were trained. Groomed for obedience. Prepared for tasks, but not for transformation. Told to pass, not to question.

That admission, as painful as it is, must be our beginning. Because only then can we embark on the long, necessary work of reconstruction.

We must decolonize not just the content of our education, but its purpose. Education in Africa must no longer be about copying what others have done. It must be about asking what we need and how we can innovate from where we stand.

We must rescue our languages from shame.

We must teach African history not as a series of defeats but as a legacy of resistance, ingenuity, and resilience.

Our schools must be laboratories of imagination, not factories of repetition.

We must teach our children not to envy other civilizations, but to understand them, and then to build their own with the same audacity. We must invest in science that solves African problems. We must invest in the arts that express the African soul. We must teach coding alongside proverbs. Algorithms alongside idioms. Because it is not an either/or scenario. It is a matter of dignity.

We must stop confusing foreignness with excellence.

And as we reimagine our future, let us never forget this: the most dangerous thing about a miseducated population is not that it is ignorant, but that it is confidently ignorant. And the longer we delay this reckoning, the longer we remain complicit in our own marginalization.

This is a painful truth, but a necessary one: I was taught many things, but I was not taught to know. I was taught to obey, to pass, to pronounce, but not to understand. And so, with all humility, I confess: for all the certificates I hold, for all the books I have read, and for all the titles I carry, I know nothing.

But perhaps that is the beginning of knowing.

And perhaps, when the African child begins again, not from imitation, but from introspection, the drums will speak once more. The ancestors will nod. And the land, long silent under the weight of borrowed wisdom, will begin to sing in its own voice again.

Let that voice be loud.

Let it be ours.

Let it be free.

Nkosi Sikelel iAfrikaaa!