“During European colonial rule in Africa, European colonial powers attempted to undermine the intellectual legitimacy of Africans.”

The report notes that colonial education in Africa was largely designed to serve foreign interests and often disregarded or denigrated local knowledge. It describes how schooling systems introduced by colonial powers tended to promote Eurocentric worldviews while marginalizing African languages, histories and epistemologies. This contributed to persistent hierarchies of knowledge in which Western forms of knowing were institutionalized as more legitimate than African ones.

It is however recorded that, to eliminate local competition against European commerce and industries on the African continent, European colonizers deliberately destroyed many indigenous industries, business enterprises and continental networks of commercial activities, and eliminated significant material evidence of ‘the African genius’, the inherent capacity of the African to invent, discover and create new things to sustain and develop their communities and cultures. In the European colonial project on the African continent, imperialist countries made European cultural hegemony a strategy of human development, and sought by various means to make entire African communities reject and abandon their customs and traditions, indigenous values and modes of social organisation, and adopt European cultural values, institutions, and way of life and, thus, lose their cultural sovereignty and dignity.

Colonialism was supported by, and in turn gave rise to, racist ideologies which cast colonized people as intrinsically inferior and incapable of self‑rule. In Africa and elsewhere, European theorists and administrators routinely denied the political and intellectual achievements of colonized peoples, representing them as ‘primitive’ and ‘childlike’ in need of European tutelage. Such depictions played an important role in legitimizing colonial rule and in undermining the credibility of indigenous knowledge systems.

Quijano (2007) argues that colonialism systematically discredited local knowledge systems, repressed indigenous beliefs, and disrupted cultural production, replacing them with the knowledge and practices of the colonizers. This has led to the devaluation of Indigenous epistemologies and the privileging of colonial knowledge as the standard of legitimacy (Mohammed, 2022; Tamale, 2020). Colonial intellectualism deliberately marginalized oral traditions and Indigenous wisdom, relegating them to illegitimacy (Tamale, 2020).

The study indicated that colonial authorities prioritized the establishment of Western-style education systems, which often marginalized and devalued traditional indigenous knowledge and practices. This imposition of foreign curricula aimed to create a local elite aligned with colonial interests, thereby facilitating administrative control and economic exploitation. Consequently, indigenous languages, histories, and pedagogies were suppressed, leading to a loss of cultural identity and knowledge.

Racist ideology justified and facilitated European imperialism in Africa as a ‘civilizing mission,’ or as Rodney remarks, ‘Revolutionary African thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral … spoke of colonialism having made Africans into objects of history. Colonised Africans, like pre-colonial African chattel slaves, were pushed around into positions which suited European interests and which were damaging to the African continent and its peoples.’ Colonial brutality was the standard practice across virtually the entire continent, with the chief aim of leveraging force to subdue resistance and to extract profits.

The authors stress that for a long time the history of Africa was written almost exclusively by Europeans and in accordance with colonial ideologies that denied Africa a history and civilization of its own. African cultures were presented as static, and African intellectual achievements were either ignored or attributed to outside influences. One of the objectives of the General History of Africa project is precisely to restore the intellectual and cultural agency of Africans that colonial scholarship systematically marginalized.

European concepts of conquest combined religious prejudices and stereotypes of physical and mental inferiority to justify subjugation as a civilizing force. These conquest ideologies took on a major economic purpose with New World expansion, when Europeans used physical and religious differences to justify the large-scale enslavement of Africans and displacement of American Indians for labor and land control in plantations and mines. With the rise of African slavery in the New World, Europeans shifted these stereotypes to support a racial hierarchy where Africans and African Americans were depicted as animalistic, servile, unintelligent, and sexually promiscuous.

The article argues that one task of education in both enslavement and colonization of Africa was "to dehumanise the enslaved and the colonised by denying their history and denigrating their achievements and capacities" (Mkandawire 2005). It further notes that "colonised knowledge or mental control played a major role in the economic, political, or social control of indigenous clergy through missionary education." Later the author concludes: "Both the missionaries and the then British government converged on the point of dictating what was relevant and suitable for indigenous people… White missionaries under the British government enjoyed epistemic privileges while indigenous people were subjected to knowledge which was inferior."

Colonial education policies were introduced primarily to serve administrative, economic, and missionary objectives rather than the educational needs of colonized populations. As a result, schooling became a mechanism for cultural reorientation, privileging Western knowledge systems and marginalizing indigenous ways of knowing, learning, and being. Schools were central to this process, positioning Western science, history, language, and philosophy as universal and superior, while indigenous knowledge systems were dismissed as primitive, informal, or unscientific (Smith, 1999; Santos, 2014).

The nations of Europe have had three attitudes toward the Negro problem: the first was expressed by the slave trade and slavery, when the Negro was regarded as a thing, a piece of property, a beast of burden. The second attitude was that of the nineteenth century, when the Negro was regarded as a child, a minor race, not yet grown up; and the third is that of the twentieth century, when the Negro is regarded as a man. The conception of the Negro as an undeveloped child-race has been the main excuse of modern European colonization in Africa.

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial values have become deeply embedded in everyday life, influencing thought, language, knowledge systems, and cultural practices (Mohammed, 2022). This has led to the devaluation of Indigenous epistemologies and the privileging of colonial knowledge as the standard of legitimacy (Mohammed, 2022; Tamale, 2020). Indeed, formal education, as we have it presently, is a product of colonialism (Wiafe, 2021), which helped normalize the marginalization of African knowledge within the curriculum.

The volume usefully outlines the ways in which science education and scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa continue to be impacted by the region's colonial history. Concerns that recur across many of the chapters include the continued and detrimental linguistic, financial, and ideological domination of African science education by the West. The authors highlight tensions in attempts to overcome entrenched Eurocentrism, showing how colonial legacies have long shaped which forms of knowledge are treated as legitimate in African classrooms and universities.

Reviewing colonial education, the UNESCO study explains that "colonial powers established school systems designed primarily to serve the needs of the administration and economy" and that curricula were "based almost entirely on European history, literature and values, with African cultures and knowledge relegated to a marginal position or ignored altogether." It notes that this approach "contributed to the depreciation of African cultures and to the belief that progress and intellectual achievement were exclusively associated with Europe."

Reporting on archival material from South African mission schools, the article states: "The Anglican missionary Robert Robertson also expressed his view that Africans were intellectually and morally inferior. He stated that African teachers were not fit to be placed on the same level as Europeans and that they required strict supervision." The piece argues that these attitudes were part of a wider missionary and colonial mindset that "undermined the status and intellectual legitimacy of African educators."

In colonial times, the knowledge systems of Europeans, regarded as superior and infallible intellectualism, totally discredited Indigenous oral traditions and wisdom as illegitimate methods of storing cultural records. These lacked ‘history’ given that Western knowledge systems believe written records are the sole signifier of ‘prehistory’ and ‘history’. Africans came to accept that they had no history and culture since these had been declared illegitimate and devoid of intellectual superiority.

While much of European colonial discourse in Africa denigrated African intellectual achievements, some colonial-era scholars and administrators documented and occasionally praised African legal systems, philosophy, and literature. Examples include studies of Islamic scholarship in West African centers like Timbuktu, and early ethnographic work that carefully recorded oral epics and customary law. These efforts, however, coexisted with — and did not fundamentally challenge — broader colonial narratives that placed European knowledge above African knowledge and portrayed Africans as needing European tutelage.

In a discussion of mission schools and apartheid education, a speaker explains that the Bantu Education system was designed "to contain and to control and to direct people's potential" and that many argue it had "the conscious intention of producing inferiority" ({ts:198–207}). The video also notes that by 1945 the South African government spent far more per white child than per black child, reflecting a policy framework that treated black education as inherently less valuable and more limited in scope.