Back to Basics: Integrating African Indigenous Education into the Formal Educational System in Cameroon Schools

The issue of education in Africa as a whole and Cameroon in particular has been central to curriculum development process since independence and reunification to the present. Post-colonial school curricula in Cameroon, which are mostly dominated by western values, knowledge and pedagogies at the expense of indigenous knowledge and epistemologies, remain a major area of concern in education. This condition has been blamed on the influence of the educational system inherited from colonial domination. With the national awakening of the African masses, the variety of political experiences, coupled with the advent of globalisation, certain traits of the colonial administration have become evident. Cameroon (1970) argues that postcolonial educational institutions are still marked by Western modernism and still work within the Eurocentric infrastructure of a society with different values and motives. Educational research draws our attention to the fact that the residues of the colonial era remain at work in several post-colonial educational systems. Fincham and Hooper (1996) observe that “the dismantling of colonialism and the achievement of independence by Europe's ex-colonies has been replaced by a continuing Western influence, located in flexible combinations of the economic, the political, the military, and the ideological”. Among other problems inherited from the colonial education system is the issue of ill adapted curriculum to the needs of the Cameroonian people. The inadequacy of the educational system inherited from the colonial era in its inception, orientation, structure, objectives, contents and strategies have been identified by critics of colonial and post-colonial education as the main contributing factor to the problems of education in Cameroon. After decades of debate on the relevance of indigenous knowledge and its suitability for integration in school curricula, there is need for a shift in paradigm towards recognising indigenous ways of knowing and transforming curricula towards using inclusive, contextual and practical content and pedagogies that reflect the changing needs of African society.