Critical Analysis of Ayi Kwei Armah's African and Western Systems of Education (1970)

Ayi Kwei Armah’s is a prolific novelist from Gold Coast the present-day Ghana and his novel Fragments deals with the complications of postcolonial and the venality and avidity of contemporary Africa. Though written during the postcolonial the novel Fragments remains stentorian and constant alongside Western education and its unremitting bequest in African continent. The paper interrogates the supposed civilization equipped to perceived primitive Africans by Western schooling. Notably, before westerners’ invasion of African Continent African had an antique history of the invention of science and technology. African countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Timbuktu are known for writing, science and technology legacies. Moreover, African education taught young generations African philosophy values through orality.  Some of the values are respect and love for one’s family, kinship ties, hospitality, respect for elders, courtesy and language.

 This paper argues that upon acquiring values of education in the united states African elites returned to their mother countries with hope only to be greeted with disillusionment in form of neo-colonialism. The impunities of avarice and moral decadency treated as the new normal, nurtured and implemented by mother colonizer’s court poet locals. The paper argues that the educated elites are uncertain amid the new demands of their families and society. This is attributed to sedition of African form of education values much alive in some brainwashed Africans. Indeed, they are the ‘fragments’ Armah alludes to in the novel title. Notably, some African scholars do not clown the mask of the paddy but challenges the money-oriented classism promulgated by proselytised Ghanaian educated elites. The paper bonds the gap prevailing between invented western civilization and the alleged nascent Africans. Accordingly, unveils the meaning of the novel Fragments to the contemporary digital globe.