Teaching Walter Rodney in Teacher Education: Undoing Colonial, Racist Narratives of African History

• In Event: Voices of Disruption: (Co)Constructing Educational Possibilities Through Intersectional Collaborative Frameworks of Resistance and Imaginings

Abstract

In 1933, Dr. Carter G. Woodson said, “No thought was given to the history of Africa except so far as it had been a field of exploitation for the Caucasian” (1933, p. 14). The history of Africa and African peoples have been characterized as “underdeveloped” and “poor” and the primary explanations for those conditions have been that African peoples have not adopted civilized Western values, and geography and environment determined their failure (Adeluwoye, 2018; Correia, 2013). Eurocentric explanations of African history continue to feed into anti-Black racism in the United States and internationally. The author studied a teacher education program in the Northeastern region of the United States that attempted to disrupt the dominant narrative about the Global South and histories of Africa in particular by assigning counter-narratives as part of the curriculum. One of the many counter-narratives included Walter Rodney’s How Europe underdeveloped Africa (1983). Walter Rodney was a Guyanese historian, activist, and scholar who historicized the underdevelopment of Africa and offered a counter-narrative to the Eurocentric and white supremacist narratives of African history.

This study examined how the program’s socio-political stance (Ladson-Billings, 2000) with marginalized and oppressed peoples contributed to epistemological disobedience and de-linking (Mignolo, 2009) from Eurocentric knowledges and to re-construct an accurate narrative and histories of oppressed peoples. Teaching Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in the teacher education program presented pre-service teachers with a view of the world from the eyes of peoples of Africa and an introduction of a paradigm that explained underdevelopment and poverty as a historical formation. The use of this text in the teacher education program challenged the Eurocentric and anti-Black narratives that Africa was just left behind of social and historical progress because the peoples in African nations did not adopt the correct Western values. The faculty in the program linked the opposing concepts of development and underdevelopment with children in the classroom today to make linkages of the global, colonial epistemology that frames both African history and US schooling.

The study was a one-year appreciative inquiry-informed critical ethnographic case study which yielded data from 42 seminar discussions. The findings pointed to the faculty naming the supremacy in the room and tensions and discomfort of students. At the same time, student teachers found the experience of being introduced to new paradigms as “jarring” and they felt “shook up.” An overwhelming number of alumni stated that they appreciated that the faculty had them confront their own supremacy. The author approached the study using the following theoretical framing: dialectical materialism, epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009), and de-linking (Amin, 1985) which prioritize possibilities of anti-coloniality in teacher education and social movements.

Author

• Nina Michiko Kunimoto, Edmonds College