Citizens in the Making: Civic Education and Constitutional Reform in East Africa

• In Event: Conferring and Challenging State Legitimacy through Citizenship

Abstract

This paper considers the way that citizens are educated following comprehensive and contested constitutional reforms in sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, I seek to go beyond the typical question of what people learn in civic education, to focus on how teachers are delivering the educational content. I ask: who creates citizens? In so doing, I focus on teachers as active, creative agents in a vital process of citizenship-creation in countries undertaking political reforms. I hypothesize that teachers must balance their educational mission and professional identity with the highly politicized nature of their subject matter and their leadership role in their local communities. They are typically constructed as enactors of state legitimacy but in fact, are autonomous and creative agents, at times, and embedded members of local communities, with distinct social and political obligations and identities which inform their roles as teachers. Therefore, their role as civic educators tests the legitimacy of the state, ruling party elites, and local political elites as well.

I expand here on work I have done on citizenship and inequality in Ethiopia by focusing on citizenship-formation activities in secondary educational contexts. I am interested in the role of teachers in delivering educational content and their role within the wider polity. I focus on secondary education and the subject of “History and Government”/Civic Education in Kenya and Ethiopia because of the: controversial nature of the content, diversity and complexity of sociocultural life at the district- and even school-level in some cases, and recent history of conflict. Some of the most controversial topics in both countries include not only ethnolinguistic and gender diversity but also citizenship and refugee status, migration, and the way that “meaningful citizenship” has been constructed and negotiated through the constitution-creation process (Smith 2013).

In countries like Kenya, secondary-school teachers are often seen as both narrators and arbiters of these processes. My research contributes to the study of the “message of democracy in [its] cultural contexts” (Cude 2012, 51). Existing scholarship does not adequately address the tensions around formalized processes of citizen-creation embedded in civic education programs. Research on high school civics in the United States and other western democracies points to the complicated relationship between teachers and students (Niemi and Junn 1998; Gainous and Martens 2012; Obenchain et al. 2016). However, this is in a considerably less politicized learning environment than in places that are newly democratizing. The intense professionalization of teachers in a western context is quite distinct from the way that teachers in low- and middle-income countries, like Kenya, experience teaching relationships (Sayed 2016; Hammett and Staeheli 2009; Alviar-Martin et al. 2008). They live in face-to-face communities, and teaching about controversial political topics like “democracy” or “gender and ethnic equality” may be substantially more challenging.

Author

• Lahra Smith, Georgetown University