Erasure of History, Colonialism, and its Effects in the Ghanaian and Pakistani History Curricula

• In Event: The Politics of the Curriculum

Proposal

We begun this study by exploring how recent discussions about the history of residential schools in Canada, and 1619 project in the US, and the consequent (re)teaching of history in these contexts encouraged us (the two authors) to reflect on the teaching of history in our own contexts i.e., two postcolonial countries of the global south––Ghana and Pakistan. After briefly introducing our positionalities in relation to our immediate geographical and historical contexts (emergence of 1619 project in the USA and debates on Indian Residential Schools in Canada), we discuss the history curriculum in both settings using decolonial theory and Sankofa as theoretical frameworks. We come to this paper as international scholars from Ghana and Pakistan where these conversations about history in the United States and Canada made us wonder about how our own countries’ approaches to the teaching of history in school, especially of its own history that is complex, steep in colonialism and conflict. How do students understand the need to protest the injustice resulting from the colonial legacies of exploitation, struggle, and domination in both countries if they do not fully know all of their history? More broadly we asked in this paper, how does education in Ghana and Pakistani teach all of their histories? Specifically, we ask, (a) what does the curriculum teach students about the colonial history of Pakistan and Ghana, (b) what aspects of these histories are ignored or highlighted? And (c) what ideologies/discourse are shaped or reinforced in the telling of these histories?
In order to answer our questions, we draw on one of the Adinkra symbols of the Akan ethnic group called Sankofa. The symbol is that of a bird turning its head and looking behind. Sankofa means “to return and get it.” The Akan people of Ghana believe that it is important to look back and learn from the past in order to move forward (See adinkra.org.). Slater (2019) views this indigenous symbol as wisdom for how to learn from the past in order to make progress. Slater sees indigenous wisdom in Sankofa for how to move forward past the colonial cultural hegemony by learning from our past systems and institutions of justice and leadership. In order for students to really return and get it, we have to fully teach and engage them in the full messy, complex, violent, and non-linear scope of their nation’s histories. We used Sankofa in this paper to interrogate what the history curriculum in both Ghana and Pakistan is teaching and what it offers as a pathway for students to learn from their countries’ past especially in terms of its histories of colonialism, imperialism, domination, and violence. We argue in this paper that the way the history curriculum approaches the teaching of these topics shapes the way forward for how students perceive their own nation’s history and development.
In the same vein, we also draw from De Lissovoy’s (2010) principles of decolonial theory in our analysis of the history curriculum. Like De Lissovoy, we recognize that the literature on decolonization is vast and intertwined with many other disciplines such that there is no one way to capture and define what decolonization should look like. De Lissovoy (2010) principles offer us a proximation of what our goal is in this paper; to critically analyze the history curriculum of our countries. Decolonization for us is a larger framework that must embody any study that wants to look back (Sankofa) in order to understand where we are in the present so that we can learn better how to decenter dominant ways of being, dominant voices, and stories of the dominant. Decolonization for us was important in conceptualizing our analysis because it is the only way to recenter the ways of being, knowing, cultures, stories, voices, and histories of people on the margins.
Using critical discourse analysis, we examined the curriculum of History for primary and elementary school levels of Ghana and Pakistan, respectively, primarily focusing on grades one to six in the Ghanaian context and grades four to eight in the Pakistani context. Besides the History curriculum, we also looked for some other subjects potentially including and teaching historical content, such as the Religious Education Curriculum and Teachers’ Resource Pack in the Ghanaian context. We downloaded all the curriculum documents from the (https://nacca.gov.gh/) and Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Government of Pakistan’s websites (http://www.mofept.gov.pk), (https://bisep.edu.pk/downloads/curriculum/Grades-VI-VIII/pk_ls_hs_2006_eng.pdf).
We use Critical Discourse Analysis, specifically Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA (Fairclough, 2003, 2013) to analyze the History curricula (our data sources) of both Pakistan and Ghana. We use the three-dimensional framework of CDA flexibly rather than in a linier manner as a flexible approach allows for multiple entry points into texts and the contexts where they are produced. This framework, therefore, provided us with tools to examine the context specific discursive practices such as curriculum development in education (Dorner et al., 2023), and tease out the ideological underpinnings such as that of colonization and linguistic imperialism.
Our analysis reveals that the curriculum in Ghana and Pakistan presents an unproblematized view of imperialism, colonization, the violence, and the consequences of colonialism. We found that because the curriculum does not trouble the history of colonialism, the Ghanaian curriculum presents a somewhat favourable view of the colonial period in terms of national development, and although the Pakistani curriculum does not present a favourable view of colonialism per se, it does not problematize the sociopolitical after/effects of colonial period either. Because both national curricula prioritize the construction of national identity for students, other minoritized groups, languages, cultures, and ways of being are underrepresented regarding their contribution to the histories of both countries. In both curricula, the problematic effects of colonialism are erased or glossed over quickly. Moreover, the experiences, cultures, histories, and knowledge of the many ethnic and people groups who lives in the region are not told in the teaching of history to students. We’ll conclude by discussing some significant implications for curriculum developers and teachers, especially in the Global South.

Authors

• Edwin Nii Bonney, Clemson University

• Sadia Shad, University of British Columbia