Blinded to reality and responsibility; an education of boredom in post-colonial Africa

As an African educated in Uganda I was bored both by the content and the mode of delivery throughout my education. There is limited research literature that relates to the boredom of the African youth or their “disaffection” due to postcolonial formal education systems. In most African countries that gained independence from colonial powers, education systems still maintain many elements of that colonial past, for example, a strong focus on examination performance and content which often denies local places and indigenous knowledge. Literature shows that colonial education purposefully destroyed the ethical values in society and therefore was a deliberate mis-education of the colonized peoples. It also depicts that to be educated is to be ‘Europeanised’ and unlearn all traditional ways of life and languages. So how might this be linked to the notion of boredom and how is this relevant to the contemporary African youth? I ague that post-colonial education discourses in Africa, particularly Uganda can lead to boredom through an active “inhibition in imagination”. Through the subjugation of Indigenous Knowledge, formal education in most African countries has led to continual disconnection of people from their places, resulting in a lack of imagination in African youth, which perhaps leads to a tendency to “bend their bodies …to adventure”. This paper critically engages with the concepts of boredom and mis-education in post-colonial Africa through arguing that greater consideration of place and alternative ways of knowing can engage the youth in their communities in positive, imaginative and powerful ways.