Education key to preserving African history
AFRICANS need to shape the narrative about their history and tell their own stories, and this starts with education, said the chairperson of the African World Heritage Fund (AWHF), Vusumuzi Mkhize.
“We must shape the narrative as Africans. We must also embed our own stories in our education system,” Mkhize said.
“I think if we have proper education systems that are able to gather historical facts about Africa’s development, growth and past, we then are able to make sure our future generations take pride in their Africanness and take pride in terms of telling their own stories, by Africans for Africans.”
Mkhize said Africans should build the capacity to have the necessary skills and expertise in universities to develop appropriate portfolios and historical information to assist the world in understanding the perspectives of what Africans think about their history.
He said this would be important to remove current distortions, and that these distortions were often made by those who looked at Africa as “the Dark Continent”.
Mkhize was speaking as experts held a virtual meeting this week on Sites of Memory and the World Heritage Convention in Africa.
The objective of the four-day meeting was to reflect on putting into operation the concept of sites associated with memories of recent conflicts within the framework of the World Heritage Convention in Africa.
One participant, Crispin Yoka, from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), said Africans had already started writing their own stories.
“The facts cannot be drafted by people who are not Africans.”
He said African historians had already started redrafting the history and heritage of Africans in schools and universities. We are making sure that the education systems take into account our stories,” he said.
Speaking during the opening ceremony of the meeting, the director-general of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, Dr Webber Ndoro, said colonial history needs to be balanced with African heritage concepts.