Umunthufication of Malawian education (Part III)

This is the third instalment of the late Professor Augustine Chingwala Musopole’s seminal thoughts on umunthufication of African education….

“In his book, Paul Hiebert identifies functions of worldview for human existence. The first is that “worldviews are our plausibility structures that provide answers to our ultimate questions.” Answers to ultimate questions stabilise our existence and condition our life meaning. Secondly, worldview provide emotional security.

“Paul Hiebert writes:  “Faced with a dangerous world full of capricious and uncontrollable forces and crises of drought, illness, and death, and plagued by anxieties about an uncertain future, people turn to their deepest cultural beliefs for comfort and security. It is not surprising them that worldviews assumptions are most evident at births, initiations, marriages, funerals, harvest celebrations, and other rituals that people use to recognize and renew order in life and nature.

“Thirdly, worldviews validate our deepest cultural norms which we use to evaluate our experiences and choose courses of action. For instance, worldviews provide our ideas of righteousness and sin and with ways to deal with them, worldviews serve as a map to guide behaviour, and worldviews serve both predictive and prescriptive functions. Fourthly, worldviews help to integrate particular cultures and in the case of Malawi, it means all the ethnic groups.

“This means that all our ethnic identities in which we pride ourselves and use to discriminate others are superficial since our true unity is deeper than that and is found in our worldview. Ethnic identities are variations on a common existential theme.  Fifthly, worldviews are used as monitors of cultural change as to whether it is superficial or radical change. Finally, worldviews provide psychological reassurance that the world is truly as it is seen, a sense of peace, and being at home in the world we live in. 

“However, more often than not, we often take worldview for granted, know them superficially, and allow them to be undermined by new modern outlooks without them being integrated into it. The result is that we become children of two worlds without belonging to any and thus being not at home in them, instead we are alienated from both.

The result is an education that alienates and is alienating. The way a worldview functions should provide significant content as the manner in which our education philosophy is to be constructed and even the content of the learning to be imparted to learners.

“On the surface of things, we are ethnically very diverse groups that are occupying this space called Malawi and that leads to much discrimination as we fight over the national cake in terms of jobs, appointments, power distribution, and land occupation. We despise each other’s cultural practices without even understanding them. We use the cultural standards that we have learned partially from foreigners for fighting the battles of our up-oneship game.

“However, when we examine the situation at a deeper level, the level of worldview, we have much in common, not only within Malawi, but throughout the Sub-Saharan region. The other dimension of this shared worldview is the linguistic one. Ours are Bantu languages that have arisen from the same stock of languages in the past. Languages are the means in which our worldviews are expressed and convey their meaning.  Therefore, it is important for us Malawians to re-appropriate our worldview for our own identity, appreciation of a deeper meaning, and future progress. What are the characteristics of this worldview?

“Culturally, Malawi shares a basic worldview with other countries south of the Equator or generally what is called Sub-Saharan Africa. This should not come as a surprise since some of the major ethnic groups in Malawi trace their origins to as far west as the Democratic Republic of Congo, as far south as the Republic of South Africa, as far north as central Tanganyika, and also from Mozambique in the East.

“Linguistically, its thirteen or so languages (ChiChewa, ChiTumbuka, ChiYao, ChiNgonde, ChiTonga, ChiSena, ChiLhomwe, ChiNyanja, ChiLambya, ChiNdali/ChiSukwa, ChiNyika, ChiSenga, ChiMambwe, ChiNamwanga, and ChiNgoni) share some words and concepts with languages spoken in some of the countries in the region

As a result of this shared linguistic connectedness and worldview, this discourse will engage insights from some of these countries in discussing cultural perceptions of reality among Malawi ethnic groups. It is important that we now look closely at the underlying worldview shared by all the ethnic groups in and outside Malawi with the exception of the Asians and Europeans. 

“A worldview, as we have seen, is a cultural grid through which a given people encounter the world in a meaningful way. It locates their place, identity and value in the universe. It provides a vision for their future not only in this life, but also beyond the grave. It is a construction based on the accumulated wisdom of best practices in responding to all reality and challenges that have been encountered in a people history.

Such a grid is often referred to as cultural outlook or belief systems, but it is basically a philosophic vision. This philosophic cultural grid is based on inter-and intrapersonal and communal relationships with other beings on the one hand, and other realities of an impersonal nature, both living and non-living, in the universe on the other.n

To be continued…