Education is generally promoted as the key to the future of Africa in global development discourses about the continent. Education’s official story in Africa continues to be one of innocence and public good, yet, since colonial times, education has constituted an area of intense contestation. The Education Alibi asks if it is possible that while claiming to be doing one thing, education has also been doing another in African communities. The concept of the “alibi” shines an interrogative light on institutions’ and actors’ use of education to divert scrutiny from other effects. Through ethnographic research and critical analysis across the continent, this volume focuses on people’s lived experiences to demonstrate how contemporary education systems in fact deepen economic, racialized, gendered, urban-rural, linguistic, religious, and other intranational and international inequalities.
Challenges conventional ways of thinking about global education goals and experiences of education in Africa
Chapter 1: The Education Alibi: Tracing Processes of Responsibilization,
Depoliticization, and the Production of Inequality. An Introduction.
Elizabeth Cooper (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Erdmute Alber
(University of Bayreuth, Germany), and Wandia Njoya (Daystar University,
Kenya)
Chapter 2: Responsibilizing Parents to Overcome Blindness: Changing
Intergenerational Relations through Education For All in Northern Benin
Erdmute Alber (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
Chapter 3: Symbolic Investment, Actual Indebtedness: The Competing Logics of
the School Sector in Contemporary DRC (Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga)
Edoardo Quaretta (Link Campus University, Italy)
Chapter 4: The teachers just consume our money: Casting Blame for
Educational Failure in Rural Lesotho
Claire Dungey (Kings College London, UK) and Nicola Ansell (Brunel
University, UK)
Chapter 5: Changing the Narrative on School Arson in Kenya: Beyond
Pathologizing and Criminalizing Approaches
Hildah Oburu (University of Nairobi, Kenya)
Chapter 6: Education without Critical Consciousness: An Autoethnography
Wandia Njoya (Daystar University, Kenya)
Chapter 7: Educational Reform in Times of Crisis: The Dual Missions of
Corporatized Education in Liberia
Tyler Hook (University of Wisconsin Madison, USA)
Chapter 8: Preserving Girls Futures: Girlhood, Schooling, and Development
in Niger
Adeline Masquelier (Tulane University, USA)
Chapter 9: Exam Securitization as Alibi: Education and the Distrustful
Paradigm of Governance in Kenya
Elizabeth Cooper (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Chapter 10: The Paradox of South African Schooling: An Analysis of Multiple
Exploitations of the Education Alibi
Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry (University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa)
Chapter 11: The Immorality of Pregnancy and Truancy as Alibi: Uncovering
Systemic Discrimination in Access to Basic Education in Tanzania
Aikande Kwayu (Independent scholar, Tanzania)
Chapter 12: Education between Desire and Rejection: The Perspectives of
Young Illiteracized People on Schooling in Benin
Issifou Abou Moumouni (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
Chapter 13: Privilege of Prayer: Moral Becoming as Class Formation in
Catholic Schools
Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
Elizabeth Cooper is Associate Professor at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Erdmute Alber is Professor and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. Wandia Njoya is Associate Professor of Literature at Daystar University in Kenya.
