The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
COMMENT | NNANDA KIZITO SSERUWAGI | The Ugandan scholar Melina Platas – (Sorry America: in exchange for Zohran, we are owning Melina) – has published an insightful book demanding all our attention. In Culture and Mass Schooling: The Colonial Roots of Educational Inequality in Africa, Melina argues that community norms about schooling are central to explaining the persistence of educational inequality across social groups. She researches the case of the Muslim–Christian education gap in sub-Saharan Africa, where Muslims have fewer years of education than Christians on average, to examine the origins and reasons for the persistence of this phenomenon.
While the depth and breadth of her study focused on Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda, her labour spanned across almost 30 African countries where, for a decade, she sifted through census and survey data, conducted interviews, engaged in focus groups, combed through archival documents, and ran coordination games to understand and measure divergent schooling norms across religious communities.
In her observations, disparate norms about schooling were developed in various cultural groups under British colonial rule. Communities that initially converted to Christianity developed stronger norms around mass schooling, since Christianity was closely linked to this new form of education. This fusion can be traced in historical accounts, literature and even language. For instance, in Luganda, the word “kusoma” means “to read,” but could also mean “to pray.” This implies a direct link between the two activities. Conversely, schooling norms were weaker or even antagonistic in many Muslim communities, where there was an informed fear that children would be converted.
Melina’s book is central to the literature on the inequality of educational outcomes across and within African countries because it questions the obvious answers we had. It interrogates the partial explanations for why Muslims living in Muslim-majority areas tended to have worse educational outcomes than those who did not. While she does not rule out economic and other factors entirely, Melina develops a more complete theory explaining the factors shaping school attendance in Africa while taking into account the most common barriers, including financial constraints and physical access to school.
Whereas, at first glance, Uganda did not reflect immediate disparities in levels of education between Christians and Muslims, it provided Melina an important case point for understanding how British colonialism related to newly and partially Islamized societies on the continent. Here, unlike elsewhere, a large population of Muslims tended to have higher levels of schooling than Christians. This curved the general rule in her observations, which was that within countries, the education gap was likelier to be largest where Muslims were a local majority.
Uganda was also distinct from both Malawi and Nigeria in that, whereas the majority of the Muslim population in both countries was/is concentrated in a particular region of the country, and among particular ethnic groups, the Ugandan Muslims were/are a minority everywhere and in all major ethnic groups. And whereas 12-13 percent of both the Malawian and Ugandan populations constitute of Muslims, they are much more geographically concentrated in Uganda.
To solve the puzzle presented by the exceptionality of the Ugandan context, Malawi provided Melina the best framework to understand the overall pattern of lower educational attainment within Muslim communities. There, she could study and compare minority and majority Muslim areas while holding constant ethnicity and geography. In such communities as Kutambua, she discovered that the expectation of school attendance and persistence in school was absent. There was simply no social or economic imperative for extended schooling.
Based on census data from Malawi, Melina established that “Muslim children are 50 per cent more likely to be out of school than Christian children and nearly twice as likely to have never attended school at all.” And that “nearly one-third of Muslim children between the ages of 8 and 12 were not in school at the time of the census, and close to one in five had never set foot in a classroom.”
More intriguing was the fact that Malawi was not an exceptional case. Melina found that the schooling gap between religious groups has persisted even in Africa’s vibrant economies and democracies, which further challenges the economic and socio-political explanations for this gap. For instance, in Kenya, nearly 60 per cent of Muslim adults have never attended school, compared to only 11 per cent of Christians. In Nigeria, one of the largest economies on the continent, with the fifth-largest Muslim population in the world, Christians have five more years of schooling than Muslims. She observes that even after two decades of free primary education, more than four in ten Muslim children aged 6 to 12 are out of school, compared to less than one in five Christian children.
More surprisingly, Melina’s study found that across countries, the gap is smallest and Muslim schooling is highest where Muslims comprise a tiny minority of the population, for example, in Rwanda (1.8 per cent Muslim) or the Democratic Republic of Congo (1.5percent Muslim). It is also surprising that the Muslim–Christian schooling gap persists within ethnic groups, and even after controlling for household assets and living in a rural area.
Melina methodically tests the standard explanations for this educational gap, examining such factors as poverty, ease of access to school, discrimination, and differing beliefs about economic returns to education, and they all fail to hold up to a concrete explanation. Malawi, for instance, presented a scenario where Muslim-majority communities with availability of free public schools tended to have children not attending simply because they “did not want to go.”
That answer informs what Melina calls “schooling norms” because it reflects the abiding attitudes shared across a community on the importance of prolonged education, or lack thereof.
The Muslim–Christian education gap dates back to the introduction of mass schooling by Christian missionaries across colonial polities. Since formal schooling was a deliberate strategy to convert Africans to Christianity, Muslim majority communities frequently restricted, suspected, avoided and rejected it. The result is what persists up to now – a massive structural divergence in the adoption of mass schooling between Christians and Muslims.
Melina discovered that Ugandan Muslims have higher levels of schooling than Christians at the national level, mostly because the majority Muslim population lives in Buganda, the economic and political center of the country. The historical reason for this thin gap, however, dates back to the colonial period.
Buganda was the site for massive investments in mass schooling during colonialism because Christian missionaries arrived here only decades after the introduction of Islam. Intense religious competition for political influence and followers ensued, creating a powerful incentive for all religious groups to invest in schooling.
That is how Muslim elites in Buganda came to establish their own schools, with the highlight being the founding of the Uganda Muslim Education Association (UMEA) by Prince Badru Kakungulu in the 1940s. According to data from the 1933 Education Report of the Uganda Protectorate, by the early 1930s, Uganda had ten private Muslim-founded primary schools, eight of which were in Buganda. By contrast, in both Nigeria and Malawi, the largest Muslim populations live in the northern and southeastern parts of the countries, respectively, neither of which experienced significant investments in education during colonial rule.
Another striking difference in schooling norms amongst Ugandan Muslims is that there is no evidence of Muslims prioritising boys’ schooling over girls. Neither do they have different expectations of what is considered appropriate for boys and girls with respect to schooling.
In northern Nigeria, Melina argues that the British implemented a less-aggressive indirect rule there because they found an already consolidated Islamic polity under the Sokoto Caliphate, and since they considered Islam more legitimate than traditional African religions, they made fewer institutional adjustments in political institutions there, as compared to Buganda. That moderation on missionary activities in the Emirates, however, led to what has become the largest Muslim-Christian education gap anywhere.
Melina’s comparative historical analysis of Buganda, where the Islamization of society and its political institutions was incomplete, and the Emirates of Nigeria, where precolonial Islamization had consolidated, reveals the difference in how colonial administrators governed areas depending on their existing political institutions. In areas with already established Islamic political institutions, the colonialists never invested much in mass schooling, leading to the divergent outcomes and long-term implications for Muslim schooling we see today.
One of the early indications of the schooling gap was vivid by the late 1920s, when “Buganda had seven times as many schools as Nigeria’s Northern Provinces, for a population one-twelfth of the size.”
With hindsight, the Emirates of northern Nigeria provides a backdrop and even a quasi-counterfactual for what Buganda (or even Uganda) might have turned out to be had complete conversion to Islam taken place before colonial rule. The British would have administered it differently, and the outcomes, in education and other aspects, would likely be very different from what we have today.
The general implication of Melina’s research is that the odds of attending school for a child living in Nigeria, Malawi, or Uganda critically depend on whether they are Christian or Muslim, or whether majority of the population in their community is Muslim or Christian. The likelihood of a Christian child attending school is higher if the child is Christian, and this holds constant across all three countries. A Muslim child is more likely to attend school if they live in Uganda and Malawi, especially if they live in a Muslim-minority area. By identifying contexts where education is treated primarily as a religious/social norm, Melina develops a thesis that challenges the assumption that education is a universally desired public good.
***
The writer is a Ugandan thinking about Uganda.
