By Sallieu T. Kamara
When the Organization of African Unity declared June 16 as the Day of the African Child in 1991, the continent's Heads of State intended to schedule a date on the calendar for the peoples of Africa to honour the courage and boldness of those students that laid down their lives during the Soweto massacre of 1976 so that others could acquire quality education and live a better life.
This declaration by the OAU came fifteen years after the apartheid regime in South Africa unleashed terror on black high school students in Soweto who were “protesting against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which forced all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction”. This left about two hundred children dead and several others wounded. It later became known as the Soweto Uprising.
It was, therefore, the longing of the OAU that the Day of the African Child would be used to raise awareness of the continuing need for the improvement of the education that African governments were providing to African children. Addressing a gathering in Windhoek, Namibia, as Guest of Honour at an event organized by the Pan African Centre to commemorate this year’s Day of the African Child, Junior Mayor of Windhoek, Councilor Charlton Taniseb, highlighted the ever growing quandary of African children.
He stressed the important role parents and guardians should play in the lives of their children and the responsibility and commitments of African governments to addressing the numerous problems affecting the well-being and development of these kids. Declaring June 16 the Day of the African Child is an opportunity that the OAU has offered to the peoples of Africa to always reflect, critically analyse the situations of our children and work collectively to improve the quality of their lives. But is it what we are doing? No, we are not. In fact, the things that we as parents, guardians and teachers do or encourage our children to do on the Day of the African Child only make the day continue to lose its meaning.
Let us take the instance of Sierra Leone. The way and manner the Day of the African Child is today being celebrated in Sierra Leone absolutely defeats the purpose for which it was established and negates the great ideals which the black students in Soweto struggled and died for on that cold Wednesday morning of June 16, 1976. Rather than encouraging and supporting our children to reflect on the circumstances that led to the horrendous massacre of their colleagues in Soweto, or to critically examine their present unfortunate situations, we pamper them to embark on untoward activities.
It is a pity that year after year on the Day of the African Child, parents, teachers and guardians stand aloof and watch their children in full admiration harassing innocent citizens and behaving like hoodlums and ruffians. Could this be a poignant reminder of the society that we are going to leave behind? What I saw again this year with our children makes me believe that the lust for materialism has completely eroded the values and standards that were once the beacon of our civilization as a country.
I left Kenema for Makeni on the morning of this year’s Day of the African Child, passing through Bo, Mile 91 and Magburaka. The unsightly scenes of little children, some as young as six years old, barricading the roads with ropes and sticks, dotted the length and breadth of the distance we covered on that morning. At each of these “posts”, the children demanded money from us and from other drivers and Okadas using the road. They were very aggressive, uncouthly bad-mannered and sometimes unyielding to our appeals to allow us to cross when we thought it was all a joke. They were doing this in full view of their parents and, in some places, their teachers as well. We did not give them a single cent, though, because we believed that what they were doing was wrong. But their behaviour caused us unnecessary hold-ups, frustration and embarrassment. But let’s look at it. If children of their age can be a menace to society especially on such an important day, what should we expect from them when they grow old?
And if you asked these children to tell you the significance of the day, none of them would be able to do so. I tried to engage them throughout the way just to find out how much they knew about the day they were celebrating. But they could not say anything meaningful other than the usual garbage that “dis nar we day, nar di tem wei den kill we compin dem”. This is where I think the teachers should play a role. Let them design classes that are specifically aimed at educating the children about what led to the student protest in Soweto and how it helped to change the entire political landscape in that country.
I believe there is now an absolute need for the Sierra Leonean society, particularly the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, to look carefully into the way and manner our children mark the Day of the African Child. If we realize that it cannot bring any value to our children, or it cannot serve the purpose for which it was established, why not stop commemorating it. I believe the unacceptable behaviour of our kids is an indication of our failure as parents, teachers, government and the entire Sierra Leonean society. We have awfully botched our responsibility to motivate, inspire and guide our children to do only those things that can make them worthy future leaders. Never should we continue to abdicate our responsibility.
Otherwise how can we explain the fact that during the Day of the African Child about seven out of every ten students acted as traffic police officers, an institution that is arguably the most corrupt in the country? The reason for this is very simple. Traffic police officers are the only public officials that our children see all over the country every day publicly soliciting and collecting monies from drivers and Okada riders and nothing comes out of it. What this is telling us is that we have taught our children to believe that “money is everything” and with it you can get away with anything, no matter what. How you acquire it does not matter at all. In other words, we have taught our children to be corrupt.
This is not the kind of society that our parents bequeathed to us – a society that is morally and ethically broke. June 16 provides us the opportunity as parents and as teachers to encourage our children to think critically about their present situations to see whether, in fact, they too are not going through the same path that led to the Soweto uprising in 1976.
Are our children receiving the kind of quality education they deserve? What about our public schools, do they have the wherewithal to give our children quality education? These and many more are the questions that we need to find answers to on the Day of the African Child. It is an incontestable fact that some of our public schools have not only become a dumping ground for our children, but also a breeding ground to churn out hard-core criminals that daily cause distress and anguish to the people. The Minister of Education, Dr Minkailu Bah, has spent over five years claiming to be fighting corruption in his ministry leaving out other equally important sectors of the educational system to decay at the expense of our children. Little wonder that private schools have taken over the country, making it impossible for children of poor parents to access quality education.
Go to the rural communities and experience the unacceptably appalling conditions under which our children “learn”. What passes out as classrooms, mostly constructed through communal labour, are in a decrepit state with inadequate or completely absent furniture thereby forcing children to sit on the bare floor or on stones. Teachers are either not paid or payment is very irregular. Even in urban towns and cities, the challenge of maintaining children in schools has become very huge. Extra-charges demanded by teachers on a virtually daily basis are killing parents and making some of them to withdraw their children from school. Teachers place more premium on their private lessons and on the sale of pamphlets than their classroom work for which they are paid. Whilst all of this is happening, the rich are sending their children to private schools in the country or sending them abroad to acquire quality education that will make them lord over their less fortunate compatriots like a Colossus after their parents would have left the stage. Is this not important enough to discuss on the Day of the African Child?
We may not have laws that compel the use of an “inferior” language in public schools as a means of instruction whilst private schools use English, but the situation in Soweto then and what obtains now in Sierra Leone in terms of education are not fundamentally different. And, I am sure, so too is the intention. Whilst defending the apartheid regime of South Africa in the run-up to the Soweto Uprising, the then deputy minister of Bantu Education, Punt Janson, said that the black people did not need education that would take them beyond working on a farm or in a factory as labourers. “Why should we now start quarrelling about the medium of instruction among blacks,” he asked rhetorically. My reading of this defence is that the apartheid regime was using the segregation laws in education as a tool to continue their dominance of all sectors of the South African society.
Could it be the case here in Sierra Leone? Is the neglect of education by successive government a deliberate ploy to keep the vast majority of Sierra Leoneans perpetually as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”? What about the increase in incidents of little girls being raped and molested on a daily basis by men the ages of their fathers' and grandfathers' who most times go unpunished? Young kids indulging in hard drugs, some out of frustration or the lack of opportunities to develop themselves. Are all these issues not significant enough to exercise our minds on the Day of the African Child?
Let us honour those who deserve it. The Martyrs of Soweto deserve to be honoured. They died for a noble cause. Let us not make light of the Day of the African Child by the way we commemorate it. It is a day meant for sober reflections and collective actions in the interest of our children. The murderous apartheid regime would have succeeded in killing the children of Soweto, but they did not succeed in stopping them from getting what they wanted. Ten days after they were killed, on 26 June 1976, the apartheid regime annulled the teaching of Afrikaans in all black schools. And since then, South Africa has never been the same again. We don’t want a repeat of what happened in Soweto here, but we can draw lessons that will help us shape the future of the next generation of Sierra Leoneans.
