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181  Chapter Twelve My Closing Days I returned to Buea from Bafut as the new Secretary of State for Primary Education, West Cameroon, and set to work to acquaint myself with the requirements of my new responsibility. My departmental experts were on hand to put me through the necessary paces, but I was anxious myself to introduce fresh impetus into some elements of our education system in which I passionately believed. So, during my maiden visit to the education institutions in the territory under my charge, I presented a paper on “A New Page in our Education” which was an expose on my ideas of how the shape of our post independence system of education ought to be. In brief, my idea was and is that the system of education modelled in the British colonial era, and on which lines we mainly run, falls short of our post independence needs as a country. The colonial education needs were smaller, and centred around the production of the limited needs of staffing the existing colonial services teachers to run the few schools, clerks to keep records in the few offices, policemen to keep the peace, messengers to deliver mail, etc. As the needs for literacy were few, the system was naturally shaped to take care of this, although there was gradual expansion as the services grew. This accounts for the small number of schools in the territory and the existence up to the early thirties, of only the Normal College for training teachers at Buea as the highest institution of learning in the territory. It later moved to Kake, Kumba, and was renamed Kake Teachers Training Centre. The missionary bodies delved into the opening of schools principally to expand their missionary work through literacy to enable Christian converts read the Bible to understand Christian teaching. So the content of colonial education was limited to the few needs of the time; but now with the arrival of independence and general enlightenment, a new situation forced us in providing a system more adapted to the needs of the day. Thus ran my theme. I record my disappointment at the cool reception of my message by those who ran the system. The reason: I was speaking a language too blatantly true perhaps. As an advocate for change of the system, it was like a preacher of a new order amongst the “Pharisees and 182  Scribes” steeped in the doctrines of the past. I had no doubt though, that my audience understood the problem, but their dilemma appears to be where their expertise was going to stand in the new message, and how they were going to overcome the obvious obstacles in the battle for change. Yet, it was only a matter of postponing the battle day, for we were simply deceiving ourselves if we did not accept the need to radically embrace change in our education system. The colonial system of education which had been for a select few, was now grossly out of tune when practically 80% of our children, male and female, now went to school. Watching a march past on our public holidays, one saw thousands of boys and girls in our teeming schools. The number of children in one divisional centre alone could easily have equalled the entire population of school children, in say 1930, in the entire British Cameroons. If all we did was to take out all these future inhabitants of Cameroon from the villages and homesteads only to teach them to read, write, type, learn a bit of geography and history and then turn them out to the country with paper certificates, we had to admit that we were not facing up to the realities and the harsh situation dictated by the needs of today’s society. What was the value of an education system that did not prepare the young for the appropriate needs of the society, and to train them to effectively play their part in it, building on the foundation of their fathers? Was it not painfully true that a large number of our school leavers came out of school having not learnt even how to repair the thatch roofs of their parents’ traditional huts? Then finding they could not even happily live with their parents again, drifted to the towns to create and/or increase the social problems that now beset our urban communities? What was the use for parents spending their entire meagre earnings to pay fees for children who spent years in...

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