Educated to Forget: The Crisis of Learning and the Politics of Ignorance in Uganda

By Emmanuel Mihiingo Kaija

Abstract

This paper is both lamentation and resistance—an invocation of ancestral echoes and a denunciation of institutional amnesia. It argues that Uganda’s education system, once conceived with potential as a liberatory pathway, has mutated into a machinery of epistemic exile, manufacturing docility under the guise of development. Through a multidisciplinary lens—drawing from classical antiquity (Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle), liberation theology, African philosophy (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, John Mbiti, Fanon), and biblical wisdom—it critiques the colonial and neoliberal architecture of learning that fosters forgetting over remembering, obedience over imagination. Against this backdrop, the paper calls for a radical reimagining of education as anamnesis—sacred recollection—rooted in African cosmologies, prophetic consciousness, and the gospel of truth.

1.A Pedagogy of Amnesia: Learning to Forget

In the land where Lake Victoria mirrors the firmament and termite mounds whisper genealogies older than empires, a strange silence echoes in the classrooms of Uganda. The silence is not of absence, but of erasure. The chalkboard, that once sacred canvas of transmission, now rehearses rehearsals—facts without fire, repetition without revelation. The students, rowed like reeds before a bureaucratic breeze, recite without understanding, obey without reflection. It is as if the river Lethe—the ancient Greek stream of forgetfulness—has been diverted through the nation’s schools, rendering its youth spectators to their own unmaking. The Latin sage Cicero warned, “Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum”—to be ignorant of what came before you is to remain forever a child. Yet that is the desired outcome of Uganda’s syllabus: eternal adolescence. A deliberate curriculum of cultural detachment, where British monarchs are exalted but the dynasties of Bunyoro and Buganda are footnotes, if remembered at all.

The very structure of schooling promotes intellectual exile. A young girl in Karamoja may walk ten kilometers to a school where her native tongue is unwelcome. A boy in Bundibugyo learns Shakespeare before knowing his clan’s totem. These are not pedagogical coincidences. They are imperial designs. For as Fanon taught, colonization is not only about land but about memory—and the most dangerous rebel is not the one who fights, but the one who remembers. Thus, remembering becomes a sacred act of defiance, and education must be reclaimed as the site of anamnesis—that ancient Platonic and Christian act of holy recollection. For what is wisdom, if not the retrieval of what is true, good, and beautiful?

2.Colonial Blueprints, Postcolonial Ghosts

The genesis of Uganda’s educational malaise lies buried in colonial cartography—not just of land, but of the soul. The British, in their utilitarian genius, did not seek to educate Africans for freedom, but to train them for service. Schools became factories of compliance. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o roared in Decolonising the Mind, the colonial classroom was not neutral; it was a psychological warzone. The “cultural bomb” detonated not with fire, but with silence—silencing native languages, native religions, native pride. The Bible was weaponized, not as liberation, but as sedation: “Servants, obey your masters.” Yet behind this scriptural manipulation stood a deeper violence—the erasure of orality, of ubuntu, of collective memory.

Greek philosophy understood education as paideia—the formation of the soul into harmony with truth. But colonial education reversed paideia, replacing the soul’s melody with the noise of Empire. Aristotle declared, “Education is the best provision for old age,” but in Uganda it became the theft of inheritance. The wisdom of ancestors was mocked as myth; the English textbook became scripture. The tragedy is not merely that this colonial system was implemented—it is that it was inherited, untouched. Postcolonial Uganda painted its schools in national colors, but taught the same syllabi. Today, a Senior Four student may be well-versed in Newton’s laws but unacquainted with the names of Ugandan freedom fighters. This is not just miseducation. It is disenchantment—education devoid of enchantment, narrative, belonging. The child is taught to memorize, but not to remember.

3.Neoliberal Metrics, Hollow Outcomes

The second great betrayal came not by gun or crown, but by calculator and clipboard. When the Bretton Woods institutions arrived in the 1980s, their Structural Adjustment Programs transformed education from a human right into a market commodity. The World Bank’s gospel of privatization turned schools into businesses, teachers into wage-laborers, and learners into data points. In theory, education was expanded; in practice, it was emptied. A UNESCO report from 2022 states that Uganda’s primary completion rate remains below 40%, with literacy levels dangerously low in rural areas. But this crisis is more than numerical—it is ontological. What kind of human being is being formed?

Seneca wrote, “Non scholae sed vitae discimus”—“We learn not for school, but for life.” Yet Ugandan education has become the opposite: learning for exams, not for existence. The tyranny of standardized tests has eclipsed the flowering of the mind. Creativity is punished. Critical thinking is optional. Moral vision is absent. The school system no longer educates—it administers. A thousand certificates may be printed, yet a million dreams lie unawakened. The neoliberal ideology insists that value is measurable—but how does one measure curiosity, wisdom, or courage? In the rush for results, the soul has been sidelined.

4.Theological Amnesia: The Church and the Classroom

The church, once a countercultural force in Africa, has often mirrored this forgetting. Seminaries churn out preachers fluent in Greek exegesis but tongue-tied in Luganda spirituality. Sunday Schools teach creation stories from Genesis but ignore the cosmologies of Ganda or Acholi lore. The sacred becomes foreign, and the foreign becomes sacred. Yet Scripture itself warns against this loss of memory. In Deuteronomy 6:12, Moses implores, “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt.” Forgetting is not just human weakness—it is spiritual danger. In biblical theology, remembering is redemptive. To remember is to re-covenant. Thus, true education is not indoctrination but epiclesis—an invocation of the Spirit upon the learner, awakening both memory and mission.

Augustine, the North African bishop of Hippo, saw education as a divine restlessness—“Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te”—“You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” But how can a heart rest when it has been taught to forget itself? Uganda’s children must be taught not only how to learn, but why—not for wealth alone, but for witness; not for function, but for formation. The resurrection of the African soul will not be achieved by GDP or university rankings, but by a re-sacralization of the curriculum.

5.Toward a Prophetic Pedagogy: Remembering as Resistance

What is to be done? The answer is not reform, but reformation. Uganda must birth a prophetic pedagogy that restores education as anamnesis—a sacrament of memory. This means infusing syllabi with local histories, oral traditions, spiritual wisdom. It means de-centering the imperial canon and lifting up the epics of our ancestors. It means teaching Lugbara children in Lugbara, not because English is evil, but because language is belonging. It means educating not just for jobs, but for justice.

We must retrieve the African notion of ubuntu—“I am because we are”—as the foundation of educational ethics. Let the classroom become a shrine of mutuality, where the child is not an empty vessel, but a sacred flame. Let literature include not only Achebe and Shakespeare, but also Okot p’Bitek and grandmother’s lullabies. Let science awaken wonder, and theology stir liberation.

Above all, let memory be honored. For to remember is to resist. To remember is to rebuild. To remember is to rise.

Conclusion: From Exile to Exodus

Uganda’s education system stands at a moral crossroads. Will it continue as a vehicle of forgetting—efficient, silent, obedient? Or will it become the chariot of awakening—restless, creative, alive? The choice is spiritual. For every child forgotten is a prophet unborn. Every language erased is a universe collapsed. Yet every act of remembering is a crack in the empire of amnesia. This paper is a trumpet blast—a call to remember the God who calls us by name, the ancestors who danced in wisdom, and the children who await a curriculum that sings.

Let us now, in the words of the Psalmist, “Tell it to the next generation: the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, His power, and the wonders He has done” (Psalm 78:4). For education is not merely the transmission of knowledge—it is the resurrection of the body of truth.