The truth behind the marketing of western textbooks in French-speaking Africa

The education system of French-speaking Africa is bedeviled by a combination of two unfortunate conditions. First, the colonized content of these textbooks and, second, the production of those textbooks by two Western institutions: The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The reflection and analysis in this piece are based on reliable sources.

Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, generally comes to mind when we ponder the education system of formerly colonized countries, and the mental state of the students educated under that system. He stated, “The white man (colonizer) is gone but he left behind a textbook that functions as a perfect surrogate white master”. He later theorized the machinery that distorts the thinking and decision-making ability of the so-called independent people in a seminal book titled Decolonizing the Mind (1986). A look at the textbook production and the budget behind it corroborates Ngugi’s concerns. Research unveils that 90 per cent of textbooks in Francophone Africa comes from France. The material is written by French citizens who have resided in Africa, temporarily, to write reading and arithmetic textbooks and more. Those books are written in France, by French people and produced by French publishing houses.

Mamadou et Bineta, the most common textbook used for the teaching of reading in basic schools in Francophone Africa in the colonial days, is still used in some countries. The names of characters in those Francophone-produced books are African names like Kojo, Kokou, Fanta, Amina, Koffi, and so on. The subject matter is in the following vein: Pierre et Karim vont au marigot (Pierre/Peter and Kareem are going to the river), Delphine joue avec ses amies (Delphina is playing with her friends), La rentrée des classes (School reopening day), and Les chaussures du roi Makoko (King Makoko’s shoes). The students, who study such manuals, learn to see the world through the lens of French culture. Thus, the mind of the African is conditioned or programmed to function the way the French citizen wants it to function and the textbook becomes an agent of destruction, of control or defeat which is more powerful and more wicked than the European colonizer. Another important detail is that these school manuals are produced by two publishing companies: Hachette Livre (founded in Paris in 1826) and Hatier, founded in 1880, with headquarters in Paris.

The business behind this mental conditioning is clearly captured in a study by UNESCO which concludes that 15 per cent of the education sector budget in French-speaking African countries is allocated to textbooks that are produced in France. Many critics claim that “Africans are lazy, since they cannot produce textbooks or school manuals for themselves”. Such people generally go further and ask, “what prevents Africans from stressing entrepreneurship and establishing publishing houses that produce textbooks written by Africans for Africans? Is France responsible for all the misfortunes of Africa? In this case, the answer is “yes”. The economic situation in Africa is said to compel African countries to subsidize textbooks which are sold in local bookshops at half of the cost at which the book is sold by the French publisher. A book that costs 5,000 CFA francs (8.5 USD) on the African market was probably bought from the publisher for more than 10,000 CFA francs (17 USD) by the African state or government. In such cases, the state is the main importer, and the bookshops get their commodities from the state.

This subsidy is financed by “loans” obtained from the World Bank and the IMF, as I intimated initially. It must be noted that those funds are not sent to the coffers of the African states but transferred directly to the French publishing companies which, in turn, send the books to the African countries. So, for 60 years (since the “end” of colonization), Africans have been paying for the subsidization of school textbooks, produced by French companies and sold at a high cost, with no competitor, since they are the sole producers of the books. African countries, therefore, cannot choose to purchase textbooks from the publisher of their choice (it could be a European, Australian Canadian publisher, etc.) whose prices are lower and whose books have the content required by the national curricula of African countries. Many non-African countries are able to acquire textbooks that match their curriculum from the publisher of choice, once the price is within budget. This is certainly the case in the US.

In Africa, two financial giants dictate who produces these texts. That could explain the choice of the directors of those two institutions. The IMF is almost always led by a French citizen and the World Bank has an American (US) director. So, the wealthy Western institutions trade among themselves, using Africa as an asset in that financial game.

The patriotic African educators and entrepreneurs who set up publishing houses (because they have discovered the exploitation of the French) will likely go bankrupt because the production cost of their textbooks will demand a higher market price as they would not benefit from state subsidization despite their more appropriate Afrocentric content. Consequently, parents or students will patronize books published in France because the African Government bears part of the cost. The African state will simply tell the African publisher that they are unable to subsidize his books, since the subsidies from the IMF and World Bank are allotted to the French publishers, leaving Africans with only huge debts to pay. So, African consumption is controlled by the debt (loan system), an apparatus that enriches Western institutions, a plain display of the innermost system of neocolonialism. For 60 years, the Hachette and Hatier publishing houses have been cashing in billions, with the only justification being that their country, France, had colonized ours in Africa. A UNESCO publication reported that “the exportation of textbooks to French-speaking African countries enabled the two French publishers to cash in 500 billion CFA francs or about 847,007,284 USD over ten years, and that means 50 billion CFA francs or roughly 84,690,325 USD, annually.

The quality of education in Africa has been debated and what stands out is the neocolonial influence on the education system which is said to be more pronounced in French-speaking Africa. Apparently, not so much was known about the pro-France economic policy. It would be worth finding out if a similar unjust intellectual and mercantile policy exists in English-speaking Africa.

Moussa Traoré is Professor in the Department of English of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana.