Deborah J. Johnson, DeBrenna LaFa Agbényiga and Robert K. Hitchcock (eds.)Vulnerable Children2013Global Challenges in Education, Health, Well-Being, and Child Rights10.1007/978-1-4614-6780-9_4© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
4. The Nyae Nyae Village Schools Project: Indigenous Community-Based Education in Namibia
(1)
Kalahari Peoples Fund, 4811-B Shoalwood, Austin, TX 78756, USA
Abstract
Twenty years ago, an experimental school project was begun among indigenous people, the Ju/’hoan San, in a remote part of Namibia, then still apartheid South West Africa. The children of the Ju/’hoan people, or Ju/’hoansi, had been identified as “educationally marginalized” in the late 1980s, before Namibia’s Independence from South Africa (March, 1990). Those few children who had access to national schooling showed a very high dropout rate; the schools were clearly not appropriate to their needs. Accordingly, they were the “blamed victims” and an embarrassment to the national education system.
Twenty years ago, an experimental school project was begun among indigenous people, the Ju/’hoan San, in a remote part of Namibia, then still apartheid South West Africa. The children of the Ju/’hoan people, or Ju/’hoansi, had been identified as “educationally marginalized” in the late 1980s, before Namibia’s Independence from South Africa (March, 1990). Those few children who had access to national schooling showed a very high dropout rate; the schools were clearly not appropriate to their needs. Accordingly, they were the “blamed victims” and an embarrassment to the national education system.
The Nyae Nyae Village Schools Project (VSP) was an attempt to provide appropriate and effective primary schooling to this marginalized minority as a bridge to participation in the national system. The social and cultural situation of the time, with enormous prejudice against nonwhite people, and especially nonwhite indigenous people, made the start of the project a colossal struggle. The practical and logistical problems themselves were extremely daunting. There were also predictable but challenging arguments made about its relatively high cost for a small target group. Ju/’hoan childhood clearly was “undefended” from the point of view of access to education that would allow them to participate in the life of the new nation to which they belonged.
The project remained a struggle—practically, politically, and philosophically—for many years. However, by 2008, it was clear that this ambitious pilot had borne fruit as a model for the wider area of southern Africa. In a major poster exhibit about the VSP created by the staff and students at !Khwa ttu, a San people’s learning center in South Africa, the VSP is said to be perhaps the most progressive and best-known minority education initiative in southern Africa (Hays, 2007, Ministry of Basic Education and Culture, Namibia, personal communication, 2008). In this chapter, I outline the history of the Nyae Nyae Village VSP that was already in beginning stages in the late 1980s in the Ju/’hoan communities of northeastern Namibia. The VSP was an ambitious, radical approach to providing the formerly hunting and gathering Ju/’hoan San (known to many as the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert) with appropriate, accessible, and effective primary education in their mother tongue. The mother-tongue emphasis was adopted not only for itself but as the most reasonable bridge to the new national language, English, that replaced Afrikaans, regarded as the language of the oppressor. The VSP was an attempt to remedy the educational problems of a small, scattered group of people living in substantial isolation from the rest of the Namibian population. Linguistically, the San have been isolated from their African neighbors by the Khoisan, or “click,” languages they speak. Further, their languages have not been in written form until very recently. The distance between the Ju/’hoansi and the mainstream population was not only physical and linguistic but social and economic. Apartheid—added to the ancient mistrust between hunter-gatherers and pastoralists in that part of the world—had put the Ju/’hoan and other San at the bottom of every human ladder.
Basically, the San are a “Fourth World” people living in the developing “Third World” countries of Namibia, Botswana, and a few neighboring nations of southern Africa. Their educational problems have presented, in microcosm, the class and racial issues dividing them from an equitable share in the future of southern African countries (Hitchcock, 1992; Hays, 2004, 2007).
In our book, The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae since Namibia Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa (Biesele & Hitchcock, 2011), we detailed the historical matrix out of which the VSP grew. This community-based educational project, a part of the national school system of Namibia since 2001, was begun under the auspices of the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia (NNDFN, formerly the Ju/wa Bushman Development Foundation). The VSP resulted from a collaboration among anthropologists (including myself), linguists, several educators, writers, development workers, and the Ju/’hoan community as represented by their people’s organization, the Nyae Nyae Farmers Cooperative (2011) (NNFC, which has since become the Nyae Nyae Conservancy).
I described the necessary orthographic, grammatical, dictionary, and curriculum work carried out in the Ju/’hoan language to make the VSP possible. I also presented a bibliography containing materials produced by and about the project. The VSP language work was carried out under the direction of a linguist hired by the NNFC. The linguist, the late Patrick Dickens of the University of the Witwatersrand, was involved along with me in early community consultation leading to the VSP. The VSP spent a great deal of time getting parents actively involved in hands-on teaching of traditional skills, and this is seen as one important key to its success.
A second key was the respect and attention shown to the effective, long-honed educational, and child-socialization systems of the Ju/’hoansi themselves. The achievements of the Namibian VSP provide useful examples and positive suggestions for the educational future of both the Ju/’hoan, who live on the Botswana side of the international fence shared with Namibia, and other minority-language communities. In particular, the VSP experience underscores the need for any such project to take time to adjust to the pace of a local community. It highlights the need to understand local cultures of communication as well as local languages. It holds cautionary lessons on the danger of “top-down” educational planning for children in vulnerable communities. Finally, its cultural spin-offs (rapidly spreading literacy in mother tongue and English, empowering connection to the Internet) help to defend San childhood in unexpected ways.
The Need for the Village Schools Project
The problems of remoteness and the painful legacy of apartheid combined in Nyae Nyae to create an educational crisis that was deeply worrisome to the leaders of the NNFC. As the quote from then chairman Tsamkxao =Oma below shows, the NNFC around the time of Independence was very much motivated to tackle it:
When I look into the future to see what (our children) will see, one thing I see is that my children have come to fear schooling. They fear it because they fear being beaten. So they’ve all separated, left school and gone off in all directions. Every time I’m in Tsumkwe I see kids who aren’t in school. They say they’re tired of trying. They got along all right with the earlier teachers, but now there’s no understanding with the new ones. All (the children) see is pain. And that’s why they go about avoiding school these days. They don’t want to be there.
A while back we went to the (school administrator) and asked, ‘If beating a child makes him leave school, what good does that do?’ And all he said was ‘Mmm. So we said, ‘Misbehaving is one thing. If a child acts badly on many occasions, and the teacher discusses it with the parents so they understand each other, well, okay, go on and hit the child. But don’t just beat him as an ordinary thing! Sometimes they beat them for very small things. They don’t even tell the child why. They don’t even speak to the father about it.’
If the child learns some things but doesn’t learn others, you shouldn’t just beat him, but tell him what he hasn’t learned. You say, ‘This is the name of this,’ and you teach him along, teach him along, and then finally you ask him if he has learned the thing…If instead you go around beating the children, pretty soon you’ll see they’ll all be gone. This is how we tried to talk to the school administrator. But he persisted and finally we gave up.
But if the children did get good schooling? Some of them could get work in hospitals, medical work, and some could teach children in schools, and some could be police, and some could work in offices and do secretarial work; there’d be men’s work and women’s work. Or they could have shops, or some could learn to work on machines, machines that build trucks, or (welding) machines that work with fire, because these days people don’t just do one thing but do lots of kinds of things. Some are truck people and others are welders and some work on truck machines and others keep hostels for schoolchildren. Some could go to work for the government in another area, maybe in waterworks, or some might be in agriculture, and many of them might want to work in water detection and borehole drilling.
If they had a chance to learn these things, they’d know how to do them. My heart burns for them to learn. That’s how our work would go forward. (Biesele & Hitchcock, 2011, p. 233–234)
Tsamkxao =Oma’s statement in 1987 reflected some of the social problems with the government school at Tsumkwe, which since 1978 had been increasingly staffed with white South African military personnel as teachers. Corporal punishment, punitive and rote instruction in Afrikaans, terrible sanitary and social conditions in the hostel, and a cap on San education levels that meant that even the San kids who finished school couldn’t obtain jobs anyway led to a high dropout rate. The effective, permissive traditional child socialization and hands-on learning system the Ju/’hoansi enjoyed in their earlier community context was the opposite of what was being offered by the government system under apartheid. The NNDFN, following repeated requests from Nyae Nyae community members and the NNFC, determined to explore the possibility of a more appropriate educational system that would be based in the communities where children could live with relatives and keep learning the traditional skills their elders still wanted to teach them, along with becoming literate and possibly employable.
Patrick Dickens worked tirelessly to render Ju/’hoansi a professionally documented and professionally taught language. Dickens’ Ju/’hoan–English, English-Ju /’hoan Dictionary (Dickens, 1994) has become an indispensable tool of literacy and scholarship for the Ju/’hoan community as well as for linguists of the Khoisan languages. At the same time, there was growing awareness on the part of the Ju/’hoan people of the power of media and of their own need for the tools of literacy (Biesele et al., 2009). World literacy experience has affirmed that the most effective approach is to become literate in the mother tongue and then generalize this skill, after the first 3 or 4 years, to a national language. Around the time of Independence, English was replacing Afrikaans in Namibia, and the Ju/’hoansi, like many other minority groups, were anxious to develop skills both in English and a written form of their own language.
Dickens based his work on that of the linguist Jan Snyman of the University of South Africa (Snyman, 1975). He trained four young Ju/’hoan men, who already had some schooling in Afrikaans, to read and write Ju/’hoan using his newly streamlined, “practical” orthography. The VSP education program was a pioneer in the creation of a “self-literate” population, helping to design curriculum communally in a newly written language.
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