A child in Paris learns mathematics in French. A child in Tokyo learns science in Japanese. A child in Berlin learns history in German. A child in Beijing learns everything in Mandarin. A child in Accra learns mathematics in English. A child in Lagos learns science in English. A child in Nairobi learns history in English. A child in Johannesburg learns everything in a language their grandmother does not speak.

This is not education. This is architecture.

Introduction: The Invisible Scaffolding

Every morning, millions of African teachers walk into classrooms and do something so normal that they have stopped noticing it: they teach in a language that is not their own, to children who do not speak that language at home, about subjects that have no intrinsic connection to that language.

We have made the extraordinary seem ordinary. We have taken a radical, historically unprecedented experiment—educating an entire continent in languages imported from across an ocean—and convinced ourselves that this is simply how education works.

It is not how education works. It is how conquest works.

The decision to teach African children in European languages was never a pedagogical decision. It was never about what was best for children’s learning, cognitive development, or intellectual flourishing. It was a political decision, made by colonial powers for colonial purposes, and it remains the most successful and least examined instrument of mental colonization on the continent.

This essay is an examination. Not of language policy—of the soul.

SECTION 1: The Installation

How Colonial Education Systematically Devalued African Languages

The British did not arrive in West Africa and announce: “We will now teach your children in English because it is superior.” That would have been too crude, too obviously arrogant. Instead, they did something more effective: they installed English as the language of power while systematically discrediting African languages as unfit for serious thought.

The mechanism was simple. First, they called African languages “dialects”—a word that carried the implication of incompleteness, of being a lesser version of a “real” language. A language has grammar, literature, philosophy. A dialect is just… talk. The English had a language. The Fante had a dialect. The difference was not linguistic—it was political.

Second, they built a school system in which every subject of value was taught in English. Mathematics, science, history, geography, literature—all in English. African languages were permitted only as a bridge, a temporary scaffold to be removed as soon as possible. The message was unmistakable: serious thinking happens in English. Your mother’s tongue is for the market, for the home, for what is personal and unimportant.

Third, they created an economy in which English proficiency was the gatekeeper to opportunity. The clerk’s job, the teacher’s post, the administrator’s office—all required English. The message again: if you want to matter, you must leave your language behind.

By the time colonialism formally ended, the installation was complete. Africans themselves believed that English was the language of intelligence. Africans themselves enforced English-only policies in schools. Africans themselves looked down on students who spoke their mother tongues in the classroom.

The colonizer did not need to stay. The colonized had internalized the hierarchy.

Today, a teacher in Ghana will correct a student who asks a question in Twi. A teacher in Nigeria will tell a student to speak “good English.” A teacher in Kenya will shame a child for speaking Kiswahili in class. We do not ask ourselves: why? Why is it wrong for a child to think in the language where their thinking is deepest? Who decided that?

The answer is uncomfortable: the colonizer decided. And we have been enforcing that decision ever since.

SECTION 2: The Split Consciousness

What Happens When a Child’s Thinking Mind Operates in One Language While Their Emotional Self Operates in Another

There is a Ghanaian child. Let us call her Ama.

At home, Ama speaks Twi. She tells her grandmother about her day. She jokes with her siblings. She negotiates with her mother about chores. In Twi, Ama is fluent, expressive, confident. She thinks in Twi without effort—the language is not a tool she uses but a medium she inhabits.

At school, Ama is required to speak English. When she raises her hand, she must formulate her thought in a language where she does not dream. She must translate before she can speak. The thought that was alive in Twi becomes stiff in English. The nuance is lost. The confidence falters.

What does this do to Ama’s mind?

Over time, Ama learns something that no teacher ever explicitly teaches: her real thinking—the thinking that is deep, natural, effortless—is not acceptable in the classroom. The classroom requires a different kind of thinking: slower, more careful, more constrained. The classroom teaches her that her natural intelligence is somehow inadequate. That to be intelligent, she must think in a foreign language.

This creates a split consciousness. Ama develops two ways of being: the person she is at home—fluent, confident, fully herself—and the person she is at school—hesitant, self-conscious, performing for approval. Over time, the school self becomes the “real” self, the self that matters. The home self becomes private, personal, less important.

This is not an accident. This is the mechanism through which language colonizes the mind.

The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes it as the “colonial alienation” of the African child:

“The colonial child was made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen and defined by the colonial culture. He was made to see his past as one wasteland of non-achievement and his present as a dark reality from which he had to escape to the light of European culture.”

The escape route was language. The destination was a mind that could think, but only in borrowed categories.

Consider the contrast with a child in France. That child learns mathematics in French—the language of their dreams, their family, their inner life. For them, thinking and language are unified. The subject matter and the medium of thought are one. They do not experience the split. They do not learn that their deepest self is inadequate.

The African child learns something different: that intelligence is something external, something that comes in a foreign package, something that requires leaving yourself behind.

This is not pedagogy. This is psychic violence. And we have normalized it for over a century.

SECTION 3: The Hierarchy

Why English Is Treated as the Language of Intelligence While Twi, Hausa, and Yoruba Are Treated as Languages of Tradition

Walk into any African school and observe. You will see a hierarchy so deeply embedded that no one notices it anymore.

English is at the top. English is the language of instruction, of textbooks, of examinations, of authority. The principal speaks English at assembly. The teacher speaks English in class. The student who speaks excellent English is admired, respected, seen as intelligent.

Below English, in descending order, are the other European languages—French, Portuguese—depending on the country’s colonial history.

At the bottom are African languages. Twi. Hausa. Yoruba. Igbo. Kiswahili. Amharic. Shona. These are the languages of the home, the market, the village. They are not the languages of the classroom. A student who speaks only Twi is seen as uneducated. A teacher who cannot express a complex idea in English is seen as incompetent.

This hierarchy is so pervasive that we have stopped questioning it. But question it we must.

Why is English the language of intelligence?

Is it because English is inherently more logical? No—all languages have logic. Is it because English has more words? No—vocabulary size is irrelevant to cognitive capacity. Is it because English is the language of science? No—science happens in whatever language scientists use.

The reason English is the language of intelligence in Africa is simple: colonialism installed it there. And we have maintained the installation.

The proof is in the exceptions. In Tanzania, Kiswahili is the language of instruction in primary schools. Tanzanian children learn mathematics, science, and social studies in Kiswahili. Are they less intelligent than Ghanaian children learning in English? No—they are more fluent, more confident, more able to express complex ideas, because they are learning in the language where their thinking is deepest.

In Ethiopia, Amharic has been the language of instruction for centuries. Ethiopian scholars produced written texts, philosophical treatises, and scientific knowledge in Amharic while Europe was still in the Middle Ages. Are Ethiopians less intelligent because they did not learn in English? The question is absurd.

The hierarchy is not natural. It is political. It was constructed. And it can be dismantled.

SECTION 4: What Was Lost

The Philosophical Concepts, Scientific Knowledge, and Ways of Knowing That Cannot Be Translated Without Distortion

When a language dies, something dies with it. Not just words—ways of seeing, ways of knowing, ways of being in the world.

Africa has lost more languages to colonialism than any other continent. Hundreds of languages have disappeared entirely. Hundreds more are endangered. With each loss, a universe of knowledge vanishes.

Consider what is untranslatable.

The Akan concept of Sankofa—”it is not taboo to return and fetch what you forgot”—contains a philosophy of history, memory, and progress that cannot be captured in a single English word. To translate it as “learning from the past” is to flatten it, to lose the specific relationship between past and present that the word encodes.

The Yoruba concept of Ori—the inner spiritual head that determines destiny—contains a sophisticated understanding of agency, fate, and selfhood that has no equivalent in English thought. When Yoruba philosophy is taught in English, this concept is reduced to “destiny” or “fate,” losing the nuanced understanding of how the individual relates to the cosmic order.

The Kiswahili concept of Utu—humanity, personhood, the quality of being human in relation to others—is the foundation of an entire ethical system. Ubuntu in Nguni languages carries similar weight. These are not just words. They are philosophical frameworks.

When we teach African children in English, we do not just teach them a new language. We teach them to think in categories that cannot accommodate these concepts. We teach them that their ancestors’ deepest insights are untranslatable—which means, implicitly, that they are unimportant.

And what of scientific knowledge? Pre-colonial Africa had sophisticated systems of agriculture, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. These were encoded in African languages. The knowledge of when to plant, which herbs cured which illnesses, how to read the stars—all of this was carried in language. When we abandoned African languages for European ones, we did not just abandon words. We abandoned knowledge.

The result: an African student today learns about Newton’s laws in English but knows nothing about the mathematical principles encoded in the construction of the Great Zimbabwe. They learn about European medicinal plants but nothing about the pharmacopoeia their grandmothers used. They learn European astronomy but nothing about how Dogon priests mapped the stars without telescopes.

This is not education. This is amnesia.

SECTION 5: The Alternative

What Bilingual Education Could Look Like If It Truly Served African Children

The argument against African-language instruction is always the same: “English is the global language. Our children need English to compete.”

This argument assumes what it should prove. It assumes that the choice is either English-only or no English at all. It assumes that teaching in African languages means abandoning English. This is false.

The alternative is not English or African languages. The alternative is both—but differently.

Imagine a classroom where:

• A child learns to read and write first in their home language, building literacy skills that transfer naturally to English later
• Mathematics and science are taught in the language where thinking is deepest, with English introduced as a second language, not a replacement
• History and social studies begin with local knowledge, local heroes, local achievements—taught in the local language—before expanding to continental and global contexts
• English is taught as a foreign language, with the same respect and methodology used to teach French in English schools
• African literature is taught in African languages, with translations available for those who need them
• Philosophical concepts are explored in the languages that birthed them, then discussed in English as a second language

This is not fantasy. This is how education works in every other part of the world. In Finland, children learn in Finnish. In Japan, children learn in Japanese. In China, children learn in Mandarin. Only in Africa do we insist that children must learn in a foreign language to be educated.

The objection: “But we have many languages! Which one would we choose?”

This is a logistical challenge, not an insurmountable obstacle. Tanzania chose Kiswahili. Ethiopia chose Amharic. Nigeria could choose Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo as regional languages of instruction, with English as the common language. Ghana could choose Twi, Fante, Ga, Ewe, and Dagbani as languages of instruction in the early years, with English introduced gradually.

The question is not whether it is possible. The question is whether we have the political will to do it.

Closing: The Question

The question is not whether your students can speak English.

They can. They will. English is not going away. It is a useful tool, a global language, a means of communication with the wider world. No one is arguing that African children should not learn English.

The question is deeper.

The question is: can your students think in the language where their thinking is deepest?

The question is: do your students know that their home language is a language of intelligence, of philosophy, of knowledge?

The question is: have your students been taught that their grandmother’s tongue is sufficient for serious thought—or have they been taught that it is a dialect, a relic, a language of tradition but not of progress?

The question is: when a child asks a question in Twi, do you tell them to speak English—or do you welcome the question and answer it in the language where the child is most alive?

The question is not about policy. It is not about curriculum. It is not about the Ministry of Education.

The question is about you. In your classroom. Tomorrow morning.

Will you continue to enforce the hierarchy? Or will you begin, in small ways, to dismantle it?

The grammar of conquest was installed over centuries. It will not be undone overnight. But it can be undone—one classroom, one teacher, one child at a time.

The question is whether you have the courage to begin.