Education Marginalization in Sub-Saharan Africa by Mfum-Mensah Obed;

Author:Mfum-Mensah, Obed;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 6

Educational Development and Marginalized Zongo Muslim Communities

I devote this chapter to outline the tensions of the Christian missionary and colonial education discourses when juxtaposed with Islamic education, and how religion, ethnicity, and spatiality overlap to create dynamic Zongo Muslim communities as cultural spaces in Ghana. The chapter also highlights the ways the marginal school participation of children from Ofoase Zongo community fits into the broader discourse on Islamic communities’ resistance to Western education in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on Zongo Muslim “communities” as a unit of analysis in this chapter helps readers to conceptualize the complexities of the colonial encounters, colonial economic productive processes, community development in indigenous Ghanaian societies, and extension of social services including education to diverse marginalized communities in Ghana. Analysis of educational development in Zongo communities is particularly important because discussions about educational development in Ghana have not given much attention to how education was provided in Zongo communities in colonial and postcolonial educational discourse. There is not much literature on Zongo communities in general and the paucity of literature is staggering when it comes to education of Zongo communities in Ghana. The development of Zongo communities in the contexts of the Christian missionary enterprise and colonial encounters, and expansion of Western forms of education in Zongo communities provides a glimpse of the calculated marginalization of Islamic communities in sub-Saharan Africa and Islamic communities’ resistance to colonial forms of socialization.

Zongo Muslim communities in urban and rural spaces in Ghana reveal a settlement phenomenon that began in the colonial era. In recent years, the development of Zongo communities has taken a center stage that one of the early initiatives taken by the newly elected Ghanaian government’s New Patriotic Party after its inauguration was the establishment of the Zongo Development Fund. As “stranger communities” in Ghana, the “Zongo” provides a lens for analyzing the complex ways migration and immigration in the colonial era overlapped with religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status to create a marginalized “space” and culture and the impact of this social arrangement on community development in urban and rural Ghanaian societies (Silver 1983; Sarfoh 1986; Allman 1991; Pellow 1991, 2001; Obeng 2002; Williamson 2013).

“Zongo” as a “Cultural Space”

The Zongo as a spatial settlement and spatial culture in Ghana is the result of migration and immigration, transnational, and transcultural processes and shifts created by colonial economic forms in colonial productive processes (Silver 1983). Zongo first emerged as a settler community that the colonial administration created to organize and restrict and contain new migrants in search of opportunities to participate in colonial economic and productive processes in colonial territories. The word “Zongo” is a Hausa term which means “foreign settlers,” “travelers’ camp,” or “stopover.” Zongo is a sort of “ghettoization” created in Ghanaian urban and rural communities which began as an informal settlement (slum) in Ghanaian spatial settlement where Muslim immigrants temporarily squatted during the British colonization of the Gold Coast. The colonial government reconfigured and created new forms of spatial social arrangements in the colonial Gold Coast

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