Imagined Communities
What is a nation? Defining this is harder than it sounds.
Nations are not physical objects like trees or mountains. They also seem to be
more than the sum of their observable parts. You can conquer a nations’ land,
envelop its people, burn its flag and even revoke its legal status without
extinguishing it entirely – just ask the people of Kurdistan, Quebec or
Palestine.
Nations can be effectively viewed as imagined communities. Though members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellowship members, in the minds of each lives
the image of their communion. This image can be exceptionally powerful: it can
send people to war, paper over societal divisions and help coordinate people en
masse.
As a result, nations are malleable constructs that change
when the stories that underpin them change as well. This can happen remarkably
quickly: for example, the nation of East Germany ceased to exist virtually
overnight, as the story behind it was rewritten following the fall of the
Berlin Wall. One of the most effective ways to rewrite these stories is through
education, via its ability to shape the collective imagination of citizens. In
this post, we focus on two comparative case studies to demonstrate this: Tanzania
and Kenya and India and Pakistan.
Tanzania and Kenya
At independence, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania and Jomo
Kenyatta’s Kenya were remarkably similar. Both had similar East African
geographies, both contained a similarly diverse composition of different ethnic
groups and both inherited a similar set of institutions brought about by
British colonial rule.
Despite these similarities, the two nations quickly diverged
due largely to the disparate personalities of their inaugural leaders. Nyerere
was perhaps Africa’s closest approximation to Plato’s ‘philosopher king’: a
highly educated visionary committed to the lofty ideals of self-determination,
equality and pan-African socialism. These ideals drove Nyerere to pursue an
ambitious nation-building programme in which education played a vital role.
Above: Tanzania’s
‘philosopher king’, Julius Nyerere. Source:
www.infed.org
For example, via changes to the curriculum, Swahili was
institutionalised as the lingua franca of Tanzania. Even students who entered
primary school with no knowledge of Swahili soon learned and brought it home to
their villages, enabling Tanzanians to communicate with each other in a common
tongue. The new curriculum also placed heavy emphasis on ‘civic education’: a
subject designed to spread stories about shared Tanzanian identity, ideology and
memory. By the 1970s all teachers were required to serve in the paramilitary
national service organisation, helping to indoctrinate them into the ideals of
the Tanzanian regime. The net result of this was that Tanzanian schoolchildren
left school with a common language and a shared idea of their past, present and
destiny as fellow Tanzanian citizens.
Across the border, Kenyatta was driven less by ideology and
more by the harsh realpolitik of
maintaining power in a divided society. Instead of building a nation, he sought
to entrench the power of his ethnic group (at the expense of others) by
rewarding his fellow Kikuyu with Cabinet positions and lucrative business
contracts. This lack of nationalist impetus was reflected in education policy:
Swahili competed with English and local languages (e.g. Kikuyu) as the primary
mode of instruction in school and the official geography, history and civics
curriculum did not study Kenya as a nation until grade 5. As a result, many
Kenyans left school without a common language and without a shared idea of what
it meant to be Kenyan – in stark contrast to what happened in Tanzania.
The consequences of this have been wide-spread. While
Tanzania has experienced virtually no ethnic conflict since independence, Kenya
has suffered ethnic violence at every election since Kenyatta’s rule. Moreover,
as Miguel (2005) shows, public goods provision is significantly lower in Kenya:
people are less willing to give resources to help their fellow citizens. Since
their ethnic makeup at independence was virtually identical, these differing
experiences can be largely traced to greater nation-building efforts in
Tanzania – of which education was an essential component.
Interestingly, Tanzanian nation-building efforts were
typically not extended to Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous archipelago off the
coast of Dar Es Salaam. Little effort was made to infuse a pan-Tanzanian
identity into the curriculum, as the Zanzibar Ministry of Education was left
(and remains) largely autonomous of the mainland. As a result, the Zanzibari
people have generally not ‘bought in’ to the Tanzanian myth, resulting in a
powerful secessionist movement which breeds instability and violence at
election times.
India and Pakistan
At Independence in 1947, two new nations of India and
Pakistan came into being facing ostensibly similar situations. Both were
products of the same colonial project with a broadly coherent education policy:
Empire sought to educate a ‘pro-British Indian elite’ through a system that was
selective rather than universal, liberal rather than scientific and imperial
rather than national. However, colonial educational institutions were unevenly
distributed and relied on local collaboration, challenging the idea of initial
equivalence. At the time of the first Census in 1950, literacy rates between
India (20%) and Pakistan (14%) already exhibited a discrepancy.
India and Pakistan pursued similar educational policies at
the outset: a broadly secular education communicated through a unifying
language (Hindi for India, Urdu for Pakistan). Both projects expressed a
prescriptive vision that was not merely postcolonial but anti-colonial: whilst
building on colonial institutions, education offered an opportunity for
intellectual decolonisation.
There were differences, which reflected the different national
challenges each country faced. India’s national identity was to be built around
a tolerant multiculturalism that explicitly rejected communalism. In
recognition of India’s immense linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity, it
was hoped that education would serve to enfranchise diverse communities and
dismantle identity hierarchies such as caste. Across the border, the ethnic
incongruity between East and West made Pakistan an immediately less stable
state: the inclusion of Islam in educational policy reflected an urgent need to
build a national identity that could make sense of this unique geography.
These initial ideals have not been realised. In addition to
failures of policy implementation, both visions of national identity have
undergone change almost beyond recognition. In 1977, Zia-ul-Haq launched a coup
in Pakistan and sought to legitimise his dictatorship through an agenda of
Islamization. As with Jinnah’s vision thirty years previously, education policy
was mobilised to express a new national identity. The right to education,
contents of curriculum and its purpose were all realigned to the values of the
Quran and Sunnah, while national identity was re-expressed along lines of
solidarity with the Sunni Middle East, at the expense of cohesion within
Pakistan.
In India, Nehru's educational model of secularism and
internationalism was consistently rejected by the Bharat Janata Party, whose
advocacy of Hindutva, Hindu majoritarianism, became part of educational policy
with the advent of their parliamentary majority in 1998. The return of Congress
to power in 2004, followed by the subsequent resurgence of the BJP under
Narendra Modi, has led to a certain flip-flopping of educational policy: entire
textbooks are rewritten according to the ideological bent of the incumbent
political party. At government schools, Indian children are taught historical
fantasies as facts, as Hindutva
legitimises and enforces a national identity that is explicitly anti-Muslim and
self-reliant.
From broadly similar starting points, India and Pakistan pursued
similar policies at Independence, both of which were undermined by ideological
re-conceptualizations of nationhood.
Whilst neither nation has achieved the success seen in East Asia,
India’s educational progress has continued to outstrip its neighbour’s. To
explain this, we might look to the fact that the ideological
reconceptualization of education policy manifested itself in India two decades
later than Pakistan. We may also return to the unique strains on Pakistan’s
nationhood in 1947 and question whether, as Sen cautiously notes, ‘just as
education influences culture, so can antecedent culture have an effect on
educational policies’.
[1,296 words]
References
The idea of viewing nations as imagined communities is
most commonly attributed to Benedict Anderson. Yuval Harari presents this idea in a
more contemporary and accessible fashion, arguing that our ability to believe
in ‘imagined communities’ differentiates us from other species in the animal
kingdom, and has enabled us to evolve from insignificant apes in the Horn of
Africa to the dominant species on Earth.
The Tanzania and Kenya section draws heavily on the work of
Ted Miguel, whose work on public good provision helps make tangible the impact
of the different commitments to nation-building between the two countries.
The idea of India as an imagined community is best
articulated by Sunil Khilnani. Amartya Sen’s coverage of the Subcontinent and
development policy is essential reading, not least due to the author’s own
experience of Partition. He argues that the current Indian government is
repeating some of Pakistan’s mistakes of nation-building, particularly
regarding ideological reworkings of nationhood.
- Anderson. B, ‘Imagined Communities’
- Harari. Y, ‘Sapiens’
- Miguel. E, ‘Tribe or Nation? Nation Building and Public Goods in Kenya versus Tanzania’
- Khilnani. S, ‘The Idea of India’
- Sen. A, ‘Development as Freedom’
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