Ka Nu Culture

From improved critical thinking to increased self-esteem and school retention, teachers and students have noted many benefits to bringing Aboriginal viewpoints into public school classrooms. In Integrating Aboriginal Perspectives Into the School Curriculum, Yatta Kanu provides the first comprehensive study of how these frameworks can be effectively implemented to maximize Indigenous students' engagement, learning, and academic achievement. Based on six years of empirical research, Kanu offers insights from youths, instructors, and school administrators, highlighting specific elements that make a difference in achieving positive educational outcomes. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, from cognitive psychology to civics, her findings are widely applicable across both pedagogical subjects and diverse cultural groups. Kanu combines theoretical analysis and practical recommendations to emphasize the need for fresh thinking and creative experimentation in developing curricula and policy. Amidst global calls to increase school success for Indigenous students, this work is a timely and valuable addition to the literature on Aboriginal education.

Curriculum as Cultural Practice aims to revitalize current discourses of curriculum research and reform from a postcolonial perspective.

Swimming Against the Culture of Corruption is, as the title suggests, intended to fight corruption, which has been one of the societal ills in Kenya. It is intended to point out to the ordinary Kenyan that he or she has a responsibility to deal with this evil and not to wait for political leaders to change the culture of corruption exclusively by themselves. Culture in this book is used in its wider meaning as to include such things as lies, which is corruption of truth. I have argued that fighting corruption calls for personal sacrifice, and I have demonstrated this with my personal experience and testimony. That was the purpose of telling my short life story in order to encourage others to come out and tell their stories as well in dealing with the rampant corruption in our society, which is to be found at all levels. Equally, the book argues that legislated law alone cannot deal with the problem as long as corrupt practices have been embedded in our culture. At the same time, I have argued that the culture of corruption is not inherently African. That, whereas its genesis may be traced in the twentieth-century colonization of our country by the British, the real practice as exercised by Kenyans against one another is, indeed, a post-Independence phenomena. In arguing the case of the power and efficacy of culture in determining the destiny of a society, I have said that we need to change our culture, and that by doing so, we shall be reverting to our truly African culture of integrity.

This notwithstanding, over the years, the African culture in all its manifestations became the bulls eye for attack especially during the Atlantic Slave Trade, Colonialism, Racism. During these periods, Europe dealt coup de grace to the African personality, to his is-ness, by destroying the African cultural values. They disrespected African peculiarities, languages enriched with traditions of centuries, parables, many of them the quintessence of family and national histories; modes of thought, influenced more or less by local circumstances, local poetry which reveals the profundity of African literary wizardry. A lot of these were altered against the background that the African in all his susceptibilities is an inferior race and that it is needful to give him a foreign model beacon to emulate and follow. In our time of globalization, bringing about a new sweep of changes on the African cultural values, a more careful, historically grounded interpretation of the cultural changes occurring on the continent is, therefore, needed and for it to be useful, it should enable us to transcend the narrow and narrowing parameters that currently dominate the discourse on the processes and structures of change occurring in contemporary Africa. This piece is a great accomplishment by African scholars to do a grounded hermeneutics of the structures of changes taking place in Africa. The different chapters are the fruits of the 2018 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies (APAS). The authors, like artists, combine originality with insightful imagination. They have carefully treated the historical, conceptual, basic and substantive issues in cultural change in Africa. Their coherent, systematic and encyclopedic approaches have the capacity to expand the intellectual and professional horizon of its readers.