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Our greatest strength is our diversity. But what is even greater, is what is common, our resilience as a people, our adaptive nature, our love for human life, our belief in people before things, our spirituality. While we have been adaptive under someone elses political and economic will, Africans in the Diaspora have to use that same adaptive quality to further their progressive existence under a political and economic agenda designed for and by Africans.

Miseeducation Continious The African continent was the home of the original human population. For nearly 100,000 years, Africa was home to the only human population (Homo sapiens sapiens) on the earth (Diop, 1991). Then the migrations scattered Africans all over the world to develop new human societies and phenotypes (falsely referred to as "races"). Those who remained on the continent continued to develop African cultural forms. Among these forms were included designs of education and socialization. Cheikh Anta Diop (1978) has argued that at the cultural deep structural level, the African continent as a whole formed a cultural "cradle," the southern cradle. This shared continental cultural deep structure evolved and spread itself in an African cultural diaspora to other parts of the world, including North and South America, before the slave trade and the colonial period, and during and after both of them. Africans have faced and solved the problem of the design of education and socialization, as a part of Africa's broad cultural evolution. So when I approach this topic from an African perspective, I do not approach it merely as an individual of African descent, expressing a personal point of view.  My attempt is to synthesize my specific study of African history and culture, ancient and modern, as well as the history and culture of Africans in the Western diaspora, including both North and South America, and specifically, the United States. I am interested in the education of African people within this context. How did African people educate themselves?

What was the aim, method and content of African systems? Often, when "minority" group members in the United States are asked to express themselves from a particular ethnic ("black") point of view, implicit in the invitation is the expectation that the person will react mainly to conditions of oppression and "minority status," and/or will offer superficial insights into certain superficial though unique cultural practices, such as ethnic slang. My studies have yielded information to show that there is much more to African perspectives than this (Hilliard, 1995b). African perspectives are rooted in African experiences, cultural and political.  The collective African cultural deep-structural perspective on education and socialization in its pre-foreign or non-foreign form, must be the starting point for our discussion. Again, how did Africans educate themselves? Of course, the entire experience of African people must be taken into account, including the period of the MAAFA (the terror and horror of invasions, slavery, colonization, apartheid and white supremacy). But the story must begin at the beginning, not at the end. And it must be a story, not an episode! This discussion is necessary because of the common practice of beginning an analysis of African education/socialization problems as if there were no pre-slavery antecedents, or as if pre-slavery indigenous African education antecedents were "primitive," "pagan" or "savage," and therefore unimportant or irrelevant, if not detrimental. Even if these views are not held explicitly, few educators seem to know anything at all about the education/socialization experience of Africans, pre-slavery, during slavery or post-slavery. Worse still, they may rely on Hollywood images for whatever fuzzy impressions they may have. There is today in general a profound absence of respect for African traditions, even by people of African descent who have not been taught their traditions.   This has resulted in a situation where problems of education of African people, and problems of education of people in general, are considered without reference to the point of view and practices manifest in the cultural tradition of Africans. African points of view and resulting practices are a part of the world education tradition, not just the African. Some have had a powerful impact on world civilization (Obenga, 1992, 1995). AFRICAN HISTORY OF EDUCATION Abundant oral and written records exist to describe the history of education on the African continent, especially its ancient and indigenous forms The best recorded ancient tradition of primary, secondary and higher education in the entire world is found in the Nile valley complex of cultures. This includes Cushitic and Kemetic centers of high culture, that is "Ethiopia," Somalia, Sudan, Nubia and Egypt. Ancient texts exist in Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, texts containing philosophy, religion, science and the arts Not only are these traditions ancient, they are also profound models for excellence in education. Vast technical complexes and the residuals of a broad, general culture, reflect the high level of intellectual development of African culture in the Nile valley complex. Selecting the year 2,000 before the Common Era (B.C.E.), in the nation of Kemet (Egypt),

we can use the ancient texts, monuments and architecture to reveal highly sophisticated higher education and highly developed arts, sciences, theology and philosophy (Budge, 1928; Hilliard, 1985, 1986, 1989; Van Sertima, 1989) existing in Africa earlier than anywhere else on earth. (That 2,000 B.C.E. date is also pre-Europe and pre-Greece, even mythical or pre-"Heroic-age" Greece.) As a result, an educator who wishes to understand indigenous Africa, must understand how education was conducted in the Nile valley complex. In fact, world education systems, including the Western world, must understand the Nile valley cultures to understand themselves (Obenga, 1992).
However, as Dr. John Henrick Clarke, the great African historian, has said, in order to understand the culture on the continent of Africa, it is necessary to understand the evolution of culture in all of the major river valleys of the continent, not just the Nile valley, and the relationship among the cultures developed in those river valleys (Middleton & Hilliard, 1993). For example, the Niger river valley in West Africa, similar in many ways, culturally, to the Nile river valley, produced great higher education institutions at Timbuktu, Jenne, Gao (Austin, 1984; DuBois, 1969; Griaule, 1972; Griaule & Dieterlen, 1986; Saad, 1983; Temple, 1976). The Niger river valley produced, side by side, a great, Islamic-based higher-education system, and a great indigenous African higher education system, represented in the philosophy and theology of the Dogan of Mali and others. Many writers have also referred to these ancient traditions as African "secret" societies, which were systems of indigenous education that frequently had parallel gender tracks. For example, in West Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone, there is the Poro society for young males the Sande society for young women.

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