The Education Alibi
Tracing Education's Entanglements Across Contemporary Africa
Published on 22. October 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
338 pages
978-0-472-05775-7 (ISBN)
Description
Education is generally promoted as the key to the future of Africa in global development discourses about the continent. Education's official story in Africa continues to be one of innocence and public good, yet, since colonial times, education has constituted an area of intense contestation. The Education Alibi asks if it is possible that while claiming to be doing one thing, education has also been doing another in African communities. The concept of the "alibi" shines an interrogative light on institutions' and actors' use of education to divert scrutiny from other effects. Through ethnographic research and critical analysis across the continent, this volume focuses on people's lived experiences to demonstrate how contemporary education systems in fact deepen economic, racialized, gendered, urban-rural, linguistic, religious, and other intranational and international inequalities.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Ann Arbor
United States
Illustrations
3 figures, 2 tables
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-472-05775-7 (9780472057757)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Elizabeth Cooper is Associate Professor at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Erdmute Alber is Professor and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth.
Wandia Njoya is Associate Professor of Literature at Daystar University in Kenya.
Erdmute Alber is Professor and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth.
Wandia Njoya is Associate Professor of Literature at Daystar University in Kenya.
Content
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Education Alibi in Africa: Tracing Processes of Responsibilization, Depoliticization, and the Production of Inequality
Elizabeth Cooper, Erdmute Alber, and Wandia Njoya
Part I. Responsibilization
Chapter 2: Responsibilizing Parents to Overcome Blindness: Changing Intergenerational Relations Through Education for All in Northern Benin
Erdmute Alber
Chapter 3: Symbolic Investment, Actual Indebtedness: The Competing Logics of the School Sector in the Contemporary DRC (Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga)
Edoardo Quaretta
Chapter 4: "The Teachers Just Consume Our Money": Casting Blame for Educational Failure in Rural Lesotho
Claire Elisabeth Dungey and Nicola Ansell
Chapter 5: Changing the Narrative on School Arson in Kenya: Beyond Pathologizing and Criminalizing Approaches
Hildah Oburu
Part II. Depoliticization
Chapter 6: Education Without Critical Consciousness: An Autoethnography
Wandia Njoya
Chapter 7: Educational Reform in Times of Crisis: The Dual Missions of Corporatized Education in Liberia
Tyler Hook
Chapter 8: "Preserving Girls' Futures": Girlhood, Schooling, and Development in Niger
Adeline Masquelier
Chapter 9: Exam Securitization as Alibi: Education and the Distrustful Paradigm of Governance in Kenya
Elizabeth Cooper
Part III. Production of Inequality
Chapter 10: The Paradox of South African Schooling: An Analysis of Multiple Exploitations of the Education Alibi
Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry
Chapter 11: The Immorality of Pregnancy and Truancy as Alibi: Uncovering Systemic Discrimination in Access to Basic Education in Tanzania
Aikande Kwayu
Chapter 12: Education Between Desire and Rejection: The Perspectives of Young Illiteracized Peoples on Schooling in Benin
Issifou Abou Moumouni
Chapter 13: Privilege of Prayer: Moral Becoming as Class Formation in Postcolonial Tanzania
Hansjoerg Dilger
List of Contributors
Index
Chapter 1: The Education Alibi in Africa: Tracing Processes of Responsibilization, Depoliticization, and the Production of Inequality
Elizabeth Cooper, Erdmute Alber, and Wandia Njoya
Part I. Responsibilization
Chapter 2: Responsibilizing Parents to Overcome Blindness: Changing Intergenerational Relations Through Education for All in Northern Benin
Erdmute Alber
Chapter 3: Symbolic Investment, Actual Indebtedness: The Competing Logics of the School Sector in the Contemporary DRC (Lubumbashi, Haut-Katanga)
Edoardo Quaretta
Chapter 4: "The Teachers Just Consume Our Money": Casting Blame for Educational Failure in Rural Lesotho
Claire Elisabeth Dungey and Nicola Ansell
Chapter 5: Changing the Narrative on School Arson in Kenya: Beyond Pathologizing and Criminalizing Approaches
Hildah Oburu
Part II. Depoliticization
Chapter 6: Education Without Critical Consciousness: An Autoethnography
Wandia Njoya
Chapter 7: Educational Reform in Times of Crisis: The Dual Missions of Corporatized Education in Liberia
Tyler Hook
Chapter 8: "Preserving Girls' Futures": Girlhood, Schooling, and Development in Niger
Adeline Masquelier
Chapter 9: Exam Securitization as Alibi: Education and the Distrustful Paradigm of Governance in Kenya
Elizabeth Cooper
Part III. Production of Inequality
Chapter 10: The Paradox of South African Schooling: An Analysis of Multiple Exploitations of the Education Alibi
Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry
Chapter 11: The Immorality of Pregnancy and Truancy as Alibi: Uncovering Systemic Discrimination in Access to Basic Education in Tanzania
Aikande Kwayu
Chapter 12: Education Between Desire and Rejection: The Perspectives of Young Illiteracized Peoples on Schooling in Benin
Issifou Abou Moumouni
Chapter 13: Privilege of Prayer: Moral Becoming as Class Formation in Postcolonial Tanzania
Hansjoerg Dilger
List of Contributors
Index