⁣Ɛna Efua Tolliver Funeral Tribute-FINAL

African hair was never just about appearance. It carried identity, culture, and meaning. Colonialism and slavery disrupted that, stripped it down, and replaced it with a system that taught African women to see their natural hair as something to fix, manage, or hide.What we now call preference did not appear out of nowhere. It was shaped over time, reinforced through schools, workplaces, and media, until straight hair became the standard and everything else had to adjust.So the real question is not what African women are choosing today. The question is why those choices feel necessary, and who defined that necessity in the first place.If there is any real conversation to be had, it is this: how much of what we call beauty is actually ours, and how much of it was imposed on us.

Kangmwa Gofwen examines how Africa’s education system, far from being a tool of liberation, was structured to produce disconnection from history, power, and self-determination. It argues that colonial schooling did not simply sideline African knowledge and identity, but also deliberately failed to teach generations of Africans how global systems actually work, from international finance and resource extraction to shipping routes, geopolitics, and the institutions that shape the modern world. The result is an education that rewards memorisation over critical understanding and produces graduates who can speak the language of development without being equipped to challenge the systems that keep the continent dependent.This is a call to rethink what education in Africa should be for. It urges a shift away from inherited curricula that centre Europe and detach African students from their own realities, and toward an education rooted in African history, practical knowledge, and strategic understanding of global power.