Abstract:
Since independence, one of the greatest worries of African states has
been how to maintain national cohesion amongst the multiplicity of ethnic
groups which characterize them. My aim in this paper is to show that,
other factors notwithstanding, national integration had been a major
educational ideology in Cameroon and that it contributed to the peace and
stability that the country was known for, amidst a turbulent central African
region until the advent of neoliberalism and multiparty politics in 1990. I
discuss the nature of contents that helped to achieve this while arguing that
a de-emphasis on the social sciences and particularly on the integrationist
approach to history education in the multiparty era is not unconnected
to the post-1990 reinvention of various parochial identities antithetic to
national cohesion in which recent calls for the secession of the Anglophone
region by some radical groups is seen as the culmination of the trend. I
conclude by highlighting the social relevance of curriculum within which
history education should be re-invented as a vector for peace, unity and
national integration in the country.
