Some initiatory observations
Present experience shows that the true harnessing of Africa’s intelligence and learning potential is impeded by a dogmatic mind-set institutionalized in its universities. The blockage is clearly systemic and no solution is in sight. Due to its own limitations the present official educational system excludes by its nature any initiatives it has not beforehand sanctioned as scientific by its own credo. Rather than being in the service of knowledge it believes to own the knowledge.
However, the consequences of continuing with imported approaches to research and development in Africa are and will prove catastrophic. The already visible tearing of the social and environmental fabric of the continent needs to be directly linked to the (under)performance of present day knowledge delivery. In light of this the continued exclusion of African systems of transmission of knowledge (and we all know: knowledge is power) is inadmissable. If that African form of knowledge is indeed power, it will find its own means to ascertain itself. These means should be viewed with less bias!
It is the opinion of the authors that sustainable strategies for success in building a strong educational powerbase in Africa would have to draw from its own as yet unacknowledged scientific, cultural and technological energy and powers.
The fact that these have not been perceived as such reveils much about the filters applied to what valuable scientific research ought to be and how it should be transmitted. Ironically, much of the scientific thinking going on in the rest of the world has begun to focus on entirely new ways of perception, struggling for wholistic visions of the global impact of the technological revolution and its fallout for the future of humankind.
Clearly, the emergence of the Internet – to mention just one phenomenon – mirrors the need for a planetary re-appraisal of the stock of human knowledge and its achievements. Today, there is a strong consensus in the scientific community that due to the virtual extension of knowledge and its accesses no one is or can solely be in charge of demonstrating and realizing skilfull approaches to researching and communicating knowledge contents. This utterly new perspective – of course – strikes at the very heart of education and its transmission.
If the necessity of a restructuring of the education sector is strongly felt in many quarters, the loss of answers, particularly in Africa, on how to go about it is quasi total and understandable (everyone knows that putting in a few terminals will not do).
It can be rightfully asked why, for instance, the Japanese model seems to succeed fairly well without having recourse to its Zen tradition, or, why Indian education can show some visible successes (e.g. output of software engineers) apparently – perhaps only apparently so – without recourse to its philosophic past.

The non-linear evolution of learning and its institutions
In order to understand the challenge, we have to exit read-made solutions – which may or may not have been suitable in the past – to concentrate all our attention on the learning process as it presents itself here in Africa. Innovation – should it be expected – will come from a global view of what constitutes typically “the African experience”.
Historically, our university model is an import from Europe. There was none there before the Islamic civilisation sounded a wake-up call and left a body of knowledge at the footsteps of medieval Europe. This body of knowledge in turn drew its sources not only from ancient Greece but ancient India and Africa as well.
That this tradition of knowledge and knowledge-delivery is such a failure today in Africa (and let’s not forget: elsewhere) after having come back to its sources, should incite very useful scientific inqiry. Success and failure are the bread and butter of education and inherent ingredient of any achievement. Without clearly acknowledging – rather than sidestepping – and disecting the source of failure, success remains paralyzed.
Only a can-do attitude and the keen experience of the pressure which is building up will gather the emotional and political ressources needed to tackle the problems in order to come up with original and skilfull solutions. Africa must – and will – in the end re-invent itself.
Faculties it has long officially neglected start to re-ascertain themselves. Too long, these faculties have been lying dormant. Interestingly, it is exactly these faculties which are nowadays in high demand in advanced institutions and laboratories of learning: not Cartesian logic but dream-power and intuition drive the internet, this world-wide satellite-connected electronic field of trembling information and knowledge-dissemination. Thanks to all the gadgets from some frontier-type entrepreneurs, thinking alone – as an act of separating from the body – does not make for being anymore. By the way, it’s the historic separation of mind from the body which has induced all this gadgetry in the first place. The frantic attempts – played out like a medieval turnament before the inhabitant of the galactic village – of the data-storage revolutions to impregnate matter with spirit is all aiming to bring back the absconded body to life, and life to body, the domain of initiation. The modern-day scribe of the Egyptian past is the awesome surfer of the world-wide-web in search of the “secret and its transmission”. Does Africa have a say in all this?

Initiation: application-technology at hand
This – the secret and its transmission – is the domain of initiation. Handling tremendous amounts of data has created new castes of information high-priests obscuring more than enlightening the purpose of life on earth. They are lacking a specific body of knowledge still available in parts of Africa and elsewhere accessible not to information but to transformation alone.
The breath-taking explosion of information-storage technology and memory-capacity from hieroglyph to microchip has overshadowed a memory-loss of what constitutes the Experience of Man, the basic experience of the human being and its predicament. No tool can help us circumvent this specifically human predicament the suffering of which and the knowledge of which are not the same. The difference between the two – suffering and knowledge – can only be established by physical evidence and physical testimony: the experimental level of experience by scientific investigation. This physical aspect of experience should no longer be excised or delegated to inanimate matter. Each person has within immediate reach of the body trillions of animate electrons storing valid information in so far as they are certified by evolution. As we all know these electrons are not standing still, they are awaiting further instruction, something of a wake-up call!
Without which, today, we and our conference, are part of a huge world-wide communication-jam which is rapidly adding to stress-disorders in absence of a channel for initiation. Although its methodology may have been researched anthropologically and so on but rarely applied to reality to answer the question: how to learn learning!