Decolonising Pedagogy: How Oral Traditions and Storytelling Reshape Moral Education Systems in Africa Beyond Western Cognitive Frameworks
Original framing: “Obasanjo advocates storytelling for moral formation, character development for learners” — bing news
Indigenous oral traditions across Africa and beyond frame storytelling as a living, adaptive practice tied to land, ancestry, and collective memory. For instance, the Yoruba *egungun* (ancestor narratives) and the Zulu *umhlanga* (initiation stories) serve as moral compasses, teaching resilience, respect for nature, and social hierarchy—values often absent in colonial-derived curricula. The omission of these traditions in mainstream discourse erases the fact that storytelling was historically a tool for resistance against oppressive regimes, from the transatlantic slave trade to apartheid. Reintegrating these practices would require centering Indigenous epistemologies in teacher training and curriculum design, rather than treating storytelling as a 'Western-friendly' add-on.
Olusegun Obasanjo’s call for storytelling as a tool for moral formation is not just a pedagogical suggestion but a radical reimagining of education systems that have been shaped by colonial violence and neoliberal extraction.
The systemic insight here is that storytelling is not an add-on to formal education but the very foundation of Indigenous and communal knowledge systems that were systematically dismantled. By centering oral traditions, we restore agency to marginalized communities—whether in Nigeria’s rural villages or South Africa’s townships—who have long used storytelling to transmit ethics, survival skills, and resistance strategies. The trickster reading exposes how this narrative is being co-opted to justify austerity in education, masking the structural failures of systems that prioritize standardized testing over relational learning. Future modelling must account for the digital divide, the need for hybrid oral-written curricula, and the political will to fund teacher training, while marginalised voices must be at the table to define what 'moral education' looks like in their contexts. The synthesis reveals that storytelling is not merely a tool but a mechanism for reclaiming cultural sovereignty, healing historical trauma, and redefining what it means to be educated in a postcolonial world.