It is rather strange that after children of northern elites started going to Western education system, boys of parents from poor homes in the north were still left with only Islamic teachers
Of three major pre-modern cultural practices that had gained national and international attention in the last half century—patriarchy, female circumcision, and Almajiri—the one that has been most resistant to change is the Almajiri system. Events since the coronavirus pandemic have suggested or are suggesting that the system may soon experience major restructuring or reform.
Western education had started taking roots in southern Nigeria through Christian missionary schools long before the 1914 Amalgamation of Southern and Northern Protectorates and free primary education later became accessible to all children in Western Region as from 1955 under the premiership of Obafemi Awolowo. But in the north Almajiri remained the major school system for most children, even after Western-type education had been introduced to Northern region.
. This piece is not to discuss the politics of Almajiri school system but to celebrate attempts to end the project and, hopefully, bring Almajiri boys into mainstream secular learning that made it possible for members of their age group born into richer and more powerful homes in the north to train in Western school system to become engineers, doctors, bankers, economists, lawyers, and professors of Islamic theology and Arabic language.
However, the method of closing down Almajiri by the governors could have been more sophisticated and life-enhancing that it was. Packing Almajiri boys and men into trucks on homeward journey to rejoin their parents in other states at the peak of coronavirus pandemic is tacky. Rushing boys and young men who grew up in Kano, Jigawa, Sokoto, or Katsina, etc., to their so-called ancestral homes in the middle of a pandemic seems callous.
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