Category: Education & Knowledge Systems

Overview: Burkina Faso is revising history, geography and civic education, including replacing “explorer” with “invader” in lessons about European conquest. The reform is underway, not complete: pupils are still using old textbooks alongside interim guidance for teachers. The deeper question is whether the change will help students examine evidence, or simply replace one unquestioned story with another.

One word carries a history

Explorer. Invader.

In Burkina Faso, “explorer” is being removed from history lessons and “invader” put in its place. Why can one noun carry so much weight? Because a name can turn a person who crossed into someone else’s homeland into a hero of discovery. It can leave the people already there unnamed, as if history began when an outsider arrived.

On 7 September 2026, Minister of Secondary Education Moumouni Zoungrana announced a review of history, geography and civic education curricula at a flag-raising ceremony in Ouagadougou. “Those who came to conquer Africa are called explorers, conquerors,” he said. “Were they conquerors? They were spies. They were invaders,” according to Agence de Presse Africaine.

The minister also accused textbooks of using terms that “infantilise” and “animalise” Africans, and said such language should be removed, APA reported.

The reform is not yet a completed rewrite. Because new textbooks take time to write, validate and print, the ministry distributed an interim booklet for teachers. It identifies expressions to avoid, chapters to remove or revise, and new material to introduce. Pupils are still using the existing books, with the booklet as a guide, West Africa Report noted.

The school year began on 1 October. On 7 October, Zoungrana said chapters judged demeaning had been removed and material on national victories and values added, according to KOACI. The government calls this “decolonisation of knowledge.” The phrase names a real ambition. The details will determine what it means in a classroom.

Names shape what we can see

Language is never only vocabulary. Names help decide who is the discoverer and who is discovered; who arrives and who was already there. When a schoolbook calls a military advance exploration, it does more than choose a polite word. It can soften the violence of conquest and narrow the space available for African memory.

That matters beyond Burkina Faso. Colonial-era school texts across Africa often presented European expeditions in heroic terms, and governments have revised textbooks since independence, West Africa Report writes. The colonial education system did not only pass on facts. It also carried assumptions about whose knowledge was authoritative and whose language belonged in formal learning.

I think about that question through Haiti, where Creole and French share official status under the 1987 Constitution. Yet a language’s recognition on paper does not, by itself, erase the hierarchy around it. UNESCO describes the continuing effort to make Haitian Creole a foundation of learning in Haitian schools (UNESCO).

Ghana offers another lens. English became central to formal education and government under British rule, even as policy also debated instruction in local languages, according to research on colonial education in the Gold Coast. These histories are not interchangeable. But they raise a shared question: what does a child learn about their own intelligence when the language closest to home is treated as less fit for serious knowledge?

A classroom can open a mind. It can also train a child to defer, to accept that someone else’s account is the only account worth learning. To decolonize education is not to discard knowledge because it came from elsewhere. It is to ask who made the curriculum, what it leaves out, and whether students are allowed to question it.

Editorial illustration of a classroom.

Complexity is not a retreat

There is a harder question inside Burkina Faso’s reform. Zoungrana told officials that “five white men, no more” conquered the territory that is now Burkina Faso, then asked who helped them. The number is a claim the minister made; he did not explain where it came from, West Africa Report notes.

The question he raised deserves care. European powers rarely conquered West Africa with European troops alone. French forces relied on African soldiers, interpreters and guides, as well as alliances with local rulers who had their own reasons to take sides, according to the same report.

That record does not cancel the violence of colonial conquest. It does make the story more complex than a few outsiders imposing control on a passive population. African agency belongs in the history, not as a weapon for blaming the conquered, but as part of the truth about how power moved through people, interests and choices.

The minister’s question, “Who helped them?” matters because a serious history does not hide the difficult parts. It asks who acted, under what pressures, for whose benefit, and with what consequences. Complexity does not weaken the case for correcting a colonial narrative. It makes that correction more trustworthy.

A new story must still be questioned

One detailed report says the reform plans 54 new lessons, from the first year of primary school to the final year of secondary school. It says those lessons will include the Charter of Kurukan Fuga, African scientific contributions, slavery, resistance to colonisation and the Alliance of Sahel States. But the 54-lesson figure has not been confirmed by other outlets, so it should be treated as a single report, not as an established count (West Africa Report).

The Charter of Kurukan Fuga itself calls for thoughtful teaching. Traditionally linked to the 13th-century Mali empire and associated with Sundiata Keita, it was passed down orally before reaching a written form in the late 20th century. Historians disagree about how closely that text reflects its supposed origins, West Africa Report explains.

That uncertainty is not a reason to leave it out. It is a reason to teach students what is known, what is debated and why. A curriculum should not turn a complicated inheritance into a certainty just because certainty feels affirming.

There are practical questions, too. Can teachers be trained in time? Will the interim booklet reach classrooms consistently? How will exams change? Observers have raised these concerns, while independent teachers’ unions, historians and education researchers have said little publicly. That means the scale of the problem in old textbooks remains, for now, largely the government’s account.

Illustration of an open textbook and map.

Revising a textbook is not the same as freeing a classroom. The test is whether the new material rests on careful scholarship, and whether students learn to weigh evidence for themselves. Not to memorize one authorized story instead of another. Not to exchange silence for certainty.

My book Alike Regardless: This Is Where It Began asks what becomes possible when we look beyond inherited divisions and examine the stories that shape how we see one another. That work begins with a simple but demanding act: reflection.

The classroom once taught obedience while calling it learning. Reclaiming it means reclaiming the authority to name, and the discipline to question every name, including the ones we choose ourselves.

Reclaim the mind. Rewrite the future.

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