Impact of Colonial Education in Northern Nigeria

This paper pinpoints the role of colonial education towards the emergent of social split between the western educated elites and the majority people of Northern Nigeria whom were Islamically educated. This thesis examined that British induced educational model have created westernized elites during British rule who during and afterwards the colonial era occupied most significant positions in state bureaucracy and economic life. Accordingly, those who took Islamic education thereby were not permitted to obtain white color jobs in the colonial and post-colonial administration offices. Western education altered the societal norms and values of the people so much that the ¿West became a co-name for ¿modernization.¿ As this paper also proposes, western education has become the key vehicle that which was later to renegade large portions of the society into a position subordinate to the Westernized, dominant, but still implanted, Nigerian elites. Paradoxically, the same all educational system also provided Nigerians with a modernist ideology with which to first imagine a unified nation and then to mobilize it in order to accomplish political sovereignty, in 1960s.