A School in Remote Zaire

This photograph was of a school class in the interior of Zaire, near Lake Mai Ndumbe. The children were holding up pieces of wood that served as chalkboards for the lessons given by their teacher, standing in the back.

As a Peace Corps volunteer teaching high school, a major frustration was the antiquated school system. The Belgians left Zaire’s curriculum from the early ‘60s. The materials were grossly outdated and instruction was based on rote memory.

To make matters worse, there were no textbooks, so pupils copied their lessons from the blackboard into thin workbooks. In turn, any of the kids who became teachers would use their notebooks to write the lessons onto the board for the next generation of students. It was an invitation to misinformation. Like a “gossip” game, lessons were passed on from one generation to the next; and they become progressively more garbled and deformed, until they made absolutely no sense at all.

These elementary kids above, however, were in such a impoverished and remote area that they did not even have notebooks in which to copy their lessons, so little was retained and little was passed on.