By Al-Amin Isa

Let’s get this straight: not knowing English does not make anyone ignorant — it only means they were educated in a different intellectual tradition. What colonialism did was not just conquer territory; it conquered definitions, and then used those definitions as chains.

For centuries, Northern Nigeria practiced literacy, scholarship, and governance through Arabic and Ajami, producing books, legal documents, poetry, political treaties, and women-led education networks before the first British classroom ever existed in the region. Scholars like Usman dan Fodio, Muhammad Bello, Abdullahi Fodio, and Nana Asma’u were not village storytellers — they were international-standard intellectuals, respected across Africa’s Muslim networks from Timbuktu to Cairo and Mecca.

So when anybody repeats the lazy stereotype that “the North didn’t value education,” what they are really doing is repeating colonial propaganda without fact-checking history.

Let’s ask the obvious question:

Why did the British choose indirect rule in the North instead of dismantling and replacing the system?

The answer is simple:

Because they found an already literate, bureaucratic, record-keeping society with trained scholars and judges who governed using written laws, not oral improvisation. Colonial policy documents admit this fact. Northern Nigeria was not behind — it was simply organised around a non-European knowledge system.

The tragedy is not that the North lacked education.

The tragedy is that post-colonial elites internalised European definitions so deeply that they began to insult their own ancestors.

If Japan writes in Kanji, they call it tradition.

If Arabs write in Arabic, they call it civilisation.

If Northerners write Ajami, they call it illiteracy.

Why? Who taught us to hate our own writing?

The modern world demands new skills — yes.

English, digital literacy, STEM, entrepreneurship — yes.

But upgrading is not the same as erasing.

It is not progress when we trade roots for accents.

It is not education if it starts with cultural self-insult.

It is not intellect if it requires forgetting your own script.

The real revolution is duality:

Arabiyya & Ajami.

English & ICT.

Faith & science.

Tradition & innovation.

Northern Nigeria does not need permission to call itself educated.

We only need the courage to stop apologising for who we are.

We are not illiterate — our literacy was simply unrecognised.

We are not uneducated — our education was simply untranslated.

We are not behind — we are only different.

And different is not inferior.