An Open Letter to African Educators in Elite International Schools in Africa

Dear locally-hired African educators,

Your identities matter.

You are not a single story. You are classroom teachers, counselors, librarians, middle or senior leaders… Some of you are working in your country of birth, some educated locally or in other systems. You carry different ethnicities, languages, and passports.  You are not always seen as the unique professional contributors that you are but when you are, the whole school benefits. Access to leadership remains an issue. But when you have space to lead well, the whole community is enriched with a more granular understanding of African diversity and excellence. It is an honor and a privilege to write this open letter to you today, to thank you for your contributions to international education in Africa and encourage international schools to reflect on your status, and experiences, for, they are amongst the clearest indicators of whether your school is truly international or not. 

You enter every day through the gates of elite international schools to do your thing: educate young minds from all over the world together with colleagues who may be equally diverse. However, there are so many surprising layers to your  experiences, some inspiring, some less glamorous than expected. 

For instance, your salary may look good in the local context but who notices when you carry an invisible financial burden, and are spread too thin as your earnings cover the needs of so many people? This is what Niq Mhlongo, South African essayist discusses in his book Black Tax (2019): in the name of Ubuntu and family solidarity, African workers with lucrative jobs often contribute substantially to the needs of their extended families. This specificity is to be noticed if not acknowledged. 

You may also sometimes sound different from your colleagues and maybe, have African mannerisms and an accent that trigger, consciously or unconsciously, a superiority complex in some of your co-workers or other community members. Our wish for you is that  when some of these adverse experiences happen, you have enough allies and equitable systems in your school environment, to correct injustice and inequities. We also wish that whenever students G-O-A-T you out, quote you fondly in their graduation speeches or refer to you as their most transformational teacher, your school community truly hears it and honors your positive impact. 

The community needs you.

Our schools could not be what they claim to be without you. We keep coming back to that when we think about your place in elite international schools across the continent.

You authentically embody African cultural assets like Ubuntu and Teranga, modeling African approaches to greeting, respect, and resilience. That is why you often know the children beyond the files, and the families beyond the formal meetings. When you share which ministry office actually returns a call, and what a long silence in a parent meeting really means, that is the kind of connection no training manual covers. 

And still, we wonder: how often does anyone actually call that leadership?

Danau Tanu, an anthropologist who has studied international schools closely, gives us a way to think about it. Her point is simple and uncomfortable. The word “international,” she shows, already carries a look and a sound of its own, one that tends to reward a certain accent, a certain passport, a certain practiced ease. That ease has been shaped by colonial history, which handed some people authority and made others work harder to be heard. One accent gets read as a limitation. Another, saying the very same thing, gets read as authority. 

You may have witnessed some of your professional strengths being framed as liabilities; for example, being perceived as too loud when joyful or assertive. You may have been called too firm when respectfully setting high expectations for students. You may have been classified as too timid when you were respectfully quiet. Maybe you watched someone’s unfamiliarity with the country get praised as “fresh perspective,” while your own knowledge of the place got filed away as background. You may have wondered how to help your school community understand enough African cultural codes to make their evaluation of your work and their host country’s practices better balanced.

We are raising these issues because elite international  schools in Africa have a real opportunity in front of them: to be honest about what “international” has often meant, and to become more rooted in the place they stand. That will not happen while African knowledge keeps getting treated as helpful, but secondary.

So, let’s call your gift what it actually is: the intelligence our schools need if they want to lead well on this continent. You are not at the margins of international education in Africa. You are one of the clearest tests of whether it is truly international.

Our message to you today is:

1. Come to school as yourself. Of course, we all choose the parts of our cultures that we will embrace or abandon. May this process be dictated by your ethical compass rather than any form of coloniality. By bringing African culture, stories and references into the curriculum and the community, you are helping your school and more importantly your students, understand and love the host continent. You are Africanizing the “international” in international education. What a gift!
2. Redefine international education. If, like us, you are no longer amused when you read that there was no “education” in Africa before brick-and-mortar schools, make African ways of knowing an educational pillar. Normalizing proverbs and ancestral wisdom in learning, inviting elders and African scholars as guest speakers, and showcasing contemporary African excellence in mathematics, literature, or the arts will feed your soul and increase your work satisfaction. It will also transform the colleagues, leaders, and community members who benefit from you opening that door to the host country. Of course, this work must be done within the parameters of your school’s curriculum, mission, and child protection boundaries. It should also be a collective effort and a school goal, rather than the exhausting and isolated initiative of one or two African teachers. 
3. Know your leadership super powers. As an African educator in an African international school, you have specific hurdles. You know all about it when you are trying to take professional development training in Europe and are denied the visa, or when you look at the leadership team and there is no one like you in there. You do also have special super powers. You bring a local connection to leadership teams and that supports balanced decision making and grounded wisdom. But the African “badge” should never limit your leadership scope because as you show every day in your work, you are not only an African educator, you are an international educator. 

References

Mhlongo, Niq, editor. Black Tax: Burden or Ubuntu? Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2019.

Tanu, Danau. Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School. Berghahn Books, 2018.