Ibrahim Ado Kurawa on Traditional Learning and Modern Education

In this episode, Gaddafi is in Kano, Nigeria, speaking to Ibrahim Ado Kurawa, a prominent northern Nigerian writer, historian and Islamic scholar.Their conversation is about history, knowledge and power in northern Nigeria. And it gives us a glimpse of the rich tradition of scholarship and education in Islamic West Africa, what Kurawa calls the Sudanic tradition, and its interactions with colonialism and more recently, the wider liberalization of knowledge. Kurawa gives us a sense of what the older systems of Islamic learning in Kano were like, in a way, how he experienced them when he was a young man.He sketches out how they are changing and what may be lost as scholarship moves away from the deeply immersive forms of traditional learning to a faster, more fragmented and more instrumental system of modern education.But the conversation also turns to why young Nigerians should know their history, how northern Nigeria continues to struggle educationally, why skills training alone cannot solve unemployment, and how the role of traditional leaders in governance has changed under the democratic Nigerian state