One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen had the power to change the world, and they can still change it today.

On 16 July 2003, former South Africa president Nelson Mandela uttered a famous sentence, “education is the most powerful weapon,” in a speech commemorating the launch of the Mindset Network, a group working to improve education and healthcare in South Africa.

I will allow myself to share my experience of how my birth and elementary education in Africa helped to shape my entire life. I was born in Africa, and I feel proud to have met the world in this rich land of Egypt, where I was raised along the River Nile and had the chance to study in a Catholic school where I first learned the notion of cultural diversity in the playground and became aware that respect means to accept the other for who he is, even when he is different and if I do not agree with him.

In the 1990s, I learned the history of this rich continent in Europe from the perspective of the Western world, and a few years later I had the opportunity to teach at the Senghor University in Alexandria. This is considered to be a landmark for African education around the world and is linked with two giant figures: Leopold Sédar Senghor, who lends his name to the institution, and Boutros Boutros Ghali, who put the education of young Africans at the top of his priorities when he was UN secretary-general in the 1990s. 

He decided to create an educational institution in Egypt that would have a large cultural department as a way of helping young Africans to approach the views of others, to allow more information to flow into their intellectual systems, and to foster an openness of mind towards the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. 

At Senghor University, I discovered another perspective on the same continental history that I had learned about in Europe some years before. I realised the importance of writing history books and of teaching a basic understanding of the world and its history.

I was proud to learn my first lessons in Egyptian history with specialist in African Studies Gamaleddin Mokhtar, a figure who introduced me to the UN cultural agency UNESCO in Paris and was the first person to instruct me in the basics of what we now call cultural diplomacy, in other words the balance between culture and politics. 

Together with then Egyptian minister of culture Tharwat Okasha and French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Gamaleddin Mokhtar led the International Campaign for the Salvaging of the Nubian Temples that was launched by UNESCO in 1961 and laid the foundations for international cultural cooperation. 

Gamaleddin Mokhtar, one of the icons of Egyptian Egyptology, passed away in 1998. But I think he would have been happy to learn that in 2010 I was appointed as the first woman director of the Egyptian Nubian Fund – the National Organisation for the Safeguarding of the Nubian Monuments – that he supported so firmly for so many years.

I was blessed to be able to undertake research with eminent professors from European universities in Lyon, Paris, and Rome, who taught me how to be intellectually curious and creative and to use critical and analytical methods in my research. They made me consider the power of perspective in my reading, and I enjoyed the publications of the famous Senegalese historian Sheikh Anta Diop, who contributed greatly to the study of African history. 

In 1974, Sheikh Anta Diop, alongside Theophile Obenga from the Democratic Republic of Congo and about 20 Egyptologists and anthropologists, were the guests of a conference organised by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) under the auspices of UNESCO to share scientific views about the African continent’s history. 

The records of these specialists sharing knowledge and discussing arguments in an academic context in a civilised way were later immortalised in a scientific publication in which everyone expressed his or her opinions based on relevant references and texts from ancient Egypt. 

PRIMARY EDUCATION: Once upon a time, the positive dynamic of education was supported by precious human values and the zest for life given by reading books, listening to music, sharing knowledge, and discussing with other people in a society that had a keen curiosity about other people abroad. 

Do these fundamental values still exist today? If some of them do, are they sufficient to shape healthy minds among the next generations? 

In a continent like Africa, where history, cultural heritage, oral traditions, art expressions, creativity and artisanal industries are extremely rich and diversified, as well as being of great value for humanity as a whole since they constitute a major part of the UNESCO World Heritage and Intangible Heritage Lists, what would be the right way to face the coming decades of the third millennium?

In my view, an appropriate and “modern” education that can face the new and unprecedented challenges of the future should balance new and digital elements with a respect for cultural education. Culture means history, the life lessons of ancestors, the beautiful values of ancient civilisations, wisdom, and the love of wisdom – in other words, “philosophy,” a word that is derived from the Greek philo (love) and sophia (wisdom).

Culture is also fundamentally a question of language, and language is an important part of identity. Language and social identity are closely intertwined. Their mother tongue is an important part of children’s culture, identity, and beliefs. According to UNESCO, “our values, beliefs and identity are embedded within language.” Family and school play important roles in the development of children’s linguistic skills. These skills are influenced by the positive verbal input they receive from teachers and from their parents in the home environment.

I wrote the lines above with a great deal of emotion and nostalgia for the time when culture had a firm role to play within national strategies that helped governments, even though these were passing through difficult times, to produce iconic branding for their nations and therefore for Africa as a whole.

* The writer is a member of the House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee and a researcher at the French National Research Centre CNRS-Sorbonne University.