This article examines the changes occurring in learning and literacy in the age of ubiquitous mobile phone use. Focusing on rural Kenyan women’s use of mobile phone technologies in civic education programs, mobile banking, and to contact family members, the article explores how these women’s use of mobile phones, based on their everyday needs, has facilitated the development of a literacy. The women learned to read on their phones to receive money, civic education information, and to communicate with their family members. In this process, these women, who self-identified and are also nationally classified as illiterate, developed a relevant social literacy through active use of text-based mobile phone applications.
Countless historians have studied the African diaspora, but one topic that has been significantly understudied is education. This chapter documents how Africans in the diaspora came to learn, attend school, and advance their knowledge, both during enslavement and in the years thereafter, and how those educational experiences impacted Africans on and off the continent. It is a remarkable narrative. From the earliest schooling considerations in African kingdoms, to Haiti, the first black republic, and the Caribbean and the Americas, this chapter details how Africans used literacy and schools well into the twentieth century as a means to liberate themselves from enslavement and segregation by law and advance themselves as citizens in their new homelands and for uplift around the world.
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