Care Ethics and Human Formation in Igbo Indigenous Education : The Nwa Boy Tradition as a Pedagogical Practice

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the Igbo Nwa boy tradition as an informal educational practice, with particular attention to care, human formation, and moral responsibility. The tradition has been studied predominantly as an economic arrangement, with its pedagogical dimensions largely overlooked. This study addresses that gap by examining what one man’s experience of the tradition reveals when taken seriously as education. The empirical material consists of a recorded conversational interview with my father, a former Nwa boy who lived and worked in Cameroon under the tradition as a child. The study is interpretive and narrative-based, and does not seek to generalize across all experiences of the tradition. Rather, it asks what this one account makes visible about how care, formation, authority, and moral responsibility operate within the practice. The analysis draws primarily on care ethics, theory of formation, and critical educational theory, particularly the works of Nel Noddings, Martin Buber, Klaus Mollenhauer, Ivan Illich, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and A. Babs Fafunwa. The study finds that care within the tradition was real but conditional, embedded within the Igbo moral framework of Omenala and the ideal of Ezigbo Mmadu, and often recognized more fully only after the transactional structure of apprenticeship had dissolved. Formation occurred through sustained participation in everyday life and through proximity to adults who carried moral authority. At the same time, authority within the tradition left limited space for direct questioning, producing tensions between moral formation and the development of critical agency. The thesis contributes to educational theory in two ways. First, it argues that particularly Noddings’ care ethics carries assumptions about how care is expressed and recognized that do not translate easily into communal indigenous contexts. Second, it challenges school-centered understandings of education that render practices such as the Nwa boy tradition difficult to recognize as educational because they do not produce the institutional forms through which education is usually legitimized. Rather than resolving the question of what education is, the study makes that question more difficult to answer narrowly.