(Edmonton) Access to education made the difference in the life of University of Alberta honorary degree recipient Helen Kay Raseroka.

“My life, which in retrospect and when compared to millions of my fellow African rural and urban peoples, has been privileged,” she said at the June 7 convocation of the Faculty of Education, where she accepted an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. “The fundamental difference between me, my life and theirs comes from my fortune to have had access to education. I therefore stand before you today on the shoulders of generations of African leaders who understood the significance of Western education in changing Africa’s future.”

Raseroka, who is the University of Botswana’s library director, served as the first African president of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. She founded Botswana’s Children’s Information Trust, and has devoted more than 35 years to promoting the importance of oral learning in indigenous communities.

“Western education enhanced indigenous ways of knowing and broadened our world view, facilitating the survival of our people through struggle and resistance during the colonial era,” she said. “Missionary education, in spite of its negative aspects, gave our forbearers access to control of their own destinies, resulting in our freedom and success today.”

In Africa, the consequences of not engaging in the formal education sector are significant, said Raseroka. “[The consequences] are serious for social relations between the governments and the people, and between educator and learner, because the result is the imposition of everything the dominant figures possess on the uneducated and the ordinary citizen.”

Raseroka also spoke at the May 30 convocation at the U of A Augustana campus in Camrose. She drew parallels between the funding drive that helped to establish her own university in Botswana and the public-funding drive that drive the creation of the new Augustana library.

“It is a wonderful representation of the spirit of collaboration, of humaneness,” she said. “It’s an affirmation of the integrity of human experience mirrored in communities that are a world apart in various ways.”