Transnational policy borrowing and lending of ideas is mostly from the global North to the global South. In sub-Saharan Africa, transnational policy borrowing and lending is complicated by western "dirty gossips" (distortions and stereotypes) about African societies. While works by Steiner-Khamsi, Quist and Kendall outline the complexities of transnational resource flows to sub-Saharan Africa, analysis of how western distortions about Africa shape transnational policy transfer is lacking. This paper employs symbolic violence and postcolonial frameworks to outline how Europeans and Americans' "dirty gossips" about Africa have influenced external transfer and flow of educational ideas and practices to sub-Saharan Africa since the colonial era. It also delineates the complicated ways western distortions and stereotypes about sub-Saharan Africa is a strategy by western partners in the global transnational policy borrowing and lending processes to position themselves in trusteeship roles while infantilizing education policy makers in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper argues that western education partners, particularly, western Africanist scholars, employ distortions and stereotypes as important components of their transnational policy borrowing and lending frameworks with the objective to present education in sub-Saharan Africa as a "crisis" and a new frontier, and their resolve to confront, explore and tame the crisis.