The Changing face of Colonial Education in Africa

Education, Science and Development

Peter Kallaway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The Changing Landscape of Colonial Education in Africa offers a detailed and nuanced perspective of colonial history, based on fifteen years of research, that throws fresh light on the complexities of African history and the colonial world of the first half of the twentieth century. It provides an analytical background to history of education in the colonial context by balancing contributions by missionary agencies, colonial government, humanitarian agencies, and scientific experts.

The book offers a foundation for the analysis of modern educational policy for the post-colonial state. It attempts to move beyond clichés about colonial education to an understanding of the complexities of how educational policy was developed in different places at different times while giving credence to arguments which see schooling as a form of social control in the colonial environment.

The book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policy makers looking to better understand colonial education and contextualise modern developments related to the decolonising African education. It is intended to provide an essential background for policy makers by demonstrating the significance of a historical perspective for an understanding of contemporary educational challenges in Africa and elsewhere.

Chapter 1

The International Missionary Council and education in colonial Africa^*

* This paper was first presented at the History of Education Society (UK) conference at the Royal National Hotel in London, 3–5 November 2006. A version was first published in History of Education 38(2) (March 2009): 217–246.

A key challenge for the mission churches was to meet the increasing demand for schooling in the highly complex context of the educational politics of the times. This chapter is concerned to map the background to those international influences that shaped the policy and practices of mission education and the increasing engagement of colonial governments with the field of education.

Church and state gradually expanded their cooperation in the field of colonial education as the costs of education outstripped the resources of the missions and the demand for mass education came to be linked to nationalist demands for political and economic rights. This chapter addresses the question of the worldwide Protestant mission church’s response to the changing political, social and economic environments of the first half of the twentieth century. It seeks to explore how mission initiatives helped to shape thinking about education in Asia, Africa, North America, Oceania and Latin America by the 1930s in the political framework established by the Covenant of the League of Nations. It also attempts to situate those issues within a wider educational framework by linking them to the emergent debate about pragmatism and utilitarianism relating to Progressive Education in the United States and the quest for social democratic forms of education in the United Kingdom and Europe as part of a policy response to socialism, nationalism and totalitarianism. In short, the chapter explores the influence of the Christian mission churches with regard to social policy, in general, and the provision of education, in particular, during the interwar years, with special reference to areas influenced by the work of the IMC.

At a time when there was diminishing support for “foreign missions,” how did the policy disputes between those with “conservative views” of personal religion and those who were promoting a “social gospel” transform themselves into debates regarding the role of missions in “non-Western societies”? And how did these essentially ecclesiastical/theological issues come to influence public policy, specifically educational policy, in the long term? The conclusions are that mission churches had a very significant influence on the shaping of educational thinking in the colonial and imperial context at a time when state influence in the sector was still often quite weak. The origins of the conference and research culture that has informed educational policy since the establishment of the United Nations Organization had its roots in the broad context of the Charter of the League of Nations, with a meeting of religious and secular goals, prior to the outbreak of World War II. Between 1910 and 1939 there was a significant history of educational reform and community development that has only been partially documented in relation to its global significance. This is an attempt to build a framework for understanding the nature of those changes and what was achieved. The investigation is conducted through an exploration of the three great World Mission Conferences of the IMC held at Edinburgh (1910), Jerusalem (1928) and Tambaram, India (1938). The attempts of Christian churches to engage with dramatic social changes associated with industrialization, urbanization, poverty, cultural change and the rise of anti-colonialism, with specific regard to the field of educational policy, are documented and analyzed.

History of education and mission education

As David Bebbington has noted with regard to the pre-1914 era, “the standard literature of the history of the British Empire tends to relegate religion to the margins of the analysis.”¹ Where religious issues are referred to they are often seen in rather static and reified terms. The approach leads to a neglect of the influence of the “home church” on imperial endeavor and a failure to adequately assess the role of the local or colonial church’s interaction with political, social and economic policies.

This assessment would also seem to be applicable to the post–World War I era. Outside of isolated works like William Hogg, William Hutchinson, Adrian Hastings, Andrew Porter and Norman Etherington,² historians do not seem to have adequately linked ecclesiastical history with mainstream social or world history. The transformation of Protestant Christianity from an evangelical endeavor focused primarily on individual salvation and “conversion” in the nineteenth century to a “social gospel” which “saw public authority and government as an instrument for building God’s kingdom on earth”³ seems to have been a key aspect of theological debate and policy reform in a transforming British political economy of the interwar years both at home and abroad.

This shift was noticeable in theology and in public policy. In theology the European Protestant tradition which linked Frederick D. Maurice’s somewhat eccentric nineteenth-century Christian socialism to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s rigorous defense of religious freedom in the context of Nazi Germany asserted a link between Christian mission and engagement with the politics of everyday life, which highlighted the links between religious practice and the politics of equity and democracy. This tradition was also significantly linked to secular concerns by influential Christian socialists from the Fabians to R.H. Tawney and was coming to have a significant impact on British Labour politics by the 1930s.⁴ Tawney provided crucial link between the community endeavors of Toynbee Hall in London’s East End, the Workers’ Education Association (WEA), the Labour Party, the academic and research ethos of the LSE during the time of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Lionel Robbins, Harold Laski, Bronislaw Malinowski, Richard Titmuss, T.H. Marshall, Lancelot Hogben, William Beveridge, Maynard Keynes⁵ and the “social gospel” wing of the Anglican Church.⁶ Tawney argued that “the general extension of educational provision was important if citizens were to be developed who would be satisfied with nothing less than freedom and would have the confidence to pursue it.”⁷

Within the mission churches this represented a radical and highly contested challenge to traditional policy and practice and impacted fundamentally on how they engaged with a new age of politics in the world beyond Europe and North America, through the mechanism of what came to be known as the “social gospel.”⁸ In the arena of public policy, ideas took shape regarding what later came to be called “community development” and gradually began to influence British Colonial Office policy and practice in Africa and Asia. The idea of trusteeship, applicable to the mandates, but increasingly read as applying to all colonial contexts, gradually came to influence colonial policy and welfare provision.⁹

For churchmen like J.H. Oldham, the secretary of the IMC for much of the period under review, the role of the Church in these issues of public policy was of fundamental significance.¹⁰ The influence of Thomas More, William Wilberforce, Thomas Buxton and John Philip in earlier ages was seen to exemplify the potential role of Christianity in the shaping of public life.¹¹ The mutual benefit of cooperation between Church and State was pressed home at a time when the mission churches were being overwhelmed by demands for social, medical and educational support, and the colonial state was not geared for a major role in public social provision.

If religion is an area of neglect by mainstream historians of the imperial age, this chapter is concerned to point to the even more significant dearth of research in the field of education. Mainstream historians seem to have been particularly reluctant to engage with the role of the educational policy and the school as a fundamental aspect of historical transition in the imperial colonial context.¹² Despite increasing evidence that it is difficult to overestimate the significance of mission education and emergent mass education in the first half of the twentieth century, few major imperial historians have addressed themselves to this issue in any depth since the vogue for structuralist studies about “cultural imperialism” in the 1970s. This issue is of particular importance given the major shifts in educational theory and practice that were taking place in the late colonial period. Progressive Education in its many forms was to influence educational thinking in the mission field as well as the European and Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Appendices
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The genesis of educational policy in late colonial Africa: 1900–1950s
• 1 The International Missionary Council and education in colonial Africa
• 2 Conference litmus: the development of a conference and policy culture in the interwar period with special reference to the New Education Fellowship and British colonial education in Southern Africa
• 3 Welfare and education in British colonial Africa: 1918–1945
• 4 Science and policy: anthropology and education in British colonial Africa during the interwar years
• 5 Diedrich Westermann: linguistics and the ambiguities of Colonial Science in the interwar era
• 6 Donald Guy Sydney M’timkulu: South African educationalist: 1907–2000
• 7 The modernization of tradition? isiXhosa language education and school history: 1920–1948 – reform in the work of Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi
• Conclusion
• References
• Index