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ABSTRACT
The question of ‘native’ education became urgent in interwar Britain in the context of imperial expansion in Africa. Simultaneously, debates concerning black education were central to a global pan-African nationalist movement demanding black rights and liberation. In this context, education became a site of competing ideas regarding black accommodation and rights. Missionaries drew connections between educating ‘black Africa’ and ‘negro America’ as adaptive education became part of a new civilising mission in Africa. This article explores the application of these ideas at Mt Margaret, a Protestant mission in Western Australia, in the interwar period. Drawing on missionary accounts it shows how their endeavours to promote adaptive education for Wongutha people were shaped by developments in the empire, particularly the Phelps Stokes Commissions in Africa. We see the transnational reach of this Anglo- American exchange and its vernacularisation in a settler colonial context where adaptive education was about building Indigenous citizens.Footnote1
1 Throughout this paper I put the word ‘native’ in speech marks to denaturalise the term. In the western imaginary the term was associated with the othering of Indigenous people, operating to deflect their humanity and underscore the development of policies and practices targeting them. It has been necessary to reproduce this language here as the topic is ‘native education’ as articulated at the time.
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Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Throughout this paper I put the word ‘native’ in speech marks to denaturalise the term. In the western imaginary the term was associated with the othering of Indigenous people, operating to deflect their humanity and underscore the development of policies and practices targeting them. It has been necessary to reproduce this language here as the topic is ‘native education’ as articulated at the time.
2 ‘Aboriginal Children’s Concert: A Bright Show’, Kalgoorlie Miner, August 30, 1938, 2.
3 See, for example, Anna Haebich, Dancing in the Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2018).
4 John Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity: A Story of Hope (Hamburg: Albatross Books, 1990).
5 R. S. Schenk, The Educability of the Native (Perth: United Aborigines Mission, 1936), 5.
6 Thomas Jesse Jones, Education in Africa: A Study of Western, Southern and Equatorial Africa by the African Education Commission Under the Auspices of the Phelps Stokes Fund and Foreign Mission Societies of North America and Europe (New York: Phelps Stokes Fund, 1922), 5.
7 See, for example, Robert Powell, The First Ten Years at Mt Margaret, Western Australia (Melbourne: Spectator Publishing Company, 1933); and Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2000).
8 Margaret Morgan, Drop in A Bucket: The Mount Margaret Story (Victoria: United Aborigines Mission, 1986).
9 Harris, One Blood.
10 Morgan, Drop in A Bucket, 5.
11 Ibid., 14.
12 Ibid., 21.
13 Ibid., 27–8.
14 Ibid., 89.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 57.
17 Ibid., 18.
18 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
19 Schenk haggled the local pastoralists for a minimum of one pound a week and keep.
20 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 43.
21 Ibid., 96. According to Bennett, ‘friends’ of the mission contributed 52 shillings annually towards the cost of food for a child.
22 Ibid., 104.
23 Mary Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines: Data from the Mt Margaret Mission (Perth: City and Suburban Print, 1935), 5.
24 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 106–8.
25 Jayeeta Sharma, ‘Kalimpong as a Transcultural Missionary Contact Zone’, in Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands, ed. Markus Viehbeck (Germany: Heidelberg University Press, 2017), 43.
26 Available at:http://drgrahamshomes.net/history-of-homes.php (accessed February 7, 2021).
27 Sharma, ‘Kalimpong as a Transcultural Missionary’, 26.
28 Ibid., 39.
29 Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997).
30 Russell McGregor, ‘Representations of the Half-Caste in the Australian Scientific Literature of the 1930s’, Journal of Australian Studies 36 (1993): 43–50.
31 Commonwealth of Australia, Aboriginal Welfare. Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, April 1937, National Archives of Australia: A52, 572/99429/912, 11.
32 Rod Schenk, The Educability of the Native (Perth: United Aborigines Mission, 1936), 28.
33 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 107.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 107–8.
36 Haebich, ‘The Battlefields of Aboriginal History’; Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell, Themes and Debates in Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 1–21.
37 Coral Edwards and Peter Read, eds., The Lost Children: Thirteen Australians Taken From Their Aboriginal Families Tell of the Struggle to Find Their Natural Parents (Sydney: Doubleday, 1989).
38 I trace this conflict in Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2015), 196–225. See also Haebich, Broken Circles.
39 Excerpt of letter from Mary Bennett to Harold Moody, reprinted in The West Australian, February 17, 1935, 9.
40 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 102.
41 Booker T. Gardner, ‘The Educational Contributions of Booker T. Washington’, Journal of Negro Education 44, no. 4 (1975): 502–18.
42 Edward H. Berman, ‘American Influence on African Education: The Role of the Phelps Stokes Fund’s Education Commissions’, Comparative Education Review 15, no. 1 (June 1971): 132–45.
43 Jones, Education in Africa, xiii.
44 Robert Maxon, Struggle for Kenya: The Loss and Assertion of Imperial Initiative, 1912–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
45 Udo Bude, ‘The Adaptation Concept in British Colonial Education’, Comparative Education 19, no. 3 (1983): 341–55.
46 Jones, Education in Africa, 10.
47 Ibid., xix.
48 Thomas Jesse Jones, Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Coloured People in the United States (Washington. DC: Bureau of Education, 1917).
49 Andrew E. Barnes, ‘“Making Good Wives and Mothers”: The African Education Group and Missionary Reactions to the Phelps Stokes Reports’, Studies in World Christianity 21, no. 1 (2015): 66–85.
50 Donald Johnson, ‘W.E.B. DuBois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle for Social Education, 1900–1930’, Journal of Negro History 85, no. 3 (2000): 74.
51 Ibid., 80.
52 Ibid., 84.
53 Thomas Jesse Jones would be the educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund for over 30 years, until his death in 1950.
54 Johnson, ‘W.E.B. DuBois, Thomas Jesse Jones’, 81.
55 Berman, ‘American Influence on African Education’.
56 See, for example, The Report of the Commission on the Closer Union of the Eastern and Central African Dependencies (1929). https://www.scribd.com/doc/74835698/CAB-24-201-Report-of-the-Commission-on-Closer-Union-of-the-Dependencies-in-Eastern-and-Central-Africa-1929
57 Jones, Education in Africa, xxiv.
58 Ibid.
59 Powell, The First Ten Years at Mt Margaret, 31.
60 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 110.
61 Ibid., 18.
62 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 25.
63 Lucy Mair, Native Policies in Africa (London: Routledge, 1936), 12.
64 Mary Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being (London: Alston Rivers, 1930), 138.
65 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal, 140.
66 Holland, Just Relations.
67 Mary Bennett, ‘Lecture to the Women’s Service Guilds’ (Rischbieth Papers, National Library of Australia, MS2004/12/235-303, December 11, 1932).
68 A. P. Elkin, ‘Native Education with Special Reference to the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania 7, no. 4 (1937): 439–500.
69 P. W. Beckenham, The Education of the Australian Aboriginal (Camberwell, Vic: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1948).
70 Haebich, Broken Circles.
71 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 96.
72 Schenk, Educability, 7.
73 Ibid., 27–31.
74 Ibid., 28.
75 Ibid., 31.
76 Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines.
77 Ibid., 36.
78 Ibid., 66.
79 Mary Bennett to William Morley, February 26, 1939, Papers of the Association for the Protection of Native Races, Sydney University Archives, series 7.
80 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
81 Bennett, ‘A Native Policy for Australia’, NAA (National Archives of Australia): A461, A300/Part 3, Aboriginals Policy, 1937–1943.
82 Johnson, ‘W.E.B. DuBois, Thomas Jesse Jones’, 91.
83 Bennett, ‘The Aboriginal Mother’ (Elkin Papers, University of Sydney Archives, Box 23, Item 8, 1933).
84 Schenk, Educability, 27–9.
85 Cati Coe, ‘Educating an African Leadership: Achimota and the Teaching of African Culture in the Gold Coast’, Africa Today 49, no. 3 (2002): 23–44.
86 Ibid., 28.
87 Ibid., 29.
88 Morgan, Drop in a Bucket, 201.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alison Holland
Alison Holland is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. She researches in Australian and Indigenous History with a focus on social justice, humanitarianism, rights, citizenship and governance. Her book, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade For Aboriginal Rights (UWA Publishing, 2015) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History prize. Her second monograph, Breaking the Silence: Aboriginal Defenders and the Settler State, 1905–1939 (Melbourne University Publishing) was published in 2019.