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ABSTRACT
Examining developments in the history of education in Africa as a whole raises far-reaching philosophical, anthropological and historical questions about what Africa is and whether such a history is even possible as such. The course of that history and its tributaries wend around social theories; its dominant issues, tensions and gaps represent ideological interventions that highlight competing narratives in attempts to theorise social progress along a set of converging historiographic projects through which the conflicts between positivist, Marxist and poststructuralist (and other critical theory) perspectives – and the Eurocentricity of their objects – become visible. Anticipating broadened inquiries that centre Africans in historical narratives concerning education in Africa, this review (a) critiques historians’ obsession with and dissensions on colonial education, (b) clarifies epistemic ruptures in the well-worn quest for ‘truth’ in history evident in that obsession, and (c) proposes some prospects for decolonial futures in the history of education in Africa.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Binyavanga Wainaina, ‘How to Write About Africa’, Granta: The Magazine of New Writing - The View from Africa 92 (2005): 92.
2 Hilda D. Oakeley, ‘How is History Possible? The Presidential Address’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1940–1941 41 (1940): i–xviii; Georg Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay, trans. and ed. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1977[1907]). While earlier defenders of historical realism note that, for historians to do their work, they cannot afford to pay much attention to philosophy (see Gordon S. Wood, ‘Review of Truth is History by Oscar Handlin’, Journal of Modern History 53, no. 1 [1981]: 87), it is minimally in, with and through philosophy that these clarifications can be fruitfully carried on.
3 For commentaries, see Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Vol. 5: Historical Writing Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); for a brief summary, Alun Munslow, ‘What History Is’, History in Focus, https://archives.history.ac.uk/history-in-focus/Whatishistory/munslow6.html (accessed January 8, 2022).
4 For the founding of the source-based empiricist tradition in history, see Leopold Von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. Georg G. Iggers with an Introduction, trans. Wilmer A. Iggers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Barry Schwartz, ‘How is History Possible? Georg Simmel on Empathy and Realism’, Journal of Classical Sociology 7, no. 3 (2017): 213–37.
5 In the African context, these distinctions are portmanteaus for handling questions concerning the relevance of European colonial education; see, e.g. George J. Sefa Dei, Schooling & Education in Africa: The Case of Ghana (Trenton, NJ/Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2004); Birgit Brock-Utne, ‘Decolonisation of Knowledge in the African University’, in Knowledge and Change in African Universities, ed. Michael Cross and Amasa Ndofirepi, vol. 1: Current Debates (Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2017).
6 John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Touchstone, 1938). Dewey’s use of the criteria of continuity (all experiences continue in future experiences, in that they internally transform the person who experiences) and interaction (external reality is transformed as individuals act outwardly on their materials world in response to their experiences) essentialises informal learning, not merely as foundational for formal education, but as constitutive of the social and interactive processes of biological and sociological existence.
7 See, e.g., Pauline J. Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth & Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976); V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Oxford/Bloomington, IN: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1988); Tsenay Serequeberhan, African Philosophy: The Essential Readings (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1991).
8 E. H. Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire (London: John Murray, 1879), 262–98; Okpe Timothy Adie and Joseph Simon Effenji, ‘The Problem of Rationality in the History of African Philosophy’, GNOSIS: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis 1, no. 1 (2018): 95–105.
9 See, e.g., Gilbert A. Valverde, ‘Curriculum Policy Seen through High-Stakes Examinations: Mathematics and Biology in a Selection of School-Leaving Examinations from the Middle East and North Africa’, Peabody Journal of Education 80, no. 1 (2005): 29–55; Sergio Saleem Scatolini and George Milton, Education and Society in the Middle East and North Africa: English, Citizenship and Peace Education (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020).
10 Safaa El Tayeb El-Kogali and Caroline Krafft, Expectations and Aspirations: A New Framework for Education in the Middle East and North Africa (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2019); UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report: Non-State Actors in Education – Who Chooses? Who Loses? (Paris: UNESCO, 2021). UNESCO has shifted from ‘Arab States’ and ‘Middle East and North Africa’ used in the earlier Education For All Global Monitoring Report to ‘Northern Africa and West Asia’ in designating the same region.
11 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘The Inventions of African Identities and Languages: The Discursive and Developmental Implications’, in Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, ed. Olaoba F. Arasanyin and Michael A Pemberton (Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 2006), 14–26.
12 Jonathan O. Chimakonam and Uti O. Egbai, ‘Is “Africa” a Racial Slur and Should the Continent be Renamed?’, African Identities 20, no. 1 (2021): 10.
13 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Retinking Africa’s Globalisation, Vol. 1: The Intellectual Challenges (Trenton, NJ/Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2003), 3.
14 Ibid., 4.
15 Okot p’Bitek, Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1966).
16 Willem Fourie, ‘Four Concepts of Africa’, HTS Theological Studies 71, no. 3 (2015): 1–10.
17 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, ix.
18 Damiano Matascia, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and Hugo Gonçalves Dores, ‘Imperialism, Internationalism, and Education in Africa: Connected Histories’, Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 3 (2021): 221–7; Damiano Matascia, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and Hugo Gonçalves Dores, Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
19 Lewis Ricardo Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (New York: Routledge, 2016).
20 Addressing an academic audience in writing sets boundaries around every key element of the narrative. A completely different set of assumptions, modalities, epistemic frameworks and sources would be necessary if the primary audience of this review were a non-academic cadre of African historians, both those working in official capacities, such as in royal courts, and those (often elders) more diffused in communities as historical knowledge bearers.
21 Richard J. Wolff, ‘European Perspectives on the History of Education: A Review of Four Journals’, History of Education Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1986): 87–94.
22 Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, ‘It’s a Small World After All: The Wider World in the Historians’ Peripheral Vision’, Perspectives on History 51, Iss. 5 (May 2013), assessed May 20, 2023. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/may-2013/its-a-small-world-after-all; Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Why Do Only Some Places Have History? Japan, the West, and the Geography of the Past’, Journal of World History 28, no. 2 (2017): 187–218.
23 The journals include History of Education, History of Education Quarterly, Paedagogica Historica and History of Education Review. If one were to include publications by the Journal of Negro Education, considering their long history of publication on Africa, including several pieces in the 1990s focusing on Apartheid and post-Apartheid transitions, the number rises to about 99%. Publications that focus on Eurocentric education traditions (e.g. post-independence educational developments) were excluded, although these are arguably part of an ongoing colonial intervention.
24 Margaret H. Read, ‘Education in Africa: Its Patterns and Role in Social Change’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 298 (1955): 170–9.
25 Philip Curtin, foreword to Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (London: Macmillan, 1992).
26 Spencer D. Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 7; Emmanuelle Saada, ‘Regards Croisés: Transatlantic Perspectives on the “Colonial Situation”’, French Politics, Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 2.
27 See, e.g., Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz, eds., Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).
28 See, e.g., Colin G. Wise, A History of Education in British West Africa (London: Longman, 1956); Philip Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); John E. Anderson, The Struggle for the School: The Interaction of Missionary, Colonial Government and Nationalist Enterprise in the Development of Formal Education in Kenya (Nairobi: Longman, 1970); James Keith Watson, ed., Education in the Third World (London: Croom Helm, 1982).
29 B. Ọlatunji Ọlọruntimẹhin, ‘Education for Colonial Dominance in French West Africa from 1900 to the Second World War’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria VII, no. 2 (1974): 347–56; Philip G. Altbach and Gail P. Kelly, Education and Colonialism (New York: Longman, 1978); Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: David McKay, 1974); Martin Carnoy and Joel Samoff, Education and Social Transition in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
30 David J. Finlay, ‘Review: Education and Polity in Ghana’, History of Education Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1971): 319.
31 Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz, ‘Introduction’, in Kallaway and Swartz, Empire and Education in Africa, 2; note the telling distinction between ‘excellent historical studies of the construction of education systems’ immediately after African independence and the ‘more recent literature [that] has been patchy and often linked to contemporary fashions associated with the progressivism or the radical education turn of the 1960s and 1970s’. See also Clive Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 316.
32 Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India’; Clive Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire’, History of Education 34, no. 4 (2005): 441–54; Peter Kallaway, The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa: Education, Science and Development (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2021).
33 Simon McGrath, Education and Development (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018); Clive Harber, Education and International Development: Theory, Practice and Issues (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2014); Emily Hannum and Claudia Buchmann, ‘Global Educational Expansion and Socio-Economic Development: An Assessment of Findings from the Social Sciences’, in Educating All Children: A Global Agenda, ed. Joel E. Cohen, David E. Bloom and Martin B. Malin (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences and MIT, 2006), 495–534.
34 V. P. Franklin, ‘Response: Reflections on History, Education, and Social Theories’, History of Education Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2011): 264; Carl F. Kaeste, ‘Ideology and Educational History’, History of Education Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1982): 123–37.
35 Derwent Whittlesey, ‘British and French Colonial Technique in West Africa’, Foreign Affairs 15, no. 2 (1937): 362–73; Remi P. Clinet and Philip J. Foster, ‘French and British Colonial Education in Africa’, Comparative Education Review 8, no. 2 (1964): 191–8; A. I. Asiwaju, ‘Formal Education in Western Yorubaland, 1889–1960: A Comparison of the French and British Colonial Systems’, Comparative Education Review 19, no. 3 (1975): 434–50; Arie J. vanderPloeg, ‘Education in Colonial Africa: The German Experience’, Comparative Education Review 21, no. 1 (1977): 91–109; Bob W. White, ‘Talk about School: Education and the Colonial Project in French and British Africa (1860–1960)’, Comparative Education 32, no. 1 (1996): 9–25; Ọlọruntimẹhin, ‘Education for Colonial Dominance in French West Africa’; Matthew Lange, James Mahoney and Matthias vom Hau, ‘Colonialism and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies’, American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 5 (2006): 1412–62; for commentary on the British adaptation policy, see Albert Charton, ‘French Tropical and Equatorial Africa: The Birth of African-French Culture’, in The Year Book of Education (London: Evans Bros, 1949), 366–79; Udo Bude, ‘The Adaptation Concept in British Colonial Education’, Comparative Education 19, no. 3 (1983): 341–55; Michael Omolewa, ‘Educating the “Native”: A Study of the Education Adaptation Strategy in British Colonial Africa, 1910–1936’, Journal of African American History 91, no. 3 (2006): 267–87; for French assimilationism, associationism and elite education, Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Martin Deming Lewis, ‘One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The “Assimilation” Theory in French Colonial Policy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 2 (1962): 129–53; Tony Chafer, ‘Teaching Africans to be French?: France’s “Civilizing Mission” and the Establishment of a Public Education System in French West Africa, 1903–30’, Africa: Rivista Trimestrale di studi e Documentazione dell’Istituto Italiano per ‘Africa e l’Oriente 56, no. 2 (2001): 190–209; for Portuguese assimilationism, Eduardo Moreira, ‘Portuguese Colonial Policy’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 17, no. 3 (1947): 181–91; James Duffy, ‘Portuguese Africa (Angola and Mozambique): Some Crucial Problems and the Role of Education in their Resolution’, Journal of Negro Education 30, no. 3 (1961): 294–301; Antoinette Errante, ‘Education and National Personae in Portugal’s Colonial and Postcolonial Transition’, Comparative Education Review 42, no. 3 (1998): 267–308.
36 Spencer D. Segalla, ‘The Micropolitics of Colonial Education in French West Africa, 1914–1919’, French Colonial History 12 (2012): 1–22; Kallaway and Swartz, Empire and Education in Africa; Desmond Ikenna Odugu, ‘Historiographic Reconsideration of Colonial Education in Africa: Domestic Forces in the Early Expansion of English Schooling in Northern Igboland, 1890–1930’, History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2016): 241–72; Matascia, Jerónimo and Dores, ‘Imperialism, Internationalism, and Education in Africa’; Matascia, Jerónimo and Dores, Education and Development.
37 Felix K. Ekechi, ‘Colonialism and Christianity in West Africa: The Igbo Case, 1900–1915’, Journal of African History 12, no. 1 (1971): 103–15; Shokop Yamada, ‘“Traditions” and Cultural Production: Character Training at the Achimota School in Colonial Ghana’, History of Education 38, no. 1 (2009): 29–59; Kay Whitehead, ‘Inventing and Commemorating Queen Elizabeth School, Ilorin, in Nigeria (1956–2016)’, History of Education 48, no. 2 (2019): 254–72; Heather J. Sharkey, ‘Christians among Muslims: The Church Missionary Society in the Northern Sudan’, Journal of African History 43, no. 1 (2002): 51–75; Fiona Leach, ‘Resisting Conformity: Anglican Mission Women and the Schooling of Girls in Early Nineteenth-Century West Africa’, History of Education 41, no. 2 (2012): 133–53; Julia Allen, ‘Slavery, Colonialism and the Pursuit of Community Life: Anglican Mission Education in Zanzibar and Northern Rhodesia 1864–1940’, History of Education 37, no. 2 (2008): 207–26; Jenny Collins, ‘They Came with a Purpose: Educational Journeys of Nineteenth-Century Irish Dominican Sister Teachers’, History of Education 44, no. 1 (2015): 44–63; Felicity Jensz, ‘The 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference and Comparative Colonial Education’, History of Education 47, no. 3 (2018): 399–414; Pierre Guidi, ‘“For Good, God, and the Empire”: French Franciscan Sisters in Ethiopia 1896–1937’, History of Education 47, no. 3 (2018): 384–98; Peter Kallaway, ‘German Lutheran Missions, German Anthropology and Science in African Colonial Education’, in Kallaway and Swartz, Empire and Education in Africa, 205–32; Judith van Allen, ‘“Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, no. 2 (1972): 165–81; Jamaine Abidogun, ‘Western Education’s Impact on Northern Igbo Gender Roles in Nsukka, Nigeria’, Africa Today 54, no. 1 (2007): 29–51; Misty Bastian, ‘Young Converts: Christian Missions, Gender and Youth in Onitsha, Nigeria 1880–1929’, Anthropological Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2000): 145–58; Elsie Rockwell, ‘Tracing Assimilation and Adaptation through School Exercise Books from Afrique Occidentale Française in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Kallaway and Swartz, Empire and Education in Africa, 235–70; Kwabena Dei Ofori-Attah, ‘The British and Curriculum Development in West Africa: A Historical Discourse’, Review of Education 52 (2006): 409–23; Clive Glaser, ‘Nostalgia for a Beating: Discipline, Generational Authority and Corporal Punishment at a Soweto High School, c.1960–2000’, History of Education 48, no. 3 (2019): 395–409.
38 Andrew Bank, ‘The Berlin Mission Society and German Linguistic Roots of “Volkekunde”: The Background, Training and Hamburg Writings of Werner Eiselen, 1899–1924’, Kronos 41 (2015): 166–92; Richard Glotzer, ‘A Long Shadow: Frederick P. Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation and the Dominions and Colonies Fund Area Experts 1923–1943’, History of Education 38, no. 5 (2009): 621–48; Peter Kallaway, ‘Diedrich Westermann: Linguistics and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Interwar Era’, in The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa: Education, Science and Development (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2021): 167–92, 353–62; Peter Kallaway, ‘Diedrich Westermann: Linguistics and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Interwar Era’, in The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa: Education, Science and Development (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2021).
39 Wallbank, ‘The Educational Renaissance in British Tropical Africa’, 105–8; Edward Coleson, ‘The Impact of European Education in West Africa’, History of Education Journal 6, no. 2 (1955): 169–78.
40 White, ‘Talk about School’; Matascia, Jerónimo and Dores, Education and Development.
41 Clive Whitehead, ‘Education in British Colonial Dependencies, 1919–39: A Re-Appraisal’, Comparative Education 17, no. 1 (1981): 71–80; Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I’; Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II’. Such emphasis on policy has (mis)led Whitehead to jump from archival impressions that the British never had a cohesive education policy to outright dismissal of the charge that British colonial education was cultural imperialism.
42 Segala, ‘The Micropolitics of Colonial Education in French West Africa’, 4.
43 Georges Balandier, ‘La Situation Coloniale: Approche Théorique’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 110 (2001/1951): 16; Saada, ‘Regards Croisés’, 2.
44 Magnus O. Bassey, Western Education and Political Domination in Africa: A Study in Critical and Dialogical Pedagogy (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999); Ọlọruntimẹhin, ‘Education for Colonial Dominance’.
45 Saada, ‘Regards Croisés’; Jeanne Marie Penvenne, ‘Colonial Encounters between Africa and Portugal: An Introduction’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 36, no. 1 (2003): 1–6. Pieces appearing in the NYU Institute of French Studies journal, French Politics, Culture & Society, while rarely on education, provide some historical insights that might be of interest, especially in the North African context; see, e.g., Frédéric Viguier, ‘A French Educational Meritocracy in Independent Morocco?’, French Politics, Culture & Society 38, no. 2 (2020): 148–73; Johann Le Guelte, ‘Photography, Identity, and Migration: Controlling Colonial Migrants in Interwar France and Senegal’, French Politics, Culture & Society 37, no. 3 (2019): 27–52.
46 Histoire de l’éducation publishes both French and English versions of its articles, Cadernos de História da Educação, in Brazilian Portuguese and English, Educació i Història of the Societat d’Història de l’Educació dels Països de Llengua Catalana, in Catalan, Spanish and English, and so forth. For a list of other such journals (although this does not include any journal from Africa) and a monthly list of history of education pieces appearing in outlets that are not frequently read by western scholars, see Rick Mikulski, ‘History of Education Journals, Periodicals, and Series’, Humanities and Social Science Online, accessed May 20, 2023. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14281/pages/2050427/history-education-journals-periodicals-and-series.
47 Matascia, Jerónimo and Dores’s Education and Development, as well as their accompanying special issue on ‘Imperialism, Internationalism, and Education in Africa: Connected Histories’, published by Paedagogica Historica, includes pieces that engage with French literature and sources.
48 Vincent Alamercy, ‘L’historiographie française de l’éducation: essai de cartographie de ses objets et de ses auteurs’, Histoire de l’éducation 117 (2008): 97–116. For comparative reference, over half of French publication on the history of education focus on France and Europe, with seven countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) making up over 76% of all geographic indexations. See Alamercy, ‘L’historiographie française de l’éducation’, 112.
49 Harry Gamble, ‘La crise de l’enseignement en Afrique occidentale française (1944–1950)’, Histoire de l’éducation 128 (2010): 131; Harry Gamble, ‘Peasants of the Empire: Rural Schools and the Colonial Imaginary in 1930s French West Africa’, Cahiers d’études Africaines 195 (2009): 775–803.
50 Clive Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India,’ History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005), 315–29; Clive Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire,’ History of Education 34, no. 4 (2005), 441–54; Dinesh D’Souza, ‘Two cheers for colonialism,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 May 2002, B7.
51 Gamble, ‘La crise de l’enseignement en Afrique occidentale française’.
52 Frederick D. Lugard, ‘The White Man’s Task in Tropical Africa’, Foreign Affairs 5, no. 1 (1926): 57–8; Frederick D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Frank Cass & Co, 1922).
53 Wallbank, ‘The Educational Renaissance in British Tropical Africa’, 107.
54 Ibid.
55 See Gamble, ‘La crise de l’enseignement en Afrique occidentale française’.
56 Lugard, ‘The White Man’s Task’, 59.
57 Sir Arthur H. Hardinge to Sir C. Hill, April 25, 1897, The National Archives, London, FC. 107/77; see also E. R. Turton, ‘The Introduction and Development of Educational Facilities for the Somali in Kenya’, History of Education Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1974): 347.
58 Whittlesey, ‘British and French Colonial Technique in West Africa’, 362; Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 1; for early commentary on traditional systems of education in Africa, see Abdou Moumouni, L’Éducation en Afrique (Paris: Françoise Maspero, 1964), 34; A. Babs Fafunwa, History of Education in Nigeria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974); Michael Omolewa, ‘Traditional African Modes of Education: Their Relevance in the Modern World’, International Review of Education 53 (2007): 593–612.
59 Dewey, Experience and Education.
60 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, ‘Manufacturing and Consuming Knowledge: African Libraries and Publishing’, Development in Practice 6, no. 4 (1996): 293–303; John E. Anderson, The Struggle for the School: The Interaction of Missionary, Colonial Government and Nationalist Enterprise in the Development of Formal Education in Kenya (London: Longman, 1970), 1.
61 Desmond Ikenna Odugu, review of Empire and Education in Africa by Kallaway and Swartz, History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2019): 137–41.
62 Kenneth King, China’s Aid & Soft Power in Africa: The Case of Education & Training (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2013); Martin Bailey, ‘Tanzania and China’, African Affairs 74, no. 294 (1975): 39–50; Jane Weiß and Ingrid Thea Miethe, Socialist Educational Cooperation and the Global South (Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag, 2020); Constantin Katsakioris, ‘Nkrumah’s Elite: Ghanaian Students in the Soviet Union in the Cold War’, Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 3 (2021): 260–76.
63 Michael Omolewa, ‘The Practice of Lifelong Learning in Indigenous Africa’, in Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives, ed. Carolyn Medel-Añonuevo (Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education, 2002); M. B. M. Avoseh, ‘Learning to be Active Citizens: Lessons of Traditional Africa for Lifelong Learning’, International Journal of Lifelong Education 20, no. 6 (2001): 479–86.
64 Aaron Benavot, ‘Vocational-Technical Education in Tropical Africa’, Sociology of Education 56, no. 2 (1983): 63–76; David E. Gardinier, ‘Vocational and Technical Education in French Equatorial Africa (1842–1960)’, Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 8 (1985): 113–23; Edwin Hamilton and Kobina Asiedu, ‘Vocational-Technical Education in Tropical Africa’, Journal of Negro Education 56, no. 3 (1987): 338–55; Anthony I. Akubue and Edward C. Pytlik, ‘Technology, Technical, and Vocational Education in Nigeria: Past Neglect and Present Attention’, Journal of Epsilon Pi Tau 16, no. 2 (1990): 43–8.
65 Kevin Lougheed, ‘“Teach the Mutual Interest of the Mother Country and her Dependencies”: Education and Reshaping Colonial Governance in Trinidad’, History of Education 50, no. 6 (2021): 745–63; Michael O. West, ‘The Tuskegee Model of Development in Africa: Another Dimension of the African/African-American Connection’, Diplomatic History 16, no. 3 (1992): 371–87; Rebecca Swartz, ‘Civilisation and Colonial Education: Natal and Western Australia in the 1860s in Comparative Perspective’, History of Education 47, no. 3 (2018): 368–83.
66 Handlin, Truth in History.
67 Odugu, ‘Historiographic Reconsideration of Colonial Education in Africa’.
68 Kallaway and Swartz, ‘Introduction’, 2; Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India’; Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II’.
69 Handlin, Truth in History, 21; see also Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Geoffery R. Elton, The Practice of History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967); and Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002/New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 282–97.
70 Handlin, Truth in History, 4–5.
71 Adiele E. Afigbo, ‘Oral Tradition and the History of Segmentary Societies’, History of Africa 12 (1985): 1–10; Hayden White, ‘Response to Arthur Marwick’, Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 2 (1995): 233–46; Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); Felix K. Ekechi, ‘Oral Tradition and African History: An Example from Southeastern Nigeria’, International Journal of Social Education 4, no. 1 (1989), 26–40; Christopher Lloyd, ‘Beyond Sciences in Historical Theory? Critical Commentary on the History/Science Distinction’, Storia della Storiografia 48 (2005): 128–38; Christopher Lloyd, ‘For Realism and against the Inadequacies of Common Sense: A Response to Arthur Marwick’, Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 1 (1996), 191–207; Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representations of the Past (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); Linda Orr and Jules Michelet: Nature, History and Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Frank Ankersmit, ‘Tocqueville and the Sublimity of Democracy’, Tocqueville Review 15 (1994): 173–201.
72 Wood, review of Truth in History by Oscar Handlin, 86.
73 Ibid., 87.
74 Paul L. Ward, review of The Practice of History by G. R. Elton, History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 114; for a more detailed account of this revolt, see Cushing Strout, The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).
75 W. E. B. DuBois, preface to A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel Press, 1951); T. Walter Wallbank, ‘The Educational Renaissance in British Tropical Africa’, Journal of Negro Education 3, no. 1 (1934): 107; Wood, review of Truth in History, 84; Israel Shenker, ‘Historians Still Debating the Meaning of the American Revolution if it Was a Revolution’, New York Times, July 6, 1976.
76 Wallbank, ‘The Educational Renaissance of British Tropical Africa’, 105.
77 William A. Dunning, ‘Truth in History’, American Historical Review 19, no. 2 (1914): 217–29.
78 John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, eds., The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
79 Dunning, ‘Truth in History’, 219.
80 Handlin, Truth in History, 1.
81 Dunning, ‘Truth in History’, 224, emphasis added.
82 Ulli Beier, ed., The Origin of Life and Death: African Creation Myths (Nairobi: East African Educational Publisher, 1966); Obiakoizu A. Iloanusi, Myths of the Creation of Man and the Origin of Death in Africa: A Study in Igbo Traditional Culture and Other African Cultures (New York: Peter Lang, 1984); Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola, The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
83 Dunning, ‘Truth in History’, 221.
84 Ibid., 223.
85 Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
86 Dunning, ‘Truth in History’, 228.
87 Ibid., 226.
88 Wood, review of Truth in History, 86.
89 Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 296.
90 Handlin, Truth in History, 405.
91 Ibid., 406.
92 Kallaway and Swartz, Empire and Education in Africa; Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I’; Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II’. For critique, see Odugu, ‘Historiographic Reconsideration of Colonial Education in Africa’; Odugu, review of Empire and Education in Africa.
93 Felix K. Ekechi, ‘Oral Tradition and African History’; A. E. Afigbo, ‘Oral Tradition and the History of Segmentary Societies’, History of Africa 12 (1985): 1–10.
94 Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I’, 316.
95 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007/1781); Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
96 Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
97 Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (New York: Basic Books, 2018).
98 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018).
99 Mark Freeman, ‘Adult Education History in Britain: Past, Present and Future (Part I)’, Paedagogica Historica 56, no. 3 (2020): 384–95; Mark Freeman, ‘Adult Education History in Britain: Past, Present, and Future (Part II)’, Paedagogica Historica 56, no. 3 (2020): 396–411; Malcolm Chase, ‘Stories We Tell Them? Teaching Adults History in a Postmodern World’, Studies in the Education of Adults 32 (2000): 97.
100 Kallaway, The Changing Face; Kallaway and Swartz, Empire and Education.
101 Kallaway, The Changing Face; Odugu, review of Empire and Education in Africa.
102 Kallaway, The Changing Face, 194–195; Matascia, Jerónimo and Dores, Education and Development for recent elaborations of colonial encounters as complex, precarious and indeterminate, with varied (and sometimes contradictory) roles and outcomes across time and context that voids any coloniser–colonised distinction.
103 Kallaway, The Changing Face, 110–11.
104 For other fruitful examples see C. N. Ubah, ‘Western Education in Africa: The Igbo Experience, 1900–1960’, Comparative Education Review 24, no. 3 (1980): 371–88; Ekechi, ‘Oral Tradition and African History’; and Afigbo, ‘Oral Tradition and the History of Segmentary Societies’.
105 Kenechukwu Chidiogo Daniel, Anselm Maduabuchi Ibeanu, Jacinta Uchenna Ikegwu and Emuobosa Akpo Orijemie, ‘New Radiocarbon Dates from Archaeological Sites in Parts of Igboland’, Radiocarbon 64, no. 1 (2022): 35–50; Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, Eden in Sumer on The Niger: Archaeological, Linguistic and Genetic Evidence of 45,000 Years of Atlantis, Eden and Sumer in West Africa (Abuja: CARC, 2013); Jamaine Abidogun, African Science Education: Gendering Indigenous Knowledge in Nigeria (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018); Shadreck Chirikure, Metals in Past Societies: A Global Perspective on Indigenous African Metallurgy (New York: Springer, 2015).
106 See for example, The Mineral Ordinance, 1945 issued by King George VI for the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria as an amendment and consolidation of previous ordinances. For research commentaries on the link to the chequered history of mining in Nigeria and to global capitalism broadly, see A. O. Y. Raji and T. S. Abejide, ‘The British Mining & Oil Regulations in Colonial Nigeria c.1914–1960s: An Assessment’, Singaporean Journal of Business Economics and Management Studies 2, no. 1 (2014): 62–75; Raymond E. Dumett, Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870–1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics and Territorial Expansion (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2009).
107 See, e.g., Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, History Compass 12, no. 10 (2015): 485–96; Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies 21, nos 2–3 (2007): 168–78.
108 William Mpofu, ‘Decoloniality as Travelling Theory: Or What Decoloniality is Not’, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, presented August 7, 2017, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/seminar/Mpofu2017.pdf (accessed January 23, 2022).
109 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Walter Mignolo, ‘On Pluriversality’, Walter Mignolo, http://waltermignolo.com/on-pluriversality/ (accessed January 22, 2022).
110 Kallaway, The Changing Face, 195, emphasis added.
111 Lynn Mario T. de Souza, ‘Foreword: A Decolonial Project’, in Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education: Reclaiming Voices from the South, ed. Zannie Bock and Christopher Stroud (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), xiii–xxiii.
112 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom, 2.
113 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience’, Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 3 (2011): 273–83.
114 For recent issues, see the African Journal of Historical Sciences in Education website, https://hoedson.org/?page_id=9 (accessed January 3, 2023).
115 Chidozie S. Agu and Chukwuma C. Opata, ‘Iron Technology and Political Power: Examples from the Iron Smelting Belt of Nsukka Area, Enugu State, South-Eastern Nigeria’, Research on Humanities and Social Sciences 2, no. 9 (2012): 166–75; Chukwuma C. Opata and Pamela Eze-Uzomaka, ‘Beyond Stereotypes: Gender and Politics in Iron Smelting Society of Lejja, Nigeria’, Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 1, no. 3 (2012): 39–49; Christian Chukwuma Opata, ‘African Education and Cultural Belief Systems: Extrapolations from Igboland, Nigeria’, in The Palgrave Handbook of African Education and Indigenous Knowledge, ed. Jamaine Abidogun and Toyin Falola (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 233–44.
116 Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The Ibadan School of Historiography and its Critics’, in African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi, ed. Toyin Falola (Harlow: Longman, 1993), 195–202.
117 Cullen Gwin, Yacouba Sawadogo: The Man Who Conquered the Desert (Atlanta, GA: LearningIsland, 2017).
118 Ana Duarte Rodrigues, ‘From Pairidaea to Planet Garden: The Homo-Gardinus Against Desertification’, in Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene, ed. Maria Paula Diogo, Ana Simões, Ana Duarte Rodrigues and Davide Scarso (New York: Routledge, 2019), 95–111; Rosemary E. Agbor and Wele Elangwe, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Agrobiodiversity in Africa’, in Environmental Resilience and Food Law: Agrobiodiversity and Agroecology, ed. Gabriela Steier and Aberto Giulio Cianci (New York: CRC Press by Taylor & Francis, 2020).
119 For a critique of this position, see Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (London: BBC Publication, 1986); Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, History Compass 13, no. 10 (2015): 485–96.
120 Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (2007): 217.
121 Awele Achi and Francis Chukwuedo Achi, ‘Mutual Aid Economy: Exploring the Locally Generated Venture Capital Approach in Igbo Business Industrial Clusters’, in Indigenous African Enterprise (Advanced Series in Management, ed. Ogechi Adeola (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2020), 177–88.
122 Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, eds., Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007); Monica Heller and Bonnie S. McElhinny, Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Towards a Critical History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); Adama Ouane and Christine Glanz, eds., Optimising Learning, Education and Publishing in Africa: The Language Factor: A Review and Analysis of Theory and Practice in Mother-Tongue and Bilingual Education in sub-Saharan Africa (Hamburg/Tunis Belvédère: UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning [UIL] and Association for the Development of Education in Africa [ADEA], 2011); Desmond I. Odugu and Camille N. Lemieux, ‘Transitional Multilingual Education Policies in Africa: Necessary Compromise or Strategic Impediment?’, Language and Education 33, no. 3 (2019): 263–81.
123 Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); Lewis R. Gordon, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonisation (New York: Routledge, 2021).
124 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013).
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Desmond Ikenna Odugu
Desmond Ikenna Odugu is an Associate Professor of Education and the chair of Education at Lake Forest College in the United States He holds a PhD in Comparative and International Education from Loyola University Chicago. In addition to his research on linguistic processes, education and social change in Africa and beyond, as well as on race, space and education in the United States, he explores the history and historiography of education in the African context. His interest spans epistemic reconsiderations of colonial education historiography, oral history and indigenous African educational processes prior to and since colonial encounters. He is a Carnegie African Diaspora fellow and coordinator of the International Network for Action Research on Education, Language, and Society (INARELS) with extensive field experience in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa and Botswana.