![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article examines African female education reform between the wars as a conjuncture of transnational philanthropic initiatives and state and missionary objectives on the ground. Through a comparative treatment of four schools in West, East and South-Central Africa, it shows that the search to recover and re-create the authentic African subject was a gendered process that aimed to critique one brand of colonialism (settler and industrial capitalism) by bolstering another (indirect rule). The schools at Achimota (Gold Coast), Kabete (Kenya), Hope Fountain (Southern Rhodesia) and Mbereshi (Northern Rhodesia) all idealised women’s traditional education as the key to offsetting the dangers of modernisation and preserving the integrity of the social body, and ‘adapted’ their curricula accordingly to their perception of women’s normative economic and social roles. However, the internal contradictions of this project stymied any possibility of implementing it in a cohesive way, and even its advocates and architects were often forced to admit the limits of tradition as a coherent logic or redemptive force. The gendered contours of adaptation, therefore, showed the potential of education to destabilise as much as to reinforce the shifting paradigms of the colonial project.
Acknowledgements
Previous iterations of this paper were presented at the 2014 Centre for Historical Studies Seminar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the 2012 American Historical Association and the 2010 Decolonisation Seminar. The author would like to express her deep gratitude to the convenors, participants and commentators of these sessions (and particularly to Neeladri Bhattacharya for his insight about neo-modernity) and to the anonymous journal reviewers for their invaluable feedback. She would also like to thank Rebecca Hughes for introducing her to Mbereshi, and April Mohler for pushing her initial thinking on the gendered philanthropy that undergirded colonial education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution; Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind; Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism.
2 Windel, ‘British Colonial Education in Africa’; Whitehead, ‘Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy’; Ball, ‘Imperialism, Social Control’; King, Pan-Africanism and Education.
3 Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘The Education of African Women’; Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, 3, 16 May 1931, Box 224, International Missionary Council Archives (hereafter IMC), Library of Congress Microfilm (hereafter LCM) and School of Oriental and African Studies Special Collections (hereafter SOAS).
4 Jones, Jeanes Teachers in the United States; Benson, ‘The Jeanes School’, 421; Carnegie, Village Education in Africa, 12–24.
5 Alridge, Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois; Esedebe, Pan-Africanism; Anderson and Kharem, Education as Freedom.
6 Johnson, Uplifting the Women; Wolcott, ‘“Bible, Bath, and Broom”’; Taylor, ‘Womanhood Glorified’.
7 Jones, Education in Africa; Jones, Education in East Africa. A subsequent, also influential study was Murray, The School in the Bush.
8 The model of indirect rule as the basis for colonial trusteeship was articulated most famously by Lugard, The Dual Mandate. On the concept of ‘culture contact’, see, for example, Schapera, ed., Western Civilization; also studies published under the Rhodes-Livingstone Papers.
9 For a contemporary apology, see Murray, ‘Education under Indirect Rule’. Although its specific meaning makes its universal applicability questionable in colonial political structures, particularly in the case of more diffuse polities like those encompassed by Kenya, it is clear that indirect rule infiltrated most aspects of British colonial governance in principle if not always in policy.
10 Vail, The Creation of Tribalism; Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika, ch. 10; Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’; Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited’; Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism and Limits of Invention’; Berman, ‘Ethnicity, Patronage’; Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals; Grier, Invisible Hands. African responses to the Phelps-Stokes Commissions and adaptive education more generally were mixed, ranging from those who criticized this kind of schooling as anti-intellectual infantilisation designed to keep blacks in their place, to those who found in the Tuskegee example and the evangelical strains of adaptation an empowering tool for advancement and coalition-building. See Barnes, ‘Industrial Education’; Barnes, ‘Tuskegee and the Christian Black Atlantic’, On the role of western education, particularly universities, in forging pan-Africanist networks of imperial critique, see Matera, ‘Colonial Subjects’; Parker, ‘“Made in America Revolutions”?’; von Eschen, Race against Empire; Bush, Imperialism, Race, and Resistance.
11 Report of the East Africa Commission, 52.
12 220/240–42, IMC, LCM/SOAS.
13 I mean ‘neo-modernity’ in this historicised sense of a colonial invention of progress, and am not referring to the neomodernist critique of postmodernism. Barbara Bush has noted some of these tensions in the gendered formulation of colonial development discourse more broadly over time: Bush, ‘Motherhood, Morality, and Social Order.’
14 Fraser, ‘Aims of African Education’; ‘Achimota’.
15 Benson, ‘The Jeanes School’; Dougall, ‘School Education and Native Life’; Jones, ‘Training Native Women’; Haworth, ‘Village School and its Layout’, 124–34. On women as a source of anxiety within the colonial order, see Summers, ‘“If You Can Educate the Native Woman … ”’, 450–52.
16 Shaw, ‘A School Village’. For a thorough treatment of the Girls’ Boarding School as a response to these concerns, see Morrow, ‘“No Girl Leaves the School Unmarried”’.
17 Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘Education of African Women’, 1–3, 10–13, 20–21.
18 Jones, Education in East Africa, 370.
19 1936 Jeanes School Kenya Annual Report, 6, 03/14/04, box 277, Conference of British Missionary Archives (hereafter CBMS), SOAS.
20 Benson, ‘The Jeanes School’, 426.
21 Fell, ‘Agricultural and Industrial Work’, 177–78.
22 Sabin to mother, 24 Feb. 1940, Box 1, Sabin Collection, SOAS.
23 Report on Achimota College for the Year 1930, 17–32, Box 311, 03/27/03, CBMS, SOAS.
24 Sabin to sister Dorothy, 18 May 1935, emphasis in original, Sabin Collection, SOAS.
25 Sabin to mother and sisters, 9 Aug 1936, ibid.
26 ‘Report of the First Refresher Course and Reunion of Jeanes Teachers, 2nd–6th April, 1928’, reprinted in Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa, 317–321, Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 879/121/4, the National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA).
27 Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 571–72; Jeanes School Kenya Annual Report, 1938, 8–9, box 277, 03/14/04, CBMS, SOAS.
28 Rudd, ‘Community Work’, 94.
29 On the gender implications of African domestic labour and the role of colonial education (particularly ‘farm schools’) in managing labour demands in Rhodesia, see Grier, Invisible Hands, ch. 5; Summers, ‘“If You Can Educate the Native Woman … ”’.
30 213, IMC, LCM/SOAS.
31 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for flagging this irony.
32 Africa Committee Conference with Mabel Carney, Teachers College, 22 April 1931, 224, IMC, LCM/SOAS; Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘Education of African Women’, 7, 16–17.
33 Burstall and Whitelaw, “Education of African Women,” 9.
34 Mass Education in African Society, especially the ‘Report of a Sub-Committee on the Education and Welfare of Women and Girls in Africa’, African No. 1169, Feb. 1943.
35 Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘Education of African Women’, 21.
36 Shaw, God’s Candlelights, 140.
37 Shaw, “A School Village,” 527.
38 Sabin to mother, 21 Jan. 1933, Sabin Collection, SOAS.
39 Sabin to mother and sisters, 16 Aug. 1936, ibid.
40 Sabin to mother and sisters, 12 Sept 1936, ibid.
41 Sabin to mother and sisters, 10 Oct 1936, ibid.
42 Shaw, ‘A School Village’, 535.
43 Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 569.
44 Jeanes School Kenya Annual Report, 1936, 18–19, box 277, 03/14/04, CBMS, SOAS.
45 Jones, ‘Community Work’, 81; Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 567–68; Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘Education of African Women’, 7, 12; Mumford and Parker, ‘Education in British African Dependencies’, 27–28. On the medicalisation of maternal health as the key to maintaining the social body, see, for example, Tuck, ‘Venereal Disease’; Thomas, Politics of the Womb, chs 1, 2.
46 Sabin to mother and sisters, 9 Aug., 18 Oct. 1936, Sabin Collection, SOAS.
47 Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 571; Jeanes School Annual Reports, 1936, 8; ibid., 1938, 9, box 277, 03/14/04, CBMS, SOAS.
48 Rudd, ‘Community Work’, 97.
49 Ibid., 92.
50 Mhombochota, ‘Type of Work Done’, 100.
51 Comments on the Memorandum on the Education of Women & Girls, 9 Feb. 1940, 208/93, IMC, LCM.SOAS.
52 Fegan, ‘The Education of Women in West Africa’, 1929, condensed report submitted to Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, IMC 224/294.
53 Grier, ‘Child Labor and Africanist Scholarship’, 8.
54 Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 570–71.
55 Shaw, God’s Candlelights, 50. A nsaka was described as ‘a round thatch supported on poles—a shelter that is found in all the villages in this country; it serves as village hall, court of justice and the general meeting-place of the people’.
56 Shaw, Children of the Chief, chs 2, 6.
57 Shaw, God’s Candlelights, 53–54.
58 Hughes, ‘“A Treasure of Darkness”: The African Woman in British Missionary Propaganda, c. 1915–1940’, 14, in Hughes, ‘Africans in the British Missionary Imagination’.
59 Shaw, God’s Candlelights, 55–56.
60 On the clitoridectomy controversy in Kenya’s evangelical missions, see Pedersen, ‘National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts’; Kanogo, African Womanhood, ch. 3; Murray and Strayer, ‘The CMS and Female Circumcision’. On the Anglo-Catholic ‘adaptation’ of age ceremonies in Tanganyika, see Lucas, ‘Educational Value of Initiatory Rites’,; Ranger, ‘Missionary Adaptation of African Religious Institutions’.
61 Wynn-Jones, CMS Kingwa, ‘An experimental initiation camp held at Ugogo, 1930’, Extract from Africa Group Document, Oct. 1932, IMC/CBMS 201, SOAS.
62 ‘Achimota’, 89.
63 Welch, ‘Can Christian Marriage in Africa be African?’, 31; see also Raum, ‘Christianity and African Puberty Rites’.
64 Leakey, qtd in E. Hutchinson letter to A. Neilans, 4 Jan. 1934, 3AMS D/01/F1, Association for Moral and Social Hygiene Archives (AMSH), The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University.
65 Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘Education of African Women’, 10. The report made specific reference to Hoernle, ‘Outline of the Native Conception of Education’.
66 Shaw, God’s Candlelights, 56; Shaw, ‘A School Village’, 530–33.
67 Extract from East Africa, 14 Nov. 1935, in ‘Correspondence relating to the Welfare of Women in Tropical Africa, 1935–7’, 6, CO 879/139, TNA.
68 Sabin to mother, 13 Feb. 1937, Sabin Collection, SOAS.
69 Sabin to mother and sisters, 18 Nov. 1936, ibid.
70 Sabin to mother, 19 Aug. 1927, 380320/01/01, ibid.
71 Shaw, A Treasure of Darkness, 53-54.
72 Morrow, ‘“No Girl Leaves the School Unmarried”’,631–34.
73 Sabin to sisters, 11 July 1940, Sabin Collection, SOAS.
74 ‘Achimota’, 89–90. Although acknowledging the privileged status of womanhood in some African social and political contexts, this early advocate for the coeducational scheme of Achimota believed that it would counter the more typical lack of ‘comradeship’ that characterized ‘the relationship between the sexes, either before or after marriage’. Separate and segregated schools only replicated that standard, whereas Achimota would show that ‘the most important contribution that educational work can give to Africa is a reasonable solution of the sex problem—that and child welfare’.
75 Nene Mate Kole address, Founders’ Day tributes to Fraser marking his death, 3 March 1962, Box 311, 03/27/03, CBMS, SOAS. Kole was the konor of Manya Krobo.
76 The Achimotan, 1948–58, Box 311, 03/27/03, CBMS, SOAS.
77 Report on Achimota College for the Year 1930, 32, Box 311, 03/27/03,CBMS, SOAS.
78 Maxwell, ‘Missionary Science and Christian Literacy’; Sithole, ‘Beyond African Nationalism’; Peterson, ‘Paperwork and the Millennium’; Wild-Wood, ‘Bible Translation’; Peel, Religious Encounter.
79 See, for example, Mani, Contentious Traditions; Midgley, Women Against Slavery.
80 Dougall, ‘School Education and Native Life’, 54.
81 Smith, Aggrey of Africa; Gollock, Sons of Africa, 122–49. On Aggrey’s trans-Atlantic identity formation, see Jacobs, ‘James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey’.
82 Williams, Achimota, 120; Report on Achimota College for the Year 1930, 8.
83 Gold Coast Committee Report, 9.
84 Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 572.
85 Gollock, Sons of Africa, 140, 237.
86 Conference on West Africa and Mission Education, 23 Dec. 1934, 263 IMC; CO and IMC correspondence on drafting CO Memorandum on Women’s Education and Co-Education, 1939–40, 220, IMC, LCM/SOAS; Devolution of Nigerian schools on Achimota model, CBMS minutes, 24 July 1942, CBMS, SOAS. On the racialisation of colonial society in the interwar Gold Coast, see Bush, Imperialism, Race, and Resistance, ch. 3; and Ray, Crossing the Color Line, chs 4, 7.
87 Ofori Atta, ‘Akyem Abuakwa and Education’; Coe, ‘Educating an African Leadership’, 23–44.
88 Burstall and Whitelaw, ‘Education of African Women’, 8–9.
89 Jones, ‘Training Native Women’, 569.
90 Shaw, ‘A School Village’, 531.