Paper long abstract:

As the dominant providers of elementary schooling in many parts of the colonial Gold Coast, missionary societies typically offered education which promoted individual self-realisation within a Christian peasant community. Government typically endorsed missionary ideas about the role of schooling in uplifting and improving local languages and cultures. However, in late 1940s, British tutors from the new University College's Department of Extra-Mural Studies began to provide elementary school-leavers with free courses based around the discussion of the history, politics, constitution and economy of their country. These courses have since been criticised in the educational studies literature for failing to meet the employment aspirations of individual students, and for imposing on Africans an educational model that was derived from the provision of adult education in working-class areas of Britain. This paper, by contrast, will highlight the unique contribution of extra-mural classes to nationalist politics, and to the writing of a new nationalist history.