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- Convenors:
-
Pierre Guidi
(IRD, université Paris Cité)
Jean-Luc Martineau (INALCO (CESSMA))
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Short Abstract:
The panel will focus on the political and social dynamics of schooling from colonization to the first decade of independence. The communications will aim to understand how educational policies and practices are bounded with the building of colonial and independent states and societies.
Long Abstract:
The panel School Education and the Shaping of Colonial and Independent States and Societies (19th century-1970') will focus on the history of educational institutions, their actors, their curricula, and on the social dynamics of schooling from colonization to the first decade of independence. Drawing on situated approaches, the communications will aim to understand the ways in which educational policies and practices are closely bounded with the building of colonial and independent states and societies.
Questions related to education were instrumental to the construction of colonial empires. At the interface of colonial powers and colonized populations, schools are relevant places to understand the colonial "encounter", its violence, conflicts, contradictions, negotiations, and processes of domestication. Moreover, school education was central in the shaping of anti-colonial movements. Despite their imperial objectives, educational institutions were focal point for claims to equality, and they trained the future nationalist elites, leaders of political parties and trade-unions. Finally, after the independences, education was considered as one of the main instruments of new state-buildings.
Our aim is, therefore, double. First, in analyzing educational policies, we want to read anew the objectives of colonial and post-colonial states, their internal contradictions, their the permanences and inflexions. Second, the social history of education will enable to understand the experiences of populations confronted to the political, economical, and cultural transformations engendered by colonization and post-independence state-building. This will, in turn, help to understand how Africans contributed to shape their own societies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Herrade Boistelle (Université de Lausanne)
Paper short abstract:
In 1924, the Protectorate Government decided to create an educational department. This act underlined the birth of a new state apparatus. We would show how it emerged and its implication in the colonial state building.
Paper long abstract:
Buganda was the place where the British protectorate decided to establish his power, the core whose spreaded the western and ganda influences in the whole country. Missionnaries installed their Missions in the colonial Buganda to develop education and spreaded their faith as many people in as possible. In the beginning of XX century, the Protectorate set up his power in building a new shape of state founded of that Burke called an « indirect style of indirect rules ». He would say that when the British legislated on the colonial state making with the Uganda ordinance in 1900, they superimposed the Baganda's chieftainship and its cultural model over Buganda neighbours. As in many African country, the main purpose of school of chiefs 'sons was to shape a new form of elite who embedded the colonial knowledge. This politics was handed by missionaries. But, in 1924 as result of the Phelps Strokes report, the colonial Government took over the educational policy. We would enlighten (1) how this government appropriation shape a new state apparatus which play an important role in the State building in the 1930s and (2) how this formation confirm a twofold domination in the hand of British settlers and Baganda elite. This paper rely upon an empirical archives work and based on Foucault and Weber theorical framework.
Carol Summers (University of Richmond)
Paper short abstract:
With writings from Uganda's most globally educated colonial-era men, such as A.Nyabongo, E. Kalibala, Joseph Kiwanuka and E.M.K. Mulira, this paper explores their challenges to conventional ideas of useful education. How, I ask, did global connections allow these men to reimagine Uganda's schools?
Paper long abstract:
From at least the early 20th century onwards, a few bright and well-connected Ugandans went to school outside Uganda, earning not simply secondary certificates or professional training in medicine, but advanced degrees. These individuals then returned to Uganda as social and political entrepreneurs and leaders. The correspondence and publications these men produced sharply critiqued conventional ideas about education in colonial Africa. These graduates denounced the Phelps-Stokes vision of adapted education. They rejected British Colonial Office ideals of culturally and communally unifying education. And they opposed missionary monopolies on schools and faith institutions. Instead, both as individuals and within diasporic networks of African, African American and Caribbean intellectuals, they criticized, sought recognition for their qualifications and skills, imagined and founded new schools, and argued that their educations, in immersing them in the Western cultures of Britain and the United States, were useful in a way that no shorter or cheaper program of learning could have been.
The experiences of men such as Akiki Nyabongo, Ernest Kalibala, Joseph Kiwanuka, E.M.K. Mulira and others were varied, but examining them within the context of royalist Ugandan politics, African American and diasporic networks, Catholic ideals, and Fabian Socialism begins to illuminate just how complex and multifaceted Ugandans' expectations and hopes for their own educational systems were.
This paper draws on work with a range of personal papers, archival collections and publications to examine how these leaders defined, pursued, and sought respect for their visions of "useful" education.
Luciana Laura Contarino Sparta (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Paper short abstract:
Unlike in other Portuguese colonies, European education spread in Cape Verde islands. Literate people gave birth to intellectual movements that fought against colonial oppression, but also distinguished themselves from other Africans and built Cape-Verdean identity stressing on European roots.
Paper long abstract:
It would be true to assert that, inside Portuguese empire, Cape-Verdean people benefited from a much more developed and extended educational system in comparison to other colonies. Anyway, it is also true that people who were granted an early access to schools since 19th century had to pay a price for it: they were compelled to delete a shared past with other Africans, related to slavery and oppression, no matter if they belonged to a creole population that descended from European settlers and enslaved continental African women. The first generation of mestizos could achieve father's recognition by means of correcting maternally inherited "blood defects", what included the commitment of chasing fugitive slaves.
Literate people covered the lowest administrative positions in Cape Verde colonial government. They also gave birth to local intellectual groups, the Nativistas, who emerged during the last half of 19th century, and the Claridosos, in the inter-war period. Both of them claimed against hunger and lack of opportunities that most of the population suffered in a territory signed by cyclic droughts and absence of official initiatives. At the same time, they worked in the construction of Cape-Verdean nationalism searching a specificity that could distinguish themselves from other Africans and from Europeans at the same time. Our purpose is to analyse these processes of identity building that always fluctuated between two extremes and implied a tension that never could be overcome. Even facing independence as colonized subjects, to define themselves as Europeans appeared clearly as a valid option.
Lorraine Towers (University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
Formal schooling in Ethiopia has been central to the formation of state power through its cultivation of particular traditions in a diverse polity to the exclusion of others. These process will be explored through the oral histories of school experience of the marginalised from 1950s - 2000s.
Paper long abstract:
Schooling has an intimate relationship with colonialism, including in the country so often typified as having never been colonised - Ethiopia. The strategic deployment of formal schooling has been not only an exercise of state but critical to the historical generation and maintenance of varying forms of state power; imperial, socialist, and ostensibly democratic. This deployment has been predicated on the potential of schooling as the quintessential institution of modernity to both articulate and police forms of subject being and practice that derive from, and enhance, centralized power. However, this is not a simple historical account of a 'developing' country submitting or resisting 'western' European hegemony. Rather, it considers how schooling in Ethiopia has historically reified ways of being in a diverse polity that draw on particular traditions of the Ethiopian highlands as modern, urban, civilized and educated, excluding others as backward, rural, uncivilized and impervious to modern transformation.
Drawing on oral histories of school experience of those considered antithetical to the materiality and promise of the modern, the Oromo peoples, it considers the changing nature of schooling policy and practice and the mediation of people, place and power from the 1950s to the 2000s. The contradictions of this schooling is manifest in the historical development of Oromo identities of resistance and ongoing contestation that seeks to claim power through the reconfiguration of the symbolic landscapes and embodied practices of modern schooling, affording both a closer proximity to the modern state and the capacities to make it their own.