We Come as Members of the Superior Race: Distortions and Education Policy Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa 9781789209143

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction “Dirty Gossip,” Transnational Policy Borrowing and Lending, and Education
Part I. Western Distortions and Stereotypes about Sub-Saharan Africa
Chapter 1. Theorization and “Africa” in European-American Imaginations
Chapter 2. “Dirty Gossip” and a Different “Africa” in the Global Geopolitical Order
Chapter 3. Architects of European “Dirty Gossip” about Africa
Part II. Effects of Distortions on Education and Development Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa
Chapter 4. Education and Social Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa
Chapter 5. US Philanthropy and Industrial Education for Black Africans
Chapter 6. Philanthropy, Education, and Race Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa
Chapter 7. A Generation of Slackers and Lazy People Demanding Handouts?
Chapter 8. The Political Economy of Affirmative Action Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa
Chapter 9. “Dirty Gossip” and Education Policy Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

WE COME AS MEMBERS OF THE SUPERIOR RACE

We Come as Members of the Superior Race Distortions and Education Policy Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa

¨´ Obed Mfum-Mensah

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Obed Mfum-Mensah All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mfum-Mensah, Obed, 1965– author. Title: We come as members of the superior race : distortions and education policy discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa / Obed Mfum-Mensah. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Westerners have long represented Africans as “backwards,” “primitive,” and “unintelligent,” distortions which have opened the door for American philanthropies to push their own education agendas in Africa. We Come as Members of a Superior Race discusses the origin and history of these dangerous stereotypes and western “infantilization” of African societies, exploring how their legacy continues to inform contemporary educational and development discourses. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018896 (print) | LCCN 2020018897 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789209136 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789209143 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education—Social aspects—Africa, Sub-Saharan. | Education and state—Africa, Sub-Saharan. | Educational assistance— Africa, Sub-Saharan. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) —Africa, Sub-Saharan. Classification: LCC LC191.8.A42 M48 2021 (print) | LCC LC191.8.A42 (ebook) | DDC 306.430967—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018896 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018897

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-913-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-914-3 ebook

Contents

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Acknowledgments Introduction. “Dirty Gossip,” Transnational Policy Borrowing and Lending, and Education

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Part I. Western Distortions and Stereotypes about Sub-Saharan Africa Chapter 1. Theorization and “Africa” in European-American Imaginations

17

Chapter 2. “Dirty Gossip” and a Different “Africa” in the Global Geopolitical Order

32

Chapter 3. Architects of European “Dirty Gossip” about Africa

49

Part II. Effects of Distortions on Education and Development Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa Chapter 4. Education and Social Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa

69

Chapter 5. US Philanthropy and Industrial Education for Black Africans

86

Chapter 6. Philanthropy, Education, and Race Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa

101

Chapter 7. A Generation of Slackers and Lazy People Demanding Handouts?

120

vi

Contents

Chapter 8. The Political Economy of Affirmative Action Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa

136

Chapter 9. “Dirty Gossip” and Education Policy Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa

151

Conclusion

170

References

175

Index

195

Acknowledgements

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In writing this book I have benefited greatly from the assistance of my institution, Messiah University. The institution provided much of the needed financial support for the numerous trips I made overseas. To my academic mentors, I thank you for nudging a curious and “radical” thinking that could not be suppressed. To my longstanding professional colleagues and friends: Professor Henry Danso and Dr. Theresa Mannah-Blankson provided dimension to some of the issues in the book. It is so refreshing to have a dear sister as your schoolmate and professional colleague. Dr. Martha Donkor is such a generous person who dedicated much of her time to help shape the book. Her thoroughness and constructive criticism challenged my thinking and prompted me to move beyond my use of conventional analysis to the important issues discussed in the book. While there were some setbacks and disappointments in the last phase of the data collection in Kenya in July and August of 2019 that nearly derailed the project, I have a wonderful and understanding family that support me tremendously. To Roseline, Louisa, and Nadine, I owe you a debt of gratitude for loving me unconditionally and creating the environment for me to pursue my goal to complete this book project. February 2020

Introduction “Dirty Gossip,” Transnational Policy Borrowing and Lending, and Education

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“Dirty gossip”? Yes, this book analyzes the complicated ways Western distortions and stereotypes about Africa shaped education policy and practice in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). I use the terms “West” and “Western” deliberately in the book to represent European and American forces and entities that have engaged in all sorts of activities on the African continent. While Liveson Tatira refers to Western distortions and stereotypes about Africa as “Old World Novels,” I prefer to use the term “dirty gossip,” which the Ugandan philosopher Okot p’Bitek refers to as “the Western distortions and stereotypes about Africa” (p’Bitek 2011: 11; Tatira 2015). As a sociological construct, “dirty gossip” outlines the hegemonic processes used by the West to exclude Africans from colonial and postcolonial discourse (p’Bitek 2011: 11). The hegemonic processes expose the subtleties of race relations between Europeans and Americans (West) and Africans (and other indigenous populations), which aimed to promote white racial superiority. As a framework on race relations, “dirty gossip” reveals the complicated strategies and processes used by Europeans to misrepresent African societies to institutionalize racism, white superiority, and Western exploitation of African people and people of African descent. A major objective of Western dirty gossip was to “infantilize” Africans and position Europeans (and Western societies) in trusteeship positions to justify forced conversion and proselytization, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation, and to extract material benefit from Africa’s resources. Underneath European misrepresentations about Africa is the goal to invalidate the role played by African societies in the global geopolitical processes, development discourse, and knowledge production. Through dirty gossip, Europeans delegitimized Africa’s knowledge and epistemologies and African societies. P’Bitek notes

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that two tasks confront African scholars as they try to write about the dirty gossip perpetrated by Europeans about Africans: First, to expose and destroy all false ideas about African peoples and culture that have been perpetuated by Western scholarship. Vague terms such as Tribe, Folk, Non-literate or even innocent-looking ones such as Developing, etc. must be subjected to critical analysis and thrown out or redefined to suit African interests. Second, the African scholar must endeavor to present the institutions of African people as they really are. Western scholars had to justify the colonial system, hence the need for the myth of the “primitive.” The African scholar has nothing of the sort to justify. But he [or she] must guard against overreacting in the face of the arrogance and insults of Western scholarship. (p’Bitek 2011: 3–4)

The advice here calls for scholarship that seeks to interrogate dirty gossip about African societies to be objective in outlining issues as they are and let readers draw conclusions. Narratives about “Africa” should move beyond the single storyline that portrays the continent as a vast savannah of predominantly wild animals that compete with humans for survival. Africa transcends the images that international nongovernmental organizations portray about the poverty-stricken, sickly, and hungry humans dying of famine and starvation. The region is more than the tales about people dying of HIV/AIDS and Ebola, and where malaria kills a third of white expatriates that go there to “help.” Not every country in the region is embroiled in “tribal” wars. Africa is not just a crisis zone of inadequate social services, economic mismanagement, corrupt politicians, and deplorable education systems. This book therefore takes a critical approach to discuss how Western distortions and stereotypes about Africa shaped Western interventions in education policy discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. Postcolonial and globalization literature outlines how European Christians, colonizers, and imperialists dictated the direction and pace of ideological borrowing and lending (the rationing and dissemination of ideas about knowledge, cultural norms, values, traditions, skills, and attitudes) as they encountered non-Western and non-Christian societies. Globalization literature (see, for instance, the works by Kendall 2007; Quist 2003; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000) outlines the ideas of transnational policy borrowing and lending, and transnational networks in sub-Saharan Africa since colonization. These works have done a great job of discussing the complexities of transnational resource flows to SSA. This book contributes to the discourse by analyzing how the “dirty gossip” of Western bards about Africa and African

Introduction

3

societies influenced external transfer and flow of educational ideas and practices to SSA in the past and their impact on contemporary education policies and practices in the region. The issue of how Western dirty gossip about Africa shaped transnational policy borrowing and lending over the past six centuries is too vast a subject to provide exhaustive analysis in these few pages. I should also point out that the materials now available are an insufficient basis for answering with confidence all the questions that have arisen. I define the construct “education” as the ideological and cultural transformation processes and the politics of human capital development for the global economic and productive processes. It is also “the transmission of broad and specific knowledge that includes but also moves beyond that imparted by national school systems” (Stromquist 2003: 176). I use human capital in this book to represent the differences in skills and knowledge that help explain why some people and groups are more economically productive in both local and global geopolitical order. While I refer to the African continent broadly, my focus is the sub-Saharan African region or African societies south of the Sahara. I use the concept “contemporary times” operationally in the book to refer to the period from the 1980s to present when transnational advocacy groups and global governing bodies systematically repositioned and inserted themselves into the social policy discourse in SSA and, in the process, introduced austere economic measures of structural adjustment programs (SAP) to address the economic challenges faced by sub-Saharan African societies.

Africa’s Complicated Relationship with Western Forces The complicated relationship between African societies and Western forces began with the arrival of the Portuguese trade adventurers to the West African coast. The Portuguese came to West Africa with the blessings of the church hierarchy—the Pope. The success of the expedition and overseas exploits had an effect on the Portuguese economy and ultimately increased the remittances to the Catholic Church through tithe payments (Newitt 1973). During their early explorations in West Africa, Antão Gonçalves is reported to have brought back to Portugal the first prisoners from the Sahara and the following year returned with slaves and a little gold dust to prove that the voyages to Africa were not a waste of money (Newitt 1973: 6). The Portuguese exploitative model set the standard for Europeans’ interaction and exploitation of indigenous societies globally. They came in the garb of

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Christianity, and the Pope’s Order and the Papal Bull of 1496 justified and emboldened the Portuguese to claim various regions on the African continent in the name of God, the Pope, and the King. The year was 1471, and the Portuguese had just arrived on the shores of Edina, a small fishing village in modern-day Ghana in the West Coast of Africa, which the Portuguese would later rename El Mina because of the abundance of gold. Historian Edward Asafu-Adjaye explains in detail how these Europeans made inroads and forged trade partnerships with the Edina people using the barter system. The Portuguese merchants would leave fanciful objects on the Edina beach and retire to their boats. Interested locals would then place quantities of gold dust beside these fancy goods and retreat. The European merchants would then return and remove the gold dust if they found the amount acceptable as fair exchange for their goods. Once the merchants had left, the African traders would go back to the scene and remove the goods left in exchange for their gold (Asafu-Adjaye 1958). Reading this history, one can sense the trust that fomented and cemented the initial trading relationship between these Europeans and indigenous West Africans. However, the trust was short-lived as the Europeans came to realize over time that they could barter African humans together with the African goods for almost the same price. The year 1482 was a watershed period for the Europeans and Africans as it marked the beginning of the great experimentation that led to imperialistic Western exploitation, enslavement, and colonization of Africans as well as racism against the indigenous population. The formal meeting between the Portuguese and the Edina locals in 1482 was different from their earlier encounters because this time the Iberian trade adventurers had come to stay to establish something far bigger and sinister than one could have imagined. Leading the Iberian traders was Don Diego de Azambuja who came with an entourage of six hundred soldiers and a hundred masons and carpenters in nine caravels and two big ships. They filled their ships with the necessary stones and other materials to construct a fortress (Asafo-Adjaye 1958). Their request was for land along the Edina coastline to build a fortress where they could consolidate their trading relationship with Africa. They convinced the local people of the potential mutual benefits from the trading relationship and the chiefs and local people of Edinaman leased to the Portuguese a strip of land where the sea forms a small inland lagoon. Captain Don Diego de Azambuja and his people started constructing the Sao Jorge de Mina in 1482 as the first trading post that Portuguese built on the Gulf of Guinea and the oldest European

Introduction

5

building in existence south of the Sahara. The Edina people leased the land innocently to the Iberian marauders, but it was a harbinger of “the very bad and ugly” things that later unfolded in almost all African territories south of the Sahara. This trading post soon became an infamous barracoon for trading in human beings. The architectural structure of Jorge de Mina in Edina Ghana (Elmina Castle) and later castles and forts built by Europeans in Ghana, Senegal, and other coastlands of West, Central, South, and East Africa make the compelling argument that these Europeans had the motive to trade in humans from the beginning. Written texts alone about the slave trade do not provide the full picture of the inhumane treatment endured by African slaves at the hands of European slave traders and the American slave masters. The slave traders employed “divide and conquer” strategies and incentivized the African captors, which motivated many of the coastal traders to work alongside the Europeans and other Africans in the interior to capture innocent Africans and drag them thousands of miles and for weeks to slave markets. At these slave markets, the African captives were auctioned for their final transfer to the European castles along the coast where they awaited shipment to the Americas. This past year (2019) marks four hundred years since the first African slave stepped onto the shores of the Americas. Tracing the slaves’ steps on the journey of no return at Elmina and Cape Coast Castles in Ghana and the Goree Island off the coast of Dakar Senegal and other places provides a glimpse of the brutality and barbarity of the European Transatlantic slavery in the name of wealth. Once the captured African slaves arrived at the castles, their European captors tortured over two hundred slaves at a time and confined them to crammed underground dungeons where they awaited shipment like cargo. The waiting period for shipment was also traumatizing as their European captors and traders objectified them and subjected them to inhuman treatment. The slaves lived, ate, and slept in their filth and excreta in the dungeons. Some of the European slave traders raped and sexually abused the captured women at will. They threw those women who refused to be used as sex objects into to a small cell for a period of confinement to teach them a lesson about who was in control. In his documentary The Bible and the Gun, Basil Davidson explains that slaves were locked in “infamous barracoons where, well-guarded by their captors, they had lingered for weeks, even months, anchored for just long enough to buy them from their captors.” Once they were aboard the ship bound for the Americas, their misery became worse.

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We Come as Members of the Superior Race

European Distortions to Justify Colonialism and Imperialism Europeans employed symbolic violence to construct the African “other” as less of a human to justify the institution of slavery. They also used distortions to label African societies to justify their subsequent colonization, imperialism, and exploitation of Africans in the global geopolitical processes. In many novels, the representation of Africa and African cultures invoked the clichés of the “Dark Continent,” the site of dangerous disorder and savage violence, and the emblematic “Garden of Eden” under threat set to be saved by the “white man.” Europeans portrayed Africans as “black devils” and “noble savages” (Göttsche 2013). Europeans (later followed by Americans) stripped away Africa’s human and natural resources. They also stripped away Africa’s dignity and caricatured Africa’s image to dislocate the identities of Africans in the global community. European explorers, wanting to gain “knowledge” about the “Dark Continent” and its mysteries, tore the continent inside out and upside down as they explored Africa’s geographical landscapes. Explorers used imaginative geographies to present Africa south of the Sahara as an object of “circus and spectacle” that merited decoding its enigmatic elements and geographical mysteries. Similarly, European scholars and researchers turned Africa into a laboratory where they pursued anthropological, sociological, psychological, and scientific research to present Africa as a mysterious concept and space.

The “Lazy Africans” in White European Imaginations Europeans viewed it as their right to serve as trustees of African societies. This trusteeship ideology led to Europe partitioning and eventually colonizing Africans societies. The trusteeship roles also meant the Europeans had the right to exploit African labor. African resistance to such exploitation sometimes resulted in harsh punishments in some colonial territories. In spite of the harsh punishments meted out to Africans, some refused to work for the Europeans cheaply. In many of the cases, African antipathy to laboring for Europeans was a form of resistance to white European male exploitation of Africans. However, the Europeans explained such resistance in stereotypical terms. The European colonists created a narrative that portrayed black Africans as “lazy, docile, childlike, . . . irresponsible,” and exhibited docile attitudes toward work and labor (Degler 1976; Shadle 2012; Whitehead 1999). European settlers and farmers who most needed African labor

Introduction

7

berated natives as idle and lazy when those Africans demonstrated an unwillingness to work on settler farms and preferred instead to work on their own farms in less alienated forms of labor. The Europeans expressed negative stereotypes about the African’s antipathy and limited capacity for work and labor. The European colonialists’ value judgment about work also made European settlers in some African countries infantilize their African workers and gave them lashes (Shadle 2012). Such views and value judgment about the black African’s attitude to work and labor became part of colonial narratives of white European colonialists. This narrative ignores white European males’ exploitation of black Africans through forced labor in colonial encounters.

Education and Development of the African “Other” The European Christian missionary project in Africa was part of the Christian religious ideology to take the gospel to the “uttermost part of the earth.” European Christian missionaries justified their benign and forced proselytizing and conversion missions as coming from a higher authority—God and His word. Okot p’Bitek (2011) points out that new spiritual forces drove the Western man toward a new destiny. The Christian faith provided that spiritual force, which saw humanity as born under a curse, enslaved by the dark powers of cosmic evil, and sinking even deeper under the burden of its own guilt. While such scriptural verses of the Bible provided the basis for the European Christians to take the gospel commission to the heathen lands, Acts 1:8 and 13:47 provided the impetus to justify their divine right to carry the gospel to the “heathens.” Acts 13:47 in particular states that “For so has the Lord commanded us, saying, ‘I have set you as a light for the Gentiles, that you should bring salvation to the uttermost parts of the earth.’” The European Christian missionaries saw conversion, cultural imposition, civilization, development, and transformation of the “heathen” African societies as all encompassing. Their divine right to seek converts among the heathen became a watershed moment that shaped the destiny of all non-Western societies. The strategy of white European Christians was to use all tools possible to convert the heathen Africans. This is not a surprise because after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christians forcibly spread the gospel, punishing “heretics” with torture and death, and using religion to accumulate vast amounts of power and wealth. When the European Christians realized that the gospel message alone could not provide total transformation, they embarked on an

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We Come as Members of the Superior Race

even more ideological strategy—implementation of Western forms of education to strategically reconfigure African societies’ social and cultural arrangements. Trapped in their aggressive ambitions to transform non-Christian lands and societies into Christian societies, European Christian institutions portrayed African practices as primitive and their religions as paganistic and barbaric. They presented Western forms of education as the only way to develop and transform Africans and wean African societies of paganism. In order for Africans to embrace Christianity, Europe “must drain African religions of their powers” (Davidson 1984). The European Christians initially saw proselytization through schools as an effective way to break the new (progressive generation of Africans) from the old (backward and primitive generation). European Christian denominations and institutions scouted African societies, established mission schools, and used mission education to enforce European Christian religion on African societies as part of their “divine” project. During formal colonization, colonial administrators also saw the potential of Western education to transform the “lazy” African and develop the human capital needed to shore up the colonial productive process. The European colonizers used colonial schools to further distort Africa’s narratives to young generations of Africans to a position of identity flux where they dislocated their identities and embraced European cultural values and social arrangements as the epitome of progress.

Philanthropic Foundations and the Contours of Education in Africa Philanthropic initiative has been a formidable strategy used by Western societies to shape the educational discourse in SSA. Philanthropy is a symbiotic process that draws its roots in religion, humanism, and enlightenment (Cunningham 2016; Phillips and Jung 2016; Union Bank of Switzerland 2014). In the early twentieth century, calls were made to use philanthropy to complement governments’ efforts to promote social services including education and human capital development to strengthen the roles citizens should play in a liberal democracy (Salamon 1992: 10; Barman 2017; Borgmann 2004; Cunningham 2016; Kunzman 2012). The civic sensibilities of philanthropy took on a new form in the United States during the early days of the US industrial revolution as civic-minded individuals employed charitable initiatives to promote mass education in a context of burgeoning social transformation. Philanthropy became a way to transform society itself, since

Introduction

9

longstanding sustaining philanthropic initiative was seen as an investment in human capital. As businesses boomed, the wealthy saw the need to use their wealth to support social services (Hall 1994). With time, philanthropy took on a new meaning as capitalist control of those who needed it and a way to promote capitalist ideologies. Philanthropic entities used market mechanisms to analyze and guide their decisions of giving, even if the giving was for a common good. They assessed the rate of return on investment, enforced competition, and used the framework of close supervision and standardized output as indicators of success (Edwards 2015). Sometimes the philanthropic organization’s goal is to perpetuate an entrenched system and keep practices in place. Their support for specific social programs are based on their own agenda, which force them to play contradictory roles of advocacy and civic engagement in a context where they sometimes also push or promote the dominant ideologies that advocate some political agenda and power asymmetry in the society. Edward Berman points out that “the decisions to initiate work in specific geo-political regions, to consider funding various categories of activities, and to fund or reject specific requests are made based on some criteria, some of which are public, some of which perforce, remain unknown” (Berman 1978: 72). In the early decades of the twentieth century, US foundations saw their philanthropic initiative as an effective strategy to insert the United States into global political, economic, and sociocultural discourse. Motivated by the political, economic, and social currents of the times, US philanthropic foundations became convinced that they should play important roles to shape the political, economic, and social reforms in colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa. These philanthropic foundations became involved in colonial African education for three reasons: to limit the activities of African-American Christian missionaries in Africa; to deter communist tendencies in African societies; and to ensure the United States’ presence in Africa to promote their own vision of investment in human capital and ensure the survival of business enterprise. US philanthropic entities worked with colonial governments to shape the educational discourse in SSA and determine the kind of education to provide to black Africans to keep them in subordinated positions (similar to the plight of blacks in the Southern United States). The educational initiatives of these non-state actors from the 1920s into the 1970s and beyond connected education and the US foreign policy agenda in complicated ways. The US philanthropic entities became convinced that they could use education to connect Africans on both sides of the Atlantic to place them in sub-

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ordinated positions in the global knowledge, cultural, economic, and political processes (Berman 1978; Yamada 2008). The idea of improving human capital became a major Western policy and economic agenda item for African societies from the 1960s into the last decade of the twentieth century. In the1990s, global governing bodies including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a host of development entities pushed for aggressive development of human capital in Africa through policies of “Education for All” (EFA), which promoted educational access, quality, gender parity in education, and many other initiatives. Arguably, the distortions about Africa influenced the educational initiatives of these global development entities. How do contemporary development entities (and Africans) conceptualize the capabilities and agency of African societies and provide them the needed support and space for Africans to chart their own path in the development of human capital? This is an issue that African policy makers, African scholars, and the global development entities may need to critically interrogate in the twenty-first century.

Organization of the Book This book employs “symbolic violence” and “postcolonial theory” to examine how European distortions about African societies influenced education discourse in SSA from the early decades of the twentieth century within the contexts of proselytizing, cultural transformation, and development of human capital for the colonial and global productive and economic processes. The book makes several arguments. First, the European and US bards’ distortions and stereotypes about sub-Saharan Africa created an education policymaking relationship that positioned Africans in subordinated status in the global geopolitical order. Second, the distortions and stereotypes served as the framework, lens, and basis for US philanthropies to push “adapted education” on Africans and use education to promote race relations that placed African societies in a subordinated position in a white racial supremacy. Third, the European portrayal of African “backwardness” influenced European colonial administration and US philanthropists to employ education as a tool to stratify colonial territories in Africa where Europeans were at the top, other intermediary groups were at the middle, and Africans were at the bottom of the knowledge and social hierarchy. The Europeans and global forces’ use of education to reconfigure African societies along the lines of European hierar-

Introduction

11

chical order had lasting implications, creating social, political, and economic marginalization of many groups in African societies. It also necessitated that independent African governments implement affirmative action initiatives to address inequities and inequalities created through the education systems. Finally, the “dirty gossip” about Africa has occasioned the contemporary global partners’ paternalistic attitudes toward Africans regarding conversations on transnational policy borrowing and lending and education policy initiatives. International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs), Western education policy experts, and researchers see Africa’s development and progress as “backward” and below expectation. They use research to highlight a “crisis” in education to perpetuate the distortions about African societies and assume trusteeship of education policymaking and practice in sub-Saharan Africa. I organize the book around two parts and ten chapters. Part I encompasses the first three chapters and discusses the ways Europeans employed distortions and stereotypes to construct the ordering of Africa and symbolically violate Africa’s identities to help marginalize and position people of African descent in subordinated status in the global order. Chapter 1 discusses the theoretical frameworks of symbolic violence and postcolonial theory as inquiry approaches for understanding how colonialism and imperialism as political and economic processes determined the human capital development of colonial subalterns. The chapter delineates how symbolic violence as an inquiry approach helps analyze the various ways and the tools used by European and US colonial and imperial forces to relegate African societies to subordinated status to dominate and colonize, and provide education that relegated African people and people of African descent to subordinated statuses in global cultural, economic, and political order. The chapter also explains how a postcolonial framework helps de-center colonial and imperial discourses, which distort and misrepresent the crucial role played by African societies in global development narratives. Chapter 2 traces the root of Western distortions about Africa from Africa’s initial encounters with Europeans in the fifteenth century. The chapter analyzes the dimensions of European-American strategy to stratify African societies in the global economic and political discourse and portray Africa in a dependent position in the global discourse with the goal of justifying colonialism, imperialism, and the subordinated treatment of black Africans and people of African descent in the global governance processes. Chapter 3 highlights how the activities of the early European traders, nineteenth-century explorers, Christian missionaries, colonial officers, European scholars, geographers and scien-

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tists and US philanthropies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries misrepresented African societies. Part II encompasses chapters 4 through 9 and discusses the effects of those narratives, distortions, misrepresentations, and stereotypes on education policy discourse including education policymaking and education research in SSA. Chapter 4 delineates the systematic ways European powers utilized Western education to stratify sub-Saharan African societies and define the opportunity structures and access to the colonial labor and productive processes. The chapter argues that underneath this stratification was the ideology of distortion and misrepresentation that viewed Africans as backward, primitive, unintelligent, and culturally inferior. The intricate role played by US philanthropic entities and the British government to transplant the US industrial education model in sub-Saharan Africa is the focus of the fifth chapter. The chapter outlines the objective behind the adapted education policy as development of human capital of blacks in Africa and its grand scheme of education transplanting to subordinate black Africans in colonial territories in Africa. Chapter 6 outlines the paradox of US philanthropic entities’ work to use education policy and practice that drew from deficit ideologies to promote race relations. The chapter outlines how deficit ideologies of European and US forces provided a justification for their use of agricultural and industrial education to ratify black Africans’ inferior position in colonial society. Chapter 7 highlights the paradox of “Education for All” by outlining the higher levels of educational enrollment rates and the growing unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses how the global campaigns to promote the development of human capital since the 1960s hinged on the rationale to promote national economic development, and how over the years the increases in educational access have not translated into increases in employment rates in sub-Saharan Africa. It outlines how education policies and practices have historically led to some groups’ participation in the economic and productive processes creating opportunities for their social mobility while marginalizing other groups. In Chapter 8, I outline the evolution of affirmative action strategies in SSA from the 1960s and the rationale for affirmative action strategies used by sub-Saharan African governments to offset the cumulative effects of inequalities created during colonization, and the potential challenges faced by governments implementing affirmative action initiatives. The ninth chapter delineates the role of contemporary Western education scholars in formulating education policies. The chapter delineates how education research and reports highlighting the crisis

Introduction

13

of education in SSA feed into the existing colonial “dirty gossip” to justify the direction of transnational borrowing and lending of ideas and knowledge from the West to SSA, project Western development entities as the “saviors” of African education crisis, while using education research to perpetuate the exploitation of African societies. The conclusion ties the themes together and provides reflections for African policy makers, education scholars, and development entities with the objective to forge new partnerships of hope that promote empowered engagement of all partners in the development processes.

PA RT I

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CHAPTER 1

Theorization and “Africa” in European-American Imaginations

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Theorizations about how Europeans (and later Americans) distorted African societies help grasp the nature of race relations between whites and blacks in global hegemonic discourse. I use the terms “colonial” and “imperial” to refer to power relations and different processes through which European and American forces took control of the physical, social, cultural, political, economic, and psychological spaces of the subalterns. Contacts between sub-Saharan African societies and European-American imperialistic forces created complex power relations and hierarchies that disadvantaged Africans and people of African descent and placed them in a subordinated status in the global community. Symbolic violence as a social construct helps conceptualize the mechanisms employed by these colonial and Western imperialistic forces (Europeans and Americans) to create subalterns in colonized societies and construct Africa’s “otherness” so they can dominate and marginalize Africans in the global geopolitical process. A postcolonial framework, on the other hand, helps challenge Western epistemologies that portray non-Western societies as static and homogenous and overlook colonialism and the history of global Western domination (Go 2013a).

“Symbolic Violence” as Colonial Construction of Subalterns The symbolic violence inquiry approach is useful for analyzing social relations, economic processes, capitalism, marginalization, and hierarchies in societies (Bourdieu 2001; Clark 2004; Flam and Beauzamy 2008; Orser 2005, 2006; Richards 2013; and Wilson 1999). Feminist

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literature defines “violence” as the violation of the rights of individuals and groups and the disruption of their well-being (see Bourdieu 1991; Galtung 1969; Mfum-Mensah 2018). Johan Galtung, for instance, discusses how social structures and wider, deeper, and more abstract levels of the societal production of harm are a form of violence. He points out that the lack of resources for some group and repression, for instance, are forms of violence that could lead to death. Similarly, the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) delineates ways indirect violence such as cultural representations and stereotypes in society are blatant forms of violence. Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of symbolic violence expands the cultural forms of violence: there are dimensions of violence that connect at the structural level and can lead to physical violence. I have argued elsewhere that any deliberate strategy by state entities and apparatuses to withhold resources to certain groups to confine them to the margins of society is a high form of symbolic violence (see Mfum-Mensah 2018). In this case, school practices such as teachers’ low expectation of children from certain social groups, inequitable distribution of school resources, and unequal treatment of different genders violate the rights of such groups and have the potential to deprive them of life’s necessities, and ultimately lead to asymmetrical power relations. Symbolic violence draws from a symbolic interaction framework, which focuses on ways human beings take control of their lives as performers in a society that is a “complex of ongoing activity.” Symbolic interaction posits that human interaction involves giving social objects symbolic value. Symbols are abstract meanings attached to things, people, and behavior so that they can have different meanings for different individuals. Individuals consciously and creatively evaluate, make decisions, and act. Interaction also involves the self, engaged in communication with self by selecting, checking, suspending, regrouping, and transforming meanings in terms of the social context and the individual’s intentions and interests. Mark Juergensmeyer defines “symbolic” as “something beyond their immediate target: a grander conquest, for instance, or a struggle more awesome than meets the eye” (Juergensmeyer 2010: 41). Symbolic interaction explains that humans draw and modify meanings through an interpretive process they use by the person when dealing with the things we encounter (Adams and Sydie 2001). Symbolic violence is an analytical framework that outlines the ways societies comprise fluid ranking systems in which groups try to establish status in relation to one another by means of symbolic relations (Orser 2005, 2006; Wilson 1999). Different groups in the social system are constantly negotiating the fluid ranking. The ranking

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is symbolic and a strategy whose purpose is for one group to dominate other groups. Charles Orser (2005, 2006) draws from Bourdieu’s analysis of classic Marxian theory to outline the symbolic dimensions of the relations of power that are practiced within any socio-historical formation. He connects symbolic violence to social hierarchies, domination, access to power, and the distribution of economic opportunities. Symbolic violence also focuses on how powerful groups sustain power inequalities not just through physical violence and repression but also through social and cultural norms and practices. The symbolic violence framework helps analyze how societies employ abstract meanings to people and groups and behaviors to assign different meanings that in turn create and perpetuate inequalities (Bourdieu 2001; Clark 2004; Flam and Beauzamy 2008; Seal and Harris 2016). For example, suggesting the construct that inner cities and ghettos where black, brown, and poor people inhabit are “hot spots” for crime and street violence and dangerous, while suburban spaces are safe is an act of symbolic violence. Its intention is to portray groups that inhabit urban poor spaces as groups that should be treated unequally (Seal and Harris 2016). In an attempt to exert some control over these environments, police conduct intensive surveillance and introduce control measures to restrict young people’s movement and presence within public spaces. Similarly, Europeans’ narratives of “Africa” as a devastated place filled with diseases and African people as barbaric and primitive during their early encounters are symbolic acts that helped create the narrative that blacks are violent and unintelligent and therefore could be enslaved and brutalized when they posed any resistance. In contemporary times, these narratives are drawn from people’s skin color to label entirely diverse groups as homogeneous and categorize them as violent people society should fear. In the United States, the negative narratives about blacks have motivated white police to employ harsh tactics that brutalize especially black people the police apprehend even if they are not armed. The consistent shooting of unarmed black males by white police is born out of the way symbolic violence leads to physical violence. Pierre Bourdieu outlines symbolic violence as a “‘censored’ euphemism unrecognizable, socially recognized violence” (Bourdieu 1977: 191, cited in Orser 2005: 393). He surmises that any power is guilty of symbolic violence when it has the ability to impose meanings on things and at the same time to legitimate its power by concealing the relations that underlie it. Bourdieu sees symbolic violence as a gentle, disguised act when overt violence is either impossible or inadvisable. It is a form of domination exercised in an unrecognized manner because of its normalization within the socio-historical setting.

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Symbolic violence occurs within a hierarchy between a “dominant” normative group on one hand, and “dominated” defective “others” on the other hand. Within this conceptualization, symbolic violence acts as a mechanism for promoting power asymmetry to maintain the power of the “dominant” groups in the society. Marshall Clark outlines the different dimensions by which powerful and dominant groups employ symbolic violence to create and maintain power relations and power asymmetry in societies in reference to those they consider a “subordinated” “other” (Clark 2004). Clark points out that the dominant group constructs symbolic violence to ensure its own survival. For example, in the social relations between the imperialistic West and Africa, the West misrepresented the continent and its people to validate Western cultural, religious, social, political norms, values, and traditions. The distortions were born out of Western vulnerability in reference to indigenous African traditions and values. The vulnerability here could be linked to European white males’ search for a sense of “white” male identity and their thirst for domination of the nonwhite “other.” Clark (2004) points out that the vulnerability leads dominant groups into a world of violence where they can misrepresent and distort the narratives and the identity of a whole continent and its people. Helena Flam and Brigitte Beauzamy (2008) conceptualize symbolic violence as the pervasive violation of human rights that persists in every society that manifests in everyday encounters. The encounters lead to the daily representations of people and groups that some perceive to be the “other,” relative to those who entertain that perception and who perceive themselves to be the normative group. Flam and Beauzamy challenge Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic violence as an act that does not hurt the victim. In their study of migration in the United Kingdom, Flam and Beauzamy noted that while Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of symbolic violence represents the positive, status-upgrading naming and bonding practices, it conceals the true face of exploitation and domination (2008). They point out that Bourdieu’s conceptualization of symbolic violence means that the victims are unaware of their constructed status and do not experience any injury that links to the way the statuses are constructed. Flam and Beauzamy (2008) argue, however, that such an assumption is not always the case because any form of violence hurts the victim in whatever form or shape. They see symbolic violence as a calculated strategy to deny the presence, skills, or contributions of some groups considered subordinated groups in society and calling attention to real and symbolic status downgrading. The subsequent subsections outline the dimensions of symbolic violence.

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Dimensions of Symbolic Violence Symbolic violence helps analyze how some groups dominate the economy and relegate others to the margins. Pierre Bourdieu sees symbolic violence as the process by which economic domination comes to be masked as wealth, status, prestige, and taste and thereby legitimized. Patricia Richards (2013) notes that the transformation created by symbolic violence leads members of society to see wealth, power, poverty, and exploitation as derived rather than built on a system of domination. In this way, domination and power inequalities are disguised and legitimated by cultural values, which some view as universal even though such power inequalities are socially constructed. Those groups with economic power as well as cultural and symbolic capital exercise symbolic violence over those who do not have this power or capital, often unconsciously. Richards (2013) intimates that in epistemological terms, those with symbolic capital become the “knowers,” the subjects of the social world. By virtue of their cultural and economic power, they are able to establish a privileged version of history and the rules, regulations, and norms by which shared existence proceeds. At the same time, the dominated become complicit and participate in their own domination, as they misrecognize the power wielded over them. This misrecognition and social structures of domination reproduce themselves. Symbolic violence serves as a strategy of exclusion by intent. Therefore, symbolic violence as an epistemological framework, helps analyze the ways powerful forces in society deliberately exclude and marginalize some groups from active engagement in the political, economic, and cultural processes. Tim Butler (2014) sees symbolic violence as exclusion by intent whereby the dominant group rations the scarce resources or opportunities in ways to ensure that only those with access to those resources get the opportunity to assess some services. The dominant group employs symbolic violence as a tool to marginalize a perceived dominated group and deprive them of the assets, opportunities, and services readily available to dominant groups. Symbolic violence acts as a mechanism for creating and institutionalizing both privilege and inequality with the sole intent of benefiting specific people and group(s) while denying those benefits to others. Thus, those who own desired assets try to garner them for their children, but at the same time, systematically deny those assets to other groups. Those who perceive themselves to be the dominant group employ mechanisms that “demonize” some groups and render them unqualified, to justify why members of their own group have the right to the asset and

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resources. Bourdieu notes that those with such assets tend to disparage others not in possession of them in ways that render them largely invisible and ignorant (Butler 2014). Butler (2014) compares symbolic violence to the process of “gentrification.” Those who use symbolic violence blame the poor and the powerless for their own failure in an exercise of “soft power.” The ability of the relatively powerful to displace the less powerful from geopolitical discourse occurs because those who have power and economic assets find a way to displace those who are vulnerable. They use narratives and misrepresentations to construct the powerless and “blank out” and render them invisible (Butler 2014). Furthermore, symbolic violence is a social annihilation mechanism in society that relegates some groups to the periphery. The literature discusses how symbolic violence helps to promote and perpetuate the invisibility of subaltern groups perceived by the supposed “dominant” group as “foreign,” invisible, and nonexistent (Clark 2004; Flam and Beauzamy 2008). The literature notes that symbolic violence can be a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims. The invisibility of symbolic violence means that victims of this act take part in constructing the violence perpetrated against them. In this case, the social agents become part of the process of the violence exercised upon them with their complicity (Clark 2004). Perpetrators impute symbolic violence in this case on normal human beings, males or females, and subject them to various forms of violence, which may include denying them social agent resources or a voice and treating them as inferior or causing them to feel inferior. The victims come to apply categories from the point of view of the dominant ones and accept the treatment, which violates their rights. Thus, the symbolic violence of domination is “misrecognized” as natural and the way things are supposed to be. Clark (2004) uses the example of how society constructs gender relations in terms of symbolic violence, whereby for centuries, women have been denied similar rights and opportunities available to men, yet for much of this time, due to various social, religious, and political pressures, women could do little to protest against their so-called inferiority. Bourdieu (cited in Clark 2004) argues, for example, that we cannot fully understand patriarchy simply in terms of coercion by men over women. Rather, patriarchal domination existed precisely because women misrecognized the symbolic violence to which they were subjected and treated it as something natural (Clark 2004). Western misrepresentation of Africa’s location on the development spectrum is an example of how symbolic violence creates the “othering” of Africans. The intent of the colonial and Western misrepre-

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sentations of Africa in the global community is to promote “symbolic annihilation” of the Africans in global development discourse. This strategy is what Bourdieu calls “invisibilization” (Clark 2004). Invisibilization is a process of hegemonic exclusion where the West excluded Africans from discourse through what Okot p’Bitek refers to as “dirty gossip.” The goal of the misrepresentation is to invalidate the role played by African societies in the global geopolitical processes, development discourse, and knowledge production. This “invisibilization” leads to delegitimization of Africa’s knowledge and epistemologies and African societies’ adoption of the Western viewpoint as “knowledge.” One example I can give about invisibilization is African youth’s support for US President Donald Trump when he used a wide brushstroke to paint all African countries as “shithole” countries. Many of the youth in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana took to social media and expressed their support for President Trump’s naïve mischaracterization of African countries partly because of their own ignorance of the calculated symbolic violence the president of the United States employed to promote his agenda of divisiveness to limit immigration. Many of these young people who probably have not taken the effort to understand the historical contexts that created Africa’s underdevelopment in some areas validated the statement made by the most powerful person on the planet who in his formative years was sequestered from the challenges faced by 97 percent of the global community because of his privileged upbringing. Trump’s dirty gossip about African societies is a calculated ploy to demonize immigrants from a continent he probably never set foot on prior to becoming the leader of the free world, and he likely has limited knowledge about the contributions that the African continent has made in the global geopolitical and economic order. Flam and Beauzamy (2008) note that symbolic violence is a mechanism employed to deny the presence, skills, or contributions of people or a group perceived as belonging to a subordinate group calling attention to real and symbolic status downgrading. In the process, the people who consider themselves the dominant group denigrate and disparage the subordinate group and render their contributions virtually invisible, while rejecting their demand for equal rights and social recognition. Some scholars assume that victims of symbolic violence are unaware, passive, and therefore unhurt by the act. However, as Flam and Beauzamy note, the victims are often both aware and hurt. Colonial forces employed symbolic violence as a tool to suppress indigenous communities and create colonial subalterns. European colonialists used direct, armed force to subjugate certain African peoples to clear the way for exploitation. European-American colonial

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and imperial forces also used distortions to infantilize African societies and justify the colonization of people they perceived as “defective” and who had deviated from European norms and social organization. For one group (or society) to misrepresent another is a blatant form of symbolic violence and provides the justification for exploiting and controlling the society or group. Thus, symbolic violence becomes a way to construct people in invidious ways to damage a subordinated group’s identity. As a colonial mechanism, symbolic violence is a systemic form of violence, which works through institutional policies and policy-related practices to reinforce or perpetuate the existing power and social structures and promote inequalities in society. The strategy is to undermine the rights of the victims and functions as blatant or benign strategies to strengthen the existing marginality of marginalized societies (Dunne et al. 2006; Ngakane et al. 2012; Orser 2005, 2006). Orser (2006) notes that dominant groups employ symbolic violence to shift power from overt coercion and threat of physical violence to symbolic manipulation by imposing meaning on things, and at the same time, to legitimate their power by concealing the relations that underlie it. Bourdieu illustrates the mechanism of symbolic violence with gift giving. A wealthy donor who has the economic capital to endow a hospital wing exercises symbolic violence by the moral obligations and emotional attachments that accompany the gift. Every time patients and visitors to the wing see the donor’s name on a brass plaque or above the doorway, they are reminded of the donor’s ability to amass capital and to bestow it on those in need. Bourdieu notes that people usually misrecognize the endowment as pure altruistic philanthropy when it is really an exercise of lasting power linked to the social capital associated with all aspects of the gift. Another example of the colonial mechanism of symbolic violence is the misrepresentations and distortions, which lead to the negative treatment of “African” societies in global economic and development discourse. Even though Africa is a part of our global community, the West constantly misrepresents and portrays it as a devastated and depraved continent that is consistently undeveloped and lacks basic amenities and where people are dying of starvation and suffering from diseases. The West’s negative portrayal of the African continent is part of its symbolical and ideological “colonization” of the continent and its people and a way to justify their colonizing activities all in the name of promoting development. In a global community where all societies play crucial roles, African societies find themselves in a position where they experience internal colonization in a global community of which

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it is also a part. In the global community, African nations find themselves with little advantage in global economic discourse even though they produce much of the needed resources for economic production. The strategy to marginalize African societies has been through misrepresenting them (Gladden 2002; Mfum-Mensah 2005; Watts and Erevelles 2004). Symbolic violence as a tool enables colonial forces to trap colonized subalterns in “ideological imprisonment” (Bourdieu 2001; Clark 2004). Victims and perpetrators of symbolic violence can be trapped in the narrative about the victim when they ignore, accept, or promote symbolic violence. Pierre Bourdieu uses the concept of “paradox of doxa” to refer to the status quo or orthodoxy values and discourses widely purported to perpetuate the status quo as inherently true and necessary and “doxic acceptance” as total submission to these entirely arbitrary conditions (Bourdieu 2001). The analysis here by Bourdieu applies to the situation where images, stories, imaginative geographies, films, media portrayals (such as Tarzan and informercials used to describe the devastations and distortions about Africa) provide a site where social and political relations can be represented, renegotiated, and manipulated deliberately and unconsciously (Clark 2004). Symbolic violence becomes a mechanism of imprisonment when it emerges from what appears to be a sense of practice of ambivalence to construct a group’s “otherness.” What is interesting about symbolic violence is that victims become numb to it and come to embrace the negative depictions about them as correct and accurate.

Colonial Subalterns and Resistance of Symbolic Violence The ideological, hegemonic power and domination characteristic of symbolic violence appears to be ineluctable for those on whom it is perpetrated (Bourdieu 2001; Orser 2005). Oser (2005) intimates that members of the dominant class hold enough economic, social, and cultural capital to ensure that they fulfill their own wishes, therefore becoming aware of the structural changes to the status quo is an effective strategy to resist symbolic violence. Pierre Bourdieu and Charles Orser do not discount the active roles of dominated people in the resistance of symbolic violence. They nonetheless point out that victims of symbolic violence fall into the trap of subversions against the status quo, which are produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is fought, and therefore victims perpetuate the existing social relations of domination (Bourdieu 2001; Orser 2005, 2006). They note that any attempt to resist symbolic vio-

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lence requires that victims and perpetrators come to terms to search for patterns that produce and reproduce domination and interrogate or challenge those patterns. This is where critical frameworks also become useful. It takes critical approaches to expose how the nature of social structures, narratives, stories, film, artwork, media portrayals, and infomercials about Africa can play contradictory and paradoxical roles. For example, advertisements of Western development entities, infomercials by Western media, African theme parks, films about African animals, and an overemphasis on safaris and African hunting sports could all be strategic reification of Africa and a form of symbolic violence. Orser (2005) offers possible approaches to resisting symbolic violence. He employs the concept of homology of social positions to explain how to achieve it. The concept holds that individuals who occupy dominated social positions in social space also occupy dominated positions within the field of cultural production (a plethora of literature on ideological borrowing and lending provides evidence of this arguments: see, for instance, Hershey and Artime 2014; Kendall 2007; Raby 2009; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000). The dominated positionality occupied by subalterns means that they would never be able to express their interests within the field of cultural production unless some members of the dominant class provide the instruments that would enable them to break away from the social and mental structures already in place, which tend to continue to reproduce the distribution of symbolic capital. He notes that the dominated can use the material culture of the dominant class as a tool for resisting symbolic violence. The subaltern can also recontextualize the material culture in expressive and originally unintended ways. The Africanization of religious practices of Western “orthodox” Christian traditions (many African churches have used local musical genres in place of hymns) and/or the invention of independent African charismatic churches are examples of how indigenous Africans have appropriated Western religious traditions to suit indigenous African cultures.

Postcolonial Theory Scholarship focusing on colonized subalterns and indigenous societies discusses the ways European-American colonial and imperialistic forces worked to project the superior space occupied by the white race and its culture, religion, society, and economic and political forms and, in the process, discounted other societies. European-American

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forces constructed the subordinated statuses of colonial subalterns to justify colonialism and imperialism and to perpetuate their subordinated statuses (see Allen 2000; Al-Shetawi 2013; Columpar 2002; Go 2013a, 2013b; Johnson 2013; Judd 2014; Kapoor 2002; Lennox 2006; London 2003; Nagy-Zekmi 2007; Said 1993). European and American colonial and imperial forces used literary works and their imperialistic institutions, such as universities, museums, and media structures, to project the cultural values and epistemologies of the white race while discounting the narratives and bards of the supposed colonial subalterns. Their objective was to promote the white hegemonic agenda and create power asymmetry and power relationships that project the supremacy of white European-American political, cultural, and economic forms and subordinate indigenous populations in African and other societies in the Global South. Postcolonial literature outlines the usefulness of drawing a connection between colonial and postcolonial in discursive frameworks about formerly colonized societies. This is because one cannot discuss the concept of postcoloniality without bringing colonialism into the conversation. Jurgen Osterhammel defines colonialism as a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of invaders and/ or a system of governance where the colonizers define and implement the fundamental decision affecting the lives of the colonized in pursuit of the colonizers’ interests in a distant metropole (Osterhammel 1997). He conceptualizes colonialism as three distinct stages including classical colonialism, internal colonialism, and neocolonialism. Osterhammel explains classical colonialism as the subjugation of an indigenous society by a foreign power and internal colonialism as the domination of a nation (defined geographically, linguistically, and culturally) within the national borders of another nation-state by another group or groups. Finally, he views neocolonialism as the domination of the industrialized nations over the Third World in different forms. Colonialism relates to postcoloniality in how the former shapes the latter. Ella Shohat (2000) defines “postcoloniality” as a new designation for critical discourse that thematizes issues emerging from colonial relationships and their aftermath, covering a long historical span (including the present). Similarly, Norrel London explains that postcoloniality is a concern to renarrativize the story of the colonial encounter in a way that gives prominence to issues that have to date been put on the periphery of the education debate as it concerns colonial societies (London 2003). He points out that the need to examine and understand the complex ways the colonial powers brought the colonized under their imperial system arises because the impact

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lingers even though these nations have attained independence (London 2003). Since the 1960s, postcolonial framework has emerged as an epistemic inquiry in scholarship. Scholars like Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and many others have used postcolonial epistemic inquiry to draw connections between colonial and postcolonial, outlining the ways colonial cultural processes and social and political structures made indelible imprints on colonized societies. Postcolonial theory delineates the way colonialism is not just political and cultural processes but also an ideological process that imprints on colonized people. Colonialism is an ideological perspective in the sense that it cannot be identified only with economic gain and political power but is essentially a state of mind in colonizer and colonized alike (see London 2003; Said 1993). Colonial ideological thinking begins when colonizers arrive on the scene and does not end when they go home. In other words, as London (2003) points out, colonialism becomes an unfinished business and a footprint. Because of these colonial-postcolonial connections, many scholars argue about the usefulness of inserting the views, perspectives, and bards of colonized subalterns in cultural, economic, and political discourse to disentangle and estrange the colonial mindset that serves as a psychological dislocation of colonial subalterns (see Allen 2000; Al-Shetawi 2013; Columpar 2002; Go 2013a, 2013b; London 2003; Tam 1998). Postcolonial scholars such as Frantz Fannon and others point out that colonialism imprinted an inferiority complex on colonized people. Fannon describes this situation as “the outcome of double processes of ‘internalization of inferiority’ and ‘epidermization of inferiority’” (Johnson 2013: 54). Fannon notes that the formerly colonized subalterns cannot liberate themselves from the colonist without liberating themselves from the contradictions that colonization has nurtured in them. The colonial imprints can be compared to what Pierre Bourdieu describes as another form of “habitus,” which he explains as the mediation between the colonial past and the postcolonial future, troubling the future’s promise. Bourdieu argues that only through a comprehensive program aimed at resocialization can a proper change occur in the wake of national independence (Go 2013a). David Johnson (2013) points out that the insights made by Fannon and Bourdieu demand that psychological liberation becomes an essential element to help formerly colonized societies to free themselves of the arsenal of complexes developed by the colonial environment. Postcolonial frameworks help analyze education discourses in formerly colonized societies and highlight the vestiges of colonial systems of education in formerly colonized nations as an example of

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colonial imprints, which colonized societies need to interrogate. The literature focusing on postcolonial influences on education argue that the implications of colonialism may be as complex and far-reaching for education as they are for other sectors. Some scholars therefore note that postcolonial discourse on issues like language policies in formerly colonized societies cannot trivialize the educational policies and educational objectives that prevailed in any particular nation during the colonial era (see Bray 1993; London 2003; Tam 1998). Postcolonial scholars argue that European history cannot be detached from Europe’s imperial practices. Sara Lennox outlines the usefulness of a postcolonial framework by noting that the inquiry approach helps us grasp how racial formations of the imperial world were constitutive of white European identities in the metropole as well as the colonies, thus helping to define the most intimate domains of modern life. She intimates that postcolonial analysis stems from the premise that colonial power relations is a sublimated expression of repressive desire in the West, of desires that resurfaces in moralizing missions (Lennox 2006). Scholars also view a postcolonial framework as a deliberate, intentional, and revisitionist approach to challenge and estrange colonial episteme and discourse, which projected the narratives of white Europeans and colonial people at the center of cultural processes. Postcolonialist challenge texts that occlude the history of imperialism and colonialism and instead reproduce imperial epistemic structures and Eurocentrism also fail to provide a critique of Western colonialism and racial domination (Go 2013a: 66; Lennox 2006). Julian Go defines postcolonial theory as a loosely coherent body of writing and thoughts that critiques and aims to transcend the structures supportive of Western colonialism and its legacies (Go 2013a). He notes that one of the distinct contributions of postcolonial inquiry approach is its emphasis on cultural, ideological, epistemic, or even psychological structures. The postcolonial framework examines all types of discourse, episteme, cultural schemas, representations, and ideologies that promoted Western imperialism including everyday discourse, novels, art, scientific tracts, and ethnographies (see Go 2013a: 30). Postcolonial scholars draw from postcolonial discourse to delineate issues of colonialism, race, ethnicity, identity, inequality, and global structures and the dialectic relationship between the colonizing West and the “other.” It is a counter-discursive strategy to challenge Western episteme to deconstruct those notions and processes, which rationalized the imposition of the imperial world on the rest of the world. Postcolonial theory displaces, transforms, and transfigures colonial discourse (Allen 2000).

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Homi Bhabha (cited in Allen 2000) notes that the process of displacement and estrangement is paradigmatic of all indigenous resistance to dominating discourses. Literary intellectuals also draw from postcolonial theory to resist and challenge the colonial portrayals of colonized people, which have been the foundation of Euro-American literature. Mahmoud AlShetawi (2013) notes that postcolonial discourse challenges the cultural authority of colonial regimes and colonial narratives by turning colonized peoples’ narratives into sources of alternative wisdom and beauty. Postcolonial scholars caution other scholars to be suspicious of Western sociocultural institutions and structures such as colonial administration, metropolitan universities, museums and media houses because they are the structures that push colonial episteme on colonial subalterns. Postcolonial theory links Western imperialism with Western intellectual and cultural production, including research, writing, ideas, arguments, and images (Judd 2014; Kapoor 2002; Lennox 2006;). Due to the entrenched hegemony of colonial sociocultural institutions, the challenge faced by postcolonial inquiry is that even as the colonial subaltern can speak, nobody (in Europe and/or Western academe) is listening. Instead, the voices still audible are those of the ruling class. The postcolonial framework helps interrogate practices and promote ideological liberation. Frantz Fannon (cited in Johnson 2013) proposes that formerly colonized societies promote postcolonial “humanism,” which is the stipulation that each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. Postcolonial humanism should point out the ways formerly globalized subalterns create ourselves and determine who we are. For formerly colonized societies in Africa, postcolonial humanism must be a framework for interrogating African national bourgeoisie who function as intermediaries of white capitalists.

Concluding Thoughts The two analytical frameworks help discuss the ways European and American forces’ dirty gossip helped define the relationship between Africans and European-Americans and influenced education discourse (policy, research, and practice) and the transnational flow of educational ideas in sub-Saharan Africa. Symbolic violence helps conceptualize how the complex interrelationships of hierarchical society exist to promote the aims and goals of people who occupy dominant positions (Orser 2005). Charles Orser points out that symbolic violence

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constitutes an important, albeit abstruse, subject for inquiry. Its influential and transformative characteristics can be difficult to locate and troublesome to interpret, because by its very nature, symbolic violence is subtle and designed to be misunderstood. A major objective for employing symbolic violence as an inquiry and discursive framework of this book is to highlight the complicated ways European-American bards distorted and misrepresented African societies, the rationale for the distortions, and the effects of the distortions on education discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. The postcolonial framework as a discursive approach of this book helps de-center colonial and European discourse that misrepresents African societies in global development narratives. It also helps challenge imperialist narratives that employ imaginative geographies to depict the depravity of African societies and the “white savior” mentality, which work as a psychological self-defeat of the African psyche. I use the framework to call attention to the process of knowledge production that does not create spaces for indigenous views about knowledge. My goal here is also to call colonial and imperialistic forces’ attention to local voices that European and US researchers have rendered fugitive in knowledge production discourse. The framework also helps outline how the supposed metaphoric and proverbial “subalterns” are also active participants of the new global geopolitical processes and the development discourse that Western societies have crafted around the “White Racial Order.”

CHAPTER 2

“Dirty Gossip” and a Different “Africa” in the Global Geopolitical Order

¨´

My younger daughter traveled to our native country, Ghana, for the first time in 2011. She went with high hopes of experiencing the Africa she has heard about from her teachers and seen on television screens—natural environment, people with painted faces, animals roaming around, red soil, and, of course, the heat. She was so happy to experience the hot and humid temperatures of Accra, which does not disappoint in July. The next few days she stayed in Accra, she realized that the neighborhood she was staying is not strikingly different from where she lives in the United States, which made her express some doubt about whether she was in “Africa.” She asked her mom to take her to the “old Ghana” where she could experience the “Real Africa.” My daughter’s experience is similar to that of many Westerners who visit any part of the continent and want a taste of the “Real Africa,” especially when they see that the infrastructure is as developed as in their own countries. Curtis Keim and Carolyn Somerville (2018) observe that when people from the West come to Africa, they seem to expect and prefer the “Real Africa” to be different and often the more different the better. When they find an aspect of Africa that is similar to the West, they get disappointed. This was my daughter’s experience. Europeans have misrepresented Africa in ways that depict Africans negatively and position African societies in subordinated status in the global geopolitical order. Europeans’ dirty gossip about the African continent and its people began centuries before social scientists theorized “social construction” in the sociological lexicon. Diodorus of Sicily, who lived between 90 BCE and 30 BCE, used what would be

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considered today to be a racist characterization to describe Africans noting that: The majority of them [Africans] . . . are black in color and have flat noses and woolly hair. As for their spirit, they are entirely savage and display the nature of wild beasts . . . and are [as] far removed as possible from human kindness to one another and cultivating none of the practices of civilized life as they are found among the rest of mankind, they are a striking contrast when considered in the light of our own. (Oldfather 1955 cited in p’Bitek 2011: 9)

Ugandan philosopher Okot p’Bitek notes that while the Greco-Roman world did not subject the early Africans who entered the Greco-Roman world to racial discrimination, the Greco-Romans painted African societies of anarchy, promiscuity, and cruel living. They described Africans as “strange” and miserable folk who exist in continual hunger and fear. The processes through which Europe institutionalized distortions about Africa are complicated. Although situating the encounters of Europe and Africa within the broader historical and sociological contexts provides some clues that help explain the political, economic, and cultural changes that ensued, the full impact of the encounters between Europe and Africa paints only an impressionistic image. However, the fuzzy picture still helps us understand the intricate roles of Western writers and ways they created discourse to provide distorted images about the African continent to caricature its people with the goal to stratify and marginalize African societies in the global geopolitical order. In August 1992, I was on a train from Vienna to Braunau am Inn in Austria. Seated beside me was a young lady who was on her way to Linz. As we traveled along, I engaged her in conversation. Her curiosity about “Africa” steered us into an interesting conversation around the same old Western negative depictions of the African continent. This woman inquired about Africa’s jungle, animals, wildlife, famine, diseases, and wars. My “travel companion” made the statement that “African people must be ‘geniuses’ to build their mud houses on treetops” (Palmer 1987; Staples 2006; Walker and Rasamimanana 1993). I did not expect anybody to make such a statement in the 1990s. By the way, building houses in treetops shows human ingenuity and creativity and explains why I did not take offense at the woman’s statement but laughed it off even though I knew what she meant. The lady demonstrated the naivety of most Westerners who display little knowledge about the African continent. I explained to the lady that some of those narratives she had read or heard about Africa are not accurate but

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“dirty gossip” distorted, fabricated, and exaggerated to make Westerners feel superior. As we progressed in our conversation, she mentioned that had a pen pal from Kenya whose name was John Ochieng and asked if I knew him. The lady had imagined Africa as a tiny village. From the works of cartographers to that of development entities and Christian missionaries and all those in between, people from Western societies have presented Africa as a small concept and ignored the diversity and complexity of African societies, histories, economies, languages, and levels of development. I wanted to be ridiculous and explained to the young lady that John’s parents and my parents share the same backyard. We did not have the luxury of time to continue the conversation as she was going to disembark in Linz. I seized the opportunity of the few minutes remaining to compact my geography lessons about the vastness of the continent and told her that Kenya was six hours away from Ghana by plane and has a three-hour time difference. My conversation with the young lady became a learning experience for me to be proactive in getting to know my own continent so I can provide accurate narrative about the few African societies that I am familiar. The series of everyday narratives about Africa and its people depict the stereotypes tagged on the continent. Early Europeans presented Africa as a mass of land where only wild creatures roam about, the sun only sets, and people inhabiting it are Neanderthals and “primitive” monolithic tribal people whose primordial tendencies make them irrational and impervious to progress. Contemporary Western forces present “Africa” as a place embroiled in protracted tribal wars and people only know hunger, famine, diseases, and abject poverty, and waiting for the “White Savior” to come and help. Some people in our global community utilize a wide brush to paint the picture of what Africa is supposed to be in their imagination—“shithole” countries full of parasites that have nothing to contribute to the progress of the global community. The narratives of Western bards about Africa hardly includes the resilience of Africans in challenging European colonization, imperialism, and influences to preserve their own sovereignty (Walker and Rasamimanana 1993). Europeans’ negative views about Africa up to the nineteenth century occurred at a time when Europe itself was not comparatively enlightened. Given the historical contexts of the time, one can extend a pardon to those in antiquity and the bigoted fifteenth-century seafaring traders who spearheaded the negative categorizations and portrayals of that time (Keita 2014). However, the negative portrayal of Africa since the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century

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is either ignorance or something more sinister. Several centuries (possibly millennia) of prolonged and sustained contacts between Europe and Africa make it inexcusable for Western societies to conjure and present distorted narratives about Africa (Keita 2014; Kidula 2013; Palmer 1987; Staples 2006). For centuries, Europe denied the existence of Africa’s social, political, historical, and economic structures but rather objectified and reified the continent and its people as noble and awe-inspiring (Keita 2014: 23). The objectification and reification of Africa fed into the stereotypes about Africa and people of African descent. A major reason (I suppose) why many Westerners view the African continent and its people as “strange” is because their knowledge about Africa is the distorted and fabricated narrative in textbooks, lore, and anecdotal accounts, which in most cases tends to caricature African societies (Hershey and Artime 2014). Megan Hershey and Michael Artime (2014) intimate that Western societies and their education systems expose young people to confused images of Africa from childhood. Therefore, most Westerners grow up with negative views about “Africa.” Western forces depict African societies in symbolic violent ways to suppress and marginalize the African continent from contemporary global cultural and economic discourse.

Roots of the Misrepresentations Europe’s distortions about Africa began centuries earlier but deliberate and systematic institutionalization of such dirty gossip began in the mid fifteenth century as Europe’s economic and trade relations with Africa evolved in the fifteenth century. Prior to fifteenth-century maritime trading, the trans-Saharan trade connected North Africa and Sahel merchants with southern Europeans and provided a commercial and economic relationship between the two regions. The trans-Saharan trade lost its significance as new markets opened on the West African coast. Europe as a geographical realm in the fifteenth century forged trading partnership with India and neighboring China to sustain its economy. This globalizing process depended on sustained trade between Europe and Asia through Byzantine territory. The Europe-Asia relationship was threatened when in 1453, the Ottoman Empire overran Constantinople. This Islamic empire, which gained control over many parts of Central and Southeast Europe, loathed European societies and dealt ruthlessly with Europeans that used the Byzantine route to Asia to trade. Apart from the physical threats posed by the Ottomans

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to European traders, the Ottomans imposed heavy taxes on goods that passed through the empire. Trading between Europe and Asia dwindled as many Europeans saw the economic and physical perils of using the well-known route to India to sustain the European economy. Europeans, faced with the dire situation of interrupted trading and the challenges of sustaining their economy, embarked on sea explorations to sustain the Europe-Asia trade link. Human ingenuity to adapt and survive under critical situations at all cost coupled with the Portuguese adamantly using their sea technology brought Europe into new forms of trade partnership with African societies. The contact led to many years of sustained relationship with Africa that skewed in favor of the Europeans and saw African societies stripped of their humanity, and their political, economic, and cultural arrangements. The foundation of Europe’s relationship with Africa was deceit, lies, and exploitation, and African societies were initially oblivious to Europe’s grand agenda. Africans have learned their lesson and now sleep with one eye wide open. An Akan proverb says Ahunu bi pen nti na aserewa egyegye ne ba agoro a na woayi nani ato nkyen (when partridges engage in playful acts with their hatchlings, the partridges look the other way). Europeans employed both subtle and blatant strategies to distort facts about Africa in ways that have had political, cultural, economic, and psychological imprints in our global community. For Europeans—and by extension, white Americans—the distortions left a lasting negative construction of Africa and people of African descent. The distortions also created the “white superiority” mentality. Many white Europeans and Americans entertain the mythical ideology that Africa is a jungle and developmentally stagnant even as Europe and the United States advance. Western misrepresentation of the African continent is a calculated strategy to project African societies in a subordinated status in the global geopolitical discourse. How do African societies reposition themselves and utilize education, scholarship, and the development processes to debunk some of these myths and distortions about Africa? This question does not have an easy answer. However, it is imperative for African policy makers, African intellectuals, and global partners to work together to craft balanced narratives about Africa and African people.

How Do European-Americans Distort “Africa”? Early Europeans used distortions, stereotyping, and labeling to create a narrative that helped institutionalize a power asymmetry between

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them and non-European societies (Li 2009; Mahoney 1997; Maines 2000; Weinberg 2014). Many Europeans and Americans grow up with the notions of Western (and white) racial superiority relative to non-Western (black and brown people). The stereotypes and distorted narratives of European trade merchants, Christian missionaries, geographers, and European colonial forces became a framework for their engagement with Africans. Europe’s distortions of Africa became a basis for assigning Africans in the global community subordinated statuses and devalued roles in the global geopolitical processes. In doing so, Europeans elevated the status of whites. I use Carl Degler’s analysis to outline the ways social construction manifests, to illustrate my point. Degler notes that the early twentieth-century interpretation of many US historians was that race determined human behavior and that the inefficiencies of slavery and the social and moral behavior of blacks under slavery was the result of the Negro’s race and not the consequence of slavery (Degler 1976). Such an interpretation absolved slave masters (perpetrators) of any wrongdoing and took attention away from the consequences of slavery to the slaves (victims). Europeans and Americans used their social organization and cultural frame as the norm by which they judged all societies and cultures (Adams et al. 2018; Reagan 2005). European and American forces also used coded and operationalized concepts, terms, and labels such as “the Dark Continent,” “Third World,” “the Global South,” and “developing nations” to distinguish between African societies and Western geopolitical powers. Development and scholarly literature has not been immune from this categorization. A plethora of development, economic, and anthropological literature is littered with such terms to show the position of Africa relative to Western societies and the so-called developed world. Similarly, Western societies have used stereotyping as a tool to dehumanize societies in the developing parts of the world. The process entails making a simple generalization about a group, community, society, nation, or continent and claiming that all its members conform to that generalization. The fourth strategy includes “exoticizing” and “romanticizing” a group, society, or nation as forms of appropriation that are insidious because on the surface there is an appearance of appreciation but then it masks the truth and the complexity of the situation. For instance, oppressed people may be presented and appropriated in ways that mask their true situation. Contemporary ways of “exoticizing” and “romanticizing” some developing societies of our global community entail praising these developing nations when their economies improve in a way that caricatures these nations’ progress as if that economic

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progress is something extraordinary and strange and is not expected of the society. Underneath such praise is the assumption that “such primitive and backward” societies are not expected to have that level of progress. For nations in Africa, such views from developed Western entities feed into the narrative of “Africa qua Africa,” which means Africa is developmentally expected to remain in its backwardness. Labeling and reification as forms of symbolic violence are effective strategies used by Western societies to create inequality and relegate Africans’ experiences to the margins. Labeling promoted, legitimized, and perpetuated differences and oppression. It helped to justify European conquests, colonization, domination, and exploitation of Africans (and other non-whites) and the universalization of white peoples’ experiences and social arrangements as the norm and representation of humanity. Reification, which entails inscribing relations to society as “things” from which one can make profit, became a tool for transforming Africa and African societies as opportunities to profit the West. As an example, “Africa” has been at center stage for Western cultural and development “tourism.” Western tourism that focuses on “African safaris,” nongovernmental organizations, Christian missionary activities, global health initiatives in “Africa” are sometimes benign forms of reifying Africa. Western television screens are littered with infomercials that highlight African children dying of starvation, poverty, disease, and white “saviors” stepping in to “help.” What are the motives driving the infomercials on our screens that sometimes exploit human tragedy? Are they meant to draw attention to global inequalities or exploit the situation of those unfortunate victims? Feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua (1999) uses the concept of “borderlands” to explain that the distortions and myths about colonized groups reinforce differences and inequalities in the ways marginalized groups are treated in a society and in global geopolitical processes. Anzaldua and other scholars (see, for instance, Lorde 1992; Estrada and McLaren 1993) point out that the differences we find in societies are the product of history, culture, power, and ideology.

Historiography and Construction of the African “Other” Europeans and other Western forces (traders, Christian missionaries, geographers, colonists, philanthropic entities, and contemporary development entities) employed distortions as a prop to justify why Europe (and the West) should enslave, colonize, and relegate African societies to subordinated statuses and hollow out their cultural, religious, so-

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cial, economic, political, and technological arrangements of Africans (Keita 2014). European (and other Western) distortions and stereotypes about Africa emerged out of European self-interests. Europe’s agenda from the fifteenth century was to subjugate and colonize Africa. Therefore, the distortions about African societies helped justify Europe’s political, cultural, economic, and social agenda of colonization and Europe’s divine right to civilize, “uplift and develop” Africa socially, religiously, economically, culturally, and politically. In their attempt to implement their agenda of supposed civilization, Europeans portrayed Africa and its people as despicable, and the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious arrangements and practices of African societies unwholesome and in need of “fixing.” Western forces “infantilized” Africans and their own right to develop and shape the destiny of Africans societies (Hershey and Artime 2014). Through colonial education, European Christian missions and colonial officers implanted in the African psyche an ideology of inferiority that has had far-reaching implications. Utterances of Thomas Buxton, Lord Lugard, and Cecil Rhodes provide us some clues about the ideologies of such colonists and how such ideologies lead to Europe’s negative attitudes toward Africa and its people (I have provided examples of such utterances in the next chapter; see Bratton et al. 1991; Buxton 1976; Rhodes 1877). During the nineteenth century, Christian missionary activities took an interesting turn as many Christians trooped to the African continent with a divine project to “save the lost,” “take care of the poor,” and “welcome the stranger.” Returning missionaries from Africa narrated accounts of their great works of saving the “damned” African souls. Those embellished narratives of “calculated kindness” and “condescending” benevolence energized and enlisted new Christians to join the divine project of saving the heathens. There is no doubt that the missionary fervor of the nineteenth century contributed to changing the development landscape of African societies. The missionaries opened schools, established hospitals, and promoted many social activities that contributed to the social development of African societies. Mission schools helped develop many of the early pan-African leaders who put pressure on colonial governments and fought for independence. However, Christian missionaries also helped cast Africa and its people as the “other” to justify their proselytizing agenda and forced conversion. The nineteenth century witnessed the loss of many missionaries in the Christian “battlefields” on the African landscape due to tropical diseases. However, these Christian missionaries wanted to make their case regarding why mission work must continue even within the contexts of many Christian missions being lost to tropical

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diseases. They provided distorted and inaccurate narratives. Many of these European missionaries narrated that Africans were killing Christian missionaries and boiling them in the “black African pot” (Davidson 1984). Furthermore, European Christians treated their African converts like children, and sometimes whipped them if they exhibited erratic attitudes toward church attendance. Europeans positioned themselves as trustees of Africans and defined the terms of their partnership. The strategy worked and became the framework of the trusteeship relationships between the supposedly “Global North” and “Global South” in all phases of economic and social discourse including education. In these contemporary times, the objectification and reification of Africa are at the root of this trusteeship framework of philanthropic initiatives of global multilateral agencies and Western humanitarians in Africa. Western paternalism and distortions about Africa have the grand idea of promoting and strengthening the same old props of furthering European capitalist economic process and political subjugation of Africans. The negative European depictions of Africa have always been a strategy to colonize and recolonize Africa and its people politically, socially, culturally, economically, and religiously (for extensive discussion on this, see Mfum-Mensah 2017a; Rodney 1988). Teju Cole (2012, cited in Hershey and Artime 2014) describes succinctly that some of the depictions of Western humanitarianism is part of the “White Savior Industrial Complex” portraying foreigners as the rescuers of oppressed Africans.

The Political Economy of Europe’s Distortions of Africa I recently watched a CNN documentary titled “Child Slaves Risk their Lives on Ghana’s Lake Volta” by Leif Coorlim (see CNN February 2019). The documentary was about child slavery and child trafficking in a fishing village on the Volta Lake in Ghana, which aired on 1 March 2019. As usual, I had my doubts when I watched the documentary because it suggested to me that the story was one-sided. I thought to myself that CNN possibly lacked an understanding of the role these children play in their community and needed to do more investigation to get the full picture. Thankfully, the Member of Parliament for the area and two other scholars later wrote an article to provide a balanced perspective to the story. There is a political economy in the distortions about Africa. Sensational news about Africa appeals to a wider audience and the Western media knows that. The advent of improved information and communication technology (ICT) in the twentieth century means

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that Western media through literature, artwork, film, documentary, and photography would provide the social and technological means for re-imagining African cultural and natural landscapes. However, the broader reach of media has even strengthened parody about the African continent. With improved ICT, one expected that African media would have access to and claim ownership of African narratives. However, actors and bards from outside Africa still control Africa’s image in the twenty-first century. These actors use literature, art, and images to project the wild and untamed nature of Africa’s landscape. They portray the continent as a place of wild creatures, exotica, famine, and a destitute and despicable hostile environment (Bunce 2015; Casteñeda et al. 2013; Hershey and Artime 2014; Mbaiwa 2012; Staples 2006). Amy Staples points out that “despite the technological advances . . . the image-making practices of Western travelers in Africa remain embedded [in] nineteenth-century narratives and visual tropes of travel and exploration” (2006: 393). The West’s blatant and subtle misrepresentation of Africa is also incorporated in colonial histories, art, literature, and contemporary media, literature, and tourism, among others. In educational textbooks, European-Americans portrayed Africa in derogatory terms such as being the “dark” continent, a jungle, rife with devastation, and chaotic. Sheila Walker and Jennifer Rasamimanana (1993) intimate that the nude adults in media, infomercials, literature, artworks, photojournalism, and films. for example, are guaranteed to shock US school children and assure them that Africans are indeed “primitive” (1993: 10). Similarly, Lansana Keita (2014) points out that Europeans characterized African societies as backward, tribal, and embracing paganism and heathenism on the basis of technological primacy and used frivolous considerations of dubious scientific nature to construct Africans as “negroes,” bantu,” and “bushmen,” among other things. Europeans also categorized African societies as uncivilized, culturally monolithic, and without history. Such views about Africa paved the way for the global discourse that portrayed Africans and people of African descent as savages, cannibals, callous, cruel, violent, superstitious, and people who do not think but are rather controlled by primordial drives. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European explorers became the main source of media images of Africa. Sensationalistic tales of adventure and discovery helped perpetuate stereotypical imagery of Africa and its people. Europeans and Americans executed their misrepresentations about Africa through print media for political and economic benefits and did it within the rubric of demonstrating the power dynamics at play and control of the market economy. And in the twen-

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tieth and twenty-first centuries, there has not been any fundamental changes to these props (Pires 2000; Staples 2006). Western ecologists and conservationists, boxed in their own self-serving attitudes, have been silent on the 1908–1910 expeditions of somebody like Theodore Roosevelt whose onslaught and expeditions to East Africa led to the slaughter of endangered animals to demonstrate his power and hunger for trophies. Reports indicate that Roosevelt and his son Kermit and their party shot over five hundred animals including nine rare white rhinos, seventeen lions, eleven elephants, and seven cheetahs (Staples 2006: 393). Contemporary hunting expeditions in South Africa done in the name of sports by such Westerners as dentist Walter Palmer, who killed Cecil the lion, and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, sons of the current US President Donald Trump, and others who killed lions and other endangered animals, feed into the Western narratives and perceptions about Africa’s wildlife. These occurrences happen because of the broader narratives, denigrations, and exaggerations about Africa in images, television, photojournalism, and print materials that have become a selling point. Postcolonial scholars outline the political economy of the media distortions and denigration of Africa and African societies. The myths created by the media about Africa are a strategy for marketing tourism destinations in sub-Saharan Africa (Mbaiwa 2012; Palmer 1987). Contemporary African media houses are beginning to beat Western societies at their own game by seizing upon the distortions of Africa and cravings for exotica to also market and promote tourism in Africa. The strategy has not generally altered the international media distortions of Africa. From the use of multimedia technologies and resources including television, movies, twitter, social media, podcasts, and other internet-based sources to international media reportage, one witnesses gross distortions of African traditional religions, social arrangements, cultures, economies, and political forms with the sole purpose of reconfiguring those institutions that showcase the diversity of African societies and make them distinct in global geopolitics. International media’s distortions about the African continent continue to play a big role in the stereotypes about the African continent. Robin Palmer (1987) notes that international domestic (Western) radio programs increasingly simplify and trivialize issues about Africa and do little to challenge stereotypes about Africa. The self-serving nature of international media means that journalistic reportage focusing on the African continent must highlight news that attracts wider consumption in the international media marketplace. International journalists are obsessed with news that graphically dramatizes civil unrest, devastation,

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conflicts, wars, tribal, and ethnic divisions, wider corruption, political failures, electoral malpractices, poverty, famine, “primitive” cultures, and “primitive” cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation and circumcision among other things. This strategy is symbolic violence and a way to make African societies look “foreign.” International media coverage inaccurately presents some of these issues without the contextual nuances. They also use “tribal” language and condescending terms to explain away an issue. African media houses do little to debunk some of these distortions for the reason that they are chronically weak and vulnerable because many do not have a wider circulation beyond their local borders (Bunce 2015; Palmer 1987). Postcolonial theory retrieves the colonial past through myths and attitudes, which Western societies construct about people in former colonies and developing nations. Joseph Mbaiwa (2012) points out that these kinds of myths manifest in three areas: the myth of the unchanged timeless local culture, traditional as it was supposed to be during the precolonial eras; the myth of the uncivilized backward culture different from the modernized Western lifestyle; and the myth of the unrestrained, where Western societies expect their action not to be controlled or prohibited. Through these myths, visitors expect local African cultures and natural environments to be unaffected by Western modernization (Mbaiwa 2013: 119). The three myths generate a notion of “otherness” that was and still is inextricably linked to the accounts of travels and explorations in imperial lands. For quite some time now, the idea of presenting a balanced view on Africa in international media reportage is gaining momentum. In social media, many have begun to question who exactly speaks for Africa and how the continent is presented to international news consumers (Bunce 2015; Hershey and Artime 2014;). The issue of who must own Africa’s narrative in the news media is a contested terrain in postcolonial discourse and becoming an important issue in contemporary times. This is because for over five centuries, outsiders who acted as the mouthpiece for Africans have reified, objectified, and exoticized the continent and its people (Bunce 2015). African scholars, scholars of African descent, and local journalists are now working to reclaim ownership of narratives about Africa (Hershey and Artime 2014). These scholars question why people from the West (most of whom are far removed from the lived experiences of Africa and do not understand the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts of localities in Africa) should dictate the standard for narratives and depictions of Africa. The recent rise and use of local journalists for international media represents a welcome break in the historic domination of Western

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perspectives in the international news. A recent study in East Africa outlines the benefits that local journalists working as international correspondents in their local countries bring to the narrative and reportage of Africa. Their in-depth knowledge about the local contexts enables these journalists to provide the accurate information to their media outlet. This knowledge notwithstanding, Mel Bunce (2015) points out that there still exist power relations in Western media that make African journalists think, see, and write as Westerners do. She notes, for instance, that, on one hand, many foreign correspondents reporting on Africa are disconnected from local realities and therefore enjoy a parasitic relationship with the local environment, profiting from the suffering they observe. On the other hand, local journalists find themselves in precarious situations when they have to write stories that must sell in order to earn compensation in contexts where they also must also write stories about the realities of local people.

Effects of Western Distortions and Stereotypes about “Africa” Distortions about Africa should be of much concern to African policy makers and scholars because of the power relations in current global geopolitical discourse. Europeans have not changed the props that served as the basis for the past distortions of Africa’s narrative. Therefore, African scholars and policy makers must vehemently interrogate the distortions about the continent in the twenty-first century and see it as part of the same old strategy of global forces to mentally recolonize and imperialize African societies and place African nations in subordinated position in global geopolitics. The world has moved toward globalization and societies in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have made tremendous progress on a global scale since the latter part of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding the progress so far, the West and other global forces continue to use a single brushstroke to depict all societies in Africa negatively to undermine the gains and progress made on the continent and depict them as something pedestrian. European forces relegated Africans to subordinated positions centuries ago by direct enslavement of Africans, outright colonization, imperialism, and exploitation of African resources. Contemporary Western global governing and transnational agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and other Western entities saddle African nations with debts through overseas development assistance and grants to dictate economic policies, governance and development

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programs, and education policies and transnational borrowing and lending of knowledge and ideas of African nations. Similarly, Western governments define and dictate trade relations with African governments and continue to see Africa as the pool from which they draw raw materials. African nations must realize that twenty-first-century globalization is not different from nineteenth-century colonization where Europeans dictated the pace of the economic, social, religious, cultural, and political structures. African policy makers, governments, and their societies must reclaim the ownership of Africa’s narratives by vigorously promoting balanced stories because it is only by this strategy that they could provide accurate records. Western misinformation about Africa is the reason why Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s (2009) presentation about the dangers of a single storyline is so important in development discourse. Mark Pires recounts a story of a US high school student who lived in Kenya during a summer program. Through the student’s experience, he realized that “Africans are not simply helpless people unable to feed themselves, but that they too struggle to improve their lives as do so many others around the world” (Pires 2000: 41). Western narratives and depictions of Africa in a single storyline obfuscates the realities of Africa’s progress. Global forces have systematically manufactured a whole continent based on the binary oppositions that juxtapose a civilized and democratized West with a savage Africa and a West that has a self-sustaining economy with an “Africa” that is in a dependency situation (Bunce 2015). The mythical narratives about Africa present a couple of dangers: they reinforce and perpetuate the negative stereotypes about Africa; they reinforce the neocolonial power imbalance; and they perpetuate the “otherness” of Africa and people of African descent. The distortions about Africa in our global geopolitical contexts disadvantage Africans, people of African descent, and black and brown people. They create a psychological identity and powerlessness, which some scholars term the “Africanness” identity. Africanness is a state of being, shared identity, and a prism for understanding the lived experiences of Africans both on the continent and in the diaspora (Dei 2012; Gyekye 1995; Ovens and Prinsloo 2010; Wainaina 2005; Wiredu 1996). The identity of Africanness is about the multiple ways Africans and people of Africans descent negotiate their identity (race, culture, history, and religion) in contexts where their identities are distorted. Africanness also helps outline the power relations, baggage, and burden people of African descent (and other black and brown people connected to the continent) carry. At the root of all the levels of racism people of African descent and black and brown people experience in

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the West are Western distortions about Africa. The assumed white racial superiority is due to the negative images Europeans created about Africans in the nineteenth century. The systematic framing of Africa as a “dark” place riddled with poverty and disease helped construct a racial hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom. The racialized hierarchies have created power relations where blacks receive prejudicial treatments, racial discrimination, stigmatization, and disrespect whether they are in their own societies or in the diaspora.

Interrogating the Distortions about Africa Western distortions about Africa obscure the true information about the continent and African societies. Therefore, education is an important tool that could help demystify the distorted narratives about Africa. Western education policy makers must see revisions to school curricular to provide accurate knowledge about Africa as part of the broader reforms in the education systems of Western societies (Keita 2014; Kidula 2013; Mbaiwa 2012; Walker and Rasamimanana 1993; Wa’Njoku 2009). Western societies teach that Africa is culturally and socially monolithic, backward, and lacks development. Many school systems in the West devote only a snippet of their content to discuss African societies in history and geography. The curriculum content of literature, art, and epistemological processes provide a pedestrian representation of African societies or sometimes deliberately omits African societies altogether. When Europe and America decided to include Africa in their curriculum content in the 1960s, they presented the continent tangentially. Nancy Schmidt observed back in 1965 that: “Although . . . children’s literature about Africa has been increasing rapidly in recent years . . . young people are likely to use such books in connection with school assignment or purely for pleasure (in the case of animal stories), but they will gain little understanding of African people and cultures from them” (1965: 61). A 1990 Rockefeller Foundation report, A Greater Voice for Africa in Schools, for example, drew the lamentable conclusion that in 1967, Africa remains the most neglected world area in the United States school curriculum (Walker and Rasamimanana 1993). This and subsequent reports identify contemporary media distortions of Africa and Africans and the education system’s omission of “Africa” in school curricula as major contributors to this situation. Walker and Rasamimanana (1993) noted three decades ago that the true knowledge about Africa would emerge only if the myth is stripped away. They note that teaching and learning about

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Africa takes place against a background that views the continent and its people as inferior and underdeveloped. Until the 1970s, many of the books written about Africa for young people in the West were based on unfavorable stereotypes of Africa. They focused on animals and adventurous encounters with dangerous wild creatures in a terrifying jungle. European literary writers used derogatory terms such as “pygmy” and “Bushmen” in literature to show the lack of civilization in Africa. Schmidt (1965) notes that most literature about African folktales for children gave equal focus to animals and human beings. Many books of the era discussed the histories of European explorers and according to Schmidt, “they all included colonialist biases about Africans.” Early European writers and scholars presented Africa as a space without history until the white person emerged. Some contemporary Western scholars and agents of Western multinational organizations devote less time to discussing indigenous cultural, economic, and political processes of African societies and the contributions of various communities to the global development processes. Rather, they devote the large portion of their narratives and reportage to talk about the challenges of the region as if all global challenges take their habitation in Africa. The few conversations about the strides and progress made by African societies are couched in an “exoticized” and “romanticized” manner outside of the bonds of human possibilities, development, and progress. Western media also do little to provide important information about Africa unless the information is negative, sensational, tragic, or devastating. News that portrays African societies positively is stuck away in the middle of printed pages of the daily newspapers, which make it impossible for students to discover. Elliot Eisner points out that “the knowledge schools do not teach is as important as what they do teach . . . ignorance is not simply a neutral void: it has important effects on the kinds of options one is able to consider, the alternatives that one can examine, and the perspectives from which one can view a situation or problem” (1985: 97).

Concluding Thoughts How might education policy makers in the SSA and the rest of the global community use education to interrogate the distortions about Africa in a global community that continues to view Africa as nothing more than its wild creatures, animals, primitive tribal cultures with primordial drives, diseases, famine, wars, and corrupt political actors? It is imperative for Western educators to view a balanced story about

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Africa as an important aspect of their twenty-first century education policy and practice. At the higher educational level, cultural exchange and study abroad programs should help to deepen the connection between Western institutions and those in sub-Saharan Africa (Wheeler and Ntihirageza 2013). Governments, policy makers, and institutional policy makers in SSA should design robust programs and provide resources that will make their institutions attractive to students from Western institutions. Many students from the West are apprehensive about traveling to Africa because of the images, stereotypes, and distortions in the West. Institutions from Africa and the West can collaborate to provide pre-departure orientations to demystify such stereotypes. Mark Pires suggests that faculty from the West that have already experienced the challenges and rewards of an African sojourn could serve as African academic and educational exchange ambassadors and effectively promote greater awareness and informed interests in educational exchange to Africa (Pires 2000: 40). Some scholars also propose that educators employ culturally integrative pedagogical approaches to teaching about the sub-Saharan African region. Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson (2013) has suggested an approach she calls “global simulation” to balance negative images of Africa and to foster deeper connections with its culture, literature, and people. Global simulation is the creation of a fictitious yet culturally grounded world in which students develop a character and collaborate with other members of their community to create and invent their own world. The format for global simulation entails a set of classroom activities used to facilitate cultural literacy and the acquisition of communicative competence. Similarly, policy dialogue between education policy makers from SSA and the West could be an important initiative to implement as a policy framework. African education policy makers should find ways to engage with international entities and change the approach from a transfer of Western education and policy models to that of cultural exchanges between the two regions. While subSaharan African governments and education policy makers continue to introduce models of Western education policies, they should mandate that Western entities act as agents of African knowledge exchange and transfer to the West.

CHAPTER 3

Architects of European “Dirty Gossip” about Africa

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The preceding chapter outlined how centuries of European encounters with Africa culminated in European forces employing subtle and blatant strategies to misrepresent Africa and its people in the global community. Western forces that were instrumental in perpetuating the distortions about Africa include geographers, Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, philanthropic entities, social scientists, biologists, conservationists, and researchers. Arguably, Western forces played contrasting roles in Africa’s positionality, role, and participation in the global geopolitical, economic, and cultural processes. Western forces worked hard over the years to promote Africa’s “development” in whatever ways possible. Notwithstanding their development efforts, they also distorted narratives about African societies. There is an Akan proverb that goes like this: dee oko nsuo na obo ahina (the person who treks to the stream to fetch water is likely to be the one to break the water pot). This proverb sums the contrasting roles of Western development entities in promoting the common good in African societies.

Views of Fifteenth-Century European Traders European traders used distortions as a protectionism tool to ward off other competitors from trading in Africa and to justify their depletion of Africa’s material and human resources. They portrayed Africa as a place of devastation and devoid of any organic life to monopolize African resources because they needed the resources to support their own national economies. The distortions also helped justify the barbarity and inhumanity of slave trading, explaining that Africans were lesser

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humans. The “Christian” seafaring groups came in the garb of trade partnership with Africans and spreading the Christian gospel, but their real motive was acquisition of wealth and profit. European Christians of all stripes were more interested in money and power than the gospel they professed to spread to the non-Christian world. The greed of wealth and capitalism shaped Western racism. European slave traders removed tens of thousands of productive Africans, bound them in chains, packed and shipped them like commodities, and relocated them in the Americas where for centuries they humiliated, mistreated, and terrorized African slaves to work for nothing.

European Explorers, Imaginative Geographies, and Africa’s Distortion Beginning in the nineteenth century, a new kind of European emerged on the African continent and penetrated the interior. These explorers, adventurers, and later Christian missionaries came to explore the geographical mysteries of Africa but also to acquire lands for king and country. Explorers such as Mungo Park, David Livingstone, Frederick (Lord) Lugard, Richard Burton, Samuel Baker, John Hanning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley, Mary Kingsley, Adolf Lüderitz, Carl Peters, and others were fascinated by the geographical mysteries of Africa. These nineteenth-century explorers served as the arm of the European exploitative establishments. They were part of the old order repackaged in new form and served as the “unofficial symbolic imperialists that helped define the cultural terms on which unequal political relations between colonizer and colonized could subsequently be established” (Driver 1991: 135). European explorers articulated the reason for their presence in Africa in their own words. Henry Morton Stanley clearly stated that the explorers’ “intention of subduing (Africa) by peaceful ways and to remold it into harmony with modern relief party” was their reason for their expeditions. One of the major goals of the explorations was, therefore, “to establish civilized settlements” (Greely 1894: 365). Patrick Brantlinger (cited in Driver 1991: 140 observed that “Africa grew dark as these Victorian explorers, missionaries and scientists flooded it with light” [italics mine]. Europeans expressed the benefits of their presence in Africa despite their reportage of the harshness of the continent. In 1878, Leon Gambetta who was a French diplomat predicted the effects of Henry Morton Stanley’s journeys through Africa and outlined the imperialist goals behind the geographical expeditions: “Not

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only have you opened up a new continent to our view, but you have given influence to scientific and philanthropic enterprises which will have its effects on the progress of the world” (Greely 1984: 364). The explorers’ lack of understanding of the African terrain, cultures, and religion manifested in their reportage, which fed into the earlier distortions and myths about “Darkest Africa.” In their encounters with the natives, most of the explorers depicted the African natives in derogatory ways. Describing his expeditions through the Congo basin and encounters with the natives, Henry Morton Stanley outlined the barbarity and savagery of the people who inhabit the place, and the viciousness of the terrain: “The scattered villages are filled with barbarous and hostile tribes . . . poisoned skewers, covered with green leaves, were placed in the paths and twice (our) party was attacked” (Greely 1894: 367). Henry Morton Stanley and other explorers, including Mary Kingsley and Richard Burton, constantly referred to the native Africans who resisted their activities with derogatory labels using such constructs as “savages” and “cannibals” to depict their humanity and behavior because the African “tribes” did not grant their wishes of easy passage. Stanley described a situation where the native African proved to be resistant this way: Unlike the Luavala villagers, they did not wait to be addressed, but as soon as they came within fifty or sixty yards, they shot out their spears, crying meat! Bo-bo-bo-bo, Bo-bo-bo-bo o! . . . Undoubtedly these must be relatives of the terrible, Bo-bo’s above, we thought, as with one mind we rose to respond to this rabid man-eating tribe. . . Why were human beings who regarded me and my friends only in the light of meat? Meat! We? . . . Meat! Ah! We shall have meat today. (Stanley 1899: 157)

Mary Kingsley, another famous and formidable English woman explorer, ethnographer, and biologist, portrayed the Akele community of Gabon as “savages” and “cannibals” that resisted all forms of civilization introduced by the European explorers to bring progress to the African community. In her 1897 memoir (see Kingsley 2003), Kingsley noted that the Akeles were dangerous and had the urge to feed on the European “other.” She recounted her disdain for and fear of the Akele people of Gabon in her reportage. Akele tribe, a powerful, savage and difficult a lot to deal with, and just in the same condition, as far as I can learn, as they were when Du Chaillu made his wonderful journeys among them. (Kingsley 1897: 41 published in 2003 by Greenwoods Traders ) I was too frightened to go into the forest that afternoon because on the previous afternoon, I had been stalked as a wild beast by a cannibal sav-

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age and I am nervous. Besides, and above all, it is quite impossible to see other people, even if they are only black savages gliding about in canoes. (Kingsley 1897: 59)

Such depictions of African communities only soaked the psyche of the Westerners in ideas about the dangers of black communities. Other earlier accounts by supposed notable man and cosmopolitan Richard Burton portrayed the Fan ethnic group that lived along the Ogowe and Rembwe rivers in Gabon as having cannibalistic predilections (Greely 1894). Historical accounts of the Europeans portrayed the Fan ethnic group as notorious for their hostility to outsiders, secretive in their social habits and feeding regimes (because they were cannibals), and tended toward violence when surprised by visitors. Whether this tale is accurate or not is one thing but Europeans who categorize all African societies as homogeneous, stuck to such portrayals to extrapolate the violent nature of African tribes. These kinds of distortions fed into the narrative that those African societies (and by extension, black people) were hostile, violent, and dangerous. The explorers presented the African continent as enormous uncharted territory, hostile disease environments, and full of aggressive native tribes (Howell 2014: 59). In London, for instance, the British Geographical Society provided a display that portrayed the “heart of savage Africa,” which included a “native hut, an African primeval forest and village scene, complete with two slave boys” (Driver 1991: 140). This portrayal of Africa as “dark” encouraged the Europeans to test their own strength in taking control over the entire continent. Their approach to geographical explorations in many ways embodied the cultural style of the new imperialism that exercised strength and resilience and was bold, brash, and uncompromising (Driver 1991; Howell 2014). Nineteenth-century European explorers were interested in gold, ivory, and the geographical mysteries of Africa. Like the fifteenthcentury European slave traders, the explorers were never interested in the humanity of Africans. These Europeans helped popularize the myths and fantasies about Africa and its people. They created “imaginative geographies” that imprinted in the mindset of Europeans and Americans the fantasies and mysteries of the African “other.” Even revered Christians and scholars became entrenched in the distortions of the African tribe and Africa. It is amazing that someone like David Livingstone, who was considered to be a more generous European who saw the humanity of Africans, could also perpetuate the negative distortions. Livingstone’s own words echo the views of European’s at-

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titudes toward Africans: “We come among them as members of a superior race and servants of a government that desires to elevate the more degraded portions of the human family. We are adherents of a benign holier religion and may by consistent conduct and wise and patient efforts become the harbingers of peace . . . to a downtrodden race” (Davidson 1984). As to whether one should weigh Livingstone’s statement within the context of his time is something I will leave for historians to determine. One interesting thing is that on his deathbed, David Livingstone had two close pals Susi and Chuma who attended to him. Basil Davidson notes that because of Europeans’ dispositions toward Africans, European historians treated Susi and Chuma’s generous act as a footnote. Many in Western societies continue to celebrate someone like Henry Morton Stanley as a harbinger of African civilization. The Scientific American portrays Henry Morton Stanley, (probably the most controversial explorer of Africa) as someone who “knew Africa more than the Africans know of Africa.” Such depictions of Stanley were the basis of Adolphus Greely’s argument that Stanley deserved the title “Stanley Africanus” because of his supposed deeper and extensive knowledge about the African terrain and cultures (Greely 1894: 350). Stanley employed “imaginative geography” to portray the mysteries of Africa. In his 1875 account, he described the mysteriousness of the entirety of Central Africa, which comprises modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In his writing, Stanley portrayed Central Africa as a primeval place, untouched by history. “The entire equatorial Africa is an unknown country, from which not even the slightest information has passed to the outer world . . . it is wrapped in mysterious darkness, and the great superstition of the inhabitants has surrounded it with horrible imaginations (Scientific Americana 1885: 19). In describing the Bambenga, Bambuti, and Batwa ethnic groups of Congo (Europeans later labeled them with the derogatory term “pygmies” because they were generally not as tall as other groups in Central Africa), Stanley ridiculed these groups and portrayed them in derogatory ways: “vicious dwarfs striped like the zebras, living on elephants, and using poisoned arrows.” (Scientific Americana 1885: 19). Stanley’s negative portrayal of the pygmies fed into the narrative about the “dark” continent and the mysteries of its people. The explorers calculated their reportage about the African continent, its terrain, and the African people to show the hazards that European-Americans must encounter to unlock the mysteries of the continent. Stanley portrayed some of the ethnic people in Congo as mostly cannibals even though

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he viewed some as partially civilized (Scientific Americana 1885: 19). Scientific Americana accurately points out that Henry Morton Stanley used geography to promote economics and imperialism. Stanley noted, “The study of geography ought to lead to something higher than collecting maps and books of travel and afterwards shelving them as of no further use” (Driver 1991: 138). He also noted that through these explorations, Europe could colonize Africa and promote trade and commerce. Stanley’s negative depictions and distortions about the Congo was the basis for the harsh treatment of the people in Central Africa by King Leopold II after the partition of Africa in 1885. European government officials also portrayed Africa negatively as a place of diseases and death because of the lore, and anecdotal and unsubstantiated reports. Richard Burton, for instance, provided images of miasma, rot, and putrefactions to fabricate and portray portions of Africa’s low-lying landscape as disease-ridden but higher elevations as healthy (Howell 2014). When Vice Admiral Sir John Hay addressed the House of Commons on 17 June 1864 after the death of his brother in Gold Coast (Ghana), the emotionally charged soldier accused the British imperial government of sending British troops to perish of fever, thirst, and want of shelter on the burning plains and fetid swamps of West Africa (McIntyre 1967, cited by Howell 2014: 52). The depiction, based on the criticism of a section of the British subjects to the imperial government to halt colonial expansion in West Africa, painted a picture suggesting that the region was a graveyard and a hopelessly fatal environment for European subjects. The British media seized on these hyped reports and showed images of Victorian discourse comprised of lonely, dying soldiers and colonists, exposed to danger by the parent nation, which fed into the narratives about the dangers of the West African region. Some European explorers (including doctors and scientists) in the 1850s and 1860s believed that climate influences such as rotten vegetation, dampness, or merciless heat caused tropical illnesses. The high mortality rates in West Africa made Europeans label the region the “White Man’s Grave” (Howell 2014). In order to explain their repeated illnesses and justify their continued presence in Africa, mid-nineteenthcentury travel writers including Morton Stanley and Richard Burton creatively and selectively combined medical, racial, and political rhetoric in ways that enhanced their own narrative authority (Howell 2014). Richard Burton, for instance, pushed for segregation of races to guarantee imperial success. Jessica Howell (2014) points out that in Central Africa, Burton used vivid sensory details and detailed first-

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person descriptions of illness in order to bolster his own heroic persona. Similarly, in West Africa, Burton zoomed out to create hygienic maps, allowing space for ongoing white settlement at higher African elevations. Reading such accounts, one can understand why the Basel missionaries to Ghana moved from the Osu coastal plains and settled on the mountain ranges in Akwapim. With this hygienic science, Richard Burton used “environmental pathology” to justify the separation of races and presented “‘uncivilized’ Blacks as suited to their lowlying, dank settlements because they cannot know otherwise” (Howell 2014: 61). Western explorers like Burton and Stanley played paradoxical roles by using fear-inspiring images of climate and also encouraging European settlement in West Africa. Burton recommended that Europeans use geophysical and cultural separation of whites from blacks when settling in Africa. His framework influenced urban and suburban geography and settlement patterns globally. He worked hard to present a stereotype that inspired “ghettoization” and “kept blacks in their place.” In his Wanderings in West Africa, Burton associated blacks with lower elevations and pointed out that: “Only an inferior person remains in a poor location, because he lacks the refinement and sensitivity needed to ‘sense’ an unhealthy area and lacks the motivation to leave it” (Howell 2014: 67). Most of these explorers positioned themselves as “the authority” in matters of African cultures and tribal groups. They lumped the diverse African ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups together as homogeneous, culturally monolithic, uncivilized, and without history until the white European explorer and Christian emerged on the scene to construct their history. Many of these Europeans also invented the anthropological and geographical construct of “discoveries,” which has colonizing and imperialistic flavor, to strategically and intentionally consolidate their right to any foreign land they encountered in their exploration exercises whether that land was inhabited and populated by indigenous groups or not. The construct of “discoveries” signifies power, trusteeship, and ownership. Empires and kingdoms with different levels of development existed in Africa centuries before Europeans formally established trading posts and eventual colonies on the continent. Empires such as Ghana, Songhai, Mali, as well as the kingdoms of Benin, Sokoto, and Asante, among others, existed with elaborate social arrangements and developments. However, European explorers presented African societies in their reportage as if these societies had not experienced any levels of political, cultural, social, and economic developments.

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Christian Missions, European Colonizers, and Africa’s Religion and Social Arrangements Christian missionaries working among African societies in the nineteenth century used their field reports, lore, tales, and writings to popularize the myth of “Darkest Africa.” Nineteenth-century European Christian missions worked hand in hand with colonial powers that followed them to promote an agenda to develop Africa using the “3Cs”: Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization. These missionaries of the nineteenth century were ethnocentric and saw cultural practices outside the European cultural parameters as inferior and primitive. This proved to be a major problem in the eyes of European Christians since they portrayed African religions as “paganistic” and viewed their own divine right to convert individuals on this “heathen” continent. Most of the early European Christian missionaries worked together with the explorers and paved the way for European colonization of African societies. They distorted all forms of African religions and portrayed them as beliefs that thrive on superstition. They also branded African health care systems as witchcraft and characterized healers as witchdoctors. Similarly, they viewed land use in African societies as unplanned, disorderly, or irrational. Even though there were similarities between European and African systems, Europeans downplayed such African systems that were like those in Europe. For example, some African religions were similar to Christianity in being monotheistic. The Akan concept of Onyame, the Yoruba concept of Olorun and the Igbo concept of Chi all portray a single God who is the Supreme Being and yet European missionaries who worked among these African ethnic groups viewed the God of these groups as an alien “god.” In the same vein, Europeans used herbal medicines as in Africa, but did not see any similarity between European herbal medicine and African herbal medicine (Frontani 2015). From the onset, European colonizers demonstrated their agenda to push commerce and to exploit African societies. With their zeal for the commercial and “civilizing” project at hand, colonial powers invented the term “development” to maintain momentum by drawing in other societies. Rooted in seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinking, development, founded on the ideas of progress, linear history, and growth, became the dominant way of thinking about human societies. Gilbert Rist points out that with this new way of thinking, European Christian and colonizing forces presented three important points upon which they measured and treated societies they encountered: “History is the same as progress; all nations travel the same road; and all soci-

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eties do not advance at the same speed as Western society. Thus, colonization became possible as a means by which to aid more ‘backward’ societies along the road to what the West had already achieved” (Rist 2009, cited in Frontani 2015: 160). European colonizers promoted their perceived “development” from the reference point of European norms, values, and practices because in their estimation, Africans were infants, “backward,” and “primitive” in development, and even retrogressing because societies on the continent were not organized in the way European societies were organized. Colonial forces promoted the idea of “development” on the premise that Africans were naïve and ignorant. The utterances of colonists like Thomas Buxton, Lord Lugard, and Cecil Rhodes provide glimpses of the mindsets of colonists and ways such mindsets translated to their treatment of Africans (see Bratton et al. 1991; Buxton 1976; Fetter 1979; Rhodes 1877). Those statements could also be born out of the general frustration sometimes expressed by Europeans as indigenous Africans resisted their incursion. In his 1926 essay, Dual Mandate Lord Lugard the colonial administrator of Nigeria portrayed Africans this way: In character and temperament the typical African . . . is [a] happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight, naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity . . . his mind is far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals’ placidity . . . he lacks the power of organization, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business. (Bratton et al. 1991: 187)

The British-born South African colonist Cecil Rhodes wrote similar things to justify colonization, imperialism, and subjugation: I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. (Rhodes 1877)

Rhodes’s brash, blunt demeanor became the model for later colonists that saw Africans as infants and primitives who do not deserve any respect. In his 1936 publication justifying why US philanthropy must extend the Jeanes teacher training program to rural Kenya and southern Africa T. G. Benson, referred to Europeans as “advanced and Africans as backward races.” He noted that in the contact between Europe

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(advanced race) and African societies (backward race) four things are bound to happen: (1) the weaker race dies out; (2) is absorbed into the stronger (3) or they commingle and become something different from what was before; (4) they dwell together unmixed, each preserving its character. Benson intimated that the European colonizer’s ideal is to ensure the achievement of the fourth option (Benson 1936: 419). The push for Western-type education (whether Christian education or colonial education) was a calculated strategy to reconfigure the mental development of the African child and engrain European epistemologies in the African child. As Benson also noted, “the school takes on new meaning”: “It bears with it the whole idea of the enlightening of young and old, the whole community . . . homes, health, agriculture, handiness, recreation, religion, all are centered there” (Benson 1936: 420). Heidi Frontani points out that the Global South including many African societies have bought into the European concept of “development” to create the mindset about the region’s underdevelopment and the need to participate in the development process. She argues that after several years of work on development not much has changed and each failure in the development process leads to another attempt. Several African societies have come to embrace the Western invention of “development” as a “religion” and “ritual.” A plethora of recent literature has criticized the conceptualization of “development” noting that development in comparative and international contexts has become too associated with narrow economic interpretations that frequently view culture as insignificant and an obstacle to change (D. Adams 2001). European Christians and colonizers also used education as a tool to thwart development in Africa (Rodney 1988). Missionary and colonial education implemented the colonial language medium of instruction with the goal to disorganize the thinking process of the African children, and reconfigure the African child’s psyche in ways that have had far-reaching implications. Some scholars argue that the use of a borrowed language as a medium of instruction affects the psyche of colonized people and leads to underdevelopment (see Brock-Utne 2000; Brock-Utne and Holmarsdottir 2004; Mfum-Mensah 2005).

Earlier Distortions about Africa in the Name of Research and Science Western scholars, scientists, and researchers (Europeans and Americans) played prominent roles in using science and research to distort African societies and construct Africans and blacks as racially infe-

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rior (Benson 1936). The European grand agenda to use the African continent for scientific study stemmed from Europe’s categorization of Africa as the “Dark Continent” during its formal encounters. This categorization created in Europe a thirst to decode the mysteries of the “Dark Continent.” Geographical explorations provided an even greater impetus and justification for scholars to view the African continent and its people as a space and concept to study. The French statesman Leon Gambetta articulated such a view in 1878 when he commended the journeys of Henry Morton Stanley by noting: “Not only have you opened up a new continent for our view, but you have given influence to scientific and philanthropic enterprises, which will have its effects on the progress of the world” (Greely 1894: 364). European scholars seized on imaginative geography to distort the continent and its societies. In the nineteenth century, geographical knowledge came to be widely regarded as one of the tools of empire building, enabling territories to be evaluated, boundaries drawn, wars fought, and peoples conquered (Driver 1991). The Royal Geographical Society in England, for instance, became an arm of the British government, represented British expansionism, and became the arena where global forces like geographers and explorers converged and debated the geographical mysteries of African terrain, rivers, mountains, and forests, and where government officials discussed British imperial policies. The society became the repository of information for a range of government departments. Western scholars became obsessed with studying not just the terrain of the African continent but also the origins of African societies. In the mid-Victorian era, discussions about how people acclimatize became an important project for geographers and anthropologists who wanted to solve the problem of how Europeans could survive the harsh diseases on the African continent. These scholars’ goal was to give credence to the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of Africans. Monogenists assumed that all humans came from a common human ancestor and that acclimatization was the result of evolution. This group explained that humans might have changed over time because of geographical conditions and factors (Howell 2014; Keim and Somerville 2018). These theorists believe that Africans have degenerated and needed a great deal of help to return to the level of Europeans, if such a return was even possible. Polygenists, on the other hand, imagined multiple centers of origin for different races and therefore assumed that a given race’s land of origin was its only natural habitat. Polygenism lent itself easily to racism through the oppressive gestures of labeling another race as a discrete species inevitably lower than

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one’s own (Howell 2014; Keim and Somerville 2018). Polygenist ideologies that saw the African continent through the eyes of Europeans as a place of harsh environments and full of diseases, and its peoples of inferior race, bolstered European racism of the era. This led to European and American mistreatment of Africans and people of African descent from that era onward. The polygenists were mostly men who used the polygene ideology to justify their right and the appropriateness of traveling and settling in foreign, climatologically hostile lands and colonize the African territories. European scholars used their established epistemologies to influence presentations about Africa and thereby obstruct the scientific view of African cultures, including their histories. Paola Ivanov (2002) points out that the interpretation of facts in the scholarly literature is marked by unexpressed cultural axioms, which fulfill certain sociopolitical functions. Even Shakespeare in The Tempest portrayed Caliban as a complicated black character, which was the justification for Prospero, Trinculo, and Stephano to enslave him. The white characters dehumanized Caliban because he represents the black magic of his mother and appears bad, especially when judged by conventional “civilized” standards. With one big brushstroke, the Europeans cast Africans as monolithic in their attitudes and exhibited unitary “behavior” that was superstitious, savage, and determined by primordial drives. European anthropologists and ethnographers studied Africa and scrutinize Africans in social laboratories. They employed the same old construct of “primitivity” to portray Africans as unintelligent “children” that needed direction in the “development” process. Many of these Western scholars also suggested that Europe and (later America) direct and steer Africans from primitivity to civilization (Benson 1936; Hershey and Artime 2014). Joseph Conrad in his writing of Heart of Darkness and Andre Gide’s journals in the late 1920s portrayed Africa as “the other side of hell” (Parmer 2012: 155). While Conrad attempted to show little difference between the supposed (Europeans) “civilized people” and (non-European “other”) “savages,” based on his voyages in the Congo Free State, he nonetheless mischaracterized Africans and painted an image that dehumanized Africans and advanced the views about the “otherness” of African societies. T. G Benson, a US educationist who was one of the architects of the Jeanes school ideology in eastern and southern Africa, depicted the African as an individual who “does not look closely into things . . . he loves to accept laws and rules to be followed blindly . . . such an attitude we have to face carefully, and sanely” (Benson 1936: 420). Such views shaped Western narratives about Africa in education curricula in European and US school systems.

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, European scholars and US philanthropists began to systematically study the education of “primitive” peoples in SSA and “Negros” in the United States. In the United States, the study was viewed as part of a broader initiative to promote race relations. Anson Phelps Stokes established The Phelps Stokes Fund in 1911 to provide financial support for white scholars and researchers at higher educational institutions in the United States to “study the Negro.” The Phelps Stokes Fund broadened its race relations initiative to include tropical Africa. The Phelps Stokes Fund constituted the Phelps Stokes Commission to embark on an educational expedition in 1920 and 1923–24 to understand the “primitive” Africans and to package education suited for their adjustment in their colonized environment. In Europe, the obsession to understand “primitive” peoples in tropical Africa led to the creation of the Colonial Department at The University of London’s Institute of Education in 1927 (Little 2004: 6). This department later evolved to become the School of Lifelong Education and International Development (LEID) at the Institute. At these institutions and many others that later pursued anthropological and sociological studies on Africa, researchers devoted their time and resources to study black Africans, sometimes misrepresenting and mischaracterizing them. Through these studies, European and US scholars sometimes homogenized the diverse African societies as having unified behavioral characteristics and animalistic tendencies. Publications of these studies became another important basis for the dirty gossip about Africans and blacks in the global community. Okot p’Bitek described his experience studying with professors and scholars in the Anthropology Department at Oxford University in the 1960s. He noted that during his first year at Oxford University, The teacher kept referring to Africans or non-Western peoples as barbarians, savages, primitives, tribes etc. I protested; but to no avail. All the professors and lectures in the Institute, and those who came from outside to read papers, spoke the same insulting language. In the institute Library, I detested to see such titles of books and articles in the learned journals as Primitive Culture, Primitive Religion, The Savage Mind, Primitive Government, The Position of Women in Savage Societies, Institution of Primitive Societies, Primitive Song, Sex and Repression in Savage Societies, Primitive Mentality, and so on. (p’Bitek 2011: 1)

The experiences that Okot p’Bitek narrated here are not exceptions. Western scholars have pursued distortions about African societies and mischaracterized African people in the name of science and research into the familiar colonial narratives.

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Philanthropic Initiatives and Reification of African Societies The ideological stance of US philanthropic entities shaped their push for “adapted education” in the British Colonial Empire in Africa and creation of university programs to promote Western dirty gossip. US philanthropic entities provided grants to universities to create Social Anthropology and African Studies programs in the United States to pursue research on Africans. The philanthropic entities’ hesitation to provide funding to African American scholars who pursued similar research agendas explains the rationale for why US philanthropic support possibly entailed motivations beyond cultural production. The Rockefeller Foundation provided financial support to the London School of Economics and International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) to support the development of Social Anthropology. The organization also helped to create a thriving Departments of Anthropology in these institutions, which linked the natural and the social sciences through the application of subjects like Anthropology, Biology, Psychology, and Physiology to social problems. The agenda of the Social Anthropology programs included utilizing the methods of social science to study “primitive” life and customs in colonial settings and understanding problems of “racial contact” (Fisher 1986). Social Anthropology scholarship saw African societies as a laboratory where white European Africanist researchers studied, dissected, and theorized African cultures and societies. Aspects of African economies, land tenure, primitive cultures, among other areas became the focus of researchers and another phase of perpetuating the negative narratives about Africa. Prior to World War II, African American scholars focused on African Studies as a way to disprove popular myths about Africa and Africans that projected racist ideas about black inferiority. African Americans viewed the study of Africa not as an academic affair but as the only means by which all peoples of African descent could become accepted members of the human race (Gernshenhorn 2009). Philanthropic entities worked to control the narratives about Africa and people of African descent in the United States. US foundations in the 1950s clung onto the idea of Africa being backward, barbaric, violent, and stagnant needing help as the continent “awakened” from its long “sleep” and became “restless” and self-conscious and credited colonialism as the source of the African “dawn” (Parmer 2012: 154). US philanthropic leader Alan Pifer in his own words mischaracterized African societies. Before visiting Africa, Alan Pifer, President of Carnegie Corporation, commented to the trustees that “I assume the people would be very

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much alike and the terrain an endless jungle” (Parmer 2012: 154). Pifer lamented the lack of known facts about Africa and wanted to generate a greater knowledge base of its problems and needs as a first step toward investing in the continent. US philanthropic entities entertained the general view that Africa was deplorable and Western aid agents were the “saviors” who could modernize and civilize the continent. This mindset already obscured the potential of the region. In the 1950s, US philanthropists constructed Africa as a romanticized laboratory to be researched by notable scholars in prestigious universities in the Western world. Arnold Rivkin, the veritable scholar for the African development research center at the Massachusetts Institution of Technology portrayed Africa as the “lost frontier” to conquer and to gain control of during one of his Carnegie-funded expeditions to Madagascar, which aimed to secure the country for the United States strategic stockpile of raw materials as part of the Marshall Plan (Parmer 2012). Rivkin depicted Malagasies as “backward peoples” “struggling” toward “modernity” and “development.” Such utterances bore the hallmarks of Western superiority (Parmer 2012). The popular ideology in the 1950s and 1960s remained the same narrative of Africans being monolithic and tribal in their thinking and mindset. During the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, politicians and development entities in the United States entertained the fear and skepticism that Africans’ supposedly monolithic and tribal mindset may sway newly independent nations to side with communist nations. The comments by Alan Pifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation summarizes it very well: As a geographical area four times the size of the US producing minerals and primary agricultural products of great importance to America and (2) as the home of nearly 200 million people, most of them colored, who, unless we are very careful, may take sides against the West . . . We are going, therefore, to need every bit of expert knowledge we can possibly muster about all parts of the African continent. (Parmer 2012: 155)

In 1958, American philanthropic entities led by the Carnegie Corporation organized a meeting, which centered on development of higher education and related issues in West Africa. These philanthropic organizations did not invite or involve any Africans. The explanation the Carnegie Corporation gave was that it was commonly felt in US and British circles that Africans had not yet become “sophisticated” in this area, they were inexperienced, and their identification of needs might be either uninformed or politically biased or both (Parmar 2012: 156). During the 1950s and 1960s, US philanthropic foundations and US universities used African societies as a laboratory to pursue more in-

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vestigations. US philanthropic entities provided massive funding to US universities like Columbia, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, Chicago University, Boston University, Indiana University, Wisconsin University, and Michigan University among other institutions to develop African Studies programs or pursue research to help understand Africa’s historical, social, cultural, economic developmental mystery (Parmer 2012). Between 1965 and 1969, research produced on Africa exceeded 1,422 texts and spanned topics of development problems such as urban planning, land economics, development administration, demography, political stability, and national integration. Inderjeet Parmar (2012: 159) notes that the African past was being “reconstructed” as “essential for understanding ‘contemporary’ Africa.” The scholarly focus on Africa provided more impetus for US and other international scholars to view Africa’s “otherness.” European and US scholars researched Africa in the twentieth century more than they did any other continent. The US philanthropic entities provided support for major white institutions to develop and operate programs focusing on African Studies (Parmer 2012). Such discrimination and marginalization translated into contemporary marginalization of African scholars in much of the development work in the sub-Saharan African region. It is no surprise that European and US scholars are the ones mostly recruited to oversee many of the programs implemented by multilateral and aid agencies in SSA even though there are equally qualified African scholars who could be enlisted to do such work. Since time immemorial, the goal has always been about using white development workers as the “expert missionaries” of development work in the region.

Concluding Thoughts Africa’s relationship with Europe (and later the United States) skewed in favor of Western development “saviors.” European and US forces became strategic in their interactions and dealings with African societies. They distorted and mischaracterized Africans and created a narrative that positioned African societies in a subordinated status. Twentieth-century American philanthropic entities carried on the tradition of infantilizing Africans and positioned themselves as trustees of African issues in the 1950s and 1960s, in much the same way European powers colonized Africa in the late nineteenth century. Africans are actively engaged in global geopolitical discourse. What is happening on the continent is not all bad news. As one traverses the regions of

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East, West, Central, and Southern Africa, one realizes the strong and growing middle class in cities like Nairobi, Kigali, Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Lusaka, and others like Windhoek, Luanda, and Maputo among many cities. Much of the “dirty gossip” the global community hears about sub-Saharan Africa is all about crisis and underdevelopment. Perhaps we need writers, scholars, and actors who will provide a balanced story that sets both the tales about the struggles and challenges alongside the resilience and successes happening in Africa to demystify “Africa.”

PA RT I I

¨´ EF FE C T S O F D I S TORT I ON S O N E D U C AT I ON A N D DEV E L O PM E N T D I S C OU R SE IN S U B - S A H A R A N AF R I C A

CHAPTER 4

Education and Social Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Stratification is “the differential ranking of human individuals who compose a given social system and their treatment as superior and inferior relative to one another in certain socially important respects” (Parsons 1964: 69). Theorizing the forms of social stratification in precolonial African societies is complicated and challenging because sub-Saharan African societies are diverse and complex. Stratification was part of the social arrangements of traditional African societies long before Europeans emerged on the African continent (Adebayo 2007; Beswick 2004; Blakemore and Cooksey 1981; Bond 1982; Chodak 1973; Herring 1973; Jackson 1973). The plural and heterogeneous nature of traditional African societies makes discussions about social stratification a complicated endeavor. Traditional African societies were organized along the lines of ethnic grouping, clanship, social standing, cultural groups, ability, age, education, sex, access to land and landownership, access to cattle or animal herds among other things (Adebayo 2007; Chodak 1973; Jackson 1973). The nature of stratifications could be extreme and opposite from others as one examines the different African societies. Akanmu Adebayo (2007) outlines the hierarchical structures of West African societies of Yoruba and Akan and notes that these two societies had hierarchies that were based on age differentials as well as rulers and the ruled. He provides examples of a specific social order of these societies that included (1) kings and princes, (2) chiefs and nobles, (3) commoners or freeborn, and (4) slaves, servants, and other people under various forms of involuntary servitude. He notes that these four categories, regrouped loosely into two divisions, represented the “upper” and “lower” classes respectively. Adebayo notes that in the case of Akan of Ghana, stratification ensured little social

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distance between the ruler and the ruled as the rulers were accessible to their subjects. It was also obvious that membership of the “upper” and “lower” classes was by ascription while some degree of mobility was also allowed. From the inception of the kingdom through the nineteenth century, there was no intervening “middle” class between the upper class and the lower classes. There was also no middle class between rulers and the subjects as was the case in Western Europe. By the twentieth century, these two societies had developed new forms of hierarchies based on a new elite due to their contacts with Europeans. Max Gluckman also notes that in traditional African societies: Men quarrel over many things—cattle, land, women, prestige, indeed over accidents . . . or if men don’t quarrel, they have differences in opinion, about the rights and wrongs of contracts, and these differences have to be settled by some rule other than that of brute force, if social relations are to endure. Often difficulties in dispute arise not over what is the appropriate legal or moral rule, but over how the rule applies in particular circumstances. (Gluckman 1963 cited by Chodak 1973: 402)

Elaborate hierarchies existed in some traditional African societies and sometimes in some of these societies, people resisted their rulers. One example of people resisting their rulers was the case of Hausa societies of Sokoto where there existed the complex centrifugal and centripetal social arrangements among pluralistic forces expressing the diversity of interests composing the society (Chodak 1973). Some centralized and non-centralized societies also maintained caste social arrangements. For instance, non-centralized societies such as the Tutsi, Hima, and Hutu of Rwanda, the Wolof and Toucouler in Senegal, and the Marghi of Western Sudan maintained strict caste systems. Similarly, centralized societies like the Zulu, Ngwato, the Memba, Asante Kingdom of Ghana, Swazi of Swaziland, Buganda of Uganda, and Hausa and Oyo Kingdoms of Nigeria had society-wide caste systems (see Jackson 1973; Lemarchand 1966; Smythe 1958). Such societies used group stratification to ensure the stability of their societies. Some of the societies also ranked people as either free men or slaves in addition to other layers of stratification. Acephalous societies including the Dinka and Nuer of South Sudan, the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria, the Somalis, Maasai of Kenya, the Uyombe of Zambia, and the Kokomba and Tallensi of Ghana were not highly stratified for the most part. Their social structures were more diffused, egalitarian, and fluid and sometimes people’s skills and abilities provided pathways for them to move through social ranks and acquire honor and dignity. However, as some of these nations acquired ele-

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ments of state culture and evolved to become highly structured; they institutionalized stratification. Stephanie Beswick intimates that among the Dinka of Southern Sudan “chiefly clans” were recognized as having more religious and political rights than “common clans.” She notes that the Dinka ethnic group employed myths, histories, and ancestral heritage to support its societal stratification (Beswick 2004). Among the Acholi of northern Uganda (which was also an egalitarian society), hierarchies served two purposes. First, it was a social arrangement for incorporating other tribal groups into the state. The presence of a central organ or hierarchy eased the process of incorporating new groups into the society. Second, the emergence of hierarchy of “proto-classes” with one man standing above the people symbolized their unity as a corporate group. In this society, stratification included the rwot (king) and his royal clan, aristocratic clans, clans that provided hereditary advisors for the rwot, and commoner clans (Herring 1973: 503). Ralph Herring notes that this social and political hierarchy was an important part of Acholi society, but it was not a true class. The hierarchy did not come with a congruent hierarchy of wealth. Even though some leaders received more cattle and foodstuffs than the average person did because of their position in society, they nonetheless had to redistribute the resources or lose their position. The type of “hierarchical” social arrangement among the Acholi discouraged the accumulation of wealth. Most precolonial African economies were subsistent and household-based economies (this was the case for the most part in centralized societies also), and bartering was an important process for the exchange of goods. Therefore, group stratification did not provide the kind of economic advantages witnessed by traditional African societies in the aftermath of colonialism. Exchange of services was mostly a community voluntary-based initiative. However, this does not mean that the subsistent economies did not create stratification since among the Uyombe of Zambia, stratification was largely based on subsistence activities related to land, labor, and produce and incumbency of territorial posts in the tributary state (Bond 1982). The territorial structure in Uyombe society reflected the system of social stratification and hierarchy where the chief and the heads of the royal branches were at the top followed by the village headmen, heads of domestic clusters, and the common folks in descending order. Those at the top of the hierarchy of this socially stratified society may have benefitted economically. George Bond (1982) notes that the wealthiest trader in Uyombe society was the chief because of his easy access to Arab traders.

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Some centralized societies in traditional Africa developed economies that promoted trade and exchange of goods and services with other centralized and non-centralized societies. Therefore, it would be wrong to assume that group stratification in traditional Africa accorded few advantages to some groups. The presence of stratification ensured social, political, and economic advantages in some societies. Whether centralized or acephalous societies, the nature of economies in precolonial African societies made it practically impossible to institute any sophisticated economic marginalization until Europeans introduced mercantilism, a colonial capitalistic economy, productive processes, and the technological skills to shore up complex economic processes. These new systems helped reconfigure African societies. Indigenous African societies on the east coast of Africa witnessed the development of strong hierarchical structures with the emergence of Arabs who came to dominate the indigenous Africans physically and ideologically and established the long-term social order. Some precolonial African societies used traditional education to stratify and create hierarchies in their societies. Special formal forms of education in societies like the Akan of Ghana, Poro, Sande, and Bondo of Liberia, Kamajors and Due of Sierra Leone, and Ubutwa of Eastern Shaba Zambia provided elaborate specialization where admittance into the institution and the secrecy of specialized knowledge became the basis of high status in a stratified society. Among the Poro, Sande/Bondo, and Ubutwa, secrecy of knowledge was a “property” acquired by those who enrolled in the secret society because it provided them the advantage of high social status (Fanthorpe 2007; Murphy 1980; Musambachime 1994). It is important to point out that when the European forces encountered African societies, in some situations, they used the social structures in place to their advantage to reconfigure and remold the societies. In the words of Henry Morton Stanley, the objective of European colonialism and imperialism was to “establish civilized settlements with the intention of subduing the region by peaceful ways and to remold it into harmony with modern relief party” (Greely 1894: 336). The next section outlines how European forces employed Western forms of education to institutionalize stratification.

Western Education and “Institutionalized” Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa The current economic, social, and political stratification that characterizes diverse social groups in sub-Saharan African societies along the

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lines of race, economic status, ethnicity, tribal group, ability, sex, religion, and geographical settlement were part of the European strategic reconfiguration of African societies. European forces employed Western forms of education as a tool to stratify African societies. While the Portuguese traders were the first to create the “castle schools” at the Elmina Castle, successive European traders established such schools in many of the castles and forts they used as trade posts. The creation of some of these schools were the result of the promiscuous activities of some of the early European traders. One of the many encounters of the European traders with native Africans was their engagement in sexual activities with local African women, some of whom were slaves the European slave traders held at their castles awaiting shipment to the Americas. Through their sexual activities, the Europeans sired biracial children or mulattos. Despite the promiscuous activities of these European traders, at least they thought it useful to educate their offspring, and therefore they established castle schools. A visit to Cape Coast and Elmina Castles in Ghana provides a glimpse of the beginning of the castle schools in modern-day Ghana. In the early nineteenth century, Christian missionaries introduced mission schools to proselytize African children. These schools aimed to educate Africans, many of whom later became the arms of the Christian proselytizing agenda. The introduction of Western education became a watershed moment because it created new forms of social stratification, which institutionalized social, economic, and political stratification in colonial territories in Africa. It is telling how Europeans used education to introduce new dimensions of social stratification. Europeans had a grand agenda to reconfigure and repackage social structures in African societies. While European Christian proselytization was one form of reconfiguring African societies, colonialism offered them the needed opportunity and impetus. During the colonial era, the European Christian missions and colonial administration worked together to strengthen existing Christian mission schools and establish colonial schools in some regions where schools did not exist. Their aim was to reconfigure sub-Saharan African societies to consolidate cultural/religious, economic, and political control. There were underlying political reasons for regions where the European colonial forces deliberately did not settle immediately. The introduction of Western forms of education in traditional African societies was more than the mere transmission of European cultural values and ideologies. Western education served also to position African societies in subordinated statuses in colonized territories. In the words of Lisbon’s Patriarch Cardinal Cerejeria, establishing schools was essential in Por-

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tuguese colonies to stratify and create hierarchies in colonial Africa where the colonizer was at the top of the hierarchy. “We need schools in Africa, but schools in which we show the native the way to the dignity of man and the glory of the Nation that protects him . . . We want to teach the natives to write, to read and to count but not to make them doctors” (cited in Ferreira 1974: 26). Western forms of education introduced new forms of social structures based on peoples’ levels of schooling rather than the “traditional social order” that existed and served as the mode of stratification in African societies. Those Africans who participated in the European schooling process had access to colonial economic power and privilege and they in turn transferred their economic power, privilege, and prestige to their own children, especially their sons (Bond 1982; Cubbins 1991; Mfum-Mensah 2017a). The new forms of group differences, which the European Christian missions and colonial administrators created through Western forms of education, helped institutionalize and perpetuate the economic, social, and political marginalization and alienation of some groups. This has necessitated that postcolonial governments implement affirmative strategies to offset the cumulative effects of the marginalization of some groups. Adebayo (2007) outlines in his description of the hierarchical structures in Yorubaland and Akan that the idea of the “middle” class became a reality when Africans encountered Europeans. One should understand that the introduction of Western formal education and a cash economy added new social classes (and sometimes attempted to undermine the existing social structures) but did not change the social structures in place in African societies. The interactions between Europeans and Africans who lived on the coast of Ghana and Nigeria helped many of these Africans to participate in European trading and receive education. They learned new skills and professions that carved for them a new social and eventually economic status. The new elitism became an institutionalized hierarchy in the nineteenth century, which coincidentally was the time when the Europeans formally colonized African societies. Adebayo noted that, as with the economic changes, monetization, and long-distance trade, the new elite group of the nouveaux riches emerged from among the commoners in these two societies. Western education became the main avenue leading toward social advancement. It opened new opportunities, as many people became teachers, lawyers, engineers, physicians, and civil servants. Those who converted to Christianity and became preachers or went into politics experienced upward social mobility. Similarly, economic processes of cash crop production, retailing, and transport business led to the

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emergence of a structured middle class (Adebayo 2007). It is noteworthy that these new social classes did not supersede or replace existing groups made up chiefs, royals, and other statesmen.

Education as a Tool of Stratification in Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa The complexity of group stratification seen in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa is the result of a calculated strategy by European Christian missions and colonial governments. They introduced this complex arrangement to reconfigure traditional African societies to gain social and political control, plunder African lands and its people, and determine who was to be engaged in the European capitalist economic productive processes. The stratification experienced by groups who also created economic and political “core” and “periphery” groups can be attributed to the Europeans’ policy of “divide and rule,” which had the objective of stratifying African societies socio-politically, socioeconomically, and regionally ( Allman 1991; Mfum-Mensah 2018; Nwosu and Arinze-Umobi 2016; Sowell 2004). Canice Chukwuma Nwosu and Somtoo Arinze-Umobi explain that colonial alienation of diverse groups was deliberate and meant to create levels of marginality among the traditional Africans to subjugate them economically and politically. European colonizers constructed visible borders to homogenize diverse traditional groups during the partitioning of African societies with the assumption that citizens of the new nation-state were culturally homogenous. Within the same context, European colonizers deliberately constructed invisible borders along the lines of race, ethnicity, religion, language, and geographical regions to stratify Africans and as a strategy to consolidate power over the colonized (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Mhlanga 2013). European colonial forces used colonial institutions including the church, school, the press, and popular culture to propagate a religious and cultural worldview that legitimized and justified their right to rule the black population (Simme 2010). In most of these colonial African territories, colonial governments deliberately created tiered forms of school or withheld the establishment of Christian and colonial schools in some ethnic, religious, and geographical communities to advance their own religious, social, political, and economic agendas. In Muslim-populated and pastoral communities in the former British colonial territories of Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, the European Christian missions and colonial administration deliberately and strategically withheld schools to preserve these communities as a

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pool of labor for the colonial establishment or to ensure political stability (Imam 2012; Mfum-Mensah 2017a; Plessis 1921; Ruto et al. 2010; Sanderson 1975). The “divide and rule” politics of the imperial forces created ethno-religious differentiation in these countries. This created exclusionary identity politics as the fabric of many African societies. Scholars like Anna Madeira, Bob White, and Remi Clignet outline the deliberate strategy of French colonial administration to create tiered education systems to stratify native African groups. The French colonial government in West Africa established elite Ecole de fils de chefs in French West Africa to train the sons of kings to create an administrative elite in French colonial territories. The strategy helped satisfy the kings who were potential barriers to the French colonial agenda. When the French colonial administration finally opened up education in the territories in West Africa, it used the tiered system to provide inferior education for rural folks, education for clerical and specified occupations, and urban education for Europeans and assimilated elements (Clignet 1968, 1974; Madeira 2005; White 1996). Similarly, the Belgian colonial administration provided different education to rural folks to prevent them from migrating to urban spaces. Such colonial strategies meant that groups in those communities were relegated to the margins of educational, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical development. The education policies implemented by European colonial administrators in many African territories had the primary objective of stratifying colonial societies. European colonial forces designed Western education in colonial territories in Africa to create an economic hierarchy where few traditional Africans participated as elites in the colonial productive process, while the rest were relegated to the margins of colonial society (Banya 1993; Corby 1990; Finnegan 2013; Imam 2012; Oketch and Rolleston 2007; Simme 2010; Sowell 2004; White 1996). Both Richard Corby and Kingsley Banya cite the case of Sierra Leone where the British colonial administration blatantly and systematically provided opportunities to elite Krio families and the ex-slaves in Freetown to enroll in schools within a context where many other groups were restricted from accessing colonial education (Banya 1993; Corby 1990). Moses Oketch and Caine Rolleston outline how the colonial administration in East Africa used school examinations to constructed marginality (Oketch and Rolleston 2007). Through the practice of examination, colonial administrators denied many of the rural and urban folks in the region from gaining entry to education. Their argument was that providing education to rural folks would undermine the rural subsistent economy and that too many educated people would not serve colonial interests. Thomas Sowell intimates that in Nigeria, the

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Ibos of southeastern Nigeria who were once lowly and socially backward, seized upon the opportunities presented by Western education and rose up the occupational ladder above their erstwhile superiors, notably the northern ethnic groups (Sowell 2004). The British colonial administration was not keen about extending education to northern Nigeria, which had majority Muslim population, because of the fear that it could incur political backlash due to the presence of Koranic education. This policy nonetheless affected northern Nigerians during colonial times and in the early years of independence. The erstwhile superiors in northern Nigeria did not take the social reversal of Ibos with good grace. Therefore, as Nigeria approached its independence in 1960, intergroup jealousies and friction delayed the creation of a constitution and a government—a situation which delayed independence itself. Furthermore, Sowell outlines the wide disparities in school enrollment in the 1950s between northern Nigeria and southern Nigeria. He noted that before independence, virtually all the Nigerian students in institutions of higher learning, whether overseas or at home, were from southern Nigeria. The disparities in higher education translated into wide occupational disparities on the eve of independence (Sowell 2004: 100). The disparities outlined here in Nigeria became the motivation for northern communities’ emphasis on group representation rather than individual skills. Documented accounts outline the complicated strategies used by European Christian and colonial forces in Southern, Central, West and Eastern Africa in their attempts to divide traditional African societies to gain control (Anunobi 2002; Banya 1993; Barthel 1985; Blakemore and Cooksey 1981; Constantin 1989; Corby 1990; Hoel 2016; Imam 2012; Madeira 2005; Oketch and Rolleston 2007; Skinner 2013; Snyder and Tadesse 1995; VanderPloeg 1977; Ylonen 2013). In some instances, colonial administrators combined race with ethnicity and economic class to determine the nature of stratification and marginalization of groups. Colonial administrators bifurcated colonial territories along the lines of race, ethnicity, and other sociocultural factors to ensure that even educated Africans were marginalized in the colonial economic establishment. Kenneth Blakemore and Brian Cooksey outline the strategic ways the British colonial administration employed ethnicity and regionalization to alienate traditionally educated Africans in colonial territories of Sierra Leone, Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria, and Zimbabwe (Blakemore and Cooksey 1981). Similarly, Vincent Khapoya provides elaborate accounts of how the Portuguese colonial administration employed policies of aggressive racial stratification to divide

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African populations in Mozambique and Angola into two subgroups: the assimilados who adopted the Portuguese way of life as defined by Portuguese law; and native Africans who were categorized as Indegenas who were required by law to carry a pass at all times and were drafted into labor camps in the colonies or in South Africa. Portuguese colonial establishment also excluded Indegenas from attending government schools, subjected them to curfew hours after dark in certain towns of the country, and segregated them in many social facilities. In Mozambique, the Indegenas could open accounts in post office banks but they could not withdraw funds without the permission of the local Portuguese colonial administrator. South Africa presents a peculiar context of racial bifurcation policies that were implemented and ensured whites and white spaces were developed while black Africans were systematically underdeveloped. The policy was reinforced by apartheid laws in which colonial governments not only “disenfranchised the colonized” but also created poverty around black Africans and pushed them to black communities with the hope of trapping black Africans in a perpetual underclass and eternal poverty (Abdi 1998; Hoel 2016). In colonial and apartheid South Africa, the National Party implemented Bantu Education, which furthered the already segregated society along education systems that separated “White,” “African,” “Indian,” and “Colored” children into different schools. Colonial South Africa also used apartheid laws to construct spatial marginality by creating exclusive areas with adequate infrastructural facilities for white habitation even though South African land belonged to black South Africans by natural right (Abdi 1998; Nwosu and Arinze-Umobi 2016). This systematic marginality saw blacks move from their ancestral homelands to “shanty” towns subjugating and subjecting blacks to a life of misery. While apartheid officially ended in 1994, the marginality and the bifurcation created by that system may take years to level up, and now we experience blacks pitted against blacks and blacks pitted against whites. Colonial forces combined ethnicity and religion in predominantly Islamic communities to create an effective framework to alienate and marginalize many traditional Africans. The strategy also helped pit the Islamic religious communities against each other and against other groups in such colonial territories as Senegal, Sudan, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Colonial administrators did one of two things in Muslimdominated territories. They either alienated the Muslim communities in these colonial-controlled territories when it came to institutions like education where there was a majority Muslim population so that the Muslim populations did not have the same civil rights as the European

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colonial masters or the same educational opportunities as other traditional peoples. In some instances, as in the case of Sudan, British colonial administration used a second strategy: implementing strong control of the education system and using the system of colonial education to stratify society. Colonial administrators in Senegal, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Sudan privileged a few Muslim rulers and scholars and presented them as allies in administrative matters (Davidson 1984; Loimeier 2013: 273; Seri-Hersch 2011, 2017; Sowell 2004). In northern Nigeria for instance, the British colonial administration used indirect rule policies to “divide and rule” this vast region, which was predominantly Muslim. The British colonial administration strategically worked with the emirs and native African leaders who became the colonial representatives and puppets in those communities and collected taxes for the British. The emirs represented the colonial administration for their own political expediency because for them to stay in power they had to do the bidding of the colonial administration. These small groups of British puppets were caught in the British “divide and rule” strategy even as the framework also helped them to enrich themselves, preserve their power and position, and oppress their own people. Roman Loimeier (2013) also cites Sudan as an example of territories where the British colonial administration used the “divide and rule” tactic to their benefit. Britain defeated the Muslim leader Madhi in 1898, killing him and eliminating all traces of him including the destruction of his tomb and prohibition of a set of prayers organized in his memory. In 1914, the British forged a relationship with the surviving son of Madhi and appointed him an official leader of the Ansar group. The British colonial administration did this because it realized that the vastness of the Sudan territory required that they forge an alliance to control and develop the huge territory. The British colonial administration also implemented indirect rule in both the Kordofan and Darfur regions of central and western Sudan and northern Nigerian territories and used the local leaders as puppets of the colonial administration. Northern Nigeria was a vast region of more than 9 million people ruled by fewer than a hundred British political officers. In regard to education, the British colonial administration in Sudan had strong control of education in northern Sudan and implemented a tiered education system that included education of a “competent artisan class,” education for the “masses of the people” to enable them “understand the merest elements of the machinery of government,” and training for “small native administrative class who [would] ultimately fill many minor government posts” (Seri-Hersch 2017: 4). The

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goal was to create strong stratification in the region to consolidate colonial rule in Sudan. The “divide and rule” strategy worked very well for Britain in Zanzibar where the British colonial administration used local Muslims as figureheads controlled by the British administrative representative. The “divide and rule” strategy worked effectively in heavily Islamic populations because the colonial governments employed the institution of school. Loimeier points out for instance that the French colonial administrator in Senegal General Louis Faidherbe used schools to raise elites of loyal Muslim clerks, notables, and qadis, which the French used for the effective administration of a growing number of Muslim subjects (Loimeier 2013: 283). These colonial administrators educated some of these traditional leaders in colonial schools and created the impression to those educated in colonial schools that they were better than their fellow Africans who were not educated. In spite of the “divide and rule” tactics and atrocities of colonial conquests, the colonial administrators presented themselves as the protectors of Islam in order to win the respect of Muslim colonial subjects as allies as was the case in both World Wars (Loimeier 2013). In Kenya, the colonizers seized Maasai land and forcefully took some Maasai young men and educated them in colonial schools to serve the colonizers as tax clerks on Maasai land. European colonizers also combined religion and ethnicity within the framework of the “divide and rule” strategy to marginalize Zongo-Muslim migrant communities in Gold Coast (Ghana). The British colonial administration had negative patronizing attitudes toward the Zongo-Muslim communities in Gold Coast during colonization. These attitudes carried into the era of independence when many in the Ghanaian society saw the Zongo-Muslim communities as poor and educationally and developmentally backward (Price 1954; 1956: 33). The French colonial administration’s assimilation policy worked effectively in Senegal and other French West African nations because it helped create a feeling of “superiority” among some native Africans. These native Africans bought into the idea that through French acculturation they would assimilate and become French citizens. European Christian and colonial administration also employed calculated strategies to stratify traditional African societies along gender lines. This gender reconfiguration was a blatant cultural assault with negative consequences. It marginalized African women from the productive processes and relegated them to the domestic sphere during the colonial era. The idea and practice of stratification based on gender was nonexistent in many traditional African societies until European

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forces came on the scene. Contrary to Western narratives that distorted and misrepresented sex and gender roles and positionality, many African societies did not discriminate based on sex and gender but used the distinctive roles played by males and females to ensure stability of their societies. Women in most African societies were not “jural minors” who fell under the guardianship of their fathers and husbands as European anthropologists portrayed them to be. In precolonial Africa, women participated actively in all spheres of social life. There is plenty of evidence of the active participation and influence of women in the political life of diverse African societies. A plethora of historical documents shows how Dinka women were avid in traditional law and order and settled quarrels. Similarly, market women in Nigeria fixed prices and settled quarrels, while powerful women in Cameroon, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Ghana among other societies resisted foreign incursion in their respective societies (Beswick 1994, 2004 Snyder and Tadesse 1995; Sudarkasa 1986). European colonizers who were captives and products of their societies, implemented policies that combined sexism, misogyny, and ethnocentrism to refashion African women’s gender identities and roles to approximate those prescribed by the European ideology of domesticity (Schulman 1992). Both the Christian missions and colonial administration made calculated efforts to reconfigure the sex differential roles in Africa to reflect European secular society and the Christian tradition that prevailed in Europe. Gwendolyn Schulman points out that the system of doing this in French colonies included implementation of science training centers. The objective of these centers was to change the social definition of African women to reconfigure her according to the Euro-Christian, patriarchal ideal of mother, wife, and housekeeper to carry on the French values, mores, ethos, and submission to the French hegemony. In her classic book Women’s Role in Economic Development, Ester Boserup (1970) outlines the systematic ways European colonial administrators reconfigured the roles played by African women in African societies in the area of agriculture and economic and productive processes and spatial settlements where Europeans used policies that discriminated against women in colonial territories. Boserup noted that in Uganda, where women were mostly engaged in cotton production, European colonial agencies deliberately neglected women cotton farmers and cultivators when they introduced new agricultural methods. They taught only men in agricultural settings of traditional female farming. In other places, such as Kenya, colonial administration implemented the policies that engaged only men in colonial administration and productive processes. Colonial governments

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also implemented European-style land reforms in colonial territories of Nigeria, Congo, Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa, which created opportunities for men to own land and women the crops on the land. The land reforms ensured that women lost their right to land, which they previously owned (Boserup 1970: 58–60; Forde 1946; Snyder and Tadesse 1995). Where it was difficult for men to take over land due to customs and traditions, Europeans attempted to dismantle the traditions. In Congo, for example, the Christian missions and Belgian colonial administration launched propaganda against the matrilineal customarily social arrangement (Boserup 1970). In the Union of South Africa, Europeans implemented land reforms in 1898, which saw the transfer of land from women to men. Margaret Snyder and Mary Tadesse point out that the setback for women was the consolidation and settlement schemes that transferred land title deeds to men even when they were absent from the farm. This policy systematically ensured men’s right to the proceeds of land including the products of women’s labor. Snyder and Tadesse point out that with this policy in place, the prestige accorded to women’s work in the parallel-society system of an earlier era was consequently downgraded even though women often worked continuously and for more hours than the men (Snyder and Tadesse 1995: 23). Colonial administrators also created African industrial towns and urban spaces as a “man’s world” where European recruitment policies disenfranchised women and women had to struggle to live and participate in the areas of market trade labor in places such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal. Where women engaged in agricultural work, the majority sold food crops (Boserup 1970). However, we need to provide nuances to such situations to provide a clearer picture. Some women cultivated export cash crops like cocoa (as we find in Ghana), and French beans (in Kenya). Sometimes, traditions rather than colonial policies also deterred women from engaging in certain productive activities. For instance, in the Avatime area of the Volta region of Ghana, women were prevented from rice production (rice was the chief crop) due to tradition, not because of colonial intervention. The colonial administration discriminated against women who migrated to towns where the modern economy offered opportunities. Both Sheila van der Horst and Ester Boserup have cited examples in places like Zambia, Central and West Africa, and South Africa where European colonial establishments expelled African women from towns or forbade them from migrating to towns without special permission (Van der Horst 1964: 35; Boserup 1970). Something noteworthy is the fact that the European colonial administration used all means to marginalize African

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women in the economic and productive processes except when women had to pay taxes for the colonial administration that the Europeans saw African women as equals to men. Regarding people with a disability, colonial administrators provided limited educational services for children belonging to this group and used a disorganized approach to provide education to them. European Christian missionaries and colonial administration used education as a tool to marginalize people with disabilities in colonial territories (Avoke 2010; Kisanji 1993; Obiakor 1998; Muuya 2002). There is not enough narrative about educational development for people with disabilities in sub-Saharan African during the early days of Western education. This is a situation that provides the evidence regarding the anachronistic holdover of the colonial legacy of discrimination against people with disabilities in sub-Saharan Africa. In most SSA societies (also the case in many parts of the global community), colonial governments provided marginal education for children with disabilities. While Christian missions provided some of the earliest educational services and institutions for individuals with disabilities, they developed education for people with disabilities within the rubric of proselytization, and humanitarian and moral services. The proselytizing and capitalist economic agendas, which became the goal of Western educational development in SSA, meant that education for individuals with disabilities was not important in the colonial era. Elaborate policies and programs for educating this group only became possible after the colonial territories attained independence (Chitiyo and Wheeler 2004; Dogbe and Ocloo 2006; Korpinen 2009; Mpofu et al. 2007; Mutua and Dimitrov 2001; Olubukola 2007). The few education programs implemented by the Europeans for children with disabilities during the colonial era were established in urban centers. Such institutions were also institutionalized, segregated, and mostly accessible to affluent African families who saw their children with disabilities as a burden and therefore used the services to put them in institutions (Avoke 2010; Kiyaga and Moores 2003; Dogbe and Ocloo 2006; Mpofu et al. 2007; Mutua and Dimitrov 2001; Olubukola 2007). Colonial societies came to view disability as a “fossilized” condition without hope. The curricula for educational institutions for individuals with disabilities were based on the deficit ideologies and therefore children with disabilities were taught simple crafts like basketry, woodwork, leatherwork, and cobbling (Chitiyo and Wheeler 2004). I have outlined how the colonial forces created stratification to explain why many postcolonial governments in sub-Saharan African have embarked on affirmative action initiatives to address the margin-

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alization and calculated inequalities that had only served to benefit a few groups and disadvantage many groups.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter juxtaposed precolonial forms of stratification with European forms of stratification. Social stratification creates inequalities in societies and provides advantages for a few individuals and groups while disadvantaging several members or members belonging to other groups. Stratification also creates power asymmetry in societies. From a functionalist perspective, some may view stratification as a mechanism for creating equilibrium and stabilizing the society. However, powerful forces did not use merit as the mechanisms for creating stratification but rather the accident of one’s birth. European forces radically reconfigured stratification in precolonial Africa during colonialism to consolidate their agenda of positioning all African societies in subordinated statuses in the global geopolitical order. In some areas traditional chiefs experienced gradual loss of power and authority as the colonial authorities extended their area of control (see Blakemore and Cooksey 1981; Deng 1985; Loimeier 2013). Colonial stratification determined the distribution of education and people’s access to colonial education. Blakemore and Cooksey (1981) note that the degree of stratification in traditional African societies affected the development of education as the Europeans worked within the existing stratification frameworks and provided the nature and amount of education to groups based on those social hierarchies. They note that the nature and amount of education received by an individual was a function of the degree of stratification, the roles the individuals were likely to play in adult life, and the relative importance of ascription and achievement in distribution of the adult roles. The cases of the French West African territory of Senegal and the British territories of Kenya and Nigeria illustrate this observation. In Kenya for instance, colonial education was racially segregated with different schools and curricula for Africans, European settlers, Indians, and Arabs (Muslims). The tiered system of education was also the case in French territories in West Africa. The implementation of the “divide and rule” politics of the imperial forces created ethno-religious differentiation in African countries. This created exclusionary identity politics as the fabric in many African societies. The social reconfiguration has had implications for stability in many societies in SSA. The European distortions, misrepresentations, and stereotypes about the

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“backwardness” of Africans influenced Europeans’ use of education as a tool to stratify African societies with Europeans at the top of the hierarchy with intermediary groups in the middle and Africans at the bottom. Access to knowledge and economic possibilities marked the stratified colonial society (Blakemore and Cooksey 1981). The distortions and misrepresentations of Africa became the basis for Europeans to use education to reconfigure African societies in a European hierarchical order. Europeans viewed Africans as less intelligent and therefore, as later accounts showed, they pushed industrial education on Africans with the goal of educating “laborers and farmers” for colonial economic and productive processes. Colonial stratification has had lasting implications by creating social, political, and economic marginalization of some groups in African societies.

C HAPTER 5

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In the early twentieth century, American philanthropic foundations inserted themselves into education discourse in colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to this institutionalized approach from these nonstate actors, private support for education came from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Egypt, and the United States, and their educational support in the colonial territories was diffuse and unorganized (Seri-Hersch 2017). European Christian entities laid the foundation of philanthropic initiatives in sub-Saharan African. The “great awakening” motivated several European Christian missions to troop to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to spread the Christian gospel. Supported by European Christian philanthropic entities, these European Christian missions used Western forms of education as a tool to convert the African “heathens.” The goal of European Christian philanthropic initiatives of the era was based purely on the religious ideology to extend the gospel to the non-Christian world. However, these early attempts to spread the Christian gospel did not yield much success, as indigenous Africans were impervious to the gospel message. In their approach to Christianize the “heathen” Africans, Christian missions developed broader charitable programs in education, medical care, and food supply to enable communication and sustained interaction (Engel 2015). European churches and religious philanthropic and benevolent entities provided financial support for Christian missions in colonial territories to promote education. The organizations included the Christofel-Blindenmission, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society from England, the Society for Missions to Africa and the East, and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of the Church of England. Others included the London Missionary Society, Baptist Missionary

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Society, Basel Missionary Society, the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Similarly, religious organizations, which included the Order of Immaculate Conception, the Bremen Mission of Germany, the Society of Missionaries of Africa, the Society of the Divine Word (SVD), and St. Nicholas, provided financial support for Christian churches and governments of colonial territories to promote education to further the European social transformation agenda (Diara and Christian 2013; Pawliková-Vilhanová 2007). Some of these European Christian philanthropic organizations were loosely organized entities whose sole purpose was to support Christian missions to promote the gospel missions in foreign lands, encourage social reforms, forge stronger relationships with indigenous people, suppress slavery, and promote race relations. The European Christian missions’ use of Western education as a new avenue for changing the hearts and minds of the young generation of Africans was a strategy that targeted the young boys who were to be educated to carry the torch of the Christian missions in their communities. European Christian philanthropic entities were not interested in providing an education that would foster a technological culture for the African societies but to use it as a means to break “the new” from “the old” (Madeira 2005). In that sense, the nature of education bequeathed to Africans by the missionaries was for the most part different from those the missionaries received in their home country. Through Christian philanthropic initiatives, the missionaries educated a cadre of passionate Africans who took the mantle of proselytization to non-Christian members of their communities. European missionaries depended on the generous philanthropy of European Christian charitable organizations and entities to succeed in establishing schools. The religious ethos of Western education gradually transformed as mission schools embraced secular objectives during formal colonization of Africa. Architects of nineteenth-century colonial policies in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Portugal actively encouraged nongovernmental agencies (particularly missionary societies) to help stake out national claims in Africa. The belief was that nongovernmental and missionary agencies could play valuable roles in carving out colonial empires at a time when the official European presence in Africa was still an evolving imperial policy. Philanthropic entities became another arm of the colonial governments especially in British colonial territories, and helped implement the governments’ foreign policy agenda (Mfum-Mensah 2018; Seri-Hersch 2011, 2017). During colonization, colonial governments used education to reconfigure the social structures of traditional African societies. Economi-

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cally, Western education was to be a way for colonial administrations to train few Africans and co-opt them into the colonial economic and productive processes. In the early twentieth century, a proposition to make the AfricanAmerican experience the starting point of thinking about philanthropy in Africa placed new themes on both missionary and colonial agendas. Analysis of the role of Christian missions in Africa and particularly, the educational and proselytizing role of African-American Christian missions in Africa help to explain the rationale for American philanthropic foundations to participate in black education in Africa (Engel 2015). The presence of the African Methodist Episcopal Church missionaries (AME)—the first African-American missionaries who pioneered mission work in West and South Africa in the early twentieth century— posed a dilemma for the white colonist and the European Christian missionaries. Elisabeth Engel points out that the activities of the AfricanAmerican missionaries followed the idea of the “providential design” according to which African Americans saw uplifting Africans as their special duty based on their own experience of rising from slavery to freedom. The philosophy of industrial education was a key element of the African-American missions (Engel 2015). Engel notes that the European-American missionaries despised the African-American missionaries’ presence in Africa because the African-American missionaries drew large amounts of disciples from their congregations and facilitated the uncontrolled rise of independent African church movements. The European colonists were also suspicious that African-American missionaries’ activities might encourage Africans to make demands for liberation or join the pan-African movement that grew in the United States in the 1920s around the black anticolonial agitator Marcus Garvey. On the other hand, the European-American missionaries and colonizers found that there were elements in the African-American missionary movement that they liked. The African-American missionaries, they observed, reached Africans with great ease, and the Tuskegee-style education, they presumed, could help orient Africans’ ambitions toward improving their working skills into directions that benefitted white colonists’ interests. The discourse of philanthropic support for education in the twentieth century emerged out of the debates regarding the ambiguous role of African-American missionaries in Africa. White missionaries and colonists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were trapped in their ideology that only they could and had the right to redeem black Africans. White missionaries and colonial administration debated the role African-American missionaries should play in education. The debate concretized in the

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1920s in recommendations and resolutions that defined the place the African-American experience was to have in missionary-colonial government collaborations (Engel 2015). After World War I, American philanthropic foundations decided to engage in educational activities in sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from the complex religious flavor that motivated the American philanthropic entities to get involved, they also had political, economic, and sociocultural objectives as we read from Dr. Anson Phelps Stokes’s comments in the preface to the Report of the First Commission to West Africa: “The end of the world war . . . and the appointment of mandatories under the League of Nations had drawn the attention to publicists in Europe and America to the importance of adopting educational policies that would tend to prevent international friction and to fit the Africans to meet the actual needs of life (Benson 1936: 421). The goal to insert the United States in global geopolitical education discourse motivated support by twentieth-century US philanthropic entities for education in sub-Saharan Africa. The economic motive was to ensure the United States’ presence in Africa and promote their own vision of investment in human capital to ensure the survival of business enterprise (Berman 1978; Parmer 2012). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States made economic gains surpassing Britain to become a major creditor globally. With such economic progress, many economic, commercial, and other interest groups demanded that the United States engage in global affairs. Edward Berman (1978) points out that in the face of increasing US political and economic isolation, US philanthropists designed overseas educational schemes to allow corporate America to capitalize on developing an export market and raw material. The groundwork of philanthropic work in Africa in the early twentieth century was not new. Apart from the economic gains, the United States was experiencing what Inderjeet Parmer (2012) calls a “psychic crisis” brought about by massive industrialization, mass immigration, and rapid urbanization. One result of the psychic crisis was the United States’ desire to expand beyond its frontiers. The other result of the psychic crisis was an intensification of protest and humanitarian reform and the establishment of philanthropic foundations to help tackle the ills of the society, economy, and politics. Underneath the political, economic, and social motives of US philanthropic foundations was also the sociocultural motive to use philanthropy to structure colonial societies in Africa. From the colonization era to the early years of the United States as a nation, philanthropic foundations and charitable entities invested in education to improve

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the general welfare of the community, prevent poverty, or provide opportunities for the poor to improve their conditions. The motivation to acculturate diverse social groups into the dominant white US culture was also a major objective of US philanthropic initiatives (Bremner 1988; Stanford University 2003). For philanthropic entities such as the Manumission society, educating blacks and former slaves was an act of common good meant to instill morality and “good” behavior in them and improve their lives. This common good was nested in the overall ideology of promoting white European values, culture, norms, mores, and behavior as the moral standard blacks and the poor in society needed to embrace (Hall 1994). Ideologies that shaped black education in the US South also directed the US philanthropic entities’ education reforms for black Africans. US education policy and practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to promote agricultural and industrial education, to position blacks in a subordinated position in US society. Shoko Yamada points out that the idea of agricultural and industrial education for blacks should be put in the context of the US South in the nineteenth century. Agricultural and industrial education for blacks was less objectionable to Southern whites than providing them with literacy education. Raymond Blaine Fosdick notes further that if the white Southerners had to permit the Negro to obtain any education at all, they wanted it to be the kind of education that would make blacks better servants and laborers, to be good “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and not education that would train him to attain social mobility (Forsdick 1962 cited by Yamada 2008). US philanthropic entities injected themselves into the educational policy discourse in colonial territories by bringing the ideology of black education in the US South to British colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. Their goal was to collaborate with the colonial administrators to address how indigenous Africans “should” be educated. The ideological goal of European and American philanthropic foundations broadened later to include how to use education to construct a subordinated positionality of blacks on the African continent in the same way as in the Southern United States. The work of US philanthropic foundations promoting education of blacks in colonial Africa was to create a space within the international arena for nonstate and nonmarket actors to shape the trajectory of international affairs and influence how Americans think about the world (Heydemann and Kinsey 2010). The Phelps Stokes Fund documents articulated the agenda to promote the organization’s ideological stance of black racial subordination for blacks in the US South and later in Africa. Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones, educational

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director of the Phelps Stokes Commission would later emphasize the need to relate education to the actual needs of the people for whom it was intended. “Dr. Jones was a great believer in ‘education adaptations’ and it is this wise gospel that his report would carry with so much conviction” (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932: xxi; 1962; Yellin 2002). In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Phelps Stokes Fund developed a complex relationship with the British colonial government in SSA and organized a commission that embarked on a fact-finding mission to promote education in the region. Although the commission visited all the regions in sub-Saharan Africa during its two expeditions, its recommendation became the blueprint for education policy-making in British colonial territories in the 1920s and 1930s. The Report of the Phelps Stokes Commission also formed part of the material on which the Belgian Commission based its recommendations regarding educational policy in Congo. The report also attracted attention in the French colonies. However, it was in British colonial Africa that the Commission’s work had the most impact. The complex relationship helped explain the rationale behind philanthropic initiatives, and how philanthropic foundations supported the educational policies and initiatives, which were dictated by European colonial officials. The relationship was ultimately to benefit the European colonizers and other Western imperialists with few benefits (if at all) to the colonized in Africa (Berman 1978; Dunitz 2017).

Philanthropy and Transplanting US Models of Blacks’ “Human Development” The Phelps Stokes Fund set the pace for US philanthropic initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa and made its activities in sub-Saharan Africa the model for other US philanthropic entities to follow to engage colonial administrations in education discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. The groundwork of philanthropic work in Africa in the early twentieth century was similar in form and shape to the philanthropy conceived by Christian missionaries and early colonial administrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shoko Yamada rightly points out that “[t]he ideas of ‘adaptation,’ government-mission cooperation, and character training through religious instruction, which Phelps Stokes Fund . . . preached, were not new to colonial officials and missionaries working in Africa. American models did not supersede what had been practiced already, but rather mixed with British notions about education for lower social ranks and local contexts” (Yamada

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2008: 22). The education policies of most colonial administrations in the early days of colonization included adaptation policies for educating Africans. For instance, Portuguese assimilation in Angola and Mozambique was nothing more than adaptation to suit Portuguese interests. Similarly, the policy of adaptation was mixed with assimilation policies in French colonies in West Africa. The British colonial administration’s education policies were putatively adaptation policies. Belgian colonies also implemented forms of industrial and technical education programs adapted for use in the Belgian Congo (Madeira 2005; Mfum-Mensah 2017). The Phelps Stokes Fund, which focuses on “Negro Education” in the Southern United States, commissioned a group that embarked on two expeditions in 1920 and 1924 where they surveyed schools in Africa and advised the British Colonial Office as to where the existing education needed adjustment. The first expedition occurred in 1920 after World War I, when the Phelps Stokes Fund commissioned some individuals who embarked on a philanthropic initiative in British colonies in SSA. The expedition began with a series of negotiations between the commission and European governments in control of African territories, including the missionary society in Great Britain, the US Baptist Foreign Missionaries, the Council of Foreign Missions Conference of North America, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the United States government. The key recommendations were that traditional literary education should be abandoned in favor of industrial and agricultural training, as preconceived by Tuskegee, and that missions and governments should more closely coordinate their educational activities in this respect. The white colonists’ ideology to provide industrial education and particularly the Hampton-Tuskegee philosophy of education was to “lay the foundation of a ‘true civilization’ to the black person” (Benson 1936: 423). At a time when the British colonial government still demonstrated apathy toward mission schools in Africa, the Phelps Stokes Commission recommended that missionary schools must be brought under colonial government supervision and with government financial aid. The result of this recommendation was that a system of grants to specific schools was established in British colonial territories (Sanderson 1975, 1976; Zimmerman 2010). This strategy also streamlined black educational initiatives in Africa (for close supervision), as the Phelps Stokes Commission wanted to be sure the educational initiatives of African-American Christian missions come under the colonial administration’s supervision. White European-Americans of the era entertained the idea of the lack of intelligence of blacks.

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The Phelps Stokes Fund’s involvement in education policies of the British colonial empires in Africa cemented the complicated collaborative relationships between colonial governments and the United States government that could only be compared to a marriage of convenience with vested interests by all the colonial partners. US philanthropic entities (secular missionaries) were the brokers of this relationship and extended their philanthropic initiative to promote education in the British colonial empire. In the process, the African beneficiaries were “seen but never engaged” in the educational discourse. Philanthropic support for education in SSA from the missionary era was made more complex by the relationship between philanthropic entities, colonial administration in colonial territories and the home office, diverse religious groups, and Western nations (notably the United States). This “marriage of convenience” pushed the ideologies of all the collaborating partners in the development of education policy discourse and policy implementation to align with the foreign policy agendas of colonial and national governments. In the process, organizations suspected of having the slightest potential to undermine the policy agendas of these complicated foreign agencies were confronted. The supposed paradoxical role played by the African-American missionaries in Africa concretized the European-Americans’ decision to recommend a resolution to African’s education. The Rockefeller Foundation also worked through its international Education Board and forged strong relationships and provided financial support for the Phelps Stokes Fund. The Carnegie Corporation also provided financial support to the Phelps Stokes Fund to promote education in SSA from the 1920s. The Carnegie Corporation’s support for education in Africa (particularly, South Africa) began in the 1920s and continued into the 1980s and it represents one of the complexities of ideological drive and use of complicated partnership between colonial governments, Christian missions, philanthropic entities, and people of good will to promote the broader colonial and imperial agenda. Combining the Calvinist principles of its Scottish founder filtered through his US industrial power, the Carnegie Corporation’s promotion of education in SSA after World War I demonstrates the complicated ways international philanthropies incorporate ideologies and a colonial development agenda to promote international foreign policy agenda. The Carnegie Corporation’s support for education began in 1927 when the corporation’s president Frederick Keppel and its secretary James Bertram visited Africa for two months during the summer of 1927 to explore educational opportunities for effective use of the Special Fund within the limit of the charter. The visit paved the

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way for an enduring relationship between African educational institutions and the corporation (Rosenfield 2014: 106). The Carnegie Corporation’s support for education in Africa was cemented by the formation of a complex partnership between the foundation and local experts in sub-Saharan Africa. Morgan Bell (2000) notes that the partnership exposed the complexity of the British Empire and its former colony, the United States, and African societies (including South Africa). The partnership that emerged between the Carnegie Corporation and partners in East and Southern Africa in particular, in the implementation of higher education in the region Africa in the late 1920s presented a different level of partnership between any philanthropic entity, the British Colonial Office, and the colonial settlers. It was a marriage embroiled in suspicion and a clash of ideologies and policy direction. First, the British Colonial Office was threatened by the work of the Carnegie Corporation in education because of policy differences. This threat created a serious misunderstanding and suspicion between the British Colonial Office and the corporation. The suspicion led to much controversy between the British Colonial Office, colonial settlers, and the native people. In these African colonies, white settlers and the native populations advocated for their own local higher education institutions to eliminate the necessity of traveling to the United Kingdom or the United States. In the course of the debates, the Phelps Stokes Fund (backed by the Carnegie Corporation) recommended something different. The Carnegie Corporation pointed out that the complicated misunderstanding stemmed from the disagreement regarding higher education in colonial territories. “The Phelps Stokes Fund study conducted by Thomas Jesse Jones had recommended . . . focus[ing] on vocational education and local community-based training for the native populations . . . seeking to appease the settler and native populations, the British government had taken tentative steps to upgrade the local colonial colleges” (Rosenfield 2014: 108). This approach created a complex situation in South Africa where the issue became who could attend which institutions due in part to the racial and linguistic complexities between the English and the Dutch. In the 1930s, at the direction of Frederick Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation revisited the issue and saw the need to forge new partnerships while strengthening the existing one and promoting more support for closer collaboration between all the different entities. The corporation established committees of local experts in South Africa who took responsible roles including disbursement of grant funds as the corporation documents attest. This was a new strategy of grant making in the dominions of the British Empire. “When opening new

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areas of grant making in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa, the corporation would usually send [a] consultant to survey the field and advise on program strategy” (Rosenfield 2014: 99). The Carnegie Corporation’s local committee in South Africa included both British, Afrikaner South African advisers, and a handful of colored, Asian, and African South Africans. In contrast, in other British colonies in Africa and elsewhere, there was little or no advice from Africans or white settlers. Other local committees established for the Carnegie Corporation included the South African Advisory Committee, which administered Carnegie Corporation grants, and the Carnegie Corporation Visitor Grants Committee, which determined who would receive support in South Africa. The idea of transplanting education for blacks from the Southern United States into African soil included the Phelps Stokes Commission’s initiative, which helped introduce industrial education at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone and advance higher education and found Government College at Makerere in Uganda in 1922. The implementation of the Hampton-Tuskegee type of education at Achimota in Accra, Gold Coast, in 1924 and similar institutions, such as the Tabora Government Secondary School in Tanzania established in 1925, development of a combined effort with Protestant missionary societies in establishing Alliance High School in Kenya in 1926, Ecole Normale William Ponty in Senegal for the entirety of French West Africa. The Carnegie Corporation’s collaboration with colonial governments and Christian missions also witnessed the transplant of Jeanes teacher program to Kenya and Southern Africa particularly in North and South Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), the Nyasaland (Malawi), and Nigeria. The program in Nigeria, which began in 1928, was abandoned for various reasons. The third was the implementation of Booker T. Washington School in Kakata in Liberia in 1929 (Benson 1936; T. L. Davis 1935; David 1964; Mwiandi 2005; Phelps Stokes Fund 1932; Quist 2003; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000;Yamada 2005, 2008). All these programs aimed to give black students training skills needed for jobs available to ordinary blacks and to instill character training to accept a lower social and economic positon (Yamada 2005). Colonial administrators saw educated Africans as a threat to colonial rule. Europeans saw “practical education” as a means to oppress Africans via an inferior form of education. The Achimota program in Accra, Ghana, was the first school in British Colonial Africa to implement the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education transplanted as “adapted education” in 1924 under the auspices of the British colonial administrator Gordon Guggisberg. Dr.

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Kwegyir Aggrey who was part of the Phelps Stokes Commission later coincidentally became the school’s vice president. This school stood as an example of the complicated collaboration between the British colonial administration and the US philanthropic entities. Achimota was repackaged to combine the English “public” school model and the Hampton-Tuskegee model. The school prepared both elite members who later graduated and enrolled at Oxford and Cambridge as well as others who were to be trained to be handymen. In this sense, the school had an elitist curriculum that reflected the classical tradition and also promoted an Africanization curriculum and adapted to the rural environment and emphasized agriculture and manual training. This type of school was debated in both the United States and in Africa because of the deficit ideologies that formed the basis of implementation of this vocational-industrial education. Achimota’s integration of two very distinct and opposing models created tension and contradiction in the sense that it created a few elite Africans within a context where it also prepared many graduates who were supposed to return to their rural enclaves. The Gold Coast-educated elite vehemently criticized Achimota for training generations of individuals to remain in their rural areas forever. Both Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Hubert Quist (2000) and Hubert Quist (2003) note that Achimota stood as a calculated strategy to stratify Africans to subordinated statuses “to serve the colonial master and for confinement to tribal life.” Ghanaian elites opposed the Eton-Winchester prototype and Hampton-Tuskegee prototype fused into one because they entertained the fear that more emphasis would be placed on the vocational- technical curriculum and would turn the emerging Ghanaians into “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and frustrate progressive efforts at accelerated national development (Quist 2003; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000). The students of Achimota were to be provided special training and expected to remain in their rural enclaves as chiefs, teachers, homemakers, farmers, medical assistants, and artisans (Quist 2003). Since the establishment of the Achimota School, there was a suspicion that vocationalism was really just a second-class education. The rural-focus objective of the colonial education policymakers became another motivation for their establishment of the Jeanes program supervising teachers. The Jeanes teachers emphasized practical things in education, and networks of visiting teachers to rural community schools who would aid local teachers in making their schools focal points for the transformation of their communities (Benson 1936; T. L. Davis 1935; Mwiandi 2005; Yamada 2008). The first Jeanes teacher program was set up in 1925 in Kabete, Kenya, to train supervising

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teachers and their wives and children to support rural school communities. This cadre of chosen “matured” men with experience were to supervise bush schools in rural Kenya providing pedagogical support and a context-specific curriculum that met the need of the rural setting. These supervising teachers were to be itinerant, traveling teachers just like traveling evangelists. This model was a transfer from the Southern United States where Miss Jeanes had implemented a similar program and was a component of the Hampton-Tuskegee industrial educational ideology. The wives of these supervising teachers were to be “domesticated” as definite by white society rather than provided intellectual knowledge. We see from the Jeanes program, the transfer of Western gender asymmetry to East Africa where women who were versatile and had no restrictions in the roles they performed in their communities, received training in domestic education. The training of the wives of the Jeanes teachers was a way to distort Africans’ social arrangements and feed into the negative European narratives about Africa. T. G. Benson, the second principal of Kabete Jeanes, noted that women were taught sewing and stitching “since clothes have come to stay let them know how to make things simply and cheaply and clothe their family decently” (Benson 1936: 427). This ideology was a nineteenth-century Western form of “domestic feminism” that US philanthropic entities, through support for the Jeanes program, transferred to Africa in the twentieth century. The curriculum of the Jeanes male teachers encompassed three major areas: academic and general training, professional subjects, and practical or industrial training in agriculture, woodwork, crafts, building, gardening, animal husbandry, forestry, and vegetable gardening. In Kenya, the curriculum also emphasized raising cattle while in South Rhodesia the curriculum included building and effective improvement in school building. The major objective was to turn out “handy” men. Training in community work and village improvement was also crucial in the Jeanes teacher program. In addition, the program provided training in sanitation and hygiene to teachers and their wives, which made the teacher a holistic expert in the village community who taught good pedagogical strategies to village teachers, helped repair or build school buildings, served as the sanitary inspector, provided advice for proper hygiene, and served as agricultural demonstrator to rural farmers (Davis 1935). The wives of Jeanes teachers received training in domestic skills and how to maintain a home, so they could model proper homemaking to the surrounding population. They also received training in midwifery, child welfare, hygiene, and care for the sick. They received skills in housecraft and domestic subjects such as

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cooking, laundering, sewing, and handcrafts. This kind of training was the exact replica provided to women in colonial and early US society, and packaged to teach black women in the Southern United States. US philanthropists transplanted this education to Africa to educate women. Women were not to have education that would make them independent, rather they should be given the kind of education that tied them to their husband’s profession of the traveling teacher evangelist who was tasked to develop rural Africa. The Carnegie Corporation supported Jeanes teacher training as part of the education transplant project in Southern Africa in 1929. The foundation pledged to establish twenty Jeanes schools in Africa between 1929 and 1938 (Benson 1936). Within this project, the Carnegie Corporation provided a grant of $191,000 to support seven Jeanes training projects while the Phelps Stokes Fund supported one in Mozambique (R. H. Davis 1980: 99). Another strategy to transplant black education from the US South to African soil was the Phelps Stokes Fund’s establishment of the Booker T. Washington Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Kakata, forty-five miles inland from Monrovia in Liberia in 1929. The Liberian initiative was of particular interest to the Phelps Stokes family, some of whom bequeathed part of their estates to support the institution (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932). In higher education, US philanthropists forged complex partnerships with diverse entities and institutions in the metropole and in Africa. A clear example is the nature of the relationship between the Rockefeller Foundation, the British Colonial Office, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) in the development of Social Anthropology, which aimed to focus on studying the diverse African society. Rockefeller supported many scholars and students’ work in Africa in their new Social Anthropology program through the Rockefeller IIALC Fellowship (Fisher 1986).

Concluding Thoughts In the early nineteenth century, European Christian missionaries laid the groundwork for philanthropic initiatives to help spread the gospel message to the “heathen” and primitive Africans for conversion. By the early twentieth century, the initiative had evolved and become a complicated process that included important policy initiatives and machinery to advance development discourse in order to push foreign policy agendas in the region. The Christian missionaries believed in

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using philanthropy as an institutionalized and sustained strategy to convert the hearts and souls of indigenous African societies. Through schooling, they believed in moral and character transformation of the young generations. By the twentieth century, the concept had evolved and become a strategy for US development entities to insert their home government into the education policy discourse in colonial territories. Nonstate actors (Christian missionaries and philanthropic entities) recognized the important role education could play in shaping the ideology and cultural values of indigenous Africans in a global community that was transforming rapidly. Christian missionaries saw education as the most effective conduit to shape the minds and souls of the primitive, barbaric, and “backward” societies to embrace the Kingdom of God. They also saw the effectiveness of enlisting the younger generation and preparing them to be the harbingers of the Kingdom to Come in their communities. Young and energetic Africans were to be the torch bearers who would shine the light of salvation in their communities. US secular philanthropies inserted themselves in African educational discourse for a couple reasons. First, the philanthropic entities wanted to link the two African communities on both sides of the Atlantic to a common destiny. Such a destiny was premised on the subordinated positionality of blacks everywhere. Second, philanthropy became a way to transfer and transplant the Hampton-Tuskegee black education model to Africa to ensure that the education of blacks in the global community would stratify them in the global geopolitical, economic, and cultural discourse. Third, philanthropic initiatives were to ensure the institutionalization of the “knowledge ghettoization” of blacks in global cultural production and social transformation. Fourth, philanthropic initiatives helped ward off all the suspicious global elements that the Europeans and Americans thought could potentially derail the white European-American capitalist and global knowledge discourse. They did not want any suspicious elements to influence black Africans during the era. Those suspicious elements included the potential spread of communist ideologies after World War I and during the Cold War era when many colonized African nations attained independence. US philanthropic entities broadened such elements to include black intellectuals in the United States and Africa and viewed this group as propagandists who have the potential to use their scholarship to challenge the entrenched systems. The education transfer of Achimota and the Jeanes training shows that the Hampton-Tuskegee model would not have raised the “talented tenth,” which W. E. B. DuBois mentions, in colonial African societies to pursue self-government. The next chap-

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ter continues the discussion about how US philanthropic organizations used their work in service to the US government’s agenda of promoting “race relations,” US “idealism,” and global “development” in the sub-Saharan African region in the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 6

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US philanthropic entities decided to get involved in education in sub-Saharan Africa after World War I to promote race relations and US idealism in the region. Generally, Western philanthropic activities in sub-Saharan Africa were shaped by the ideology to advance European and American cultural, political, and economic order. The French official Léon Gambetta’s prediction in 1878 (cited by Greely 1984) that European explorations of Africa would pave the way for scientific and philanthropic initiatives on the continent became a reality when, forty years later, philanthropic initiatives moved to a different level in development discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the United States found itself isolated politically and economically. US philanthropic entities saw the design of overseas educational schemes as a strategy to allow corporate America to capitalize on developing export markets and raw materials. US philanthropists also saw the need to pacify international racial tensions while developing lucrative African regions. The United States’ foreign policy agenda in Africa after World War I was to ensure the United States’ significance in the cultural transformation process of black Africans. Education became the “unofficial” social welfare concern rather than a matter of politics or economics (Dunitz 2017). It is insightful to put the US philanthropic initiative of promoting race relations within the context of the post-World War I world. Many blacks in colonial territories of Africa fought alongside Europeans during World War I. The experiences gained by Africans that went to the war widened the horizon of those who took part in these wars as Dr. Oldham of the Phelps Stokes

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Commission reported (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932: 76). The political contexts of World War I provided the motivation for US philanthropies to embark on educational initiatives in Africa to engage Africans in a world that was changing and where the old order of things was crumbling. US philanthropy dialogued with British colonial officers and Christian missions and introduced new approaches to education policymaking and practice on the African continent. The Phelps Stokes Fund and Carnegie Corporation (and later the Rockefeller Foundation and in the 1950s, the Ford Foundation and others) stepped in to support education in SSA to push US politics to center stage in the global geopolitical order (Ford Foundation n.d.; Parmer 2012; Phelps Stokes Fund 1932; Sutton 1960). This was not coincidental given the United States’ involvement in global affairs after World War I. The US philanthropic entities expanding their purview into British colonial Africa also became part of the United States’ agenda to transfer the race relations framework in the Southern United States to Africa (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932). From the early decades of the twentieth century, US philanthropic foundations became obsessed with studying black communities as part of their broader objective to promote race relations at home and abroad. The popular belief among US philanthropists was that learning about different populations, and ethnic and racial groups was a “republican” and nationalist ideal of promoting “co-operation, self-government and self-reliance” of diverse groups (Dunitz 2017: 49). US philanthropic entities broadened their interests to study the “other” to include supporting initiatives that promoted the education of blacks. Rockefeller supported the General Education Board (GEB), an umbrella foundation created in 1902 to study and support the material needs of black schools and colleges, and the Negro Rural School Fund, which supported the Jeanes schools. US philanthropic foundations also developed global networks in Africa to support education commissions, research institutions, colonial education bodies, and teacher training institutes. Carnegie Corporation of New York financed the Advisory Committee on Education in the colonies (ACEC) in the 1930s. American philanthropic assistance helped sponsor many African students in the United States and Britain. From its establishment in 1911, the Phelps Stokes Fund, the pacesetter of US philanthropic initiatives in Africa, took keen interests in “studying the Negro” as part of its framework of improving race relations. Thomas Jesse Jones, the educational director of the Fund and architect of the Phelps Stokes Commission education initiatives in SSA believed that studying other populations engenders an understanding of the broader

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social unit and how the discrete entities fit together in a multicultural society. He also believed that black people had discrete identities that warrant investigation and analysis (Dunitz 2017). The Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation also saw education as a way to improve race relations in colonial territories and independent nations in the sub-Saharan African region. In later years, US philanthropic foundations broadened their philanthropic initiatives to promote race relations to include promotion of US values, norms, dominant institutions, and ideologies in SSA to further US interest in the region. The US government and other US entities anticipated that modeling colonial African educational policies on US cultural norms would draw unexploited African regions into an expansionist United States, an empire in all but name. The Carnegie Corporation’s educational initiative in SSA influenced many people and national policies of African societies. Edward Berman (1978) portrays the relationship between the Carnegie Corporation, the US government, and the British Colonial Office as a marriage of mutual interest. After many African countries attained independence after 1960, African societies witnessed the transnational policy of borrowing knowledge and learning from the direction of the United States to African societies as US educational policies and school organizations gradually became the policy frameworks in sub-Saharan African educational systems. The European and American philanthropic ideology of the time was based on the distortions regarding the assumed “backwardness” and “primitivity” of African people and their attendant deficit ideologies and imperialism, which global forces clothed in the garb of extending the “common good” to the sub-Saharan African region.

Philanthropy, the US Foreign Policy Agenda, and Race Relations Beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, Europeans and Americans embarked on massive philanthropic initiatives to promote education for blacks in Africa as part of their longstanding strategies and efforts to demonstrate their commitment to promoting strong relationships between whites and blacks. This longstanding strategy should be situated within the context of black education in the United States in the late nineteenth century to the end of progressive era and white Americans’ resistance to black social mobility until the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The reconstruction project that took place after the US Civil War did not change the white racial ideology for educat-

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ing blacks in the Southern United States. The ideology of white racial supremacy was a mindset of even “generous” white Americans after the Civil War. Education of blacks was to make them to be “hewers of wood,” “drawers of water,” and necessary laborers for white industrialists and entrepreneurs. Jim Crow laws, which unofficially enforced legal segregation, operated in all parts of US society until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in1964. The idea of adapting education to meet the special needs and characteristics of the black race (whether in the United States or Africa) was an ideology that emerged from pseudoscientific racism and the new ‘imperialism.” After World War I, US philanthropic entities saw the need to broaden their educational support to include education of black communities on the African continent by transplanting agricultural and industrial education provided to blacks in the US South to Africa (Cameron 1975; R. H. Davis 1980; Hubbard 1975). This kind of international philanthropic initiative in the 1920s was a calculated strategy to shape education policy for “blacks” on the African continent to reflect US global policy and practice (Berman 1978; R. H. Davis 1980). Phelps Stokes’s educational initiatives for blacks in the US South were based on the rubric of white supremacy and “manifest destiny.” White Americans believed they had found in certain forms of education the key to solving the so-called black and white race problem. First was the need to understand the black person. Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones, educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, believed that an effective approach to improving race relationships was to study the black person: “Help the Southern White man to study the Negro at first hand, overcome prejudices of an earlier day and help to bring about trained white leadership to cooperate with trained Negro leadership in the solution of the Negro problem” (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932: 14). Second, white Americans perceived the Hampton-Tuskegee type industrial education to be the solution in the United States and in Africa. In discussing the influence of Americans in African education in the early twentieth century, Ellen Murray (cited in R. H. Davis 1980: 87) pointed out that educated blacks in the United States and Africa saw the common tie that bound them. At the same time, white Americans also came to feel that their experience of the black and white problem in the southern states could provide a solution to a similar problem in Africa. When the question of extending US influence in British colonial territory became an item on the agenda, white educators like Thomas Jesse Jones and others who had worked with Booker T. Washington to push industrial education in the US South believed that the Southern solution was transferable to Africa (R. H. Davis 1980). The events of

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World War I encouraged the Phelps Stokes Fund to pursue its ambition of promoting race relations through education in Africa. Once the war ended, Europe and the United States saw a greater need to promote “wise” educational policies for “backward” Africans to prevent interracial friction and prepare native Africans to meet the actual needs of life (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932. The Phelps Stokes Fund stepped in and promoted a low standard of schooling in character development, health and hygiene, agriculture and gardening, industrial skills, knowledge of home economics, and wholesome recreation for the Negro masses in Africa (Healy-Clancy 2014). This kind of education had the purpose of socializing black Africans to know their place in the emerging global society where Europeans and Americans were in control. Education was to be used as the instrument to promote blacks’ perpetual economic and political subordination in a global hierarchical order. Black Africans and blacks in the global community would serve as “the drawers of water and hewers of wood” in the global productive processes. US philanthropic foundations saw the promotion of black education within the framework of “white supremacy” as the most effective way to promote race relations. Europeans and Americans perceived Africans as “backward,” “primitive,” “unintelligent,” and inferior to the white race, and therefore were to be relegated to subordinated statuses. The Phelps Stokes Fund boasted of the nature of socialization the agricultural and industrial education provided to blacks on the other side of the Atlantic. The awakening interest in recent years of the educated Negro both in the United States and in Africa in his cultural background is a matter of real rejoicing. The socialization of tribal life at its best, Negro art, the “spirituals,” the traditions of worthy leaders in the past—these all deserve the attention they are increasingly receiving. Racial pride, when it does not carry with it unfair attitudes toward other races, is always to be encouraged (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932: 31)

The structure of black education, which aimed to improve race relations, was to ensure that black Africans live side by side with white colonists without competition or vouching for emancipation. Godfrey Brown and Mervyn Hiskett (1975) argue that “adapted education” that the Phelps Stokes Commission proposed was an educational analogue of “indirect rule.” Through education, black Africans would be pawns in the hands of whites. Black Africans would be adapted to the mentality, aptitude, occupation, and traditions of the various peoples, conserving as far as possible all the sound and healthy elements in the fabric of their social structure and adapting them where necessary

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to the changed circumstances as they become necessary. Adaptation would enable the black African to navigate the complexity of education within the context of two cultures—that is, the European and African cultures.

Deficit Ideologies, Race Relations, and Education for Black Africans Missionaries, government officials, and philanthropic entities on both sides of the Atlantic who were concerned with black welfare and black education all believed in providing differentiated education for blacks. The Hampton Institute was founded on the idea that blacks needed “teachers of moral strength as well as mental culture” and the introduction of manual labor as a cure for their poverty. The Hampton Institute, according to Richard Hunt Davis, was “to become a drill ground for the future and to send men and women rather than scholars into the world” (R. H. Davis 1980: 88). Many of the philanthropic initiatives for educating blacks in the Southern United States during the time was premised on the view that blacks were less intelligent and less capable of undertaking rigorous academic work. Even the black intellectual Booker T. Washington expressed those views as we see in the debate between him and W. E. B. DuBois who argued that blacks were capable and therefore needed education for the “talented tenth” to provide leadership for the black community. Many whites who supported the Booker T. Washington ideology of industrial education for blacks at that time did so because of their belief that education policies should be a way to reproduce the racial status in global geopolitical contexts. The Phelps Stokes Fund’s push for adapted education was to ensure that blacks in the Southern United States would be trained as semi-skilled and semi-literate, while members of a burgeoning working class would be utilized to help industrialize the reconstructed South. The Phelps Stokes Commission for Africa also recommended adapted education to the “backward” and “primitive” peoples around the world on the racist assumptions that black people are inferior genetically; they will continue to be “drawers of water and hewers of wood” (R. H. Davis 1980). The HamptonTuskegee type education was to be the model for institutions in Africa to prepare and produce African leaders who would cooperate with philanthropically minded whites. These African leaders would abstain from discussions of political and social problems, since the probing of such topics was not conducive to a spirit of cooperation. Thomas

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Jesse Jones bluntly argued that: “What had to be avoided in Africa and in the Southern United States as far as possible was the disease of an educational system like that of India that overstocks the market with clerks, talkers, and writers. Otherwise there would be a recurrence in these areas of the troubles that plagued British authority in India” (R. H. Davis 1980: 87). The racist and deficit ideology that graced black education in Africa should be viewed within the context of the global eugenics movement and the anti-immigration sentiments of 1921 after World War I and the philanthropic support for the eugenics movement of the era. The Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation supported the advancement of the field of eugenics. The Carnegie Corporation based its support for the Phelps Stokes Fund and commission in the United States and Africa in the 1920s on the belief that industrial education was the appropriate education for blacks even with resistance from black intellectuals like W. E. B. DuBois and Carter Woodson. In 1923, the John D. Rockefeller International Education Board provided a grant to the Phelps Stokes Fund to conduct a survey for the British Colonial Office of educational institutions in British West Africa and later in Southern and East Africa (Rosenfield 2014: 75). The report that came out of this grant provided a blueprint for the Carnegie Corporation’s educational investment in Eastern and Southern Africa. The Carnegie Corporation also supported education initiatives in SSA to strengthen US influence in cultural transformation in British colonial Africa. Carnegie philanthropic initiatives in Africa aimed at creating conditions unfavorable to the spread of communism. Philanthropic initiatives for education became a tool for waging ideological warfare (Berman 1977).

Philanthropy and Transnational Borrowing of Race Relations American race relations are complex and complicated in both domestic and foreign policy agendas. US philanthropic foundations’ use of education to promote race relations in Africa provides some insights about the complexities of race relations in US domestic and foreign policy agendas. It also helps us understand how US entities exist to promote institutional racism and support white interests. Phelps Stokes Commission membership was a telling point in the supposed agenda of “improving” race relations. The commission included the personality of Thomas Jesse Jones, a British subject with training in the United States and the Director of the Hampton Institute for blacks. The Phelps

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Stokes Fund saw Jesse Jones as someone with a deeper knowledge of the black experience. Henry Stanley Hollenbeth, a dentist who was an expert in agriculture and animal husbandry, was recruited to the commission to provide expertise in practical education in agriculture and animal husbandry. The rationale for his recruitment (in accordance with the Phelps Stokes Fund’s objective) was to help provide education to meet the social needs of Africans so they would remain in their rural communities as farmers. The British missionary society had their representatives in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wilkie Leo Roy from New York. Wilkie Roy was made the secretary of the commission because of his intimate knowledge of Negro education in America. African education architects saw his specialty in industrial education as a gift for the agenda. The commission saw the usefulness to add an African to the group to bring creditability to this “calculated benevolence.” The Phelps Stokes Fund recruited for the commission Dr. James Kwegyir Aggrey, a black African from Gold Coast (Ghana) who had a doctorate in theology and was at that time pursuing another doctorate at Columbia University. The Phelps Stokes Fund pointed out that it recruited Kwegyir Aggrey to serve as a member of the commission for his belief in black and white race relations. Not least among the services rendered to Africa by the Phelps Stokes Commission was the inclusion as a member of the Commission of Dr. J. E. Kwegyir Aggrey, a Native of the Gold Coast. He was animated by a passionate belief in the necessity and value of cooperation between black and white for the good of Africa and possessed a unique gift of interpreting one race to the other. His influence was felt all over Africa. (Phelps Stokes Fund 1932: 81)

The Phelps Stokes Commission crisscrossed West, West Central, and South Africa in their first expedition in 1920–21 followed by visits to East, Central, and South Africa in 1924. In places like South Africa, Phelps Stokes played a pronounced role in shaping Natal policies in bifurcating education for blacks and whites. When the commission toured South Africa in 1920 and 1924, Natal educational official Charles Loram accompanied and offered tremendous support for it (Healy-Clancy 2013). The objective to improve race relations between blacks and whites in Africa was broadly understood as transplanting US ideas about black education to Africa. The Phelps Stokes Commission influenced the education policies in Belgian and Portuguese colonies in the 1920s into the 1930s (Benson 1936; Phelps Stokes Fund 1932). The idea of improving race relations in sub-Saharan Africa was broadened to in-

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clude bringing African educators to the United States. After the expeditions of the Phelps Stokes Commission in Africa, the organization provided travel grants to persons involved in African education to visit the United States. The Carnegie Corporation, in particular, demonstrated support by providing funds for educational exchange for individuals to visit the United States. The Carnegie Corporation’s support for education in Africa became part of the grand agenda to promote United States’ connections to the world through immigration, foreign languages, and international exchanges that enabled Americans to engage in the world as a motivation that spurred US philanthropic initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. The Carnegie Corporation points out that: “The grants in support of industrial and community education for blacks in the rural American South in conjunction with the efforts of the General Education Board and the Phelps Stokes Fund laid the groundwork for the major grant programs on this theme in Africa in the late 1920s and 1930s” (Rosenfield 2014: 65). The Carnegie Corporation’s philanthropic initiatives supporting education in SSA initially took center stage in South Africa after World War I. The initiative had the backing of the US government and was part of the grand agenda of the United States to stimulate optimism after the war had weakened progress in Europe. It was during this time when US President Woodrow Wilson promoted an inclusionary and idealist vision of international citizenship based on a partnership of peoples, not merely governments, and provided a persuasive political and cultural context for the initiative (Bell 2000). Between 1929 and 1938, the Carnegie Corporation and the Phelps Stokes Fund collaborated and promoted the Jeanes training initiative, which was part of the organizations’ agenda to transplant black education from the Southern United States to Africa. These two philanthropic entities also supported the educational visits of African educators to St. Helena Island in South Carolina to study black education and interracial work in the South. In the 1950s, the framework of promoting race relations in Africa evolved to include facilitating strong relations between the United States and newly independent African nations, especially as the United States plunged into the Cold War with the Soviet Bloc. The efforts made by United States policymakers to build a strong relationship with the newly independent African countries in the 1950s and early 1960s was intended to demonstrate to the newly independent African nations that the best way to achieve their economic and political aspirations lies in embracing and cooperating with the free world (Parmer 2012). US policymakers saw that it was critical to work with these newly in-

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dependent African nations and nudge them toward embracing democracy, free market ideologies, and human capital ideologies to promote human development and human resource needs. US policymakers viewed the United States’ influence on African nations as critical and part of the overarching objective of promoting US idealism in Africa. The “secular” missionaries were ready to execute this important philanthropic agenda in Africa. Once again US policymakers enlisted their “secular missionaries” of the era—philanthropic giants—to further this development policy agenda. In 1954, Alan Pifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation, stated that the corporation’s interest in Africa was primarily motivated by a desire to strengthen “the Western democratic part of the world” even though most Africans still lived under colonial rule. US policy makers had a strategic interest in Africa in the sense that they wanted the African region to be “free of inimical influences” and friendly to the United States to ensure that African governments’ political, economic, and social evolution reflect an image of the United States. They also wanted to guarantee that the United States had access to resources, increased commercial, industrial, and cultural activities and to consolidate its cultural and moral position with respect to Africa (Parmer 2012: 156). Development in Africa, as seen from the accounts here, was to be subordinated to the whims and caprices of the higher strategic goals of the United States and Western powers. Philanthropic entities generally never consulted Africans on the issue of Africa’s development initiatives. Inderjeet Parmer (2012: 156) cited an example of a philanthropic conference in 1958 focusing on the development of higher education and related issues in West Africa. The Carnegie Corporation organized the conference, which the Ford Foundation, representatives of the British colonial authorities, US government agencies, and several Africanists from the United States attended. However, the Carnegie Corporation did not invite a single African to this meeting. This is further evidence of the paternalist approaches used by Western forces on Africans when it comes to the education discourse of SSA. The development ideology of American philanthropic foundations was important in a post-World War II Cold War era where US policymakers took African societies seriously to dissuade them from entering the Soviet Bloc. At the time, Europe itself was under the Marshall Plan, both European and American policymakers saw the great economic significance of the African continent. Africa was rich in all the resources needed for the atomic age. It was also replete with agricultural produce including cocoa, coffee, cotton, and vegetable oils (Parmer 2012). Parmer (2012) points out that with all the abundant

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resources, the newly independent African societies needed development that would promote elite top-down modernization. The Christian missionaries and colonial administrators had laid the foundation for new African leadership familiar with the West and who spoke the colonizer’s “language” in contrast to the masses. It was in the view of philanthropic entities, notably the Carnegie Corporation and others that future leaders must be educated in the United States to effect the greatest intellectual transformation. Parmer (2012) points out that the acculturation of African elites had political and economic consequences, as these African elites helped expand markets for Western consumer products.

Philanthropy Support, Black Africanist Intellectuals, and Race Relations The supposed agenda of “improving [the] race relationship” between whites and blacks demonstrated how race and racism shaped philanthropic support for research on blacks and Africans by white and black Africanists (Gershenhorn 2009; Parmer 2012; Vitalis 2015). The racial question regarding the relationship between white and black Africanist intellectuals and their respective access to resources is something worth highlighting. In the 1940s into the 1960s, US philanthropic entities including the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation made expansive funding available to individuals, universities, and research institutes to embark on research on black African societies. Black scholars sought to capitalize on these developments, which coincidentally was an era of increased interest in Africa among philanthropic foundations and the federal government in the creation of African Studies programs (Gershenhorn 2009; Parmer 2012; Vitalis 2015). Interestingly, black Africanist intellectuals at historically black institutions, such as Howard University, were shut out of these opportunities. Philanthropic entities denied funding to the few black intellectuals including W. E. B. DuBois and Carter Woodson, branding them propagandists. Research projects on blacks during this period received foundation support only when white researchers controlled them (Gershenhorn 2009; Vitalis 2015). Black Africanist scholars witnessed what some of them termed as the “hijacking” of Africa’s narratives by white Africanist scholars. The philanthropic entities’ treatment of black Africanist scholars caused some rifts in the 1960s politics of African Studies. These inequalities of funding support came to a head when in 1969 at the African Studies Association conference

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in Montreal, black scholars led a protest to call for black people to control African Studies. The conflict boiled down to who was supposed to provide the narrative about Africa. The African Heritage Studies Association, which was a caucus carved out of ASA in 1968, raised the issue of who was supposed to interpret African history, white or black scholars. At this conference, black activists asserted that they were not going to permit white scholars to abuse African people. They proclaimed that as people of African descent they would no longer permit “our people” (Africans) to be raped culturally, economically, politically, and intellectually merely to provide European scholars with intellectual status symbols of African artifacts hanging in their living rooms and irrelevant and injurious lectures for their classrooms (Gershenhorn 2009). Jerry Gershenhorn points out that black scholars faced enormous obstacles as philanthropic entities had no interest in funding African American scholars (who in the estimation of philanthropic entities could not be relied on) to follow the US State Department’s Cold War line, which aimed to perpetuate European and American imperialist domination in Africa. Philanthropic foundations’ deprived black intellectuals of support for research, which has been a longstanding practice in a “White World Order” (to borrow the words of Robert Vitalis 2015: 106) and part of the ideology of “domination and dependency among the world’s so-called superior and inferior races.” The longstanding strategy used by Western philanthropic entities is to be the trustees and voice of African societies and disenfranchise, marginalize, and disempower African intellectuals and intellectuals of African descent from providing their own narratives about themselves and their societies.

Philanthropy, Race, and Poverty Alleviation Post-World War II humanistic ideologies that shaped the educational discourse of the 1940s and 1950s influenced the policy agenda of American philanthropic entities working in Africa. These ideologies promoted discourse that linked education and poverty. The popular ideologies about education and occupational mobility in the United States at the time and the rationale to use education to fight poverty and racial inequality, which resulted in the publication of the Coleman Report (1966), influenced the policy agenda of US philanthropic entities and shaped conversations about education policy and practice in sub-Saharan Africa. The education and poverty discourse of the era coincided with the wave of many colonized African nations attaining

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political independence. When African nations entered a period of transition in the British colonial dominions, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation forged partnerships with many of the newly emerging nations to support education and development initiatives with the understanding that there would be a high rate of return to many citizens attending schools in the newly independent African nations. The economic, political, and social emergence of these [underdeveloped] countries into the modern is one of the most momentous developments of the modern times . . . What all these areas share in common—for some of them are “new nations” in the political sense, others will soon become so, and some are in fact old nations—is that the process of modernization lies ahead for them. In highly telescoped fashion, these emerging nations are striving to create modern economic and political structures in the merest fraction of the time it took the West to do so. Their success will represent the best hope for a peaceful world for all of us; if they fail at that, it will represent failure—and tragedy—for all of us. (Rosenfield 2014: 224)

The US philanthropic entities’ efforts to promote economic development was influenced by the US government and private organizations’ agenda to support human capital development through technical assistance to support the growth and development of newly independent African countries. Technical assistance included the introduction of new technologies to promote modernization (expressed in the form of “liberal capitalism”) as a counter to communism (Parmer 2012; Rosenfield 2014). The Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation supported human capital in SSA to target higher education where the organizations provided strong support for scholarships for Africans from dominions of British colonial empires to enroll in universities in the United States. The human capital development agenda of the US philanthropic initiatives also included support for national education commissions to establish teacher education programs and institutes of education in some African countries. The Carnegie Corporation supported the Ashby Commission of Nigeria to establish more institutes of education. The Ashby Commission recommended in 1960 that universities be established in each region of Nigeria to promote modernization. The corporation also supported linkages between the Institute of Education of the University of Ghana, the Institute of Education at the University of London, and the Teachers College at Columbia University to organize a professional association to maintain regular contact on issues related to teacher education and curriculum reforms (Rosenfield 2014: 246). The Carnegie Corpo-

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ration also supported faculty exchanges between universities in the newly independent African countries and Teachers College. As several territories in SSA became politically independent in the 1960s, the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation collaborated with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and some US development entities, business investors, and the British Colonial Office to support higher education in countries in SSA in the 1960s. These efforts provided networks of scholars, investors, philanthropists, and policymakers who became influential. Until this time, American philanthropic entities were sometimes caught in the middle between either ceding to the demands of African nationalists for rapid progress through more higher education or preparing a small elite that would be pro-Western in outlook and composition and carry the agendas of Western development entities. It should be noted that Western development entities were skeptical and feared that the growth of an educationally “Westernized urban intelligentsia could stair nationalistic pressure and derail the West’s ultimate agenda, they also envisioned the potential of native elites to succumb to the whims and caprices of Western development entities and perpetuate the Western agenda” (Beshir 1969; Parmer 2012; SeriHersch 2017).

Philanthropy and US “Idealism” US philanthropic entities saw their presence in sub-Saharan Africa as a way to promote US “idealism” in Africa. US philanthropic foundation activities in SSA were based on the principle that nationalism and internationalism could be mutually reinforcing. The liberal developmentalist ideology of the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century embedded the United States’ imperial interests of altruism, evolution, and world progress. For US philanthropic entities, promoting US idealism internationally meant bringing other countries to the consciousness of the United States through the support of schools, universities, libraries, development of key programs to support university staff training, scientific research, and useful publication beyond the United States to include former British dominions and colonies (Effah and Senadza 2008; Weeks 2008). US philanthropic entities made direct grants to support the development of disciplinary studies in African universities and development of African Studies programs at universities in the United States. During the interwar years between the mid1920s to the 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation developed a special

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interest in anthropology and provided support for the development of Social Anthropology. It provided direct grants for operating expenses, research grants, fellowships, and publication assistance to support institutions including the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC). Donald Fisher points out that the rational for such interest was to apply scientific methods to social science research to offer knowledge that would make the colonial administration both more efficient and more humane. Social control would be increased, and the problem associated with “culture contact,” which were very much part of the American scene, could be resolved (Fisher 1986). The US philanthropic entities’ goal of promoting liberal development idealism became obvious in their activities in South Africa in the 1930s and in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1960s. The objective of the Carnegie Corporation’s philanthropic support for education in South Africa included shaping the policy process in South Africa to bring Africa more firmly into the consciousness of the United States and serving as an important antidote to official US policy toward the colonial territories at this time. The liberal development agenda also became the underlying ideology of the Carnegie Corporation’s British Dominion and Colonies Fund for South Africa, which persisted into the 1970s when the international community spoke against the brutalities of apartheid in South Africa even as the United States remained silent about the political situation there. The Carnegie Corporation shifted its strategy during the 1970s so as not to be seen as an agent of US foreign policy (Bell 2000). The liberal development idealism was the basis for the Rockefeller Foundation to develop the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), which provided grants for many educational activities. The Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation also provided support for education in Africa through the Association of African Universities. In Ghana, US philanthropic foundations collaborated with local institutions to provide platforms for building institutional management and leadership capacities. The Carnegie Corporation supported the Ghana National Council of Teacher Education to help them develop manuals on leadership for newly appointed heads of tertiary educational institutions (Effah and Senadza 2008). US philanthropic entities also pushed their liberal democratic agenda in the 1950s and 1960s by supporting higher education in newly independent sub-Saharan African societies. The Carnegie Corporation and others saw education as the key to development and therefore focused on developing a system of colleges and universities that would mass-produce men and women qualified to develop Africa (Parmer 2012). The Ford Foundation supported higher education by collab-

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orating with US agencies and engaged in active institution-building programs, including economic planning units of the University of Ife, and the behavioral sciences at the University of Ibadan. The foundation spent $164 million on African development programs between the 1950s and 1974 in the areas of social sciences and a further $18 million on research and training programs. The Ford Foundation also provided $25 million for university education in Nigeria of which a third was invested at the University of Ibadan. The Ford Foundation also funded institutes of African Studies in Ghana and Nigeria to promote a national sense of identity in newly independent states (Parmer 2012). While the Rockefeller Foundation took active roles in supporting education in SSA in the 1920s and 1930s, it provided more support for independent sub-Saharan African societies. The foundation contributed a further $9 million to the University of Ibadan in the 1960s and 1970s while the Carnegie Corporation expended $10 million on African universities to promote innovations in teacher education (Parmar 2012: 158). Parmer points out that in spite of the supposed “good” will of US philanthropic activities, support for education tended to focus disproportionately on the whites of South Africa and white colonial educators across the rest of the (British) African continent. US philanthropic entities also supported African Studies programs in predominantly white universities in the United States, including Columbia, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago University, Boston University, Indiana University, Wisconsin University, and Michigan University to develop programs on African Studies and pursue research on Africa (Gernshenhorn 2009; Parmar 2012). In the twenty-first century, US philanthropic entities continue to support higher education in SSA through grants to promote human development (D’Souza 2019; Rockefeller Foundation 2014; Walker 2020). The Carnegie Corporation continues to support knowledge and ideas through support for educational institutions and libraries, promotion of peace, democratic institutions, socioeconomic development, and international engagements. The corporation supports information technologies, women’s advancement in higher education and sciences, and preparing future university faculty. In its fiscal year 2017–18, the Carnegie Corporation made available $15.8 million to support these courses. The Carnegie Corporation collaborates with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to provide grants to support the African Humanities Programs (AHP), which operates in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda to strengthen humanities and social sciences (D’Souza 2019). In the last decade of the twentieth cen-

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tury, the Ford Foundation incorporated peace education, promotion of democratic values, and provision of grants and scholarships for students to promote gender, race, and ethnic justice. The Rockefeller Foundation is also partnering with other entities, including Intel, to close the digital gender gap in Africa.

New Directions of Philanthropic Support The “Education for All” (EFA) initiative has been a watershed moment for sub-Saharan African nations. While there is a renewed commitment to support universal basic education in the region to promote the “common good” of all people, the cost involved in promoting the EFA initiative continues to put excess strain on the resources of most governments in SSA. Governments in SSA allocate between 11 and 28 percent of their national budgets to education with an average of 18.3 percent and devote 5 percent of the total GDP (about $1.5 trillion) to public education (The Africa-America Institute 2015; UNESCO-UIS 2011). The higher expenditures on education still represent only a portion of the financial resources needed by the governments in the region to fund education programs that target marginalized groups. International donors provide nearly 6 percent of the education resources in SSA, and individual households contribute about 25 percent of the total national education expenditure on education (The Africa-America Institute 2015). The 2014 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report points out that continual external support (including philanthropic support) is crucial for comprehensive planning for education and the kind of predictable finance that long-term aid commitment can provide for the region. Within the contexts of the efforts to fulfill the EFA agenda, support received from Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) toward education continues to decline, which means that efforts to promote the global EFA, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be hampered (UNESCO 2018). Education systems in SSA have been expanding rapidly in SSA but governments are struggling to reach their educational development goals. These scenarios show that the international community needs to sustain its support for education to meet its humanitarian commitment in the sub-Saharan African region. Support for education should be viewed within the rubric of economic development, affirming humanistic idealism, and ensuring participatory democratic processes for all, rather than being a political tool to sustain the power asymmetry and marginalization of groups.

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Concluding Thoughts At the outset, US philanthropic entities’ promotion of race relations at home and abroad entailed strengthening and perpetuating the existing power asymmetry in the global community. The philanthropic entities in the United States pushed the agenda by supporting and funding research initiatives that focused on Africa after World War II. During the Cold War, philanthropic entities (backed by the US government) saw the necessity to create area studies programs to produce experts to help the United States execute policies that served its global interests. African American scholars sought to capitalize on these developments at this time, which coincidentally was an era of increased interest in Africa among philanthropic foundations and the federal government signaled by the creation of African Studies programs (Gershenhorn 2009; Vitalis 2015). However, African American scholars faced enormous obstacles as philanthropic entities expressed no interest in funding African American scholars (who in the estimation of philanthropic entities, could not be relied on) to follow the US State Department’s Cold War line, which intended to perpetuate European and American imperialist domination in Africa. Here we witnessed the use of philanthropy to consolidate institutional racism in grant support. From the late twentieth century into the twenty-first century, the Carnegie Corporation shifted the promotion of race relations in Africa from the earlier paternalistic and racist views to strengthening African scholars to chart their own destiny and write their own histories, their arts, their philosophies, their literature, and their musical and cultural traditions. These stories are not told by the colonizers, but by their own makers, scholars, and thinkers (see D’Souza 2019). Established US philanthropic foundations have employed market mechanisms to guide their decisions of giving. They are more conscious about the rate of return on investment aiming to enforce competition, weed out the weak, provide close supervision, maintain standards, and embrace output as indicators of success. There is much emphasis on “value for money” (Edwards 2015; Payton and Moody 2008). The new approach to philanthropy in the United States involves a network of business-oriented philanthropic organizations and limited liability companies whose goal is to reform public schools along free market ideologies. The agendas of these philanthropic entities are already making their way to SSA and other parts of the developing world. Bilateral agencies and transnational global governing organizations are embracing the education policy models proposed by these contemporary philanthropies. Education policy transfer continues to be an im-

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portant process in these times of economic and cultural globalization where there is much emphasis on technology transfer and sharing of initiatives that promote economic and technological transformation and political cohesiveness.

CHAPTER 7

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Colonial economic discourse pushed narratives that depicted black Africans as lazy, childlike, irresponsible, and exhibiting docility attitudes toward work and labor (Degler 1976; Shadle 2012; Whitehead 1999). European settlers and farmers in colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa depended on African labor for their exploitative enterprises. European colonists and farmers berated African natives as idle and lazy when those Africans demonstrated their unwillingness to work on settler farms and preferred to work on their own farms with less alienated forms of labor. Europeans colonists pushed narratives that etched various stereotypes about African antipathy and limited capacity for work and labor. In many of the cases, the Africans’ supposed antipathy toward European labor was a form of resistance to White European male exploitation of Africans. Ann Whitehead details the account of the Lamba people’s resistance to work in white colonial industries in the Copperbelt region of Zambia. This group refused to work on colonial settler farms and in the copper mines to resist their displacement by the British colonial establishment. Due to the proximity of the Lamba to the copper mines and the growing urban areas in the Copperbelt, the Lamba became more interested in marketing their grain and vegetables instead of working as laborers on settler farms and in mines. European colonizers described the Lamba in derogatory terms: “timid, lazy, stupid and backward people.” The European colonialists’ value judgment about work also made European settlers in Kenya treat their African workers like children by beating them. Their belief was that if they did not beat their workers, the lazy Africans would shirk even more than they already did (Shadle 2012). The Europeans explained that the only punishment they un-

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derstood was the lash. We see this kind of belief among slave owners in the United States who also referred to their black African slaves in similar derogatory terms. The slave owners popularized the concept of “Sambo” to portray the African slaves as lazy, full of infantile silliness and talk inflated with childish exaggeration, unable to think, dependent on the whites and behaving like children (Degler 1976). Such views and value judgments about blacks and Africans’ attitude toward work and labor became part of the colonial racist talk perpetuated by White European colonialists and American imperialists. Such views about black people fed into the narratives that blacks are “lazy and only interested in handouts” and not willing to engage in the productive process. The view has also created the narrative in the United States about blacks needing and depending on “handouts,” and views and strategies by mostly conservative politicians to limit food stamps. In global development discourse, views about “the lazy” Africans have shaped Western “dependency” theories. This narrative ignores white European male exploitation of black Africans through forced labor in colonial encounters. From the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, Europeans colonists used forced labor as colonial policy and pushed a “civilizing” agenda in many African territories. Notable among such atrocities included the agents of King Leopold II to extract rubber from Belgian Congo, Cecil Rhodes in Nyasaland, the Portuguese in Angola and northern Zambesi, Germans in Togoland, and British in apartheid South Africa. There is documented evidence of how white European settlers strategized and subjected Africans into forced labor in many other colonized societies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Colonialism, Education, and the Labor Market in Sub-Saharan Africa A postcolonial framework helps examine the issue of unemployment in SSA from colonial productive discourse. One of the vestiges of colonial capitalism is its effects on the postcolonial labor market. It is useful to examine how white Europeans used colonial education to co-opt Africans into the colonial economic and productive processes (Boserup 1970; Livingston 2006; Mfum-Mensah 2017a; Waller 2006). In British colonial territories, the few educated elites worked for the colonial administration while the uneducated Africans worked in the mining, agricultural, and industrial sectors of the colonial productive processes. The French colonial administration implemented tiered education systems in French colonies. This limited the access to jobs

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based on educational opportunities (Clignet 1968, 1974; Madeira 2005; Mfum-Mensah 2018; White 1996). In French colonial territories in West Africa, the discriminatory practices that restricted access to education and colonial productive processes caused youth to migrate to the neighboring British colonial territories in search of employment (Warson 2017). Many natives in French colonial West Africa also migrated to the British territories to escape the constraints of forced labor and other labor obligations in French-ruled territories. Later in 1946, the abolition of forced labor in French territories slowed the youth migration and shifted to patterns of temporary seasonal migration in British West African colonies. There were contradictions in the colonial economic and productive processes, in particular, how colonial governments used different sociocultural variables to engage different groups in the colonial economic and productive processes (Boserup 1970; Livingston 2006; MfumMensah 2017a; Waller 2006). Richard Waller, for instance, points out that at the heart of the ambivalence of colonialism lay a contradiction that became increasingly apparent as colonialism developed. During colonialism, colonial forces co-opted and turned young Africans into productive and “responsible” citizens because of their belief that it would guarantee the future of colonialism. Colonial governments socialized the youth through modern institutions including schools, youth organizations, welfare, and penal agencies as symbols of modernity to co-opt the youth into the colonial economic and productive processes. Within this same context, colonial forces used the same modern institutions to stratify society. For instance, colonial governments used race, sex, spatial, and geographical location, religion, and one’s ability among others to determine who had access to education and who was co-opted to work in the colonial economic and productive processes in colonial territories of Southern Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and West Africa. Race determined how the youth were co-opted to work in South Africa and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. The contradiction of colonial reconfiguration of the labor market is that it sometimes created unease in colonial societies. Waller (2006) notes that in South Africa, for instance, the realities of racial domination where whites had easy access to the labor market and blacks did not undermined the masculinity of men who were no longer masters of their own homes. There were disruptive and unequal opportunities of social and economic changes and the realities of racial domination in colonial societies. The introduction of transnational capital and new industrial forms of work in the twentieth century determined who could work in the

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colonial productive process. Beginning in the 1930s, British colonists used standardization of bodies and minds in Botswana, ranking peoples’ bodies by physical “types” according to scientific standards of measurement to determine who was capable of working in the colonial economic and productive process (Livingston 2006; Mfum-Mensah 2017a). By the 1940s, men who sought work in South African mines faced a medical examination to determine their “fitness” for work. Those whose bodies the colonials deemed “unfit” for industrial employment by virtue of their age, weight, perceived impairment, or other criteria were economically and socially marginalized. Colonial administrators socially engineered disability and connected it to colonial capitalism, which left a legacy. Similarly, colonial legacy regarding the ways European forces used religion and geography to determine African youth’s access to colonial economic and productive process abounds (Loimeier 2013; Mfum-Mensah 2005). British colonial administrators were strategic in using religion to determine the nature of engagement for different youth in colonial territories. For example, in the heavily Islamic areas of the British colonial territories of northern Ghana, northern Nigeria, and parts of the Muslim north in Pokomo in the Tana River County in Kenya, and Tanzania, colonial establishment withheld the development of education, which provided access to the colonial productive process and later to the postcolonial labor market. Their strategy was to ensure that the only option for the Muslim youth to gain access to the colonial labor market in those geographical areas was for them to work as unskilled laborers in the colonial economic and productive process. In Belgian Congo, European forces deliberately withheld education from the rural communities to ensure that rural folks did not migrate to the cities to taste the European lifestyle. The situation was similar in the German and later French colonial territory of Togo where Kwesi Aning and Naila Salihu (2013) note that, during Togo’s colonization, the southern ethnic groups were considered the commercial and intellectual elite who were recruited to fill skilled administrative positions of the colonial establishment. However, the northern ethnic groups were recruited for military service during colonial French rule, and at the time of independence, the Kabres of northern Togo formed the majority of Togo’s army. In much the same way, in German colonies, the colonial administration ensured that only children of the wealthy had access to educational opportunities and colonial productive markets. European colonizers did not take the time to educate themselves about African social structures to understand how unlike European and Asian societies they were where men traditionally performed most

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of the agricultural labor; in African societies, the situation was complex and complicated. European colonizers never understood that in some African societies, men were responsible for building houses and grain stores, fencing and maintenance of Kraal, taking care of the animals, making tools, and digging wells among other things. The Europeans, trapped in their ethnocentric worldview, entertained the myth and ideology that African males were naturally lazy, unresponsive to economic incentives, and lethargic due to the labor of African women. They therefore sought to use forced labor as an aspect of the progressive rule and justified the policy. When sub-Saharan Africa became the primary focus of global policy and economic discourse in 1884/5, indigenous Africans lost their territories to the European invaders who out of greed and hunger for African resources and their possession of sophisticated technology, introduced new levels of slavery that exploited indigenous Africans on their own land to work for nothing. There is a treasure trove of documentary evidence of European enslavement and exploitation of Africans on their own lands during colonialism (Boserup 1970; Crowder 1968; Fetter 1979; Hochschild 1999; Mfum-Mensah 2018; Newitt 1973; Okia 2012; Rotberg 1967; Stearns 2008). In Southern Africa, Cecil Rhodes and his group of marauders exploited native Africans in ways equivalent to a new form of enslavement where native Africans worked for a pittance. Michael Crowder (1968) reports that European colonizers gave similar treatment to workers in Cote D’Ivoire, Gold Coast, and Nigeria where the colonist withheld part of the meager salaries they were supposed to provide to native workers and also deprived them of benefits due them. Historical documents also outline the varied ways Portuguese and British colonists in Angola and Nyasaland implemented labor strategies that could only be equated to new levels of colonial enslavement (Newitt 1973; Rotberg 1967). The exploitation was even harsher and worse in Belgian colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa. While slavery was legally abolished by the late nineteenth century, King Leopold II introduced a new form of slavery in the Belgian Congo where he used brute tactics to enslave and exploit native Africans to work for nothing. Those African youths who failed to work for nothing had their hands or legs severed. Article III, Leopold II’s document of settlement of Native Children, highlights his strategy to subject Belgian Congolese youth to new forms of slavery. “From the day of their admission the children should be placed exclusively under the guardianship of the state, to which they shall remain subject, and shall be liable to work at the discretion of the Governor-General, up to the expiration of

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their twenty-five year in return for maintenance, food, lodging and free medical care” (Fetter 1979: 85) Leopold and his agents made life miserable and unbearable for Belgian Congolese. He forbade these native Africans to shift their village and to visit, even temporarily, a neighboring village without a special permit. He forced the Congolese to work on the rubber plantations. They trekked for two days in most cases into deep forest every two weeks, until they arrived at the area with abundant rubber vines. In the forest, the Congolese rubber collector passes a number of days in a miserable existence. He has to build himself an improvised shelter. He has no food . . . He is deprived of his wife, exposed to the inclemencies of the weather as the attacks of wild beasts. When once he has collected the rubber he must bring it to the State Station or to that of the Company, and only then can he return to his village, where he can sojourn for barely more than two or three days because the next demand is upon him. (Fetter 1979: 88)

Estimates show that King Leopold of Belgium extracted approximately $1.1 billion dollars worth of profit from the Belgian Congo (Hochschild 1999). German colonial administration in West Africa implemented a similar brute tactic in German Togoland where it initially schemed to bring northern Togoland under its rule to protect the Northern German Missions. This, together with economic exploitation, made Gustav Nachigal, then the representative of Otto Von Bismarck, together with the German military and German trading companies expand the German territory of Togoland from the southern majority Ewe territory to annex the north, which also included Dagomba, Kabre, Konkomba, Tykossi, and Kotokori (Stearns 2008). The German colonizers used African forced labor to work in rubber, palm, cotton, and cocoa plantations. The colonialists used the penal system to intimidate native Africans who refused to work. Later, in 1946, the French abolished forced labor in their territories. Colonial governments also reconfigured sex differentiation to determine access to colonial productive processes in colonial territories (Boserup 1970; Forde 1946; Snyder and Tadesse 1995). Ester Boserup outlines how colonial administrations in sub-Saharan Africa reconfigured the roles of the sexes in the colonial economic processes along the structures of the European Victorian era with the belief that women needed to work in the domestic sphere. In rural contexts, colonial reconfiguration confined women to domestic roles and production of food crops while men engaged in cash crops to assure men’s access to

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the cash economy. Colonial discriminatory policies ensured sex discrimination in training, land reforms, introduction of technology and new equipment, provision of new scientific methods and innovative skills in the agricultural sector leading to differences in the productivity between men and women (1970: 53). With new methods, skills, and advanced technology, men produced cash crops for export. As colonialism shifted African societies to industrial productive process, industrial labor in towns became a new phenomenon. Within these new colonial industrial societies, the colonial government implemented policies that supported the participation of males in the industrial labor market sidelining women in the productive processes in the urban communities. Colonial administration developed cities like Nairobi, Salisbury (Harare), Dar es Salaam, and Johannesburg, among others so males could migrate from their rural enclaves to work in factories while they left the women (and wives) behind in the rural communities. As more women defied these confining colonial arrangements and migrated to urban communities, colonial forces strategized and decided not to employ women who lived in urban communities, which threatened the stability of the family. Until 1948, when the global humanistic initiatives spurred global campaigns for universal education, colonial governments structured their education systems to provide educational opportunities for only few African children. During the colonial era, the few Africans who had access to the colonial school systems also got the opportunity to seek high-status employment in colonial administrations. Most of these educated Africans worked as clerks and administrators for the colonial governments. For the rest of the Africans who never had access to colonial schooling and those who received little education, participation in the colonial productive process was through working as laborers in colonial industrial and agricultural sectors. One of the contradictions of colonial education is that it became a tool for stratification even as it was supposed to promote opportunity. Colonial administration deliberately reconfigured Western education as the tool for accessing the labor market and participating in the colonial production process. Colonial education presented ambivalent situations, sometimes creating uncertainties for the youth and many families. Sometimes, educated Africans had a hard time accessing the labor market. As people experienced marginalization and discrimination in their efforts to access to the labor market, many became disillusioned about the promise of education. Richard Waller notes that urban spaces became the preserve of “spivs” who combined the two crowning colonial vices of idleness and insolence. Labor migration moved adult men from rural families and

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sometimes destabilized some families, becoming a process through which masculinity was fashioned and transmitted. Colonialism created a loss of control over youth and its aspirations at the very moment the future seemed most uncertain. Colonial rule presented a future sharply divided and tightly controlled within the colonial hierarchy of opportunity (Waller 2006: 79, 80). For some young men, colonial rule offered an accelerated path to wealth and status. For others, colonialism seemed to deny a future altogether. The practice of discrimination in many colonial territories made the youth exercise open contempt of both employment and the law. For the privileged few, colonialism became a control of the future, not its lack. In schools, many students exercised unrest demanding access to “white color” education to gain respect for future leadership.

Contradictions of Education and the Labor Market in Post-Independent Sub-Saharan Africa After attaining political independence, many nations in sub-Saharan Africa embarked on campaigns for mass education to develop human capital to shore up their national economies. Over the past sixty years the campaigns have led to increases in enrollment at all levels of the educational system in the region. For instance, between 1970 and 2013, sub-Saharan Africa witnessed the fastest growth in tertiary gross enrollment ration (GER) at 4.3 percent annually, faster than the global average of 2.8 percent. In 2012, 42 percent of young people ages twenty to twenty-four had secondary education (Brookings Institution 2018; Darvas et al. 2017). The hope was that the increases in educational enrollment would create a domino effect, expand the productive processes, and improve the national economies. What many economies in the region are experiencing is that the enrollment increases have not led to an expansion in the productive process and labor market. All the nations in the region are now experiencing high rates of unemployment. During my recent visits to Accra, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Arusha, I came across many people selling on the roadside because they are not able to secure jobs. Many have either completed school but cannot secure jobs or never went to school and therefore cannot compete against those who did in their search for gainful employment. Some of these roadside hawkers are disinterested in “dirty” labor. A major contradiction of colonialism in relation to education and access to the labor market is that local people repackage colonial practices to suit their social structures (Bledsoe

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1992). In this case, a vestige of colonialism is how educated people in former colonial territories in Africa develop a disdain for manual or what one might call “dirty” labor and come to equate education with access to white-collar jobs. Colonial economic arrangements and education practices ensured that few fortunate people had access to formal education where they were prepared to enter the colonial productive process. After independence, most post-independent governments continued the colonial arrangement to access public sector jobs. As more people gain access to education, it has become impossible to employ many of these people in the public sector. At the 25 October 2018 meeting of African Heads of States at the ninth African Union High-Level Retreat in Ghana, the President of Ghana Nana Akufo Addo highlighted the problem of unemployment faced by nations in Africa. He pointed out that the current situation of massive unemployment in Africa threatens the stability of the continent and urged African leaders to prioritize finding a solution to the growing youth unemployment situation in Africa. His warning comes at a time when the youth unemployment rate of his own nation is at an all-time high. The 2016 World Bank report indicates that Ghana’s youth unemployment is at 48 percent while that of Nigeria hovers around the same numbers (Ajakaiye et al. 2016). The International Labor Organization (ILO), the World Bank, and several economists highlight the worsening trend of youth unemployment in SSA at a time when the youth population is expected to double to over 830 million by 2050 (Calvés and Depledge 2007; ILO 2016a, b; Kamgnia and Murinde 2015; Kararach 2015; Zourkaleini and Piche 2007). Many people in the working-age population (WAP) in sub-Saharan Africa either do not have jobs or engage in jobs that do not match their skills and level of education. Some of the people in these two situations may have pursued higher levels of education with the hope that education would propel them to access gainful employment. Unfortunately, access to the labor market for the majority of these educated people continues to be a dream as they wait for their governments to create jobs. Part of the reason why national governments are not able to create jobs is the economic policies of global governing and transnational advocacy groups including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other donor agencies. These powerful institutions place a moratorium on public sector employment but also implement austere policies that make it practically impossible for governments in SSA to provide financial support to create private sector jobs. People who have the requisite skills and knowledge in areas that are highly needed are not able to access the needed financial resources to set up their

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own businesses. Recently, the Ghanaian government implemented an initiative where it recruited and trained a hundred thousand university graduates to post them to work in different public sectors. This initiative, though laudable, is still a “band aid” that does not totally address the problem of unemployment. While the overall trend of unemployment is likely to reduce slightly in SSA, the outlook for youth in many countries is still mixed. Currently, countries in the region are dealing with internal migration from rural communities to cities because of the lack of social amenities and employment opportunities in the rural areas. Major cities like Nairobi, Accra, Dar es Salaam, Lagos, Kinshasa, Lusaka, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Abidjan, Luanda, and Cape Town are dealing with a population explosion that is scary and putting pressure on the resources available in these cities. On 4 September 2018, many people took to the streets of Accra to protest the escalating joblessness in the country. These irate people lamented how they struggle to live without jobs despite having academic credentials (Ghanaweb 2018). In 2016, the ILO reported that the working poverty rates among the youth in SSA was nearly 70 percent, which translates to 64.4 million working youth in that region. This population lives in extreme or moderate poverty of less than $3.10 per day. During the colonial and early post-colonial era, many communities and groups in sub-Saharan African vehemently demanded access to education for their children because they believed in the promise of education to provide the younger generation access to the productive economic sector. The belief in the promise of education was a motivating factor for the educational campaigns carried out by newly independent governments. The perception that education was a preparation of human capital and promoted the national economy motivated the newly independent governments to provide universal primary education. The strides that many nations in sub-Saharan Africa have made in educational access and development of human capital have come vis-à-vis the challenges of high unemployment at all levels and high numbers of working-age population (WAP) that are unemployed or underemployed. Governments in the region seem to have few solutions about how to address the situation even though they are aware of its potential consequences. We recently witnessed youth protesting in the region due to unemployment and economic uncertainties. The issue now is whether the human capital ideologies and economic models European nations and the United States prescribed the newly independent countries in sub-Saharan Africa’s development in the 1960s still hold.

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Development of Human Capital and Contemporary Challenges of Unemployment Since the 1990s, the “Education for All” initiatives, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have influenced education policies in sub-Saharan Africa. Education policy making in sub-Saharan Africa is saddled with the tensions between human capital and human rights frameworks (see BabaciWilhite et al. 2012; Banya and Elu 2001; Berman 1999; Bledsoe 1992; Kanu 2007; Kuepie and Nordman 2015; Larochelle et al. 2016; Madeira 2005; Mfum-Mensah 2017a; Mundy 2016; Omwami and Keller 2010; UNESCO 1995). On one hand is the argument that societies in the region broaden and expand education to all citizens to promote economic and social development. On the other hand is the argument that we expand education to promote democratization. These conversations are also mediated by the economic policies of the structural adjustment policies that have led to reduction in funding for social programs including education. Parents, communities, and civil society all express a strong belief in education to provide opportunities for children to access the labor market in an era of global competition. The strong belief in education makes parents that can afford it enroll their children in private preparatory schools to improve their children’s chances of gaining entrance to good secondary schools despite the high costs of private education (Babaci-Wilhite 2009; Holsinger 2005; Kitaev 1999; Mfum-Mensah 2017a). Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have also expanded secondary and higher education to develop human capital for the labor market. One of the opportunities of the global “Education for All” (EFA) is that it has increased the number of youths with education, credentials, and service sector skills in sub-Saharan Africa. However, EFA has not mitigated the socioeconomic, gender, and regional disparities in the provision of education in the region. The situation also confirms the argument that the educational services available help ratify the lower status of the poor and marginalized children while at the same time they provide opportunities for children from wealthy households to advance academically and socioeconomically (M. Adams et al. 2013; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Farrell 1999, 2003; Mfum-Mensah 2003, 2005, 2017a, b). While the literature identifies a strong connection between education and the labor market, it also highlights a mismatch between education and employment in SSA. The educational systems have been expanding but unemployment has been increasing, especially in the cities in the region and among educated people (Kuepie and Nordman 2015).

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The development of human capital through EFA has created internal migration in all societies in sub-Saharan Africa. A majority of African youth are now living in the cities in search of public sector jobs. A 2003 study to assess the impact of an alternative primary school program in rural, remote, arid northern Ghanaian communities revealed that both students and their parents want students who complete school to migrate from the rural community to cities to seek job opportunities (see Mfum-Mensah 2003). Governments and policy makers in many nations in SSA have expanded schools in heavily agricultural communities but have not introduced revitalization programs in such communities to minimize migration. The result is that young people who attain education move to the cities to try their luck to access salaried employment. The governments in the region allocate high percentages of their national budgets on education. School enrollments are now high in the region. However, higher enrollment in education may not translate to high productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. The gap between growth in investment in education and access to the labor market creates a severe challenge for governments. Policy makers need to explore possible initiatives to address and arrest the high unemployment rates in their societies.

The Complexities of Unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa I now return to the issue of how nations in the region have expanded their educational system to promote the development of human capital in the context of the challenges of unemployment in SSA. The trend of unemployment is a major problem for governments in SSA and many people in the region are becoming impatient because they do not see any substantive strategies from their governments to mitigate the problem. Africa’s demographic structure shows a pyramid-shaped age structure in which half of the population is under the age of twentyfive. Estimates show that eleven million youth will be available to enter the labor market in SSA each year for the coming decade. Already many of the working-age population (WAP) in the region are facing multiple barriers accessing the labor market (Bhorat et al. 2017; Chakravarty et al. 2017; Kuepie and Nordman 2015). The situation has recently spurred a slew of studies to understand how education responds to the labor market in SSA (see Kuepie and Nordman 2015; Chakravarty et al. 2017). Unlike other regions of the world, the WAP in SSA continues to rise every year. Haroon Bhorat, Karmen Naidoo, and Arabo Ewinyu point out that the WAP in sub-Saharan Africa will

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increase by 70 percent from 466 million in 2013 to 793 million in 2030. This population increase is occurring at the time when there are high levels of unemployment and/or underemployment coupled with lowwage income (Bhorat et al. 2017; Chakravarty et al. 2017; Kangnia and Murinde 2015). Subha Chakravarty, Smita Das, and Julia Vaillant (2017) report that SSA’s youth labor underutilization rate averages 61.1 percent for men and 72.8 percent for women. Many of the WAP possess credentials that should make it easier for them to gain access in the labor market. However, that has not been the case as many youths continue to struggle to secure jobs. Mathias Kuepie and Christophe Nordman (2015) note that there is a sharp increase in the number of very skilled youth who are unable to find work that matches their skills in the formal sector. A 2017 Brookings Institution report (see Bhorat et al. 2017) shows that SSA has a 7.5 percent unemployment rate with a slight improvement in labor participation of 0.9 percent. However, it is quite likely that the reality is different, especially when one observes the many unemployed youth who loiter in the streets of cities and towns in SSA. The employed youths have very limited earnings (Chakravarty et al. 2017). The Brookings Institution reports a steady decline of extreme working poverty (workers earning below $1.90 per day) from 49.3 percent between 2000 and 2007 to 31.7 percent in 2017 and a rise in working poverty (workers earning between $1.90 and $3.10) from 23.8 percent between 2000 and 2007 to 30.4 percent in 2017. Both Chakravarty et al. (2017) and Bhorat et al. (2017) note that the agricultural sector in SSA employs between 54 and 62 percent of the working population on average, with countries like Burundi, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar having more than 80 percent of the labor force in agriculture. Employment in the industry sector is the lowest in SSA. Employment in the agricultural sector is expanding but that labor force has been left mostly to women and few uneducated men in the rural communities.

Concluding Thoughts Social scientists in Western societies generally use economic and social analysis to explain whether people may participate (or not) in the labor market. However, in SSA the issue is complicated. In many countries in the region, people do not have the liberty to think about any trade-off between investing in education to access quality employment in the labor market and entering the labor market after compulsory education. Many university-educated graduates cannot access the public

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sector jobs, and they lack the resources (and sometimes the needed skill) to open their own private businesses. Similarly, social, cultural, and political factors shape some people’s ease of access to the labor market (Ajakaiye et al. 2016; ILO 2016). In a labor market that is seriously constrained, women and people from rural, remote, and urban poor communities, people with disabilities, and people with limited social networks encounter several barriers to gainful employment (Kamgnia and Murinde 2015). The issue of people with education credentials not able to access the labor market is a development challenge for sub-Saharan African governments. Some development entities blame the issue of high rates of unemployment on low levels of marketable skills among the educated. The World Bank, for instance, notes that after completing primary and secondary school, many youths lack the foundational and technical skills that employers need. The Bank’s report shows that young women even face monumental challenges of unemployment because of their low literacy rates compared to young men (World Bank 2016). Many countries in SSA have yet to undergo a structural transformation into an industrialized economy, and employment is concentrated in smallholder agriculture and informal selfemployment (Chakravarty et al. 2017). This means that governments and education policy makers need to liaise with industries and labor entities to help reorient the education systems to provide content and skills that would prepare youths for the labor force in the agricultural sector. These partners should also work to diversify the economic forms to incorporate and expand the industrial and service sectors. Wage employment in the formal sector is the exception rather than the rule. Salaried work accounts for only 21.4 percent of employment in SSA compared to about 50 percent globally. Because many people in the region are informally employed, governments and policy makers in SSA should implement economic policies that would help expand the informal sector. Unemployment in SSA is gendered, feminized, classed, ethnicized, regionalized, abilitized, and to some certain extent, religified with more women than men informally employed, more rural folks informally employed, more people with disabilities unemployed, and more people belonging to minority religions unemployed (see Pew Research 2015; Mfum-Mensah 2017b). Social networks, nepotism and “who one knows” continue to be critical to most Africans’ access to the labor force. Discrimination and network disparities also explain why many individuals from some ethnic and social groups are not employed. In almost all countries in subSaharan Africa, connections and access to the high echelons of the society is likely to facilitate one’s access to the labor market (Chakravarty

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et al. 2017; Magruder 2010). Take the case of Ghana where recruitment into the army, policy force, and the public sector is now politicized to the extent that connections rather than one’s abilities, now determine such recruitments. Chakravarty et al. (2017) note that once an individual has chosen a career path, networks are a crucial source of soft skills, and contacts are central to success both in business and in access to wage employment. One of the reasons why many people from rural, marginalized communities and poor households form the bulk of unemployed citizenry is because they lack the networks to enable them access to the labor market. Jeremy Magruder (2010) reports that in South Africa, fathers serve as useful network connections for their sons during the job search process. Chakravarty et al. (2017) note that the challenge is further complicated in SSA where wage employment is not the norm and young people often have little exposure to the world of work, exacerbating the disadvantage of poor networks. Given that informal employment is the rule and many working-age populations find themselves informally employed, the education system should introduce courses that provide students entrepreneurial skills to help address youth unemployment. The current high rates of unemployment in SSA means that there are several issues policy makers in sub-Saharan Africa should address to make the link between education, development of human capital, and access to the labor market stronger. What should the governments in sub-Saharan Africa do differently to address the unemployment challenges in the region? How might governments in SSA ensure pathways for educated youth to transition to the labor markets to ensure returns to those huge investments in education? What different approaches to human capital development might help expand the labor market? Sub-Saharan African governments know that there are no easy answers to these issues. In January 2020, the President of Ghana, Akuffo Addo reiterated the challenges of youth unemployment in African countries during his presentation at Davos Switzerland. He outlined the challenges faced by his own nation Ghana to address the joblessness of the youth. He suggested expanding the private sector as one of the pragmatic approaches to mitigating unemployment in Ghana. We commend Akuffo Addo’s government for its efforts to expand the private sector. It is an approach all African nations should explore. Many Ghanaians have not felt the impacts of getting employed because of the private sector expansion but they remain hopeful. Governments in SSA should prioritize job creation, workforce development, and occupational innovations above all other things. Access to the labor market determines a nation’s productivity, peoples’ standards of living, access

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to healthcare, and education and other things. Sub-Saharan African countries will not move forward without jobs. That is all the more reason governments should make job creation the single most important policy agenda item in the region. In the context of high unemployment rates in the region, the credibility of government erodes when a select few elite politicians continue to enjoy good compensation packages and live lavishly while the masses struggle.

CHAPTER 8

The Political Economy of Affirmative Action Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Many sub-Saharan African governments have implemented affirmative action initiatives to address the cumulative effects of colonial stratification, which created political, social, and economic inequalities including inequalities in access to education and the labor market. Affirmative action can sometimes be contentious because of the debates regarding the most effective approach to address the cumulative effects of marginalization of groups historically discriminated against in education and employment. The psychological effects of affirmative action policies on beneficiary groups include the stigma of “reverse discrimination” that opponents of the policy raise. People in privileged positions sometimes do not realize the necessity of addressing the cumulative effects of systematic discrimination that slavery, colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, gender oppression, and all forms of oppression have created in a liberal democratic society without affirmative action initiatives. Some people in privileged positions are not able to envision the challenges addressing the inequalities may entail. Because discrimination and marginalization do not just happen in society, members have a responsibility to understand the sources of the cumulative inequalities resulting from discrimination and marginalization that relegate some groups to subordinated statuses in society. They also have the responsibility of supporting efforts to address the inequalities as a matter of liberal democratic values. Since the 1960s, African governments have implemented different forms of affirmative action initiatives to address the social, economic, and political stratification institutionalized by European colonizers. The dimensions of affirmative action initiatives implemented by gov-

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ernments in sub-Saharan Africa include the following: educational access, hiring and recruitment into public and private sectors, promotion of gender balance, promotion of ethnic and regional balance, ethnic and regional representation in politics and governance (Ahikire 1994; Clayton 2015; Fobanjong 2003; Furley and Katalikawe 1997; Goetz 1998; Johnson et al. 2003; Josefsson 2014; Machharia 2011; Muriaas and Wang 2012; Ndegwa 1997; Nzomo 1994; Obonyo 2007; Ocran 2014; Rothchild 1970; Stotsky et al. 2016). In the area of educational access, governments have used such affirmative action initiatives like quotas to increase the number of women enrolled in schools. Governments have also implemented programs that specifically promote enrollment of ethnic minorities and people from marginalized regions to offset ethnic and regional imbalances in higher education. Some governments have used government loan schemes to provide pathways for people from low-income communities to enroll in school. In the areas of recruitment and hiring, some countries have implemented quota hiring of ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, and people from deprived areas to bring regional balance in government and private sectors. This chapter examines the constitutional mandates and frameworks African nations use to implement affirmative action initiatives, the kind of affirmative action strategies in place, and challenges of implementing affirmative action policies.

Constitutional Provisions and Affirmative Action Strategies A review of constitutions of sub-Saharan African nations shows that these societies view equality, human rights, justice, inclusivity, and the well-being of citizens as important values that all societies must uphold to promote the common good in democratic societies. I use the definition of affirmation action as enshrined in the Zambian constitution as my working conceptualization because it clearly outlines the issues discussed in the section. The 2015 Zambian constitution defines affirmative action as “a measure designed to ameliorate an inequity or remedy a systematic denial or infringement of a right or freedom” (The Constitution of Zambia 2015: 276). Analysis of the constitutions of some selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa provides a basis for my discussion of the contours of affirmative action in the region. As a result of the analysis, I make the following observations: some countries in the region have explicitly outlined affirmative action strategies in their constitutions to provide a mandate for the nation to address the cumulative effects of the history of marginalization of some groups;

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for many other countries, the discussion of affirmative action is rather implicit and subsumed within the conversation of equality and human rights. I provide samples of how national constitutions make accommodations for affirmative action. Those nations that explicitly mention affirmative action strategies in their constitutions also emphasize the need to target minority groups, gender (notably women), regional disparities, and people with disabilities, and implement policies to offset the cumulative effects of the history of marginalization of such groups. Countries like Burundi, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Uganda, Cameroon, Kenya, and South Africa have enshrined in their constitution that priority be given to minority groups as a form of protection (see Burkina Faso’s Constitution Amended 2012; Burundi’s Constitution of 2005; Constitution of Cabo Verde 2010; Constitution of the Republic of Cameroon 2008; Kenya’s Constitution of 2010; Constitution of the Republic of Uganda 1995). The constitution of Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) specifically emphasizes the need for correcting the hierarchies and marginalization existing in the societies. Article 79 of Cape Verde’s 2010 constitution indicates that the state shall be responsible for correcting the asymmetries and promoting equality of opportunity among the various parts of the country with respect to the effective access to cultural goods. The constitution further promotes the need for development benefits for all including the balanced development of all the islands and the adequate use of their specific advantages. The constitutional mandate further promotes the well-being and quality of life of the nation especially for the neediest and removes economic, social, cultural and political obstacles that hinder true equality of opportunity among citizens, especially factors of discrimination against women in the family and in society. The government guarantees the right to equality of opportunity with respect to access and educational success (The Constitution of the Republic of Cabo Verde 2010: Article 79). Similarly, Uganda’s 2005 amended constitution stipulates that: “Notwithstanding anything in this constitution, the state shall take affirmative action in favor of groups marginalized on the basis of gender, age, disability or any other reasons created by history, tradition or custom, for the purpose of redressing imbalances which exists against them” (The Constitution of the Republic of Uganda 1995: Article 32.1). Article 33 of The Constitution of Uganda is explicit regarding affirmative action strategies. It gives preference to women for redressing the imbalances created by history, tradition, or custom. Furthermore, the 2010 Constitution of Kenya highlights the importance of using affirmative action strategies to reverse discrimination against some people and groups and offset the imbalances created by

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such discrimination. “To give full effect to the realization of the rights guaranteed under this Article, the State shall take legislative and other measures including affirmative action programmes and policies designed to redress any disadvantage suffered by individuals or groups because of past discrimination” (The Constitution of the Republic of Kenya 2010: Article 27.6). Article 56 of the Kenyan Constitution outlines that affirmative action strategies should target minorities and marginalized groups and regions and should encompass the areas of representation in governance and other areas including education, economy, employment, and social services. Countries including South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, use strong words to justify the governments’ constitutional mandate to use affirmative action to empower marginalized persons, groups, and communities. Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution is clear that affirmative action programs should target groups such as youths and females. It provides further mandates that the state and all its institutions and agencies at every level must enforce affirmative action programs to ensure that the youth are provided equitable education and afforded opportunities for employment and other avenues to economic empowerment. The 1996 constitution of South Africa states categorically that the state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone based on such variables as race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnicity or social origin, color, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, or birth. The history of injustices in South African necessitates that sometimes the state uses fair discrimination to offset the cumulative marginalization of groups during the apartheid era. Therefore, South Africa’s constitution deliberately makes provision for the state to fairly discriminate directly or indirectly against individuals and groups to promote an equal and just society. The constitution also emphasizes the need for broad composition of race and gender in political appointments. Countries like South Sudan, Kenya, and Nigeria, draw from the constitution to promote regional balance. These countries’ constitutions state clearly that regional balance and involvement of other groups is important for political participation. The South Sudan constitution emphasizes the importance of nondiscrimination based on religion, ethnicity, region, gender, health status and physical disability, and the need for ethnic composition, regional diversity, and social diversity in governments to promote national unity and command national loyalty. The constitution also emphasizes due regard for inclusiveness based on ethnic and regional diversity and gender (South Sudan’s Constitution 2011, Articles items 112, 3; 139, 1d; and 202, 5).

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Similarly, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Tanzania, and Nigeria acknowledge the need to promote nondiscriminatory practices in the constitution. However, the constitutions of these countries do not go further to outline the ways to address any previous acts of stratification and discrimination that marginalized some groups in the society. The constitutions of Cote D’Ivoire and Tanzania, for instance, emphasize the need to promote justice without discrimination but do not explicitly acknowledge the history of discrimination and marginalization during the colonial era and the need to offset the cumulative effects of marginalization. While Cote D’Ivoire’s constitution is explicit about how diverse groups are to be treated, it does not make provision for ways to address previous acts and vestiges of discrimination that already exist in the society. Article 4 of Cote D’Ivoire’s 2016 Constitution stipulates the following: “no one may be privileged or discriminated against by reason of their race, their ethnicity, their clan, their tribe, their skin color, their sex, their region, their social origin, their religion or belief, their fortune, their difference in culture or language, their social status or their physical or mental state” (Cote D’Ivoire Constitution 2016: Article 4). That is as far as the constitution goes. Similarly, the 1996 amended Constitution of Ghana and Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution do not explicitly discuss affirmative action but implicitly point to the need for affirmative action strategies within the rubric of addressing discrimination and promoting equality and social justice for all people. Chapter 15.2 of the Nigerian constitution states that: “accordingly, national integration shall be actively encouraged, whilst discrimination on the grounds of place of origin, sex, religion, status, ethnic or linguistic association or ties shall be prohibited” (Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, Chapter 15.2). Finally, the constitutions of countries including Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and Chad acknowledge the need to promote equality of groups in a just and democratic society. However, the constitutional documents are silent on how to address the history of marginality and its cumulative effects on some groups that make it necessary for the nation to implement programs to address those equalities. For these categories of countries, affirmative action programs that target groups that were historically marginalized because of social stratification may not be based on the constitution. For instance, Article 17 of the 2015 Democratic Republic of Congo’s constitution only mentions treating women and men the same, which may not give a stronger justification for addressing the cumulative effects of gender inequalities and the need for affirmative action initiatives that promote gender parity (see The Constitution of the Demo-

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cratic Republic of the Congo 2015: Article 17). Botswana, on the other hand, does not mention (explicitly or implicitly) the need for affirmative action strategies to address inequalities experienced by groups in society.

Early Postcolonial Africanization Initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa The earliest form of affirmative action initiatives was the implementation of “Africanization” policies aimed to address the problems of the marginality created by colonial administration. Africanization programs were implemented by almost all postcolonial sub-Saharan African countries in the early days of independence. After independence, these governments were caught between two situations: on one side, Africanization of the public and private sectors of the economy where African citizens who were marginalized socially, economically, and politically take over the nation-building agenda and, on the other side, economic development. Donald Rothchild explains the situation more elaborately: African countries, fresh from an encounter with powerful, privileged European states, carry over a wide range of liberal commitments into the post-independence period. They are naturally determined to continue the struggle against remaining manifestations of colonialism on the continent—white settler oligarchies, neocolonialist military and economic arrangements . . . Their leaders proclaim both nationalist and panAfricanist objectives and call simultaneously for a leveling egalitarianism and rapid economic growth. The extent to which they can reconcile these somewhat overlapping, and even conflicting goals with the compelling claims implicit in nation-building remains to a crucial question with broad implications for regime stability. (Rothchild 1970: 737)

Africanization legislation enabled Africans to replace Europeans in key public and private sectors. The policy addressed colonial discrimination practices that characterized colonial markets, giving preference to traditional black Africans (Fobanjong 2003; Machharia 2011; Ndegwa 1997; Nzomo 1994; Obonyo 2007; Ocran 2014; Rothchild 1970; Stotsky et al. 2016). Donald Rothchild cited the example of Kenya where at the time of independence the country had a three-tiered pyramidal structure of Europeans at the top, followed lower down by Asians, and then Africans in areas of education, welfare, and income policies. After independence, the government implemented Africanization policies to address the inequities in society (Rothchild 1970).

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Countries like Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa represent recent acts of Africanization due to their recent independence. Zimbabwe implemented a form of Africanization and branded it “Black Advancement,” which focused mainly on correcting past discrimination in the public sector. The 1980 presidential directive, which authorized the public service commission to recruit blacks who had the qualifications but lacked experience, led to white migration from Zimbabwe (Fobanjong 2003). The nature of Africanization strategies implemented in South Africa is complicated given the country’s history. There are two forms of affirmative action strategies in South Africa. The nature of affirmative action in South Africa is that it is a majority group that is going to benefit by the fact that it was denied by past injustices of colonization and apartheid. The first form of affirmative action is implementation of “remedial measures” to offset the lack of educational skills and knowledge needed to work. Early signs of implementation of affirmative action in South Africa was in 1976 when some foundations and foreign companies and a few local employers began implementing affirmative action programs as a means of providing education and training to blacks who were denied equal access to educational and employment opportunities by the exclusionary policies of apartheid. The second form of affirmative action in South Africa is “preferential hiring” only if the remedial measures provided for in the first model fail to develop the skills and qualifications that will enable historically deprived groups to compete on merit with historically advantaged group (Fobanjong 2003). These two affirmative action philosophies position South Africa in a very unique position when it comes to affirmative action policies in sub-Saharan Africa.

Affirmative Action Strategies to Address Gender Inequalities Gender is complicated in SSA in the sense that traditional African societies do not speak in one voice when it comes to gender identity. Therefore, theorizing gender identities in the region from a unitary framework further complicates an already complex issue. Marginalization based on gender was putatively a colonial creation to assign different roles based on gender. Postcolonial affirmative action strategies in many sub-Saharan African societies targeted gender representation in education, politics, and socioeconomic discourse. The plethora of literature reviewed shows that gendered affirmative action initiatives have been used to improve the underrepresentation of women

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and girls more than other disadvantaged groups (Ahikire 1994; Clayton 2015; Goetz 1998; Johnson et al. 2003; Nzomo 1994; Machharia 2011; Obonyo 2007; Ocran 2014; Stotsky et al. 2016). Affirmative action initiatives regarding gender representation in SSA occurs within the context of gender disparity, which dates to pre-colonial times. The diversity of African societies requires that we historicize the discussions on affirmative action strategies on gender within the contexts of various societies and their colonial encounters. Furthermore, we need to analyze women’s participation in SSA within the context of the nature of patriarchal ideologies that existed in diverse African societies (Nzomo 1994). Affirmative action initiatives focusing on gender has been a progressive step made by governments in sub-Saharan Africa. These strategies have helped to address the issue of gender imbalance, inequities, and inequalities in areas such as economic and social development, education, politics, and leadership. Countries such as Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, and Senegal among others have implemented affirmative action strategies that focus specifically on women’s equitable participation, school enrollment for girls, hiring and promotion of women in leadership positions and political participation (Machharia 2011; Ocran 2014; Stotsky et al. 2016). For countries like Kenya and Tanzania, quotas are being used to promote women’s participation in the political system. Sub-Saharan Africa is a leader in the world of announcing quotas or women’s representation in politics. International Knowledge Network of Women in Politics points out that women’s representation in politics in countries like Rwanda, Mozambique, Burundi, and South Africa has exceeded the global threshold. These achievements are the result of the introduction of electoral gender quotas in the region. Early implementation of the quota initiative occurred in Ghana in the 1960s followed by Tanzania in 1975 (Ocran 2014). The objective is to have a critical mass of women leaders in all sectors of the society. Such affirmative action strategies for women have been undertaken to introduce corrective changes to the history of discrimination meted out to women and to ensure that special attention is given to enable women to participate and compete equally with men in the political arena. The strategy is also to shore up women’s participation in the economic and social fields within the public and private sectors to ensure an egalitarian nation. Affirmative action policies related to gender inequality and initiatives that address the cumulative discrimination against women in SSA have come about as a result of social movements and pressure from civil society groups and women’s groups. Take Ghana as a case in point. The 31st December Women’s Movement in Ghana was a force

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that pushed for women’s equality in Ghana’s political and development discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. In Tanzania, women’s organizations like the Kilimanjaro Women’s Information and Education Corporation (KWIECO) is a regionally linked institution that coordinates the affairs of women’s associations to discuss issues of women’s economic participation. In Kenya, the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) works with many partners to ensure implementation of initiatives to address girls’ and women’s education in urban Kenya. FAWE Kenya works to ensure that gender equity and equality is built into all educational policies that where gender imbalances in education persists, positive and specific short-term affirmative action is taken to redress them (Birch and Wachter 2011). The affirmative action strategies, which women’s groups fought for, have helped to improve the status of many women in SSA especially in the areas of higher education and recently in politics. In many societies in SSA including Tanzania and Uganda, affirmative action strategies have helped to widen women’s access to science and technical courses through bridging courses, lowering cut-off points, and funding students (Obonyo 2007). These affirmative action initiatives that specifically focused on gender issues helped move women’s issues from the margins to center stage in social, economic, and political discourse.

Affirmative Action Strategies to Promote Regional and Ethnic Balance Many countries in SSA have implemented affirmative action initiatives to address ethnic and regional representation and to bring regional/ ethnic balance in areas of education, public-sector employment, and political participation. In the early days of their histories, countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and Cote d’Ivoire implemented forms of affirmative action strategies to promote ethnic and regional balance in the country’s politics. For instance, during the Presidency of Daniel Arap Moi, the Kenyan government implemented forms of political affirmative action strategies to provide access for minority groups to higher education, administrative recruitment, and allocation of public funds (Ndegwa 1997). Currently, Kenya’s government’s affirmative action strategy encompasses quotas in admissions to secondary school and hiring. The Kenyan government ensures that the best student in every region or county is automatically selected and admitted to the national secondary school. Similarly, in areas of employment, the government ensures that applicants from deprived regions are given preference in

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hiring to bring regional balance. Nigeria’s affirmative action strategy is primarily geared toward promoting regional balance in all areas of the society and is rooted in the country’s Federal Character Principles and the constitution. The 1999 constitution is explicit on affirmative action: The composition of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the Federal Character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few states or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that government or any of its agencies. (The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, Chapter 2)

Sadly, Nigeria’s affirmative action strategies to promote regional balance in hiring and university recruitment have met some challenges for a couple of reasons. To bring regional balance into the public sector, the Nigerian government makes an effort to recruit people from the northern region, an area that has historically had lower representation. However, sometimes it is very difficult to fill the imposed quotas from the northern region and southerners are temporarily used to fill the slot until a northerner who is qualified emerges and the southerner is relieved because she or he served a temporary position. The Overseas Development Institute (2006) reports that Nigeria’s regional affirmative action strategy creates challenges because of the lack of political will to make this happen, which reflects the politics of patronage, and the lack of functional transparency and accountability mechanisms. The document notes that positive discrimination for one group is often read as negative discrimination by others, and therefore creates a backlash. In the early days of Ghana’s independence, the government of Kwame Nkrumah implemented affirmative action by providing full tuition scholarships and stipends for food expenses to northern Ghanaian students to address the northern versus southern disparity in educational attainment. The goal was to promote secondary school enrollment in the northern part of Ghana where many people had not participated in the education system because of the history of educational marginalization of northern Ghanaians, which was instituted by the Christian missions and colonial educational expansion initiatives. The affirmative action initiative promoted by Nkrumah’s government provided free scholarships for all northerners who enrolled in secondary schools with the goal to promote ethnic and regional balance in the school system. Many countries in SSA also have in place affirmative

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action strategies for regional/ethnic balance that vary from the ones I have described in this section.

Affirmative Action Strategies to Integrate the Youth in National Development The conversation about how to ensure that the youth in sub-Saharan Africa acquire the skills and knowledge to enter the labor market and engage in productive participation in the national, regional and global economic discourse has been a high priority of development stakeholders in SSA since the 1990s (World Bank 2014). In the early 1990s, many development entities envisioned that education would be the most effective affirmative action strategy to provide opportunities for the growing young people in sub-Saharan Africa. Within the last decade, the global community has witnessed a surge in the youth population, which gives further credence to the need for nations in SSA to position themselves to implement policies targeting the youth. The United Nations General Assembly, for instance, declared the year 2010 as the International Year of the Youth. Other global organizations such as the World Bank and International Labor Organization (ILO) have developed initiatives that aim to specifically engage the youth in national and regional economic processes. The conversations and subsequent implementation of initiatives to engage the youth have to be situated within the global population predictions. The youth population continues to grow in some regions. The African continent has the youngest population with about 70 percent of its population under thirty years of age, and it is predicted that by 2050, 29 percent of the total world youth population will reside in Africa (ILO n.d.). The global population increase means that development entities and governments should recognize the need to channel national development policies toward economic engagement of the younger generation. Governments and international development entities in SSA acknowledge the need for a national and regional policy discourse that would help to create the environment for youth engagement in the economic and production processes (ILO 2012). The 2012 report of International Labor Organization pointed out that: “youth employment is a cross-cutting and high priority issue that needs to be addressed within the framework of an interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral, and multi-stakeholder approach” (ILO 2012). Over the past decade, governments in Africa and development entities have implemented policy initiatives including the African Youth Charter (2006), the Decade Plan of Action for Youth De-

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velopments (2011), and the Declaration of Intent on the Joint Youth Employment Initiative for Africa (JYEIA) to create the environment for youth engagement in the region. Affirmative action strategies to address youth unemployment have received attention in policy making and governments’ strategic dialogue in SSA and come at a time when youth unemployment has become a major development challenge as the previous chapter outlines. Therefore, policy makers view affirmative action strategies for youth employment as important development discourse (Fox et al. 2016). Governments continue to devote increasing budgetary resources to youth employment programs. Many global forces have also complemented such efforts by the governments. The challenges to affirmative action strategies that specifically target youth include pilot programs that do not scale and some programs implemented by governments that do not retain power. There have been several programs to mitigate the challenges of youth unemployment at the sub-regional level. In 2006, governments in Africa endorsed the African Youth Charter to strengthen and reinforce continental and regional partnerships and relations. The Charter went into force on 8 August 2010. The Charter is a political and legal document aiming to prioritize youth development on the African Union’s development agenda and propel youth empowerment and development at the continental, regional, and national levels (ILO 2012). Another initiative is the partnership between the African Union Commission (AUC), the African Development Bank (AfDB), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the ILO, which led to the signing of a Declaration of Intent on the Joint Youth Employment Initiative for Africa (JYEIA). This declaration aimed to create employment to accelerate youth development and empowerment through three major intervention strategies: policy-level interventions; direct interventions; and knowledge production. The JYEIA came into force in August 2010 with signatories from thirty-seven countries and ratified by twenty-one. AUC heads of state and governments also declared 2009–18 as the Decade on Youth Development in Africa. African governments and global forces including ILO have designed a number of programmatic interventions for creating youth employment. The intervention strategies have focused on thematic areas of jobs creation, skills development, employment services, integrated services, and others. Bernadette Kamgnia and Victor Murinde (2015) point out that many governments in SSA have gone beyond declarations to adopting and mainstreaming employment in their national employment policies and national development frameworks in an attempt to address concerns about youth

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employment. Governments have been firmly engaging in affirmative action in favor of youth employment (Kamgnia and Murinde 2015). The Ghanaian government recently initiated the NACOB program to employ 100,000 youth. These regional and continental initiatives are part of the global initiatives to promote education and human capital development and to curb the challenges of youth’s economic migration to the West for better opportunities. Western governments also realize the need to support youth development initiatives in the developing parts of the world to slow the economic migration of youth from the developing world to Western societies. This idea was one of the major foreign policy initiatives of US President Barack Obama’s administration.

Affirmative Action Strategies to Support People with Disabilities Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have made great strides in affirmative action strategies for people with disabilities but they need to do more work to lessen the inequalities experienced by people with disabilities. Some governments in the region have the mentality that once they provide accommodations such as ramps and easily accessible buildings, they have addressed the marginality experienced by people with disabilities. An effective way to provide a meaningful affirmative action initiative for people with disabilities is to historicize the level of marginalization experienced by this group during the early days of the region’s formal educational development. I have outlined the nature of marginalization experienced by people with disabilities during the development of Western education to provide a context for why governments should provide strong affirmative action strategies to help this group participate strongly in national, social, economic, and political discourse. Countries like Kenya and South Africa have already implemented initiatives to promote the full participation of people with disabilities. Kenya’s 2010 constitution makes the provision for quotas to people with disabilities to enable them to participate in the mainstream productive and political processes.

What Is Missing in Affirmative Action Strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa? The affirmative action strategies implemented in SSA have been effective in some societies but not in other societies. Constitutional mandates of many countries in SSA require those countries to implement

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affirmative action strategies to ensure equality in a liberal democratic society and address the regional imbalances and all forms of marginalization. However, governments and policy makers in some of these countries do not demonstrate strong political will to implement bold initiatives that will address the inequalities experienced in their societies. The complexities of many of the societies and their histories of colonization make implementation a more complicated endeavor in those countries. For instance, implementation of affirmative action strategies in South Africa is complicated given the history of apartheid and the reality that a majority of the population would have to benefit from such strategies. Similarly, in many sub-Saharan African societies, the nature of affirmative action strategies becomes another strategy to advantage some groups or strengthen some already advantaged groups and marginalize the already disenfranchised groups. Take the case of Uganda where the government emphasized the need for affirmative action for women. It is possible for women from the urban middle class to benefit from the strategy more than women from urban poor, rural, and other marginalized communities. Similarly, when we take the case of Ghana, we see similar scenarios where Nkrumah’s government’s affirmative action strategies to address regional imbalances in the 1960s benefited the urban middle-class children in northern Ghana. Many of the children from the northern region who enjoyed the northern scholarship were those from comparatively wealthy households in that region including some current individual politicians whose parents were wealthy and already in politics at that time. Many of the rural children that the affirmative action initiative was supposed to target never benefitted from the policy because the policy targeted children in secondary school and many of the rural children from the remote and hard to reach communities never had access to upper primary school or made it beyond the middle school level. Rural children in northern Ghana still had to sit for and pass the Common Entrance Examination to access the government’s affirmative initiative. Therefore, most of the children from the north that accessed the program were those living in urban communities in the northern region. It is possible that affirmative action strategies for marginalized children in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) region in Kenya and pastoral communities in northern Nigeria also have similar outcomes.

Concluding Thoughts The discussions of how global forces and local forces became complicit in bifurcating diverse groups and in the process created group margin-

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alization, and affirmative action strategies as policy initiatives enable policy makers and development entities to conceptualize the ways government policies, politics, and education policies and initiatives can place limitations on groups and communities. One of the important ways to give credence to affirmative action strategies from a policy standpoint is for governments to ground them in national constitutions. Constitutional mandates are likely to provide strong support and protection for any affirmative action initiatives to offset the cumulative discrimination and marginalization experienced by diverse groups in the nations during the colonial era. Whether by design or ignorance, education initiatives and policies implemented in many societies disenfranchise many communities and groups and complicate the marginalization in education of already marginalized children. Addressing marginality in SSA will entail dismantling some of the same old structures that colonization bequeathed to the region. It also means education scholars must employ their scholarship to interrogate some of the postcolonial policies in place and that shape policies. Education policy reforms, which aim to promote strong participation of marginalized groups, should work to strike a balance between theory and practice and enlist local communities and outsiders who demonstrate some interests in those marginalized communities. Governments and policy makers must implement affirmative strategies to shore up the educational participation of marginalized communities and groups and access to employment because it is their moral responsibility to do so. Such a bold initiative will communicate to marginalized communities that they can trust their governments, the system works, and they will have occupational reward for participating in school irrespective of who they are, and where they live. Nevertheless, the discussion here brings me to another important point. Given the complexities of the histories of marginalization in sub-Saharan Africa, any affirmative action framework should consider the intersectionality of marginality. The assumption and practice of categorizing marginalization from a one-dimensional approach obscures the complexities of marginality and its intersectional and overlapping nature. Therefore, having affirmative action strategies for women does not necessary provide opportunities for women who are also marginalized in other areas. Similarly, implementing affirmative action strategies to shore up regional/ethnic balance does not mean all marginalized groups in a deprived region are going to benefit from the policy (or benefit the same way). This is why we need intersectional and multidimensional approaches to implementing effective affirmative action strategies.

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Today, the most common refrain is crisis. Education in Africa at all levels and in all its forms, is in dire straits, we are told. With few exceptions, both schools and learning have deteriorated, and the situation is continuing to worsen. —Joel Samoff, “No Teacher Guide, No Textbooks, No Chairs,” 2003

The statement above is a popular refrain and arguably part of the Western narrative about the education crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. Okot p’Bitek (2011) points out that Western “dirty gossip” ceased in the 1950s when sub-Saharan African nations attained independence. He notes that the political independence in the region in the 1960s swept away Europeans’ and Americans’ focus on Africa as a subject of study. However, the statement above and many other subtle statements made by Western Africanists provide the evidence that sub-Saharan African nations’ attainment of political independence did not stop the “dirty gossip.” Instead, the distortions morphed into new and complex forms as Western development entities reemerged with new forms of development agendas. Education became one area where Europeans and Americans perpetuated the distortions about Africa. Beginning in the 1980s, Western development entities once again inserted themselves in education policy discourse in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by telling governments in the region how to strengthen their deteriorating education systems. These Western entities strengthened their strategic agenda during the1990 Jomtien World Conference on “Education for All” (EFA). At the Jomtien conference, the Western development entities presented the urgency of EFA and urged all governments to double their efforts to promote the initiative to ensure that

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all children enroll in basic education by 2015. Sub-Saharan African nations have experienced post-Jomtien pressure from Western development entities to reform their education systems to meet the goals of EFA. The pressure obviously stems from the “Old World” narrative that African societies, being “backward” societies, would not heed the call to promote universal education unless coerced to do so (LugoOcando and Malaolu 2015). Notable personalities from Africa have even blamed African governments for being impervious to policies that promote educational access for all children as we see from the comments attributed to Graça Machel: Africa is in the midst of an education crisis. Despite pledges to improve access to education for all children by 2030, many African governments are failing to fund this ambitious component of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) . . . Today, roughly half of the world’s young people, including some 400 million girls, are not being educated to succeed in the workplace of the future. This challenge is most acute in Africa although 75 percent of girls in Sub-Saharan Africa start school, only 8 percent complete secondary school. (Machel 2018)

A plethora of media publications and development entities’ reports portrayed education systems in SSA as in crisis. Some of the media outlets blamed “corrupt” African governments as the enemies of progress and the very barriers to addressing the educational crisis. Western development entities have used microaggressive approaches to highlight the “crises in education” and dictate education policy transfer and transnational flow of ideas from the West to sub-Saharan Africa. The trends in education policy making in SSA from the 1990s provide evidence of how Western education “experts” imposed policies and practices and education models from the West on sub-Saharan African nations. I use the terms “Western development entities,” “global forces,” and “global governing bodies” interchangeably to include multilateral advocacy groups, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and Western education scholars and researchers. However, the focus of this chapter is on Western education researchers and scholars. These entities have worked in diverse ways to promote educational development in SSA after nations in the region attained political independence.

“Institutionalized Paternalism and Infantilization” in the Global Order European (and later US development entities) introduced and promoted Western forms of education as a process of developing human

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capital and an imperialistic apparatus to push Western agendas in sub-Saharan African societies. After the 1990 Jomtien World Education Conference, European and American development entities renewed their agendas and presented their activities as the most hopeful for sub-Saharan African nations facing human capital development challenges. Governments in SSA also embraced the educational agenda of the West as the hope for the region’s development even though these governments also understood the complexity of their relationship with these global forces. Africa’s development relationship with European and American development entities in these contemporary times has consistently reflected the kind that existed during the colonial era but in forms that are more complicated. European and American development entities continue to dictate the pace and terms of development initiatives, including education, in SSA because of their views and assumptions that present African societies are incapable of solving the plethora of development issues facing them. Western development entities operate within a framework of “trusteeship” and “institutionalized paternalism” in their development relationship with sub-Saharan African nations. This framework infantilizes sub-Saharan African nations and brands them developmentally “backward” in the global order. For instance, the Britton Woods Institutions (The World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and other development entities use paternalism when they relate to their African counterparts. As part of their control mechanism as the funding agency of sub-Saharan African nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) on sub-Saharan African nations in the late 1980s and 1990s, which came with austere economic policies and introduced draconian economic policies that shaped the contours of development in sub-Saharan African nations. The effects of these draconian economic policies on especially poor communities in SSA are not secret in the development literature (see Adams et al. 2018; Dei 1993 Keim and Somerville 2018). As I draft this chapter, the IMF has imposed a moratorium on public sector employment in Ghana because it provides financial support for the country—a situation that has placed restrictions on employment and left graduates scrambling for jobs that are not available. Many of the Western INGOs working in SSA dictate development policies and activities in the region with little oversight from national governments. Sub-Saharan African societies receive “top-down” treatments from global entities because of the colonial infantilized approach that views and treats African societies as “backward,” “primitive,” inexperienced, and incapable.

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The relations between Western development entities and subSaharan African societies have been primarily beneficial for Western entities. Powerful global governing bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF position themselves as friends of Africa’s development but within the same context, their policies continue to strengthen the old global colonizing and imperialistic order. Their aim has always been to support the European-American agenda. Since they came into existence, Britton Woods Institutions have supported oppressive regimes in the African continent as long as those oppressive regimes supported the European and American agenda. For instance, in the 1950s, the World Bank was the largest foreign financier to several regional colonies then under minority rule providing loans to white ruling regimes in South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique for the benefit of white economic interests and relatively rich white consumers. Western powers from the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union (and recently, China, an emerging world power from Asia) and other global governing bodies use financial aid and grants to saddle governments in SSA within the framework of “paternalism” and impose Western policies on African nations (Kopinski and Sun 2014). Until recently, the development policy framework introduced by global forces hardly enlisted sub-Saharan African nations in the development process. Sometimes, a Western regional power such as the European Union or the G7 would invite two or three sub-Saharan African leaders as observers at its international meetings to serve as the “voice” and “mouthpiece” of the entire forty-eight nations that constitute sub-Saharan Africa. This exclusive club of the world’s richest and powerful countries would ask these representative nations from the region to present development needs of their continent and what they expect of rich countries (Bakoup 2014). African leaders should view this institutionalized paternalistic and infantilized treatment from the G7 as an affront on their sensibilities and resist this same old approach where Western societies viewed and treated African societies as homogeneous and monolithic in spite of their complex development and economic needs (Fredriksen and Fossberg 2014). This rich exclusive club of nations imposes policies on African governments without any negotiations from African societies (Bakoup 2014). This is clear evidence of how these global forces continue to infantilize African societies in a global geopolitical order in much the same way the European (and American) forces viewed and treated them over a century ago to justify colonialism and imperialism. I am sure many readers are asking the question of why Africa’s leaders continue to succumb to the

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whims and caprices of Western powers that infantilize them and not treat them as equals. Readers may be wondering why African leaders cannot show some spine and decline G7 invitations and reject Western Overseas Development Aid and rather explore their own agency and capability to develop their societies. African leaders are sometimes to blame for how they operate from weak positions and become enablers of Western meddling in their development agendas, politics and governance. One explanation for why many African leaders are cautious is because they know how Western forces have done everything in their power to undermine leaders who resist their dictates. African leaders like Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, and Qaddafi who refused to be stooges and stood up to the West were removed in violent ways. A strongly united Africa will be a force for the West to reckon with. Hopefully, the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and the African Union will position themselves strongly to provide some power play for the continent in their dealings with the West given that there still exist new forms of “development colonialism and imperialism” that continue to disadvantage African societies. This “development colonialism and imperialism” pushes African societies to embrace policy models that sometimes (and many times) are antithetic to the ongoing development initiatives on the continent. Contemporary development discourse provides evidence of the global forces’ infantilization of African governments through the imposition of policy decisions on African societies in the same way they took over Africa during the1884/5 Berlin Conference. At the conference, European powers partitioned, bifurcated, dismantled, and hollowed out ethnic groups and societies in Africa at a meeting that took place thousands of miles away from the African continent without African representatives. During the colonial era, Europeans positioned themselves to be the voice of Africans in the global geopolitical order. European colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and US imperialism should give some warning signs about the recent encroachment of China in Africa’s development agenda. Centuries of slavery followed by systematic extraction of Africa’s natural resources, ideological disorientation through forced proselytization and Western education, colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation of Africans in that order rendered African societies poor. Therefore, it would be a commendable step if the West would return the gesture by helping African societies to develop and regain what they lost because of colonialism, exploitation, and imperialism. Despite the centuries of European and American exploitation of Africa’s resources to develop Europe and the Americas, development aid to the African continent

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in the global development order continues to be the least compared to other continents. Ferdinand Bakoup (2014) points out that Africa’s share in the gross disbursement of multilateral development banks was low between 2000 and 2007 and has not increased much in the past decade.

Juxtaposing Aid Reality and Policy Support for Education in Sub-Saharan Africa For the more than sixty years since the first colonized nation in Africa attained political independence, economic and development policies and decisions in African societies continue to be influenced and dictated by European and American forces (although China is gradually creeping in and inserting itself in Africa’s development discourse). The economic policy of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) implemented in the 1980s and 1990s was a “carrot and stick” strategy of the Britton Woods Institutions, which created economic disorganization in many nations in SSA. The United Nations drafted the Millennium project and recommendations to position developing nations as the naïve and ignorant partners in the global development order. This approach is part of the global narratives that portray African societies as “backward.” The 1990 World Education Conference became another opportunity for the global development entities to insert themselves as the trustees in Africa’s development agenda. African societies were once again pushed to embrace the global agenda of “Education for All” (EFA) and commit to a global initiative they least had the resources to support. The 1990s was an awkward era for many nations in subSaharan Africa to implement EFA as most nations in the region did not have the needed financial resources to implement the initiative. The failure of many countries in the region to meet the EFA deadline of 2015 attests to the challenges that these nations faced. Many of the governments in SSA were not in the position to embark on the EFA initiative because they lacked the resources, plain and simple. African nations were deeply in debt and faced economic challenges that began in the 1970s and were aggravated by the introduction of SAPs. Centuries of Western exploitative activities in Africa, which ended in the creation of “colonial states” and bifurcation and marginalization of ethnic groups and regional areas, finally busted out as the center could not hold anymore. Ethnic conflicts and political instability were all over the African map. Coupled with this political instability, the economic climate in Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s left these

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nations jittery. The global forces introduced EFA at a time when the Britton Woods Institutions had imposed SAPs on sub-Saharan African nations and these nations reeled from the austere economic measures. Nations in SSA were not in the position (so to speak) to undertake the expansive human capital development policies given their situation and limited resources. However, the human capital ideologies of that era dictated that sub-Saharan African nations embrace EFA if they wanted to be grafted into the global geopolitical order. The higher expenditures on education did not meet the entire financial resources needed by the governments in the region to fund education programs. The global forces pushed the EFA agenda as part of their policy fiat. However, their support for education initiatives in SSA peaked at 6 percent of the education expenditure in Sub-Saharan African (The AfricaAmerica Institute 2015). Since European powers exploited Africa’s resources to develop the West during colonization, it behooved them to support such an expansive global education policy. Lord Lugard, explorer, military administrator of Uganda, and the Governor General of Nigeria, declared in the early twentieth century that Imperial Britain (and Europe) would use Africa’s resources to develop the global community and Africa. The complexity of the processes used by colonial and imperialistic powers to deplete Africa’s resources to develop continental Europe and the United States is beyond the scope of this discussion. My point here is that the 1990s was an opportune time for Western nations to have fulfilled the second part of Lord Lugard’s mandate. The EFA initiative proved to be expensive for African societies because they had to rely for the most part on their own resources to finance the greatest portion of the financial requirements for the EFA initiative. The global community’s clarion call to promote EFA in SSA contrasts the situation of shrinking ODA since the 1990s. UNESCO reports that about 57 million children and 69 million adolescents remain out of school in SSA and African nations require more financial support to achieve EFA (UNESCO 2017). While education systems have been expanding rapidly in SSA, governments are facing the task of reaching their educational development goals because national spending still provides the most important contribution for sub-Saharan African countries. The global development entities tout EFA as the greatest opportunity for human capital development in the developing parts of the world. However, in addition to the financial constraints the elaborate human development policy has imposed on nations in the developing world, sometimes it is very difficult to assess the economic benefits of EFA in some countries from a pragmatic standpoint. I am not sure

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whether Western policy makers assess how the policy leads to mass production of perfunctory literates and does not necessarily prepare Africans for their place in a globalized, highly technological society. The policy is likely to perpetuate the subordinated status of Africans in a highly economic and technological globalization of our global community. Walter Rodney made a compelling point when he argued vehemently that Europe used education as a tool to underdevelop Africa. “Education in Europe was dominated by the capitalist class . . . The same class bias was transferred to Africa; and to make matters worse the racism and cultural boastfulness harbored by capitalism were also included in the package of colonial education. Colonial schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion and the development of underdevelopment” (Rodney 1988: 241). Europe’s grand agenda, which has formed the basis of school organization, implementation of curriculum, educational access, and the transition to the labor market, has always been to reconfigure African societies and perpetuate Africans’ marginalization in a global economic discourse.

Distortions, Knowledge Production, and Development Discourses in Sub-Saharan Africa Knowledge production and distribution in global contexts is part of Western hegemonic structures in a global political order. In research and development discourse, bibliographical materials and scholarly works, narratives, anecdotal stories and lore help us understand how global forces create, distribute, and disseminate knowledge and claim ownership of discourse in the transnational flow of ideas in the global community (Raby 2009; Stambach and Cappy 2012). Rosalind Raby notes that the trend of education discourse provides an understanding that is instrumental in the dialogue of who controls knowledge and how that knowledge reshapes the world. Similarly, Amy Stambach and Christina Cappy documented how the distribution and dissemination of scholarship remains dominated by a limited range of voices, editors, and locations of publishers. For one thing, knowledge creation, flow, and dissemination all show a center versus periphery dichotomy that puts nations in SSA in peripheral positionality in the global development discourse. Global forces portray sub-Saharan African societies bleakly and in a weaker position in global development narratives, a situation that feeds into the existing negative symbolic images about SSA. Jairo Lugo-

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Ocando and Patrick Malaolu report on an October 2001 statement by Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of Britain, during a speech to an audience that “the state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. However, if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, it will become a deeper and angrier” (Lugo-Ocando and Malaolu 2015: 86). Tony Blair’s portrayal of African societies is blatant form of microassault and problematizes the continent to reinforce the narratives of other Europeans, the likes of David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Burton, Cecil Rhodes, and many others who portrayed the African continent and African societies as degraded portions of the human race. They provided narratives about Africa’s hopeless situation and a problem zone in the global community. LucoOcando and Malaolu point out that the sometimes the “distortions about sub-Saharan Africa are written in magisterial tone, derisive, dismissive or, at least, adopting the conspiratorial tone of ‘After all, it is Africa; what do you expect?’ What is almost always missing in the news construction of poverty and human suffering in Africa is ‘empathy’” (Luco-Ocando and Malaolu 2015: 88). The global misrepresentation of Africa obscures the reality of the gains made by African societies and the challenges of extending development initiatives to marginalized and vulnerable populations in African societies. The distortions numb the global community’s responsibility to help provide concrete actions to address those development challenges, presenting Africa as what one should expect from “Africa,” which also feed into the stereotype of “Africa qua Africa”—meaning Africa will always be Africa. Over 130 years since European geographers and explorers employed imaginative geographies as a tool to paint the diverse and complex African societies in a single brushstroke, development entities continue to paint the continent in the same manner. Lugo-Ocando and Malaolu point out that European and American bards present narratives about Africa that depict the continent as characterized by issues of four Ds: disease, disaster, debt, and death (Lugo-Ocando and Malaolu 2015). International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are global bards that contribute to those narratives that distort the gains that nations in SSA have made in the global development process. Healthrelated INGOs and their researchers extrapolate the incidences and/ or research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in individual communities to portray the prevalence of the disease in the entire African continent. In 2014, when the Ebola outbreak occurred in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, the global community stigmatized and screened all travelers from sub-Saharan Africa. Within few days of the outbreak, Africans became the target as European, US, and other international airport

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authorities began screening travelers from all other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. I am not arguing that we should not have precautionary measures to contain diseases from a region. What I am suggesting is that any effort to control diseases from a region should not be another process for creating “otherness” of an entire group or region. The stigmatization of people from the African continent when there is an outbreak of a disease in a region of this vast continent obscures the reality of how to address such an epidemic. In their zeal to solicit funds for their development works in Africa, development INGOs package infomercials about African children emaciated, hungry, skinny, and sickly with flies all over their mouths to sensationalize endemic crisis in African societies. INGOs take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the societies and communities they work in, and sometimes reify poverty in the most inhumane and despicable ways possible all in the name of solicitation. These organizations are aware that such images appeal to the sensibilities of well-meaning people in the West to give to their programs and projects. In the early days of Christian missionary evangelization, many missionaries, passionate to convert the “heathen Africans,” relied on donations from benevolent charities back home. During the early phases of the Christian missionary enterprise, many missionaries died. The missionaries distorted the narratives and misrepresented the story about why many succumbed to death in Africa. Later accounts showed that many died due to their lack of immunity to such diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and dengue fever. However, in their reports to their missionary organizations back home, the missionaries reported that the indigenous and “cannibalistic” Africans murdered the Christians and boiled them in black African pots as food (Blakemore and Cooksey 1981 Davidson 1984). We see the connection here between early European distortions and contemporary narratives, anecdotal accounts and the lore of many INGOs. Interestingly, many well-meaning individuals from the West only reach for their wallets and donate when they see images of “suffering Africans” because it confirms the prior narratives and paintings about Africa. The presentation of a “crisis” is an intervention strategy in development discourse. The early European Christian missionaries presented “crisis” as a reason why benevolent entities back home must sustain charity flow. Contemporary development entities also use “crisis” as an effective and powerful strategy to ensure sustained financial support from benevolent people back home (Lugo-Ocando and Malaolu 2015). The next section outlines the ways global development entities employ “crisis” as an intervention strategy in education policy and practice.

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“Organized Hypocrisy,” Distortions, and Contemporary Discourses on Education in SSA There seem to be many contradictions in how contemporary global forces present education in SSA as in crisis in the global human capital development processes. In a preceding section, I mentioned the concept of “organized hypocrisy” to describe how organizations reflect conflicting norms by systematically creating inconsistencies between talk, decisions, and actions (Mundy and Menashy 2014). Presentations about the crisis of Africa’s education also fall under the concept of “organized hypocrisy.” Let me reiterate here (just in case my readers have forgotten or do not know) that the Europeans introduced Western forms of education in sub-Saharan Africa. During the colonial era, European and American forces introduced complicated transnational borrowing and lending of knowledge and learning framework that dictated schooling policies, processes, and all forms of school organization in sub-Saharan Africa. The Christian missionaries, the British, French, Portuguese, Germans, and Belgians that were the major forces and power brokers of the development of Western forms of education in SSA determined who had access to established colonial education systems. These Europeans also determined the different levels that various social groups attained, the content of knowledge provided to those who got access, who they trained to teach in the school, the pedagogical approaches used, and access to the productive process for those who graduated from the school system (Mfum-Mensah 2017a). The goal was to determine how to graft different social groups into the colonial productive process. When US philanthropic entities inserted themselves into education policy making after World War I, they worked within the existing colonial framework of “exclusion,” and promoted education whose main objective was to stratify and socialize black Africans to subordinated positions and statuses. The current systems and structures of education in SSA (for whatever their shapes and forms) were the result of the educational structures the European and American forces bequeathed to sub-Saharan African societies. US forces of the early twentieth century supported the education structures in place, but pushed even further and introduced “adaptation education” with the objective of confining blacks to the lower rungs of society. European-American colonial and imperial forces had the opportunity to develop education systems that would prepare Africans to meet the industrial and cultural transformation that took place in Europe and the United States at the time, but they chose not to. During those seventy years of formal colonial rule, European and American

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colonial administrators and education policy makers became impervious to providing the kind of education that promotes technological development to transform African societies to reflect the metropoles. The few African-educated elites criticized the forms of education in place and pushed for the same education that existed in European and American societies. However, colonial administrators wanted to limit the number of educated Africans because they suspected that a highly educated populace might pose resistance to colonialism. After African nations attained political independence, these same European and American imperialists turned around to highlight the wrongs of the educational system they developed and institutionalized in Africa.

Philanthropy, Research, and “White World Order” Knowledge production and the direction of discourse are hegemonic processes that shape and reshape our understanding of the world. When it comes to Western narratives about “education crisis” in subSaharan Africa (which intensified after the 1990 Jomtien World Education Conference), one can argue that it is part of the strategy to create the “center” versus “periphery” and “superior” versus “inferior” dichotomy in the global geopolitical order. The 1970s and 1980s were challenging decades for sub-Saharan Africa economically and could partly explain the crisis in education in the region. One can also view the Western forces’ focus on the education crisis as another way to justify why external agencies needed to intervene in the educational discourse and transnational flow of ideas in SSA in much the same way Europe and the United States collaborated to push agricultural and industrial education in colonial territories in Africa after World War I. There are some fundamental questions that people are not asking. Why do indigenous African educational experts not seem to have a voice in the discourse? Why is it that most of these “experts” on education in SSA are predominantly white Europeans and Americans? Why is it that most global development entities routinely recruit mostly Western education researchers and policy makers to consult on African education? How does the work of global development agencies parallel the roles of “colonial representatives” and “saviors”? Rosalind Raby (2009) poses similar questions regarding why dominating countries continue to have a hold on knowledge dissemination. Research and policy making are hegemonic and apart from the power and control that come with the research process, the other danger of hegemony is when Western researchers and scholars become “the voice” of an entire continent

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with almost 1.5 billion people. Where are the voices of African scholars and experts? Jairo Lugo-Ocando and Patrick Malaolu articulated it coherently when they said, “Africans had little voice in their own stories—the ‘knowledgeable’ Western ‘experts’ speak for them, analyze their developmental problems for them and proffer the ‘necessary solutions’” (2015: 88). White Africanists use their research on African societies to position themselves as “the voice” for Africa. The voices of these Western researchers are now the prevailing “valid voice” and their scholarship is the valid knowledge about Africa. They have now taken over the role of “trusteeship” of the African education systems in ways similar to how European colonists like Cecil Rhodes and others did over a century ago. Rhodes’s assumed trusteeship of southern Africa became the prop for the Rudd Concession of 1888, which deprived the Ndebele of their land and territory. Cecil Rhodes encouraged Lo Bengula, king of the Matabeleland and Mashonaland, to sign a document he never understood. We can draw parallels to the contemporary Western “Education Africanists” who use their research to push for transnational policy borrowing and lending of educational ideas in favor of Western models of policy and practice. They see themselves as the Education Trustees and operate within the same colonial rubric of the supposed inferiority and “infantilized Africans,” and their “divine right” to take charge of sub-Saharan Africa’s education (Keim and Somerville 2018; Wainaina 2005). The activities of these contemporary Western education experts have also become synonymous to that of colonial geographers who saw Africa as a laboratory to investigate and viewed themselves as “luminaries” in the “Dark Continent” to unmask the “real problems” and sources of the “educational crisis.” African education scholars’ lack of resources to pursue research has immobilized them, and they do not have authority to speak on Africa’s educational issues. African governments’ budgets for research are limited and keep dwindling, and therefore African education researchers have become captives of their own systems. The fugitive treatment of educated African scholars by Western development and funding entities could send a message that African scholars are incompetent. Development entities recruit white Western consultants to work on projects in Africa even though there are native Africans who have similar expertise. This practice has been a longstanding development approach and is not new. As I outlined in earlier chapters, US philanthropic organizations started the “research discrimination” practices in the 1940s when they strategically withheld funding for black intellectuals and historically black institutions that have African studies programs. Instead, these organizations ensured a continuous flow of

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financial support for white scholars and individuals in predominantly white universities in the United States. We need to analyze how funding provided by Western institutions and entities and the scholarships that come out of this funding contribute to perpetuating the stereotypes about Africa and Africans’ knowledge base. If Europeans and Americans are the experts on Africa, does it mean the Africans are not intelligent? Or does it mean that African scholars do not progress beyond their “backwardness” and therefore should suffer marginalization in the academic and scholarly discourse on Africa? Does this also justify why transnational knowledge borrowing and lending is always one direction—from Western societies to Africa? How does the practice of Western white scholars speaking for Africans shape education policies promoted in African societies? These issues deserve analyzing within the rubric of symbolic violence and postcolonial theories. Through their scholarship, some Western researchers undermine African education in ways that make African scholars insignificant. The strategy and approach that prevail in scholarship where white Africanists become the mouthpiece of Africa was a strategy by Western philanthropic entities to disempower African societies from providing their own narratives about themselves and their societies. The objective is to continue to present the West as a role model in research and knowledge production (Gershenhorn 2009; Keim and Somerville 2018; Lugo-Ocando and Malaolu 2015; Parmer 2012; Vitalis 2015). The real reason many African scholars and researchers have become insignificant is part of the European and American colonization and imperialistic strategies in research, scholarship, knowledge, and policymaking. European and American scholars and researchers use their scholarship to highlight and superimpose the wrongs about African education as a way to continue to inject themselves and justify why their presence is inevitable in Africa’s educational policy discourse. White Western Africanists keep the imagery of an education crisis in sub-Saharan Africa alive to highlight what is going wrong in Africa. They selectively highlight the crisis of the educational systems and do not highlight the research and community engagements of African researchers in African institutions in the context of the challenges they face. Reading these reports makes one ponder whether Africans are making progress in their education systems or not. Some can interpret these reports (correctly or incorrectly) as part of the strategy to justify why Western entities must serve as trustees of African societies. It has been a routine practice of Western development entities and researchers to present good news about Africa and overshadow it with bad news about the continent. This is a form of microassault those

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entities perpetrate on African societies. When it comes to Africa’s development narratives, development entities and researchers have two problems: their narratives usually lack contexts and nuances; with few exceptions, development entities present a single story without much balance. There is the potential for external researchers to present imbalanced stories and therefore some international development researchers advise that external researchers create effective dialogue with local communities and local policy makers in the generation of research agenda to its execution (Carasco et al. 2001; Puchner 2001). While dialoguing with local communities comes with complications, Laurel Puchner (2001) notes that such an approach is nonetheless worth the hassle. Joseph Carasco, Nancy Clair, and Lawrence Kanyike (2001) implore external researchers to self-critique and become aware of the formidable force that entails the politics of knowledge creation. Those with power and status of research-based knowledge frequently set the research agenda and interpret the result, and those with limited power generally remain silent. Education systems in SSA have their challenges. Some of the systems lag behind many countries in other regions on nearly every indicator of Western-style education development. It is also true that schools and learning continue to deteriorate in some countries, and the situation continues to worsen. The quality of primary education continues to face challenges and the physical conditions of most schools are unacceptable, especially in rural areas and urban poor communities in many countries. No one can dispute the fact that there are teacher shortages in some societies in the region and the problem becomes acute in the remotest part of the region even as many children continue to trek for more than five miles to access the available school. National agendas for gender parity and girls’ education continue to meet cultural and financial roadblocks and policies focusing on girls’ education continue to be against pregnant teenage girls returning to schools. Policies on special education continue to shortchange people with disabilities. No one can dispute these educational challenges, except that the issues have been around since Europe introduced Western forms of education in sub-Saharan Africa. For more than a hundred years, those Europeans that came to disrupt Africa’s indigenous education and introduced their forms of education could not fix or address the problems of the system of education they introduced and bequeathed to African societies. European colonial administrations failed to develop robust education structures that provided innovations in preparing new generations of Africans to confront their potential challenges of the future. Education itself became the tool to underdevelop Africa

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(Dunitz 2017; Rodney 1988). Sarah Dunitz notes for example, that in the rich Gold Coast colony, less than 10 percent of children were enrolled in government-assisted schools during the 1920s and 1930s. In the territory of Nigeria, government expenditure on education was less than half of the Gold Coast. Andrew Roberts also reports that opportunities for post-primary education were even more limited in colonial SSA where “in 1938, some 5,500 Africans were receiving secondary education in South Africa, and no more than this in tropical Africa” (Roberts 1990: 228–229). Nevertheless, the same global forces now want African societies to address the problem in sixty-three years since Ghana, the first nation, attained independence. My point is not to give excuses for what African policy makers could do to improve the system. African societies need to be creative and innovative to reshape the system they inherited from the colonial and imperial structures. However, we have to point out the irony here and the double standards played by these global forces.

Dirty Gossip and “Crisis” in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa Published reports about education in SSA from Sudan to South Africa and from Kenya to Senegal highlight the same refrain of “crisis” in sub-Saharan African education systems. How does one explain this renewed research to unearth the crisis in education in SSA and not the educational crisis in the global community? Let me revisit the US philanthropists’ initiative in education in the 1920s to set some context. After World War I, US philanthropic foundations, academics, and social reformers embarked on education research to address the race relations in the United States through the study of black societies. However, it was a challenge to pursue such initiatives at home because of the racial tensions in the United States after the war. The alternative was to export the framework to SSA where a stable British imperial presence supported such kinds of research on black life. US philanthropic entities pursued the studies on blacks to further US cultural and economic interests abroad. American philanthropists’ educational architects in Africa in the 1920s recognized cultural particularism. The philanthropists stressed the distinctiveness of “native” rural communities that they must research, to devise schemes to reassert order and stability (Dunitz 2017). I provide this context to stress my point regarding the similarities between the research initiatives of US philanthropic entities of the 1920s and 1930s and the research initiatives of contemporary Western Africanist education scholars. Many

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of these Western Africanist researchers and their development entities devote much of their tales, lore, publications, and reports to highlight the wrongs of the education systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Generally, the reports will begin with a general negative narrative about SSA and peak with something like “inadequate development, abject poverty, declining public services, the collapse of state institutions and sociopolitical infrastructure including health and education systems leading to the problem of HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Ebola and then a broken educational infrastructure.” The narrative will then conclude with a highlight of what the sub-Saharan African governments are not doing right and the interventions of Western entities as “saviors” of SSA to alleviate the issues (see Lugo-Ocango and Malaolu 2015; Maruatona 2008; Matenge 2015; Samoff 2003). Here are some excerpts of such narratives: Despite significant progress in education in most African countries, at least 31 of the 44 African countries will not achieve the goals of Education by 2015. (UNESCO 2018) Of all regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of education exclusion. Over one-fifth of children between the ages of 6 and 11 are out of school, followed by one-third of youth between the ages of about 12 and 14 . . . without urgent action, the situation will likely get worse as the region faces a rising demand for education due to a still-growing school-age population. (UNESCO-UIS 2011) With the exception of Mauritius, no African country has achieved significant structural transformation—necessary for long-term growth . . . the absolute levels of human development as measured by Human Development Index are still lowest in the world. Indicators of service delivery are appalling; teachers in public primary schools in Tanzania are absent 23 percent of the time; doctors in Senegal spend a total of 29 minutes a day seeing patients and the rest of the time seeking alternative means to underwrite their incomes. (Bold et al. 2001 cited in Kararach 2015: 51)

These reports do not mean that we should treat every report that emerges from research on an education policy and practice in an African context with suspicion. However, the way such narratives shape the psyche of our global community is expressed clearly by Jairo LugoOcando and Patrick Malaolu in their cautioning of the potential challenges those narratives pose: It is by no means being suggested here that all reports on Africa follow this pattern. However, the prevalent approach in the reporting of Africa is one in which the West is presented as a role model. Because of this, news media reports on poverty in Africa often make explicit and implicit comparisons between the West’s efficient, civilized and honest societies

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and values against the less transparent and uncivilized ways of the African continent. (Lugo-Ocando and Malaolu 2015: 98–99)

This format, which contemporary education scholars and researchers employ to present education challenges in SSA, is similar in shape and form to the methods used by the nineteenth-century geographers to distort the narrative about Africa. Contemporary Western education policy experts and researchers see both “education in SSA” and African children’s minds as new frontiers to confront, explore, and tame through education research and implementation of education initiatives. European and American education researchers highlight a “crisis” to portray the potential “challenges” to encounter, and implementation of initiatives as their resolve and resilience to tame the frontier in much the same ways explorers and colonial forces trooped, confronted, and took over “uninhabited lands.” Sometimes, reading about the educational practices from SSA and sitting through presentations that subtly highlight what is wrong with the education systems in SSA at international conferences can be challenging for native African scholars that have deeper understanding about how colonial and imperial forces attempted to use the same education to underdevelop the region. It is a laudable idea that the Carnegie Corporation has shifted its focus to provide direct support for African institutions that will take Africa’s destiny and write its own histories, philosophies, and literature, and develop its arts and its musical and cultural traditions— not as told in the voice of its colonizers, but represented by its own makers, scholars, and thinkers (D’Souza 2019).

Concluding Thoughts Past distortions and stereotypes that infantilize Africans and depicted them as “primitive” and developmentally “backward” continue to influence and shape how contemporary global forces treat sub-Saharan African societies. Some Westerners explore Africa to find depravity (Keim and Somerville 2018). The assumed depravity in Africa makes contemporary Western forces view themselves as “trustees” of Africa. Curtis Keim and Caroline Somerville (2018) note that the Western trusteeship role of sub-Saharan Africa implies that Africans are biologically inferior, and Western development entities and researchers need to take care of them. This justifies their control of sub-Saharan Africa’s development initiatives including education. This is a demonstration of the West’s paternalistic attitudes, “calculated benevolence,”

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and “condescending sympathy” toward African societies sometimes for their own benefit and a way to feel good, as they seek to promote development. The continual practices of Western Africanist researchers highlighting the crisis in education in SSA perpetuates and reifies African narratives to benefit Western development entities. Dirty gossip that highlights the “crisis in education in SSA” is an industry that benefits Western education researchers. We can allude to the eighteenthand nineteenth-century contrasts made between the so-called civilized West and uncivilized North Africa, which grew into a very popular and lucrative genre of writing, the “Barbary captivity of narratives” (see Keim and Somerville 2018: 41). Since the fifteenth century, Western forces have demonstrated pugnacious attitudes to profit from nonEuropeans, which led to the conquests, colonization, and imperialism of the non-European world. Western entities also see the need to employ research and development as another tool and “technology” to conquer and subjugate the non-Western (developing) world. Keim and Somerville point out that “they [Westerners] felt the need to justify their actions in moral terms, and they frequently wondered about the meaning of their relations with other people” (2018: 38). The global community faces an education crisis. Many societies in our global community continue to fail their younger generation due to the lack of adequate preparation of the next generations in an era of imposing complex technologies, economies, and productive processes that expose the new generation to global competition. Some societies have done a better job of preparing their younger generation than what most are doing. However, even those societies that are doing a better job, children from poor households and marginalized groups do not have access to the quality of education that those from wealthy households and those belonging to the dominant cultures do (see Alba and Foner 2015; Behtoui 2015; Kozol 1991; Rutter 2015; Sattin-Bajaj 2015; Vallot and Jacobs 2016). The global education research community should acknowledge that there is a global crisis in education that needs pragmatic ways to address it if we see education as one of the powerful processes to promoting a democratic society where social justice is our core ideal.

Conclusion

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I began this book by outlining the usefulness of using symbolic violence and postcolonial frameworks to examine how the “dirty gossip” of European (and American) bards about African societies have influenced education policy discourse in sub-Saharan Africa since the introduction of Western forms of education. It is important to understand that this dirty gossip limited the global community’s understanding of the African continent and its people. The negative narratives mischaracterized the image of Africa in the minds of especially Westerners. Those misrepresentations obfuscated the real stories about slavery, colonialism, imperialism, exploitation. It also concealed Africans’ resilience and strength to challenge the inequities perpetrated against them. The arguments I make in this book are that the distortions and stereotypes of the European bards about Africa influenced Western interventions in education policy, practice, and education research in sub-Saharan African education systems. Once the European colonial forces realized that their strategy of “divide and rule” had become inane and ineffective, colonial administrators collaborated with US philanthropies to introduce a new kind of education policy to transfer “adapted education” to African societies. The objective for implementing adapted education was to reorganize African societies to create a hierarchy that saw the European colonizers at the top and the Africans at subordinated positions in colonial societies. Colonial administrations strategized to marginalize and confine Africans to the bottom of the colonial social strata within a context where they also provided opportunities for selected few Africans to become the elite in colonial establishment. The objective was to use Western education to develop a few Africans to work in the colonial productive process. Africans resisted the adapted education in every colonial territory a few years after the European and American philanthropic entities introduced the

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policy. Even as Africans challenged the adapted education, Western colonial and imperial powers also introduced a new kind of race relations that aimed to place African societies in subordinated positions in a white racial supremacy. Western entities couched these new kind of race relations as “development” of the colonial territory. The development initiative, which began with the spread of the Christian gospel, evolved to include promoting Western forms of education, transplanting industrial education, researching the African “other,” spreading Western ideals and values, and enforcing Western models (including Western capitalist economic forms and Western political forms to help democratize sub-Saharan African societies). The European distortions about the “backwardness” and infantilization of Africans became the basis for the Europeans’ and Americans’ use of education as a tool to stratify African societies to maintain Europeans at the top, position a few intermediary groups at the middle and Africans at the bottom of the knowledge and social hierarchy. One of the ironies of European colonialism and Western imperialism is how Western forces infantilized Africans and positioned themselves as trustees of African societies and Africa’s resources. They did so and yet found it necessary to develop educational systems intended to stratify African societies such that Africans would be at the bottom. If they were like children, then by inference they were at the bottom, so why bother? Western entities knew the people they portrayed as “inferior” were capable of challenging their situation. The new configuration of African societies created by the West by using education had lasting implications. It helped create social, political, and economic marginalization of many groups in African societies. Women, rural communities, Muslims, people with disabilities, and some people in specific geographical areas such as pastoralists, were marginalized educationally. After independence, it became the responsibility of the new African governments to promote inclusion if the nations were to be united. In many African societies, governments introduced affirmative action initiatives to address the systemic inequalities the Western forces created in the education system during colonization.

Dirty Gossip in Contemporary Education Discourse The European and American dirty gossip continued to influence education policies and practices in contemporary discourse in sub-Saharan Africa. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) working with education systems in the region, and Western education pol-

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icy experts and education researchers are now the new “global forces” and “saviors.” They have been using their development initiatives and research to highlight a “crisis” in education in SSA based on their earlier distortions and misrepresentations about African societies, in the global geopolitical order. The issue of unemployment is a global crisis and many nations in the Western world are facing the same challenge of unemployment crisis. However, Western entities are quick to point out that the challenges of unemployment in the region are the result of the region’s educational crisis. Let me make few observations regarding unemployment in the region. The issue of unemployment in sub-Saharan Africa is complicated and convoluted. Colonialism, imperialism, and new forms of globalization have all complicated how people are engaged in the economic and productive processes in sub-Saharan Africa. Excessive capitalism (what Henry Giroux terms “casino capitalism”(Giroux 2013) combined with new forms of information and communication technology and globalization have necessitated that industries move to regions where technology and communication networks are available and where access to cheap labor is easily found. The old situation where Europe and other Western allies saw the African continent as the producer of raw material for industrial development in the West continues to dictate how Western governments treat the sub-Saharan African region. The region continues to serve as a hub for raw materials not only for the West but also now even for China and the Asian region with the resulting environmental carnage on sub-Saharan African societies. Furthermore, the terms of global trade policies continue to marginalize the sub-Saharan African region in favor of Western global entities. These situations complicate and compound the unemployment situation in the region. Africans are not lazy people who are not willing to work. If manufacturing companies are to go by the economic principle and locate their industries where they have access to raw materials, it will address the unemployment situation in sub-Saharan Africa. Right now, sub-Saharan Africa continues to serve as the source of raw materials for Western and Asian industries and is the dumping ground for finished industrial goods from the West and Asia. It is an unfortunate and unjust situation but nations in sub-Saharan Africa have limited advantage regarding the direction of trade. During colonization, schools served as the major avenue for Africans to have access to employment in a colonial establishment. However, in our current post-independence Africa, a diploma is not worth much.

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Some Closing Thoughts As we complete the second decade of the twenty-first century, global forces may need to revisit their strategies about how to engage education policy and practice in SSA. The process of knowledge production and distribution should have a paradigm shift from “knowledge transfer” to “knowledge interaction” (Stambach and Cappy 2012). Such an approach may help the research and international development community “de-center” knowledge production and dissemination. It will also help to distribute the transnational flow of ideas equitably, rather than the generation, distribution and management of ideas solely by Western scholars. Western researchers and policy makers and their agencies use Western-generated research to influence decisions about knowledge production, knowledge flow, and dissemination, and in the process, push education policy makers and practitioners in SSA to adopt Western conventions and models wholesale whether those models are feasible to particular contexts or not (Bledsoe 1992; LugoOcando and Malaolu 2015; Raby 2009). Caroline Bledsoe observed some three decades ago that local communities in Africa do not embrace these Western forms of policies wholesale but reinterpret and adjust those models to meet their own needs. Western development entities’ strategy of highlighting a “crisis” of education in SSA has become an industry in itself with benefits to these imposing global forces. The strategy feeds into the distortions and narratives and becomes a way to re-center Western-driven development and policy initiatives and rebrand Western researchers as the secular “saviors” of sub-Saharan Africa’s education systems. Most Western researchers overemphasize the “crisis in education” in Africa without discussing the conditions that created those crises to obscure or explain away the real issues faced by many societies in the region as they work to educate their citizens. Western researchers should recognize their hegemonic positionality as an extension of the colonial and imperial activities that created and left indelible marks on Africa’s development. The Western Africanist research community should reflect and understand its hegemonic positions and the many ways its own privileged positions influence its research agenda, research processes, interpretation and recommendations, and reshape the position of SSA in a changing global community. Such critiques should include the following fundamental questions: what motivates Western Africanist researchers to engage with a specific African society? Is it because these researchers are the only experts? Are there other native-born Africanist

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scholars that could also speak to such issues in the same ways we do? If that is the case, why do external development agencies not utilize those local experts? Western education researchers know that external research support for education in SSA is a political enterprise and part of their hegemonic structures to dictate education policy and practice in the region. Western philanthropic and development entities work with Western scholars to blatantly or benignly perpetuate that “dirty gossip” about Africa to validate and strengthen their own narratives about the continent. Dirty gossip has become an industry in global development discourse. Western philanthropic entities provide the bulk of their funding to Western academics rather than local African scholars who inhabit institutions in Western countries. Both Edward Berman (1978) and Jerry Gershenhorn (2009) observe that Western philanthropists’ treatment of African (and black) scholars since the 1950s is part of the Western forces’ grand agenda to consolidate the existing power asymmetry in knowledge production and distribution, and have oversight of the flow of ideas in the global geopolitical order.

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Index

¨´

Achimota School, 95–96, 99 affirmative action, 137–49 African American Missionaries, 88, 93 African Development Bank, 147 African Economic Research Consortium, 115 African Heritage Studies Association, 112 African Humanities Program, 116 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 88 African Studies Association, 111 Africanization, 26, 96, 141–42 Africanness, 45 Aggrey, Kwegyir James, 96, 108 Akan, 36, 49, 56, 69, 72, 74 Akufo Addo, Nana128 Alliance High School, 95 America, 1, 5, 6, 46, 50, 61, 64, 73, 89, 92, 101, 108. See also United States American Council of Learned Societies, 116 Angola, 78, 92, 121–22, 124, 154 Ashby Commission, 113 Baker, Samuel, 50 Bantu, 41, 78 barbarians, 61 Benson, T. G., 57–58, 60, 97 Bertram, James, 93 biologists, 49 British colonial territories, 75, 87, 91–92, 121–23 Burton, Richard, 50–52, 54–55, 159

Buxton, Thomas, 39, 57 cannibals, 41, 51–53 Carnegie Corporation, 62–63, 93–95, 98, 102–103, 107, 109–11, 113–18, 168. See also foundations, and philanthropic organizations capitalist, 9, 31, 40, 72, 83, 99, 158, 171. See also class Civil Rights Act, 103–104 civilization, 7, 39, 47, 51, 53, 56, 60, 92 clan, 69, 71, 140 class, 71, 79, 133 capitalist, 158 dominant, 25, 26, 30 economic, 77 lower, 69–70 middle, 65, 70, 74–75, 149 ruling, 70 social, 74 underclass, 78 working, 106 colonization, 2, 6, 8, 12, 24, 28, 35, 38–39, 44–45, 56–57, 80, 87, 89, 92, 123, 142, 149–50, 157, 164, 169, 172 commerce, 54, 56 Congo, 51, 53–54, 60, 82, 91–92, 121, 123–125, 140 conservationists, 42, 49 Cote D’Ivoire, 124, 140, 144 cultural production, 26, 30, 62, 90 cultural transformation, 3, 10, 101, 107, 161

196

Index

development, 1–2, 7–13, 23–24, 26, 31, 34, 37–39, 44–46, 49, 55–58, 60–64, 72, 76, 81, 83–84, 91, 93, 95–96, 98–100, 102, 105, 110–11, 113–18, 121, 123, 129–34, 138, 141, 144–48, 150, 152–65, 167–74 Dinka, 70–71. See also Sudan discoveries, 55 domestic, 42, 71, 80–81, 97, 107, 125 DuBois, William. Edward. B., 99, 106–7, 111 Ecole Normale William Ponty, 95 economies, 34, 37, 42, 49, 72, 127, 169 African, 62, 71 subsistent, 71 education adapted, 10, 12, 95, 105–6, 170–71 colonial, 39, 58, 76, 79, 84, 96, 102, 121, 126, 145, 158, 161 Eton-Winchester, 96 formal, 74, 128, 148 girls’, 165 Hampton-Tuskegee Education, 92, 95–97, 99, 104, 106–7 industrial, 12, 85, 87–88, 90, 92, 95–97, 104–8, 162, 171 Jeanes School, 57, 60, 95–99, 102, 109 Negro Education, 92, 108 vocational-industrial education, 94, 96 Education for All, 10, 12, 117, 130, 151–52, 156 enlightenment, 8, 56 ethnographies, 29 exoticize, 43, 47 expansionism, 59 exploitations, 1, 3–4, 6, 7, 20–21, 23, 36, 38, 44, 120–21, 124–25, 137, 155, 158 explorations, 3, 36, 41, 43, 50, 52, 54–55, 59, 101 Ford Foundation, 102–3, 110, 113–17. See also foundations; and philanthropic organizations

Forum for African Women Educationalists, 144 foundations, 8–9, 62–63, 87–91, 102–3, 105, 107, 110–12, 115, 118, 142, 166. See also philanthropic organizations geography imaginative, 6, 25, 31, 50, 52–53, 59, 159 as a subject, 34, 46, 54 as a tool of exploitation, 53–55, 59, 123 geographers Colonial, 37–38, 49, 163, 168 European, 11, 59, 159 geopolitical, 3, 6, 10, 22–23, 31–33, 36–38, 44–45, 49, 64, 84, 89, 99, 102, 106, 154–55, 157, 162, 172, 174 Ghana (Gold Coast), 5, 23, 32, 34, 40, 54–55, 57, 69–77, 80–82, 95–96, 108, 113, 115–16, 123–24, 128–29, 131, 134, 140, 143–45, 148–49, 153, 166 ghettoization, 19, 55, 99 heathen, 7, 39, 41, 56, 87, 98, 160 hegemony, 30, 81, 162 hierarchy, 3, 10, 20, 46, 71, 74, 76, 85, 127, 171. See also stratification Hollenbeth, Henry Stanley, 108 human capital, 3, 8–11, 89, 110, 113, 127, 129–131, 134, 148, 153, 157, 161 humanism, 8, 30. See also ideology ideology, 7, 60, 63, 81, 86, 110, 114–15 deficit, 39, 107, 124 human rights, 130, 138 monogenist, 59 polygenist, 59–60, racism, 1, 4, 45, 50, 59–60, 104, 107, 111, 118, 158 trusteeship, 2, 6, 11, 40, 55, 88, 153, 163

197 imperialism, 1, 6, 11, 27, 29–30, 34, 44, 52, 54, 57, 72, 103–104, 112, 137, 154–55, 169, 171–72 indigenous, 3–4, 20, 23, 26–27, 30–31, 47, 55, 57, 72, 87, 90, 99, 124, 160, 162, 165 Institute of Education, 61, 113 International Institute of African Language and Culture, 62, 98, 115 International Labor Organization (ILO), 128, 146. See also organizations International Monetary Fund (IMF), 10, 44, 128, 153. See also organizations invisibilization, 23 Jones, Thomas Jesse, 90–91, 94, 102, 104, 107–108 Kenya, 23, 34, 45, 57, 70, 75, 80–82, 84, 95–97, 120, 123, 138–39, 141–43, 148–49, 166 Keppel, Frederick, 93–94 Kilimanjaro Women’s Information and Education Corporation, 144 King Leopold II, 54, 121, 124–25 Kingsley, Mary, 50–51 labor, 6–7, 12, 71, 76, 78, 82, 85, 90, 106, 120–22, 124–28, 130–34, 146, 158 laborers, 85, 90, 104, 120, 123–24, 126 Livingstone, David, 50, 52–53, 159 Loram, Charles, 108 Lüderitz, Adolf, 5 Lugard, Frederick (Lord), 39, 50, 57, 157 Maasai, 70, 80 Malawi (Nyasaland), 95, 121, 124, 154 Manumission Society, 90 marginalization, 11, 17, 64, 72, 74, 77, 85, 117, 126, 136–140, 142, 145, 148–50, 156, 158, 164, 171

media, 10, 18, 23, 25–28, 30, 40–47, 54, 73, 152, 167 Millennium Development Goals, 117, 130 Moi, Daniel Arap, 144 Mozambique, 78, 81, 92, 98, 122, 143, 154 Nachigal, Gustav, 125 Nigeria, 23, 57, 70, 74–79, 81–84, 95, 113, 115–16, 123–24, 128, 139–40, 144–45, 149, 157, 166 Nkrumah, Kwame, 145, 149, 155 nonstate actors, 86, 90, 99. See also foundations organizations, 103, 161 church missions, 86–87 civic, 122 international nongovernmental, 2, 11, 152, 159–60, 171 nongovernmental, 38, 144 philanthropic organizations, 63, 93, 100, 109, 113, 118, 163. See also foundations western multinational, 47, 146 Park, Mungo, 50 Peters, Carl, 50 Phelps Stokes, 61, 89–98, 100–109. See also foundations; and philanthropic organizations philanthropic organizations, 9, 63, 87, 100, 163. See also foundations Pifer, Alan, 62–63, 110 Portugal, 3, 87 Portuguese, 3–4, 36, 73, 77–78, 92, 108, 121–22, 124, 161 primitive, 2, 8, 12, 19, 34, 38, 41, 43, 47, 56–57, 61–62, 98–99, 105–106, 153, 168 primordial, 34, 41, 47, 60 proselytization, 1, 8, 73, 83, 87, 155 psychic crisis, 89 pygmies, 53 reify, 38, 160

198

Index

researchers, 6, 11, 31, 50, 58, 61–62, 111, 152, 159, 162–69, 172–74. See also geographers; and social scientists Rhodes, Cecil, 39, 57, 121, 124, 159, 163 Rockefeller Foundation, 46, 62, 93, 98, 102–3, 107, 111, 113–17. See also foundations; and philanthropic organizations romanticize, 47, 63 Roy, Leo Authur Wilkie, 108 savage, 6, 33, 41, 45, 51–52, 60–61 secular missionaries, 93, 110. See also foundations segregation legal, 104 racial, 54 slave, 5, 7, 19, 37–38, 40, 44, 50, 52, 60, 69–70, 73, 76, 90, 121, 124 trading, 49, 50 slavery, 5–6, 37, 40, 87–88, 124, 136, 155, 170 social scientists, 32, 50, 132 social systems, 18, 69 society, 8–9, 18–22, 24, 26–27, 30, 37–38, 52, 59, 70–72, 80–82, 84, 86–87, 89–90, 92, 97–98, 104, 108, 133, 139–41, 143, 145, 158, 161, 173 acephalous, 70, 72 civil, 130, 143 colonial, 12, 78 egalitarian, 70, 71, 141, 143 global, 105 liberal democratic, 137–38, 140, 149, 169 multicultural, 103 secret, 72 segregated, 78 stratified, 72, 79, 85, 122 western, 57 South Africa, 42, 78, 82, 88, 93–95, 108–9, 115–16, 121–22, 134, 138– 39, 142–43, 148–49, 154, 166 Speke, John Hanning, 50 Stanley, Henry Morton, 50–51, 53–54, 59, 72, 159

Stokes, Anson Phelps, 61, 89 subaltern, 11, 17, 22–23, 25–31 Sub-Saharan Africa, 1–3, 9–13, 17, 30–31, 42, 44, 48, 64–65, 69, 72–73, 75, 83, 87, 89–91, 94, 100–103, 109, 112, 114–17, 120– 21, 124–25, 127–35, 141–43, 146, 148, 150–68, 170–73 Sudan, 70–71, 78–80, 140, 166. See also Dinka superstition, 53, 56 Sustainable Development Goals, 117, 130, 152 symbolic violence, 6, 10–11, 17–26, 30–31, 38, 43, 164, 171 Tabora Government Secondary School, 95 Tanzania, 78–79, 95, 116, 123, 140, 143–44, 167 Teachers College at Columbia University, 92, 113–14 Togoland, 121, 125 tribal, 2, 34, 41, 43, 47, 55, 63, 71, 73, 96, 105 tribe, 2, 51–52, 61, 140 United Nations, 146–47, 156 United States, 8, 9, 19, 23, 32, 36, 46, 61–64, 86, 88–90, 92–107, 109–18, 121, 129, 154, 157, 161–162, 164, 166. See also America Washington, Booker T., 95, 98, 104, 106 witchcraft, 56 witchdoctors, 56 World Wars, 62, 89, 92–93, 99, 101–5, 107, 110, 112, 118, 161–62, 166 Woodson, Carter, 107, 111 World Bank, 10, 44, 128, 133, 146, 153–54. See also organizations Zambia, 70–72, 82, 95, 121, 137, 139, 154 Zongo, 80