How far did the impact of western education on Africans
vary between different territories or colonies in terms
of their impact on the emergence of nationalis

by: Johannes Huhmann

Index

Introduction

Case studies

The Gold Coast

The Ivory Coast

The Belgian Congo

Bibliography

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to discuss in how far the impact of western education on Africans varied between different territories or colonies in terms of their impact on the emergence of nationalism and the struggle for independence. Education was a major tool in the cultural conquest of Africa and the colonising powers realized this quite early. Missionaries were among the first to make serious efforts to introduce a western style education in the early nineteenth century. To the same extent different colonial powers approached the colonization and administration of their territories differently, approaches to educate the Africans differed. Western education had an impact on the African societies during colonial rule, in the process of decolonization and also in the time after independence. As said, I want to focus on the impact of educational efforts on the struggle for independence and the nationalist movements in Africa. To do this, I chose three territories as case studies which were administered by three different European powers: The Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast and the Be lgian Congo. Methodologically, I opted to work through a list of questions which I grouped into six categories. The questions are:

1. When did education get introduced in this colony?
2. By whom was the education conducted and who had control over it?
3. How was the educational system outlined and how big was the proportion of Africans that were schooled?
4. Where and when was the vernacular, where and when the language of the colonisers used in the educational process?
5. What were the underlying ideologies and colonial policies that determined the education?
6. In what kind of jobs or functions and with what kind of attitudes or orientations did the educated continue their lives when leaving the educational institutions? How did this affect the emergence of nationalism and the struggle for independence?

I will discuss these questions for each case study separately. However, it occasionally makes sense to compare aspects of one case study with the similar aspects of the other ones. I also avoided a general conclusion at the end, because I consider point six in each of the case studies as separate conclusions in itself, which however do not miss to draw comparisons to the other cases as well.

The Gold Coast

1. When did education get introduced in this colony? The first western kind of schools were introduced in the Gold Coast by protestant missionaries in the beginning of the 19th century. ¹ More advanced and sophisticated secondary schools or colleges started to get introduced in 1876; higher education was established after the Second World War.
2. By whom was the education conducted and who had control over it? Education in the Gold Coast was in the hand of the missionaries, who next to the inhibition of slave trade devoted their efforts largely to this matter.² In the 1950s, three fourths of the schools were run by religious institutions, the ratio of protestant to catholic schools being two to one.³
3. How was the educational system outlined and how big was the proportion of Africans that were schooled? Before the introduction of university education, the Gold Coast had a three-tiered system of primary, middle and secondary schools with additional vocational schools (e.g. for teachers training) at the middle and secondary levels. At the apex, there was a secondary school to train the new elite groups, which was the Achimota School. ⁴ This school was a specialized institution with the aim of preparing students for the administrative service which, as we will see later, should have a profound impact on nationalism. Curtain notices about Achimota and its French West African counterpart William Ponty in Dakar that “[t]hey were sometimes the nurseries of entire national elites – Westernized, alienated from the mass of the population, but fervent nationalists with the intention of exercising the leadership roles for which they had been trained.”⁵ Some statistics illustrate the scale of the educational efforts in the Gold Coast. In 1950, 6.5 percent of the total population attended school. School enrolment doubled from percent.⁶ The vast educational efforts of the missionaries led to a large quantity of educated people. This went so far that much more people were produced towards the end of one educational stage that could actually move into the next stage. This was a reason for discontent, as we will see later. The Gold Coasters could attend English universities since the nineteenth century, but territorial university education came only after WWII.⁷

[...]

1 I. Wallerstein: The Road to Independence. Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Paris: Mouton & Co, 1964, 15

2 ibid., 15

3 ibid., 138-9

4 Wallerstein, 15

5 Philip Curtin and others: African History. London: Longman, 1978, 535 1950 to 1955 to 599,843 in February, 1955. The growth from 1946 to 1951 was 61.2

6 Wallerstein, 137

7 Curtin, 535