History of Education in African Societies. Appropriation, Negotiation, and Struggles. Part 2
Pierre Guidi
université Paris Cité, IRD, France
Chair(s): Ellen Vea Rosnes (VID University)
The book History through Narratives of Education in Africa. Social Histories in Times of Colonization and Post Independence (1920s – 1970s) is the result of a collaboration between the Centre Population et Développement (CEPED, France), the Centre d’etudes en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques (CESSMA, France) and VID Specialized University (Norway). The 15 chapters are written by an international group of scholars giving the book its rich perspectives. The chapters of the book cover a wide range of topics, all of which investigate the history of education in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this context, the institutions under study range from government and mission schools, to universities, to teacher training centres, to a leprosy village. The social and political history of the school-educated, the history of knowledge, struggles over schooling, and schools as places to address broader political claims, are just some of the topics explored. The chapters can be said to be thematically linked by their attention to the intersections of race, gender, class and education, and to specific contexts within broader colonial settings. The geographical scope includes Algeria, Angola, Cape Verde, Belgian Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Réunion, Somalia and South Africa. In History through Narratives of Education in Africa the roles of various actors involved in colonial and postindependence education in Africa are highlighted. The chapter contributions place, at the heart of their narratives, pupils, parents, teachers, policymakers, colonial administrators, politicians and religious leaders as well as Islamic organizations, missionary societies, families and communities. The authors have searched for narratives of education through different sources: oral interviews, written documents from private and public archives and publications like bibliographies, and films. To deal with the wide range of actors and institutions, as well as with the broad geographical scope covered in this book, through a shared repertoire of understanding there is a focus on a concept taken from Mary Louise Pratt: how schools constituted contact zones, zones where content, access, and aims of education were negotiated (Pratt, 2008). All the chapters in the book address educational settings as social spaces where both contact and separation between colonisers and colonised are constructed through social interactions, negotiations, and struggles. How the chapters relate to education as social spaces impacted on the structure of the book which consists of three parts: The Genesis and Action of Intermediary Social Groups, Colonial Spaces of Contact, Allegiances and Loyalties, Limits and Closings of Contact Zones and Two Way Round Circulations.
Presentations of the Panel
History through Narratives of Education in Africa
Ellen Vea Rosnes
VID University
Co-editor Ellen Vea Rosnes will present the book project
Bibliography
History through Narratives of Education in Africa. Social Histories in Times of Colonization and Post Independence (1920s – 1970s), Edited by Ellen Vea Rosnes, Pierre Guidi and Jean-Luc Martineau (Brill 2024)
Where is the Nation Heading? Empress Menen School for Girls and the ‘New Era’ in Ethiopia (1940s–1950s)
Pierre Guidi
Ceped, université Paris Cité, IRD
Co-editor and author Pierre Guidi will present his chapter ‘Where is the Nation Heading? Empress Menen School for Girls and the ‘New Era’ in Ethiopia (1940s–1950s)’ In addition to sources produced by the ministry of Education and the Empress Menen School, an elite school for girls in Ethiopia, Pierre Guidi looks for the voices of school actors debating about women’s education during the 1940–1950 period. During these two decades, women and men teachers and students, Ethiopian and Western expatriates, wrote opinion articles in the national press in English or Amharic. These written sources are supplemented with interviews with former female students for a retrospective look at the education they received. These multiple and somehow classical sources are of significant value when their content is examined at the crossroads of gender, schooling, nationalism, and the ideology of progress. Linking opinion debates to these school sources enables to understand how the contents of teaching materials and the level of women’s education stimulated conflicting arguments about the identity, place, and role of women in the future of the nation. In addition, to shed light on the impact of the educational projects on the identity of young women students, these sources also say a lot about the channels through which the national project reached the limited population of readers. School reports and the debates in the press exposed a redefined female figure to the imagination of reading-elites. The debates about this new model of femininity, which contested the model of the male as breadwinner as well as of male authority in private and public spaces, gave women students and teachers the opportunity to find their voices to defend their opinions.
Bibliography
History through Narratives of Education in Africa. Social Histories in Times of Colonization and Post Independence (1920s – 1970s), Edited by Ellen Vea Rosnes, Pierre Guidi and Jean-Luc Martineau (Brill 2024)
Making the Colonial School: Catholic Teachers and Muslim Students in Italian Somalia (1930–1941)
Caterina Scalvedi
Wake Forest University
Author Caterina Scalvedi will present her chapter Making the Colonial School: Catholic Teachers and Muslim Students in Italian Somalia (1930–1941). This chapter provides an example of how, in the absence of an educational policy defined by a political centre (even though it was a Fascist regime), competing narratives, emanating from Catholic missionaries and Muslim educators in Italian Somalia, are offered to the historian to understand from the inside the history of the development of school curricula for the colonised. School programmes, designed to promote as closely and effectively as possible, the pupils’ integration of colonial and Islamic knowledge, are rich in lessons on the relationship between the designer and the recipients. The stories, or at least the writings, of the Italian Catholic missionaries on the ground provide the meta-text indispensable for understanding the processes of program development and their local reception. In this context, it is these non-governmental sources, which should be distinguished from private family or individual sources, that allow us to understand how, against all expectations, it was the local communities and missionaries who left their mark on the ‘indigenous programmes’ or teaching materials validated a posteriori by Mussolini’s Rome. The variety of governmental archives, is usefully complemented by the accounts, letters, and memoranda produced by the missionaries with their internal debates. What seems to distinguish these letters and memoranda from the official government archives is their capacity to inform as much about the daily life of the school as about the major political trends that even the fascist governor of Mogadishu struggled to influence.
Bibliography
History through Narratives of Education in Africa. Social Histories in Times of Colonization and Post Independence (1920s – 1970s), Edited by Ellen Vea Rosnes, Pierre Guidi and Jean-Luc Martineau (Brill 2024)
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