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Indigenous Adaptation: Uganda's Village Schools, ca. 1880–

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Article in Comparative Education Review · May 2010

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 Indigenous Adaptation: Uganda’s Village Schools,
ca. 1880–1937
HOLLY ELISABETH HANSON

Millenium Development Goal 2, that both boys and girls will be able to
complete a full course of primary schooling, has refocused attention on the
challenge of both providing access to education for all African children and
ensuring that the education provided has a meaningful and enduring impact
on the lives of learners. In Uganda, the implementation of universal primary
education (UPE) in 1997 and universal secondary education (USE) in 2005
have led educational policy makers, teachers, parents, and students to seek
creative solutions to the problem of ensuring educational quality as schools
incorporate 4 million more students. Some Ugandans worry about over-
crowded classrooms and express concern that the children of the poor, who
cannot escape into the private school system, will be disadvantaged in the
end by the short-term decline in outcomes that UPE must inevitably entail.
Others assert that only by tackling the challenge of universal primary edu-
cation can the means be found to achieve it. As educators in Uganda search
for strategies that will yield a high-quality education for all, it is instructive
to look back to a time, early in the twentieth century, when Uganda had an
educational system that provided rudimentary education to equal numbers
of girls and boys, and large numbers of adults, but turned away from it.
African history figures in comparative education scholarship primarily in
inquiries into the promotion of the Tuskegee/Hampton model for African
American education by the Phelps-Stokes Commissions, which toured West,
South, and Central Africa in 1920 and East Africa in 1924. Under the chair-
manship of Thomas Jesse Jones, an advocate of vocational education for
Africans, the Commissions’ recommendations led to a turn away from literary
education toward a focus on “adapted education.”1 Reviled by Africans as an
attempt to hold them down and preserve European domination, “adapted
education” sought to address the disconnect between the needs of predom-
inantly agricultural communities and the literary character of most African
schooling at that time (Davis 1976; Bude 1983). The role of missionaries as
the primary promoters of education in colonized Africa and their “selective
lending” of nineteenth-century school practices has also been explored (Yates
1984; Mackenzie 1993). This research has focused on the application of
1
See Berman (1971, 1972), Ruddell (1982), Corby (1990), Steiner-Khamsi and Quist (2000).

Electronically published March 12, 2010

Comparative Education Review, vol. 54, no. 2.
䉷 2010 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
0010-4086/2010/5402-0001$10.00

Comparative Education Review 155

 HANSON

European and American ideas regarding education by missionaries, colonial

policy makers, and a very small number of well-educated Africans. Although
sensitive to the racial attitudes of their subjects, these studies have not con-
sidered the role of African initiative, or African educational systems, in the
dissemination of the new technology of reading that missionaries brought.
Making use of recent work in African history and the exceptionally rich
historical sources for Uganda, this essay argues that educators concerned
with Africa need to consider a different kind of adaptation. Africans used
indigenous practices of education to spread the skill of mother-tongue lit-
eracy: they did the adapting of what they already knew about education.
Village schools (numbering 5,673) served 227,996 learners in Uganda in
1937; they were built, run, and staffed by Ugandans and had developed from
the 1870s as Ugandans enthusiastically embraced literacy and new religions.
(Known in the 1930s as “bush schools” or more politely “substandard schools,”
the less derogatory term “village school” accurately designates the schools as
local community initiatives.) The story of the village schools and the attitudes
toward education of colonial officers, chiefs, missionaries, and African pro-
fessionals are documented in the notes and verbatim testimony given to the
De La Warr Commission on Higher Education in East Africa in 1936 and
1937 (De La Warr 1937).2 As a result of the Commission’s recommendations,
the Protectorate withdrew funding from most of these schools in order to
direct more funding to a select 218 primary schools at a higher standard
(Colonial Office 1937, 33). The ultimate goal of this policy was the estab-
lishment of a university in Uganda, and the history of Ugandan education
has been written in a way that highlights that remarkable achievement and
ignores the loss of the locally organized village schools that had gone before.
The further development of those village schools is a road not taken in the
effort to educate all Ugandans. How the history of Ugandan education—or,
indeed, the history of Uganda—might have been different if the network of
village schools had continued to improve and expand is an intriguing ques-
tion but not one that can be answered through historical inquiry. Instead,
this essay seeks to resuscitate the memory of these forgotten schools, to
demonstrate their origins in a creative blend of indigenous patterns of ed-
ucation with the new knowledge brought by missionaries, and to explain
what happened when Uganda’s exceptionally progressive colonial decision
makers chose to let them go.
Sir Philip Mitchell and the blue-ribbon panel of experts whom he con-
vened to determine the possibilities for higher education in East Africa did
not perceive the achievement of literate Ugandans in creating a large and
growing system of community schools, and historians of Ugandan education
have not seen it, either. Published histories describe African indigenous ed-
2
Citations to the De La Warr Commission Notes and Correspondence give testimony numbers
and dates, rather than page numbers, as the collected documents are not consecutively paginated.

156 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

ucation as a complex system of formal and informal processes, from chil-

dren’s rhymes to apprenticeships in skilled crafts, through which accumulated
knowledge was passed on to successive generations. These sources depict the
literacy instruction that Protestant and Catholic missionaries gave to converts
beginning in 1877 as a completely new stage, a break from the past (Furley
and Watson 1978; Ssekamwa 1997; Tiberondwa 1998). From this perspective,
missionaries created the network of village schools that taught literacy, nu-
meracy, and religion, and those schools were quickly superseded in impor-
tance by primary and secondary schools funded by government and run by
the missions. These well-known schools, including the coeducational King’s
College Budo; Gayaza for girls; and St. Joseph’s Namilyango, St. Mary’s Kisubi,
and Mwiri for boys, have received most of the attention of those examining
Ugandan education (McGregor 1967; Paige 2000; Summers 2006). A careful
examination of historical sources, however, reveals important continuities
between indigenous education and the village schools. African Christians
insisted on the expansion of education more rapidly than missionaries wanted
and seized the initiative in carrying it out. Furthermore, the historians’ dis-
missal of the village schools, that “the standards of teaching, buildings and
equipment did not warrant government grants,” is anachronistic (Furley and
Watson 1978, 270, 189). It describes not the inherent character of the schools
but the consequences of the policy, which began with the formation of a
Protectorate Department of Education in 1925, to fund only a small pro-
portion of the schools that had been created. The village schools resulted
from the close partnership of the early missionaries and their African hosts,
who combined new knowledge—Christianity and the skill of literacy—with
indigenous practices regarding the capacity of every learner to be a teacher,
community responsibility for education, and the importance of educating
both girls and boys.

Indigenous Education Set the Pattern for Village Schools

In order to recognize the indigenous antecedents for the schools that

taught literacy, numeracy, and the Bible in coeducational mixed-age classes,
it is essential to look objectively at the African approach to knowledge that
preceded imperial conquest of eastern Africa in the late nineteenth century.
The people who lived in East Africa more than 150 years ago used the science
of observation to generate new, useful knowledge and shared that knowledge
through informal and formal processes of education (Horton 1967). Parents,
grandparents, and older siblings taught those who were younger within fam-
ilies (Ssekamwa 1997). In communities, married women taught each other
skills they brought from their natal homes (Ocitti 1973; Tiberondwa 1998,
2–3; Shetler 2003). Juniors learned from their seniors in age-set organizations.
In professional organizations, experts taught new members specialized knowl-
edge, such as healing or metallurgy (Kalibala 1934, 39; Tiberondwa 1998, 4).

Comparative Education Review 157

 HANSON

Initiation into adulthood of an age set was a time for formal instruction (Furley
and Watson 1978, 9). People seeking specialized knowledge, such as healers,
also traveled long distances to learn from experts in other regions (Feierman
1985). The high level of technological innovation that people achieved
through a practical science of observation and experimentation surprised
the first foreign visitors who came to this region. For example, the Protestant
missionary doctor R. W. Felkin observed a cesarean section performed in
Bunyoro (part of modern Uganda) in 1879; the healer used banana wine to
cleanse his hands, sutured the incision with hot metal to reduce bleeding,
closed the incision with iron pins, and dressed the wound with a paste of
roots (Felkin 1884, 922). Felkin described the woman’s successful recovery
and concluded that the surgical procedure was well developed and performed
frequently. One visitor described knife blades made by Ugandan smiths as
“quite equal if not superior to the forgings of Sheffield” (Tucker 1908a, 95).
Bantu languages had a word for a women’s kitchen garden, which was where
she would experiment with her crops. In this small plot, close to her dwelling,
she would grow out the best seeds, thereby improving her stocks. The emer-
gence of particular characteristics of African animals and plants, such as millet
strains with husks strong enough to deter birds and the very large horns of
Ankole cattle, are evidence that people intentionally selected their plants and
bred their animals to develop the characteristics they most desired. The
ancestors of today’s East Africans had a deep understanding that people
created the knowledge they needed through using their intelligence. People
actively sought knowledge from outside their communities, but people also
saw in themselves an ability to observe and undertake experiments that
yielded information and understanding that allowed them to improve their
lives. A critical dimension of East African’s heritage regarding education was
that everyone had the capacity and responsibility to teach others what they
knew.
The autobiographies written by the first generation of literate Ugandans
demonstrate that people embraced literacy enthusiastically when it was first
introduced into the court of the king of Buganda in 1862 as an aspect of
Islam. Conversion to the “religions of the book” entailed learning to read
and write, and believers in the new religions were called readers. Deliberate
literacy education began when the trader Ali Nakatukula taught Kabaka
(king) Mutesa about Mohammed, and Kabaka Mutesa began to fast, to pray
on Fridays, and to study the Qur’an (Rowe 1966, 69–84). The king organized
a study class for himself, some chiefs, and their wives, in which they learned
to read the Qur’an in Swahili in Arabic script. A story from that time is that
the chiefs would always try to get the women to read the most difficult
passages. According to Bartolomayo Zimbe, the king decreed that his pages
had to learn to read and arranged for a meal to be served to them every
afternoon when their class ended. Kabaka Mutesa often asked the Muwanika,

158 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

his chief in charge of the palace, “are they learning?” (Zimbe 1939, 59). Later,
after the Church Missionary Society missionaries had arrived in 1877 and the
White Fathers had arrived in 1879 in response to Kabaka Mutesa’s request
for teachers, the chief appointed by Kabaka Mutesa to be in charge of reading,
the Ekizigiti, gathered people in the mosque of the palace to teach them to
read the Gospel, the catechism, and the Qur’an.
Following the indigenous conception that everyone with knowledge has
the capacity to share it, early Ugandan Christians who learned to read from
missionaries immediately passed their skills on to others. Soon after they
began teaching, the early Protestant and Catholic missionaries began to meet
Ugandans who could already read well, having been taught by other learners
(Taylor 1958, 53; Waliggo 1976, 170). Bishop Tucker observed in 1890 that
besides this thirst for knowledge and instruction, the Baganda seemed to me to
possess not only a peculiar aptitude for teaching, but a singular desire to engage
in it. No sooner was a reading sheet mastered than at once the learner became a
teacher. It was the same with the Gospels, every fact noted, every truth mastered,
was at once repeated to groups of eager inquirers. It was a most touching sight to
see little groups scattered about here and there in the church, each of which had
in its centre, a native teacher who was himself at other times in the day an eager
learner. (Tucker 1908a, 111)

The Catholic missionary Father Achte wrote to his parents “We do nothing
except examine . . . the postulants teach each other” (Waliggo 1976, 103).
So many learners gathered around each reading sheet that people learned
to read letters upside down as well as right side up. Literacy spread rapidly
to thousands of people through the practice of everyone teaching what they
knew, and readers incorporated reading, Bible study, and letter writing into
their daily lives. Reading materials became highly sought after, and the de-
mand far exceeded the supply. George Pilkington, the Anglican missionary
and linguist, wrote that the mission needed “not thousands, but millions” of
books (Hanson 2003, 105). In order to respond to the rapidly expanding
number of readers and their insatiable thirst for something to read, the
missionary societies brought printing presses from the coast, carried by head
loads, and assembled them in Uganda. The introduction of literacy education
in Uganda cannot accurately be attributed to missionary effort alone. When
Moslem merchants from Zanzibar and a handful of Protestant and Catholic
missionaries from Europe brought the skill of literacy to Uganda, hundreds
of Ugandans responded, first by learning to read themselves, and then by
teaching the skill to tens of thousands of others.
The African practice that communities took responsibility for education
contributed to the establishment of the network of village schools. Local
initiative and local responsibility characterized the schools: they were built
of local materials with local volunteer labor, overseen by local church councils,
and the Phelps-Stokes report noted that fees and financing through collec-

Comparative Education Review 159

 HANSON

tions made at local churches “amount to twice that given by the government
as grants-in-aid” (Furley and Watson 1978, 187). Seeking to explain that the
village schools were run by communities and not by the Church Missionary
Society, Archdeacon Bowers explained: “Native parsons generally are re-
sponsible for these subgrade schools and the whole system comes from the
Native Council which deals with the pay of all the teachers. There may be
anything from ten to fifty subgrade schools of that kind in one parish. They
are run entirely by the Church Council, which is entirely native” (De La Warr
1937, no. 50, February 2, 1937). Communities supported the teacher by
cultivating his food garden and offering him crops at harvest (Kalibala 1934,
13; Tiberondwa 1998, 51). The autonomy of the schools resulted from African
Christians’ initiative, a wave of persecution in 1882 and 1884 that had stim-
ulated the creation of church councils, and the foresight of a few missionary
leaders. Observing that those studying Catholicism brought large groups—
up to 35 and 40 people—whom they had already taught, Bishop Streicher
reorganized Catholic strategy so that it depended on lay catechists (Waliggo
1976, 96–97). The Anglican Bishop Tucker insisted on a nonracial democratic
church structure, against the objections of many of his missionaries (Tucker
1908a, 238; Taylor 1958, 86–87). Ugandans who were members of church
councils devised the process through which chiefs sponsored teachers who
lived as their guests, teaching reading and religion (Taylor 1958, 65). By 1896
the Church of Uganda had 725 “Native evangelists” teaching 60,000 readers
in across Uganda (Tucker 1908b, 77). The initial Catholic strategy had been
to settle Catholics on mission stations for instruction, but the competition
between Catholics and Protestants for followers led each group to disburse
lay teachers as broadly as possible (Waliggo 1976; Hansen 1984, 118). The
“reading-houses” established by lay evangelists became institutionalized as the
village schools, supervised by local church councils, with a curriculum con-
sisting of reading, writing, basic numeracy, and Bible study, divided into one
class of beginners and one class of more advanced learners. In contrast to
the Congo, where church-sponsored schools are said to have focused on
memorizing the catechism and hymn singing, those attending Ugandan vil-
lage schools learned to read and write, and used the skills. The schools were
entirely self-funded until 1909, when the Protectorate government began to
refund to the missions an amount equivalent to the poll tax paid by teachers.
A poll tax rebate was necessary because teachers who had to find work to
pay the tax would have had to stop teaching. Chiefs also promoted education,
especially the founding and maintenance of the boarding schools their own
children attended, which began to be established in the first decade of the
twentieth century (Ranger 1965, 62; Furley and Watson 1978, 99; Tiberondwa
1998, 54–55).
Significantly, the village schools followed African practices of education
such that equal numbers of girls and boys attended them. When the Catholic

160 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

Mill Hill Bishop Campling asserted, “Here in Uganda we have reached the
stage when most of the parents are more or less educated,” Miss Esdaile, the
commissioner highly focused on home economics education for girls, asked
if she was right in thinking that the Lord Bishop “was referring more to the
male and less to female”? The Bishop replied, “No, females are as well ed-
ucated as the men as regards reading and writing. More boys have a knowl-
edge of English” (De La Warr 1937, no. 46). By the 1930s, a few hundred
primary schools with four graded classes taught English and a broader range
of subjects than the village schools, but this level of education, supervised
and conducted by missionaries, served boys, since the missionaries disap-
proved of coeducational schools. Archdeacon Bowers, expressing the CMS
(Church Missionary Society) position, said, “I am dead against the whole
system of co-education in this country. I have no use for it at all” (De La
Warr 1937, no. 50, February 2, 1937). The consensus among Europeans was
articulated by Father Hughes of the White Fathers’ Mission: “We feel very
strongly that the education of girls should have a strong bias towards the
building of homes. The time has not come to give them an academic edu-
cation,” and Miss Esdaile elaborated, “Your native teachers can really give
definite help towards making the women better home keepers, better child
tenders, better providers of food?” (De La Warr 1937, no. 45). This was a
much smaller social role than women had held in African societies in early
centuries, as the Tanzanian Martin Kayamba, the most highly placed African
in the colonial service at that time, explained, “In our tribal life women are
very important; we have women chiefs ruling people; women doctors; women
agriculturalists who support their families, and their influence is very strong
not only in the homes but outside. I think myself the education of women
is just as important if not more than that of men” (De La Warr 1937, no. 18,
January 16, 1937). In 1937, missionaries and colonial officers wanted girls’
education to fit them for the domestic sphere (Tripp 2004), while Africans,
who understood women to have much wider social roles, wanted girls to learn
everything that boys learned. Before colonial rule, African women had held
powerful social and political positions (Allman, Geiger, and Musisi 2002); it
made sense to these witnesses that women needed a comprehensive education.
Every African who spoke to the De La Warr Commission expressed
concern that the mission schools (in contrast to the village schools) offered
girls less education than boys. They urged that girls study the same curric-
ulum as boys and, when asked, expressed no hesitation regarding coedu-
cation. J. M. Kasozi, representing the British Government African Employees
Association, told the Commission, “We would like to see the education of
women brought to the same level as that of men. We would like to give the
same education to girls as well as to boys” (De La Warr 1937, no. 24). The
Ngobi, a chief in the Busoga region, expressed the same view: “We have asked
that schools for girls should be on the same lines as those for boys, so that

Comparative Education Review 161

 HANSON

girls will learn in the same way as boys from the bottom to the top” (De La
Warr 1937, no. 51, February 5, 1937). Serwano Kulubya, at that time the
treasurer of the Buganda kingdom, disagreed with marriage being an obstacle
to women’s education, and in response to a question about Africans refusing
to pay school fees for girls, he explained, “The reason for that is that they
think education the girls are receiving today is not as good as that of boys;
and they are not willing to pay for anything for which they do not receive
proportionate value” (De La Warr 1937, no. 41, January 20, 1937). King’s
College Budo, the premier Protestant secondary school, was coeducational,
against the wishes and advice of the Church Missionary Society, the Reverend
Williams explained, because the Ugandan-dominated board of governors had
insisted that girls be allowed to attend (De La Warr 1937, no. 50, February
2, 1937).
Another practice that distinguished schools organized by Africans from
foreign-organized ones was the incorporation of learners of all ages. When
asked whether adult learners should not be taught separately, Martin Kayamba
responded, “We have adults and children together and it is a great advantage.
For one thing a son who is educated is tempted to look down on parents
who are not educated” (De La Warr 1937, no. 18, January 16, 1937). The
fact that village schools had equal numbers of boys and girls, and included
adult learners, while the next higher level of school, controlled by missions,
focused on boys grouped by age, shows that the village schools blended
indigenous ideas regarding education with the new knowledge of literacy
and religion.
While the village schools expressed indigenous ideas regarding education
in that girls, boys, and adults learned together, and whole communities con-
tributed to building and maintaining the schools, they also represented a
sharp break from African patterns of education. Indigenous education had
taught the full range of skills people needed to prosper and inculcated the
capacity to generate knowledge, as well as to incorporate knowledge from
far away: the new schools taught only the new knowledge of literacy and
religion, in a classroom setting (Ssekamwa 1997, 42). Imperial conquest was
an intellectual conflict as much as a military or economic one. Africans who
had been adults when Europeans arrived thought of their own cultures as
equally valid, and in ways superior, but the generations that grew up under
British domination accepted the colonizer’s assertion that African societies
had been primitive and Europe was the source of all progress.3 The village
schools focused entirely on aspects of the new knowledge that had come with
missionaries, and testimony before the De La Warr Commission indicates
that by the late 1930s Africans demonstrated a single-minded focus on learn-
ing what Europeans knew. African indigenous knowledge had been built on
3
See Feierman (1985), Ssekamwa 1997, Tiberondwa (1998), Hanson (2003), Doyle (2006).

162 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

the power of observation, but Dr. Kauntze, the Director of Medical Services
for Uganda, told the Commission it was a struggle to get a medical student
“to observe and think and get away from his belief that all wisdom is to be
found in books” (De La Warr 1937, no. 49).
Seeing Europeans’ knowledge as the source of their power, African wit-
nesses wanted Africans to study the same curriculum Europeans studied, in
English. The very small number of church leaders, teachers, and chiefs and
their families who had received a superior education at the elite boarding
schools knew the increasing pressure on most Ugandans, because scores of
relatives appeared in their compounds, asking for help. They also saw, on
ritual occasions and in their interactions with the missionaries and the oc-
casional Protectorate official, the extreme difference in wealth evident in
clothing, food, and possessions, between the foreigners and themselves. At
this time, the salary of the lowest-paid European was five times the salary of
the highest-paid Africans. The richest Africans demonstrated their place near
the top of the class hierarchy by building elaborate homes and the conspic-
uous consumption of imported goods (Waliggo 1976, 161). Almost everyone
else made the standard of living of the wealthy their goal and let go of the
ethic of community responsibility that an earlier generation had learned. Mr.
Mathu spoke for the Kikuyu African Teachers’ Union in Kenya, which argued
“education should be on the same level for all communities in Kenya; Eu-
ropean, Indian and African should have the same standard, pass the same
examinations and all be equal in education” (De La Warr 1937, no. 36,
January 20, 1937). The implication of this noble principle was that in a quest
for certificates that would lead a tiny minority to work in the colonial ad-
ministrations, all Africans would receive an education irrelevant to rural life.
The articulate African elite wanted Latin to be taught to Africans, not because
it had any intrinsic value but, as Serwano Kulubya explained, because not
knowing Latin kept their children out of British schools (De La Warr 1937,
no. 41, January 20, 1937). In the master’s thesis he wrote under Mabel Carney
at Columbia Teacher’s College in 1934, the Ugandan Ernest Kalibala argued
that the academic education desired by his fellow Ugandans produced “mo-
rons” who were dissatisfied with village life but had no means to change it.
If African children appeared to be “mentally inferior,” it was a result of the
inferior education of their teachers, whose initiative and perception had been
systematically suppressed (Kalibala 1934, 17, 52).

The Turn Away from Village Schools

In 1937, Ugandans recognized that the system of village schools needed

improvement. They recognized that learners needed more than basic mother-
tongue literacy and religious education. They wanted village schools to teach
the practical knowledge people had learned informally in the past, but they
also wanted them to follow the curriculum of schools with missionary teachers.

Comparative Education Review 163

 HANSON

They saw and regretted the schools’ uneven standards and expressed their
hopes for improvement to the De La Warr Commission. In a written sub-
mission, the Mukama, ruler of the ancient kingdom of Bunyoro, urged that
education be free for poor children, that it begin at age 7, and that the crafts
of metalworking, pottery, and weaving that Europeans had found in the
country when they arrived be revived through teaching in schools (De La
Warr 1937, April 29, 1937). The Ngobi, ruler of Busoga, said his people had
asked him to ask the Commission for the elementary school syllabus to be
taught in the village schools and that elementary school begin with English
from the first year (De La Warr 1937, no. 51, February 5, 1937). Ernest
Kalibala told the Commission that village schools could be improved by ex-
panding the number of inspectors from 5 to 150, so that they could visit
schools once a month instead of once a year, and inspectors could work with
the teachers to help them improve (De La Warr 1937, no. 41, January 20,
1937). Africans wanted the system expanded, so that it covered all Ugandan
children. (In 1937 it was, reaching about one-third of the estimated 750,000
children in the Protectorate.)
In contrast to the perception that gained currency in the mid-twentieth
century that Africans did not want schooling, efforts toward compulsory ed-
ucation are evident in the early colonial period. In 1904 and 1909 the African
members attending the Synod of the Church in Uganda had pushed for a
resolution requesting the Buganda Lukiko (Parliament) to make education
compulsory, but missionaries discouraged the movement because compulsory
education would have had to be secular (Taylor 1958, 156–57). Attempting
to convince the Commission of the vigorous support Africans showed for
education and the importance of funding village schools, Mr. Lacey, the
Director of Education for Nyasaland (now Malawi) described one province
where a chief had made vernacular elementary education compulsory (De
La Warr 1937, no. 31).
Instead of responding to the Africans’ aspirations to improve the schools
they had created, the Uganda Protectorate withdrew the small amount of
funding that 5,673 of them received, in order to concentrate on improving
218. Mr. Jowitt, the Director of Education in Uganda explained this as “se-
lecting the best” and promised that more would be taken over, based on
priorities provided to the Department of Education by the missionaries (De
La Warr 1937, no. 48, February 12, 1937). He stated that he hoped to take
on 600 village schools, but the De La Warr Commission’s published report
indicates that only 218 had been selected for improvement (Colonial Office
1937, 33). Despite this deliberate disavowal, the Department of Education
reported the village schools to the Colonial Office, and they appear in statistics
on Ugandan education (Benavot and Riddle 1988). Since the policy of de-
funding village schools had begun in 1925, missionary educators had already
observed its consequences and made a passionate defense of rural schools

164 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

to the De La Warr Commission. Protestant Archdeacon Bowers pointed out

the feebleness of the government’s stated intention: if there were 150 schools
in Bunyoro, and the government aided four more each year, “when are you
going to catch up?” (De La Warr 1937, no. 50, February 2, 1937).
Since most of the funding for the schools came from local communities,
and teachers were paid almost nothing (4 shillings a month at a time when
the lowest paid police constable made 36 shillings a month), it might have
been thought that the loss of government support would not make a differ-
ence. However, the main financial support to the village schools had been a
tax exemption for the teachers: without the tax exemption, many teachers
were forced to leave teaching in order to find work to pay the tax, and the
number of schools declined. The Head of Education for the Church Mis-
sionary Society, Reverend Williams, asked the Commission to think about
balance—to continue to fund education at every level. He pointed out that
“with very little help we can do very much more in bush schools. For instance,
you will find that 50% of the teachers in bush schools teach because they
like teaching. As long as they can get tax exemption and a few shillings besides,
they are quite contented.” He said 20 shillings a year “might make all the
difference” between keeping a village school open and closing it, and the
village school system could be used to expand education in areas that were
poor and had limited resources (De La Warr 1937, no. 50, February 2, 1937).
The White Fathers’ Bishop Michand also put in a plea for the poorer people,
who were losing educational opportunity because of the new policy. He told
the Commission that the village school should receive “more attention, more
encouragement, more recognition, not in proportion to its perfection, but
in proportion to its needs.” He expressed frustration at the standards set by
the government for schools to receive funds: “We cannot get a grant to make
a school perfect, and we cannot get a school perfect because we cannot
obtain a grant—it is a vicious circle” (De La Warr 1937, no. 45).
Without funding, the village schools declined. By 1939, there were only
4,513 (Furley and Watson 1978, 270). Some endured, and many Ugandans
began their education in locally created schools whose self-help character
contrasted sharply with government-funded schools (Walakira 1975). The
absence of government funding exacerbated their denominational character,
which had always been their greatest weakness. The separation of Catholics
and Protestants in schools maintained the tension between Catholics and
Protestants that had come to Uganda with the first missionaries and been
intensified by civil war. Since the schools taught Christianity, as well as literacy
and numeracy, they excluded Moslems and those who did not want to learn
religion. Government support, of course, might have enabled the village
schools to overcome this liability. In fact, the director of education considered
the religious character of schools to be “vital” and essential to educational
progress (De La Warr 1937, no. 48, February 12, 1937). Continued funding,

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 HANSON

the implementation of a standardized, secular curriculum, and enhanced

supervision and inspection could have created village schools that combined
African communities’ initiative and concern for the education of their chil-
dren with the resources of the state. The possibility that government assistance
could transform the village schools into a system of universal education, urged
by the African chiefs who spoke to the Commission, was not pursued.
Sir Philip Mitchell’s reminiscences about his time as governor of Uganda
seem to indicate that he thought the closure of village schools might be a
good thing. He acknowledged that Bishop Tucker and the other early mis-
sionaries had provided a thorough education to an earlier generation but
criticized the current efforts. He focused on the creation of a university, he
explained, because education for the masses was a “muddle,” and “I had not
the power to stop it, to close three-quarters of the primary schools, nor the
means—in money and teachers—to make them any better” (Mitchell 1954,
180). Sincerely committed to African advancement, he wanted to give East
Africa the best that Britain had to offer, which Mitchell saw as the system of
elite education that had produced men like himself. Mass education, which
was only practicable to a limited degree even in Britain, could only happen
through the instrumentality of a highly educated minority. Mitchell and the
De La Warr Commission recreated Ugandan education on a British model.
The fortunate few attended schools that were formal, focused on examina-
tions, and separated a small number of well-educated men from most other
men and all women. In some way (not made explicit for either Britain or
Uganda) the excellent education of a minority would benefit the masses left
uneducated.
The leading liberal thinkers who spoke to the De La Warr Commission
intended that their own moral system would replace the one Africans had
lost through the social transformations brought by imperialism, forced labor,
and a cash economy. Dame Margery Perham, the eminent anthropologist,
wanted East Africa to avoid the situation in West Africa, where a self-serving
elite had emerged. Mathews, the Commission’s only African member, agreed
with Perham that “West Africans do not want to throw themselves into the
life of their own people after they come back from abroad; they only want
to make a success of their own particular job,” a result that might have been
avoided, according to Perham’s thinking, by closer association with the right
kind of Britons (De La Warr 1937, no. 44, February 5, 1937). S. Rivers-Smith,
who had been the Director of Education in Tanganyika, warned the Com-
mission against “the creation of a plutocratic official class with standards far
beyond the reach of the community as a whole” that would estrange him
from the community he was to lead. Low wages, he suggested, could be the
solution because he did not think, “speaking generally, that the African wants,
or is happier with, a lot of money” (De La Warr 1937, no. 13, December 16,
1936). Perham’s suggestion for replacing African morality was the creation

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 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

of a new public sphere through “the building-up of a vital old students’

association,” the close association of African students with “the best teachers
England can supply,” and systematic study of African institutions and societies
(De La Warr 1937, no. 44, February 5, 1937). Perham’s suggestions found
their way into the final report and into the building of Makerere. Unfortu-
nately, the architecture and social organization of Oxbridge, transferred to
Uganda, did not have the positive consequences hoped for by Mitchell and
the De La Warr Commission.
The decision to fund the most successful schools, which tended to be in
the wealthiest areas, and to stop funding the majority contributed to growing
social divisions in Uganda. The Protectorate’s preferential treatment of the
Buganda kingdom in southeastern Uganda over the north and west was
already creating a new kind of internal differentiation. During the decades
of forced labor from 1906 to 1922, a gap between a small, privileged group
and everyone else had emerged because employment with Europeans ex-
empted people from the onerous forced labor requirement (Hanson 2003,
167–77). Those few who were exempted stayed healthy and earned income,
while everyone else did 1–2 months of hard work in difficult conditions—
they lost the work they would have done on their own farms or crafts during
those months and often got sick because of poor food and unhealthy con-
ditions in work camps. A larger scale transfer of wealth from rural farmers
to the wealthiest and most privileged was occurring through the use of cotton
and coffee profits for urban development. For example, in 1937 the director
of education had made a proposal to use 20 percent of the £129,000 export
tax on cotton for rural education. In Uganda cotton was grown by peasant
farmers, so his plan returned to farmers £25,000 of education benefits from
the taxes on what they had produced, and 80 percent would be spent else-
where, but in fact, the treasurer objected to losing that revenue, so the
producers of Uganda’s wealth, rural farmers, got much less than 20 percent
of the wealth in taxes their labor had created (De La Warr 1937, no. 48,
February 12, 1937). The decision to withdraw funding from 96 percent of
Uganda’s schools made the widening gap between rural Ugandans and the
very small elite even more insurmountable, because rural areas lost schools
and school places. Organizing simple schools had been one way that people
in rural communities could try to connect to the new knowledge flowing into
Uganda, but without a tax exemption for their teachers, and in the face of
the extreme strains placed on them, the simple schools atrophied or closed.
Without even a rudimentary education most Ugandans, who were small-scale
farmers or herders, fell further behind the chosen few. As Terence Ranger
(1965) points out, they were paying with their taxes for education others
received.
Makerere University graduates became the elite they were supposed to
become. Frederick Pedler, the secretary of the De La Warr Commission,

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 HANSON

defended its work in 1972, stating that “the cheap jibes against Oxbridge in
Africa” neglected the fact that Makerere, Ibadan, and Legon Hill had been
created to provide degree courses at the standard of British universities, to
train national leaders—“which is what Oxford and Cambridge did”—and to
provide advanced education, “and they have done so” (Pedler 1972). All that
was true, but the investment in quality education over mass education had
other goals as well. The Makerere University graduates who were supposed
to use their education to uplift the nation took over the homes, the salaries,
the privileges, and the attitudes of departing colonials (Goldthorpe 1965,
72,79; Kasozi 1994, 47). They became the bagudde mu bintu, the rich people
“who had fallen into things” whether they deserved them or not. Wilbert
Chagula, a Makerere graduate who became the principal of the University
College of Dar es Salaam, was one among many who criticized the intellectual
elite for their “aloofness” from the masses (Sicherman 2005, 48). In Uganda
a feeling grew that educated people, in the words of The Common Man’s
Charter, “think of themselves as the masters and the uneducated as their
servants” (Furley 1988). In his searching exploration of the cause of Uganda’s
decades of war and social violence, A. B. K. Kasozi argued that “inequality
. . . has been the main source of social conflict in Uganda, generating the
structural violence from which all subsequent political, military, and civilian
violence would erupt” (1994, 7). The immense gap between the educated
elite and the undereducated masses, which had been deliberately furthered
as a social policy in 1937, proved to be costly for Uganda.
Education officers in independent Uganda attempted to solve the in-
creasingly evident problem of educational inequity through a process of cen-
tralization that deprived school authorities of any real power. Headmasters
and school committees could no longer choose teachers, secure textbooks,
or even acquire furniture on their own, and the bureaucracies that carried
out these functions favored schools in urban areas and those with the wealth-
iest children and teachers (Heyneman 1975). With the curricular revisions
of 1975, Ugandans tried to make education more fully an expression of
Ugandan culture and society. A local publishing industry produced a rich
variety of texts and supplementary books. The Ministry of Education brought
testing and test supervision inside Uganda. Despite the tremendous social
upheaval that Uganda experienced in the 1970s, Uganda’s schools continued
to function, and the educational infrastructure expanded. Headmasters and
teachers kept Ugandan schools opened despite the collapse of the economy
and war through acts of heroism and courage (Paige 2000). It is also a
testament to Ugandans’ deep commitment to education that the number of
schools increased during the difficult years. In 1969, there were 113,000 pupils
in 632 elementary schools; by 1979, that number had more than doubled,
to 252,000 pupils in 1,223 elementary schools. On the secondary level, the
number of school places also doubled: from 29,540 in 1969 to 61,126 in 1979

168 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

(Heyneman 1983). When inflation reduced teachers’ salaries to the equiv-

alent of less than $10 per month, teachers kept teaching, and parents renewed
the village school practice of providing food to teachers.
The first years after Uganda returned to stability in 1986 saw a revival of
a sense of local responsibility for education. The local council system of local
governance introduced by President Yoweri Museveni initially stimulated peo-
ple’s sense of collective agency and capacity, and the number of simple com-
munity schools increased. The Kajubi Report in 1989, and the government
White Paper in 1992, urged a shift of emphasis in Ugandan education away
from examinations and toward a philosophy of education for all (Ssekamwa
1997, 202). One aspect of their suggested reforms, the promotion of priva-
tized, for-profit education, had unforeseen consequences as social status be-
came a predictor of academic performance. Uganda’s educational outcomes
had been deemed superior to those of many wealthier countries because
academic performance had not been predicted by family background before
the 1970s (Currie 1977; Carasco, Clair, and Kanyike 2001, 257). Uganda’s
educational pyramid was steep, but in earlier decades a very bright child from
a poor family who found a primary school place had a chance of being
noticed, chosen for further education, and progressing.
Community schools established during the Museveni years in Uganda are
engaged in a constant struggle for funds, including external sponsors. Com-
munity schools with external funding, such as the Complementary Oppor-
tunity for Primary Education schools funded by UNICEF in the 1990s meet
the problem of funding but may lack sustainability (Hopper 2005). The
extreme poverty that most rural Ugandans experience as a result of war and
the rural-to-urban transfer of wealth carried out by colonial and postcolonial
governments have made supporting a school much more difficult than it was
for the communities who created the village schools. In 1937, sub-Saharan
Africa was still a net exporter of food, most rural people derived a secure
subsistence from agriculture, and people had the extra time to build and
cultivate for a teacher and extra food to donate (Kalibala 1934, 45). Families
have fewer resources to contribute now, as the lived experience of both rural
and urban Ugandans is that they are not as well off as their parents were.
The struggle to secure subsistence works against the aspirations of teachers,
parents, and communities to improve the quality of education (Carasco et
al. 2001, 278).
It is difficult to count the costs of the deliberate defunding of Uganda’s
village schools. The loss of educational opportunity for hundreds of thousands
of Ugandans, and the growing inequalities of wealth, power, and voice were
not the most significant consequences of the decision to stop supporting
Uganda’s village schools. Dependence on those from outside for funds, for
ideas, and for initiative is a great barrier to the progress of education in
Uganda presently (Carasco et al. 2001, 270–72). Eighty years ago, the De La

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 HANSON

Warr Commission concluded that the work of educating ought to be carried

out by highly trained professionals, and the indigenous model, in which
everyone who could read taught others and local church councils assumed
the responsibility to create educational opportunities, ceased to have valid-
ity. The system of state-funded religious schools is so firmly fixed in the
memories of Ugandans that few remember a time when education was
everyone’s work. People who had enthusiastically taken responsibility for
education learned that they were not qualified, and they gave up the task.
R. C. Pratt, assessing Protectorate policy, observed that the village schools
“were an integral part of the village communities. They were something that
the people felt to be their own. By leaving them outside its education system,
the Government neglected an institution that, because of its acceptance
within the African community, might have been a vital agent of social change”
(Pratt 1965, 522). Ranger noted that official education policy “rooted out a
great deal of effective African influence” at the level of the village schools,
“without doing anything for increased African influence at the higher levels”
(Ranger 1965, 73). The establishment of teacher training schools, the de-
velopment of standards, and the elaboration of a curriculum beyond basic
numeracy and literacy was without question important for Uganda. An op-
portunity was lost, however, when those advances shut out the local initiative
and broad social involvement in education that Ugandans had created when
they encountered literacy.

Conclusion

The story of Uganda’s village schools suggests questions for reflection

regarding current efforts to achieve universal primary and secondary edu-
cation in sub-Saharan Africa. In the first decades of the twentieth century,
African communities across the continent created schools like the ones de-
scribed in this article. But village schools have never been seen for what they
were—an expression of African communities’ long experience in organizing
education, adapted to quickly spread the new knowledge foreigners had
brought in the 1880s. As this example shows, Africans as well as foreigners
have defined these schools as the work of missionaries, even though the early
missionaries’ own descriptions of their actions clearly reveal how much the
initiative came from African Christians. What do we not see, and what pos-
sibilities for educational advancement do we close down, when we accept
misinformation about the African past? How does our perception of African
education in the present change, if we recognize African initiative in teaching
literacy, African science, and the indigenous commitment to girls’ education
that distinguished Africans speaking to the De La Warr Commission in 1937
from their less enlightened British interlocutors?
When Ugandans first encountered literacy, every learner became a
teacher. Tens of thousands learned to read, because no one doubted that

170 May 2010

 UGANDA’S VILLAGE SCHOOLS

everyone who knew could teach. Would it be possible for communities to

recommit to that conviction to support teachers in UPE and USE classrooms?
How could parents, older siblings, and community members who have them-
selves been to school support the teachers who now have 50 to 100 students
in their classes?
A high level of sacrifice characterized the village schools—community
members gave up food and labor, and teachers worked for little more (and
sometime less) than subsistence. Commitment to a new religion motivated
those sacrifices, but the religious character of the schools has been seen as
one of their liabilities. How could people draw on the motivation for sacrifice
that the creators of village schools derived from their faith, without the lia-
bilities of exclusion and sectarianism that characterized those earlier efforts?
How can ethnically and religiously diverse African communities develop unity
of purpose in supporting education?
Sir Philip Mitchell and the De La Warr Commission discounted the efforts
of the 5,673 Ugandan communities that had built village schools, supported
their teachers, and managed the schools’ affairs because the schools’ achieve-
ments were limited. The humble but persistent efforts of tens of thousands
of people, serving hundreds of thousands of learners, lost government sup-
port because those with power preferred to fund those village schools that
had already achieved a higher degree of success. How much do those who
attempt to assist African educators today make the same choice?
The village schools established from the 1880s to the 1930s have been
ignored or belittled in the published histories of African education, but they
deserve attention. They achieved qualities that the centrally controlled system
that followed it still struggles to achieve. In addition to gender equity, the
village schools were accessible. They emerged out of the willingness of com-
munities to make sacrifices for the education of their children, and they
expressed a strongly held cultural understanding that communities had the
responsibility, and the capacity, to organize education for their members.
They were the first “adapted education”—Africans adapting new knowledge
to forms of organizing education they already knew.

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