Ranger AfricanAttemptsControl 1965

African Attempts to Control Education in East and Central Africa 1900-1939
Author(s): Terence Ranger

Source: Past & Present , Dec., 1965, No. 32 (Dec., 1965), pp. 57-85
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/649956
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AFRICAN ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL
EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA
1900-1939
A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN RECENT NUMBERS OF PAST AND PRESENT HAVE
sought to establish a connection between educational histo

political history in seventeenth-century England. The poin
in these articles strike the historian of twentieth-century Af
immediately relevant to his concerns. Africa, too, has ha
century of "educational revolution"; has known the chall
educated men "no longer content to be ruled-inefficient
their social superiors"; has experienced the problem of the "al
intellectuals", the men who find the new African establish
"too small and too restricted of access to satisfy their aspir
Whatever may ultimately be accepted by seventeenth-ce
historians, the historian of Africa can be in no doubt of th
relation of educational and political developments. Pol
historians, indeed, are paying more and more attention to edu
history. In so far as they are coming to see African nation
a complex of different reactions to modernization, the school, a
agent of modernization, is clearly central to its study. In s
recent African politics is increasingly seen in terms of "r
allocation", the processes which determine the number of scho
their location are clearly once again of central importance. An
far as attention is focussed on the leadership group in African
historians must inevitably seek for information about the
where that group grew up together and obtained some part at
of their controlling ideas.1
It would, no doubt, be most useful to readers of Past and Pr
to be given a discussion, in the African context, of the same c
issues which have pre-occupied Mrs. Joan Simon, Professo
Curtis and Professor Lawrence Stone. Perhaps perversely
paper does not set out to do this. Its aim is to throw light on
aspect of the African educational revolution. This paper de
what might be called African "independent education" - w
attempts by Africans to control the educational process th
1 M. H. Curtis, "The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England",
Past and Present, No. 23 (Nov. I962); Joan Simon, "The Social Origins of
Cambridge Students, I603-40", Past and Present, No. 26 (Nov. 1963);
L. Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, I560-I640", Past and
Present, No. 28 (July I964). And see Christopher Hill's articles in Past and
Present, 1964-5.

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58 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 32
pressures on government and mission schools and in the last resort

by the establishment of independent schools. In terms of seven-
teenth-century history we might compare the topic of this paper not
so much with the educational revolution discussed by Stone, nor
even with the counter-establishment education discussed by Mr.
Christopher Hill, but with the efforts made in Catholic Ireland or
in sectarian Wales to provide alternatives to the dominant Anglican
education system.
Research into that topic might well provide some illumination for
the seventeenth century. It is the argument of this paper that a
study of African "independent education" can be a useful way of
approaching some of the problems of twentieth-century African
political development.
It is sometimes said of the independent church movements with

which these independent schools were so often associated that
historians have come to pay too much attention to them as sources
or manifestations of nationalism and that the mission churches, their
African ministers and their African adherents have played a more
decisive role in shaping African politics. In the same way it must
be admitted from the beginning that European controlled schools
have played by far the dominant part in the modernizing process.
But the attention which has been paid to the independent churches
has nevertheless been a fully justified one; they allow us to study
and to understand a number of very significant African reactions and
initiatives. In much the same way, this paper suggests, it is worth-
while to piece together the information now available on "independent
education".
The presently accepted outlines of the educational history of
East and Central Africa are familiar ones. The African reaction to
the offer of Western schooling, it is generally held, began in suspicion
and rejection; changed slowly in the I920S and I930S to acceptance;
and turned finally to eager and clamorous demand beyond the
capacity of the mission churches or the colonial governments to meet.
I have no wish to deny the validity of this outline as a general state-
ment; in many parts of East and Central Africa events have broadly
followed this pattern and it is clearly true that generally there is a
much greater demand for education today than there was in the 1920S
and that there was a much greater demand in the I920S than there
had been in the i89os. Nevertheless the generalization is misleading
if it persuades us to overlook that there have always been - and
still are - significant exceptions to it. There still are, for instance,

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA I900-I939 59
some African societies which approach Western education with

suspicion and rejection and which are now being exposed by African
governments to the same mixture of inducement and coercion that
the early missionaries used in many areas to overcome parental
resistance.
More important from the point of view of this paper is that there
were also from the beginning some African societies which enthusias-
tically welcomed Western education. At a time when admittedly
in many places schools were regarded with fear or contempt, there
were some places where a demand for education in literacy and
crafts actually pre-dated, in explicit form, the arrival of the first
white teachers; other places where such education was at once
responded to; and others where after only a few years the sort of
hunger for education developed which is normally thought to have
come into existence only in the I920S. Moreover the societies of
which this is true were some of the politically key societies in East
and Central Africa. I propose to look briefly at five of them -
Buganda, Barotseland, the Lake Tonga of Malawi, the Luo of
Nyanza, and the Kikuyu.
There is no question but that in Buganda the desire for literacy
and training in mechanical skills long pre-dated the arrival of the
Church Missionary Society [C.M.S.] in I877. The complex and
centralized bureaucracy of the Ganda and their highly competitive
and materialist social and economic system made Buganda fertile
ground for educational endeavour. The Swahili traders who
preceded whites as modernizers in the area brought with them
literacy in Swahili and instruction in crafts; from the I850s some
members of the Ganda court, including the Kabaka himself, were
literate; and there grew up also a highly esteemed and influential
class of skilled craftsmen. Thus it was that when the C.M.S.
arrived in 1877 they were told in their first interview with the Kab
that "what he wanted most was to be taught, he and his people
read and write". Thus it was that the missionaries, who were
once given land to set up a school, found "a great desire among
younger chiefs and the King's servants to learn to read and wri
These younger members of the court already lived in an atmosphe
which has often been compared to that of the great boarding scho
which the missions were later to establish for their sons. They we
at court in order to acquire skills which would enable them to
their part as members of a ruling class and to compete in a hig
individualist scramble for favour and power. They very quic
appreciated the advantages that literacy could bring. "I becam

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page at the Kabaka's court", recalled one of them, "and

desired to learn to read. I nearly became a Moslem beca
teachers were more easily accessible .... All the time I
Christian or a reader I did not clearly understand what m
all about".2
The Central African kingdom of Barotseland was in many ways
strikingly similar to Buganda. It had a similarly complex govern-
mental system and wide-ranging diplomatic contacts; a similarly
powerful and competitive aristocracy. There had been no Swahili
traders and teachers to bring literacy before the coming of the whites,
and white teachers themselves came to Barotseland a decade later
than to Buganda. But there was an immediate response to the
education which they brought. The great missionary, Franqois
Coillard, who set up the Paris Evangelical Mission in Barotseland
recorded a reception not unlike that given to the C.M.S. by Kabak
Mutesa. "The King himself is most anxious to learn and to civilis
his people", he wrote in I888, and he told a correspondent in Sout
Africa that King Lewanika had sent "no less than twelve men to
learn how to work under Waddell", the mission carpenter. "We
had famine in the land and with the best will in the world we could
not keep so many mouths chewing. He has since been after me on
the subject and would have forced us at once to begin an industrial
school had it not been our first duty to put ourselves under cover
and also to sit down and count the cost". In 1891 a white traveller
to Barotseland recorded that Lewanika "longs for light and know-
ledge" and greatly "wants teachers to instruct his people to read and
write but especially to train them as carpenters, blacksmiths and
other trades".3
State systems such as those of the Ganda and the Lozi were more
ready than other African societies to realize the advantages of
education and how it might be turned to effect within their own
system. But much less centralized societies could also respond
eagerly to educational opportunity. One such society was that of
the Lake Tonga in Malawi who enthusiastically welcomed the arrival
of missionaries in I88I. "It is clear that they were ready to make the
most of what the British had to offer", writes Dr. Van Velsen, the
2 J. V. Taylor, The Growth of the Church in Buganda (London, I958).

F. B. Welbourn, East African Rebels (London, I96I). L. A. Fallers, ed., The
King's Men (London, I964).
3 Coillard to Hunter, 24 Nov. I888 and 21 Aug. I889, Salisbury Archives,
CO/5/2/I. L. H. Gann, A History of Northern Rhodesia (London, I964).
T. O. Ranger, "The 'Ethiopian' Episode in Barotseland, 1900-1905", Rhodes
LivingstoneJ7., No. 37 (June I965).

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA 1900-1939
leading authority on the Tonga, "and they eagerly climbed on to

this new band-wagon". One of the gifts offered by the mission was,
of course, education: by 1898 there were as many as fifty-three
out-schools among the Tonga, with 8,600 scholars. In the Nyanza
district of Kenya, where the Luo people were organized on a clan
basis not dissimilar to the Tonga, early suspicion of education soon
gave way to "spontaneous educational enthusiasm"; by the early
years of this century "spontaneous bush schools were springing up
in all areas". The Kikuyu were given an educational opportunity
later but siezed it with equal enthusiasm. In the words of the
Corfield report, they "were quick to realise that education was the
strong motive force behind European civilisation and from the
earliest days they have shown an avidity for learning . as a means
of acquiring the power of the European."4
Internal competitiveness is too ill-defined a concept to be of much
use as a tool of historical analysis but it certainly seems as if the
different societies discussed above had this quality in common.
The Tonga and Luo systems did not produce competitiveness
among a court aristocracy but they did produce intense competition
between and within kinship groups and there is no doubt that this
rivalry had a great deal to do with the rapid spread of village schools.
As Dr. Lonsdale tells us of Nyanza, "schools attracted a fierce clan
pride". Similarly all early commentators on the Kikuyu stressed
their ambition and energy. The Kenya Education Commission
Report of 1964 remarks that Western education presents itself in
East Africa as competitive "to an astonishing degree", and asks:
"Are we to accept a baleful competitive atmosphere, foreign to our
natures and to our instincts, as inevitable ?" But it may be thought
that competition, either between individuals or between groups,
marked the dynamic and educationally avid East and Central African
societies we have been discussing and that among them competitive-
ness continued to produce educational development and challenge.5
For challenge grew up early in these societies. Their eagerness
for education meant in the first place that missionaries and mission
schools were welcomed. But it meant in the second place the very
4 J. Van Velsen, "The establishment of the Administration in Tongaland",

Historians in Tropical Africa, ed. Stokes and Brown (Salisbury, 1962). K. J.
McCracken, "Livingstonia as an industrial mission, I875-1900", Religion in
Africa, Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University
of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1964). J. M. Lonsdale, "A Political History of
Nyanza, 1883-1945" (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, I964). F. D. Corfield,
Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mat (London, 1960).
" Kenya Education Commission Report, Part I, I964, p. 23.

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rapid development of articulate criticism of both missio

their schools. The welcome and the criticism were two sides of the
same coin. It is important for the history of African reactions to the
modernizing process to realize that not only did African educational
enthusiasm ante-date the I920s but also that by the I920s African
criticisms of the educational provision of the missions had already
been fully articulated. The history of the growth of this criticism,
which came in some places to amount to a virtual "educational
rebellion," follows closely the lines of the history of educational
receptiveness. Thus criticism came first in the societies which first
accepted schooling with enthusiasm, so that before the I914-I8 War
there had been serious challenges to the whole system of mission
education in Barotseland and Nyasaland. It came next in the
societies which had next followed in accepting education, so that in
the years following the I914-I8 War educational rebellion broke out
first in Nyanza Province and most intensely among the Kikuyu.
And then, in the I920s and 30s, criticism spread wherever schools
were established and wherever education was desired.
A brief outline of these challenges will be given below, but we
must first explain why the most educationally eager of the societies
discussed above did not figure in the early years of criticism and
revolt. As we shall see later, Buganda eventually became one of the
most important centres of the African independent schools movement.
But in the years before I920 there was little articulate criticism of
the mission schools there. This was mainly because, in contra-
distinction to the other societies described, education in Buganda
was from the beginning profoundly influenced, if not controlled, by
leading Africans themselves. Educational provision there was made
in the closest consultation with the Ganda aristocracy. "After
much prayer and thought", so the missionary Hattersely tells us of
the foundation of the great Church boarding schools, "and in consul-
tation with the chiefs, it was decided, with the approval of the Bishop
and the Church Council, that the best way out of the difficulty was
to build a set of boarding houses, each with its own house-master.
The chiefs were delighted with the idea and readily promised to
build the boarding houses and to pay for the support of their own
children". The aristocracy of Barotseland and the clan heads of the
Tonga and Luo exercised no such conditioning influence upon
mission educational programmes in those areas.6
It is probably easiest and clearest to divide the story of East and
Central African educational rebellion into two parts - criticism and
B Cited in Fallers, op. cit., pp. I83-4.

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA 1900-I939 63
resultant action. Let us look first at the nature of the criticisms

that were levelled at mission education before and during the I920s.
The educational revolt in Barotseland, I have myself discussed in a
recent article and will do no more than summarize here. Briefly,
the Lozi aristocracy in the years between I900 and I906 became
profoundly disillusioned both with State and Church provision of
education. The British South Africa Company administration had
promised by treaty to build and maintain schools but had not done so.
The Paris Evangelical Mission [P.E.M.] schools, though good by
comparison with missionary endeavours elsewhere, were disliked by
the Lozi on several grounds. The Lozi regarded education as a
means of providing the Lozi state with qualified secretaries, clerks,
interpreters, artisans; the P.E.M. as a preparation for christian life.
The Lozi wished education to be available without commitment to
Christianity; the P.E.M. insisted that all pupils should take a part in
the life of the Church. The Lozi wanted more and better teachin
in English, more technical education. "It is abundantly clear",
wrote the Secretary for Native Affairs, North Western Rhodesia, in
I907, "that the elders recognize the value of technical education and
have long been dissatisfied with the teaching of the missionaries
which is confined to the Bible, singing and a smattering of imperfec
English". "Lewanika and the more important Barotse indunas",
wrote the same officer in I906, "have long cried out for education
They are not satisfied with that provided by the missionaries, an
no matter what improvements are made in their methods or how th
wishes of the people are met, the Barotse will not take advantage of
the opportunities offered by the Mission. It would seem that th
Barotse want secular schools in which they may be trained as inter-
preters or skilled artisans; further they are also anxious that thes
schools should bear a national character".7
These Lozi criticisms came from the aristocratic establishment; as
was appropriate to the different structure of Tonga society, criticism
among them and other Nyasa groups which responded to educati
possessed a more radical, democratic character. In this they wer
partly influenced by non-African critics of colonial education
provision - men like the radical missionary, Booth, or the Negr
minister, Cheek. As early as I899 Booth was circulating a petitio
among Africans in Nyasaland calling for the expenditure of t
entire hut tax receipts on education "to the point of equality with th
average British education", and demanding free higher education fo
at least 5% of the African population. Some years later Cheek
7 Ranger, op. cit., p. 31.

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wrote of a future "when Government will run schools with some of

the tax money used for standing armies and Imperialism". As
Shepperson and Price tell us in the book upon which this paragraph
is based, these doctrines of free popular education "unhampered by
tax-mechanism", made a strong appeal to what they call "proto-
intellectuals of Nyasaland". Booth and Cheek were followed in
their criticisms by men like John Chilembwe and Charles Domingo,
and also by men like the founder of the Tonga Watch-Tower move-
ment, Elliot Kenan Kamwana. Kamwana was a Tonga, a product
of Livingstonia mission school, who broke with the Scottish Church
when fees were introduced into its Overtoun Institute, an institution
of junior secondary standard. Kamwana became in I908 leader of
a widespread millenarian movement in Tonga country, promising
among much else "free schools for all".8
The Nyasa educational revolt, indeed, was remarkably wide in
its scope. At one level it involved the "proto-intellectuals", was
formulated in terms of the inadequacy of technical training, the
injustice of school fees, the need for instruction in English, and
expressed itself through the resolutions and petitions of Welfare
Societies. Such societies, which were later to spring up in most
parts of East and Central Africa, appeared in Nyasaland before the
I914-I8 War and at once began to express demands for improved
education. At another level the Nyasa revolt expressed itself in wide
popular support for millenarian rejection of European "selective
giving" and millenarian promises of a golden age of educational as
well as other equality or supremacy. And these educational resent-
ments were carried into neighbouring countries by Nyasa migrant
labour. Just after the first World War, Southern Rhodesian intelli-
gence reports were noting Tonga and Yao expressions of such
resentments in the mines and towns of the Colony. They noted, for
instance, the words of the Yao clerk, Alexander, in the Compound of
Wankie colliery:
He said the white people were getting very jealous of educated natives ....
The white people did not want natives to become clerks because they were
afraid of the natives getting up in the world. There was a white man in
Cape Town who would send some books and letters to him from which he
would teach the natives.
Alexander was one of a group of "proto-intellectuals" who formed

reading circles among the Nyasa exiles in the compounds and who
despised the local Shona peoples for their lack of education. But
other Nyasas carried the message to Southern Rhodesian Africans
8 G. Shepperson and T. Price, Independent African (Edinburgh, 1958), chaps.
2 and 4.

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA 1900-I939
also. There was the apocalyptic preacher, Kunga, for instance, who
told audiences in Bulawayo:
The white people are hiding the truth from you.... The natives are
equal to the white man and that is why the English people in Rhodesia do
not want an American-type religion in this country .... The people of
Bulawayo wish to persecute and kill me, the same as happened to Jesus
Christ, because the white men are hiding the truth of the Gospel and I give
it to you quite openly.
At this point his audience exclaimed: "This is a very good man

he teaches well".9
In Barotseland and Nyasaland, then, educational resentments were
expressed very early. The next societies in which they made a
significant appearance were, as one might expect, the Luo of Nyanza
and the Kikuyu. In the years following the 1914-18 war there was
an uprush of political activity in both areas with the new educated
elite providing leadership for movements which enjoyed wide
popular support. In Nyanza, for instance, there was the sudden
challenge of the Young Kavirondo Association in 1921. Its interests
were not, of course, exclusively educational ones but it gave voice,
nevertheless, to a wide range of educational resentments, and
ambitions. Its leaders demanded better education than the missions
could provide; its pagan mass following "while wanting education
were not prepared to pay the price demanded by the missionaries:
destruction of the old systems of belief". Both groups were suspi-
cious of European intentions. "We want to teach ourselves", urged
an ex-headman. "This Missions don't teach us pure teaching".10
In the same years the rapid development of Kikuyu political
consciousness was taking place, inseparably connected with the
educational aspirations and frustrations of the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu
educational revolt has been much mis-interpreted. It is often
thought of as arising out of resistance to missionary attacks on
female circumcision and as commonly linked with the later rise of
the Mau Mau movement; for these reasons it is often seen as a
turning inwards away from modernization, or at the least as an attempt
to temper the rate of modernization. Thus Mr. Fisher, arguing
that independency in Africa is essentially a means of preserving a
balance between the modern and the traditional, writes that "while
Kikuyu Christians have set up separatist schools in order to tolerate
Native Commissioner, Wankie, to Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo,

31 Aug. 1923; C.I.D. reports of meetings held by Kunga, June 1923; Salisbury
Archives, N 3/5/8. See also, T. O. Ranger, "The early history of independency
in Southern Rhodesia", Religion in Africa (cited above, n. 4).
'0 Lonsdale, op. cit.

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tribal custom, West African Muslims have set up Ahmad

separatist schools in order to go whole hog for Western educa
Such an analysis is certainly much too simple. In the K
case, as in the other cases discussed so far, there was com
desire to "tolerate" tribal custom and to gain access to educati
those who observed it, with a desire to go "whole hog" for W
education the full benefits of which, it was believed, wer
withheld. Thus the Lozi boycotted the first school for ad
instruction in English which was opened in Barotseland by th
because the pupils were compelled to attend church servic
as we have seen, the Lozi nevertheless urgently desired ad
instruction in English. What they wanted - and what the
wanted - was modernization, but modernization under African
control.
This comes very clearly out of any deeper study of the Kikuyu
movement. It sprang, as we have said, from an educationally avid
society. "The whole of the younger generation is desperately
anxious for education of some sort", reported one missionary in I92I;
"The people are crying for schools", reported another in 1927,
describing how he was "begged and begged in vain" to establish
more schools and told that "the people are dying of hunger" for
learning. The Kikuyu, then, wanted more schools. But they also
wanted different sorts of schools. They wanted more instruction
in English. Above all, they wanted more advanced facilities.
"Some of the more educated young men", reported the District
Commissioner, Fort Hall, in I925, "are asking for secondary schools
and even girls' schools". Years before the circumcision controversy
very many of the Kikuyu were beginning to express dissatisfaction
with mission provision of education; in the year before that controv-
ersy broke out the District Commissioner, South Nyeri, reported
that while the Kikuyu "have a kind of regard for mission schools . . .
their own concern . . . is that money should be spent on a school
which should be entirely independent of missions .... They want
something especially Kikuyu".12
What was meant by "something especially Kikuyu" is clearly
shown in the evidence. The education demanded by the conserva-
11 H. J. Fisher, "Muslim and Christian Separatism in Africa", Religion in
Africa (op. cit.), p. 23.
12 Rev. W. Rampley, cited by the Provincial Commissioner, Annual Report,
Kikuyu Province, 192I, Nairobi Archives, PC/CP. 4/1/2. Scott Dickson,
reported inKikuyu News, June 1927. D.C., Fort Hall, report on education,
Annual Report, Kikuyu Province, 1925, App. 5, Nairobi Archives, PC/CP.4/I/2.
D.C., South Nyeri, Annual Report, Kikuyu Province, 1928, PC/CP.4/I/2.

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA 1900-1939 67
tive Kikuyu Association and the radical Kikuyu Central Association

alike was to be dynamically progressive. It was to be education to
fit the Kikuyu for development as a nation. "If it is that you want
us to become of consequence and to become the counsellors of our
country", wrote Jomo Kenyatta to the readers of Muiguithania in
I929, "busy yourselves with education .... But do not think that
the education I refer to is that which we are given a lick of. No, it
is a methodical education to open out a man's head".l3
And the Kikuyu independent school movement when it arose was
clearly more an attempted drive towards effective modernization
than a reaction from it. "People had come to believe that the
Government had started giving education by measure", one of the
pioneer members of the movement says, "and the people did not
want that. They wanted to progress and go ahead like the
Europeans". Kikuyu parents, or many of them, did not want their
children to be compelled to give up key traditional beliefs but they
did want the best Western education available. We should note
in this connection that the only issue upon which the Kikuyu
Independent Schools' Association quarrelled with the education
officers of the Kenya Government in the I930s was over thei
insistence on using English as a medium of instruction.
The Association maintains that English shall be the medium in all advanc
classes [wrote one of its officers to the press in June I963] because it is essenti
and helpful to anybody say while in a far country where his tongue is n
used. English is also an official language in any country belonging to the
British Empire .... As soon as Government agrees to encourage English
to be taught among these independent schools on the same basis as the other
schools, i.e. Indian schools, etc. the Association will agree to co-operate fully
with the Government.14
The educational revolt of the I920S was most profound, then, in

the areas already described. But it was not limited to them. The
circumstances of the I920s and I930s were such that there was bound
to be a rapid growth of educational resentment almost everywhere.
In Richard Gray's words, "just at the moment when Africans were
beginning to demand better education and more opportunities of
sharing in the white man's world, Europeans were becoming less and
less ready to give active and confident help in this transition".
13 Jomo Kenyatta to the Editor, Muiguithania, April 1929; translated from
Kikuyu by the C.I.D., Nairobi Archives, AC/MKS Io B/I3/I, Confidential.
14 Interview between Miss N. Gicoru and Mr. Ibrahim Wamutitu, 13 May
1965. H. G. Mbuthia to Editor, East African Standard, 26 June 1936 I must
gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided in the preparation of this article
by Miss N. Gicoru who acted as my research-assistant in the period May-July
1965 and who provided most of the material used in this paper for the Kikuyu
educational revolt.

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These decades saw many open expressions of dislike and

African education by whites in East and Central Africa.
witnessed a change in educational philosophy which, h
genuinely based, ran counter to African aspirations.'5
What African critics were demanding was modernizat
African control; the presentation to Africans of the fu
Western education without preliminary conditions and wit
to select and make use. They certainly were not deman
restriction of educational form and content in the interests of the
preservation of what whites thought to be valuable in African life.
But this was what the educational changes of the I920S often brought
with them. These were the years of government experiments like
that of Malangali school in Tanganyika where there was twice-weekly
spear throwing, tribal dancing, etc; where pupils wore traditional
clothing rather than school uniforms; where the curriculum was
conceived in terms thought appropriate to the values of traditional,
rural life. These were the years of the Jeanes teacher-training
centres where Africans were instructed how to impart educational
essentials in a "relevant" manner. And they were also years of
African protest against this concept of relevance. As the Tanganyika
Superintendent of Education, W. B. Mumford, wrote with reference
to Malangali school, "the attempt to preserve old methods may be
and will be interpreted by many Africans to be an attempt to with-
hold the benefits of civilisation and keep them as a subject race".
"Why do you teach our children only to use the Native axe and
knife, and prevent us from using saws and hammers ? Why do you
tell us to make wooden spoons ?", asked a Jeanes teacher in Southern
Rhodesia. "Do you not want us to climb the ladder of civilisation ?
Is it wrong for our children to want to have chairs and beds and be
like the European?" Ndabaningi Sithole has well described the
aspirations of these Southern Rhodesian children in the I930s.
Recounting how he attended a Wesleyan mission school in I932 he
tells us that
to us education meant reading books, writing and talking English, and doing
arithmetic .... At our homes we had done a lot of ploughing, planting,
weeding and harvesting .... We knew how to do these things. What we
knew was not education; education was what we did not know. We wanted,
as we said in Ndebele, "to learn the book until it remained in our heads, to
speak English until we could speak it through our noses". 1
1 R. Gray, The Two Nations (London, I960), p. 129.
16 W. B. Mumford, "Education and the Social Adjustment of the Primitive
Peoples of Africa to European Culture", and "Malangali School", Africa,
April 1929 and July 1930. Gray, op. cit. N. Sithole, African Nationalism
(Cape Town, 1959).

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In this context it is not surprising that one of the long-expressed

African educational demands began to fall away in the I920s, eve
while these demands generally were much more widely and loudl
voiced. Early African criticisms were often directed against defi
ciencies of technical education. King Lewanika himself took an even
keener delight in acquiring new technical skills than in the exercise
of his new literacy: he demanded both technological and agricultural
instruction as a means to the modernization and development o
Barotseland. John Chilembwe in Nyasaland laid great emphasis
upon mechanical and industrial skills in his independent schools.
For a variety of reasons such demands fell away. They were th
product of an early and optimistic period of educational revolt when
Africans were aiming at the acquisition of power to shape and
modernize their own societies. As it became clearer that economic
opportunity would lie rather in entering the system being created by
whites and as it became understood that the technological skills
offered were not capable in themselves of reproducing white material
mastery but were rather skills which equipped men only for very
subordinate positions, the demand for improved education came to
concentrate almost exclusively upon literary and clerical education.
In a situation where a newly exclusive demand for literary education
ran into a new European insistence on technical and agricultural
instruction of "relevant" kinds, there was widespread expression of
African criticisms of educational provision in the I920S and 3os in
many areas where it had not previously been heard. This was the
case in Tanganyika where the various local and central welfare
associations and tribal unions which came into being in the I920S
fought against "relevant" education. The Bukoba-Bahaya Union,
for example, which was founded in 1924, protested strongly to the
Governor about the conversion of the Bukoba Central School into an
agricultural training centre. The President of the Tanganyika
African Civil Servants' Association, founded in the same year, spoke
bluntly against government and mission educational philosophies:
"People can say what they like but to the African mind to imitate
Europeans is civilisation".17
In Southern Rhodesia, too, welfare associations and trade unions
expressed urgent educational criticisms and ambitions. The South-
ern Rhodesian Bantu Voters' Association [S.R.B.V.A.], founded in
January 1923, was from its inception concerned with educational
17 R. Austin, "Political Generations in Bukoba, I890-1939", East African
Institute of Social Research, Conference, I963: "Notes on the Prehistory of
T.A.N.U.", Makerere Journal, No. 9 (I964).

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development. Aiming as it was to register Africans in some numbers

on the Rhodesian voters' rolls, it tried both to encourage Africans to
achieve the educational standards needed and to have those standards
reduced where they seemed to be unfair. Its remarkable Secretary,
Martha Ngano, complained to Government that it was unfair to
make literacy in English a qualification for the vote when "all the
outside native schools had been teaching the aboriginal language",
and demanded that Government either provide instruction in
English or change the qualifications. She also toured the rural
areas urging that "natives should combine in an attempt to become
as clever as the white man". In I924 the Association at its annual
conference called for the provision of "a high public school" and
attacked white intentions - "the third class schools in Southern
Rhodesia is absolutely meant to keep the black man down".l8
While the S.R.B.V.A. and other elite associations expressed t
view of Southern Rhodesia's "proto-intellectuals", the voice of t
urban worker also began to be heard. The Bulawayo and Salisbu
branches of the Industrial and Commerial Workers' Union [I.C.U
founded in the late I920s, were much concerned with the whit
insincerity in educational matters.
If the white people did not believe in uplifting the native they should hav
left us in darkness.
They told us to leave all our native customs and now they are going back on
their word. We thought there would be equal rights for every civilised man.
We want education but the Government is not building schools .... We
want to have our own clerks in the offices .... The clerk must be black
because the location is a black area and if these privileges are taken away
us what are we going to school and being educated for ?
After seeing that the white man has totally failed to civilise the sav
Africa, we of the I.C.U. are going to try to educate our own people.
sure if we are given a fair chance our people will listen to us rather tha
European.
So the I.C.U. orators, addressing meetings every week-end in
African townships, struck bitterly at European "selective giving
Thus before the second World War there had been elite critici
rural criticism, urban criticism of the schooling provided b
whites; already, before the mass nationalist parties took up
amplified it, a formidable indictment. But what of the second p
18 Martha Ngano to Prime Minister's Office, 7 May 1924; minutes of

third annual conference of the R.B.V.A., 14 July 1924; Salisbury Archiv
S 84/A/26o. Native Commissioner, Gwanda, to Superintendent of Nati
Bulawayo, 26 Jan. I925, Salisbury Archives, S 84/A/300.
19 C.I.D. reports of I.C.U. meetings in Bulawayo and Salisbury, June 1
to March I930, Salisbury Archives, S 84/A/300 and 30I.

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA I900-I939 7I
of this paper: the African action which resulted from these resent-
ments ? I propose to examine this action under three heads:
African attempts to gain control of mission education within the
Church; African attempts to achieve the establishment of government
schools quite independent of mission control; and African attempts
to establish independent schools of their own, free from both mission
and government control.
The exercise, or attempted exercise, of African influence or control
over education within the mission churches could take a number of
forms. Most ambitiously of course, there was the attempt to control
the whole apparatus of the Church, taking advantage either of the
professed intentions of the missionaries to develop an indigenous
Church or of the potentially democratic institutions of a Presbyterian-
type Church system. Here the failure of Africans to control mission
education from the top is identical with the story of the general
failure to move to African churches. In Nyasaland, for example, a
great part of the educational resentment we have already noted arose
out of the failure of the Scottish mission to face up to its own success.
At the beginning both stranger and local Africans were employed in
positions of considerable responsibility, especially on the educational
side of the mission's activities; as this educational work pros-
pered and more and more local Africans became literate and
technically skilled, so the expectations of steady progress to a true
local Church developed. The greatest of the missionaries, indeed,
fought for such a development; but there developed among their
white colleagues and among the supporters of the mission at home
that "trend towards racialism evident in Britain from the i88os and
the consequent disenchantment with African leadership which one
can find in several other missions at this period, notably on the West
Coast." White control of church - and school - was strongly
re-asserted and a series of quarrels began with the best-educated of
the African converts, quarrels which were to produce the early
independent church movements of Nyasaland. It is significant in
the context of this paper that such quarrels were often over educational
policy, as in the case of Kamwana already cited, or as in the case
of Charles Domingo, in whose break-away movement "a cardinal
element was the movement for independent African schools".20
In other parts of East and Central Africa, of course, the move
towards an African Church never got under way; only really in
20 McCracken, op. cit., pp. 94-5. Shepperson and Price, op. cit. A. C. Ross,
"The foundations of Blantyre Mission, Nyasaland", Religion in Africa
(cited above, n. 4).

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Buganda did Africans gain any sort of effective and contro

in important fields of Church life. There were, however, s
differences from situation to situation. Thus in the I9
Kikuyu elders of the Scottish mission tried to use their po
the Church to achieve their educational aims without a b
as the missionaries put it, to spread "propaganda" again
teaching on circumcision. This attempt failed; such el
driven out of the Church. In Nyanza, on the other hand, t
mission, from whose converts most of the leaders of th
movements of the I920s were drawn, had from the start e
its pupils to exercise positions of responsibility in Chur
and education committees. When a Church council was formed in
1912 all its members were pupils still at school; and Dr. Lonsdale
tells us that "the Anglican schools were unique in that they were
completely independent of the parent mission body. The Church
councils elected the Maseno headmaster - as educational adviser
rather than director - and none of the £400 p.a. subscribed local
for teachers' wages passed through European hands". This contra
helps to explain in some part the divergent history of political activi
amongst the Kikuyu and the Luo.21
The sort of situation which produced the Kikuyu clash was th
rule rather than the sort of situation which gave opportunity to th
Luo elite. Almost everywhere frictions developed between missio
and the local communities over control of the schools. These
tensions increased in the I920s as official control of the whole sch
system itself increased. In the early days there was often very li
control even within the most authoritarian system of village or "b
schools. The mission body exercised strict control over its cen
boarding schools at the main station but frequently found it impos
to control in any real way its schools in the outer districts. Missi
expansion was often over-ambitious; schools would be begun
catechists posted over very wide areas, partly in order to maintai
evangelical monopoly and to keep other missions out. In the
circumstances the situation recorded by Dr. Rotberg with regard
the U.M.C.A. Mission in Northern Rhodesia was a not unusual one;
there, he tells us, several U.M.C.A. village schools opened in I908
were not visited by any missionary or any other white man until
I9I5. It was not surprising that the catechist-teacher and the local
village community came to look on such schools as very much their
own, sometimes to the extent of the school itself being carried over
21 "Memorandum prepared by the Kikuyu Mission Council on Female
Circumcision", Dec. I931, (unpublished). Lonsdale, op. cit.

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into a new denomination when its teacher changed his religious

allegiance. Occasionally missions took steps to try to control these
schools; the South African Baptists in Northern Rhodesia moved
their teachers from one school to another every three weeks to avoid
the growth of local proprietorship! But in most places before the
I920s such steps were ineffective. The little "bush" or "kraal"
schools, for all their educational inadequacy, and for "all their blithe
unconcern for 'relevance' ", so J. V. Taylor tells us, "were completely
integrated into the life of the Christian community and belonged to
the people in a way that has never been equalled since. They were
the extension of the local congregation with regard to its children".22
But, as Taylor goes on to point out, in the I920S educational
opinion turned decisively against these schools and both missions and
Government began to make efforts either to reform or to suppress
them. Governments stressed to missions what the Tanganyikan
Director of Education called "the sinister danger of the multiplication
of these little schools"; missions ashamed of the inadequacies revealed
by inspection of the out-schools, began to concentrate on the central
and intermediate schools. A series of blows was struck to the morale
and prestige of the catechist-teacher, once the key figure in the
modernizing and Christianizing expansion, and to the link between
the school and the local community. The new intensity of official
educational concern in the I92os and 3os and thereafter rooted out a
great deal of effective African influence at the lower levels of mission
education without doing anything for increased African influence at
the higher levels. This was one more factor contributing to the
growing educational resentment which paralleled educational develop-
ment, and a very important reason why this educational resentment
was not merely expressed by the elite members of the Welfare
Associations but was felt very widely. Resentment was increased by
the fact that the local community had often made a considerable
investment in its school in terms of land, labour and money. Once
again it was in the Kikuyu situation that the clash between the
village communities and the missions reached its extreme expression.
Before coming to feel its inadequacy the Kikuyu had invested
heavily in mission education - "there is no doubt", reported the
District Commissioner, Fort Hall, "that the voluntary subscriptions
received from the Natives by the various mission stations reveal
considerable willingness to pay for the benefit of education", adding
22 R. I. Rotberg, "The emergence of Northern Rhodesia; the Missionary
Contribution, 1885-1924", St Antony's Papers, No. I5 (I963). Taylor, op. cit.,
P. 94.

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that in one instance contributions to the mission were increasing by

more than one third each year. When the quarrel with the missions
came to a head in the circumcision controversy many Kikuyu
communities attempted to claim village schools as their own on the
grounds of their investment in them. Attempts were made to
revoke land grants to missions; pitched battles were fought in one or
two cases for physical control of premises; and it was not until a
series of law suits were decided in favour of the missions that the
attempt was abandoned.23
Generally speaking, then, African desire to control or to affect
education met with little enough satisfaction within the mission
framework. Almost everywhere, at one stage or another, they turned
to demand government schools as an alternative; as a way of breaking
the mission monopoly and of increasing African influence. In
Barotseland in the first years of the century there were constant
demands for the establishment of schools by the Company adminis-
tration; in Malawi, Cheek and Booth and their African allies were
calling for government run and financed schools before 1914, and
later the Welfare Associations were persistent in their demands that
government should supplement or take over mission education; in
Nyanza in the early I92os the Young Kavirondo Association called
for "both mission and Government schools. If we are only mission
boys the Government may think that missionaries prompt us when
we put forward representations." In Southern Rhodesia there were
demands on both the national and the local level for Government to
assume control of mission schools, and Masoja Ndlovu of the I.C.U.
demanded with characteristic bluntness; "Why should the children
always be sent to the missionaries ? Do we not pay taxes to the
Government ? Then we want a government school, we want to see
something for our money, we want proper schooling for our children".
In Kikuyu the educational revolt has been thought of as essentially
directed against Government as well as against mission. But there,
too, the demand for government schools was at first a very strong one.
"The Kikuyu demand for secular education and for state as opposed
to mission controlled schools existed long before the circumcision
question became acute", noted the Provincial Annual Report for
1929; for three years at least "they have asked for government schools
and have declined to make over sums for enlargement and improve-
ment of mission schools". "Naturally", the Report concluded, "the
23 Memorandum prepared by the Kikuyu Mission Council, pp. 55, 56. D.C.,
Fort Hall, Annual Report, Kikuyu Province, I925, App. 5, Nairobi Archives,
PC/CP 4/1/2.

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA 1900-1939 75
circumcision issue has fixed their determination in this respect and

strengthened the demand for state schools".24 In I929 and I930
Kikuyu delegations waited on the Director of Education beseeching
him to take over all mission schools.
Some of the reasons for these calls to Governments are obvious
ones. As the Kikuyu example illustrates, Governments were being
looked to both because they possessed the resources to run schools
properly and because it was believed that in their schools there would
be no moral or religious test of entrance. In I906 the Lozi demanded
"secular" schools, just as the Kikuyu in 1929, and the Malawi Welfare
Associations called for schools which could be attended by those who
were not "members of any church". Another factor which emerges
clearly from Masoja's demand was that it was felt that Governments
were shirking their responsibilities in not providing schools in return
for tax and demands for government schools were very frequently
associated with demands for the expenditure of all or most of the
African tax money on such schools. Again there was the expectation
that government schools would charge no fees but draw all their
revenue from public sources. As a Southern Rhodesian report on
clashes between the missions and local communities in Central
Mashonaland explained, parents resented both the existence of fees
and the ability of the missions to increase them unilaterally; a close
association was established "between the liability to pay and mission
control of schools in the minds of the people", and "in contemplating
'free' schools there was a tendency to dissociate such a school from
Mission control".25
But calls for secular schools were by no means always calls for
effective provision by the central Government. During the I920S
educationally progressive African communities attempted to make
use of the newly erected local government machinery - the Local
Native Councils [L.N.C.s] and Native Administrations [L.N.A.s] -
to achieve effective control of, or influence over, educational provision.
Just as the Lozi demand for a secular school in 1906 had envisaged
a school paid for out of central Government revenue but controlled by
the Litunga and his council of indunas, so in Nyanza in the late 1920s
when the system of Local Native Councils was being built up there,
24 Lonsdale, op. cit. J. Van Velsen, "Some early pressure groups in Malawi",
to be published in Zambesian Historical Studies (Manchester, I965). Masoja's
speech, C.I.D. report of general meeting of African Associations, 9 July 1929,
Salisbury Archives, S 84/A/26I. Annual Report, Kikuyu Province, 1929,
Nairobi Archives, PC/CP 4/I/2.
5 Van Velsen, op. cit. Report of the Mangwende Reserve Commission of
Inquiry, 1961.

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Dr. Lonsdale tells us that demands for Government African Schools

were made in the expectation that such schools would be "very much
more 'African' than 'Government' ". The Nyanza L.N.C.s collected
considerable sums for the extablishment of such schools despite the
expressed view of the central administration that they should not
devote a disproportionate part of their funds to educational provision.
In Kikuyu the establishment of the L.N.C.s in 1925 was immediately
exploited in the interests of Kikuyu educational advance. Both the
conservative Kikuyu Association and the K.C.A. were prepared to
work through the L.N.C. system. "Endeavour very zealously
indeed", wrote Kenyatta in I929, "to persuade the Councils of the
Country to put zeal into this matter that they may endeavour to pay
out the Country's money lying idle ... for the Kikuyu have
immediate need of men like these - I. THE KIKUYU LAWYER. 2. THE
KIKUYU TEACHER. 3. THE KIKUYU DOCTOR". The L.N.C.s began to
raise educational levies from the first year of their existence; by I929
the Councils of South Nyeri, Kyambu and Fort Hall had raised some
£20,000 for the building of central schools and were already envisaging
secondary school provision.26
In the long run African pressure on Governments, growing in the
I940S and 5os ever stronger and more massive, has been a major
factor in bringing about their enlarged participation in educational
provision. But there was little enough to show either from the call
for central government schools or from the drive for local authority
schools in the years before the second World War. In one or two
cases the campaign for secular schools gave Africans what they
wanted. The Lozi managed to get themselves such a school in I906,
which was not financed by the central Government nor controlled by
the Litunga and his council, but which did provide advanced education
in English without religious tests of admittance. A number of Local
Native Schools were built before I939. But generally the attempt to
control or influence education through the L.N.C.s failed. When it
came to the point, both missions and Governments were suspicious of
schools controlled by Africans, whether inside or outside the L.N.C.
system. The Catholic missions in Tanganyika, for example, declared
in 1933 that Local Native Administration schools in that territory
would become "hot beds of sedition as they surely would be seed-plots
of the evil elements of paganism". East African Governments did
not see the situation in quite so melodramatic a light but they failed on
the whole to support L.N.C. aspirations towards educational advance.
The more ambitious projects were not allowed; L.N.C.s were
26 Lonsdale, op. cit. Kenyatta to the Editor, Aluiguithania, Apr. I929.

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prohibited from assisting schools which in any way departed from,

or were not recognized under, Education Department rules. Thus
the Kikuyu L.N.C.s never achieved their ambitious programme of
becoming responsible for "the education of the many and the higher
education of the few"; nor were they able after the first year or so to
subsidize the Kikuyu independent schools movement. In the
educational as well as in the political field, Kikuyu leaders turned away
from the L.N.C.s as a possible means of African controlled moderniza-
tion. Even in Tanganyika, where the administration was firmly
committed to the encouragement of education through the L.N.A.s as
part of its Indirect Rule philosophy disillusion resulted. The most
educationally avid and progressive group in the territory, the Chagga,
were able to develop their schools as a result of government policy;
to assume responsibility for 25% of teachers' salaries; and to set up
an executive committee of the Chagga Council as the first Native
Authority Education Committee. But even here there was a change
of policy; a new partnership between Government and missions was
established; and the ideal of L.N.A. control of schools abandoned.
The Chagga leader, Chief Petro Marealle, gave eloquent voice to the
disillusionment felt by most of the educationally progressive
communities with the local authority attempt.
Gigantic allocation of funds has been proposed for the Missions [he wrote]
whilst only a negligible amount has been granted to the Native Administra-
tions . . . The inordinate influence of the missions . . . overshadows the very
real needs and requests made by Africans . . . These are usually brushed aside
and their protagonists humiliated and cowed down by a clerical and pro-
clerical influential majority.
Bitterly he accused the missions of sabotage:
The new District Education Advisory Committees with their influential
European missionary representatives constantly advise against the opening
of Native Administration schools and whenever they hear of an application
by a section of the tribe to have an N.A. school, they often try to open a Bush
School and then apply for its registration, which then precludes the
application for an N.A. school.27
Nor was direct central Government participation in education any
more satisfactory. Governments did become more concerned with
African education in the I92os and I930s. But in the first place they
did not find enough money to make much effective contribution to it.
As Richard Gray tells us, "total financial contribution remained
relatively small throughout the inter-war period. Governments still
'; For African pressures as a factor in government educational provision, see
Gray, op. cit. F. Parker, African Development and Education in Southern
Rhodesia (Ohio, I960). For the question of L.N.A. schools in Tanganyika, see
A. R. Thompson, "Partnership in Education in Tanganyika, I919-I96I"
(London Univ. M.Ed. thesis, 1965).

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played a very minor role in African education; the missions r

by far the most important educational agent". Then in th
place most government expenditure went in grants of aid to
schools rather than to the establishment of secular secondary
when Africans appealed to Governments against missions
ments usually went out of their way to show support fo
missionaries, whatever reservations about missionary wi
effectiveness they may privately have harboured. Thus the K
were firmly told that the schools belonged to the mission and
Government had no intention of opening competitive ones. F
when Governments did establish their own schools these ran
as we have seen, to African aspirations. Thus Government
ment in education, so far from meeting the ambitions which p
African demands for it, merely added new educational resent
resentments at the closure or control of village schools; resentm
the refusal to teach English or other modernizing skills.28
There remained direct action; the formation of indepe
African-controlled schools. Independent schools were for
many areas of East and Central Africa at various times betwe
and I939. The dates at which they appeared followed roug
pattern of educational development which we have al
established. Thus they appeared in Barotseland in the
I903-5; then in Nyasaland before the first world war; then on
scale in Kikuyu and Buganda in the I930s. The pattern is not
clear-cut; independent schools were started in other places during
this period and some of them were begun very early, like the schools of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church [A.M.E.C.] in Southern
Rhodesia which were established as early as I906. These schools,
however, cannot really be regarded as a growth out of local Southern
Rhodesian educational resentment; they were rather a missionary
importation into Rhodesia of the independent educational activity of
South Africa. It was not until Southern Rhodesian Africans them-
selves began to feel a keen resentment at educational inadequacies in
the I920S that these A.M.E.C. schools began to grow on any sort of
scale. "Evidence is not lacking", wrote the Southern Rhodesian
Chief Native Commissioner in I92I, "of the inclination of the natives
to break away from denominational schools", and in I925 it was
reported that the A.M.E.C. was "showing a new vigour". But despite
the work of the A.M.E.C. over several decades the independent
school movement in Southern Rhodesia did not flourish as it did in
28 Gray, op. cit., p. 133.

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the educationally precocious areas of East and Central Africa. The

three areas where independent education became really widespread
and rich were Nyasaland, Kikuyu and Buganda - Barotseland having
been satisfied for a long time with its successful government school.
A thriving independent school movement is not an easy thing to
produce; it calls for considerable local sacrifice and effort; it is
therefore the result of particular educational vitality as well as of
educational grievance. It is true that more recently areas conscious
of educational backwardness have attempted to catch up through
private or communal initiative. But independent education was
carried to its full development in terms of numbers and philosophy in
the colonial period in these three areas of outstanding educational
progressiveness.29
The independent school movement deserves a study to itself. Its
manifestations varied considerably according to the environment in
which they occurred. Thus Buganda educational independency was
directed rather against the overwhelming influence of the Ganda
"gentry" on the mission school system than against European
"selective giving", though it was nonetheless linked with radical
politics. Some generalizations, however, can be made about the
independent schools in East and Central Africa and some questions
raised for further investigation.
Just as most European schools themselves were linked with mission
Christianity so almost all independent school movements were
associated with independent church movements. As one of the
Kikuyu independent school leaders wrote of the early I930s, "in these
troubled days we reckoned that religion was necessary to a good and
progressive educational system. We found it necessary to have
churches". But some distinctions need to be made here. Practically
all independent churches ran or tried to run schools, but in many
cases this had little to do with educational concern. Just as it was
hard to conceive of a school without a church so it was hard to
conceive of a church without a school. A school was needed to
complete the religious community; or to allow the new church to
compete with the missions; or to help the new church to finance
itself out of school fees. Even the Watu Wa Mungu movement
among the Kikuyu, whom Kenyatta describes as hating and rejecting
all foreign influences and who are the clearest possible case of
sectarianism as a total rejection of modernization rather than as an
attempt to control it, run their own "schools". These schools, so an
observer recorded, had to be "built of indigenous materials. They
29 Ranger, op. cit., p. 58.

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repudiate ordinary education, such as that obtainable

schools, but run schools of their own in which all the educ
is religious".30
It is not with schools of this kind that I am concerned in
but with schools clearly produced by African desire to
control education. These schools also were invariably lin
independent church movements, even if in the case of
Karinga's Educational Association the link came some time
establishment of the school. But in these cases educational
independency was itself the main thing aimed at, and in these cas
link with independent church movements was certainly not part
a turning inwards.
The importance of educational revolt in producing some of
independent church movements of East and Central Africa
perhaps been underestimated. The so-called Ethiopian move
in Barotseland between I900 and I906, for instance, can only real
understood in these terms. The Ethiopians were Sotho mission
of the great Negro mission church, the A.M.E.C., who were invit
Barotseland by the Litunga and his indunas because they promise
erect schools which would teach English and technical skills
rapidly and more effectively than the Paris Evangelical Mi
[P.E.M.]. The arrival of these men resulted in a wholesale dese
of P.E.M. schools. When the Lozi were given their officially
sponsored Barotse National School, Ethiopianism died. In a similar
way, as we have suggested above, a good deal of independency in
Nyasaland must be seen in the context of educational resentment.
Shepperson and Price tell us that the desire for freedom from mission
control contained as "a cardinal element" the desire for educational
freedom.
That the educational facilities of the Protectorate were inadequate [they

continue] was clear from the whole history of the Booth-inspired separatist
churches, which had drawn many Africans to them because they seemed to
offer a free education. Furthermore some Africans resented the discipline
and the standards of the Scottish mission schools, which did not offer a quick
and easy road to the status they desired. The overall result was a multiplica-
tion of independent African schools side by side with the separatist churches.
As we have seen, the link between the Kikuyu Independent Schools

Association and the African Independent Pentecostal Church, and
between the Kikuyu Karinga's Educational Association and the
African Orthodox Church, developed after the establishment of
independent schools. In Buganda, too, the careers of Reuben Spartas
30 Welbourn, op. cit., p. 142. J. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London,
1938). N. Farson, Last Chance in Africa (London, I950).

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EDUCATION IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA I900-I939 8i
and Masajakitalo, founders of the African Orthodox Church and of

the most elaborate of Bugandan independent school systems,
illustrates once more the extent to which religious independency can
be powered by educational revolt.31
These links with independent church movements, it was noted
above, were in no sense a turning inwards, a retreat to a closed
African society. Independent school movements have to be outward
looking to be at all effective, even if they also aim to establish local
control and free accesss to those who preserve traditional customs.
Mission and government schools have great advantages in terms of
finance and personnel; they also have the advantage that they can cut
off the pupils of independent schools from further educational
advance by refusing to recognize the qualifications gained by them.
At one time or another all ambitious independent school movements
which aim to do more than merely to provide a school which mirrors
a tight local community, which are powered by a desire to break into
the modern world, must necessarily look for ways of tapping sources
of finance or men which are not controlled by the missions or the
colonial administrations, and look also for ways of building up their
own educational ladder so that pupils can proceed from the bottom
to the top either in the independent schools or in institutions
co-operating with them. This was one of the most important reasons
for the association of dynamic independent school movements with
religious independency. In each case instanced above the link with
the independent church concerned meant a link with outside sources
of aid.
Thus the Lozi, by calling in the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, were establishing contact with an institution which was
running many centres of Negro education in the United States and
which was concerned with the establishment of such centres in South
Africa. The Lozi contact with the A.M.E.C. did not last long enough
for this to be exploited, but the later success of the A.M.E.C. on the
Copperbelt was largely dependent upon the ability of the church to
take students through its own school system as far as the Wilberforce
Institution in South Africa for theological and teacher training, or
even perhaps to colleges in the United States. In the same way the
pre-IgI4 independent church and school movements in Nyasaland
were linked through Booth and others to the Negro church movement
in America; as Shepperson and Price have shown there was at work
a developed philosophy which looked to the Negro as the predestined
'1 Ranger, "The 'Ethiopian' episode in Barotseland". Shepperson and Price,
op. cit., p. I62. Welbourn, op. cit., chap. 5.

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educator and emancipator of the African people and w

practical effects in the support given Chilembwe's ind
schools and church, in his education in America, and in a v
other ways. At a rather different level even the adhere
Watch-Tower movement were calling upon the resource
American heterodoxy in terms of printing and exposition, w
the early days when Nyasa proto-intellectuals were subs
Watch-Tower literature in English as a mark of super
standing, or in the later days when vernacular Watch-Tower
publications were the cheapest and most easily available material for
literacy instruction. It is this which explains the boast of Alexander,
the mine clerk, that he was in contact with a white man in Cape Town
who would teach the natives to be as clever as the whites, or of the
millenarian preacher, Kunga, that American-type religion would
reveal the truth.32
The most elaborate attempts to construct an educational pyramid
parallel to and independent from the official one have been made in
Buganda and Kikuyu. Spartas began with links with militant
American Negro independency and with correspondence with Marcus
Garvey and the South African representatives of his African Orthodox
Church. But later he rejected these links and turned instead towards
Greek Orthodoxy itself, presenting the odd spectacle of an African
rebel submitting to a new alien authority. Welbourn explains this
partly as the result of a Ganda hankering for legitimacy; but it is
clearly also the result of a search for effective external aid. When the
affiliation of the Spartas' movement was formally recognized by the
Greek Orthodox Church in I946 the implications were thus spelt out
in the Greek journal, Pantainos: "It will be necessary to give to the
more keen of the Africans higher education, either here [Egypt] or in
Greece. Hospitals with doctors and nurses will have to be founded
... all this will incur heavy expenditure". This sort of development
has not in fact taken place but members of the church have proceeded
to study at Alexandria and Athens.33
The Kikuyu schools also tried to build up a rival ladder, but it was
characteristic of their much more political approach that this was done
mainly through attempts by Kenyatta and Koinange to have their
qualifications recognized by the British Government over the heads of
the Kenya authorities, and to give legitimacy to the whole system not
by tying it to an outside tradition of higher education but by gaining
recognition for no less than a university college in Kikuyu itself.
32 J. V. Taylor and D. Lehmann, Christians of the Copperbelt (London, 196I).
33 Welbourn, op. cit., p. 92.

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These attempts, of course, have been only very imperfectly

successful and the independent school movements have always been
faced with the bitter paradox of higher aspirations and lower
performance than the official school systems. Nevertheless these
schools have an important place in African educational as well as
political history. In Kikuyu and Buganda they did serve as important
supplements to the European controlled school system - it is
significant that the authors of the two most recently published
autobiographical accounts of a Kikuyu boyhood both attended
independent schools at various points of their educational careers;
and Mugo Gatheru tells us, for instance, that many present Kenyan
leaders are products of the independent schools. Their effect on
their pupils needs further investigation. Moreover these schools have
often been important as a successful way of applying pressure. The
Lozi got their National School in order that the Government could
scotch the independent schools movement in Barotseland; Southern
Rhodesian government expansion of Upper Primary and Secondary
facilities some fifty years later was at least partly the result of the
pressure of Native councils to set up their own higher schools. And
generally speaking the whole phenomenon of educational revolt
whether manifested by an attempt to gain control within the mission
system, or by an appeal for government intervention, or by the
establishment of independent schools - is an aspect of the history of
African assertion in East and Central Africa which needs to be looked
at very carefully.34
I should not, however, end this paper without bringing out the fact
that one cannot merely discuss the phenomenon of African attempts to
control and influence education before 1939, or later, as if it were
exclusively a revolt directed against the whites. Africans have been
competing for education not only against other races but also against
each other. Many of the efforts described above were directed rather
at the relative advantage of the group undertaking them than at the
overall advancement of African educational opportunity. Not only
the fact of the increased educational facilities of today but also the fact
of the inequalities which so conspicuously exist within the system must
be partly traced back to these African pressures. In 1940 Archdeacon
Owen, patron of the Kavirondo Taxpayers' Welfare Association, put
on paper his thoughts on educational development. He attacked the
system of financing education through the payment of taxes by all in
exchange for the receipt of benefits by a few. He attacked the system
34 R. M. Gatheru, Child of Two Worlds (Oxford, 1964). J. M. Kariuki,
Mau Mau Detainee (London, I963).

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84 PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 32
of fees whereby poor men could not afford to pay

and hence did not send their children to school,
prosperous men, able to afford the fees, reaped the
of their poorer fellows as well as of their own
making the same point as Booth and Cheek and
attitude was very different from that of the elite
politics with whom he had long been associated
continued, that the inequalities could be met th
African education committees to recommend remission of fees in
deserving cases. And, as we have seen, within the C.M.S. in
Nyanza, African school committees had considerable powers. But,
wrote Owen, this was
sheer delusion. In fact and in practice such a committee is the first line of
defence against the masses of a circle privileged to exploit the rates and taxes
of the masses. The Committees become Committees of Privilege, to secure
for their friends . . . and those of their circle who cannot pay fees a share in
the State facilities, which are strictly limited. One of the really distressing
features of the introduction in African tribal life of the provision of facilities
from public taxation is the keenness of the leading Christians to secure for
themselves and their circle as large a share of the benefits as they can ...
They insist on widening ever more and more the economic gap which
separates them from their unprivileged countrymen .... They attempt,
successfully, to extort the very highest price for their services which can be
screwed out of the community .... This is bound to create class
antagonism, in fact has already begun to do so, and will commit future
generations of Africans to a struggle against privileged classes as happened in
England.3
Such in Owen's eyes was the effect of the influence exerted by the
African members of the Nyanza education committees. Such also, or
something like it, was the result of the triumph of the Lozi aristocracy
in getting their Barotse National School in I906; a school explicitly
for sons of that aristocracy which took a privileged few to the best
education available for Africans in the whole of the Rhodesias and
which triumphed over a mission education system which was at least
aiming at a wide diffusion of popular education. Such was the effect
of the influence exerted by the Ganda aristocracy over the grea
mission boarding Schools. Thus some of the manifestations of
African pressure for education which we have described above were
essentially bids for privileged access to educational opportunity
others were essentially protests against the success of such bids. So
in the history of the African educational revolt as in the history of
3 5 Archdeacon Owen, Memorandum on State Financing of African Education,

I940, (unpublished). I am indebted to Dr. J. M. Lonsdale for this reference
and to much other advice on this paper.

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African nationalism as a whole one cannot afford to portray events in

terms of a monolithic movement of black protest against whites. As
far as independent schools are concerned we should need little
reminding of this fact; for colonial rule is gone from East and Central
Africa, with the exception of Southern Rhodesia, but independent
schools are with us as much as, if not more than, ever.36
The University College, Dar es Salaam Terence Ranger
'6 See especially, The Kenya Education Commnission Report, Part I, I964, p. 73.
The Report of the Uganda Education Commission, 1963.

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African Attempts to Control Education in East and Central Africa 1900-1939

Author(s): Terence Ranger

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A SERIES OF ARTICLES IN RECENT NUMBERS OF PAST AND PRESENT HAVE

sought to establish a connection between educational histo

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pressures on government and mission schools and in the last resort

It is sometimes said of the independent church movements with

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some African societies which approach Western education with

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page at the Kabaka's court", recalled one of them, "and

2 J. V. Taylor, The Growth of the Church in Buganda (London, I958).

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leading authority on the Tonga, "and they eagerly climbed on to

4 J. Van Velsen, "The establishment of the Administration in Tongaland",

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rapid development of articulate criticism of both missio

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resultant action. Let us look first at the nature of the criticisms

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wrote of a future "when Government will run schools with some of

Alexander was one of a group of "proto-intellectuals" who formed

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At this point his audience exclaimed: "This is a very good man

Native Commissioner, Wankie, to Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo,

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tribal custom, West African Muslims have set up Ahmad

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tive Kikuyu Association and the radical Kikuyu Central Association

The educational revolt of the I920S was most profound, then, in

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These decades saw many open expressions of dislike and

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In this context it is not surprising that one of the long-expressed

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development. Aiming as it was to register Africans in some numbers

18 Martha Ngano to Prime Minister's Office, 7 May 1924; minutes of

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Buganda did Africans gain any sort of effective and contro

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into a new denomination when its teacher changed his religious

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that in one instance contributions to the mission were increasing by

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circumcision issue has fixed their determination in this respect and

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Dr. Lonsdale tells us that demands for Government African Schools

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prohibited from assisting schools which in any way departed from,

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played a very minor role in African education; the missions r

28 Gray, op. cit., p. 133.

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the educationally precocious areas of East and Central Africa. The

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repudiate ordinary education, such as that obtainable

That the educational facilities of the Protectorate were inadequate [they

As we have seen, the link between the Kikuyu Independent Schools

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and Masajakitalo, founders of the African Orthodox Church and of