African history and imperial culture in colonial Nigerian schools

Abstract

Evaluations of colonial education policy tend to treat it as a tool for applying imperial ideology, which—among other things—denied the Africans their past. This study of the debate about history education in southern Nigeria in the 1930s suggests the need to re-evaluate this assessment. While some imperial pronouncements did deny African history, colonial administration also required historical knowledge. Further, many colonial educators thought it proper to provide African students with a sense of their past appropriate to colonial subjects. A few went much further, to actively promote pride in African history. In this ambivalent context African schoolteachers and graduates got on with the task of describing their past, often using colonial educational media, constrained but not silenced by their colonial situation. Recognising the fertile ambivalence of this aspect of imperial culture opens new and more fruitful approaches to colonial intellectual history in general.