Abstract
This chapter traces the origins and long-term development of African mass education in colonial sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, it addresses the unique role of Christian missions in prompting a genuine schooling revolution and explores the comparative educational expansion across colonies and between genders. While the initial expansion of missions was motivated by a global competition for new church members, the development of African mass education essentially depended on local conditions. It highlights the importance of African agency in the process toward mass education that depended on local demand for formal education and the supply of African teachers who provided the bulk of mission schooling. The chapter also assesses potential pitfalls when those realities are not considered by studies, investigating historical missionary legacies on present-day African education and social mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
See the companion chapter by Felipe Valencia Caicedo in this volume on the spread of Christian missions across Latin America and Asia.
- 2.
Worldwide, by 2018 Africa is the home to most Christians: 599 million vs. 597 million in Latin America and 550 million in Europe (Johnson et al. 2018).
- 3.
- 4.
The most important Protestant missionary societies included: Africa Inland Mission, Baptist Missionary Society, Basel Mission, Church Mission Society, London Missionary Society, United Free Church of Scotland, Wesleyan Methodist, Methodist Episcopal and Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. Main societies of the Roman Catholic Church comprised: Holy Ghost Fathers, White Fathers, Society of African Missions and Society of the Divine Word.
- 5.
Protestant missions already had expanded during the early mid-nineteenth century in Sierra Leone, South Africa, Ghana and Madagascar.
- 6.
This excludes regions of Muslim dominance.
- 7.
- 8.
Colonial Madagascar and Benin presented early exceptions to the rule, where there was a significant number of mission schools, as local demand for education could not keep up with public supply (Huillery 2009).
- 9.
Includes independent Liberia and Ethiopia.
- 10.
There were stark differences within Belgian territories. While gross primary school enrolment rates in Belgian Congo (DRC) at 23%, much higher than the average British African enrollment, in Ruanda-Urundi enrolment was only 7% in 1938.
- 11.
Except for Northern Nigeria.
- 12.
By the 1850s, some parts of the Bible had been translated into 27 African languages. In 1904, full or partial biblical printed translations existed in 112 African languages (Johnson 1969).
- 13.
Africans also voiced their frustration with the quality of mission schools that placed religious instruction at the forefront rather than imparting formal skills that would have qualified for work in the formal colonial economy (Berman 1974).
- 14.
Outside South Africa (Row 2), with a larger European presence, Protestant African ordained staff even outnumbered European.
- 15.
Also, Cameroon and Benin received missions.
- 16.
This ratio remained relatively stable. Frankema (2012) counted that in 1938 of the 8456 primary school teachers in Uganda, only 3% (285) were Europeans.
- 17.
Frankema (2013) counts for the Belgian Congo 500 foreign missionaries in 1908, while by 1938 and 1950 the number of foreign missionaries had rapidly grown to 3732 and 5336, respectively.
- 18.
See Jedwab et al. (2018) for a meta-analysis of this extensive literature.
- 19.
One exception represents Wietzke (2015) who finds no statistically significant long-term effect of early-colonial missions in Madagascar on contemporary education and economic development outcomes.
- 20.
For instance, despite overwhelming evidence of Muslim resistance against Christian schooling efforts (Frankema 2012), most mission legacy studies entirely neglect the role of Islam in their choice of control variables. Other studies control for railroads networks, although they had not even been built by the time of nineteenth-century European mission settlement.
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Acknowledgements
Felix Meier zu Selhausen gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the British Academy (Postdoctoral Fellowship no. pf160051) as part of his project “Conversion out of Poverty? Exploring the Origins and Long-Term Consequences of Christian Missionary Activities in Africa.” For detailed comments, I would like to thank Michiel de Haas, Felipe Valencia Caicedo and Gabriele Cappelli and David Mitch, the two editors of this volume.
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Meier zu Selhausen, F. (2019). Missions, Education and Conversion in Colonial Africa. In: Mitch, D., Cappelli, G. (eds) Globalization and the Rise of Mass Education. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25417-9_2
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