Abstract
If vocational education is defined as any education aimed at the importing of manual and technical skills and the intellectual knowledge associated with those skills, then it can be said that starting with the European missions that began to arrive on the western coast of Africa at the end of the eighteenth century, Christianity was propagated on the African continent through the use of vocational education. Imparting vocational knowledge was never the primary or exclusive focus of Christian evangelism, which was always the communication of the basic tenets of Christian belief, but vocation training was always seen as complementary form of cultural transfer that had the potential to give Africans who converted to Christianity a way to make a living. The history of vocational education, as taught by European missionaries, can be argued to have developed from church practices in Europe that went back to the European Middle Ages. In Africa, after its initial introduction by missionaries at the start of the nineteenth century, vocational education went through three different periods of evolution. The first period, 1800–1880, was characterized by missions operating in situations where European states had no formal political, but some real economic presence. Missions in these situations offered training in skills that fit the needs of seaport economies that connected to the global markets. The second period, from 1880 to 1920, involved competing groups of Christians, European and African, attempting to utilize industrial education to advance their evangelical agendas. This competition took place against a backdrop of European conquest and colonization. The last period, from 1920 to 1960, featured European missions working in tandem with colonial governments to provide skills that fit colonial government development ambitions. The success of the two European groups in the latter effort had the unintended consequence of creating new African corps of social welfare workers who took the fore in introducing other Africans to European civilization.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adas, Michael. 1989. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Ajayi, J. F. A. 1959. “Henry Venn and the Policy of Development.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 1 (4): 331–342.
Anderson, James D. 1988. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Ball, Stephen J. 1983. “Imperialism, Social Control and the Colonial Curriculum in Africa.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 15 (3): 237–263.
Barnes, Andrew E. 2009. Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Barnes, Andrew E. 2015. “‘Making Good Wives and Mothers’: The African Education Group and Missionary Reactions to the Phelps Stokes Reports.” Studies in World Christianity 21 (1): 66–85.
Barnes, Andrew E. 2016. “‘Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race’: E. W. Blyden, African Diasporas and the Regeneration of Africa.” In Redefining the African Diaspora: Expressive Cultures and Politics from Slavery to Independence, edited by Toyin Falola and Danielle Porter Sanchez, 225–254. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.
Barnes, Andrew E. 2017. Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism and the Shaping of African Industrial Education. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Barnes, Andrew E. 2018a. “Christian Social Welfare and Its Legacy in Colonial Africa.” In The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History, edited by Martin S. Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press.
Barnes, Andrew E. 2018b. “Samuel Ajayi Crowther: Yoruba Missionary Agent.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beize, Michael Scott, and Marybeth Gasman, eds. 2012. Booker T. Washington Rediscovered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Belfanti, Carlo Marco. 2004. “Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age.” Technology and Culture 45 (3): 569–589.
Berman, Edward H. 1970. “Education in Africa and America: A History of the Phelps Stokes Fund 1911–1945.” Ed.D. Unpublished dissertation, Columbia University.
Berman, Edward. 1971. “American Influences on African Education: The Case of the Two Phelps Stokes Fund’s Education Commissions.” Comparative Education Review 15 (2): 132–145.
Billett, Stephen. 2014. “The Standing of Vocational Education: Sources of Its Societal Esteem and Implications for its Enactment.” Journal of Vocational Education & Training 66 (1): 1–21.
Blyden, Edward W. 1862. Liberia’s Offerings, Being Addresses, Sermons. New York: John Gray.
Blyden, Edward W. 1891. The Return of the Exiles and the West African Church: A Lecture Delivered at the Breadfruit School House, Lagos, West Africa, January 2, 1981. London: W. B. Whittingham.
Blyden, Edward W. 1967. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. First published London, 1887.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. 2003. Booker T. Washington and Black Progress: ‘Up from Slavery’. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Burke, Edmund, III. 2009. “Islam at the Center: Technological Complexes and the Roots of Modernity.” Journal of World History 20 (2): 165–186.
Cairns, H. Alan C. 1965. Prelude to Imperialism: British reactions to Central African Society, 1840–1890. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.
Chatellier, Louis. 1997. The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism c.1500–c.1800. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chirenje, J. Mutero. 1987. Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press.
Cohen, Cynthia. 1993. “‘The Natives Must First Become Good Workmen’: Formal Educational Provision in German South West and East Africa Compared.” Journal of Southern African Studies 19 (1): 115–134.
Comboni, Daniel. 1871. Plan for the Regeneration of Africa. English translation consulted online at: https://www.lmcomboni.org/documentos/PlanfortheregenerationofAfrica_EN.pdf.
Correia, Stephen Taylor. 1993. “‘For Their Own Good’: An Historical Analysis of the Educational Thought of Thomas Jesse Jones.” Ph.D. Unpublished dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.
Cox, Jeffrey. 2010. The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700. New York: Routledge.
Corby, Richard A. 1981. “The Bo School and Its Graduates in Colonial Sierra Leone.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 15 (2): 323–333.
Corby, Richard A. 1990. “Educating Africans for Inferiority Under British Rule: Bo School in Sierra Leone.” Comparative Education Review 34 (3): 314–349.
Crummell, Alexander. 1891. Africa and America; Addresses and Discourses. Springfield, MA: Willey.
Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. 2010. African American History Reconsidered. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Davis, R. Hunt. 1976. “John L. Dube: A South African Exponent of Booker T. Washington.” Journal of African Studies 2 (4): 497–528.
Davis, Adam J. 2014. “The Social and Religious Meanings of Charity in Medieval Europe.” History Compass 12 (12): 935–950.
Dick, Malcolm McKinnon. 2008. “Discourses for the New Industrial World: Industrialisation and the Education of the Public in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain.” History of Education 37 (4): 567–584.
Dougall, James W. C. 1930. “School Education and Native Life.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 3 (1): 49–58.
Dougall, James W. C. 1938. “The Development of the Education of the African in Relation to Western Contact.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 11 (3): 312–324.
Dougall, James W. C. 1950. “Thomas Jesse Jones: Crusader for Africa.” International Review of Mission 34 (155): 311–317.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. “Missions and the Colonization of African Languages: Developments in the Former Belgian Congo” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 17 (2): 165–187.
Fairclough, Adam. 2007. A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Grell, Ole Peter, Andrew Cunningham, and Robert Jutte, eds. 2002. Health Care and Poor Relief in 18th and 19th Century Northern Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Gutton, Jean Pierre. 1991. “Enfermement et Charite dans la France de l’Ancien Regime.” Histoire, Economie et Societe 10 (3): 353–358.
Harlan, Louis R. 1972. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press.
Harlan, Louis R. 1983. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee 1901–1915. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hastings, Adrian. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationhood. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hodge, Joseph M. 2007. Triumph of the Experts: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Hughes, Rebecca C. 2013. “‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa, c. 1940–60.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (5): 823–842.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1988. “‘Le Bebe en Brousse’: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 21 (3): 401–432.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1990. “Domesticity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946–1960.” Signs 15 (3): 447–474.
Jennings, Michael. 2013. “Common Counsel, Common Policy: Healthcare, Missions and the Rise of the ‘Voluntary Sector’ in Colonial Tanzania.” Development and Change 44 (4): 939–963.
Jensz, Felicity. 2012. “Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the 19th Century British Empire. Part II: Race, Class, and Gender.” History Compass 10 (12): 306–317.
Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1922. Education in Africa; A study of West, South, and Equatorial Africa by the African Education Commission, Under the Auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and Foreign Mission Societies of North America and Europe. Report Prepared by Thomas Jesse Jones, Chairman of the Commission. New York: Phelps Stokes Fund; London: Edinburgh House.
Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1925a. Education in East Africa; A Study of East, Central and South Africa by the Second African Education Commission Under the Auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, in Cooperation with the International Education Board. Report prepared by Thomas Jesse Jones. New York: Phelps Stokes Fund; London: Edinburgh House.
Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1925b. “The White Man’s Burden in Africa.” Current History, 213–221.
Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1926a. “A Good Word for Missionaries.” Current History, 539–544.
Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1926b. Four Essentials of Education. New York: Scribners and Sons.
Jones, Thomas Jesse. 1929. The Essentials of Civilization; A Study in Social Values. New York: H. Holt and Company.
Julia, Dominique. 2006. “Christian education.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, edited by S. Brown and T. Tackett, 147–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jutte, Robert. 1994. Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kallaway, Peter. 2009. “Education, Health and Social Welfare in the Late Colonial Context: The International Missionary Council and Educational Transition in the Interwar Years with Special Reference to Colonial Africa.” History of Education 38 (2): 217–246.
Kalu, Ogbu U. 2008. “Ethiopianism and the Roots of Modern African Christianity.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 8, edited by Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, 576–592. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
King, Kenneth J. 1971. Pan-Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy and Education in the Southern United States and East Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Killingray, David. 2014. “Godly Examples and Christian Agents: Training African Missionary Workers in British Institutions in the Nineteenth Century.” In Europe as the Other: External Perspectives on European Christianity, edited by Judith Becker and Brian Stanley, 164–195. Gottingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht.
Koschorke, Klaus, Adrian Hermann, E. Phuti Mogase, and Ciprian Burlacioiu, eds. 2016. Discourses of Indigenous Christian Elites in Colonial Societies in Asia and Africa around 1900: A Documentary Sourcebook from Selected Journals. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Küster, Sybille. 2007. “‘Book Learning’ Versus ‘Adapted Education’: The Impact of Phelps-Stokesism on Colonial Education Systems in Central Africa in the Interwar Period.” Paedagogica Historica 43 (1): 79–97.
Landes, David. 2003. Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Europe 1750 to the Present. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Langley, J. Ayondele. 1973. Pan Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa 1900–1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Class. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Laqueur, Thomas. 1976. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lawrance, Benjamin N., Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, eds. 2006. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lebby, Samuel Joe. 1980. “The Development of Elementary Education Policy and Practice in Sierra Leone, 1924–1976.” Ph.D. unpublished dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.
Leedy, Todd H. 2007. “The World the Students Made: Agriculture and Education at American Missions in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1930–1960.” History of Education Quarterly 47 (4): 447–469.
Lindberg, Carter. 1993. Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Lis, Catherina, and Hugo Soly. 1984. “Policing the Early Modern Proletariat 1450–1850.” In Proletarianization and Family History, edited by David Levine, 163–228. Orlando: Academic Press.
Lorimer, Douglas. 1978. Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes toward the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: Holmes and Meier.
Lotz-Heumann, Ute. 2008. “Imposing Church and Social Discipline.” In The Cambridge History of Christianity, edited by S. Brown and T. Tackett, 147–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mackenzie, John M., and Nigel R. Dalziel. 2013. The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Race and Gender, 1772–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Makondesa, Patrick. 2000. The Church History of Providence Industrial Mission. Kachere: Kachere Series Publications.
Marable, Manning. 1979. “South African Nationalism in Brooklyn: John L. Dube’s Activities in New York State 1887–1899.” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 3 (1): 23–30.
Mark-Thiesen, Cassandra. 2012. “The ‘Bargain’ of Collaboration: African Intermediaries, Indirect Recruitment, and Indigenous Institutions in the Ghanaian Gold Mining Industry, 1900–1906.” International Review of Social History 57: 17–38.
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1978. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1998. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Moyd, Michelle R. 2014. Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Mwase, George Simeon. 1975. Strike a Blow and Die: The Classic Story of the Chilembwe Rising. London: Heinemann.
Newall, Stephanie. 2013. The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Norrell, Robert J. 2009. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Notcutt, L. A., and G. C. Latham, eds. 1937. The African and the Cinema: An Account of the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment during the Period March 1935 to May 1937. London: Edinburgh House Press.
Oldham, J. H. 1934. “The Educational Work of Missionary Societies.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 7 (1): 47–59.
Ozioko, Johnson Uchenna. 2015. “Rereading Comboni’s Plan for the Regeneration of Africa in the Light of Today’s Africa.” Alpha Omega 18 (3): 451–476.
Prevost, Elizabeth E. 2017. “Troubled Traditions: Female Adaptive Education in British Colonial Africa.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45 (3): 475–505.
Redkey, Edwin S. 1969. Black Exodus; Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Reynolds, Glenn. 2010. “‘Africa Joins the World’: The Missionary Imagination and the Africa Motion Picture Project in Central Africa 1937–1939.” Journal of Social History 44 (2): 459–479.
Saeteurn, Muey Ching. 2017. “‘A Beacon of Hope for the Community’: The Role of the Chavalali Secondary School in Late Colonial and Early Independent Kenya.” Journal of African History 58 (2): 311–329.
Safley, Thomas Max, ed. 2003. The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief. Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.
Safley, Thomas Max. 2004. “Charity and Poor Relief.” In Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, Vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Dewald, 452–458. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Safley, Thomas Max. 2005. Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience Among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.
Schalk, Ruben, Patrick Wallis, Clare Crowston, and Claire Lemercier. 2017. “Failure or Flexibility?: Apprenticeship Training in Premodern Europe.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 48 (2): 131–157.
Shepperson, George. 1968. “Ethiopianism: Past and Present.” In Christianity in Tropical Africa, edited by C. G. Baeta, 250–260. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shepperson, George, and Thomas Price. 1969. Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sivonen, Seppe. 1995. White-Collar or Hoe Handle: African Education Under British Colonial Policy 1920–1945. Helsinki: Soumen Historiallinen Seura.
Smit, Joyce. 1988. “Training of African Nurses in Nyasaland (Malawi) from 1889 to 1927.” Curationis 2 (2): 4–7.
Smits, Wendy, and Thorsten Stromback. 2001. The Economics of the Apprenticeship System. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Snell, K. D. M. 1999. “The Sunday-School Movement in England and Wales: Child Labour, Denominational Control and Working-Class Culture.” Past & Present 164: 122–168.
Spivey, Donald A. 1978. “The African Crusade for Black Industrial Schooling.” Journal of Negro History 63 (1): 1–17.
Steiner-Khamsi, Gita, and Hubert O. Quist. 2000. “The Politics of Educational Borrowing: Reopening the Case of Achimota in British Ghana.” Comparative Education Review 44 (3): 272–299.
Strayer, Robert W. 1973. “The Making of Mission Schools in Kenya: A Microcosmic Perspective.” Comparative Education Review 17 (3): 313–330.
Summers, Carol. 2002. Colonial Lessons: Africans’ Education in Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Oxford: James Currey.
Sweet, Helen. 2004. “‘Wanted: 16 Nurses of the Better Educated Type’: Provision of Nurses to South Africa in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Nursing Inquiry 11 (3): 176–184.
Switzer, Les. 1984. “The African Christian Community and Its Press in Victorian South Africa.” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 24 (96): 455–476.
Taylor, William H. 1996. Mission to Educate: A History of the Educational Work of the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in East Nigeria, 1846–1960. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Thorne, Susan. 1997. “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Negro Education. 1917. Negro Education: A Study of the Private and Higher Schools for Colored People in the United States. Prepared in Cooperation with the Phelps-Stokes Fund under the direction of Thomas Jesse Jones, Specialist in the Education of Racial Groups. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Van Leeuwen, Marco H. D. 1994. “Logic of Charity: Poor Relief in Preindustrial Europe.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (4): 589–613.
Van Horn Melton, James. 2001. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vaughan, Megan. 1991. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Vinson, Robert Trent. 2012. The Americans Are Coming: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Whitehead, Clive. 2005. “The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire.” History of Education 34 (4): 441–454.
Windel, Aaron. 2009. “British Colonial Education in Africa: Policy and Practice in the Era of Trusteeship.” History Compass 7 (1): 1–21.
Yates, Barbara A. 1978. “Shifting Goals of Industrial Education in the Congo 1878–1908.” African Studies Review 21 (1): 33–48.
Yates, Barbara A. 1980a. “White Views of Black Minds: Schooling in King Leopold’s Congo.” History of Education Quarterly 20 (1): 27–50.
Yates, Barbara A. 1980b. “The Origins of Language Policy in Zaire.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 18 (2): 257–279.
Yamada, Shoko. 2008. “Educational Borrowing as Negotiation: Re-examining the Influence of the American Black Industrial Education Model on British Colonial Education in Africa.” Comparative Education 44 (1): 21–37.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barnes, A.E. (2020). Christianity and Vocational Education in Africa. In: Abidogun, J., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Education and Indigenous Knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38277-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38277-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38276-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38277-3
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)