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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | African History and Imperial Culture in Colonial Nigerian Schools |
Author: | Zachernuk, Philip S. |
Year: | 1998 |
Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
Volume: | 68 |
Issue: | 4 |
Pages: | 484-505 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Nigeria Great Britain |
Subjects: | colonialism educational policy history education Education and Oral Traditions History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1161163 |
Abstract: | Evaluations of colonial education policy tend to treat it as a tool for applying imperial ideology, which - among other things - denied 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. It argues that colonial educators in Nigeria did not simply deny African history and dominate African minds. Rather, African history was simultaneously denied, delimited and, at least partially, described. A few colonial educators went much further, to actively promote pride in African history. Ideas about history education also generated conditions in which colonial subjects - in particular those connected with the colonial education system - could write histories which reached beyond, around and underneath the imperatives the imperialists intended to impart. These writers used colonial educational media, constrained but not silenced by their colonial situation. The study argues that recognizing the ambivalence of this aspect of imperial culture opens new and more fruitful approaches to colonial intellectual history in general. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. |