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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Missionaries, Marxists and Magic: Power and the Politics of Literacy in South-East Africa |
Author: | Harries, Patrick |
Year: | 2001 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
Volume: | 27 |
Issue: | 3 |
Period: | September |
Pages: | 405-427 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Southern Africa Mozambique |
Subjects: | reading missions power literacy Religion and Witchcraft History and Exploration Education and Oral Traditions Politics and Government Ethnic and Race Relations |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/823308 |
Abstract: | This article challenges the idea that literacy is a universal skill that can be acquired. Instead, the author suggests that people learn to read and write in different ways in different spatial and temporal contexts; and that the interaction between literacy and other social forces determines the way in which the skills of reading and writing are both acquired and perceived. This leads the author to question the idea of literacy as a politically neutral indicator of progress. Elaborating on this perspective, the author examines how a group of Swiss missionaries spread a set of Protestant reading practices and texts in late 19th and early 20th-century southeast Africa. He argues that their experience at home led them to view literacy as a revolutionary tool for the transformation of society. He then looks at the different contexts in which Africans adopted the skills of literacy, and the different meanings with which they imbued the practice. Next, he ties these ways of reading to the interpretation of texts and local networks of power. The final part examines literacy as a sign and source of power employed by a new class of national politicians and draws parallels between the missionaries' objectives in pursuing literacy and those of the mass literacy campaigns organized by Frelimo in Mozambique. Notes, ref., sum. |