History of Education in African societies (2024 – 2029)

Convenors:
Pierre Guidi (France)
Ellen Vea Rosnes (Norway)
Florence Wenzek (France)
Orlando Chemane (Mozambique)

Other members
Alice Jekayinfa (Nigeria)
Grace Akanbi (Nigeria)

This SWG proposal is a continuation of the work carried out within ISCHE on the history of education in colonial and postcolonial contexts, from the conference held in Lisbon in 1993 (Nóvoa, Depaepe & Johanninger (eds.) 1995), to the workshop organised in 2013 in Cape Town by Peter Kallaway & Rebecca Swartz, and to the most recent publications (Matasci, Jerónimo & Dores (eds.) 2020; Kallaway and Swartz (eds.) 2016; Bagchi, Fuchs & Rousmaniere (eds.) 2014). It also aims to continue the joint work undertaken in two books to be published in early 2024 (Vea Rosnes, Guidi & Martineau (eds.), 2024; Guidi, Martineau & Wenzek (eds.), 2024). It aims to fill a gap in research conducted on the African continent by building a intensive international network and to better integrate African history into a global history of education.

By establishing this Standing Working Group, we aim to encourage dialogue between researchers working on the history of education in Africa. Indeed, the history of education in Africa is a more recent field of study than the history of education in Europe, since it only began to be written in the 1960s, and more intensively in the 1990s. This research suffers from a lack of dialogue between the different scholars involved: the language barriers between research in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are rarely overcome. Even works conducted in the same language do not always dialogue with each other, this due to the fragmentation of the contexts studied: some fifty states, several colonial empires, contrasting religious contexts, dozens of different missionary organisations. However, there are strong chronological overviews as well as continental dynamics in many educational developments: the establishment of missionary and colonial education in the 19th-20th centuries which have undermined pre-existing forms of education, the move to national education systems in the aftermath of independence, and the increased role of private and international actors in the educational field since the 1980s and 1990s. Given the scattered nature of the available scholarship, we aim to contribute to an enhanced structuring and visibility of African educational histories. With this SWG, we also aim to respond to recent social developments – the Black Lives Matter movement, or the debates around the legacies of slavery and colonisation both in Africa and European countries – and point to the need to increase our awareness of the past. We need to critically improve the production and dissemination of knowledge on the history of the unequal relations between Europe and African societies, with a special attention to African societies’ perspectives and agency. We place ourselves in the wake of historians of Africa who have worked to overcome the long domination of a colonial history that relied only on sources produced by colonial actors. Such an history was blind to the original experience of African societies, whether it be resistance, negotiation or creative appropriation (Summers, 2002).

To this end, we suggest a reflection on the sources of the history of education in Africa, and on the perspectives they provide for research and teaching. In particular, we would like to attend to the specificity of these sources and to ask how they can help us to shed new light on certain major issues within the history of education.

The specific constraints of African history have led historiography to use different sources from those dominating the history of education in Europe; or, more precisely, to privilege the use of certain types of sources with regard to their availability. Oral sources, for instance have been very early, and still are, of crucial importance (Prins 2001): but what is the specific contribution of oral source material? How do oral sources contribute to work on recently developing issues such as children’s and pupils’ voices? Written productions from the private sphere, such as personal diaries, have only recently been investigated (Barber (ed.) 2006): which new perspectives do these ego-documents offer? Press sources have also become increasingly important in recent African history either as a means of accessing the voices of the colonised or as a way of filling the gaps in postcolonial archives (Peterson, Hunter and Newell (eds.) 2016): how does this particular source material contributes to the history of education (Labrune-Badiane and Smith 2018)?

The history of education in Africa is also written on the basis of more ‘classical’ sources, such as archival materials. Much of this material has, however, not yet been exploited. One aim of the SWG is to reflect on methodological and theoretical consequences of making use of archival sources in the context of African educational history. Possible questions are: how do we already, and which opportunities are there to make use of archives when reconstructing African educational history? What kind of subjects can be discovered in the archives, which voices do they represent and how can we analyse the agency of subjects whose voices are not immediately found in the archives?

The list of established source material can be extended: missionary sources, statistical sources, material remains, school archives. How do these sources renew our understanding of educational phenomena? What do the silences tell us about the history of education in Africa, and how can we turn them into meaningful narratives? The question of silences and omissions also invites us to work on the construction of sources, from their production to their constitution as sources for history.

In the proposed SWG, we would like to reflect on how our sources help and hinder us to move away from a Eurocentric vision of school and childhood. Indeed, the fact that the institution of the school in Africa was predominantly developed on European models raises specific issues – can it be described, for instance, as the educationalisation of African societies (Smeyers and Depaepe (eds.) 2008) ? This particular development prevents us to see that on the African continent school not necessarily is the only place for socialisation and education in childhood. Not all families for instance choose the school as their main means of education. The question we therefore would like to ask is how we can reconstruct the history of education in Africa in such a way that it can help us to rethink the universality of the Western school paradigm. Among many others, the issues of working children and family strategies of education, both in and out of school, are particularly interesting themes in such a perspective (Balagopalan 2002; George 2014).

Given the above-mentioned focus of the SWG, we particularly invite pieces of research from across the African continent and the Indian Ocean islands, but also from the Black Atlantic. Beyond these contexts, we are also interested in reflections on educational circulations between Africa and other regions of the world, especially other continents of the South: Asia, South America, Oceania, which were also formerly subject to colonial empires.

Evidence that the objectives do not overlap with existing Standing Working Groups (SWGs)

None of the SWG has a geographical specialisation and our proposal responds to a specific need on Africa, insofar as a certain number of ISCHE members carry out research on this space, but they lack the means and places to dialogue and exchange on their results.

Proposed SWG activities

• Each ISCHE meeting would be the opportunity of having two panels with 3 to 5 papers each.
• In addition, we would like to organise 4 online meetings and seminars throughout the year.
• The collective discussion thus initiated would lead to the submission of a Special Issue to Paedagogica Historica.