EFFECTS OF WESTERN EDUCATION

In occupation colonies the most difficult condition to satisfy was the first. Capacity to administer public sector institutions depended on holding responsible positions within them, thereby accumulating experience in shaping and implementing pol­icies.

Primary and secondary school enrollments grew dramatically throughout the colonial world in late phase 3 and phase 4. They did so in response to demand from below, the link between formal educational qualifications and access to responsible jobs in all three sectors being obvious. Changes on the supply side also contributed. Mission agencies, noting the popularity of schooling, expanded enrollments in order to convert more young people. Governments became active in their own right, establishing secondary schools and technical training institutes in agriculture, civil engineering, and public health.

The enrollment explosion dramatically increased the capacity of colonized peoples to capture the public sector. Particularly empowered were those attending secondary schools and postsecondary institutions. The vast majority of indepen­dence leaders in phase 5 received secondary school diplomas. Many had university and postgraduate degrees, having attained them when such accomplishments were virtually unheard-of among their peers. A survey of 107 chief executives of sub- Saharan and Southeast Asian countries between 1958 and 1973 listed the following distribution for highest level of education: postgraduate, 22 percent; university, 24 percent; secondary school, 49 percent; primary school, 4 percent; no formal schooling, 1 percent.¹¹ Thirty-four chief executives attended universities in the met­ropole. These included H. Kamuzu Banda (Malawi), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea- Bissau), Mohammed Hatta (Indonesia), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Seretse Khama (Botswana), Milton Margai (Sierra Leone), Agostino Neto (Angola), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Tunku Abdul Rahman (Malaya), Leopold Senghor (Senegal), and Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore). Others studied in another foreign country, among them Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) in the United States. First- generation executives outside sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia who were edu­cated in metropolitan universities include Grantley Adams (Barbados), S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike (Ceylon/Sri Lanka), Habib Bourguiba (Tunisia), M. A. Jinnah (Pa­kistan), Norman Manley (Jamaica), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), and Eric Williams (Trinidad and Tobago).¹²

The principal figure undermining French rule in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, lived in Paris from 1917 through 1923. Known then as Nguyen Ai Quoc, he never formally enrolled as a student. But he educated himself, becoming a voracious consumer of classics in Western literature and political thought. A fellow Vietnamese who knew him at the time described him as “a wraithlike figure always armed with a book— who read Zola, France, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo and Romain Rolland.”¹³ When Emperor Khai Dinh visited France in 1922 the young radical wrote him a hostile letter.

Postprimary education increased the capacity of non-Europeans to capture state power by giving them the formal qualifications to hold responsible positions in dominant institutions. It trained and certified lawyers, engineers, journalists, doc­tors, and other professionals who could take up employment outside of government and hence be better positioned than civil servants to speak out against the regime, become active in political parties, and run for office.

Schooling imparted fluency in the ruler’s language, enabling people to com­municate with officials in informal as well as formal settings. Command of the colonizer’s language was virtually a precondition for legislative office, as parliamen­tary business was normally carried on only in that tongue.

Schooling increased the capacity of individuals to organize colony wide politi­cal movements. A territory’s leading secondary school recruited young people from many parts of the colony and from diverse ethnic, religious, and class backgrounds. Examples from Africa were Achimota College (Gold Coast), Alliance High School (Kenya), Gordon Memorial College (Sudan), King’s College, Lagos (Nigeria), and ficole Normale William-Ponty (Senegal). Shared memories of hazing, eccentric teachers, athletic endeavors, school pranks, and the like created lifelong emotional bonds cutting across colonial society’s cleavage lines. Social networks formed in school—and reinforced at class reunions nostalgically recalling the good old days— could be activated when the time came to found nationalist movements and parties. Those who shared the old school tie also shared a European language, which permit­ted easy communication among people from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Ecole William-Ponty recruited throughout French West Africa. Personal ties among its graduates help explain why the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (rda) functioned for years after its founding in 1946 as the dominant party in several territories. School ties made for more amicable communication among political rivals, as Ruth Schachter Morgenthau notes: “That at Ponty an rda leader saved the life of an iom man; that as students rda Ivory Coast leaders learned to have confi­dence in the integrity of a Progressiste leader, facilitated the quick transfer of partisan loyalties which occurred periodically among French West African party leaders after the war.”¹⁵

A similar integrative process, at a transnational as well as national level, oc­curred when students from several colonies came to the metropole to study. The West African Students’ Union in London, for example, ran a hostel for young people from several English-speaking colonies. Ladipo Solanke, the union’s most outstand­ing figure from 1925 to 1945, encouraged hostel residents to think along pan-African lines.¹⁶ Young intellectuals from France’s colonies met in Paris. There they evolved the negritude movement in the 1930s and founded the influential journal Presence Africaine. After World War II students from Portugal’s three African colonies met in Lisbon, where they discussed shared problems and began to devise common strat­egies for the armed struggles to come. Networks initiated in the metropole permitted rapid spread of information and morale-boosting support from one colony to an­other. When nationalists from several territories acted in concert they increased leverage on the metropole. When a territory became independent the prior existence of interterritorial networks gave added impetus to the international demonstra­tion effect.

Students’ overseas experiences could directly increase their capacity for ef­fective action later on. Nkrumah writes that during his years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania

I made time to acquaint myself with as many political organizations in the United States as I could. These included the Republicans, the Democrats, the Communists and the Trotskyites. It was in connection with the last movement when I met one of its leading members, Mr. C. L. R. James, and through him I learned how an underground movement worked.... My aim was to learn the technique of organization. I knew that when I eventually returned to the Gold Coast I was going to be faced with this problem. I knew that whatever the programme for the solution of the colonial question might be, success would depend first of all on the organization adopted. I concentrated on finding a formula by which the whole whole colonial question and the problem of imperi­alism could be solved. I read Hegel, Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mazzini. The writings of these men did much to influence me in my revolutionary ideas and activities.¹⁷

In many ways education increased the will of colonized peoples to assert autonomy. Young people in schools staffed by European instructors and administra­tors had rare opportunities to see colonizers up close. Upon inspection, Europeans failed to live up to their carefully projected self-image of mental and moral superi­ority, becoming instead mere human beings with the full range of failings and foibles humans exhibit. The less intimidated school graduates were by their rulers, the more willing they were to consider challenging the status quo.

Advanced study abroad entailed extensive interaction with Europeans or, in the United States, with people of European descent. The results were decidedly mixed. Many white people treated colonial students decently and respectfully, while others practiced discrimination and sought to humiliate them. It was not possible to forget the bitter experiences even if one wanted to.

Blatant racial discrimination against students from Africa and the Caribbean convinced many to struggle not just for their territory’s independence but also for liberation of black people everywhere from colonialism and racism. The pan-African component of nationalism in these two regions markedly accelerated decolonization in both once Ghana, under Nkrumah’s leadership, became the first independent sub- Saharan state. Another ardent pan-Africanist, the Trinidadian George Padmore, was among Nkrumah’s closest confidantes and political advisers.

Living in the metropole gave students occasion to reflect on its political, eco­nomic, and cultural relations with their homelands. The metropole was politically free and economically affluent. Why should not the colony be the same? Could the colony’s poverty have been caused by the drain of its resources to the metropole and the undercompensation of its labor force for their economic contributions? If Euro­peans were not the superior beings they pretended to be, how could they justify subjugating people elsewhere?

The effort to answer such questions was, for many, profoundly radicalizing. Young people from the Dutch East Indies studying in Holland were the first to use the term “Indonesia” and the first to call publicly (in 1924) for independence.¹⁹ Four Indian Muslims living in England coined the term “Pakistan” and in 1933 issued the first call for a separate Pakistani state.²⁰ For some, residence in the metropole re­defined how colonialism was understood. To live in the imperial center was to be intensely aware that one’s homeland was part of a transcontinental empire. To par­ticipate in European intellectual life was to be exposed to theories by figures on the ideological left, such as John Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin, linking colonial­ism to capitalist exploitation. These theories appealed because they combined a searing moral critique of colonialism with a historically grounded explanation for European global dominance, while confidently asserting that the future lay with the oppressed. The fusion of particularist nationalism with broader anti-imperial and anticapitalist themes is well illustrated in Le Proems de la Colonisation Frangaise, a book Ho Chi Minh wrote while living in Paris. Writes Jean Lacouture,

The title on the cover was written in three languages—Arabic, Chinese and French. Vietnam was given the most space because the author had more experi­ence with the abuses of colonialism there, but he tried scrupulously to cite other examples of colonial abuses from Dahomey, Madagascar and the West Indies.

The book was not a nationalist protest which cited the case of a single oppressed country, but an indictment of an international system which the author felt should be opposed on an equally international scale. He ends the penultimate chapter with a manifesto for the Intercolonial Union, concluding with Karl Marx’s famous “Workers of the world, unite.”²¹

Many young people returned home from years abroad with more deeply engrained anticolonial convictions than when they set out for Europe. That return was often a deeply unsettling experience, for it highlighted the Western-educated elite’s double alienation: politically from the metropole and culturally from its own society. Individuals who had studied in Oxford, Paris, Louvain, or the Hague were themselves more fluent in a European language than in their mother tongue,²² more accustomed to the lifestyle of affluent Europe than to the austere ways of impover­ished homelands. Earnest idealists who felt called to lead their people to freedom found the sense of cultural and psychological distance from the people very painful. In Nehru’s words,

I have become a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere. Perhaps my thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me as she does to all her children, in innumerable ways; and behind me lie, somewhere in the subconscious, racial mem­ories of a hundred... generations of Brahmins. I cannot get rid of either that past in­heritance or my recent acquisitions. They are both part of me, and, though they help me in both the East and the West, they also create in me a feeling of spiritual loneli­ness not only in public activities but in life itself. I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.”²³

It did not help when officials scornfully charged that “overeducated natives” could not possibly represent the masses because they had become so westernized.

The emotional intensity with which many highly educated persons strove for independence may have been driven by a need to compensate for the alienation schooling produced. Intellectuals may have wanted to demonstrate to themselves as well as to sneering critics that the long years of distancing from their cultural roots had not obscured their vision so much as afforded them a platform from which to articulate the emerging nation’s deepest yearnings.

Schoolchildren whose lessons dispensed steady doses of Eurocentrism were more directly exposed than the unschooled to ideas instilling an inferiority complex. Yet the most effective antidote to this complex was more education. Precisely because schooling propagated European culture, each additional year brought students closer to cultural equality with their mentors. Equality came at a high price: acceptance of the colonizer’s standards and a more or less explicit rejection of one’s own culture. Nonetheless, when non-Europeans won diplomas that rulers had to acknowledge as valid measures of intellectual achievement, the notion of European racial superiority was weakened. Those who did well academically could go about their lives less burdened by doubts about their intrinsic worth.

Research conducted in the Gold Coast in the early 1950s by Gustav Jahoda confirms the connection between educational level and psychological outlook Illit­erates in Jahoda’s sample, having essentially nothing in common culturally with their rulers, felt dependent on Europeans but not inferior to them. Those with primary education were most likely to exhibit an inferiority complex. Those who had at­tended secondary or postsecondary institutions had a greater sense of autonomy and felt confident that they could replace Europeans in positions of responsibility as the colony evolved toward self-government.²⁴

Additional schooling increased one’s ability to analyze the situation with an independent, critical mind. When Albert Tevoedjre cited the poem he learned as a schoolchild, his goal was to attack colonial education for deliberately undermining the self-confidence of young Dahomeans. One of the most accomplished products of the education system had the intellectual tools and psychological outlook to argue persuasively that the system was bankrupt.

Mission schools contributed to independence movements by teaching people about the Bible. Granted, the Book of books contains narratives and sayings that can be put to almost any purpose. As noted earlier, apologists for colonial rule often cited the Pauline injunction to obey constituted authority. But ultimately the Bible con­tains messages of liberation and hope for all human beings. All are created in God’s own image, affirms Genesis. All are freed from the bonds of sin by the life and death of God’s son, Jesus, preaches Paul. The Bible says too much about the divine yearning for human self-fulfillment to be a comfort to repressive rulers, be they Nebuchad­nezzar or Herod or those of a later era.

For many colonized peoples the Bible offered an extended, theologically grounded argument for individual and collective liberation from foreign rule. When a catechist learned that the people of Israel were subjected to forced labor under pharaoh, removed from their promised land to Babylon, and incorporated into a European empire centered in distant Rome, it was easy to draw parallels with the modern colonial situation. And God clearly sided with the disempowered nation of Israel. When in 1921 the Congolese prophet Simon Kimbangu acted out the story of David and Goliath in front of a Belgian district officer, both men knew the drama’s political implications. The understandably worried administrator had Kimbangu arrested for subversive activities soon afterward. Even so, the imprisoned prophet and his followers remained confident that the God of David was on their side. Throughout southern Africa from the early twentieth century onward and in Kenya in phase 4, independent religious movements affirmed the Bible but rejected Euro­pean dominance of church structures. Indigenous versions of liberation theology promulgated by these movements shaped subsequent nationalist discourse.²⁵

The Zimbabwean nationalist Ndabaningi Sithole cogently summarizes the destabilizing effects of mission education on colonial rule:

The Christian Church has introduced a new spirit of learning without which no nation can have a truly balanced progress. It is this creative spirit which helped to sustain African nationalism and without which the whole idea would end in dismal failure....

The Bible redeemed the African individual from the power of supersti­tion, individuality-crushing tradition, witchcraft, and other reactionary forces. The same Bible helped the African individual to reassert himself above colonial powers! If the Bible teaches that the individual is unique, of infinite worth before God, colonialism in many respects said just the opposite, and it became only a matter of time before one ousted the other. The Bible-liberated African reas­serted himself not only over tribal but also over colonial authority.²⁶

Sithole quotes a South African: “When Europeans took our country we fought against them with our spears, but they defeated us because they had better weapons and so colonial power was set up against our wishes. But lo the missionary came in time and laid explosives under colonialism. The Bible is now doing what we could not do with our spears.”²⁷ Not just Africans but the colonized in all lands were set on the path to freedom by the Bible.

That Christianity was an integral component of the triple assault demonstrates the self-defeating nature of European colonialism. When products of mission schools cited biblical chapter and verse to argue that colonialism ran counter to God’s plan, rulers were placed on the defensive. Would-be civilizers found it uncomfortable enough to be called uncivilized. The critique was even more biting when the moral standards used to reach this harsh judgment were their own. The religion that inspired Europeans to go out to all the world eventually inspired people in other lands to indict the messengers for behavior contradicting the message.

In summary, continuity of overseas empires was threatened when colonial residents began to overcome the most serious obstacles to organizing for indepen­dence. For settlers in phases i and 2 the prime obstacle was unwillingness to break with the metropole. The passage of time made that break less unthinkable. For non­Europeans in phases 4 and 5 the prime obstacle was low capacity to capture public sector institutions. Diffusion of Western education greatly enhanced this capacity. Knowledge of European history and the Bible is incompatible with a permanently submissive stance.

Nationalist leaders in phases 2 and 5 did not feel ready for independence until they had become intensely ambivalent about the metropole. Settler elites moved toward autonomy when they experienced psychological distance from lands to which they had long felt close emotional affinity. Non-European elites were ready for independence when their educational experiences brought them close—psychologi­cally, culturally, in many cases physically—to a metropole that had hitherto been distant in these respects. It was precisely the positive identification with many aspects of the colonizer’s lifestyle and values that made racial discrimination all the more painful and unjustifiable when it occurred. Positive identification with the ideals of European civilization sensitized non-European elites to contradictions between these ideals and colonial domination. The only way to uphold ideals colonizers claimed to value was to reject colonizers’ claims to rule.