Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030278014
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The colonial state opened a middle school and a high school for Italians in Mogadishu respectively in 1932 and 1937. The only educational option for non-Italians remained mission-run vocational education, lasting until the establishment of a middle school for Somalis in 1950.74 To retrace the social and economic repercussions of the 1928 Agreement and the overall policy of curriculum adaptation remains a research perspective worth exploring in the future.75

Conclusion

Corni’s shift from assimilationist to adapted curriculum is not surprising if placed in the broader context of racial thinking and religious policy in 1930s Italian colonialism. By then, a more rigid and biologically based racial hierarchy emerged throughout the empire, which had an impact on colonial discourse, prescription, and practice. In this respect, the treatment of “mixed-race” children is exemplary. In 1933, a law established that meticci received full Italian citizenship when they were not officially recognized by their fathers, who were to blame for that; after 1935, the fascist regime established a rigid colonial hierarchy based on biological racism and the purity of race. According to a 1940 law, the meticci were colonial subjects and could not receive Italian citizenship given their African heritage. Historians have interpreted such shift as a product of the climate of suspicion and state surveillance brought about by the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, where fascist Italy was diplomatically isolated and employed racial differentiation as a tool of governance in the Horn of Africa.76 The matter goes beyond this essay’s research goals, but it is still important to locate the transition from assimilationist to adapted curriculum in Italian Somalia within an imperial transition toward racial legislation and segregation. Further, in the 1930s Mussolini launched a pro-Muslim and pro-Arab policy in order to find military and economic partners in the Middle East and to pacify anti-colonial unrest in Muslim-majoritarian Libya. This policy culminated in the late 1930s, when, after the incorporation of Ethiopia, about nine million Muslims were under Italian rule. Not only did fascist propagandistic publications circulated in the Arab world as never before, but in 1937 Mussolini self-proclaimed himself “protector of Islam” in Tripoli. I suggest that apparently opposite trends in colonial and foreign politics converged in the integration of Islamic elements into missionary teaching. While the emergence of racial law resulted in the increase of curriculum differentiation, Mussolini’s simultaneous pro-Arab policy allowed for the teaching of Islam among Muslim students.77

The history of missionary education in Italian Somalia during the first decade of fascist rule is overall not surprising either when placed in the history of global education and European colonialism. As explained by the editors in the general introduction to this volume, historians have recently shown how the inter-war period constituted a transitional phase in the “civilizing mission” discourse and practice. As the League of Nations proclaimed the “well-being and development of peoples” a “sacred trust of civilization,” both British and French officials increasingly justified their policies as aimed toward native development and consequent rise in native life standards.78 Published in 1922 and 1925, two inter-colonial

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