Education and Empire by Rebecca Swartz

Author:Rebecca Swartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319959092
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusion: Forgotten, Neglected, Ignored?

The schemes for African education in Natal were related to broader thinking about the relationship between race, civilisation and labour. The attempts of Commissioners to either isolate or amalgamate the African population spoke to competing visions of the colony’s future, with Africans either retaining a relative degree of autonomy within native locations, or being incorporated as wage labourers into white society. Competing and conflicting discourses of humanitarianism and settler colonialism shaped the responses of the local government to calls for either increased access to land and funds for education, or settler concerns over this spending. The imperial government remained ostensibly committed to its humanitarian agenda during this period, in spite of their unwillingness to spend on native education. They continued to be suspicious of the local government’s ability to manage the settler populations, as the correspondence regarding the Native Reserve Fund indicates. In this context, the local government reframed the colonial endeavour as a teaching opportunity. Rather than promoting industrial training as simply creating labourers, the generation of new labour was seen as a by-product of an inherently sympathetic, improving system, designed to elevate the moral character of Africans. There were exceptional cases in which Africans were provided high quality education in mission schools, for example, at the American missions of Adams and Inanda Colleges, or in Bishop Colenso’s short-lived Ekukhayeni school, which I discuss in more detail in the next chapter. However, the local government and settlers primarily promoted a version of education that bolstered their own power.

The perceived competition between settlers and Indigenous people was fundamental to access to education in the mid-nineteenth century. Settlers’ sense of their vulnerability and their desire to be recognised as equal to those living in Britain, meant that they continued to push for their rights to land and labour to be recognised, to the detriment of the local population. The settler colonial contexts of Natal, Western Australia and elsewhere, had a profound influence on the nature of education provided to Indigenous people. Although there were resonances between schemes for training freed people in the Caribbean and education programmes in the settler colonies, there were also ways in which particular settler concerns over Indigenous children’s education were articulated in the settler colonies. At the heart of these concerns were fears about how Indigenous people, when educated, might mount critiques of colonialism—in some scenarios, settlers feared, leading to rebellion. In spite of the reassurances of government that the settlers’ safety was their foremost priority, settlers across the empire maintained a level of suspicion towards the Indigenous population, particularly when they were being provided with resources from the colonial government that were believed to be in short supply. In Natal, the attempts on behalf of the imperial government to ‘protect’, ‘improve’ or ‘civilise’ Indigenous people were met with attempts to curtail spending on Africans’ education. These were often framed in terms of settlers’ own political sovereignty. Any legislation that did not apply to the ‘whole’ population, often taken to mean the settler population, was met with antagonism.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.