Missionary Rivalry And Educational Expansion In Nigeria 1885 1945

Also covers the post-1945 period.

The contribution of Western education to the creation of an African-educated elite is well documented. What is not equally well documented is the fact that African-educated elites have used their education and the schools to perpetuate their dominance by denying the poor the knowledge necessary to protect their political and economic rights and to advance in society. On the other hand, educated elites in Africa make opportunities available to their own members through selective ordering, legitimization of certain language forms and learning processes in schools, and legitimization of elite codes and experiences to the exclusion of the histories, experiences, and worldviews of the poor. This book highlights the processes by which the poor in Africa have been disenfranchised and marginalized through schools' ascriptive mechanisms, and explains why African economic development is very slow.

In Religion and the Making of Nigeria, Olufemi Vaughan examines how Christian, Muslim, and indigenous religious structures have provided the essential social and ideological frameworks for the construction of contemporary Nigeria. Using a wealth of archival sources and extensive Africanist scholarship, Vaughan traces Nigeria’s social, religious, and political history from the early nineteenth century to the present. During the nineteenth century, the historic Sokoto Jihad in today’s northern Nigeria and the Christian missionary movement in what is now southwestern Nigeria provided the frameworks for ethno-religious divisions in colonial society. Following Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960, Christian-Muslim tensions became manifest in regional and religious conflicts over the expansion of sharia, in fierce competition among political elites for state power, and in the rise of Boko Haram. These tensions are not simply conflicts over religious beliefs, ethnicity, and regionalism; they represent structural imbalances founded on the religious divisions forged under colonial rule.

This book brings together the newest and the most innovative scholarship on Nigerian children—one of the least researched groups in African colonial history. It engages the changing conceptions of childhood, relating it to the broader themes about modernity, power, agency, and social transformation under imperial rule.

This book is the first to examine the complex and contradictory history of Classics in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria. It investigates how Classical Studies, as an integral part of colonial education, enforced a notion of cultural inferiority on African subjects, but conversely played an enabling role in nationalist expression. The enquiry is structured around three main questions: how Classics contributed to the formation of a new class of Europeanising West Africans in the late 19th century; how Classics was implicated in the ideological struggles of the early twentieth century over the desirability of 'practical' or 'agricultural' education; and how the uses of Classics changed in the years leading up to independence.

This study focuses upon the fiscal aspects of John Wesley's evangelical organization, and explicates and analyzes the role of money within Wesley's concept of, and attempt at, theological and social reform. It consists of a general discussion of Wesley and money, and a Ledger which outlines, year by year, the specific receipts and payments of Wesley and the Methodist Conference.

This volume examines the major influences shaping student cognitive achievement and considers their relative importance. It does not tell people what to do in their classrooms, but provides them with a compendium of research summarising what is known about the major influences shaping students' academic achievement.

For the last two decades, child domestic work carried out in Nigeria as well as in other countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, has been given increasing attention by international policy makers and scientists. Yet, the research mainly focuses on the living and working conditions of these children, which also forms part of this book. However, in addition, political and pedagogical measures of intervention employed on international, national and local levels on child domestic work are also at the centre of analysis. Against the background of post-colonial theory the author studies the effects of social modernisation in Nigeria as a rapidly growing national economy on child domestic work and historically retraces the origins of this form of child work back to indigenous modes of socialisation and social security within the (pre-colonial) Nigerian extended family network. The research is based on field work in Nigeria, including interviews and documentary analysis.