Peter Kallaway

Editorial: Imperial, global and local in histories of colonial education

This collection of papers arises out of a workshop at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in July 2016, entitled Colonial Education in Comparative Perspective, sponsored by the UCT Research Committee and the South African Comparative and History of Education Society. (SACHES). This followed the workshop Colonial Education in Africa, also held at the University of Cape Town in 2013, from which selected papers were recently published in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective (Peter Lang, 2016). The 2016 workshop brought together a number of scholars, some early career and others well established in the field, to consider the nature of colonial education in diverse geographic and temporal locations, both within Africa and more broadly. The workshop took place at a public university in South Africa, in the midst of intense (and ongoing) debate about the South African higher education system. Student protests, which began with the opposition to the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on UCT’s campus in March 2015, called attention to the colonial legacies of institutions of higher learning in South Africa today. The #RhodesMustFall movement also provoked important questions about the nature of curricula in South African universities: were these simply reproducing systems of knowledge and thought authored by and for actors in the West, or did they speak to African knowledges and thought?1 UCT as an institution began its life as the South African College, an extension of a white male high school that catered for the settler elite (both English and Dutch speaking), which aimed to inculcate the values of British colonialism and promote group social cohesion.2 In the early twentieth century, a personal bequest from Cecil Rhodes saw the institution moving out of the city to its current Groote Schuur campus where it stands today. The workshop participants were conscious of the importance of holding this meeting at this particular historical moment and in this location. This made the political project of writing about and drawing students into discussions of colonial education even more pressing. If we are to truly understand the nature of our unequal education system today, it must be placed in a far broader historical context. The colonial situation, as diverse as it was across space and time, fostered the development of education systems that promoted certain kinds of knowledge over others, given the key role of education in social reproduction. The resulting papers from this workshop cover a range of themes and topics, including examining the relationships between race, class, gender and colonial education, and the role of government and missionaries in education provision. In this introduction, we map out the challenges in writing histories of colonial education. We then outline an approach to writing histories of colonial education that takes into account both the micro-level everyday politics of

Diedrich Westermann and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Inter-War Era

ABSTRACT Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956) was a key figure in the establishment of African studies in Germany and Britain. He was a pioneer German linguist and member of the founding generation of German Africanists (Afrikanistik) who played a significant role in the field. As professor at Berlin University, the co-director of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) in London from 1926 and an adviser to Lord Hailey’s research team for the monumental ‘An African Survey’ (1938), he was central to the promotion of policy research in the African colonial context during the inter-war era. His own work focused on the phonetics and orthography of the Sudanic languages and the methodologies he pioneered were widely adopted in West Africa. As editor of the journals Koloniale Rundschau (Berlin) and Africa (London), with links to Rockefeller research funding, he was able, with Malinowski and J. H. Oldham, to wield considerable influence over the shape of anthropological and linguistic research for more than 20 years. His links to the Colonial Office and the International Missionary Council (IMC) in London and the Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Colonial Department of the Third Reich, meant that he was uniquely placed as an adviser to both governments. This would seem to raise important questions about the similarities and differences in the climates of scientific work in these diverse contexts which has to date not attracted much attention. Westermann’s career provides a portrait of the complex academic inter-war era that Africanists scholars needed to navigate in a world charged with political conflict and the seeds of development debates that were to come to fruition with UNESCO initiatives in the post-war years.

‘Comrade Professor’ – Phil Bonner

Phil Bonner joined the History Department at Wits University in 1971 and played a leading role in the development of African History in South Africa and internationally. He was part of a cohort of young revisionist and Africanist scholars who challenged liberal orthodoxies in the academy and produced new histories that emphasised the experiences of the black majority. His book on the Swazi kingdom, Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires (1983), exemplified this scholarship. Professor Bonner was a founding member in 1977 of the Wits History Workshop andwas its head from the late 1980s until his retirement in 2012. The History Workshop pioneered social history – history from below – in South Africa and under his supervision numerous postgraduate students undertook original research on the lives and struggles of black workers, women, youth and migrants in locations, mines, factories and villages. Phil Bonner’s work ranged from the evolution of the Swazi state, to a series of deep local histories of townships, to a turn to biography later in his life, making him not just one of the most significant historians of his generation, but one of the most versatile. He wrote on squatter movements, the complexities of urbanisation, histories of black resistance and archaeology.