Berman Edward H. (1980) “Educational colonialism in Africa: the role of American foundations, 1910-1945” in Arnove, Robert (ed.) Philanthropy and Cul

Berman Edward H. (1980) “Educational colonialism in Africa: the role of American foundations, 1910-1945” in Arnove, Robert (ed.) Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. pages 179-201.

Rockefeller’s General Education Board (formed in 1902), Jeanes Fund (formed in 1907), Rosenwald Fund – largesse focused on ‘American Negroes’ – Tuskegee Institute is an example.

Jeanes Schools – a concept nurtured by Booker T. Washington and James Dillard – transplanted to east Africa (Kenya) in 1925 – adaptive education (taken from Aaron Windel, at http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:52Bwc3cuT1sJ:blog.lib.umn.edu/manu0014/gwmh/Windel_GWMH.rtf+%22Jeanes+School%22+%2Bphilosophy&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1) Essentially, these schools sought to train Africans to live better rural lives, per the understandings brought to them by white missionaries representing their own version of Tuskegee and Hampton Institute teachings.

Phelps-Stoke Fund – supported by Carnegie Corporation, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and Rockefeller-created International Education Board – for work in Africa, exporting Tuskegee model, bringing Africans to USA (Tuskegee and other HBCUs, largely).

1911 – Phelps-Stokes Fund founded – arose out of Peabody Fund and Slater Fund efforts in the late 19th century to sponsor Black education in the American South. Various Capon Springs conferences are noted (1898; 1899, 1901; etc.)

By 1923, Jeanes Fund and Phelps-Stokes were working together formally. In 1925, the first Jeanes School was built in 1925.

Anson Phelps-Stokes – first president of the Fund, a Rockefeller Foundation dude, joined in 1912 by Thomas Jesse Jones (Scottish educator who’d worked at Hampton and Tuskegee). Jones would be with Phelps-Stokes 32 years (up to WWII)

p. 183: “Although he would spend his next thirty-two years at the Phelps-Stokes Fund arguing that his educational philosophy was based solely on objective data (he was trained as a sociologist) and the best interests of black people in America and Africa, Jones’ anti-egalitarian and white supremacist views were always close to the surface. . . .

It should be emphasized that Jones’ viewpoint was not an aberration among those responsible for Negro education from 1900 to 1945. Rather, it was the representative view of the philanthropists and their agents. In the context of American social thought throughout the period, these philanthropists were considered to be liberals or, in Harlan’s words, “moderate progressives.” They acquired this designation because they were “moderate in the North on the delicate racial and sectional issue, and progressive in the South in the limited sense that . . . they offered education as a key to regional progress”.”

Phelps-Stokes Fund as an early proponent of the kind of pragmatic, utilitarian, practical education for Blacks that would enter the picture in Africa post-WWII.

From the conclusion – pages 194-195: “From its incorporation in 1911 until 1945 the Phelps-Stokes Fund based its actions on several premises:
(1) that the experience of the Negro South was directly relevant to black Africa;
(2) that neither the African nor the American Negro would be self-governing, or even have a large say in his welfare, in the foreseeable future; and,
(3) that a narrowly defined vocational education could be used to train American Negroes and Africans to become productive, docile, and permanent underclasses in their respective societies.”

Educators like W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson would argue against Jones’ stance that African-American (and eventually, African) interests in education could fully benefit by having White men represent their interests.

p. 185: “The Africanization of the Phelps-Stokes/Tuskegee policy dates from a visit to Tuskegee in 1912 by J.H. Oldham and Alek Fraser, both influential British missionary-educators, who immediately sensed the possibilities for adaptation of Booker T. Washington educational activities to Britain’s African colonies. . . . for the first time British colonial policymakers were searching seriously for a coherent educational policy to implement in their dependencies.”

1919 – American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society – called for a survey of African education that J.H. Oldham saw as a pathway for mapping out and organizing British interests in education of Africans. Phelps-Stokes Fund was where the proposal was directed, and the Fund eventually undertook the survey.

African Education Commission – 1920/1921 – toured eight countries/colonies in western and southern Africa. Stressed agricultural and manual training education – no education for leadership, no elite formation, just straight functionalism within a colonial society.

1923 – British Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa – formed by Oldham to incorporate the AEC ideas. – coordinated British African educational policy through the 1930s, in line with Phelps-Stokes

1923 – second trip by Phelps-Stokes – this time to east and central and southern Africa. Here again, Jones “stressed the importance of offering the African masses only the most restricted vocational training, and citing the overwhelmingly rural nature of African societies, particularly agricultural education. Implicit in his pronouncements was the assumption that African societies would remain rural indefinitely, while at the same time providing the European-dominated sectors with the requisite raw materials and labor to support industrialization.” (p. 188)

Jones and the Phelps-Stokes Fund pushed for Jeanes Schools and similar undertakings in Africa because of the deep-felt idea that Africans were incapable of any kind of literary, or intellectual education – such efforts would be wasteful.

1925 – as stated above, Jeanes School established in Kenya, at Kabete, with $37,500 in financing from the Carnegie Corporation. Carnegie would continue to sponsor/support Jeanes Schools and similar training centers in Africa up to the onset of WWII in 1939. This was in the spirit of supporting the ‘conventional wisdom” of the day regarding Black and African education.

1926 – Jones receives a grant of $35,000 from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund to explore expansion of Jeanes Schools throughout Africa. He pursues possibilities in North Rhodesia, Transvaal, Bechuanaland, Natal, Basutoland, Cape Province, Nyasaland, Portuguese East Africa, Tanganyika, Uganda, Zanzibar, and Southern Rhodesia. Also, a “Tuskegee in Liberia” attempt from earlier in the century is reviewed.

1927 – Carnegie Corporation allocates $500,000 for work being done in Africa – by Phelps-Stokes Fund and other entities. With multiple board members having close ties to Phelps-Stokes Fund efforts, the Carnegie Corporation support seems to have been near automatic.

Over time, regarding the Liberia experiment – which Berman writes about for several pages – it comes to be clear that Jones and his Phelps-Stokes efforts view Liberia as if it were merely “. . . a Negro community in the southern United States.” (p. 192) Apparently, the Phelps-Stokers were upset that Liberians could be upset at this presumption.

Another example of early Phelps-Stokes work in Africa – their straight up assumption that they would work not just with colonial authorities in East Africa, but with white authorities (now Afrikaaner) in proto-apartheid era South Africa.

p. 194: Black South Africans, like their black American counterparts, could actively partake of the best of their respective societies just so long as they were content to remain, in Stokes’ words, “junior partners in the firm”.”

p. 196: “The small grants voted by the Phelps-Stokes Fund trustees to support a vocationally oriented school in southern Africa or to finance the program to bring carefully selected British colonial educators and missionaries to examine the schools within Tuskegee’s orbit were not nearly so important as the catalytic effect that the Fund’s advocacy had on larger donor foundations, e.g. the Carengie Corporation.”

p. 197: “Large-scale implementation of the Phelps-Stokes/Tuskegee concept of education would have altered the course of African history radically (as it did of American history), and not in the African’s favor. For a long time the Phelps-Stokes Fund advocated a policy which not only was pedagogically questionable, but which was strongly racist as well. Phelps-Stokes Fund policies in Africa were intended to perpetuate indefinitely the unequal relationships characteristic of the colonial situation, a situation in which Africans were confronted with policies beneficial primarily to the metropolitan powers and their representatives in the colonies.”