The Relationship between the educational and economic policies of the European powers in colonial West Africa

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship, if there is any, between the educational and economic policies of the European powers in colonial West Africa. Hence, it is crucial to give a vivid picture of how West African territories were divided among the various colonial powers.

By the end of the First World War, the British and the French, who had strengthen their dominant position in West Africa by sharing the former German territories of Togo and the Cameroons, could claim to be in effective control of their territories in the area.[1] Therefore, Britain controlled the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria throughout the colonial era, while France unified Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Niger into French West Africa. With effective colonial rule established and West African societies falling under one colonial power or the other, different policies ranging from political, administrative, economic and social among others were introduced and enforced. However, the intention of this paper as stated above is to focus on the assessment of any nexus between the colonial educational and economic policies.

Education and Economic Policies in Colonial West Africa

As elsewhere in Africa, mission schools were the first to be established in both French and British colonies. The introduction of Western education in West Africa could be dated to the 1840s when European Christian missions; The Society for the propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts; the Moravian missions, the mission of Bremen, the Methodists, the Anglican and the Roman Catholic missionaries made their first successful and enduring incursions into the territories of West African societies.[2] Thus conceiving education as a major means of proselytization, the missions had a very narrow view of education for West Africans. The missionaries recognizing that the task of converting the “unyielding” adult “pagans” to Christianity would be a difficult one, tended to turn their attention to the children whom they hoped to “catch” through the school. Given this basic strategy, the curriculum was heavily weighed on the three Rs- Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic which was considered sufficient to enable the children to operate under the missionaries’ banner.[3]

Subsequently, it was envisaged that the products of this education would operate in their familiar social milieux and would therefore, be able to transmit the new massage of salvation to their own peoples. The main, if not exclusive, concern of the mission schools were to produces school masters who were to graduate to Catechists, Deacons, and then Priests, while girls’ schools were established mainly for the wives and fiancées of their male workers.[4] Hence, there was a basic anti-intellectualism built into the missionary educational system. For one thing, the missions were not really interested in the promotion of secondary education, which from their evangelical viewpoint was superfluous and likely to make the “natives” materialistic and intellectually arrogant.[5] The inevitable consequence of this was that the few secondary schools in both French and British West Africa like the CMS Grammar school Lagos (1859), The Roman Catholic Teacher’s College (Later St. Gregors’ College Lagos), Methodist Boys High School Lagos (1878) and St. Louis Normal School Dakar 1907 which were established under nominal auspices of the missions, enjoyed virtually no financial support from the parent missions or colonial governments.[6] With lack of funds and adequate manpower, it is therefore, not surprising that the Lagos Governor, MacCallum, discussed in 1898 that most of the clerks supplied by those secondary schools as “illiterate” and “Ignorant”.[7] More so in 1901, an inspector of schools noted:

Very few of the teachers in the schools in the protectorates hold certificate or have received any training as teachers. They are for the most part mission agents whose duties teaching in the mission schools form only a part and no educational qualifications or attainment are required for them.[8]

Though, the missions could be seen as the harbingers of the British colonial rule in Africa, their own operations in many parts of West Africa actually preceded the establishment of formal French and British occupation between thirty and fifty years. In a situation like this, it is understandable that the educational enterprise of the missions was inspired more by the spiritual and sectarian concerns of the churches they represented than by the secular needs of a colonial policy which was economic exploitation. This was because they were guided almost exclusively by their own conservative instincts, and it was not until the closing of the years of the 19^th century that they began to feel the influence of some effective secular authority on their activity in the field of education.[9]

In the French West Africa, it was after 1900, with the organization of the federated colonies of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, was there a French colonial policy on education. By decree in 1903, education in French West Africa was organized into a system of primary schools, upper primary schools, professional schools, and a normal school. Two further reorganizations followed decrees in 1912 and 1918, and important schools were established—the School for Student Marine Mechanics of Dakar in 1912, the William Ponty of Dakar, the Bo School for sons of chiefs and the School of Medicine Dakar in 1916.[10] The educational organization that remained in force in French West Africa from 1924 until 1947 included a system consisting of primary instruction for six years (regional urban schools), intermediate-higher education given in upper schools and in professional schools (generally one for each colony), and at the top the federal schools (two normal schools, a school of medicine and pharmacy, a veterinary school, a school for marine mechanics, and a technical school). The two schools for secondary education, both in Senegal (the Faidherbe State Secondary School of St. Louis and Van Vollenhoven State Secondary School, at Dakar), were reserved for Europeans and those rare Africans having French status.[11]  

Total enrollment in French West African schools rose from 15,500 in 1914 to 94,400 in 1945. The number of students in the higher primary schools grew in the same period only from 400 to 800 or 900. (The area’s total population in 1945 was almost 16 million),[12] Educational policy was stated frankly in the official statements of governors general:

Above all else, education proposes to expand the influence of the French language, in order to establish the [French] nationality or culture in Africa. Colonial duty and political necessity impose a double task on our education work: on the one hand it is a matter of training an indigenous staff destined to become our assistants throughout the domains, and to assure the ascension of a carefully chosen elite, and on the other hand it is a matter of educating the masses, to bring them nearer to us and to change their way of life.[13]

The involvement of the British colonial government in the education of her West Africa colonies dated back to 1882. The 1882 Education Ordinance Code of Southern Nigeria protectorates that sort to improve educational standards through ensuring effective supervision, enforcing higher criteria of efficiency, increasing educational opportunities by establishing government schools and the 1903 Code that envisaged a three-tier educational system under which high or secondary education-the top tier would receive a new fillip and providing some financial support to missionary educational efforts.[14] These however, remained little more than pious hopes until the post World War II years due to pressure from the emerging nationalists. The performance of the colonial authorities in the Hausa-Fulani north from 1900, where they had practically no Christian missionaries to deal with was equally, if not more, disappointing. There are several reasons for the failure of the foreign Christian missions to make a significant educational impact on the Muslim emirates of the north. The important issue is that Lugard and his successors, guided by considerations of effective colonial administration and by the example of Southern Nigeria, where the products of missionary schools, invoking egalitarian Christian concepts, were already becoming a thorn in the flesh of both the colonial authorities and the traditional rulers, decided on an essential government sponsored secular education for the Muslim emirates.[15] However, in spite of the secular character of the Lugardian educational system in the north, it had severely limited objectives, and betrayed the traditional colonial government stinginess in financing the education of subject peoples.[16] Similarly, in the Gold Coast in 1914 the government was responsible for only 8 percent of the schools.[17]

In all, because of the limited objectives of the pioneers of Western education in West Africa, the missionaries were interested in education as an instrument of evangelization, and the colonial administration being interested in schools as factories for producing various categories of minor functionaries like clerks, junior technicians in public works, sanitary inspectors among others, educational development for most of the colonial period was hopelessly inadequate for meeting the needs of a modern state.[18]

In the realm of colonial economy in West Africa, it is an established fact that economic motive was the most fundamental factor that brought Europeans to West Africa. The priorities of the British and French policies towards tropical Africa indicate that West Africa would guarantee returns for their investment than the other parts of Africa.[19] Therefore all the economic policies put in place by the British and French colonial authorities such as, agricultural development, railway, seaports, and roads development were meant to facilitate the effective evacuation of goods. Crowder aptly sums it up in the following words:

Under colonial rule any economic benefits that may have accrued to the Africans resulted from accident not designed by-product of the primitive economic system the colonial powers instituted to carry from Africa its raw materials for processing in the factories of Europe, in exchange for a strictly limited range of European manufactures.[20]

In the same vein, the cardinal principles of the colonial economic relationship were to stimulate the production and export of cash crops like palm produce, groundnuts, cotton, rubber, cocoa, coffee and timber; to encourage the consumption and expand the importation of European manufactured goods; and, above all, to ensure that as much as possible the trade of the colony, both imports and exports, was conducted with the metropolitan country concerned.[21] To facilitate the achievement of these objectives, new currencies, tied to the currencies of the metropolitan countries, displaced local currencies and barter trade. The state of the colonial economy was measured not by the welfare of African peasant producers, manufacturers, consumers, businessmen, or tax payers, but solely by the increase of exports and imports and the proportion of this trade that was conducted with the ruling country.[22]

In the name of a laissez-faire policy, the various colonial governments did nothing or very little to encourage the production of food crops. Yet they did not hesitate to use the resources of the colonial regimes to encourage the production of cash crops. In Portuguese and French West Africa, labour was frequently recruited for European planters, and the agricultural research stations that were financed with the African tax-payer’s money in British West Africa concerned themselves almost exclusively with the cash crops.[23]

Similarly, while France and Britain were willing to use tariffs and other measures to reserve colonial markets as much as possible for trade of metropolitan companies, whether or not there were other more economically beneficial customers, there was no encouragement, to say nothing of protection, for local manufacturers. Rather, cheaper imported textiles and household utensils were allowed to compete with traditional crafts and industries.[24] While many household utensils began to be imported, farming methods and implements remained unchanged. There is no doubt that the cheaper imports improved the standard of living especially in the cash crop areas where there was some money to buy them, but since most of the profit of the import trade was exported, the overall economic advantage to West Africa was limited.[25]

Furthermore, the colonial authorities not only directed what export crops should be planted, they often used taxation as a direct policy of encouraging migrant labour to assist cash crop production. For instance, in Portuguese Guinea, administrator had the power under Labour Code to recruit for obligatory work anyone who could not show evidence that he had a job to enable him to pay his taxes, as well as feed, house and clothe his family. Both the French and British frequently fixed taxes at a rate designed not merely to pay for needed services, but to force as many Africans as possible to increase their production of cash crops or seek paid employment.[26]

In short the colonial regimes pursued only a one-sided laissez-faire policy. Where the interest of European firms was concerned, the administration placed their resources at the firms’ disposal at the expense of Africans, while where the interests of Africans were concerned, the administrations were indifferent and left the field free for the privileged Europeans to compete unfairly with Africans. That was the essence of colonial exploitation.[27]

Influence of the Colonial Economy on Education

As earlier observed, the colonial administrations supervised and eventually began to subsidise Christian missions to produce more clerks and interpreters needed by the commercial firms or for the grades staff in the administrative and technical services that were too expensive to import from Europe. It should be noted however that whenever Africans acquired higher education, it was usually through their own efforts or the encouragement of the Christian missions and the denial of employment in the colonial administrations was calculated to discourage it.[28] By administrative measures, the colonial regimes were willing to restrict the movement of Christian missions, for example in the Muslim parts of Northern Nigeria, or to limit the participation of missionaries from other than the metropolitan country. But they were unwilling to use administrative measures to prevent the consequent unevenness in the rate of economic, educational and social development.[29]

In spite of the limited objectives of the pioneers Western education in West Africa and their reluctance to embark on a programme of mass education, colonial rule itself and the accompanying colonial economy were already bringing about certain fundamental changes in the West African societies. Changes which in turn created a growing, almost unquenchable thirst for Western literary education among many sections of both British and French West Africa colonies, For one thing, as British and French rule in West Africa became more effectively established in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the most lucrative areas of the West African economy which is the export trade in cash crops, the import trade in manufactured goods and mining came under the growing monopolistic control of alien commercial concerns operating in West Africa under the protective umbrella of the colonial governments.[30] Apart from subsistence farming, fishing hunting and crafts in which a substantial section of the population was engaged, the only other economic activities open to West Africans, unequipped with some measure of western literary education, were the cultivation of cash crops like cocoa, groundnuts, oil palm, cotton and rubber, usually on a small scale and by the back-breaking, low-yielding traditional methods; petty trading in farm crops or imported manufactured articles, which on the whole guaranteed little more than mere subsistence income; and wage employment as unskilled labour on the larger cash-crop farms, at the docks, mines, in civil construction and on the railways are engagements which by common account, has always been poorly remunerated.[31] Perhaps, the only significant exceptions to this pattern of foreign monopoly of the big plums of West African commerce are the major commercial transactions in the export of Kolanuts from the forest regions of West Nigeria to the northern emirates and the reciprocal export trade in cattle, sheep and goats from the North to all parts of Southern Nigeria. However, both commercial enterprises have always been dominated by rich Hausa-Fulani magnates with a large number of lesser folk from both regions of the country serving as agents and intermediaries.[32]

The only other career opportunities in the colonial economic system which were relatively better remunerated and provided some opportunity, albeit limited, for social and economic advancement were virtually closed to those West Africans who had not acquired a measure of Western education. These included careers as minor and intermediate functionaries in the colonial bureaucracy and the foreign commercial firms as clerks, technicians and artisans, and in the schools and missions as teachers, catechists, and priest.[33] Some indigenous businessmen emerged as moderately substantial protégés to the foreign firms in the capacity of produce buyers, factors and agents for distributing manufactured goods on wholesale and retail basis, but among such people survival and growth were more assured for those who had acquired literacy or had reliable literate subordinates.[34]

Consequently, the growing realization among the vast majority of conscious West Africans that, in the virtually closed colonial economy, the only significant opening to self-improvement socially and economically lay in Western education, would account for the persistent demands from the 1920s not only for mass education, but also for quality higher education, both of which the colonial authorities saw as potentially subversive of their own political and economic hold on the sub-continent.[35]

Conclusion              

            From the foregoing, it is not out of context to posit that the colonial educational and economic policies implemented in West Africa were adopted in order to achieve the goal of colonialism. Hence, to assert that educational policies contributed toward economic development or form part of colonial economy during and after colonialism in West African societies cannot be substantiated as the so-called achievements were accidental, but it can be affirmed that the colonial economy influenced education in West Africa.

 

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[1] J.F. Ade Ajayi and M. Crowder, History of West Africa, New York, Longman, 1971, p.514

[2]  www.britannica.com/Education-in-British-colonies-and-former-colonies, Education in British Colonies and Former colonies, Virtual Encyclopedia Britannica, Net-retrieved 15-06-2013.  

[3] S.O. Osoba and A. Fajana, “Educational and Social Development during The Twentieth Century” in Obaro Ikime(ed.), Groundwork of Nigerian History, Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, 1980, Pp. 570-572

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] www.britannica.com/Education-in-French-colonies-and-former-colonies, Education in French Colonies and Former colonies, Virtual Encyclopedia Britannica, Net-retrieved 15-06-2013.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] www.britannica.com;From Bulletin de l’Enseignment en AOF, No. 74, 1931, Net-retrieved 15/06/2013

[14] S.O. Osoba and A. Fajana, in Obaro Ikime (ed.), Op. cit.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] O.S. Ehiabhi, “Nigeria Under Colonial Rule: Administrative Structure and the Economy”, in S.O. Arifalo and G. Ajayi (eds.), Essays in Contemporary Nigerian History, Lagos, First Academic Publisher, 2003, p.72.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid.

[23] J.F. Ade Ajayi and M. Crowder, Op. cit.

[24] Ibid., p.521

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid., p.522

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., p.523

[29] Ibid.

[30] S.O. Osoba and A. Fajana, in Obaro Ikime(ed.), Op. cit., p.578

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid., p.579

[35] Ibid.