Keywords

This chapter surveys the discourse among African and European Christians about the implementation in Africa of programs of education identified as “vocational” during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. “Discourse,” as in an ongoing, though not necessarily dialectical discussion of initiatives and outcomes, is the best term to use to convey the nature of the Christian effort to transfer knowledge on how to use European technology from Europe to Africa over the period in question. Christian missionaries, the primary agents of the transfer, cannot be said to have made much headway in effecting the education of Africans in European technology. To their credit, missionaries may be said to have taught Africans how to utilize certain types of European technology. But it must be acknowledged that missionaries failed, and failed horribly, at passing on to Africans the capacity to replicate European technology. Missionaries came to Africa mostly during the European industrial age, the great age of European machines. African Christians turned to European Christians to teach them how to build and maintain similar machines. European Christians never did this.

Some African critics argued that the failure of European missionaries to teach Africans European technology was the result of design. Missionaries, like other Europeans, were committed to never giving Africans knowledge that would allow Africans to compete with Europeans. As argued below, the inability of missionaries to effectuate the transfer of European technology to Africa was a function of a good many things above and beyond the missionaries’ control. Whatever racial, proprietary instincts missionaries maintained about European technology as European had at best a limited impact on the shaping of the flow of European technological knowledge to Africa.

This chapter below will begin with a selective survey of the development of vocational education in Europe up to the nineteenth century with the goal of identifying what Christian missionaries had in mind when they first introduced vocational education in Africa. The survey will seek to show two things. First is the mitigated connection between vocational education and technical training in Europe. Second is the negative view European Christians held of any activity that involved manual labor. The chapter will move on to an overview of missionary initiatives at introducing vocational education in Africa before the colonial era, treated here as having begun during the 1880s. There was a myth shared among European Christians that vocational schools could be engines of social change. Various missiological strategies pursued in Africa up to the colonial era built upon this myth. The chapter will next consider the African Christian response to the vocational education programs put in place by nineteenth-century missions. As will be argued, Ethiopianism, a term for what has been understood in the past as a theological and ecclesiastical movement among African Christians, also had a political economical dimension. African Christians seeking to take the lead in the evangelization of Africa looked to the establishment of versions of the vocational school crafted in the USA at Tuskegee Institute by Booker T. Washington to jump-start the Christian regeneration of Africa.

The later sections of the chapter take up the response to Ethiopianism by governments and missions. Colonial governments placed the blame for Ethiopianism on missions and threatened to replace not just vocational but all mission schools with government schools. The American educator, Thomas Jesse Jones, offered colonial governments and missions a way out of their disagreements. Jones put forth a new idea of the educational program that had developed at Tuskegee and its parent institution, Hampton Institute, a new idea that suggested a new set of vocations for both European missionaries and African Christians. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the historical impact of Jones’ vision for Christian vocational education in Africa .

European Foundations of Vocational Education

In the ancient Greek intellectual traditions that inform most European historical explanations of things, Hephaestus, the god of technology, better known these days by his Roman name Vulcan, reserved fire, the source of technology, for the use of the gods. Prometheus, in some versions of Greek mythology the creator of humankind, stole fire from Hephaestus’ forge and passed it to humans, allowing humans to build civilizations. As David Landes’ seminal work, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Europe 1750 to the Present (Landes 2003) attests, European scholars have readily embraced the story of Prometheus and his theft of fire to explain how industrialization happened in Europe. The point to mentioning the myth here is that in these scholarly narratives, the Christian church is identified as one incarnation of Hephaestus. There were other, more powerful incarnations, most importantly the craft guilds who monopolized the regulation of all aspects of the technology of production and the marketing of manufactures. The state in Europe was another guise of Hephaestus. States worked in conjunction with guilds to support the guilds’ monopolies. States reserved access to markets, regulated the transfer of knowledge and enforced penalties on all manufacture and sale not authorized by local guilds. The church embodied Hephaestus through granting heavenly sanctions to these restrictions, supporting the evolution of an urban Christian economic culture that reinforced the monopoly over technology claimed by guilds (Chatellier 1997; Van Leeuwen 1994; Davis 2014). As illustrated below, however, the church might also be credited with something of a Promethean role, negotiating with the guilds for some small access to technological knowledge for the social poor, that is the socially marginal, so that the latter, under Church guidance, could learn how to make things and strive for a Christian life under the prevailing Christian ethos .

In narratives about the industrial revolution, the guilds, as Hephaestus, lost control of fire to Prometheus, treated in European ideological traditions as capitalism. European states switched roles in the drama about market access and became Promethean as well, working with capitalists to free up markets. Industrialization allowed European capitalists to break the hold of the guilds over the production of commodities (Smits and Stromback 2001). The Christian churches of Europe were mostly on the sidelines in this battle, rooting in conflicting ways for both sides. Christian churches never gave up their mediating role in communicating technological knowledge to the social poor, however (Grell et al. 2002). Christian churches endeavored to maintain this mediating role in the missions they sent out to Africa and the rest of the world.

Europeans placed in the vocational category all types of education they understood to involve training in the use of some technology. “Technology” is a European term derived from the Greek word, “techne,” one translation of which is “cunning of hand.” All forms of technology demand some degree of “cunning of hand,” of skill or manual dexterity, or to use one last phrase, of “technique” with a set of tools, coupled with some cognitive capacity to comprehend how to apply this ability to the completion of the tasks for which the technology evolved (Lis and Soly 1984; Gutton 1991; Van Leeuwen 1994; Jutte 1994). Programs of instruction aimed at the dissemination of knowledge about tools and the use of tools, what Europeans called a “craft,” is what Europeans had in mind when they talked about vocational education (Lindberg 1993; Safley 2003, 2004; Barnes 2018a).

Missionaries could not teach the production of technology. The point is worth emphasizing because the historiography on Christian missions has given a wrong impression. The historiography talks about “artisans” being sent out to staff the earliest missions, the connotation being that these missionaries had some mastery of technology, when they did not (Cox 2010). It is not even clear whether, typically, the artisans sent out were guildsmen. The vocational schools that Christian evangelists developed to reform the lives of the social poor combined the teaching of a small measure of rudimentary training in the use of some set of tools with large measures of mental and behavioral disciplining (Safley 2003, 2005; Barnes 2018a). Churches sought out Christians with some technical knowledge to teach in vocational schools. Some of the Christians with technical knowledge may have been guild masters, most probably were artisans. Primarily they were home (domestic) missionaries. Since the objective of these schools was the Christian conversion of the poor people who enrolled in them, the appeal to the Christians with technical knowledge who taught in them was not to pass on for free technical knowledge, but to save the souls to the poor (Gutton 1991; Lindberg 1993; Julia 2006).

Vocational education in Europe never aimed to challenge the economic status quo. The goal of the founders and promoters of vocational schools was to establish a symbiotic relationship with local guilds. A major issue for vocational schools and the Christians who ran them was operating costs. Most such schools were the outcome of pious bequests and donations. These monies always eventually ran out, so schools had to find ongoing ways to generate revenue. One way schools sought additional revenue was from student provided technical services and student produced commodities. Vocational schools taught students “tinkering,” to use the British expression, that is, how to supply rudimentary technical services, like fixing a door or repairing a pot, typically for other poor people. In terms of commodities, the schools taught students to produce cheap knock-offs, easily recognizable as inferior to guild made products (Safley 2005). As just suggested, there were gradations in manual skill. The manual use of tools for repair or simple manufacture was one thing. The manual use of tools for large-scale commodity production was another. The latter presumed some degree of technological mastery, not only in the use of tools, but the making of tools. In the European tradition, technological competence itself was recognized as a marketable skill whose creation needed to be controlled. Technical training in fact was far more regulated than all other types of education in Europe (Smits and Stromback 2001; Schalk et al. 2017). Thanks to the guild systems, competition in the provisioning of technological services was rigorously overseen, primarily on the local level, usually by guild leaders working in conjunction with local government officials. Until the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution mooted the power of guilds to regulate production, the knowledge of how to make things was carefully managed from above.

It is helpful to compare technical training with what Europeans considered its cultural opposite, academic education. In Christian Europe, up to the Protestant Reformation, academic education was synonymous with clerical or religious training. Academic education in European civilization aspired to recreate the learning experience that first took place in fourth-century BCE Athens, when the intellectual skills summed up in the notion of the seven liberal arts or what was later labeled the humanities were first taught in a systematic fashion. Because academic education in Europe was closely tied to the Christian church, schools from the end of Roman times to the Protestant Reformation focused on inculcating these thinking skills in individuals destined for the clergy. Ironically, the term “vocation” as used in the European Middle Ages signaled those individuals who had a “calling” or vocation for the priesthood. The term took on its modern connotations of a livelihood based upon mastery of some technology during the Protestant Reformation, when Protestant theologians followed Martin Luther’s lead in rejected the idea of a Christian priesthood as a separate social and spiritual estate (status group), affirming instead the idea that every individual had a “beruf,” a vocation or calling given them by the Christian God. Luther and the theologians who followed him did recognize the existence of a “priesthood of all believers,” meaning that there was some expectation that at least all males would have some command of the thinking skills needed to understand the ideas put forth in Christian preaching and writings (Lindberg 1993; Jutte 1994; Snell 1999; Safley 2003, 2004).

The historical import of this line of thought was that the academic education once reserved for the Christian clergy was mainstreamed in Protestant states in the form of day and boarding schools for children whose parents could afford systematic education, and “Sunday school” lessons for children whose parents could not. Catholic states went Protestant states one better and through the agency of the Society of Jesus, or as it is better known, the Jesuit order, created the first Christian school systems aimed at lay or non-clerical education. In the early modern European centuries as well, states began to compete with churches by investing in the building of state schools where the academic curriculum offered in church schools was incorporated on the primary level , while secondary fields of knowledge such as oceanic navigation or military engineering were treated on a secondary level (Laqueur 1976; Lis and Soly 1984; Julia 2006; Barnes 2018a).

Technical training evolved in a very different way. Training was through apprenticeships, which only masters recognized by the local guild were licensed to offer. Parents paid guild masters fees to train their sons. Contracts were written out, stipulating the obligations of both masters and apprentices. Special courts oversaw the maintenance of these contracts. Apprenticeships emphasized experiential learning, learning by doing, learning by trial and error. Apprenticeships involved boys leaving their parents’ home and living with the master at his shop, with the master having full legal rights of in loco parentis. After the conclusion of an apprenticeship, which lasted between three and seven years, young men spent some stretch of time completing their training as journeymen, individuals who traveled from place to place learning different secondary techniques from different masters. Ideally, the culmination of training was the completion of a masterpiece, a work that demonstrated mastery of the technology used within the craft. Completion of a masterpiece would allow an individual to be recognized as a master with the right to open his own shop and take on his own students. But by the early modern age, only perhaps a majority of the boys who began apprenticeship programs actually got to the point of receiving the letters that certified they had completed their program of training. And less than half of these were ever recognized by a local guild as masters. Almost all of latter were from families already in the guild. The economic security to be had by opening a shop was something guild masters effectively monopolized for their offspring. Most journeymen remained journeymen for their entire lives (Smits and Stromback 2001; Belfanti 2004; Schalk et al. 2017).

Over the centuries in Europe, while academic education became more accessible, technological training became more exclusive. Guilds, through their control of apprenticeships maintained something of a stranglehold on the dissemination of technical education. Two developments, however, worked to loosen the guilds’ grasp. First was the economic takeoff fueled in Atlantic Europe by the discovery of the New World and the subsequent expansion of European trade. Guild monopolies aimed at controlling local markets and as such could not keep up with, much less regulate overseas’ demand. Overseas’ demand continued to grow until, supplemented by local and national demand for goods, it created the markets filled by the industrial revolution. The glass ceiling that reserved economic opportunities for members of the families of master craftsmen broke, allowing journeymen to open shops in Europe, find wage-paying jobs at technicians in factories, or migrate to the colonies. In terms of vocational training, perhaps the second of these options was most important, since increasingly technical training was moved outside the control of the guilds, funded and supported by governments, and focused on the generation of the technical skills needed for industrial advance (Smits and Stromback 2001).

The second development was an outcome of the religious changes that swept over Europe beginning in the sixteenth century. Both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation distanced themselves from medieval notions about the holiness to be found in begging and the piety which might be displayed through dispensing alms to beggars. In the sixteenth century, religious thinkers, and the social and political elites who listened to them, came to make a distinction between the “honest” or “shamefaced” poor and the “dishonest” poor, the former being the people who would and could work if given the opportunity, the latter being those who preferred to beg. According to early modern European Christian sensibilities, only the honest poor deserved charity. The dishonest poor needed to be removed from the streets and locked away until they turned honest. Honest poor people may have been willing to work for a living, but as European economies went through the economic transformations mentioned above, opportunities for work following the old agrarian regime disappeared. Christian communities began to experiment with versions of vocational education (Jutte 1994; Safley 2004, 2005) .

The vocational schools that resulted from these experiments, more and more labeled as “industrial institutes,” were not really concerned with giving students competitive technical skills. Their first and primary objective was to teach students how to live a Christian life in a post-agrarian world. Technical skills would have helped students live such a life no doubt, but these skills were kept out of reach by guilds. For vocational institutes then, it was more important for students to learn the work discipline needed to mass produce items, the cash nexus that would permit the students to exchange these products for sustenance, and the Christian self-respect garnered by individuals who left home each morning headed for a workplace (Safley 2004, 2005; Barnes 2018a).

The trade-off for students for acquisition of these life skills was acceptance of the political, social, and cultural marginality associated with the skills they were acquiring. Early modern European civilization also inherited from the Greeks an absolute disdain for manual labor. The one direct action for which an individual could be automatically expelled from the European nobility was to be discovered engaged in manual labor. “Cunning of hand” was considered to involve far less mental prowess than any sort of intellectual cogitation. Working with one’s hands in fact was understood to dull the mind (Lis and Soly 1984).

Academic training could serve as a vehicle of social mobility in European civilization. Before the industrial revolution, technical training rarely did (Dick 2008). Technological competence was associated in the European mind with economic security, but in terms of providing a pathway to higher status in either the society, the community or the government, it was considered a dead end. A cultural gradient evolved over time in European societies, with vocational learning and those who made their living by it at one end and academic learning and those who made their living by it at the other. Between the two there grew up a cultural chasm that hardened into social and political class boundaries (Billett 2014).

Illustrative here is the etymological history of the expressions “blue collar” and “white collar.” “Blue collar” over the course of the twentieth century came to stand for all the associations that in the previous century had been subsumed under the terms “artisanal” or “working class.” “Blue collar” continues to serve in the English language as a synonym for work that involves some form of regimented manual labor. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression originally came into usage in British prisons during the late nineteenth century as a term for the type of clothing permitted to prisoners whose good behavior gave evidence of behavioral reform. Both the notion of good behavior and the notion of behavioral reform in the minds of prison authorities were inspired by Christian ideas of religious conversion. The right to wear a “blue collar” was a reward for those individuals who had accepted the connection Christians posited between the former’s social marginalization and the sinfulness of their lives and who had exhibited a willingness to work their way away from the margins through manual labor. Blue-collar prisoners were a nineteenth-century variant of the honest poor. But then use of the term “blue collar” migrated across the Atlantic to North America where it came to designate the lifestyle of all individuals who worked with their hands. The term’s use in the USA was fueled by a cultural dialectic that posited “blue collar” as the opposite of “white collar,” the latter a term that came to designate all jobs that did not involve manual labor. Blue-collar jobs remained honest, but they also involved labor that did not require intellectual effort. White-collar jobs, on the other hand, were assumed to be prizes won through academic training and mental smarts. As such, holders of white-collar jobs were deemed superior to holders of blue-collar jobs, no matter the level of material compensation. The cultural dynamics behind the dichotomy between blue collar and white collar go back in the history of European culture and consciousness and have to do with, from the intellectualist perspective, a negative view of any and all who make their living using manual labor. For those who work with their minds, those who work with their hands are the cultural “other” (Lis and Soly 1984; Billett 2014).

The political implications of this point were important. Arguably beginning with the Protestant Reformation, notions about the nature of the political nation and about who had a right to participate in it became increasingly more inclusivist in Europe. Pushed by the French Revolution, by the nineteenth century most states had come to think of their inhabitants as citizens rather than as subjects, a distinction which, thanks to the successes of European imperialism, progressively became more important. Implicit in notions of citizenship were ideas about civil or political rights. These ideas prompted efforts by states to police the borders of citizenship. Foreign birth served as one justification for excluding individuals from citizenship. Race came to provide another. Education and training functioned as a third. Just as the early modern European state churches came to demand that every churchgoer needed to be able to read the articles of faith of the national church to qualify as a good Christian, so early modern states themselves came to insist that inhabitants needed to be able to at least read in the national language to merit inclusion in the political nation. Those who could not read were not fit to be either Christians or citizens (Hastings 1997; Van Horn Melton 2001; Lotz-Heumann 2008).

The ability to read and the ability to write were viewed differently in early modern Europe, with writing ranked as a much higher intellectual skill. Thanks to the efforts of Christian churches, a majority of males in most western European societies could read by the nineteenth century. Writing remained the preserve of those who had undergone academic training. Voting, as a perquisite of citizenship, was also reserved for as long as possible as a privilege of males who could read and write. Male members of the working classes did not get the vote in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. Women did not get the vote until the early decades of the twentieth. Before these developments, for those who had it, academic learning had become a means to navigate previously recognized political and social, if not sexual hurdles, to neutralize low status. In a world that celebrated the idea of careers open to talents, bright men from the lower classes could teach or write or invent or politically maneuver their ways into higher political and social stations. Educated women did not get the vote before other women, but (unmarried) women with some academic schooling found more economic and social opportunities opening for them as teachers, governesses, nurses, secretaries and missionaries, the point being that they claimed for themselves the positions involving authority and decision-making European civilization made available to women (Van Horn Melton 2001).

European society celebrated self-improvement, social uplift, and social mobility. But poverty was the only position from which to start to climb that was lower than vocational work. Sadly, one outcome of the fact that it became increasingly possible for those with vocational education to send their children to academic schools and for those children to essay to become something other than vocationally educated was that the social status of vocational employment declined even further. Vocational education branded the individuals who possessed it as ignorant. For these individuals, any movement toward higher status necessarily began with gaining some sort of academic training, with being rebranded as a thinking being. Useful as a qualification here are Benedict Anderson’s insights about the inclusiveness of imagined communities, that is, the voluntarily embraced social and political worlds created through the evolution of especially print media in eighteenth-century Europe. Anderson’s main point was about the nation-state, but the nation-state was just the apex of a hierarchy of lesser imagined communities like religious movements, political clubs, etc. These communities were accessible to all who could read, and members of these communities were quite willing to teach those who could not read how to do so. Imagined communities such as these allowed vocationally trained individuals to gain the recognition denied them as manual laborers. No one had to stay just a carpenter, or wheelwright or ironsmith. They could become the leader of a movement or a club. Still the pathway to higher social status was through learning to read and write (Anderson 2006).

The obverse of the point about academic learning facilitating social mobility was also true. On the cultural gradient that held in European society, any movement toward vocational education brought with it political marginalization and social degradation. Thus, for those concerned with policing the borders of citizenship, guiding individuals toward vocational training became a strategy for keeping the latter outside the imagined community of the citizenry. During the nineteenth century, the state took over from churches poor relief, which governments now labeled social welfare. The old Christian ideas about marginalized populations were retained, though dressed up in the new religiously neutral language of the social sciences. Vocational educational programs were expanded. Yet to the extent to which poor people enrolled in these programs, they brought themselves within the matrices of the state as subjects not citizens. There were obvious tensions between these programs, with their expectations of self-exclusion and the ambitions for social inclusion of the people who enrolled in them. These tensions had not been resolved (they arguably have yet to be resolved), when Christian missionaries began widespread efforts to evangelize in Africa (Barnes 2018a).

Christian Missions Vocational Education in Africa

Two points may be taken from the discussion of vocational education in Europe of value for understanding the Christian missionary endeavor to introduce vocational education in Africa. First is that missionaries had no firm ideas about how to transfer vocational skills to Africa. There was a good deal of experimentation. Mission schools which featured some sort of vocational training for African students opened at a number of locations across nineteenth-century Africa. Writing in 1922, Thomas Jesse Jones insisted that several European vocational institutes were operational on the continent, but he did not give details in his work Education in Africa 1922. What he probably had in mind were the Basel Mission schools in Ghana, the Hope Waddell Institute in Nigeria, Lovedale Institute and Blantyre Institute, respectively in South Africa and Malawi. Most of these schools had some connection with the Scottish Presbyterian mission, which was perhaps the one mission that pursued vocational education as a missiological strategy (Taylor 1996; Mackenzie and Dalziel 2013). Henry Venn, who guided the Anglican Church Missionary Society through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, promoted the evangelical value of industrial training at mission stations, primarily from the perspective of the need for missions to create prosperous congregations who could pay the upkeep of their churches (Ajayi 1959; Barnes 2018b). The need for revenue also prompted some Roman Catholic missions to invest in the development of mission stations that featured industrial education. Staffing these stations for both Anglicans and Catholics was a problem, however, since only an exceptional few of their missionaries had a vocational aptitude or technical capacities. Other denominational missions set up schools with an explicit vocational focus in places like Kenya and the Congo. Depending upon the expertise of the resident missionaries, these schools offered training in an array of technical and craft skills (Strayer 1973; Yates 1978).

Vocational education at these schools was rarely a means toward the end of occupational training, however. The idea motivating the missions remained the same as that which had previously motivated churches in Europe, which was to have student labor and student-made products offset the costs associated with school expenditure. Most of the students pursued other training as a career goal, most often preparation for life as an evangelist/teacher/catechist or clerical work. One illustration of this underlying dynamic was provided in Natal, in South Africa, where, in response to complaints from settlers about competition, a vocational program nominally aimed at the production of carpenters was replaced with one aimed at the production of evangelists (see Koschorke et al. 2016, 205). The few students who eventually made a living based upon the artisanal or technical skills acquired at the schools typically found employment working for Europeans. These technicians functioned as part of the expatriate economy, not the indigenous one. One great exception to this generalization may have been typesetting and printing. Individuals with this knowledge could find employment working for the growing number of European firms, but also for African edited newspapers (Switzer 1984; Newall 2013).

One other missiological strategy had import for vocational education. This one expanded upon the experiential dimension of apprenticeships and experimented with ways of extending the contact between European masters and African apprentices. Rather than isolate vocational skills as an item for cultural transfer as part of school curricula, this approach argued for the transfer of vocational skills nested in lived experiences in the context of enclaves of Western-like community life. This was an argument for settlers as evangelists, settlers who could demonstrate to Africans, not just how to make things, but to use those things to live a Christian life. The Scottish Presbyterian missionary David Livingstone proposed that communities of the “honest poor” from Britain could serve in this capacity, freeing themselves from poverty in the process (see Cairns 1965, 194–198). The African American Anglican missionary Alexander Crummell made a similar argument, proposing that communities of entrepreneurial African American Christians serve as the agents of civilization, in their case saving themselves from the brutalities of American racism (Crummell 1891; Barnes 2017). Livingstone’s advocacy had no issue—European settlers did not come to Africa to save African souls. Crummell’s influence can be seen behind the Back to Africa movement led by the AME bishop Henry Turner and in the explanation by Orishatukeh Faduma of why the Chief Sam party emigrated from the USA to Ghana (Redkey 1969; Barnes 2017). There was a third variation on this theme. In his “Plan for the Regeneration of Africa,” the Italian Catholic missionary saint Daniel Comboni sought to address the need for vocational schools for Africans by proposing the building of mission vocational schools across the Mediterranean. These climes would be warm enough for African Christians to live, yet sanitary enough for European Christians to survive. Africans were to come to these stations for two to three years of vocational training and then head back to their home locales to pass on their skills as artisan-evangelists. This plan never got very far toward implementation, but the missionary order Comboni established, the Comboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus remains one of the largest Catholic orders dedicated to the evangelization of Africa (Comboni 1871; Ozioko 2015). A similar idea for taking Africans out of Africa to a place where Europeans would be sufficiently comfortable as to provide Africans with sustained apprenticeships was advanced and realized for at least a short time by the Welsh Baptist missionary William Hughes at Colwyn Bay in Wales (Killingray 2014; Barnes 2017).

African thinkers such as Edward Blyden indicted Europeans in general, and missionaries, in particular, for refusing to pass on to Africans the technical know-how that went into the industrial revolution (Blyden 1967; Barnes 2016). But Europeans in general and missionaries in particular did not possess much technical knowhow. Scholars writing in the past have taken for granted that concrete programs of vocational education, equivalent to liberal arts curricula, existed in Europe and that missionaries had the option of introducing these programs to Africa. But such programs did not exist in Europe either. In Europe, instruction in technical skills continued into the twentieth century to be the preserve of master-apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeship programs still exist. In recent decades, they have been supplement by for profit technical training institutes. To the extent to which technical training has been acquirable outside these types of arrangements, access has been sponsored by governments. Over the course of the nineteenth century, many European states did invest in the development of technical high schools, with structured, thought out curricula aimed at systematically training students in new machine powered technologies. Such training demanded huge investments in physical plants and equipment, and long years of trial and error learning for mastery. Few of the graduates of these high schools ever made it to Africa as missionaries, and even if they did, they had no equivalent teaching environment in which to build vocational training programs. Along the African coasts where trading firms had set up operations, and ultimately in the mining industries that came to dominate so many colonial economies , there were some Africans who were trained to a master’s level of competence in European technology. These men gained their training through apprenticeships to the European masters in the employ of European firms and colonial governments. Neither the Europeans nor the Africans were free to disseminate their knowhow, and even if they were, they lacked the workshops and materials required for the learning through doing which technical knowledge demands (Yates 1978; Taylor 1996; Smits and Stromback 2001).

Contrary to what Africans like Blyden thought, and scholars have since presumed, the programs of vocational education, of industrial education instituted in Europe were, like the programs later introduced in Africa, cobbled together amalgams of Christian evangelism coupled with exercises in social discipline coupled with rudimentary instruction in the use of European tools. The vocational programs in Europe were in fact the prototypes for the programs later introduced in Africa. Scholars have paid far too much attention to missionary writings, which presents missionaries as jacks of all trade, capable of using all sorts of European technology to solve the problems encountered out on the mission field (Adas 1989; Cox 2010). The reality was simply different. Missionaries were proficient users, but not producers of technology. The vocational education programs missionaries put into place reflected their own ignorance of technical knowledge. As such, they could not offer a comprehensive introduction to the use of any technology.

The second point to be made about the introduction of European Christian ideas of vocational education in Africa is that, while few missionaries had firm notions about what vocational education was, almost all missionaries had clear ideas about what vocational education was not. Vocational education was the opposite of the humanistic education most missionaries themselves had received. There is some irony in the fact that while missionaries failed to transfer European technical knowledge to Africa, they succeeded in transferring the contempt with which Europeans viewed manual labor. No missionary came to Africa with a purely technical background. It should be clear by now that when early missionaries were described as artisans or tinkers, these terms were used with blue-collar connotations. Still, even missionaries who themselves were the product of vocational training had some systematic training in how to read and write and in how to teach the Bible, in other words, some humanistic training. Every missionary came to Africa with some propensity toward looking down at those who only possessed manual skills.

Vocational education was as scorned by Europeans in Africa as it was by the Christian population in general in Europe, but in Africa in addition it became for Europeans the educational background of the designated racial other. Africans could not think beyond the vocational level, European thinking came to assert, which is why Africans got so many of the abstract ideas associated with Christianity and European culture so terribly wrong (Cairns 1965; King 1971; Lorimer 1978; Yates 1980a; Corby 1981, 1990; Thorne 1997; Jensz 2012). Accepting the discussion above about how vocational education was negatively coded in the European mind; accepting also that the decades which saw the number of missionaries heading to Africa increasing were also the decades when scientific racism became most pervasive in the European mind, accepting lastly the idea that Europeans understood humanistic education as helping individuals to transcend racial categories, it should be possible to apprehend how vocational education in Africa lost any necessary connection with technical training and became in the European mind a catch-all term for types of learning that would not challenge racial boundaries. Europeans feared that humanistic learning gave Africans a sense of mastery of European civilization. Under the rubric “vocational education,” Europeans tried to develop educational strategies that avoided humanistic learning (Yates 1980a; Corby 1981, 1990; Jensz 2012).

The earlier discussion of white collar versus blue collar is helpful here. Missions came to shy away from educational practices they identified as qualifying an African for a white-collar occupation, because Europeans felt that these practices also gave Africans inflated ideas about racial equality (Sivonen 1995). Europeans used the term “denationalization” for the intellectual process through which Africans came to insist that they were “civilized,” that is, just as worthy as Europeans of citizen status in the empires Europeans were constructing. Africans who thought in these ways saw themselves as white collared, and dressed appropriately. Denationalization summoned up in the European imagination a process of Africans pretending to know more than their manually oriented minds could comprehend, but also of Africans losing awareness of their tribal identity, of Africans losing their affinity for their native dress. Later in the twentieth century, the idea of denationalization was in fact replaced in anthropological literature with the notion of detribalization. Detribalization was understood to be the outcome of the onslaught of Western civilization on social adhesion and community identification in Africa. The earlier notion of denationalization, however, was more narrowly tied to the universalizing ideas inherent in academic education. Denationalization was a mental disease Africans picked up through exposure to humanism in mission schools (Barnes 2009, 2017).

As an alternative, missions tried to identify educational practices that would guide Africans toward what Europeans conceived of as indigenous equivalents to blue-collar views of the world. There was syllogistic reasoning at work. Blue-collar workers in Europe were non-citizens in ways it was hoped Africans would adjust to being non-citizens. It helps to remember that the associations middle-class European Christians posited between the blue-collar mind and apolitical thinking were formed before the emergence of labor unions and radical movements in Europe and then in Africa. Blue-collar people were the honest poor, and the minds of the honest poor, according to this earlier line of thought, harbored no political agenda. In promoting the equivalent of honest poor training in Africa, missionaries saw themselves as herding African converts away from the distraction of politics. Vocational training was supposed to be not so much the antidote to denationalization as the vaccine that inoculated Africans against the disease. Humanism replaced local ideas of culture with universalizing ideas of civilization derived from what Europeans increasingly argued was their own racial heritage. The goal of vocational education became the discovery of a formula for teaching Africans the intellectual skills they needed to be practicing Christians without simultaneously exposing Africans to humanistic thought (Cairns 1965; Thorne 1997).

Africanizing Mission Education

Missions were pushed toward this goal by the emergence of Ethiopianism. Ethiopianism is a controversial term with a contested legacy. Historically it has signaled very different things to Christians of African descent and Christians of European descent (Kalu 2008; Barnes 2016, 2017). As used here the term is meant to sum up four connected sets of ideas. First is the idea that the Christian God had decreed that the evangelization of Africa was to happen through the agency of Africans. The term “Ethiopianism” goes back to a passage from the Hebrew Bible, Psalms 68:31, “Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.” For Ethiopianists, implicit in this passage was a repudiation of the evangelical claims of European missionaries. Ethiopianists did not dispute the idea that European missionaries had introduced Christianity and Christian civilization to Africa and Africans. Ethiopianists argued that the racism that had crept into European evangelism made the Christian message European missionaries sought to communicate toxic for Africans. The second set of ideas had to do with the nature of the Christian civilization Ethiopianists hoped to strip of racist content. Ethiopianists were squarely in the liberal European tradition of viewing civilization as an interrelated collection of things, an interrelated set of “toolkits” to use a modern global history term. The collection as such had begun in ancient times and had been embraced and added to by various peoples across the ages. While recognizing and acknowledging that Europeans had added the industrial technology toolkit, Ethiopianists insisted that entire collection did not belong to Europeans—no matter how loudly the latter proclaimed that it did. Civilization was God’s gift to humankind, and it was something that Africans could access on their own, which is what Ethiopianists proposed to do in the context of Christian evangelization. Wresting God’s gift from the hands of Europeans was how Ethiopianists perceived the task before them (Shepperson 1968; Redkey 1969). The third set of ideas had to do with how civilization was to be claimed. It was to be a gradual process that implied the social transformation or, as Ethiopianists talked about it, the Christian regeneration of all African peoples. For several generations of trans-Atlantic Protestant African Christians, Ethiopianism was a cultural mindset that brought together peoples of the Anglophone Christian African Diaspora and organized their discussions around a common initiative to nurture a modern Christian civilization on the African continent (Langley 1973; Moses 1978; Chirenje 1987; Moses 1998). The fourth and last set of ideas had to do with how to pay for this modern Christian civilization. Civilizations cost money to build. Industrialization would generate that money. Ethiopianists did not condemn European industrial capitalism. Ethiopianists wanted to create an African version of it. Many African Ethiopianists had spent time in Britain and the USA and were conscious of the enormous cost of building up industrial infrastructure. So Ethiopianists sought ways to generate the wealth needed for African industrialization. As Blyden’s complaint demonstrated, Ethiopianists understood the connection between technological training, wealth creation, and industrial development. “Industrialism” was the term used for the connection in West African newspapers. Seeing industrialism as the fire that Europe as Hephaestus kept hidden from the Africans as mortal men, Ethiopianists went in search of their own Prometheus (Barnes 2017).

Africans wanted to know how to replicate European technology. As one letter to the editor in a Ghanaian newspaper proclaimed, after condemning the curriculum in missionary schools, “the Salvation, freedom and independence of the black man lies in nothing but industrialism.”1 Europeans, however, were unwilling to share industrialism. The question was how to obtain it in spite of European opposition. Another letter to the editor in a Ghanaian newspaper suggested that Africans follow the strategy of the Germans who had, “sought the lowest positions in London offices and British manufactories, accepting paltry wages, but thereby learning the rudiments of British industries.” As a result, the Germans had “mastered all that could be known, [and now were] competing with British merchants the wide world over.”2 An opinion piece in a Nigerian paper offered Africans the example of the Japanese who had paid “foreign technologists” to come to Japan to live for five to seven years, i.e., the length of the term of a European apprenticeship , to train Japanese students. By the time the foreigners were ready to leave Japan, there were Japanese “graduates” ready to take their places.3 African Ethiopianists initially invested their hopes, though, in the emigration to Africa of technologically savvy African Americans.

Edward Blyden and Alexander Crummell were perhaps the two best-known promoters of the idea of “providential design,” the idea that the Christian God had suffered millions of Africans to be taken to the New World as slaves to learn European ways, so that they could now return to Africa and bring that knowledge back with them (Blyden 1862; Crummell 1891). Historians have not given sufficient attention to the fact that the knowledge the “exiles,” as Blyden called them, were supposed to bring back was knowledge of European technology. Yet Crummell, in making the case for communities of African American missionary settlers, talked in one passage about the “well trained handicraftsmen [and] skillful sugarmakers,” from Barbados who were already making a difference in Liberia (Crummell 1891). Blyden was even more explicit. Speaking to reporters in New York on one of his trips across the Atlantic, Blyden insisted that the type of African Americans Africans hoped would return to Africa were “workers, mechanics – all the trades in fact.” As he went on to note, immigrants who had already come back to Africa from the New World had brought with them, “their trades, and steam sugar mills and saw mills, iron foundries, machine shops and all such industries.”4 Speaking the following year to a church audience in Lagos, proclaimed that “it is hardly necessary for me … to recount the advantages which would flow from the return of experienced agriculturalists and skilled mechanics … and the lessons they would impart in the various elements and appliances of civilized life.”5

As the comments by both men suggest, neither of them thought of the passing on of technical training in terms of vocation schools. They understood the transfer of technical knowledge to be the outcome of the apprenticeship process. Their ambition was to persuade African American master craftsmen in the New World to come back to Africa to train young Africans. Significant numbers of African Americans of any stripe did not return to Africa, however. In a letter acknowledging the lack of interest on the part of African Americans for leaving the New World, Blyden informed readers of African newspapers that perhaps there was no need of widespread immigration on the part of black Americans. Perhaps all Africans needed to know about industrialism had been encapsulated into an educational institution and the course of study it provided, and all Africans needed to do was to establish versions of that school in Africa as well (Barnes 2017). Tuskegee was the educational institution in question. There were many myths about Tuskegee, some of them fabricated by Tuskegee’s founder and first principal, Booker T. Washington, some of them fabricated by Washington’s many African American detractors (Spivey 1978; Anderson 1988; Brundage 2003; Norrell 2009; Dagbovie 2010). What is important to keep in mind is that Tuskegee was first and foremost a normal school that produced elementary school teachers. What was innovative about the school was the double vocational training it promoted. Schools for African Americans in the American South did not pay teachers much, so Tuskegee trained students as teachers first and then gave them additional training as artisans and craftsmen, the strategy being that income from their trade work could subsidize their meager teachers’ salaries (Fairclough 2007). Washington did not expect the majority of Tuskegee’s graduates to make their living through trade. But he did promote the ideas that the more entrepreneurial of them had gotten all they needed at Tuskegee to be successful as capitalists, and that it was from small capitalists, such as his students would become, that big capitalists, like his main benefactor Andrew Carnegie, would evolve (Harlan 1972, 1983; Beize and Gasman 2012).

Already before the emergence of Tuskegee, there was some discussion among African Christians about the advantages of American versus European style industrial education. Tuskegee Institute was the daughter institution of Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Washington was a student of the founder of Hampton, General Samuel Armstrong. There was a positive discussion of Hampton and Armstrong in African newspapers in both West and South Africa before the emergence of Washington and Tuskegee. Blyden, who distrusted the white administration at Hampton, was concerned enough about the appeal of Hampton to Africans to specifically condemn the school in the West Africa press. Yet Blyden was the most effusive African supporter of the Hampton approach to education once it became associated with Tuskegee. In South Africa, John Tengo Jabavu, editor of Imvo Zambantsundu (Native Opinion), the most successful African newspaper, was an early admirer of Armstrong and Hampton. White missionaries in South Africa were fierce enthusiasts of Hampton as well, however, so Jabavu kept his distance. Later on, after Tuskegee had become famous, Jabavu sent his son Davidson to Tuskegee to study Washington’s methods. Lastly, perhaps the greatest African promoter of Washington and Tuskegee was John L. Dube, who, when sent to America to study at Hampton as a young man, chose instead to obtain a degree from Oberlin. Dube went back to South Africa, but then returned to the USA to take a divinity degree. It was during that second tour in the USA that Dube heard Washington speak, and had a change of heart about industrial education. Dube went on to found Ohlange Industrial Institute in Natal, which he proudly characterized as the Tuskegee of South Africa (Barnes 2017).

Ethiopianists viewed Tuskegee style industrial education as the key to creating sufficient wealth in Africa to foster an industrial revolution. Washington achieved a Confucius like status in African newspapers, his speeches and writings copied, his observations and sayings quoted as “black diamonds” to fill out the spaces between articles (Barnes 2017). In both West Africa and South Africa, Africans organized movements to petition colonial and settler governments to establish schools based upon the Hampton-Tuskegee model. In the absence of government support, private initiatives, led by African churchmen, sought to establish versions of Tuskegee across Africa. In West Africa, they got nowhere. In South Africa, there was Dube’s Ohlange (Davis 1976; Marable 1979; Chirenje 1987; Vinson 2012). In Central Africa there was, for a brief moment, John Chilembwe’s Providence Industrial Institute (Shepperson and Price 1969). By the 1920s, all of these initiatives had been suppressed by colonial and settler governments (Barnes 2017).

African Ethiopianists had no greater success introducing vocation education in Africa than European missionaries. It would be wrong to say that they failed because they had no real knowledge of American style industrial education and how it worked. Orishatukeh Faduma opened his own industrial education school in North Carolina, and came back to Africa to lecture on industrial education, before returning to Ghana as part of the Chief Sam party. John L. Dube likewise spent years in the USA and visited both Tuskegee and Hampton before opening Ohlange. John Chilembwe studied at an industrial education school in Virginia before returning home to Malawi to open his school. Part of the problem was that these men were churchmen not technicians. None of the Ethiopianists had the background to pursue a technical career, much less establish a school specializing in technical training. Another part of the problem was that American style industrial education was not vocational education in the sense of technical training. At best, as demonstrated by Tuskegee, it was vocational training to serve as a supplement to a teaching or pastoral career. A final, perhaps overarching part of the problem was that Europeans were committed to making sure that industrial education for Africans, in the sense of technical training for the utilization of modern European technology, did not happen (Barnes 2017).

Colonial and Mission Resistance to Africanizing Education

Perhaps the greatest historical outcome of the industrial education efforts on the part of African Ethiopianists was that these efforts terrified Europeans into action on the issue of the provision of European style education to Africans. African efforts to found schools like Tuskegee threatened and irritated missionaries. Governments read such efforts as proto-nationalist and therefore, seditious. European fears seemed confirmed when in 1914, Chilembwe, frustrated with European efforts to suffocate his school out of existence, led his students and followers in a rebellion against colonial rule (Shepperson and Price 1969; Mwase 1975; Makondesa 2000). Marcus Garvey, a few years later, promised his followers that Booker T. Washington institutes dedicated to technical training would be opened across Africa once his steamship line was up and running (Barnes 2017). Europeans read Garvey as making overt what had been covert in Ethiopianist support for schools like Tuskegee from the start. African Tuskegees were to be the launching ports for African liberation. Europeans traced this sedition back to the denationalizing impact of African American teachings on the African mind. In the wake of the suppression of the Garvey movement, colonial governments and Christian missions worked in unison to shut down African American access to Africa (Barnes 2017).

With far less unanimity, governments and missions tried to come up with some version of technical training that would make Africans useful for the development plans of colonial states; yet inure Africans to ideas about political rights. At the core of the tensions that developed between colonial states and missions was the move by most colonial states in the decade following the end of World War I to establish departments of education, typically staffed with seconded political officers, whose primary task was to monitor the education taking place at mission schools for potentially subversive content. Schools were directed to not teach humanistic subject matter, or if they had to teach this type of subject matter, then to offer in addition some sort of “vocational” or “industrial” education experience that would serve as a prophylactic to humanism (Strayer 1973; Yates 1978; Summers 2002). In government schools, founded mostly for the training of political elites as collaborators, this effort took the form of the students getting their hands dirty through afternoon instruction in vocational techniques in school workshops run by trained technicians or agricultural methods on school farms run by agricultural demonstrators (Corby 1981, 1990). Mission schools had workshops and farms as well of course. But vocational instruction on mission stations was a haphazard affair, limited by the local missionary’s expertise.

Humanism was communicated through books, colonial governments reasoned, and the capacity to read European languages needed to be recognized as the gateway to books. The easiest and most effective way to stop Africans from reading European languages, it was concluded, was to stop teaching them European languages. Colonial departments of education came to require that missions give instruction in non-European languages. In most areas of colonial Africa, instruction was in vernaculars only recently put into writing by missionaries. In other areas, those in proximity to Muslim communities, instruction was in a Muslim lingua franca like Hausa or Swahili . Neither missions nor governments were happy with these arrangements. Missions because missionaries were spending all their time learning to teach in vernaculars. Governments because missionaries were not very effective at teaching in vernaculars. Governments began to talk about taking over education in colonial territories and replacing mission schools with government schools (Yates 1980b; Fabian 1983; Barnes 2009, 2015).

In 1920, Thomas Jesse Jones, educational director of the American philanthropy, the Phelps Stokes Fund, appeared on the scene in Africa to offer missions and governments a way out of their dilemma over African education. Jones had made a name for himself in American educational circles as an expert on the brand of industrial education taught at Hampton and Tuskegee. Jones, in fact, through his two-volume survey, Negro Education, had shaped the public perception of the nature of the education that took place at the two institutions. Jones made a persuasive case to a white American audience looking for an approach to educating African Americans that shored up white supremacy, that the educational experience promoted at the two schools produced students more interested in social service than political activism (Negro Education 1917). In 1919, British missionaries, under the direction of J. H. Oldham, general secretary of the International Missionary Council, the Protestant mission lobbying organization that grew out of the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, invited Jones to conduct an external review of mission schools in Africa along the Western coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Town in South Africa with a view toward identify how those schools could be made to better serve the needs of the colonial states. The result of what was called the first Phelps Stokes Education Commission was a 300-page report, Education in Africa, published in 1922. The first report was so successful that Jones was invited by missions and governments to come back and do the same sort of review of mission schools along the Eastern coast from Durban in South Africa up to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. This resulted in a 400-page report, Education in East Africa, published in 1925. Jones’ two reports changed the understanding of vocational education, and the role of mission schools in providing vocational education in Africa (also see Berman 1970, 1971; King 1971).

Jones agreed with the government charge that missions were responsible for the rebellious tendencies exhibited by African Christians. Notions of equality and fraternity as preached by missionaries were sending Africans all the wrong messages. Yet while he recognized missions as the source of the problem, Jones also insisted that missions were the solution as well. What was needed, he recommended, was for missions to put aside their obsession with evangelization, and focus their energies instead on training African Christians to be service providers for other Africans (Jones 1925b, 1926a).

When writing about Africa Jones already had in mind the germ of the idea of what he later developed as the “four essentials” that govern the growth and evolution of human societies. By way of quick summary, the four essentials may be identified as health and sanitation, economic activity, home life and what Jones called recreation but what he really meant to stand for religion. Distinct from previous Christian discussion of social regeneration, which focused on the redemption of the individual, Jones emphasized that the four essentials had no historical impact on the individual level. The four essentials only had an impact on the community level. Community was an amorphous term for Jones that extended from the narrowest collectivity, the village, to the widest collectivity, the race. It was from the point of view of this argument that Jones dismissed African claims for recognition as civilized individuals. Individuals could not be civilized, only communities could be civilized (Jones 1926b, 1929; Correia 1993).

Much has been written about Jones’ use of the term “adapted” to characterize the approach to education he advocated. As scholars have pointed out, there was not much in terms of specific educational strategies and initiatives behind the term. It meant different things to different groups of missionaries and colonial officials (Ball 1983; Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000; Whitehead 2005; Küster 2007; Yamada 2008; Windel 2009). Perhaps that was Jones’ goal. The hook though that Jones used to pull Europeans into his vision was the idea that at some protean moment in their past (Protestant), Europeans had begun to pursue the four essentials in some unique, exceptional ways, which explained European ascendency in the modern age. Based upon this understanding of the European past, an early example of the idea of European exceptionalism, Jones posited that to the extent other racial communities “adapted” their own versions of the four essentials to their collective needs, these groups could evolve in the same ways in the future.

The two Phelps Stokes Education Commission reports that Jones wrote recommended that missions work with colonial governments toward the completion of two goals. First was the exposure of African communities to the benefits of European versions of the four essentials: European ideas of health and sanitation to wipe out the disease rampant in Africa; European ideas of economic activity to teach Africans modern ways to make a living; European ideas of home life to show Africans the virtues of monogamy; European ideas of recreation to convince Africans of the superiority of Christianity. Missions were supposed to communicate the four essentials by dedicating their missionaries and mission stations to the provision of social services. Jones proposed that missionaries curtail their evangelical activities and commit to interacting with Africans primarily as doctors, nurses, school superintendents, teachers, technical instructors, agricultural and craft demonstrators. In these guises, missionaries could more effectively expose Africans to the social benefits that came along with European colonization (Küster 2007; Windel 2009; Barnes 2015).

The second goal toward which missions and governments were supposed to work together was the passing on to Africans of simplified versions of all these types of occupations. Missionaries were supposed to train Africans as medical dressers, medical dispensers, maternity nurses, teachers, supervising teachers, vocational trainers and model farmers. Here the idea of toolkits, as used by global historians, can again help to explain things. Edmund Burke III talks about toolkits having “hardware” and “software” components (Burke 2009). Hardware are all the material, technical attributes of a toolkit. For example, as applied to the writing, record keeping toolkit that got its start in ancient Mesopotamia before arriving where it now stands today in Silicon Valley, hardware had to do with the evolution of clay and styluses, paper and pens, touch screens and keyboards, etc. and the knowledge of how to use these things. Software are all the cultural, intellectual attributes of the toolkit. Literature, abstract ideas, legal codes are things that have evolved based upon the writing, record-keeping tool kit. While Jones did not use the terminology, his case about the four essentials was that European societies had developed a new social welfare toolkit, which had to do with making communities safer, healthier, materially more comfortable, and economically more viable for their inhabitants. The hardware in this toolkit were the hospitals, clinics, and laboratories; schools, workshops and demonstration farms; mechanical and electrical technologies that Jones proposed be introduced to Africans through vocational training. Through hands on, watch and learn, repetition and drill teaching methods, Africans were to learn the upkeep of these things and the most basic of their entry level applications. This meant that Africans would learn how to treat wounds and administer vaccines, to teach and oversee the teaching of rudimentary intellectual skills, to lay out buildings according to European concepts of construction, to prepare agricultural fields for exploitation using European technology .

Software was all the abstract thinking, intellectual and professional knowledge, government policies needed to sustain such hardware. Software was reserved for Europeans. This was because only Europeans had the collective racial knowledge needed to maintain the social welfare toolkit correctly. The capacity to determine what was hardware and what was software would remain in the hands of the colonial state. To Africans demanding some say in the introduction of European civilization in Africa, Jones argued that when Africans had acquired the collective racial knowledge sufficient to make the decisions Europeans were making, then Africans would have all they needed to leave European tutelage behind, and construct their own civilization. At the core of what Jones saw as his own liberal convictions was his certainty that Africans, like Protestant Europeans, would eventually discover their own versions of the four essentials, and use these to create their own equivalent civilization (Dougall 1950; King 1971; Correia 1993).

Vying Forms of Colonial and Mission Vocational Education

To assess the impact of Jones’ recommendations on the development of vocational education in the second half of the colonial era, it is most useful to talk about the failures first and the successes second. The failures were so total and complete that they can obscure the successes. Yet the successes led to some social and economic changes still influential in African life.

Implicit in Jones’ ideas were what was later theorized as a “takeoff” stage of economic and social development, a stage when elements come together in such a fashion that quantitative change became qualitative. More than just being Eurocentric, Jones was Anglo-centric, tracing European takeoff to developments in Britain. For him it was within the yeoman agrarian communities of eighteenth-century Britain, with their simultaneous openness to individual self-improvement and collective commitment to social amelioration, that the modern European world came into existence. The European world at that moment, not the following age of industrial revolution, was the protean stage that Jones had in mind when thinking about the development of the four essentials in Europe. It served as Jones’ starting point for his hypothesizing about how European like social and economic development could take place elsewhere. Scholars have called attention to Jones’ phobias about cities and the negative impact of cities on Africa’s social development. What should also be appreciated is Jones’ vision of prosperous rural communities as ground zero for Europe’s great transformation. The task before governments and missions seeking to redeem Africa, Jones preached, was to find ways to improve the economic viability of village-based agriculture (Jones 1926b, 1929; Hodge 2007).

The primary new vocation Jones envisioned for African males was yeoman farmer, or, given the apolitical mentality this farmer was expected to possess, the entrepreneurial peasant. The idea of an entrepreneurial peasantry may seem to have been counter intuitive, yet the idea can be argued as reflecting the same early twentieth-century belief in the capability of social engineering to transform people discernible behind the five-year economic plans pursued contemporaneously in the Soviet Union. What remains impressive in retrospect are the intellectual and spiritual energies Christian missions invested in implementing Jones’ scheme. Missions and governments, and the private philanthropies that funded their joint initiatives, applied Jones’ ideas about how to teach the social sciences as social studies to the communication of all types of technical knowledge. “Expert” European and American scholars and teachers were called upon to work out proportionate dosages such that Africans could be taught just enough biology to understand European style animal husbandry, just enough chemistry to understand the value of chemical fertilization, just enough mathematics to figure out crop rotations. All this learning was to take place in mission schools where the curriculum had been reformed away from the old preoccupation with Christian conversion and restructured to concentrate instead on the new preoccupation with community development. To teach Africans more specialized forms of technical knowledge, there was even the remarkable Bantu Cinema Project. Short films from a Do-It-Yourself perspective were to be produced, with the understanding that they would be voiced over by local technicians in languages villagers could understand (Notcutt and Latham 1937; Reynolds 2010). Animating all this effort was the shared European conviction that the clock could be turned back, and that the erosion of African village life could be reversed and that coordinated effort from above could help create an idealized, modernized agrarian existence (Cohen 1993; Leedy 2007; Hodge 2007).

Missions continued to promote back to the farm movements through the end of the colonial era, yet the revitalization of rural life did not happen in colonized Africa. How consciously perfidious colonial governments were in supporting missions in pursuit of this goal is an open question. For all the rhetoric, government policies never favored the creation of a class of small agricultural entrepreneurs, or the construction of the type of infrastructure that would allow for rural villages to become hubs of agricultural commerce and exchange. Everywhere in colonial Africa, governments were concerned with large-scale capitalist agriculture for the world market and pursued policies favorable to expatriate firms, settlers, and African elites. Schools never got the technology, and missionaries never got the training to facilitate any large-scale transformation of African villagers to entrepreneurial peasants. In practice, the new emphasis on agricultural training meant that the little humanistic education once given in mission schools was replaced with more manual labor. Agricultural education became even more tightly associated in the African mind with European domination (Leedy 2007; Barnes 2009; Saeteurn 2017).

African men , Jones promised, could become yeoman farmers. African women, he promised likewise, could become modern wives and mothers. The third of the four essentials was a stable home life which, according to Jones, had to be rooted in a monogamous marriage controlled by a matriarch. The primary vocation for which African women were to be trained was the African village equivalent of the bourgeois European housewife. Several sets of European desiderata came together to fashion this vision for the African woman. Arguably the most significant difference between the first and second Phelps Stokes education reports was that, while Jones dismissed women and girls ’ education with a few paragraphs in the first report, in the second report he dedicated an entire chapter to the topic. The argument he made in that chapter attempted to reconcile concerns by women missionaries that in any new educational scheme girls’ education be given some specific attention, concerns by male missionaries that revised school curricula give monogamous Christian marriage some reinforcement, concerns by colonial governments that schools guide African communities toward better child rearing practices. Jones identified the African male’s libido as the greatest obstacle to the relief of all these concerns. The way to surmount the obstacle was through the creation of a Christian African matriarchy who could force African men to turn their attentions from sex toward social improvement. This Christian African matriarchy, trained to rudimentary understandings of European ideas of health and hygiene, educated to understand the importance of “mother tongue” instruction in primary education, armed with the nurturing skills Europeans subsumed under the term “mothercraft,” would produce for their monogamous husbands broods of eugenically superior children (Jones 1925a).

Problems with implementation doomed this vision from the start. To highlight only one such problem, there was friction between female and male missionaries about the priority missions gave to training girls to become wives even before the Phelps Stokes education reports appeared. The reports forced these tensions out in the open. The majority of female missionaries in Africa were single women who had discovered a religious vocation in service to the evangelization of other women. They did not see anything wrong with training African girls to seek careers as service professionals, such careers implying that the girls might remain single as adults. Male missionaries wanted Christian African women to be trained to accept responsibility for mothering future generations of African Christians. Women missionaries preferred to teach African girls in single-sex schools. Women missionaries felt single-sex education kept girls safe from predatory males. Male missionaries felt that single-sex education kept girls suspicious of men and awkward in all types of gendered interaction . The issue that triggered an open debate between the two groups of missionaries was whether the American model of Hampton and Tuskegee institutes, where girls and boys studied together, would not be a better way forward in Africa. The issue was not resolved during the colonial era, mooting any pursuit of Jones’ vision. Female missionaries were so adamant in their defense of single-sex schools, that colonial governments initially backed off on the idea of American styled co-educational schools, preferring instead to build girls schools and boys schools in proximity to each other, so that the students could socialize. Later in the colonial era though, colonial governments moved toward supporting American style co-educational schools and explicit training of girls to become housewives and mothers (Hunt 1988, 1990; Barnes 2015; Prevost 2017).

The primary social engineering projects Jones convinced missions and governments to attempt failed. But Jones’ recommendations did have some successful outcomes, and these outcomes, though they may have been unintended, continue to shape the social landscape in Africa (see Lebby 1980; Vaughan 1991; Sivonen 1995; Summers 2002; Küster 2007; Kallaway 2009). Most significantly, Jones’ recommendations were the impetus behind the introduction of a new set of vocations for Christian Africans. A new social services sector came into existence in colonized Africa. It provided employment for two sets of service providers. There was a top tier of Europeans with European training in medicine or education. Most of this people were missionaries or associated with missions. There was a bottom tier of Africans trained by Europeans in medicine or education. The bottom tier was much larger and composed mostly of Africans educated as Christians. European service providers were concentrated at mission hospitals and boarding schools. Some Africans were centralized in these same locations, but many more occupied small stations set up in regional networks. At these stations, they dispensed either medicine or educational knowledge. Still a third group of Africans moved between the central and network locations, typically in performance of some oversight over activities at the latter. Initially, both groups of service providers were paid by missions, though the funding came in part for governments. Ultimately, especially the African service providers were paid directly by governments (Barnes 2009; Hughes 2013; Jennings 2013).

Male Africans found jobs as medicine dressers, medical dispensers, hospital nurses, primary and secondary school teachers, craft and farm demonstrators. Female Africans found jobs as midwives, nurses, school teachers, and home economics demonstrators (Dougall 1930, 1938; Oldham 1934). Schools were set up across Africa to teach these fields of expertise, taught in part by missionaries, but in part also by government-paid instructors from Europe and America. Some of the Africans taught in these schools became sufficiently expert at their jobs to evaluate the performance of others. Some of them even went further and became in turn teachers in the schools where they had trained (Lebby 1980; Smit 1988; Sivonen 1995; Sweet 2004; Barnes 2009). Some of these teachers spent time in Europe and America learning the cutting edge of the technology they used in their classrooms (Jennings 2013; Hughes 2013) .

In sum, missions and governments did all that they could to foster into existence a trained corps of African social service providers. Put another way, missions and governments did all the things that they did not do to issue into existence a trained corps of technical service providers. There is a striking contrast between the ways that missions and governments pursued the introduction of European social services technology and European industrial technology in Africa. In their defense, social services were an attribute of the public sector in Western cultures. Missions and governments knew all there was to know about social services, since these services had been pioneered by churches and states in Europe. Industry and technology were an attribute of the private sector in Western cultures . In Europe, churches and states had left technology and its development to guilds and then industrial capitalism.

The new vocations opened a world of opportunities for African Christians to embed themselves and their faith in African communities. Previously, the jobs available for Africans with Western education were jobs servicing the expatriate sector. Educated Christian Africans worked for Europeans. Social welfare jobs were community facing and applied European knowledge to the benefit of African peoples. There have been a number of studies of how African intermediaries played a role in negotiating the space between rulers and the ruled during the colonial era (Lawrance et al. 2006; Mark-Thiesen 2012; Moyd 2014). African social service providers were a new set of intermediaries whose roles have not received the study they deserve. One question worth investigating is the extent to which these providers helped detach Christian social services from their previous narrow association with missionary Christianity. By the end of the colonial era, European style social services were something Africans expected their governments to supply, even if Africans also accepted that governments routinely franchised the provision of these services to missions and churches. A separate question has to do with the relationship between the new social services elite and the other trained elite that Europeans introduced into Africa, the military. To the extent to which they could build their militaries through the recruitment of Muslims , colonial states could be argued to have sought to build their armies and police forces as a set of alternative intermediaries with no connection with missions and Christianity. Social and cultural interactions between the two sets of intermediaries still deserve some further examination, however, if only from the perspective of how and why the political objectives they displayed after African independence evolved in such diametrically opposed ways. A last question to be mentioned is the connection between African Christian social service providers and the leadership as well as the membership of the African independent churches that began to appear in the final decades of the colonial era. Once African social service providers began to draw their salaries from governments, not missions, they were free to explore their own notions of Christian spirituality. It would be interesting to know how vocationally , as distinct from humanistically trained social service providers shaped the indigenous Christianity that began to emerge .

Notes

  1. 1.

    The Gold Coast Leader, June 23, 1906, p. 3.

  2. 2.

    The Gold Coast Leader, August 12, 1906 (Supplement), p. 1.

  3. 3.

    Lagos Weekly Record, January 15, 1921, p. 5.

  4. 4.

    Quoted from The Sierra Leone Weekly News, January 8, 1890, p. 5.

  5. 5.

    Blyden, Edward W., 1891, “The Return of the Exiles and the West African Church: A Lecture Delivered at the Breadfruit School House, Lagos,” West Africa 19–20: 23.