“A World of Good to Our Boys”: Boy Scouts in Southern Nigeria, 1934–1951

Abstract

The origin of the Boy Scout movement was well documented by its founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, and for the British colonies in southern and eastern Africa by historian Timothy Parsons, who noted not only the importance of the formation of Baden-Powell’s ideas, but also how and why the movement became popular in the colonies covered by his study. Parsons explained the connection between British imperialism and scouting as a mechanism to support the empire; however, he further outlined the ways in which Boy Scouts in South Africa used the fourth Boy Scout law, which considered every Boy Scout a brother regardless of religion or race, to challenge racism and discrimination in British settler colonies.1 Whereas Parsons’s work focused on British settler colonies, scouting in Nigeria requires an additional analysis in order to evaluate scouting’s influence where African scouts dealt with a different set of challenges. Concepts of race and how the British colonial administration in Nigeria rationalized the “civilizing mission” remain crucial aspects for understanding the Boy Scout movement; however, the lack of white settlers in the Nigerian colony led to a different experience for boys in the southern region with vastly different reasons for joining the scout movement than boys in the settler colonies.2