Africa and the Southern States of The U.S.A.: Notes on J. H. Oldham and American Negro Education for Africans

Abstract

This paper attempts an outline of the Pan-African aspect of British colonial education policies during the inter-war years. In particular, it analyses the role of the missionary statesman, J. H. Oldham, in securing the adoption of a certain style of Negro education in the Southern States of America (one based on the work of the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes) both by the International Missionary Council and by the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education, of which he was a member. Oldham's interest in transferring the primarily agricultural and technical insights of the Hampton-Tuskegee model to Africa was developed in close collaboration with the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York, and together they were responsible for directly exposing large numbers of missionaries and colonial officials to these emphases in the Southern States. The attempt to suggest the relevance to Africa of institutions which had long traditions of compromise with white supremacy in the American South inevitably cut across the Pan-African programmes of such New World Negroes as W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, and had the effect of transplanting to the African continent some of the bitter disputes about the educational and political status of Negroes that had been common in America from the late nineteenth century conflict between DuBois and Booker T. Washington. While the article is primarily concerned with the formation of a missionary and Colonial Office consensus on the preferred Negro education for Africans, some attention is also paid to the extent to which the Hampton-Tuskegee model actually took root in Africa.