Review: Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, by Andrew E. Barnes

Abstract

In Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education, Andrew E. Barnes provides significant insight into how African Christians challenged European domination through use of a strategy of social development via Christianization, appropriated from their understanding of African American Christian life (1). Central to Barnes’s study is how African Christians strategically built upon the establishment of schools like Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Contributing to the fields of History, American Studies, and Religious Studies, Barnes reveals how African-edited newspapers became primary sources through which African Christians learned about African American life as well as African American contributions to industrialism.Examining an underanalyzed range of African-edited newspaper archives, Barnes explores how, in both West Africa and South Africa, African-edited newspapers played an essential role in movements for the establishment of industrial institutes as alternatives to mission schools for African students. In contradistinction to missionary schools that only had the capacity to educate ministers and clerks, who could only serve as support staff for mission churches and colonial governments, Barnes compellingly demonstrates how the proposed African institutes were presented as secondary schools, as distinct from primary schools, where students could acquire a technologically sophisticated education that would allow them both to understand and to reengineer European technology for African needs.According to Barnes, one of the central aims of these African-edited newspapers was to evidence how African institutes molded in the image and likeness of Tuskegee could provide a racially empowering alternative to the racially demeaning training provided at mission schools (2). In response to the broader academic discourse concerning the purported agency of African Christians in the early twentieth century, Barnes contends that African Christian movements to build industrial education schools have been noticed by scholars but mostly dismissed as not important. It is within this underanalyzed matrix of discursive African negotiations with Christianity that Barnes seeks to investigate the transnational dimensions of African transnational participation with industrialism.Divided into six chapters, Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic invites readers to consider how the African industrial education movement served as a leading edge of the African challenge to the European conquest of Africa. Barnes opens the book by providing background on his subjects of interest, beginning with an examination of African newspapers and their role in shaping the African response to missionary Christianity and European conquest. He then interrogates how many African Christians aspired to imitate the missionaries by becoming missionaries themselves. European missionaries, however, largely dismissed their efforts, suggesting that Africans as a race were not yet sufficiently mature to claim the mantle of evangelization. According to Barnes, while missionaries had little to say in the European conquest of Africa, they did look upon the winners in the competition with favor, reasoning that God in His providence had sent missions, in the form of the conquering colonial armies, a stick with which to beat down African resistance to the gospel message (9). While modern scholars have mined African newspapers for the earliest articulations by Africans of a number of secular and social notions and ideas, Barnes offers a counternarrative that attends to the obscurantism of the extant scholarly literature by foregrounding the fact that the readers and editors of these newspapers self-identified as Christians. Far from being “secular” documents, Barnes presents a group of editors and laypeople alike who both wrote and read articles in the newspapers in the pursuit of a Christian understanding of the world around them.Chapter 2 discusses the notion of ethnogenesis through education developed first at Hampton Institute under General Samuel C. Armstrong and then refined with an eye toward Black sensibilities at Tuskegee under Booker T. Washington. The concept of industrial education that caught the attention of Black Christians in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century had its start across the Atlantic at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, where Booker T. Washington trained. According to Barnes, General Armstrong, founder of Hampton, traced his notion of industrial education back to that of his father, who ran a Christian school system based upon the approach for the kingdom of Hawaii during the 1850s. Armstrong consciously set out to train future teachers to build and maintain schools for freed slaves in the rural American South. Armstrong insisted that Hampton was better prepared than traditionally trained students for their true task: the Christian regeneration of African American freed people (32). Furthermore, Washington used this master plan to build an institution whose graduates aspired to shape Christian Black society from the bottom up (40). Washington never lost sight of the Protestant idea that demonstrated control of the material world could be read as a sign of spiritual election. According to Barnes, Washington considered the creation of a class of Black Christians who owned property to be a significant part of his agenda as a Black Christian educator.Chapter 3 suggests a new conceptual framework within which to think about the term Ethiopianism as it is applied in Africa. Barnes articulates Ethiopianism as constituting one among several types of adversarial Christianity. Far from a floating signifier, the term Ethiopianism denotes the stances African Christians took in response to missionary racial and cultural presumptions. Focusing on articles written in John L. Dube’s newspaper, Ilanga, and the Sierra Leone Times, Barnes demonstrates how his study is concerned primarily with the manner in which Ethiopianists focused on identifying and moving past the obstructions that missionaries placed in the way of the advancement of Africans. These newspapers insisted that Hampton Institute was the school Ethiopianists in Sierra Leone were seeking to copy. These articles also insisted upon Hampton’s importance as a center for Christian regeneration. Hampton’s greatest investment in Christian regeneration, according to Barnes, however, was identified to be its establishment of Tuskegee Institute.Chapter 4 provides information about the reception of Washington and his school in West Africa. Central to this chapter is Washington’s impressive presence in West African newspapers. His articles and articles by others about Tuskegee were regularly reprinted, and his aphorisms filled space at the end of columns. According to Barnes, West Africans did not look to capitalism as an instrument of proletarianization (84). Instead, industrial development was about the identification and production for profit of commodities that would supply an individual with the wealth necessary to move beyond wage labor. Moreover, Barnes goes on to posit that West Africans did not think they could collectively ship out to London as a race in order to become industrial apprentices. They did think, however, that as a race they could build a number of schools like Tuskegee, which would serve the same purpose. Washington validated their convictions about capitalism and about its potential as a vehicle for economic Ethiopianism. They did not question whether the Tuskegee approach worked as advertised—most of the things they heard and read said that it did.Chapter 5 considers the reception of Washington and Tuskegee in South Africa, where Washington and his school were covered in papers more than they were in West African papers. In South Africa, however, Tuskegee and its import were contested, with African Christians and European Christians offering oppositional considerations, first of industrial education and second of Washington and his feats. South African Ethiopianists promoted images of Washington and Tuskegee that were comparable to those endorsed in West Africa, although with an additional cognizance of the obstacles to the realization of an Ethiopianist agenda posed not just by European colonial governments but by European settlers as well.The final chapter starts with a discussion of Washington’s attempt to guide Ethiopianists and missionaries toward common ground. Here, Barnes interrogates how Washington built his strategy around calling what he announced as an “International Conference on the Negro,” to take place on the grounds of Tuskegee itself. Although the conference did take place, in April 1912, and its outcome was a partial thawing of relations in Africa between Ethiopianists and missionaries, Barnes ultimately interprets the conference to be a failure, largely due to Washington’s idealism concerning the ability of missionaries and African Christians to forge a political bond through mutual respect. Washington’s death in 1915 signaled a change of direction in the history of industrial education as an educational approach on the African continent. Here, Barnes cites Garveyism’s appropriation of industrial education as part of its appeal. While a fuller account of the broader history of Black diasporic consciousness as well as Black ethnic religions that informed Garveyism’s complicated and nuanced relationship to religion and industrialism would help the reader identify what Barnes considers to be the “Black” in the Black Atlantic, this study, nevertheless, enriches our understanding of particular communities of African Christians and how they sought to participate in an ever-changing world.