British African Colonies Research Articles

Copying informal institutions: the role of British colonial officers during the decolonization of British Africa

AbstractInstitutional reforms in developing countries often involve copying institutions from developed countries. Such institutional copying is likely to fail, if formal institutions alone are copied without the informal institutions on which they rest in the originating country. This paper investigates the role of human actors in copying informal institutions. At independence, all British African colonies imported the same institution intended to safeguard the political neutrality of their civil services. While the necessary formal provisions were copied into the constitutions of all African colonies, the extent to which they were put into practice varies. The paper investigates the connection between the variation in the legal practice and the presence of British colonial officers after independence. A natural experiment around compensation payments to British officers explains the variation in the number of officers who remained in service after independence. Interviews with retired officers suggest that the extended presence of British personnel promoted the acceptance of imported British institutions among local colleagues.

“Set Alight to Her Husband’s House”: Teaching as Scholarship and Activism in the Gambian Archives

“It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.” — Bessie Head, A Question of Power “The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” — Steve Biko Speech in Cape Town, 1971 In the middle of 1951, at the start of the rainy season, a womanhunt was launched in the knotty mangroves on the shores of Bathurst, The Gambia. According to a letter sent by the Secretary of prisons, R.J.S. Pearson, to the Colonial Secretary, Ms. Haddy Dukeri had managed to escape into the marshlands where the Gambia River meets the Atlantic Ocean, but she was ultimately found and reconfined. 2 The missive penned by Pearson provides little insight into Ms. Dukeri’s plight and grave circumstances. The conditions of her confinement were deeply concerning even to colonial administrators all the way up to the colonial governor; nevertheless, little action was taken to remedy or even ameliorate the situation. What Pearson’s statement does not make known is that Ms. Dukeri was housed in a men’s prison, hundreds of kilo meters from her family. Documents reveal that she was the only woman at Mile 2, at the time an all male facility, because a female prison did not exist. She was charged with a capital offence, the details of which will be outlined shortly. Dukeri’s case was not entirely unique in the broader context of female imprisonment in British colonial Africa. 3 In many ways, this was a problem not exceptional to Bathurst, The Gambia, or British African colonies. Scholarship reveals that other territories and nations, including the United States, wrestled through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century with the issue of where and how to house

Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880–1965

Recent literature on the historical determinants of African poverty has emphasized structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions, weak institutions, or ethnic heterogeneity. But has African poverty been a persistent historical phenomenon? This article checks such assumptions against the historical record. We push African income estimates back in time by presenting urban unskilled real wages for nine British African colonies (1880–1965). We find that African real wages were well above subsistence level and that they rose significantly over time. Moreover, in West Africa and Mauritius real wage levels were considerably higher than those in Asia.

Colonial taxation and government spending in British Africa, 1880–1940: Maximizing revenue or minimizing effort?

Colonial state institutions are widely cited as a root cause of sub-Saharan African underdevelopment, but the opinions differ on the channels of causation. Were African colonial states ruled by near absolutist governments who strived to maximize revenue extraction in order to strengthen their grip on native African societies? Or did European powers build ‘states without substance’, governed with minimal resources and effort, failing to invest in basic public goods? This paper develops an analytical framework for comparing colonial tax and spending patterns and applies it to eight British African colonies (1880–1940). We show that colonial fiscal systems did not adhere to a uniform logic, that minimalism prevailed in West Africa, extractive features were more pronounced in East Africa, and that Mauritius revealed characteristics of a developmental state already before 1940.

Educational borrowing as negotiation: re‐examining the influence of the American black industrial education model on British colonial education in Africa

This study explores the extent to which American educational ideas made an impact on policy‐making and practice of education in British African colonies between the two World Wars. The analysis re‐examines the apparent ‘borrowing’ of American black industrial education models for application in Africa. It is argued that, while the view that Americans were successful in handling racial conflicts by means of education at home carried strong symbolic meaning in the colonial political arena, the ideas themselves were not new. The paper focuses on the motivations and characteristics of the people involved in this political discourse and in transferring American and other models to Africa. By doing this, the paper draws attention to a more complex network of factors that were involved in the transfer of educational policies to British colonies in Africa.

Intellectual of Empire: Eric Dutton and Hegemony in British Africa

This essay examines the career of Eric Dutton in five British African colonies from 1919 to 1952, with case studies of his work in Lusaka and Zanzibar. In analyzing Dutton's career, I use a Gramscian conception of the role of intellectuals in creating colonial hegemony, against the backdrop of recent research on the relationship of geography to colonial discourse. Dutton worked and corresponded with key players in Britain's African empire. He was a major force behind early urban-planning programs in East and Central Africa and author of four geographical books. Permanently disabled by war wounds, he was also permanently infatuated with the moral rightness of British imperial culture. A concern for geography's professional relationship with, and the geographical legacy of, colonialism has emerged in recent scholarship on Africa, largely through studies of travel writing, fiction, and nineteenth- or early twentieth-century exploration geography. Later scholar-officials like Dutton sought to apply their knowledge to the shaping of spaces to serve the Empire's direct and immediate needs in Africa, even while trying to win the hearts and minds of its subject peoples. Around Timothy Mitchell's (1988) concept of “enframing,” I build an analysis of the spatial projects with which Dutton is most associated and show how Lusaka and Zanzibar were enframed by his plans. Through his publications and correspondences, as well as his seemingly omnipresent service, Dutton has an important legacy that has neither been articulated nor analyzed, one which points to the importance of contextualized biography for analyses of colonial discourse. I argue here for seeing Dutton as an intellectual in the service of colonial hegemony and its enframing spatial discourse, although the character of his agency exemplifies why that attempted hegemony failed.

The Documentation of Colonial Rule in Africa

The aim of this paper is to show how the development of colonial rule in Africa was reflected in the production of published documents by the colonial power. Its scope is restricted to British colonies in Africa - in the time available it really wouldn't be, possible to deal additionally with French, German, Spanish and Portuguese Africa, particularly as I know remarkably little about the publications produced in non-Anglophone African territories. I propose to run through the main categories of publications issued in British African colonies, with specimen copies mostly from Sierra Leone, whose colonial status was established early in the nineteenth century. I shall also have something to say about British official publications dealing with African territories.

Emigration to British East and Central Africa

for more people, their climates for the most part are suitable for Europeans, and they have administrations and social services which could be expanded rapidly to meet the needs of larger populations. So clamorous are some of the D:ominions in their demands for immigrants that the opportunities for White settlement in other parts of the Commonwealth are easily overlooked. In Africa there are large areas of British colonial territory apparently suitable for permanent White settlement, and while these areas present the immigrant with difficulties of economic, social, and physical adaptation not encountered in higher latitudes, there are political, economic, and strategic reasons why they should be discussed in connection with emigration policies. The object of this paper is to examine some of the geographical considerations concerning economic development by White settlement in the British African colonies.*

The Evolution of Local Government in British African Colonies

The Evolution of Local Government in British African Colonies Margaret Wrong Margaret Wrong Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 22, Issue 3, July 1946, Pages 418–421, https://doi.org/10.2307/3017046 Published: 01 July 1946

Nutrition Work in British African Colonies since 1939

Although the war forced plans for nutrition field research to go into cold storage, it has at the same time focused attention as never before on food production and distribution and the application of nutritional knowledge to these problems, together with greatly increased attention to the proper feeding of large bodies of people, whether our own troops of many races, labour forces, camps of refugees, internees and prisoners of war, or hospitals and other institutions. It has, however, been a period in which doing things has been much more important than writing about them, and for this reason factual detail with which to fill out this picture is not at present available. The following very incomplete notes indicate a little of what has been happening in regard to nutrition work in the British African dependencies apart from the multifarious activities indicated above.