British Colonial Service Research Articles

The changing face of colonial education in Africa: Education, science and development

This review article enters into discussion with Peter Kallaway, in his work, The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa: Education, Science and Development, who raises serious issues related to the historical development of South Africa’s education during the first half of the 19th century and its current situation and future prospects in the broader context of African education. Education is a dynamic process that encompasses the formal and informal sectors historically. In South Africa, the informal was the norm for centuries before the intrusion of Western influences and formal education needs to work alongside the informal processes based in the home, the church and the community. Formal education is a product of the West and came to occupy the determinative place in the period covered by this book, while the informal sector was relegated to a subservient role despite its inherent value. Kallaway discusses these issues by analysing the contributions of external factors such as the International Missionary Council in the religious sphere and the New Education Fellowship and the British colonial service in the secular sphere. These played a significant role in the movement from ‘culture-bound’ to a universalised approach to education in Africa and particularly South Africa. Alongside this, the role of mission education is discussed as a source of tension with external forces and as a significant contributor to the development of education not restricted to the religious domain. Mission education emerges as an innovative force in educational development as a part of the international movement within the context of an emerging ‘development’ paradigm. The external and internal forces and the cultural and universalising are not necessarily in opposition to one another but often in conversation with and in tension with one another’s assumptions. Kallaway undertakes two case studies of South African scholars, Donald M’Timkulu and SEK Mqhayi in order to refine his analysis. It has been alleged with truth that the trader and settler followed the missionary, who was the agent of European imperialism, working hand in hand with the colonial powers for the subjugation of the black people and the territorial extension of the imperialist power. This view has been challenged by Brian Stanley who cautions against a too simplistic interpretation of the relationship between colonisation and Christianisation reached through ideological means rather than intensive historical research. He concludes that the process first appears more complex and seeks to avoid generalisations. This provides an appropriate starting point for this review article, which attempts to go beyond the historical by raising contemporary issues related to the concept of Africanisation.Contribution: This article contributes to the ongoing debate regarding developments in education in a colonial context from a historical perspective. This is relevant to current debates and challenges to the ongoing effects of colonisation in education in a democratic society and the prospect of an epistemological shift towards the Africanisation of education.

Roger Casement in the twenty-first century: the public and private faces of a multi-media Irish hero

Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916) was a diplomat in the British Colonial Service and an Irish nationalist who was hanged for high treason in London in 1916. This article offers a critical overview of the material that has been published about Casement's humanitarian work in the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon and his trial in London, including biographies and editions of his own journals, particularly the so-called Black Diaries, as well as the various dramatisations of this material for the stage and other media, concentrating on those produced in the twenty-first century. The second part of the article consists of the playwright’s account of the writing of As Duas Mortes de Roger Casement, which received its premiere in São Paulo in 2016, commenting on the play’s relationship to its sources and the decisions that were taken in the creative process.

Queering the Poetics of Race and Nationalism: Yeats, Casement, and Paul Muldoon's "A Clear Signal" (1992)

Queering the Poetics of Race and Nationalism:Yeats, Casement, and Paul Muldoon's "A Clear Signal" (1992) Alison Garden On St. Patrick's Day in 1992, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon published "A Clear Signal" in the New York Times.1 The dense and complicated poem is sixty-two lines long, written across thirty-one sardonic couplets. With its rhyme scheme forming forced and simplistic pairings, it sounds much like an acerbic children's nursery rhyme. As we have come to expect of Muldoon, the poem shifts in tone and, thematically, traverses a great amount of ground. But it is chiefly preoccupied with the deeply intertwined politics and histories of Ireland, both in the North and the Republic, Britain and the United States. Beginning with the "tit-for-tat" violence that was one part of the euphemistically named "Troubles," the poem ends by invoking the "ghost of Roger Casement" as a riposte to the Ancient Order of Hibernians' (AOH) refusal to let the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) march in the 1991 New York St. Patrick's Day Parade. Muldoon's poem—which, curiously, has never been anthologized or republished—is structured around the repeating refrain calling "to our Irish-American cousins" to desist in their support, financial and otherwise, of Troubles-related violence. Poets from Northern Ireland had long been caught in the dilemma of how to adequately respond to the violence, terror, and loss of life caused by various paramilitary groups and the British military. In Seamus Heaney's oft-quoted words, poetry changed from "being simply a matter of achieving the satisfactory verbal icon to being a search for images and symbols adequate to our [End Page 78] predicament."2 Why, then, did Muldoon turn to Roger Casement? What about Casement made him "adequate" for this particular "predicament"? Roger Casement (1864–1916) remains an enigmatic figure who has left a controversial and transnational legacy as a human rights activist and an Irish nationalist. Born an Anglo-Irish Protestant, his radical politics would see him executed for his role in Ireland's struggle for independence. He was hanged as a traitor by the British in 1916 for liaising with the German military and attempting to obtain a shipment of German armaments in the Easter Rising. To complicate matters further, Casement had, in his earlier years, achieved nothing short of a spectacular career in the British Colonial Service and Foreign Office; his reports on the systematic abuse and racialized oppression that were inflicted upon laborers in the Congolese (1903–04) and Amazon (1910–11) rubber plantations earned him a knighthood. Casement's Irish nationalism intensified as a direct result of his work participating in the British imperial project and his increased awareness of the violence of European colonialism more generally; his anticolonial nationalism led him to source support of various means from Irish America and Germany for Irish independence. Casement was well connected and well liked, especially in the United States, with multiple prominent figures signing various petitions for reprieve before his execution. In the months following Casement's arrest, Britain was courting the United States in the hope of securing support for the war effort, and needed to tarnish Casement's reputation. An opportunity to do so presented itself with the discovery of Casement's so-called "Black Diaries," uncovered during his trial and selectively circulated by the British government. These diaries detailed Casement's sexual encounters, many of which he paid for with cash or gifts, with men and adolescent males. In 1936, W. J. Maloney published The Forged Casement Diaries, which insisted that Britain had forged the diaries in order to weaken support for Casement. Debate has raged about their veracity ever since. Casement's legacy has been nothing if not contested. He has been vaunted as a seminal human rights activist; a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence; a traitor to British imperialism; and a homosexual martyr. In Casement, a slippery, evasive subject who resists categorization and capture, Muldoon finds the perfect symbol of his hope for a more tolerant, convivial sense of Irishness, unencumbered by limiting notions of religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. In celebrating Casement as a queer, unsettling subject...

Institutional Copying in the 20th Century: The Role of 14,000 British Colonial Officers

Did individual British officers determine the institutional development of former colonies? The article presents a new research program into institutional reform and economic development based on a newly established dataset of over 14,000 biographical entries of senior colonial officers in 54 British colonies between 1939 and 1966. The rich data permit a new methodological approach towards the question of how institutions are copied into countries with a radical focus on the individual actors involved in the institutional reforms before independence. The article discusses fundamental background information on the British colonial service in the 20th century and presents first preliminary analyses from within the new research agenda.

Institutional Copying in the 20th Century: The Role of 14,000 British Colonial Officers

Did individual British officers determine the institutional development of former colonies? The article presents a new research program into institutional reform and economic development based on a new dataset f 14,000 biographical entries of senior colonial officers in 54 British colonies between 1939 and 1966. The rich data permit a new methodological approach towards the question of how institutions are copied into countries. It puts a radical focus on the individual actors involved in the institutional reforms before independence. The article discusses fundamental information on the British colonial service and presents preliminary analyses from within the new research agenda. JEL Codes: B52, H83, N40, O43, O17, O19, P48

Institutional Copying in the 20th Century: The Role of 14,000 British Colonial Officers

Abstract Did individual British officers determine the institutional development of former colonies? The article presents a new research program into institutional reform and economic development based on a new dataset f 14,000 biographical entries of senior colonial officers in 54 British colonies between 1939 and 1966. The rich data permit a new methodological approach towards the question of how institutions are copied into countries. It puts a radical focus on the individual actors involved in the institutional reforms before independence. The article discusses fundamental information on the British colonial service and presents preliminary analyses from within the new research agenda. JEL Codes: B52, H83, N40, O43, O17, O19, P48

Achievements of the British Colonial Service: A Retrospective View

This article looks back on the record of the British Colonial Service in Africa, with a particular focus on how it ran Zambia immediately prior to its independence in 1964. The author, a member of that service, argues that, for all their faults, British colonial administrators discharged their duties with dedication, skill and the welfare of the general population in mind. There is, he notes, a need for a better understanding of the positive effects of contact between cultures that British colonial rule engendered in societies such as Zambia.

Not Lawrence, but Lawrance

T E Lawrence is often indicated as a model of successful interaction between Western armies and tribally organised societies – the inspiration behind the training of the AfPak Hands. But the Lawrence myth, argues Brock Millman, is a misleading one, and his contemporary, Sir Arthur Lawrance, is a better model. What is needed in countries like Afghanistan is a system of trained professionals on the blueprint of the British Colonial Service – an elite of specially selected civilian administrators with local authority.

Veterinary education in South Africa : the classes of 1938 and 1939 : historical article

Concise descriptions are given of the life histories of the 10 members of the classes of 1938 and 1939. All of them initially joined the government service, Hugo, Steenekamp and Schatz spending their entire careers in the South African Veterinary (Field) Services. Mansvelt, the first recipient of the much-coveted Theiler medal, was the 2nd veterinarian to be appointed Director of Veterinary Services, a position specially created for the 'Field' in 1962. Having first established a successful private practice, Hofmeyr was appointed as the 1st full-time Professor of Surgery of the Onderstepoort Faculty in 1958 and its 1st full-time Dean in 1976. Albertyn opted for a career in public health, becoming director of 1 of the largest local municipal abattoirs. Turner spent virtually his entire career in private practice and was eventually joined by Brown who had served in the British Colonial Veterinary Service for many years. Fick was a government veterinarian for his entire career, first in South Africa, then in the British Colonial Service (for 13 years) and finally returning to South Africa. Like Hugo, Muller filled a senior position in Veterinary (Field) Services before he opted for a farming career.

British Colonial Expertise, Post-Colonial Careering and the Early History of International Development

British Colonial Expertise, Post-Colonial Careering and the Early History of International Development This article examines the connection between late colonial development efforts and post-colonial, rural development policies and programmes. It does this by mapping the contributions of several technical officers who had their professional start as part of the British colonial service in the 1940s and 1950s, but who later went on to subsequent careers in international development. Many of these officials were recruited to work for Britain's overseas development administration or the UN's specialist agencies and the World Bank. Others were hired as advisers by international charities or consultancy companies, bringing with them the development strategies first devised during their formative years as colonial experts. After a brief overview of the early background and experiences of the colonial officials surveyed for this research, the article examines two important development schemes implemented in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s: the Swynnerton Plan and the Million-Acre Settlement Scheme. It highlights the careers of several agricultural officers involved in these projects, who later rose to positions of leadership with the World Bank. These former colonial experts were instrumental in formulating some of the institution's most high profile, Integrated Rural Development programmes, including the Lilongwe Land Development Project in Malawi and the Transmigration Program in Indonesia.

Constructive imperialism and sobriety: Evidence of alcoholism among candidates for the British Colonial Service from 1898–1904

Aims: To study what was termed ‘alcoholism’ among candidates for the British Colonial Service from 1898–1904 and how it was identified by comparison with specialist literature of the time: and to analyse the results of such medical examinations for associations between evidence of alcoholism and other variables. Setting: All 3846 medical examinations on candidates for the British Colonial Service from August 1898 to July 1904. Findings: The term ‘alcoholism’ was used in the examination although ‘inebriety’ was the more usual specialist term at the time. Physical symptomology was used for the purposes of identification. There were 79 candidates (2%) who exhibited evidence of alcoholism, the predominant indicators being the smell of liquor on the breath (68%), facial congestion (27%), tremors (23%), a furred tongue (14%), and a tremulous tongue (8%). All of the candidates with evidence of alcoholism (CWA) were males, significantly older than non-CWAs and more likely to be rejected from the Colonial Service. Multiple logistic regression analyses found that a history of syphilis and a history of having lived in the tropics were associated with being a CWA. Conclusions: The context of the examination and the terminology used showed little influence on colonial medicine from the specialist inebriety field.The use of the term ‘alcoholism’ predates its more general use in British medicine and psychiatry. The low prevalence of evidence of ‘alcoholism’ among candidates for the Colonial Service could be the result of one of more of the following: temperance movements, which made abstinence more respectable at the higher levels of English society; the overall labour skills needed for these colonial positions and the higher economic class of applicants; self-selection out of colonial work by heavy drinkers realizing that their condition would not be conducive to tropical life; or lack of motivation to pursue such careers. The syphilis finding supports testimony in the Physical Deterioration Report of 1904 that linked alcoholism and syphilis. The association between having lived in the tropics and evidence of alcoholism supports contemporary concern over the effect of the tropical climate on the health of those who did not practice moderation in drink.

Spatial practices and imaginaries: Experiences of colonial officers and development professionals

This paper explores the spatiality of colonial and postcolonial power and discourse as produced, performed and imagined by former British colonial service officers and contemporary UK international development professionals. It focuses on two key aspects of spatial practices. The first addresses the spaces inhabited by these colonial officers and development professionals overseas and how their locatedness, embedded or enclavic, shapes relationships to others. The second explores this distinctive social and spatial distancing through their relationship to, and imagined geographies of, home and away and how these are embodied in their institutional and cultural capital. The paper examines the regularities and consistencies that stand out from numerous individual practices through which both former colonial officers and development professionals negotiate the situations in which they live and work. It also specifies how authoritative management, privilege and distance informs their spatial practices despite changing global contexts and a more diverse composition of those who articulate contemporary relationships between ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. Finally, the paper suggests that the cultures which travelled over colonial space through being performed by colonial officers have been reworked throughout the postcolonial period, belying epochal historical periodizations that conjure up a clear disjuncture between colonial and development eras.

Richard Arthur Reyment: Father of the International Association for Mathematical Geology

Richard Arthur Reyment was born of parents of English, Swedish, and Spanish descent in Coburg, Victoria, Australia on 4 December 1926. After obtaining his bachelor degree from Melbourne University in 1948 he spent several years with the British Colonial Service in Nigeria. While there he obtained his masters degree from Melbourne and a doctorate from the University of Stockholm (Sweden). His work in Nigeria led to the appointment as professor at the University of Ibadan. He returned to Sweden in 1965 with an appointment from the Swedish Natural Science Research Council. In 1967 he was awarded his DSc from Melbourne University and was appointed to the Chair of Historical Geology and Paleontology at the University of Uppsala (Sweden), where he remained until his retirement in 1991. His early studies on random events, multivariate morphometrics, and statistical analysis in geology and biology naturally led him into the quantitative aspects of his chosen profession, and whetted his desire to share these experiences with others with similar interests. This, he decided, could best be accomplished through an organization to promote quantitative methods and approaches, which led to his concept of the International Association for Mathematical Geology (IAMG). His efforts and enthusiasm resulted in the founding of the Association at the ill-fated International Geological Congress (IGC) in Prague in 1968. Reyment was elected the first IAMG secretary general and later the second president. The IAMG is affiliated with both the IGC and the International Statistical Institute (ISI). In recognition of his scientific accomplishments he was awarded IAMG's highest award, the William Christian Krumbein Medal, in 1979 and a special Certificate of Merit in 2002. Reyment's pioneering efforts have influenced a generation of geologists and paleontologists.

Surgery in Singapore

Since Singapore became an independent nation about 50 years ago, remarkable progress has been made in the development and organization of the health care system, specialty services, graduate training, and medical research. The primitive health care service under the British colonial service before the Second World War which was further ravaged in the 1940s by the Japanese occupation has been radically transformed in a short period. Singapore has a modern health care service, excellent hospital facilities, an affordable health financing system, adequate medical manpower including specialists, and a postgraduate organization for the training of medical specialists. The advancement in surgical services has reached a high level where all forms of modern surgery, including laparoscopic and endoscopic operations, are routine and major bone and joint replacements, heart and liver transplantations, and complex neurosurgical and craniofacial operations are frequently carried out.

Administering Empire: the British Colonial Service in Retrospect: proceedings of a conference jointly sponsored by the University of London and the Corona Club held at the Senate House on 27th and 28th May 1999 under the auspices and direction of the Institute of Historical Research and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies; edited by John Smith. London, University of London Press,

Administering Empire: the British Colonial Service in Retrospect: proceedings of a conference jointly sponsored by the University of London and the Corona Club held at the Senate House on 27th and 28th May 1999 under the auspices and direction of the Institute of Historical Research and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies; edited by John Smith. London, University of London Press, 1999. xiv, 350 pp. ISBN 0718716159. £15.00 - Volume 82

The location of Colonial Staff and Civil Service Lists in British libraries: a preliminary checklist

In an extensive survey of the published sources available for research into the biographical data of members of the British Colonial Service and its successor (1954), HM Overseas Civil Service (‘Colonial Service biographical data: the published sources’, ARD 46, 1988, 1-16), I identified five principal serial publications beyond such general but limited reference works as Who was who. Dictionary of national biography, The Times and Daily Telegraph obituaries, and my Biographical dictionary of the British colonial governor: 1, Africa (1980). These were:i.The Colonial Office Lists, 1862-1966ii.The Colonial Service Lists, 1933-1939iii.Territorial Staff Listsiv.Territorial Civil Service Listsv.Colonial Blue Books

THE 1913 MEMORIAL: A STUDY OF PROTEST AND DISCORD AMONG THE BRITISH POLITICAL OFFICERS IN NORTHERN NIGERIA

This study focuses on the protest, discord and dissatisfaction among the .. priviledged British Political Officers. in Northern Nigeria. Hitherto, it has been assumed that protest and discord were phenomena associated with the oppressed and deprived African people. In most of the published works on the British administrative history in Nigeria, enough light has been shed on the wide gap that existed between the British and the African staff in tenns of remuneration. housing and medical care (Nicolson. 1969; 90-150). However the problems faced by the British Political Officers especially in Northern Nigeria remain a neglected theme. Like the Nigerian staif, they were not entirely pleased with their conditions of service. In many instances. they were biller '.Vith the cold attitude of the Colonial Office to their problems. They also detested some obnoxious colonial regulations and often found the policy and style of the Northern political leadership unpalatable and cumbersome. In spite of stiff sanctions against erring political officers, entrenched in the British colonial civil service general order, many of them refused to remain silent over issues that ran counter to their interests.

Legal Responses to State Corruption in Commonwealth Africa

Few countries in the world can claim to be free from corruption and none of these is to be found in Commonwealth Africa. Even though administrative incorruptibility was one of the boasts of the British colonial service, low-level corruption was common during the colonial period and indeed served to bolster the colonial system. Since African states obtained political independence, levels of corruption have markedly increased, regardless of official ideology or economic approach, and in many countries corruption is both pervasive and endemic. Changes of government are often accompanied and, in the case of military coups, justified by commitments to eradicate the corrupt practices that allegedly characterized the previous regime. Corruption is an obstacle to economic development and to political integration, and most African governments (cynically or not) avow the need to combat it. Pressure on governments to act has increased in recent years and comes from two sources. The emergence of pro-democracy forces has drawn large numbers of people into the arena of political debate and organization and this in turn has led to demands for openness and accountability on the part of government. Moreover, foreign donors and international financial institutions are today less willing to condone corrupt practices on the part of African governments. They stress the importance of good governance and accountability and the need to link economic reconstruction with institutional reform.

W.A.A.V.P. and Pfizer award for excellence in research in veterinary parasitology. Veterinary helminthology 1954–1993: a personal view of four decades of research

I have been involved with veterinary parasitology and in particular veterinary helminthology for close on four decades. At the request of the President of the World Association for the Advancement of Veterinary Parasitology, Dr Owen Slocombe, I have been asked to reflect on seminal research achievements during that period with emphasis where appropriate to my own work. By way of a preamble I will start by describing how I came into veterinary parasitology. As a young veterinarian I had joined the British Colonial Service in 1953 and was posted to the Veterinary Research Station at Vom, Nigeria. Although my remit was to work in the general area of animal production I soon recognised that apart from major scourges such as rinderpest, the biggest problems affecting animal production were parasitic infections and nutrition and the interaction between these. A vacancy occurred in the Parasitology Division of the Department of Animal Production and I joined the team led by Professor Rob Lee and Dr John Ross, both of whom are distinguished veterinary helminthologists; they were my mentors and my friends. Our laboratory concentrated on helminthology while another on the same station dealt with entomology and blood protozoa. I now propose to provide a personal view of research in veterinary helminthology over the past four decades, i.e. 1954-1993.

A biographical dictionary of the British Colonial Service, 1939-1966

A biographical dictionary of the British Colonial Service, 1939-1966