Reviewed by: Children, Education and Empire in Early Sierra Leone: Left in Our Hands by Katrina Keefer Kelly M. Duke Bryant Children, Education and Empire in Early Sierra Leone: Left in Our Hands. By Katrina Keefer. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. xxiv + 250 pp. Cloth $140, e-book $54.95. In Children, Education and Empire in Early Sierra Leone, Katrina Keefer relies on the records of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to explore how, in the first few decades after British abolitionists founded the Sierra Leone colony, missionaries established schools, developed pedagogies, and kept track of pupils. Focusing especially on pupil lists maintained by missionary educators, Keefer offers a “contextual analysis of the children whom the CMS oversaw and educated according to new European pedagogical innovations” (x) and attempts to shed light on the experiences of individual missionaries and students. These early CMS schools, Keefer contends, were “transformative” for students and for [End Page 315] the region, allowing Sierra Leone to “become Africa’s first centre of western-style education” (181). Keefer’s study offers analysis of student demographics in early CMS schools and of missionaries’ documentation, but source limitations allow only glimpses into children’s lived experiences. The first three chapters introduce Sierra Leone’s complex history. Founded in the late eighteenth century as a home for the so-called “Black Poor” of London and as a bulwark against the slave trade, Sierra Leone also welcomed Black loyalists who had settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution and Jamaican Maroons. Beginning in 1808, when Britain’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade went into effect and when Sierra Leone became a British Crown colony, settlers also included Liberated Africans, released from slave ships captured by British patrols. These settler groups lived alongside several indigenous groups, and tensions sometimes erupted into violence. Christianity was common among settlers, Keefer explains in chapter 2, and a variety of denominations were present, though the CMS predominated after 1816, having forged strong ties to the British administration. Chapter 3 offers biographical sketches of some of the most influential CMS missionaries to Sierra Leone prior to 1820, making the case that their origins and experiences—almost all were German speakers from northern Europe—impacted the colony’s “social dynamic” (62) and its schools. In chapter 4, Keefer finally turns her attention to schools and children, briefly describing existing educational practices and discussing the monitorial system introduced by CMS missionaries. Keefer discusses each mission school and settlement in chapter 5, detailing their origins and using pupil lists to examine student populations. Lists consisted of students’ names, along with some additional demographic information and missionary commentary, allowing Keefer to make observations about students and enrollment. She notes that schools near Freetown enrolled more Liberated Africans, while Muslim students were concentrated in Kapparoo and Isles de Los, and she finds that elites—sons of chiefs and of European and African (slave) traders—attended school alongside former slaves. Occasionally her sources provide insight into the curriculum or school timetable. Chapter 6 continues along these lines, examining changes in “classroom composition” (130). Missionaries used more diverse terminology (words like “native,” “settler,” “liberated,” “redeemed,” or “trader”) to describe their pupils prior to 1816, the year that tensions in the interior prompted their retreat to coastal Freetown where they primarily educated Liberated Africans. She notes that educational outcomes ranged from acculturation to early withdrawal, to death in CMS care. Finally, in chapter 7, Keefer offers brief life histories of six [End Page 316] male CMS students from a variety of backgrounds. These individuals represent the “best documented” cases, yet for four of the six, Keefer could reconstruct only the barest details of their lives; she explains that sources reveal even less about girls’ experiences. The cases show, Keefer concludes, that “a variety of different experiences were taking place” (174). Keefer should be commended for her careful reading and analysis of missionaries’ pupil lists and for allowing readers to view her entire data set, included in appendices. Her research advances our knowledge of early CMS missionaries to Sierra Leone, of their work establishing schools, of student demographics, and of the changing terminology missionaries used to categorize pupils. Yet Keefer’s...
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Apr 30, 2020
Ji-Il Tark 
Open Access