By Elisabeth Lefebvre

This post explores boarding schools as an often-coercive form of child and youth mobility in colonial Uganda. As in other places and times, a careful reading of this history suggests that when child-rearing practices of marginalized communities are so easily dismissed and the ‘best’ educational options privilege the powerful, we lose opportunities to affirm collective and more culturally responsive approaches to schooling. We also run the risk of (re)creating systems that reproduce, rather than disrupt those same inequalities.

Beliefs about the proper care of children are deeply embedded in cultural practices. We invest a lot of time and effort into thinking about which people and what institutions might best prepare our children to become productive members of society. This was as much the case 150 years ago as it is today. History is filled with examples of ‘experts’ showing up to ‘help’ ‘less-equipped’ parents in educating their children ‘properly’, including the many modern childcare ‘manuals’ that instruct parents on eating and sleeping, and everything in between. In this generally one-sided sharing of knowledge surrounding ‘best practices’, the cultural assumptions of a more dominant group often replace or marginalize others. Additionally, since the advent of mass public education, these frequently forced interventions tend to be patterned on the assumption that a literal movement from home to school is required to make a more metaphorical movement from ‘backwardness’ to ‘civilization’, or ‘inferior’ to ‘superior’ educational opportunity.

My own interest in these assumptions finds its origin in the four years I spent as an elementary school classroom teacher from 2006 to 2010. Since that time, I have pondered the relatively recent and rapid expansion of schooling as a primary site for enculturation wherein students learn largely the same nationally- (or at least regionally-) determined curriculum, away from their families, for a growing number of years. Beginning in 2012, I have studied the initial colonial development of formal schooling in Uganda, tracing this same historical pattern and process through British missionary and government writings. As my work evidences, the British development of a network of schools demonstrates a familiar theme wherein African children are presumed to be neglected, necessitating the intervention of more ‘experienced’ teachers, who might ‘properly care for’ the next generation.

British colonial writings about the Baganda, an ethnic group in what is now Uganda, illustrate these tropes. We know from John Roscoe, one of the earliest British missionaries and ethnographers of the region, that Bagandan children were traditionally understood to belong to their clan; parents typically sent their children away to live with relatives once they had been weaned and named. The purpose of this collectivist approach was to cement a child’s relationship to their extended family. This system also gave youth the opportunity to receive more specialized training along the lines of what we might term an apprenticeship. Another missionary, C. W. Hattersley, referenced this practice as well, writing that he had been told by Sir Apollo Kaggwa that mothers were too ‘soft’ on their own children to raise them properly. All in all, though, reports of Bagandan child-rearing describe communities of care that integrated children and youth into society in thoughtful and productive ways.

Yet most early British missionaries working with the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) – including Hattersley – noted their shock and dismay at the apparent ‘nakedness’ and ‘ill manners’ of Bagandan children. Instead of recognizing the constructive and intentional nature of Bagandan parenting practices, they were appalled. One British missionary made the hyperbolic claim in an 1896 letter to the CMS: “Until quite recently, multitudes of boys and girls had no idea of who was their father or where their proper home was…” Later Bishop Tucker, then leader of the CMS mission, wrote a tract decrying the “evil custom” wherein Bagandan parents would “send their children to be brought up in other homes…It is the work of the parent to watch over the child, and to train it in good habits.”

And how did these British missionaries, who criticized the collectivist parenting practices of the Baganda, think parents could raise their children more responsibly? Paradoxically, by sending them away—to school. As Tucker explained in his tract, he and the CMS were ultimately advocating for parents to enroll their children in newly-started primary schools, which tended to be boarding schools: “We are prepared to teach your children not only the law of God but other good things, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic…The better taught your children are, the better work they will be able to do, and the happier and more prosperous they will be in their lives.” He concluded his letter: “Do that which in your hearts you know to be right.” Tucker’s appeal seems to have been rooted in two conflicting assumptions: First, that parents’ assumed Christian beliefs would lead them to take more individual responsibility for their children. And second, that the British custom of boarding education would be entirely preferable to the “wicked” practice of sending children to live with family.

By the time the British colonial government began to take a more direct role in the protectorate’s education system in 1925, the Education Department estimated half of Bagandan children attended some form of schooling. Many of these were schools started by Ugandans for Ugandans, indicating a great deal of local interest in formal education (and likely access of the resultant privileges of schooling within the colonial government). But the British insisted that children’s ‘successful’ upbringing still required access to colonial schooling (and thereby control by British teachers and administrators), criticizing these local schools and labeling them “subgrade” for falling short of newly-applied ‘standards’. As a result, the government also denied them financial support.

Throughout colonial accounts, the importance of a literal physical migration of children from their communities to British missionary-run schools (which were often located in more densely-populated areas) and the metaphorical migration of Bagandans toward ‘civilization’ and ‘best’ practices in education and child-rearing (managed by the British) were inextricably linked. As a teacher at King’s School Budo noted in a 1925 letter to the CMS: “These people WILL have better education than they have had in the past…The Natives want to have it from us [missionaries], and…are prepared to pay for it. To miss such an opportunity would be absolutely criminal on our part”. In this way, traditional methods of child-rearing (and likewise community-run, ‘subgrade’ schools) were repeatedly ‘evaluated’ and devalued when compared to the ‘preferable’ imperial model.

In terms of how Bagandans themselves responded to these schools, the archive presents a spotty and incomplete narrative (though it is important to remember that the archive itself is an imperial creation). Still, there is evidence of both resistance and cooperation. For instance, early in the colonial period, a letter written in 1900 by a Miss Thomas (a CMS missionary) highlights the perspective of a Bagandan chief who encouraged parents to send their children to a newly built school in his community. Yet in testimony presented to the de law Warr Commission in the late 1930s, parents critiqued the curriculum provided by colonial schools to girls as needlessly gender-segregated and of little practical use. Likewise, as I have noted elsewhere in a book chapter examining the diverging narratives of schooling in child-focused and child-authored sources, a series of letters provide examples of strategic compliance and conflict. Perhaps one of the best examples of this duality of resistance and cooperation, was the rapid expansion of “village schools”, mentioned above, which were founded and maintained by Ugandans, out-pacing the expansion of colonial education itself.

There is, of course, much more that could be said about colonial schooling in Uganda (and elsewhere) and this account is undoubtedly far too short to tell the whole story. Yet understanding the entangled nature of physical and metaphorical educational migrations – from the perspective of one particular place and time – offers important insights that we might otherwise miss. Specifically, this history suggests that when child-rearing practices of marginalized communities are so easily dismissed and the ‘best’ educational options privilege the practices and beliefs of the already powerful, we lose opportunities to affirm collective and more culturally-responsive approaches to schooling. We also run the risk of (re)creating systems that reproduce, rather than disrupt those same inequalities.

About the author

Elisabeth Lefebvre is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Bethel University in Minnesota. Her interdisciplinary research explores the mutually constitutive and historical relationships between schooling and childhood, as well as the ways in which discourses surrounding schools and schooling impact student and teacher experiences. Elisabeth’s work has appeared in Journal of Education Policy, Discourse, International Journal of Education Development, and Teachers College Record, as well as in the recent edited volume Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Context.