Few colonial subjects evoke as much attention and controversy as education, and Empire and Education in Africa offers refreshing insights on colonial education in Africa, a subject about which much has been written and much more remains unknown. It braves the contentious labyrinth of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political, social, and economic transmogrifications that at once encapsulate Europe's worldwide campaign of imperial conquest and defy neat historical and analytic delineation. The product of a twenty-five-person group discussion, mostly graduate students from Europe, North America, and South Africa, this work makes no commitment to rupturing the broad arc of colonial education historiography, but rather to bringing broad-stroke interpretation to reckon with the multidirectional nuances of localized events. It accomplishes much in this respect without devolving into the polemics that often characterize colonial critiques and apologetics.

The important contribution is in “foregrounding education as a key explanatory tool in colonial history” (p. 3), not just one expression of it. Rather than blame or make excuses for Europe's iniquities, chapters draw from an array of archival sources to demonstrate that life in the colonial world was precarious and unpredictable for colonizers due to the exigencies of colonialism and the capricious political shifts both in the colonies and in Europe—shifts that frequently frustrated direct transformation of policy into practice. This is illustrated in an array of biographical narratives, such as on the Scottish first-class teacher George Bremner, whose failure to sustain a “New School” in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, resulted from government fiscal neglect and Bremner's own fractured relationships and clashes with colonial administrators (pp. 89-98). These tensions were aggravated by emerging social class divides among Dutch settlers, not to mention Indigenous Africans; children of lower-class Dutch families often disrupted the “vested rights of respectability” by outperforming their upper-class counterparts, to the embarrassment of more affluent Dutch parents (p. 95). It is also illustrated in the paradoxical repudiation of Charles T. Loram, a central figure in the paternalistic and racist segregationist agendas for Native Education in South Africa, who was unceremoniously “forced” to emigrate to the United States, where he continued to influence views on Native American education.

Empire and Education in Africa presents ample evidence for the well-established idea that with regard to Africa, Europeans—and eventually Americans—never held a unified colonizing agenda. Far from a monolith, missionaries, colonial administrators, philanthropists, and educators sparred over ideologies, policies, and practices, and constantly negotiated their own evolving values in response to countervailing forces and the sporadic interventions of history itself. Many chapters—Meghan Healy-Clancy's critique of mass education and the gendered politics of development in apartheid South Africa, Peter Kallaway's review of German Lutheran missions and the scientific discourse of German anthropology in colonial Africa, and Ellen Vea Rosnes's comparative analysis of protestant missionary and French colonial literacy agendas in Madagascar—variously call attention to the workings of staunch ideologies, informed as they were by theological dicta or economic ambitions, and the vagaries of conflicting policy agendas to both further and thwart sectional interests in the colonies. Locating conflicts and their potentially self-defeating outcomes at the center of colonial actors’ extensive communications (and these communications constitute an essential part of the vast archival sources presented in this volume), serves as a refreshing reminder that colonialism and the broader empire politics were fundamentally lived experiences with real-life consequences. It also brings to clearer focus conceptual tensions, such as the elasticity of the ideologies of assimilation, association, and adaptation, which historians of colonial education have used to distinguish the British and the French imperialist tactics.

Equally notable in this volume is the attention authors gave to fluctuations in the intellectual climates of Europe, mainly between liberalism and conservatism, and how these affected colonial policies and colonial actors whose roles, both as individuals and as extended social and professional networks, were pivotal in how imperial activities unfolded. Certainly, that intellectual zeitgeist influenced the course of colonial education is hardly notable per se; colonial actors did not operate in a conceptual or cultural vacuum. What matters more here is the reordering of historical thinking about links between European homelands and colonial frontiers. Historian Tim Allender's chapter, a corrective on historiographic misappropriations of a center-periphery logic with a focus on Indian dynamics in British Africa, insightfully delineates multiscalar movements of ideas between colonial frontiers and from the colonies to Europe. The key lesson here, one that runs through the entire book, is that the tendency in colonial histiorgraphy to unidirectional linearity, which holds colonies in constant passive receptivity of ideological and political forces unleashed from Europe, risks overlooking the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of imperial political influences. To the extent that places like India became labs for testing, and sometimes constructing, new ideas that shaped realities in colonies abroad as well as in Europe, there is paradoxically a lesson here for both defenders and critics of European imperialism.

The theme of multidirectional influences and the importance of the colonies in producing and disseminating imperial knowledge appears as forceful in recording the significance the colonies hold for the emergence and intellectual trajectory of specific academic disciplines—anthropology, sociology, biology, and perhaps more importantly, the traditions of science. On one hand, this piece documents the use of pseudoscience and blatantly hypocritical religious justifications for outright inhumane, racist, and contradictory practices, including emerging educational ideas still taking shape in Europe. On the other, the establishment of philanthropic “partnership” funds and cooption of intellectuals in the sentimentalized anxiety over child-rearing, the policing of morals, and the management of affective bonds and carnal knowledge all drew inspiration and intellectual force from the emergence of proto-scientific tools—surveying, interviewing, observing, cataloging, analyzing, reporting—that would eventually define various fields of natural and social sciences. In the absence of a compelling rationale for the imperial agenda, “science” and “religion” offer a ragtag of ideas to justify a “civilizing” (i.e., colonizing) narrative that simultaneously inspires both the hope of “improving” the colonized and the fear of racial equality.

There is much to commend about this book. It puts a battery of distinct historical accounts to effective use in clarifying concepts without disrupting popular narratives on colonial education in Africa, including contradictory claims to a civilizing mission and subjugation, the significance of Christian missionary evangelism and interdenominational leapfrogging in colonial education expansion, Europeans’ tenacious pursuit of racial hierarchies as ideology and policy, and partnerships of philanthropic organizations (mostly the Carnegie Corporation and the Phelps-Stokes Fund) in transforming education. It does so through well-calculated use of contextualized archival sources, which successive chapters pick up on, reinforce, and interrogate, resulting in a cohesive interrelated narrative.

Without indulging minor challenges, the narrow regional focus—all but three chapters focus entirely or significantly on South Africa—represents a lost opportunity for richer comparative analysis, especially with many historians of colonial education actively pursuing equally refreshing works on other African contexts. There are also distracting ambiguous words and phrases, such as “problematised population” (p. 83), that, without clarification, can appear to make a subtle appeal to the language of colonial apologetics. For instance, was “South Africa was inhabited by ‘native’ Africans” intended to question the African ancestry of native South Africans compared to “Asian workers, people of mixed descent, British settlers and early Dutch settlers” (p. 131)?

These minor issues pale in consideration of the major shortcoming of Empire and Education in Africa: it largely ignores the perspective and agency of Africans in transforming their educational traditions and societies during its sustained contacts with imperial Europe and America. It is curious that a historical investigation to “understand colonial education” by linking the “history of educational change” to “specific contexts” (p. 2) silences the voices of Africans, resorting instead to detailed accounts of Europeans’ experiences on the continent. Even the possible exceptions—Pierre Guidi's discussion of a French-run girls’ school in Ethiopia during the 1930s and Elsie Rockwell's analysis of assimilation and adaptation through school exercise books in French West Africa—offer Eurocentric representations. The Ethiopians whose writings appear in Guidi's narrative, among them Wärqenäh Eshété, Heruy Wäldä Sellasé, Täblat Rädda, Bäqälä Zäläqä, and Tebäb Wäldä-Ab, are westernized elites committed to preserving Ethiopia's independence through European educational expansion in the “dangerous context of colonial encirclement” (p. 302). For Rockwell, all the historical evidence documenting “ways in which educators adapted the texts and tasks to the local milieu and students inserted meaning beyond the intentions of their teachers” (p. 236) were curated by European colonial actors for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale held in Paris, and now housed in the Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. This silencing of the African and its conceptual implication for historical analysis is not lost on the authors. But they unsurprisingly blame the dearth of historical evidence from Africans. Brian Willan notes in reference to the use of Shakespeare performances as a quintessential symbol of cultural imperialism, “The missing perspective … has been that of the [African] participants in these performances. … Unfortunately, as is the nature of things, no direct evidence—letters or diaries that they may have written—has survived” (p. 117). Strikingly, the copious evidence presented in this piece shares one thing in common: it is all written sources, and mostly by Europeans. Not only does this amount to a lopsided (and therefore inadequate) account, but it is indicative of a positivist epistemological predilection that attributes superiority to written text relative to oral sources and an epistemological and methodological prioritization of European over African literary traditions, which is the book's substance. With historical referents extending to the 1950s and 1960s, surely a few Africans might have survived European imperialism who can offer firsthand or transgenerational accounts against which European archives can be sorted.