Gender, Mission Education, and the Crisis of Empire in British Africa

In British Africa, the decades following the Second World War were marked on the one hand by colonial development initiatives and attempts to consolidate imperial rule, and on the other by the increased mobilization of organized labor, political parties and pressure groups, and nationalist intellectual currents.  These conditions have often been cited to explain the weakening of empire that made decolonization possible, but they also coincided and intersected with three other broad developments, which had a profound impact on the nature of anti-imperialism and the course of power transfers: the growth of women’s movements, the spread and consolidation of Christian institutions, and the growth of an educated populace.  This paper will discuss how women’s mission education helped lay the groundwork for the demise of empire, and how the gendered terms of Christian education undergirded nationalist discourses of social health and material prosperity.  Female mission education was initially designed to produce Christian wives, mothers, and evangelists, and it often did not go beyond primary school, but missions also provided industrial, agricultural, maternalist, and medical education and training.  African women made use of mission schools and their corresponding religious communities to acquire professional skills, shore up social and economic capital, mitigate the effects of land and labor alienation, and launch maternalist programs.  The schools’ human networks and Christian ideologies of emancipation also formed a basis for protest activity by and on behalf of women, in the press and in strikes and boycotts.  Case studies from East and West Africa will therefore show not only how mission schools provided a means for women (both African and European) to participate in and launch anti-imperial movements, but also how they occasioned a feminized Christian ideology of dissent and national autonomy. 

Elizabeth Prevost

Grinnell College