Making Africa Legible

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Caitlyn Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Generation Gap ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Local Languages

European colonialism and missionization in Africa initiated a massive orthographic shift across the continent, as local languages that had been written for centuries in Arabic letters were forcibly re-written in Roman orthography through language standardization reforms and the introduction of colonial public schools. Using early missionary grammars promoting the “conversion of Africa from the East,” British colonial standardization policies and educational reforms, as well as petitions and newspaper editorials by the local Swahilispeaking community, I trace the story of the Romanization of Swahili in Zanzibar, the site chosen as the standard Swahili dialect. While the Romanization of African languages such as Swahili was part of a project of making Africa legible to Europeans during the colonial era, the resulting generation gap as children and parents read different letters made Africa more illegible to Africans themselves.

scholarly journals Making Africa Legible

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Caitlyn Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Generation Gap ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Local Languages

European colonialism and missionization in Africa initiated a massive orthographic shift across the continent, as local languages that had been written for centuries in Arabic letters were forcibly re-written in Roman orthography through language standardization reforms and the introduction of colonial public schools. Using early missionary grammars promoting the “conversion of Africa from the East,” British colonial standardization policies and educational reforms, as well as petitions and newspaper editorials by the local Swahilispeaking community, I trace the story of the Romanization of Swahili in Zanzibar, the site chosen as the standard Swahili dialect. While the Romanization of African languages such as Swahili was part of a project of making Africa legible to Europeans during the colonial era, the resulting generation gap as children and parents read different letters made Africa more illegible to Africans themselves.

scholarly journals The History of the Look-To-The-East Idea in Malaya during the British Colonial Era

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (15) ◽  
Author(s):  
Uqbah Iqbal ◽  
Nordin Hussin ◽  
Ahmad Ali Seman
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Look

scholarly journals Hong Kong’s Elusive Identity: Searching in the Past, Present, and Future

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 90 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Local Character ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
Historic Structures ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Hong Kong is adrift between its British colonial past and its upcoming political reunification with the ancestral Chinese motherland. Hong Kong has endured a prolonged identity crisis in recent years, as it struggles to reconcile conflicts between its transnational worldview and the cultural identity, or Chineseness, of its majority population. A growing wave of nostalgia for the colonial era has frustrated Beijing’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of Hongkongers. This essay analyzes how Hong Kong’s distinctive local character is reflected in several socio-cultural arenas: the heritage industry, filmmaking, efforts to preserve historic structures and intangible heritage, public education, and tourism. With reunification on the horizon, Hongkongers want to assert an independent cultural identity but still seem to exist at the “intersection of different spaces”.

Conversion to Christianity: A Bajju Case Study

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165
Author(s):  
Carol V. Mckinney
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Widespread Adoption ◽  
British Colonial

Within a 55-year period, most Bajju (Kaje) of southern Kaduna State in northern Nigeria converted to Christianity. This research identifies factors that contributed to this widespread adoption of Christianity, including political, religious, sociological, and personal factors. Lack of political representation throughout the British colonial era and the imposition of Native Authority administration formed the context within which conversion occurred. While this structure of the administrative context tended to be oppressive to the non-Muslim ethnic groups, including the Bajju, from a Bajju perspective their widespread conversion to Christianity was a profoundly religious movement.

British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1619-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
AJAY VERGHESE
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Princely State ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies

AbstractBritish colonial rule in India precipitated a period of intense rebellion among the country's indigenous groups. Most tribal conflicts occurred in the British provinces, and many historians have documented how a host of colonial policies gave rise to widespread rural unrest and violence. In the post-independence period, many of the colonial-era policies that had caused revolt were not reformed, and tribal conflict continued in the form of the Naxalite insurgency. This article considers why the princely state of Bastar has continuously been a major centre of tribal conflict in India. Why has this small and remote kingdom, which never came under direct British rule, suffered so much bloodshed? Using extensive archival material, this article highlights two key findings: first, that Bastar experienced high levels of British intervention during the colonial period, which constituted the primary cause of tribal violence in the state; and second, that the post-independence Indian government has not reformed colonial policies in this region, ensuring a continuation and escalation of tribal conflict through the modern Naxalite movement.

scholarly journals The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment 1897 to 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (6) ◽  
pp. 1139-1166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Reeves ◽  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Charles Rahal ◽  
Magne Flemmen
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Labor Force ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
Educational Reforms ◽  
Biographical Data ◽  
Elite Schools ◽  
Elite Recruitment ◽  
Elite Formation ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Propulsive Power

We draw on 120 years of biographical data ( N = 120,764) contained within Who’s Who—a unique catalogue of the British elite—to explore the changing relationship between elite schools and elite recruitment. We find that the propulsive power of Britain’s public schools has diminished significantly over time. This is driven in part by the wane of military and religious elites, and the rise of women in the labor force. However, the most dramatic declines followed key educational reforms that increased access to the credentials needed to access elite trajectories, while also standardizing and differentiating them. Notwithstanding these changes, public schools remain extraordinarily powerful channels of elite formation. Even today, the alumni of the nine Clarendon schools are 94 times more likely to reach the British elite than are those who attended any other school. Alumni of elite schools also retain a striking capacity to enter the elite even without passing through other prestigious institutions, such as Oxford, Cambridge, or private members clubs. Our analysis not only points to the dogged persistence of the “old boy,” but also underlines the theoretical importance of reviving and refining the study of elite recruitment.

scholarly journals N. C. Ejituwu and the Historiography of Niger Delta Inter-Group Relations

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
O. C. Asuk
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Group Interactions ◽  
Group Relations ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism

The Niger Delta has an interesting history of inter-group relations with attendant interchange of ideas and influences that reflected its heterogeneous and multi-polar character. However, the apparent predominant historiography of these inter-group relations tend to demonstrate an inherent prejudice against Andoni (Obolo) contrary to historical facts that portray her military exploits and significant influences on the evolution and peopling of the region and beyond. Primarily, this work aims at analyzing the role of Nkparom Claude Ejituwu in the historical reconstruction narratives of the complex inter-group relations woven around inter-marriages, inter-related migrations, commercial rivalries or competitions for economic resources, wars and fluid alliances, and traditional diplomacies with intricate outcomes. The study utilized primary and secondary sources to demonstrate the terrific historical, cultural, economic and political exchanges between Andoni and her neighbours as well as the strength of Ejituwu's scholarship in the deconstruction of orthodox stereotypes in the historiography of Niger Delta inter-group interactions. It concludes that Andoni had developed significant relations with and radically impacted her neighbours before European colonialism altered it to produce critical implications for Andoni in the post-colonial era.

scholarly journals The Effect of Meeting Opportunities on Local Urban Residents’ Prejudice against Migrant Children in China

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaap Nieuwenhuis ◽  
Xinyi Shen
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Low Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Migrant Children ◽  
School Level ◽  
Urban Migration ◽  
Reverse Causality ◽  
Migrant Students ◽  
Low Socioeconomic ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
The Social

This article explores the effect of meeting opportunities between local urban and nonlocal residents on locals’ prejudice against migrant children in China by focusing on three contexts: friendships, schools, and neighborhoods. China’s hukou policy creates a boundary between urban and rural residents, which also takes the form of locals and nonlocals in rural-to-urban migration. Urban public schools with a mix of local and migrant students offer a chance to observe the intergroup relationships between local and nonlocal students as well as their parents. Using the two waves of data of the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study examines how changes in the migrant friends, schoolmates, and neighbors of local children affect changes in their parents’ prejudice among a sample of 1,630 student-parent pairs. With longitudinal data, this study mitigates the effect of reverse causality between intergroup contact and prejudice. The findings show that parents whose children have more migrant friends have less prejudice, under certain conditions. Additionally, more nonlocal students in the school are related to less prejudice, especially among parents who are more embedded in the school. Furthermore, local families with low socioeconomic status experience an increase in prejudice, potentially due to an increased feeling of threat. Besides, this article finds that prejudiced attitudes spread through the social networks of children and parents at the school level. This study emphasizes the importance of different contexts of meeting opportunities and sheds new light on the generalizability of the contact hypothesis to the understudied context of Chinese internal migration.

scholarly journals Teaching Syrian Students in Turkish Schools: Experiences of Teachers

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammet Ruhat Yasar ◽  
Zeynel Amac
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Environment ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Phenomenological Study ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Generation Gap ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Spring Semester ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Education In Turkey

Summary The Syrian civil war affected Turkey so much that approximately three and a half million Syrians live in Turkey. Ministry of Education implemented an inclusive approach to schooling of Syrian asylum-seekers’ children by educating them in public schools with their Turkish peers in the same classrooms in 2016 in order to address their educational needs, integration into the Turkish culture, and to prevent generation gap. Education, as a basic human right and as a way of integration into the Turkish society, is provided for free at all levels of education in Turkey. The inclusion of Syrian students in the Turkish school environment is quite a new experience for Turkish teachers and if the inclusion process is not managed properly, it may have negative effects on both students and their teachers. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the experiences of teachers teaching Syrian students in the city of Kilis, where the number of asylum-seekers outnumbered the local population and almost one-fifth of the students in public schools are Syrians. The guiding question of this research was “What are the lived experiences of primary and middle school teachers educating Syrian children in culturally inclusive classrooms?” Five teachers from four different primary and middle schools were interviewed. The six open-ended interview questions allowed the participants to reflect on their experiences. The data were collected during the spring semester of 2017. The interviews were analyzed according to thematic methods. Three themes emerged: language barrier, lack of family support, and teachers’ lack of pedagogical skills to teach asylum-seeker students.

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