1 - Some Theoretical Concerns

Summary

This book is about Europeans and about how Europeans tried to remake Africans in their own image—not in any sense as individual replicas of themselves, but rather in the sense of passing on to at least selected groups of Africans the values and sensibilities that particular groups of Europeans esteemed. Over the first sixty years of the twentieth century, in the British colonial territory of Northern Nigeria, European expatriates implemented a multitude of development schemes aimed at incorporating African peoples into the cultural worlds those expatriates saw themselves as inhabiting. These schemes are the main focus of the book. They will be examined first for what they disclose about European notions of social engineering; second, for what they reveal about the ways European cultural ambitions in Africa changed over the course of time; and third, for what they have to say about how European expatriates evolved in order to relate to colonized peoples.

This book is also about Africans, and about how Africans actually responded to the development schemes introduced by Europeans.The book examines, for one small part of Africa, for one short period of time, the presentation of European culture to Africans and the African response to that presentation. In Northern Nigeria, the examination suggests, Western civilization provided a portal through which local peoples reached to grab knowledge and values to help them cope with European colonization. European expatriates certainly maintained the initiative in the presentation of European patterns of thought and material culture, but as shall be shown, Northern Nigerians exerted far more say over the reception of patterns of thought and material culture they did adopt. And the skills and values Northerners assimilated helped them resist cultural domination. Lastly, the cultural knowledge Northerners acquired can be shown to have allowed them to reach beyond their European mentors to learn from other Westernized African and Asian peoples.

The main concern of the book is with the story of Christian missions and their efforts to establish Christian communities among the peoples of the territory. I have no ambition to provide a traditional “planting” of Christianity narrative, though I will discuss the details of the spread of Christianity in the region sufficiently to help historians eager to complete such a project. Rather, Christian faith will be treated here as a medium, the primary goal being to explain how it served to transmit twentieth-century European culture and values to Africans living in an area of British colonization.