This chapter concerns the work of a White British woman named Margaret Trowell (1903–1989), who founded anglophone East Africa’s first “professional” school of fine art in the Uganda Protectorate in the 1930s. Trowell is still popularly remembered in Uganda as someone who, contrary to the dominant European views of her day, genuinely believed in Africans’ creative abilities and championed their artistic expression. However, I argue that both her pedagogical theories and her teaching practice were strongly influenced by colonial government policy and that as a consequence her stated commitment to supporting the development of a “true African tradition of art” was far less emancipatory than it at first appeared.
CITATION STYLE
Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2018). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African. In The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (pp. 85–101). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_5
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