Living on the Fringes: Boarding Secondary Schools in Nigeria and the Paradox of Colonialism

Abstract

In early twentieth-century colonial Nigeria, secondary school education was available for a privileged few. The pioneer European missionary societies bore peculiar methods of educational instruction and subject matter content and saw secondary schools as beyond the scope of their activities. As partners in the expanding colonial enterprise, the missionary societies and the colonial authorities established boarding secondary schools to train a local cadre of teachers, commercial clerks and civil servants. While these facilities were justified on practical grounds, they were also upheld as a crucial means of securing young Nigerian minds to thwart the ‘negative’ influence of student’s homes on any Christianising or ‘civilising’ efforts. Nevertheless, resistance to colonialism emerged despite the immersion with colonial ideology and praxis of the privileged few resulting in a ‘colonial paradox’. This chapter argues that participants in the Nigerian colonial boarding school system were “living on the fringes” (exclusionary) of both African societies and European colonial ideals, but immersed (inclusionary) in wider anti-colonial processes. Curricular and extra-curricular activities helped to create a fertile milieu for the creation of agitators and non-conformists. This work therefore highlights government-assisted and colonial government-established schools and combines primary and secondary source materials to accentuate student voices.