A history of education in relation to the development of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria 1900-1919, with special reference to the work of Hanns Vischer

Abstract

Mission societies provided most education in British West African dependencies in 1900. Education followed a different pattern in the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria because Lugard, short of money and men, preserved the Mohammedan emirates in the system known as Indirect Rule, Mohammedan dislike of Christianity and his own insecurity led Lugard to promise non-interference with the Mohammedan religion, a promise later used to exclude missionaries from emirates. Indirect Rule requires at least educated governing and clerical classes. Lugard disliked on principle Government-supported mission education for Mohammedans, and he feared from past experience the disruptive effect on the social fabric of African life of mission stations. Yet financial difficulties compelled his interest in Dr. Miller's (C.M.S.) Zaria Schools plan. This plan was too secular by C.M.S. standards end yet condemned by Administration for over-great religious bias. Girouard, Lugard's successor, determined on a Government Education Department as the only alternative, and he seconded Vischer - a political officer by temperament and experience sympathetic to Indirect Rule - to Education. Vischer wished to lessen the strain of the culture-clash in Northern Nigeria and to use "adapted" education as part of the evolutionary process whereby Indirect Rule would eventually give way to self-government. Slow, sure progress was made in education from 1909 to 1914, Mohammedan suspicion was lulled. Meanwhile some emirates had become Native Administrations with Treasuries, and mission expansion was considered more dangerous than ever to the political experiment. Education, religion and politics were so bound together any action resulted in a complex chain of reactions. After the amalgamation in 1914 of Northern and Southern Nigeria, the Colonial Office insisted on Vischer's education system being safeguarded in the Education Ordinance of 1916 and by subsequent legislation. On political groups this attitude was acceptable to many Residents. War checked progress. Yet the Education Department opened new schools and in its 1918 Report "adapted" education was shown to be an evolutionary process rather than a static method. From 1923 to 1939 Vischer was secretary to the Colonial Office's Advisory Council on Education, and from 1926 to 1945 to the International African Institute. He preached the doctrine of mutual enrichment through culture-clash without the disruption of either society. The ultimate choice in West Africa lay, he realized, with the African.