Making African bureaucrats: Colonial education, ‘character training’ and African agency in Tanzania, 1920s to 1960s - ASC Research Seminar

Andreas Eckert, who is Professor of African History in the Department of History, University of Hamburg, is one of Germany’s leading historians on Africa. He was awarded his PhD in history at the University of Hamburg, and Habilitation at Humboldt University, Berlin and has conducted historical research in Cameroon, France, Germany, Great Britain, Kenya and Tanzania. He has no less than 60 articles as well as a number of books to his name, including Die Duala und die Kolonialmächte. Eine Untersuchung zu Widerstand, Protest und Protonationalismus in Kamerun vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Münster, Hamburg: LIT, 1991).

Prof. Eckert will analyse a specific aspect of the history of education in colonial Tanzania and present the ways in which British colonial officials and teachers tried to inscribe discipline and character on those Africans who were to become clerks, government employees and teachers, and the way African pupils and clerks tried to make sense of the character training imposed on them. The seminar will mainly focus on Tabora Secondary Government School that was founded in 1925 as a product of the indirect rule ideology and until independence was the most important ‘elite school’ for future African colonial cadres in the country. Many important politicians of late colonial and independent Tanzania, notably Julius Nyerere, attended Tabora School. For colonial officials, discipline and disciplining were important and related measures were subsumed under the rubric ‘character training and development’ as the British tried to achieve their goals by imposing ‘simple virtues, correct manners and habits’, especially on those who supposedly lacked ‘tribal discipline’. The seminar is based on archival material as well as on interviews with former Tabora students.