The Politics of Educational Borrowing: Reopening the Case of Achimota in British Ghana

Abstract

Scholars in comparative education frequently cite the case of Achimota as an early example of an educational transfer in which an American model—industrial education for African Americans—was transferred to the African continent.1 Achimota College, located north of Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana), was the first British educational institution in colonial Africa to implement the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education. Borrowed specifically from the Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, this model provided industrial education for African Americans living in the racially segregated South. Upon transfer from the United States to Africa, the model was relabeled ‘‘adapted education,’’ and it was focused on agricultural and manual training of Africans. This particular educational concept for ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘natives’’ was heatedly debated both in the United States and in African countries. In colonial Africa, supporters of adapted education kept emphasizing the need to ‘‘adapt’’ the education of natives to their rural environment and tribal practices rather than to European urban and modern culture. In contrast, opponents pointed at the imbedded racism underlying the concept that advocated nonacademic and segregated education for Africans. For critics, adapted education was the educational pillar of the colonial order that suffered from the assumption that the education of natives had to be ‘‘adapted’’ to the limited intellectual abilities and needs of Africans.