Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education

Abstract

In Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic, Andrew E. Barnes, a professor of history at Arizona State University, chronicles the Christian educational foray into Africa from 1880 to 1920. The book focuses on black industrial education that grew in the American South under Samuel Chapman Armstrong at the Hampton Institute and later, and most famously, Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute, and its transplanting in West Africa. Barnes sees the Christian proponents of industrial schooling in Africa as forces for progressive development of the continent and its people. Moreover, he concludes, “industrial education served as the leading edge of the African challenge to European conquest of Africa” (p. 6). The author presents critical perspective on the missionary presence in Africa when he mentions the exultation of white supremacy and the fact that some of the missionaries were enthralled with scientific racism. He says that scientific racism “lasted only a few generations, but it left an imprint” (p. xi). It is good to see, here and there in his work, attention given to the ideas of Alexander Crummell, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, John Dubay, and other leading voices for African restoration. Barnes also ventures into some vexing philosophical discourse under the rubric of Ethiopianism.

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