Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History reviews Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa.M
Vol. 33, No. 3, September 2005, pp. 475-477
John M. Mackenzie
University of St. Andrews
In modern times, a rich historiography has developed around the history of the boy scouts and of youth movements (male and female) in general. The work of Rosenthal, MacDonald, Springhall, Warren and others demonstrated the manner in which such movements could open up windows on a wide range of social phenomena, including issues of gender, of militarism and patriotism, of environmental and other forms of training, and of the conceptualisation of youth and adolescence. Yet, although one of the striking characteristics of the boy scouts and the girl guides was the extraordinary extent to which they became internationalised, not so much research and publication have been devoted to their imperial dimensions. One or two scholars have pointed out the irony of a movement founded from African experience, and based on frontier lore and imagery, being sent back for the training of Africans. But this book is the first to give systematic attention to the spread of scouting (with some reference to guides) to African colonies.
Parsons has been nothing if not ambitious: he chose to examine the development of the scouts in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika in East Africa; Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe in Central Africa; and the High Commission territories of Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana as well as the Cape, Natal and the Transvaal in the south. Geographical spread is matched by chronological range. He covers the period from the first arrival of the scouts in Africa in 1908 (though they only truly got going in the inter-war years) right down to the post-independence period. And the greatest strength of the book is that the history of the boy scouts in all these territories is fully contextualised. Any student requiring a valuable analysis of the educational priorities (or the lack of them), the labour problems, the social tensions, the distortions produced by white settlers, the development of apartheid, and the stresses and strains of the pre- and post-decolonisation periods of these colonies and the Union, would do well to start here. Moreover, like so many institutions introduced by whites in Africa, the scouts were adapted to African requirements, not just in the forms that scouting took, but also in the development of unofficial 'independency' which in some respects mirrored the development of independent churches. In some cases this activity was organised; in others it was a matter of individuals seeing scouts securing privileges that led them to act as 'imposters'.
But if the boy scouts were a further example of forms of cultural imperialism reinterpreted, developed and sometimes subverted by Africans, the fact is that the African colonies threw up some of the fundamental dilemmas of scouting as a whole. The second scout law invoked loyalty, principally to king and country, but such concepts of loyalty had to undergo major revision in the course of the twentieth century. Afrikaners in South Africa demanded a more local loyalty, particularly in the apartheid era; Africans soon began to feel that their major loyalty lay to nationalist parties and their leadership, rarely but occasionally to indigenous institutions and chieftaincies. If British colonial rulers saw the scouts as a convenient means of establishing social controls, forms of imperial patriotism, adherence to aspects of the dual mandate or of indirect rule, their hopes in these directions were soon disillusioned. Even more problematic was the fourth scout law relating to brotherhood with every other scout regardless of country, class or creed. This is a formulation which notably omits race. Baden-Powell never fully grappled with this question, despite, or perhaps because of, his residence in Kenya in his final years. In South Africa, a compromise was reached in 1936 in which scouts were divided into white, coloured, Indian and African associations (the latter known as Pathfinders), a form of apartheid avant la lettre. Such separateness was also adopted in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, even in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland where settler numbers were relatively tiny. In postindependence times, the scouts were duly 'punished'. Politically inspired youth movements, often arms of one-party states, found it difficult to accommodate scouts, although, surprisingly, the movement often clung on to some form of marginal existence. Yet, throughout the imperial period, we have to remind ourselves (as Parsons's tables demonstrate) that scouting reached out to relatively tiny proportions of the black population, while even among the white its incidence was often class and ethnically specific. Moreover, some missions preferred the Boy's Brigade, and the BB often had a rather better record on race.
Parsons is principally interested in these social, political and racial questions. He is less concerned with the environmental, imaginative and frontier aspects of the scouts. It is noticeable, for example, that he makes very few, if any, allusions to Baden-Powell's bible of scouting, Scouting for Boys, with its frontier yarns and its references to natural history, the flora and fauna that scouts were supposed to immerse themselves in as an antidote to urbanisation. Perhaps such antidotes were less necessary in Africa, but nevertheless there are frequent references there to African game and shooting, initially with gun and later with camera. There are also many references to war and the scouts' duty in conflict, strikingly germane in the Mau Mau campaign and other preindependence revolts. But one of the book's strengths is that it is not unduly afflicted with the 'holier than thou' attitude of some modern American scholarship. Parsons was himself an American scout and, through at least one reference, is aware of the fact that some of the same social, racial and educational stresses were played out in the United States, notably in the South, right down to the 1960s. This reflects the manner in which the book presents a thoughtful and thoroughly intriguing route into the analysis of colonial societies in the twentieth century. There are also some excellent illustrations, though the index is sadly inadequate. It would be a great pity if its readership is restricted to those only interested in youth movements.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
Volume 33, No. 3
pp. 475-477
September 2005
