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2 Scouting and Schools as Colonial Institutions IN LATE JULY , Gen. Sir Robert Baden-Powell gathered a mix of twenty-two public school and working-class boys on Brownsea Island, off the coast of Dorset, to conduct the first experiment in Scouting. Baden-Powell, a hero of the SouthAfricanWar, used the expedition to try out ideas for youth work that he developed while adapting for boys his widely read military manual Aids to Scouting for NCOs and Men. During the roughly ten-day camp (accounts differ on the exact length), he ran his charges through a program encompassing what has become the standard Scouting fare. The boys slept in tents, cooked their own food, played games, tied knots, and learned tracking and woodcraft. Baden-Powell also taught values reflecting his own upper-class Victorian background. He stressed proper hygiene, daily Christian prayer, patriotism, and his interpretation of the chivalric code of medieval knights.1 The Brownsea program also reflected Baden-Powell’s experiences as a colonial soldier in Africa. He roused the boys each morning with a kudu horn he had captured during the fighting in Matabeleland. Around the evening campfire he told the new Scouts yarns about the colonial wars and led them in his interpretation of a Zulu call-and-response chant that he called “Een-Gonyama-Gonyama.”Yet although Scouting had a strong African flavor, Baden-Powell never expected Africans to become Scouts. His primary aim in including British boys from elite and common backgrounds was to develop Scouting into a force that would paper over the class divisions that he believed undermined the stability of Edwardian society and threatened the coherence of the empire.The Scout movement 30 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. became a colonial institution in Africa because administrators, missionaries , teachers, and social welfare experts believed that its message of service, responsibility, and social conformity would teach young Africans to be loyal to the empire and to accept their place in colonial society. In other words, British officials looked to Scouting to resolve the inherent contradictions in colonial administration, education, and society as a whole. BRITAIN’S AFRICAN EMPIRE Although this is not the place to retell the story of the colonization of Africa, the examination of Scouting in colonial society must begin with an understanding of how Britain acquired and governed its African territories . The character and influence of the Scout movement in a given colony was determined by the political economy of the territory and the strength of its color bar. These factors established patterns of authority and dictated the potential, or lack thereof, forAfrican social mobility. The demand for unskilled labor, the need for educated intermediaries, and the political subordination of Africans as “protected persons” shaped colonial education policy and thus the development of African Scouting. Britain’s colonial possessions in sub-Saharan Africa grew out of nineteenth-century trading enclaves and protectorates in western and southern Africa. In the later case, Britain took control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch after the Napoleonic Wars. CapeTown had considerable strategic value due to its central location on the maritime route to India, but the Afrikaner majority in the colony did not adapt well to the imposition of British rule.Angered by Britain’s emancipation of slaves and the anglicization of the government and culture of the Cape, approximately fourteen thousand Afrikaners, known as voortrekkers, left in the s for the high veldt of southeastern Africa. Three years later they founded the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State after defeating the forces of the Zulu king Dingane at the Battle of Blood River.The British government blocked their access to the sea by annexing Natal as a Crown Colony in the s. For the remainder of the century , British imperialists sought to further isolate the Transvaal and Orange Free State by claiming neighboring territory under the ruse of “protecting” localAfrican communities.They also encouraged increased British settlement in Natal and the Cape Colony to strengthen their hold on the region. Scouting and Schools as Colonial Institutions 31 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. In West Africa, Britain’s...

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