Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge (review)

Over the past two decades, quite a few books have dealt with the formation of national identities and the role of cultural politics in that process. Special attention has been paid to the situation of postcolonial nation-states and the entanglements of colonial and nationalist discourses that are particular to them. By focusing on the teaching of "culture" in schools, Cati Coe adds an important and formerly neglected element to this debate. To her, schools are not merely to be seen as state-controlled institutions, in which the nationalist project of turning children into citizens is realized: instead, she regards schools as "places where the relationship between the state and its citizens is negotiated" (p. 5, emphasis added).

Coe's study is based on a thorough ethnography of schooling in Akropong, a town in Southern Ghana, where she conducted fieldwork between 1997 and 2002. To enrich her analysis, she draws extensively on archival sources and, to a lesser extent, on case studies from other parts of Africa. Akropong is well chosen for her task: on the one hand, its history of formal education reaches back to the activities of the Basel Mission, which started as early as 1835; on the other hand, its schools are not among the elitist institutions of learning in Ghana and can therefore said to be fairly representative.

The book falls into two parts. Part One deals with the problem of "How Culture Became the Property of the State." This question is examined in historical retrospect, starting with the establishment of the Basel Mission and leading to the cultural politics of the (post)colonial nation-state up to the late 1990s. Coe analyzes the processes by which culture became reified and was turned into a product—illustrative of the past, yet no more considered being a matter of everyday practice. Culture became aestheticized and thereby depoliticized, resulting in a "state-sponsored buffet of culture" (p. 60). Coe shows how ambivalence toward African culture on the part of missionaries and colonial officers was instilled in the educated African elite and how this ambivalence reverberates in debates over Ghanaian national culture. Apart from this emphasis on continuity in the construction of cultural heritage, Coe looks at the transformations brought about by the consolidation of (colonial) state power. Gradually, education and the promotion of culture became the task of the state, while the churches began to develop a more antagonistic stance toward African "customs and traditions," now presented as symbols of the devil. While this development is convincingly depicted, one still wonders about the ease with which Coe brushes over the decolonization process, as if "the state" and the objectives of nation-building remained the same throughout. More differentiation is needed at this point.

One of the main arguments of the book concerns the fact that, despite the state's attempts at controlling the discourse on culture in schools, other institutions—the church and the chieftaincy—are equally important and often produce counterdiscourses to those of the state. This situation makes the practice of cultural studies in schools differ considerably from the objectives of the official syllabus. How these interests are acted out is further examined in Part Two, "How Culture Is Reclaimed by Its Citizens." Today, so Coe argues, the definition of culture in Ghana depends on a certain set of arguments, which serves as a rhetorical repertoire, differently applicable according to context. She distinguishes between government discourses ("cultural polishing and beautification / culture for development," "culture as a way of life," "culture as (ethnic) drumming and dancing") and popular discourses ("culture as ancestral inheritance," "culture as the customs of traditional kingdoms").

With a fine-tuned sense for ethnographic detail, Coe goes on to show how these discourses are differently appropriated by teachers and students, as they "perform culture" in the classroom and during school cultural competitions. In contrast to the school subject of cultural studies, these competitions are extremely...