When European expatriates in colonial Northern Nigeria sought to characterize the process of cultural transmission through which Africans were to assimilate Western civilization, they inevitably used the term “making headway.” The term was typically used in a negative construction, to convey what the expatriates’ adversaries in the contest to introduce European culture were not doing. Thus colonial administrators spoke about missionaries’ failure to make headway in the Christian evangelization of the region, while missionaries talked about the government's failure to make headway in educating Muslim elites in the behaviors expected of modern rulers. The argument of this study has been that both groups of expatriates got it wrong. Over time, and through a willingness to learn from Africans, both groups found a way to pass on their ideas of civilization to groups of Northern Nigerians.

The study has sought to emphasize five things. First is the contention and competition among European expatriates over the nature and character of European culture. There was no single conception of Western civilization that all expatriates shared. Rather, there were deep divisions among colonial administrators and Christian missionaries over how to define Western civilization. Both groups had notions of Western civilization that may be characterized as “conservative,” in that these notions advocated the recreation of societies from the European past. But colonial administrators understood Western civilization to have been built by an autocratic aristocracy, while Christian missionaries understood Western civilization as having been nurtured by a Christian yeomanry. Thus the societies the groups hoped to recreate were understood to have been built on opposing values.

Secondly, this study has endeavored to demonstrate how, initially, both groups of Europeans attempted to promote their conservative ideas of Western civilization with as little recourse to schools as possible. One common sentiment both groups shared was a fear that the versions of Western civilization they were hoping to cultivate among Nigerians were even then being uprooted in European societies. The culprit European expatriates indicted for the blighting of European societies were schools, as such institutions had evolved in contemporary European bourgeois, liberal culture. Schools based upon liberal values, they concluded, produced individuals obsessed with materialism and social attainments above their station.