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Agency and Analogy in African History: the Contribution of Extra-Mural Studies in Ghana1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Kate Skinner
Kate Skinner*
Affiliation:
CWAS, University of Birmingham
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Extract

As the pioneering generation of postwar British academics retired, some produced autobiographical texts which revealed the personal circumstances and intellectual influences that brought them to the study of Africa. Edited volumes have also provided broader reflections on the academic disciplines, methodologies, and institutions through which these scholars engaged with the continent. In one such text, Christopher Clapham and Richard Hodder-Williams noted the special relationship between extramural studies (also known as university adult education) and the academic study of Africa's mass nationalist movements:

The impetus for this study came to a remarkable degree from a tiny group of men and women who pioneered university extra-mural studies in the Gold Coast immediately after the [Second World War], and to a significant extent established the parameters for subsequent study of the subject [African politics]. Gathered together under the aegis of Thomas Hodgkin […], they were led by David Kimble […], and included among the tutors Dennis Austin, Lalage Bown and Bill Tordoff, all of whom were to play a major role in African studies in the United Kingdom over the next forty years.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 34 , 2007 , pp. 273 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2007

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Footnotes

1

This paper is part of a three-year research project funded by the Nuffield Foundation's New Career Development Scheme.

References

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14 This argument is further developed in Kate Skinner, “Mass Education at the End of Empire: Training Citizens and Improving Villagers in the Late Colonial Gold Coast,” unpublished ms.

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18 National Archives, Kew, CO 554/135/2 Higher Education in West Africa, Study Courses Arranged by the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy, 1946, 1-6. Hodgkin was also able to quote back to the ACEC sections of the Asquith and Elliot commission reports which emphasized the benefits of including extra-mural departments in the new university institutions of West Africa.

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51 Interview with William Tordoff, Chapel-en-le-Frith, 13 April 2004

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