Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived

Lives lived differently: Geography and the study of black women

This paper considers the geographical study of black women’s lives through a reflection on Jacqueline Tivers’ (Area, 10, 1978, 302) “How the other half lives: the geographical study of women.” While feminist geographers have drawn on black feminist thought, the limited presence of black women academics within the discipline of Geography contributed to a lack of sensitivity to the distinctiveness of black women’s geographies. The paper notes the considerable body of work that has emerged since Tivers’ paper, including that which challenges the universalisation of concepts of women, gender, family, and the household, especially in relation to black women’s lives globally. It asserts the globality of black women’s “lifeways” – especially the interconnections between continental Africa and the African diaspora – and suggests that a more relational approach to the study of black women’s lives could inform geographers’ understanding of gendered and racial structures of oppression and alternative geographies of resistance and freedom