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      The cultural transformation of Western education in Sierra Leone

      Africa
      JSTOR

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          Abstract

          The introduction of European schooling into West Africa in the late eighteenth century set in motion a profound cultural transformation. The Mende of Sierra Leone, the target of some of the earliest educational experiments in West Africa, began to reinterpret the Western ideals about the free dissemination of knowledge that were imposed on them. Focusing less onwhatis taught thanhowit is taught, the article shows that the Mende have transformed ideals about imparting knowl-edge according to local cultural tenets about secrecy and the control of knowledge. These tenets hold that, since valued knowledge is a key economic and political commodity, teachers, as proprietors of knowledge, deserve compensation for imparting it: a model of education manifested most strikingly in the region's famous secret societies. As was the case with more ‘traditional’ knowledge, the chief cultural idiom by which children acquire ‘civilised’ knowledge in school, and thus advance in the modern world, is through ‘buying’ or ‘earning’ blessings from those who teach them. By addressing ideologies of knowledge, power, and secrecy, the article sheds new interpretive light on the evolution of education in a country—indeed, among the very ethnic group—that comprised a keystone of nineteenth century British educational experiments in Africa.

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          Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties

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            'No Success Without Struggle': Social Mobility and Hardship for Foster Children in Sierra Leone

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              Secret knowledge as property and power in Kpelle society: elders versus youth

              Inequality based on privileged knowledge is an old topic in social analysis. It figures prominently, for example, in early works such as Condorcet's study of human progress. Condorcet argues that obstacles to progress arise when society is divided into two categories: ‘the one jealously hiding what it boasts of knowing, the other receiving with respect whatever is condescendingly revealed to it’ [1955 (1795): 17].
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                applab
                Africa
                Africa
                JSTOR
                0001-9720
                1750-0184
                April 1992
                December 2011
                : 62
                : 02
                : 182-202
                Article
                10.2307/1160454
                5e160fa0-24be-4213-bf60-6c5c4d0eccf7
                © 1992
                History

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