Author: Pablo Fernández-Cebrián (Universitat de València)
What drives educational policy in colonial settings? Across colonial Africa, the balance between state-run and mission-run schools, the “school mix”, shaped educational outcomes, and left an imprint on levels of education that persists to this day. Yet our understanding of how and why this mix evolved remains limited.
The consensus among economic historians is that African educational systems secularised after the Second World War, shifting from mission dominance towards a greater role of the state, especially in the British colonies. However, a closer look suggests a more complicated picture. In my article, I assemble an overview of primary education across several African colonies between 1930 and 1960, which shows that school mix trajectories were in fact heterogeneous across and within empires.
Such heterogeneity raises the question: what metropolitan and local contextual factors drove the evolution of the school mix across African colonies? I take a first step towards answering this largely unexplored question by focusing on the Portuguese case, and especially on Mozambique, where the colonial state withdrew from running primary schools for African children and granted Catholic missions a quasi-monopoly. I show that this was both a cost-cutting measure and an attempt to counteract the purported threat of Protestant missions.
Education under the indigenato
All of public life in Portuguese Africa, including education, was structured by dual systems of institutionalised racism. In Mozambique this system was known as the indigenato, which divided the population into civilizados, mostly composed of the white settlers, and indígenas, essentially the black Africans. Under the indigenato, the only educational possibility for most African children was ensino rudimentar, a type of primary education of very low quality.
During the 1930s, the colonial state ran a significant share of these primary rudimentary schools. However, in 1941, the Governor General of colonial Mozambique, José Tristão de Bettencourt, authorized the transfer of approximately 70 state-run schools, where some 9,000 African students had been enrolled, to the Catholic missions established in the colony. This and subsequent transfers implemented in Mozambique the 1940-41 agreements between the Portuguese Estado Novo and the Catholic Church, granting Catholic missions a quasi-monopoly on African education that lasted until the end of the indigenato in 1961.
Saving on primary education
The first driving force behind this policy choice was fiscal. Portugal was a comparatively poor colonial power, and under the austerity and strict budget balance imposed by the Estado Novo, education was never a priority for the colonial government in Mozambique. I show that relying on Catholic missions allowed for the expansion of the school network while keeping state expenditure low.
Because the colonial budget subsidised the Catholic missions, outsourcing education to them cannot automatically be assumed to have reduced costs. I therefore compare the colonial state’s expenditure per child enrolled in its own rudimentary schools against that in Catholic mission schools, at the regional level of the distrito, for 1936–1941. Unitary costs for mission schools fell steadily as their network expanded, while unitary costs for state-run schools remained relatively stable, and by the late 1930s the missions had become the clearly cheaper option for the state in the most important centres of educational activity.
From the colonial state’s perspective, unitary costs for Catholic mission rudimentary schools fell because enrolment grew faster than the subsidies it paid out, a pattern that would continue until the end of the indigenato. The missions could draw on financing beyond state subsidies and had their own incentive to expand rudimentary education as a means of attracting converts.
Funding the Catholic missions was therefore a more efficient way for the state to achieve its educational goals than directly running the schools itself. However, finance alone cannot explain the Catholic monopoly: had efficiency been the only priority, the colonial state could have subsidised Protestant missions too and let denominations compete freely. The Portuguese “civilising mission” explains why that road was not taken.
Ideology and denominational competition
The goal of the so-called “civilising mission” of Portuguese colonialism in Africa was the “nationalisation” of the local population, through the Portuguese language and Catholicism, as a way of consolidating territorial dominion. Within that framework Catholic missions held a key role. Among other things, they were considered the best antidote to the influence of Protestant missions, which were seen as a proxy for external powers, and a threat to Portuguese sovereignty.
This denominational competition was the second driver behind the choice to outsource African education to the Catholic missions. Analysing colonial discourse through a range of sources, I show that within Portuguese imperial circles, denominational competition in the educational realm was considered essential: Catholic missions, and specifically their schools, were widely seen as a key tool to counteract the purported “denationalising” effect of Protestant missions on the African population. Importantly, they were considered a better tool for this purpose than state-run schools.
To further support my hypothesis, I examine the geographical distribution of missions over time. Arguments about educational competition were not made in the abstract: colonial officials explicitly advocated establishing Catholic missions and their schools close to existing Protestant missions. I therefore build a new georeferenced annual panel of the main Catholic and Protestant missions in Mozambique between 1922-1960, to test whether imperial rhetoric translated into practice.
The evidence suggests that it did. Once I control for the full set of economic and logistical factors known to drive missionary expansion in colonial Africa, proximity to Protestant missions inside Mozambique remains a significant predictor of Catholic openings: new missions were more likely to appear close to existing Protestant ones. These proximity effects are driven by the period after 1941–1942, once the concession of the monopoly had made Catholic missions the colonial state’s chosen instrument for the education of the African population.
Countervailing imperatives
Taken together, these findings illuminate the political economy of public goods provision in colonial Africa, where states faced mutually countervailing imperatives. In Mozambique, schooling served the legitimacy imperative by indoctrinating African children in the basic tenets of imperial ideology, but this had to be balanced against the revenue imperative under Estado Novo austerity. Transferring schooling to cheaper mission schools resolved that dilemma while also serving the security and hegemony imperatives, since Catholic missions were considered a better tool than state-run schools to counteract Protestant influence. It was only in the 1960s, with the liberation wars and the perceived failure of the missions to “nationalise” the population, that the colonial state again developed its own schools for African children. The broader lesson is that to understand the evolution of educational policy in colonial Africa, both local and metropolitan contextual factors, and their changes over time, must be taken into account.