This book examines Joseph Kamiru Gikubu’s impact on Kenyan youth education. The author asserts that over his decades-long career, Gikubu played an active role in not only building and improving Kenyan youth education but also in demonstrating the role educational institutions play in imparting nation-building skills. Gikubu’s educational contributions were wide-ranging and include both practical and theoretical aspects of education through his works in various juvenile rehabilitation programs and youth clubs, as well as his insights on youth education and school leadership. Through Gikubu’s educational work, this volume interrogates Kenya’s educational development, transformation, and entailed challenges. The book fills the gap in the dearth of African-centered educational biographies and their role in shaping Africa’s social, political, and economic spheres in both the colonial and post-colonial period. It also addresses emerging scholarship in African educational biographies. div

In 2003, Olufemi Vaughan received from his ninety-five-year-old father, Abiodun, a trove of more than three thousand letters written by four generations of his family in Ibadan, Nigeria, between 1926 and 1994. The people who wrote these letters had emerged from the religious, social, and educational institutions established by the Church Missionary Society, the preeminent Anglican mission in the Atlantic Nigerian region following the imposition of British colonial rule. Abiodun, recruited to be a civil servant in the colonial Department of Agriculture, became a leader of a prominent family in Ibadan, the dominant Yoruba city in southern Nigeria. Reading deeply in these letters, Vaughan realized he had a unique set of sources to illuminate everyday life in modern Nigeria. Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for Western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure to the modern world and a growing sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. Through careful textual analysis and broad contextualization, Vaughan reconstructs dominant storylines, including themes such as kinship, social mobility, Western education, modernity, and elite consolidation in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. Vaughan brings his prodigious skills as an interdisciplinary scholar to bear on this wealth of information, bringing to life a portrait, at once intimate and expansive, of a community during a transformative period in African history.

This volume presents fifty years of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria's oldest and pre-eminent university, from its inception as a college of the University of London. The contributors are various existing and retired faculty professors, heads of the university's libraries, publishing house and printing press; from the university's administration, and former students. The essays are diverse and specific in their handling of the university's history; but all broadly document the common experience of the university's decline, and the enormous gulf between the present state of the university and the kind of institution its creators and ambassadors believe it should be. They reflect upon the earlier role of the university as an institutional of international renown and influential in shaping Nigeria's history; and the present state of depleted academic departments and inadequate libraries; and they describe how the university is suffering from the Africa-wide brain-drain and a chronic lack of funding. The esssays further demonstrate how the historical development of the university has largely rested upon the mostly detrimental and at times disastrous attitude and actions of the Nigerian State; and that the history of the university is inseparable from the history of the country; the university having become the intellectual equivalent of a marginalised Third World economy. The overall picture is not wholly one of gloom however. The contributors also propose directions the university may pursue to reverse the decline; and this publication itself represents a spirited rear-guard action.

This wide-ranging volume presents the most complete appraisal of modern African history to date. It assembles dozens of new and established scholars to tackle the questions and subjects that define the field, ranging from the economy, the two world wars, nationalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics to religion, development, sexuality, and the African youth experience. Contributors are drawn from numerous fields in African studies, including art, music, literature, education, and anthropology. The themes they cover illustrate the depth of modern African history and the diversity and originality of lenses available for examining it. Older themes in the field have been treated to an engaging re-assessment, while new and emerging themes are situated as the book’s core strength. The result is a comprehensive, vital picture of where the field of modern African history stands today.

This volume engages the reader in understanding past and contemporary critical issues in African scholarship, both in the diaspora and on the continent, that have been marginalized, unexamined, and under-researched, and proposes ways to make them visible. The book is timely as it imagines and reimagines scholarship on Africans in the diaspora and on the continent. It is bold, and authentically unpacks African immigrants’ individual and collective cultural, educational, social, and institutional experiences, especially in the context of US Pk-12 schools as they navigate and negotiate transnational spaces regarding identity and shifting positionalities. The editors and contributors, who are themselves African immigrants, exemplify their spirits of Sankofa as they look back to their roots in order to give back to their “Motherland” by fighting for the visibility, equity and social justice of Africans in the diaspora and on the continent. The book proposes critical and insightful ideas that educators, researchers, policy makers, social and human services, and community leaders will find valuable.