#industrialeducation

What do Booker T. Washington, Germany sociology and Togo have in common?

Answer? The Tuskegee Institute.

I was as surprised as I'm sure you are that these three apparently disparate things shared a common link at all. But I recently finished reading an amazing book that tells the transnational history of the connection between The Tuskegee Institute and American New South after Reconstruction, German sociology and colonial empire, and agriculture in Togo. 

Alabama in Africa, by Andrew Zimmerman is a dense but fascinating historiography of how the partnership between the Tuskegee Institute and the German colonial empire shaped agriculture in Togo. But the book is much more than that. There are fascinating threads of the global history of cotton cultivation and manufacturing, Polish workers in eastern Germany, sugar beets and W.E.B. DuBois. Zimmerman crafts an engaging work by weaving together Marxist and gender analysis with this transnational history.

It provided me with a new understanding of the historical and cultural landscape of agriculture in Togo, which really is the framework in which I am working in many ways. Thankfully I'm not here to promote cash-cropping cotton, but there are other ethical ambiguities to my mandate. Zimmerman talks about how the idea of training model farmers, who would then go back and disseminate new techniques or knowledge to their communities, was introduced to Togo by the group from the Tuskegee Institute invited by the Germans to improve cotton cultivation in Togo. This group believed that blacks would be more apt to copy the technique from one of their own than to learn the technique and implement it on their own. This idea stemmed from Booker T. Washington's idea of industrial education for blacks in the post-Reconstruction American South, that African Americans needed a different education for their different nature. According to Washington, this education should include more manual labor. 

The students I work with at the lycee, whether it's the environmental club or the girls' soccer team, still perform travail manuel at least once a week, for example cleaning up school grounds. I'm working with a group of PCVs to organize a regional model farmers' conference, where innovative farmers would gather to share what they're doing in animal husbandry or in agriculture. They would also learn how to establish a demonstration plot, conduct monitoring and evaluation and other skills for disseminating their knowledge upon their return to their communities. The idea is that there are already Togolese farmers who know much better than any PCV about the realities of agriculture here) that are already doing successful and innovative things in their communities. But their communities are not necessarily paying any attention to these positive deviants.  The idea behind a model farmers' conference is to provide the opportunity for these innovative farmers to build regional information sharing networks amongst themselves and to develop their skills for sharing their successful techniques with their communities.

Zimmerman's treatment of these two topics in particular caused me to reflect in a new way about my work here. (Trust me, I already do a LOT of reflection on the why and how of my work. But Zimmerman's book provided yet another perspective for consideration). How does a school garden project, or environmental club or English club fit into the historical context of colonial education? How does this model farmers' conference reflect German sociology's assumptions about the way the "locals" would learn?