Why Boarding Schools are Incurable Monsters of Colonialism

For at least three years now, I have run the hashtag #AbolishBoardingSchools in response to the mayhem in those institutions. One of the things I have said repeatedly is that boarding schools are part of the ignominious British colonial heritage. How is this so? First, as the renowned Congolese philosopher, V.Y. Mudimbe explains in The Invention of Africa (1988), the terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonization’ basically mean ‘organization’ or ‘arrangement’, having been derived from the latin word colere, meaning ‘to cultivate’ or ‘to design’. He then makes the important point that Western colonialism organizes and transforms non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs (p.14). He elaborates on this point as follows: … it is possible to use three main keys to account for the modulations and methods representative of colonial organization: the procedures of acquiring, distributing, and exploiting lands in colonies; the policies of domesticating natives; and the manner of managing ancient organizations and implementing new modes of production. Thus, three complementary hypotheses and actions emerge: the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives' minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective. These complementary projects constitute what might be called the colonizing structure, which completely embraces the physical, human, and spiritual aspects of the colonizing experience (p.15). Furthermore, scholars in Africa have for long explained that the Western European colonisers used a three-pronged approach to achieve their domineering goal: 1. Violence to subdue the peoples whom they invaded. 2. Religion to soften the subdued peoples to minimize the cost of a sustained military operation. 3. Formal education to provide a justificatory ideology that would sustain the colonial structures for decades, if not centuries. Boarding schools were crucial to the implementation of the third plunk of the strategy: • Take away children from their homes for long periods of time, thereby reducing their parents’ influence on them. • Teach the youth separated from their parents the culture of the colonizer as though it were objective truth – modes of dressing, eating, talking, along with a Eurocentric formal education meant to convince the young minds that there was no knowledge in Africa prior to colonialism, and that, therefore, colonialism was a “savior” rather than a destroyer. • Send the brain-washed young minds back home with a false sense of superiority, thereby grossly diminishing the authority of their parents over them: they now believed that their parents were ignorant because they had not attended the coloniser’s ‘education system’. Those who run today’s boarding schools are the direct or indirect products of the colonial boarding schools, and so continue to perpetuate the colonial ideology which says that Africa is backwards and needs ‘development’.