Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic
Subtitle
Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education
In "Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic," Andrew E. Barnes chronicles African Christians’ turn to American-style industrial education —particularly the model that had been developed by Booker T. Washington at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute — as a vehicle for Christian regeneration in Africa. Over the period 1880–1920, African Christians, motivated by Ethiopianism and its conviction that Africans should be saved by other Africans, proposed and founded schools based on the Tuskegee model.
Barnes follows the tides of the Black Atlantic back to Africa when African Christians embraced the new education initiatives of African-American Christians and Tuskegee as the most potent example of technological ingenuity. Building on unused African sources, the book traces the movements to establish industrial education institutes in cities along the West African coast and in South Africa, Cape Province and Natal. As Tuskegee and African schools modeled in its image proved, peoples of African descent could — and did — develop competitive technology.
Though the attempts by African Christians to create industrial education schools ultimately failed, "Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic" demonstrates the ultimate success of transatlantic black identity and Christian resurgence in Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Barnes’ study documents how African Christians sought to maintain indigenous identity and agency in the face of colonial domination by the state and even the European Christian missions of the church.
Bio
Andrew E. Barnes is an associate professor of history at ASU's School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
Praise for this book
Barnes traces an overlooked but important episode in South and West African intellectual history during which Africans and African-American leaders allied through the medium of Protestant Christianity to define and promote a program of educational reform designed to empower Africans in the modern world. He deftly advances our appreciation of how intellectual life in colonial Africa, too long constrained by notions of resistance and domination, is indeed rich with creative agendas for change which drew on Black Atlantic currents.
Philip S. Zachernuk Author of "Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas"
