Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa

by Timothy H. Parsons

Overview

Parsons (history and African and Afro-American studies, Washington U., St. Louis) uses the institution of the Boy Scouts to map the social division of anglophone colonial Africa. Movement leaders became willing allies of colonial authority, he explains, and reconfigured its core canon to support the British imperial agenda in Africa. The trouble came with the Fourth Scout Law, which declares all Scouts, among whom were Black Africans, to be brothers. The African noticed that Law as well, and used it to challenge the legitimacy of the colonial regime. Boy Scout uniforms are banned in Kenya today. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821441459
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	11/28/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Timothy Parsons holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in the history department and the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King's African Rifles, 1902-1964; The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa, and The British Imperial Century, 1815-1914: A World History Perspective.

Editorial Reviews

"In effect, this study of the boy scout movement in Africa serves as an avenue of entry to a much broader consideration of the African experience under British colonial rule. The scholarship is not merely sound; it is downright formidable. This is a highly original, first-rate work of social history."—Dane Kennedy, author of Britain and Empire, 1880-1945


“Scouting, according to Parsons, could promote either empire loyalism or anti-colonial resistance, ambiguities that surface in his case studies.... A solid piece of history.”—International History Review


“As Parsons shows, scouting was from the start as much an instrument of social protest as of social control.”—South African Historical Journal

From the Publisher