The Nature and Effects of Differential Access to Education in Ga Society

Africa ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire C. Robertson

Opening ParagraphWhat happens when women are denied access, over a long period of time, to formal education of the type men are given? This paper is a preliminary examination of the effects on Central Accra Ga society of this process, which began in a significant form in the nineteenth century. It posits a detrimental effect, not only on the women but also on the whole society, and on the relation between the sexes, of the systematic channelling of men into Western style education, while women were encouraged to stay in trading and home production, or given the equivalent of ‘home economics’ courses if they were sent to school.

Author(s):  
Olive Schreiner

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.


Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Fyfe

Opening ParagraphSeen in the widest perspective, 1787 is only one date among the uncounted tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years during which the present Sierra Leone has been inhabited. Archaeologists have done disappointingly little work there. But it is clear from their findings (and by implication from findings in the rest of forest-belt West Africa) that people have lived there a very long time. Though traditional historiography always tends to present the peoples of Sierra Leone as immigrants from somewhere else, the language pattern suggests continuous occupation over a very long period. As Paul Hair (1967) has shown, there has been a striking linguistic continuity in coastal West Africa since the fifteenth century. Nor is there evidence to suggest that before that period stability and continuity were not the norm.


Balcanica ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 91-158
Author(s):  
Milos Lukovic

With the partitioning in 1373 of the domain of Nikola Altomanovic, a Serbian feudal lord, the old political core of the Serbian heartland was shattered and the feudal Bosnian state considerably extended to the east. The region was crossed by the Tara river, mostly along the southeast-northwest "Dinaric course". Although the line along which Altomanovic?s domain was partitioned has been discussed on several occasions and over a comparatively long period, analyses show that the identification of its section south of the Tara is still burdened by a number of unanswered questions, which are the topic of this paper. An accurate identification of this historical boundary is of interest not only to historiography, but also to archaeology ethnology, philology (the history of language and dialectology in particular) and other related disciplines. The charters of Alphonse V and Friedrich III concerning the domain of herceg Stefan Vukcic Kosaca, and other historical sources relating to the estates of the Kosaca cannot reliably con?rm that the zupa of Moraca belonged to the Kosaca domain. The castrum Moratsky and the civitate Morachij from the two charters stand for the fortress near the village of Gornje Morakovo in the zupa of Niksic known as Mrakovac in the nineteenth century, and as Jerinin Grad/Jerina?s Castle in recent times. The zupa of Moraca, as well as the neighbouring Zupa of Brskovo in the Tara river valley, belonged to the domain of the Brankovic from the moment the territory of zupan Nikola Altomanovic was partitioned until 1455, when the Turks ?nally conquered the region thereby ending the 60-year period of dual, Serbian-Turkish, rule. Out of the domain of the Brankovic the Turks created two temporary territorial units: Krajiste of Issa-bey Ishakovic and the Vlk district (the latter subsequently became the san?ak of Vucitrn). The zupa of Moraca became part of Issa-bey Ishakovic?s domain, and was registered as such, although the fact is more di?cult to see from the surviving Turkish cadastral record. The zupa of Moraca did not belong to the vilayet of Hersek, originally established by the Turks within their temporary vilayet system after most of the Kosaca domain had been seized. It was only with the establishing of the San?ak of Herzegovina that three nahiyes which formerly constituted the Zupa of Moraca (Donja/Lower Moraca, Gornja/Upper Moraca and Rovci) were detached from Issa-bey?s territory and included into the San?ak of Hercegovina. It was then that they were registered as part of that San?ak and began to be regarded as being part of Herzegovina.


Africa ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Smith

Opening ParagraphExplanation, or the identification and assessment of the causes of events and situations, occupies the central place in nearly all historical writing in the present century. It is also the aspect of history which is most keenly debated by philosophers, and is the main issue today in the unending, wearisome, but seemingly inescapable controversy as to whether history belongs, or belongs more, with the sciences or with the humanities. The scientific or positivist school, numbering among its recent exponents Popper and Gardiner, emphasizes the extent to which historical explanation attains a regularity akin to, though not identical with, that found in the physical and other sciences, Hempel adding the contention that such explanation can always, and often should, be reduced to a ‘covering law’, or single universal statement subsuming the whole explanation. The idealists, among whom Croce, Collingwood, and most recently Oakeshott are prominent, stress conversely the uniqueness of history, and Dray has reinforced their position by his attack on the covering law thesis. The debate is one in which historians themselves have taken little part, and African historians none at all, despite its crucial importance for almost every aspect of their profession. Yet it is a debate which needs continuous illustration from the historiographical process, a need which historians are best able to meet. The aim of the present article is to contribute to the debate by examining as a problem in historical explanation the fall of Oyo, the powerful state of the northern Yoruba, in the early nineteenth century.


Africa ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Akindele Cline-Cole

Opening ParagraphIn a country which in the last 200 years has undergone continuous and often momentous political, economic and social changes, few things are capable of conveying as strong an impression of stability and changelessness as wood fuel (charcoal and firewood) consumption and production; and nowhere is this more striking than on the Freetown or Western Area (formerly Colony) peninsula. In this region, which has always accounted for the major share of national electricity, kerosene and cooking gas (LPG) consumption, not only is current percentage household firewood consumption only fractionally lower than in the nineteenth century but a much higher proportion of households consume charcoal now than at any time in the last two centuries (Cline-Cole, 1984a). Today firewood and charcoal combined supply a minimum of 80 per cent of total peninsula energy demand for both domestic and non-household uses (Davidson, 1985). Freetown's firewood consumption also represents some 10 per cent of the national total (Atlanta, 1979).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Tremml-Werner

The chapter focuses on how piracy was rendered in Spanish records from the Philippine Islands from around 1570 to 1800. The author demonstrates that the label “pirate” was used to denote a wide range of hostile elements or peoples, including other Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, and indigenous Philippine groups. Several of these alleged pirates have been largely overshadowed by later, mainly nineteenth-century, accounts that focused exclusively or overwhelmingly on the maritime raiding of indigenous Muslim “Moro piracy.” The chapter thus demonstrates the complex nature of piracy and the multiplicity of actors, practices, and representations of the phenomenon during the long period under study.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Jane Duran

This article argues that Maria Stewart is an underappreciated abolitionist, and a worthy exponent of the Black views of the 1830s. Her work is compared with that of David Walker, Charlotte Forten, and Anna Julia Cooper. A focal point of much of her work is her exhortation to the high moral ground—she remains concerned, throughout her career, about the temptations faced by many during the nineteenth century that might lead them to a non-Christian path. As is the case with Charlotte Forten, who frequently moved for more formal education, Stewart worked ceaselessly to impel Black Americans to a worthy and virtuous life.


1953 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Landau

The scarceness of published material renders difficult a true estimate of the development of political ideas in Egypt in the nineteenth century. Nor is it any less difficult to trace the origins of the first political parties.The Arabi Rebellion of 1881-1882 was preceded by a long period of unrest, which finally crystallized in a self-styled National Party. This faction, led by army officers and civilians, kept its secret character for a few years, coming into the open only at the beginning of the Arabi Rebellion. Its importance in the anti-foreign struggle, however, has drawn attention to its humble but interesting origins. Research has provided us with fairly adequate, if still incomplete, material on this point. But hardly anything has been published, on the other hand, about another secret organization of that time, called ‘Young Egypt’.


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