2. EducationIn the second instalment of this short series of articles about trek diaries we will look at those that document the provision of education services, and in particular girls’ education in what is today South Sudan.
On this type of trek officials from the Department of Education would journey across various parts of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan inspecting the quality of school buildings as well as the assessing the value of the teaching methods. Intrepid inspectors, including pioneering Sudanese such as Sitt Medina Abdulla (-1991), worked to improve local student and teacher numbers and the quality of teaching. They would work with local leaders to understand the value of boys’ and girls’ education and so generate interest in new schools.
For a very long time after Britain, (the dominant partner of an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government), took control of Sudan in 1898 the provision of education in Southern Sudan was not even deemed a government responsibility let alone a priority. Pursuing a policy of isolating the southern peoples from the Muslim north, the government devolved responsibility for education to Christian missionary organisations, allotting to each different territories of operation: evangelisation must be accompanied by some measure of education, though this was unregulated and unsupervised. Only in 1927 were government subsidies introduced to support missionary education programmes and the mission schools taken under the control of the Education Department.
Ina Beasley (1898-1994), Controller of Girls’ Education in Sudan from 1942 to 1949, documented her journeys in trek diaries and frequent letters to her family in England, and in the later publication of a book about her time in Sudan, entitled Before the Wind Changed (1992). Her personal correspondence contains quite large amounts of personal detail that may not be pertinent to treks themselves but can be useful to explore attitudes prevailing at the time. Her papers were donated to the Sudan Archive at Durham University in the 1980s.
The particular trek diary featured here records Beasley’s two-week inspection tour of Southern Sudan to inspect girls’ educational services there in April 1946. Her tour lay over more than 1,300 miles of poor roads, accompanied by a Sudanese driver in an uncomfortable, dilapidated but unexpectedly reliable Ford V8 truck. At times during her tour Beasley encountered people for whom the idea of educating women was impracticable, strange or even beyond contemplation. In contrast, boys’ schooling was well-established and usually of quite good quality if not yet as advanced as in the North. What girls’ schooling she was able to inspect she usually found inadequate, though with some exceptions. The purpose of her tour was, with colleagues in her Department, to determine how best to radically accelerate the expansion and professionalism of girls’ education in the South. She acknowledged some ambivalence about this task, summing up that it “was our business to provide the South as rapidly as possible with the tools of learning with which they may develop a way of life capable of adaptation to the world of the future, whether any of us like the particular shape of that world or not. There are forces outside their control and ours and all that we can do it to equip them, as best we may, for the contacts which they cannot indefinitely avoid”. This same ambivalence when encountering southern Sudanese peoples had for decades before the 1940s inhibited southern administrators from introducing the same investment in public services and economic development that had been introduced in northern Sudan. The sudden acceleration in Sudan’s advance toward independence after the war forced a change in attitudes.
Further georeferenced examples of trek diaries will be published here in future postings.
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