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Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement
in British Colonial Africa
 t i m ot h y h . pa r s on s

Race, Resistance, and the

Boy Scout Movement
in British Colonial Africa

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

AT H E N S
 Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 
©  by Ohio University Press
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™
             

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parsons,Timothy, 1962–
Race, resistance, and the boy scout movement in British Colonial Africa /
Timothy H. Parsons.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN --- (pbk. : alk.
paper)
. Scouts and scouting—Great Britain—Colonies—Africa. . Great Britain—
Colonies—Africa—Administration. . Great Britain—Colonies—Africa—Race
relations—History. I. Title.
HS.AP 
.''—dc

To Ann Parsons and Frances Marx
Kate, Julia, and Elizabeth Parsons
and to the memory of my father, George Parsons
 Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

PREFACE xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction 3

CHAPTER TWO
Scouting and Schools as Colonial Institutions 30

CHAPTER THREE
Pathfinding in Southern Africa, 1908–45 72

CHAPTER FOUR
Scouting and the School in East Africa, 1910–45 113

CHAPTER FIVE
Scouting and Independency in East Africa, 1946–64 146

CHAPTER SIX
Scouting and Apartheid in Southern Africa, 1945–80 191

CHAPTER SEVEN
Independence and After 237

APPENDIX
The Scout Law and Promise 259

NOTES 261

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 299

INDEX 317
 Illustrations
2.1 Woodbadge Training Course, Lexden, South Africa, . 56
2.2 Kenyan Scouts learning their knots, ca. . 57
2.3 Baden Powell’s illustration of Scouting’s egalitarianism. 59
2.4 The Kenyan Scouts who performed for
Queen Elizabeth II in ceremonial “tribal” dress, . 68
3.1 Pathfinder badge, interwar era. 87
3.2 Bechuana Wayfarers, s. 102
3.3 The Lubwa Pathfinders, . 108
3.4 Pathfinder warrant certificate, interwar era. 111
4.1 The Scout belt. 144
5.1 Chief Scout of the Empire and Commonwealth
Lord Rowallan greeting Scouts in Kenya, ca. . 152
5.2 Organizers of Kikuyu rally at Rowallan Camp, . 168
5.3 Members of the “inter-racial” Kenyan delegation
to the  World Scout Jamboree. 183
6.1 Blind Transvaal troop greets Lord Rowallan,
Chief Scout of the Empire and Commonwealth, ca. . 197
6.2 South African “inter-racial” Scout rally, ca. . 202
6.3 Integrated South African contingent to the
World Scout Jamboree in Britain, . 206
6.4 Mack Omega Shange invests King
Cyrian Bhekuzulu Nyangayizwe as a Scout, . 224
6.5 Registered African Scouts by year. 232

ix
 Preface
I FIRST STUMBLED ON this project during my dissertation research in Kenya in
the early s.As a Fulbright scholar, I had the option of sending a box of
supplies to myself through the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. While filling out
the standard customs declaration form, I noticed that the Kenyan govern-
ment listed Boy Scout uniforms along with firearms, explosives, and ille-
gal narcotics as items that could not be imported into the country.1 My
interest was piqued further upon discovering a speech by Kenya’s colonial
governor in the Kenyan National Archives referring to African Scout troops
“infected by Mau Mau.” He was essentially suggesting that Scouting had
somehow become caught up in the violent struggle against British colonial
rule that came to be known as the Mau Mau Emergency. My thinking along
these lines got an additional boost from the old men I interviewed for my
social history of African soldiers in the British East African colonial army.
During the course of our conversations, my informants invariably asked if
I had served in the army. In explaining that I had not, I thought about how
I had been a Boy Scout. Similarly, my friendship with my primary research
assistant, who was my junior by only a few years, grew when he discov-
ered that we both had been members of the movement.
Yet I undertook this project with some hesitancy. For better or for
worse, historians tend to become bound up with their subjects. Writing
about court cases or elections understandably brands an author as a legal
or a political historian. Having already been linked with the colonial
army as a result of my dissertation and first book, I found that many of
my academic peers considered the study of Scouting to be another colo-
nial military project (although, apart from a few Scout troops sponsored
by military authorities for African soldiers’ sons, there was absolutely no
connection between Scouting and the colonial army). In fact Scouting
was almost entirely an extension of the schools and missions during the
colonial era. There is also a broad perception that Scouting is a relatively
inconsequential institution that is not worthy of serious academic inves-
tigation. Friends and acquaintances often responded with wry chuckles
or bemused looks when I explained that my next project was going to be
a study of African Boy Scouts during the colonial era.

xi
 Ultimately, however, Scouting proved too tempting a target to ignore.
As a social historian, I am interested in institutions that illuminate the
conflicting values and cross-cultural tensions of colonial society. Indeed,
Scouting proved an ideal analytical tool in mapping the social divisions
of anglophone colonial Africa. The term scouting includes both male
members of official Scout organizations around the world and boys who
simply believed that they were Scouts. Scout authorities became willing
allies of colonial authority and reconfigured the core Scout canon to sup-
port the British imperial agenda in Africa. Yet they could not gloss over
the Fourth Scout Law, which declared all Scouts to be brothers. This was
a contentious assertion in territories practicing de facto racial segrega-
tion, and so Africans ranging from nationalist leaders to schoolboys
seized upon the movement to challenge the legitimacy of the colonial
regime. African opposition to colonialism is an old story, but institutions
like scouting provide deeper insights into what it was like for Africans to
grow up under British rule. For example, the material culture of Scout-
ing, which includes the Scout Law and Oath, badge tests, rank require-
ments, and uniforms, exposes key tensions over local administration and
governance, Western education, gender, and generational friction be-
tween African youth and their elders.
Africanist social historians of the twentieth century seek to under-
stand the lived experience of colonialism. In undertaking this project I
assumed that my insider status as an ex-Scout would give me a greater
understanding of the world of colonial African Scouting. To some extent
this proved to be true. National Scout and Guide associations in Britain
and Africa were welcoming, and I was able to answer in the affirmative
when my informants asked if I had been a Scout.Yet I missed an oppor-
tunity to develop a degree of intimacy with a key African figure in colo-
nial Scouting who went on to hold high political office in postcolonial
Kenya when I failed to offer him my left hand in greeting. Many Scout
organizations use the “left handshake” as an insider acknowledgment of
shared Scout status. My old troop, however, never went in for this sort of
thing.
My botched handshake led me to an important insight into the nature
of Scouting as a social institution. Almost all local Scout organizations
make key alterations to core Scouting beliefs to reflect local values and
circumstances. I belonged to a troop in Rochester, New York, that fre-
quently deviated from the official dictates of the Boy Scouts of America.
Founded in , just nine years after the establishment of the American
Scouts, my troop based its identity on its founder, J. Taylor Howard. Al-

xii p r e fac e
though technically designated Troop , it is popularly known as Tay
House, which is also the name of the large cabin where it meets, on the
grounds of its sponsoring public elementary school. The troop devel-
oped institutions and traditions over its ninety-plus years that ultimately
took it out of step with mainstream American Scouting. For example, it
got around official Scouting’s former opposition to Cub Scouting in the
s by importing manuals and badges from Canada.
When I joined the troop in the mid-seventies, Tay House acknowl-
edged the authority of the Otetiana Council but essentially followed its
own program. At a time when most troops consisted of about ten or so
boys in one or two patrols led by a Scoutmaster who was the father of one
of the members,Tay House had more than fifty members organized in at
least five patrols.We had a committee of five to eight Scoutmasters in their
twenties and early thirties, most of whom had been members of the troop
themselves. An informal rule banned fathers from serving as Scoutmas-
ters—to create an objective distance between the troop activities and fam-
ily relationships. Moreover, although they seemed very old to me at the
time, I looked up to these younger Scoutmasters because they seemed
funnier and hipper than adults who were closer to my parents in age.
Tay House managed to retain older boys by giving them a substantial
role in running the troop as junior and senior leaders, positions that do
not exist in official American Scouting. Even as a boy, I realized that in Tay
House we were a different kind of Scout. American Scouting was in de-
cline as a result of the growing antiestablishment sentiments in the sev-
enties, but our troop never wanted for members. Group pictures from
that period show rows of mostly middle-class white boys, many of them
with extremely long hair, in uniforms consisting of red and blue scarves,
collarless green shirts, rolled shorts, knee socks with garters and green
tabs, and hiking boots.This was at a time when the Boy Scouts of America
was trying to make Scouting more popular by modernizing its uniforms,
and I recall coveting the military-style long pants, shirts with epaulets, and
berets that other troops got to wear. Instead we continued to wear our
outdated shirts and shorts (even in the dead of the western New York
winters) and were dressed down by the older boys if we deviated even
slightly from the troop’s standard uniform. Conversely, I don’t think I
ever saw another troop that managed to dress all its members in the
newer uniforms. In most cases they wore a mix of blue jeans, sneakers,
and whatever bits of the uniform appealed to them. Tay House, on the
other hand, presented an even odder picture of long-haired boys dressed
smartly in the style of a bygone age.

p r e fac e xiii
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