IDNO

N.19183.ROS

Description

A distant view of a landscape in Khartoum.

Place

NE Africa; Sudan; Khartoum; River Nile

Cultural Affliation

Named Person

Photographer

?Roscoe, John R.

Collector / Expedition

Roscoe, John R. [Mackie Ethnological Expedition, Uganda, 1919 - 1920]

Date

1919 - 1920

Collection Name

Roscoe Collection

Source

Format

Film Negative Black & White

Primary Documentation

Other Information

This negative was kept in an envelope marked C30/131/ by the cataloguer. The envelope was kept in box marked C30/ by the cataloguer.
Previously stored on Shelf 4, in group of 4 wooden boxes numbered 180.

Context: “At Khartoum I was entertained by Mr. Crowfoot, the Minister of Education. He most kindly enabled me to see much of the working of Gordon College, and also told me a good deal about the place. The buildings are well planned and built of stone, and are very substantial and commodious. There are various branches of training, and boys from all classes of life are provided for. There is an elementary department, where the education is general and suitable for the ordinary worker. Then there is a technical department, in which smithing and general ironwork, carpentry and cabinet-making are excellently taught. In the upper school clerks, accountants, schoolmasters and civil engineers are trained. There is a good staff of Englishmen, many of them graduates of our Universities. The work of the college is really very advanced; but, to my mind, the tendency of the whole training is rather to strengthen than to remove the barrier than Islam raises against the spread of Christianity and true civilisation. It is an extraordinary state of affairs in a place which bears the name of a hero who gave his life for the cause of liberty, justice, and the Christian virtues, against which the whole forces of Islam are arrayed.
I paid a hurried visit to the Christian schools in Khartoum. They are, I found, doing but little that can compare with the training offered to the men in the Gordon College, where the influences are all Moslem. Christian lads have to be sent to the College because there is no other place where they can receive the education they want, but at present there are not many there.
One day I was taken over to Omdurman, and saw the remains of the Mahdi’s house and the fort where the forces under him gathered against Gordon. It was here that they concentrated the strength for the final attack in which Gordon lost his life. Here, too, it was that Kitchener made his great name and set on a firm foundation the tottering fame of Britain. Yet this is the land where the seed of the Moslem faith is being sown far and wide, and is, it seems, not only being allowed to grow but even watered and nourished by the British, under whose protection a crop of poisonous weeds, as noiseme as those which Kitchener destroyed, is fast springing up. I saw here one of the schools which the Government is establishing as branches of the Gordon College. It is a well-equipped, fine building, doing, as far as education goes, a splendid work; but it is plainly another of the agencies by which we, as a nation, are raising the propagators of Islam in Africa from a state of ignorance to the intellectual level of the advanced religions of the world. Under the old teachers of Islam in Africa that faith was doomed to give way before the advance of the higher and more progressive forms of religion, but an enormous impetus is now being given to it by the work of some of the best men of our British Universities in these schools. These men may indignantly deny the accusation, but there is not the slightest doubt that Islam is the religion which is encouraged. All forms and ceremonies of Christian worship are carefully excluded, but the college has its mosque, and the regular attendance of the pupils is enforced and supervised by the teachers, who not only thus indirectly but also by direct teaching encourage the false and exclude the true.
I had been asked to send a report to Buganda of the Gordon College and of its suitability as a place to which Baganda boys might be sent for education. I need hardly say I wrote very strongly against any such scheme, and my opinion was supported by the Minister of Education. In addition to the Moslemic tendency of the whole of the training, the teaching is carried on in Arabic, a language which is entirely unknown to the Baganda.
In Omdurman there is a Christian hospital which is doing good work in the face of many difficulties, for it receives but little recognition from the Government. I had not time to visit it, for my stay in Omdurman was limited to two or three hours, but as I passed I heard something about it and its work.
In Khartoum is the Wellcome Research Laboratory, which is carrying on such valuable and necessary work in research on the causes and cure of tropical diseases. I visited the laboratory and saw something of the wonderful diligence and care with which these investigations are being carried on” (Roscoe, J., 1922. The Soul of Central Africa: An Account of the Mackie Ethnological Expedition. (London: Cassell and Co.), p. 323 - 325.). [ED 29/10/2007]

This catalogue record has been updated with the support of the Getty Grant Program Two. [Elisabeth Deane 29/10/2007]