In theory, education was a key benefit bestowed by European colonial governments and missionaries. But it was also increasingly seen – from India to Africa to the West Indies – as detrimental. Norman Manley, later the first prime minister of Jamaica, was fond of quoting a British official who admitted that: ‘The Empire and British rule rest on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed.’ The Indian schoolchild, a local journalist complained in 1923, ‘is taught day after day to despise everything Indian and to admire…
