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REVIEWS
| Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa. By Timothy H. Parsons (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xvii plus 318 pp.).
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| In this sympathetic history of the boy scout movement in areas of Eastern and Southern Africa, Timothy Parsons combines an examination of scouts' local conditions, aspirations and concerns with a sweeping overview that sees scouting as a coherent world-wide movement connected to a non-racial ethos. |
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Parsons' lens is what he calls "The Fourth Scout Law," in theory memorized by all aspiring scouts, which declared "A Scout is a friend to all, and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what country, class or creed, the other may belong."( 3) This "law" fit awkwardly with the realities of the colonial world from the appalling military career of scouting's founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell through the conflicts over loyalties that accompanied the rise of African nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Parsons points out that despite trappings that included loot from the Matabeleland war, Baden-Powell's intent in founding the scouts was to address British social unrest, rather than to train African leaders.( 30, 51) But Baden-Powell's intentions were a minimal part of what African scouting became. In Africa, Parsons argues that a wide variety of local actors appropriated scouting and used it as a prestigious club, a system of discipline and a package of ideas. Through scouting, activists worked on their own projects— from cultivating elite schoolboys into strong leaders to getting rich by impersonating government officials or selling scout paraphernalia. |
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