"They were among my happiest days". Identity Formation and Cultural Representations of the Boarding School in Anglophone West Africa

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Tobias Robert Klein
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 247499824

The project aims to analyse the hitherto under-researched cultural and artistic representation of (Secondary) schooling in Anglophone West-Africa from both a historically-diachronic and a literary and text-based perspective. The boarding school system that since the heydays of colonialism assembled students from diverse ethnic backgrounds into classrooms and dormitories has repeatedly been related to the creation of an (elite-based) national identity, but as a major institution of socialization has more recently also shaped the personal network of relations and value system for wide sections of the emerging African middle classes. The study opens with a historical overview that includes the representation of schools in newspapers of the colonial period and a detailed description of the routine of daily life in a West-African (boarding) school, where characteristic elements of the British school tradition have gradually mingled with indigenous customs and conventions. African literature and art are in this context, owing to their dual function as a highly sensitive cultural indicator and their tendency to intervene into the very reality they describe, to be understood as a valuable supplement to the results of social and historical studies. The philologically, historically and culturally informed reading of the multifaceted perception and connotation of schooling will first examine African writer's creative adaptation of established literary genres such as the "Bildungsroman" and the British "school novel" and dwell on the textual tension and relation between fictional and autobiographical accounts of boarding school life. Particular attention will in this vein be paid to the use of narrative devices and conventions that are placing these texts into a specific literary tradition, against which their different social and cultural context subliminally rebels. Representations of schooling in past and contemporary popular culture form another major concern of the study: The project will here for the first time examine neglected genres such as the "school Magazine" and scrutinize the image of schools as an agent of social change and status definition in Ghanaian and Nigerian home movie productions. Last but not least it seeks to relate the rise of recent popular music genres such as Hiplife and Azonto to the peculiar conditions, customs and slang expressions of Ghanaian Secondary Schools' boarding houses.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants