Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa

Parsons (history and African and Afro-American studies, Washington U., St. Louis) uses the institution of the Boy Scouts to map the social division of anglophone colonial Africa. Movement leaders became willing allies of colonial authority, he explains, and reconfigured its core canon to support the British imperial agenda in Africa. The trouble came with the Fourth Scout Law, which declares all Scouts, among whom were Black Africans, to be brothers. The African noticed that Law as well, and used it to challenge the legitimacy of the colonial regime. Boy Scout uniforms are banned in Kenya today. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR