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William Fitzwilliam Owen: Hydrographer Of The African Coast, 1774-1857, Robert Brown

Dr Robert Brown

This biography of William Fitzwilliam Owen reflects an attempt to place the response of one officer to Africa into the context of the political and social views of the early nineteenth century. Officially Owen was a hydrographer and not on suppression patrol, but he committed himself to political actions that pointed out the inconsistencies of the abolitionist crusade. Owen's contributions to African as well as to naval history have received minimal attention from historians. Because of this lack of attention to Owen's life and to the naval role in the early nineteenth century British contacts with Africa, the imperial developments …

Book Review: "Resurrecting The Granary Of Rome: Environmental History And French Colonial Expansion In North Africa" By Diana K. Davis, Leah Gibbs

Leah Maree Gibbs

In this rigorously researched book, Davis argues that French colonisation of the Maghreb (the three North African countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) was motivated and rationalised by a ‘declensionist environmental narrative’; a narrative that attributed environmental decline to the land use practices of the ‘native’ people of North Africa. Davis begins by questioning the often unquestioned environmental history of North Africa: the ‘sad tale of deforestation and desertification that has spanned much of the past two millennia’. She asserts that this environmental history has been constructed and reworked over time by ‘French colonial scientists, administrators, military men and settlers’.

Democratic Education Only For Some: Secondary Schooling In Northern Uganda, Philip Kelly, Stephen Odama

Philip P. Kelly

This article analyzes the effects of the political, social and cultural contexts of secondary education in northern Uganda. Specifically, the authors examine interactions between several factors with the schooling system, including

• post-colonial curriculum,
• centralized examination system,
• several decades of war and instability,
• poverty, and
• intra-national and inter-tribal prejudice and discrimination.

Informing the analysis is the fact that Uganda is a democracy and thus has certain democratic responsibilities to its children and students. To explore these issues, the lenses of democratic theory and critical theory are employed.