The role of the missionary stations in the dissemination of european models of education in West Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century

Abstract

The article analyzes the specifics of intercultural communication at the stage of existence of the frontier in Africa. The author examines the activities of missionaries in spreading Christianity and European culture, education, among the local population, showing the inconsistency of this process and its impact on the transformation of local societies. Need to study this promotion, its political, economic and social outcomes, including humans, which existed in these circumstances. Often the interaction of peoples conflicted character, during which European and African culture are mutually adapted to each other by borrowing some traditional elements. These borrowings due to changes forced the representatives of this culture to adapt to them, mastering and using these new elements in your life. As a result, people to a greater or lesser extent, have achieved compatibility with the new cultural environment. Thus, in the interaction of cultures, the adaptation of man to the elements of a new culture the process of acculturation. In today's world the term "acculturation" is used to denote the process and result of the mutual influence of different cultures, in which all or part of the representatives of one culture (the recipient) take on the norms, values and traditions of another (the donor culture). Research in the field of acculturation has resulted in the end of XX century. On the one hand this is due to globalization and migration processes, with another – the increased interest in the problem of intercultural integration in the past and in the present.
The article discusses the phenomenon of acculturation as a result of the activities of the English Christian missions in Western Africa in the second half of the XIX century in the aspect of intercultural communication. The most important objective and outcome of acculturation is a long-term adaptation to life in a foreign culture. It is characterized by relatively stable changes in the lives of both migrant and local peoples in response to the demands of the environment. On the one hand the natives has been evaluated by the Europeans from the point of view of their usefulness to the local community, with other missionaries understood the need to adapt to climatic, social, economic and other peculiarities of life of the natives. The article describes the organization of life in the missionary station, identified priority activities of the missionaries among the natives, such as educational policy, medical practice, trade, the development of agriculture. Certainly, important also is the idea that missionary stations were a particular area of living of Europeans and Africans, a symbiosis of economic, social, and spiritual interaction of the peoples.