“A World of Good to Our Boys”: Boy Scouts in Southern Nigeria, 1934–1951

Abstract

The origin of the Boy Scout movement was well documented by its founder, Lord Robert Baden-Powell, and for the British colonies in southern and eastern Africa by historian Timothy Parsons, who noted not only the importance of the formation of Baden-Powell’s ideas, but also how and why the movement became popular in the colonies covered by his study. Parsons explained the connection between British imperialism and scouting as a mechanism to support the empire; however, he further outlined the ways in which Boy Scouts in South Africa used the fourth Boy Scout law, which considered every Boy Scout a brother regardless of religion or race, to challenge racism and discrimination in British settler colonies.¹ Whereas Parsons’s work focused on British settler colonies, scouting in Nigeria requires an additional analysis in order to evaluate scouting’s influence where African scouts dealt with a different set of challenges. Concepts of race and how the British colonial administration in Nigeria rationalized the “civilizing mission” remain crucial aspects for understanding the Boy Scout movement; however, the lack of white settlers in the Nigerian colony led to a different experience for boys in the southern region with vastly different reasons for joining the scout movement than boys in the settler colonies.²