This tightly focused study primarily harnesses the underutilized resource of digitally searchable African newspapers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to advance a series of arguments about the impact of Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute on Africans during the colonial era.

The impact of such forerunners as Alexander Crummell and Edward Blyden arguing on behalf of Africa for Africans is briefly examined before moving on to the reception of the industrial education models of Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes abroad. Andrew Barnes looks at this from a variety of perspectives, including giving notice to white missionaries' interpretation of industrial education, but he focuses especially on the Ethiopianist take that saw Washington's industrial education as a variety of liberation praxis because Africans would need to be masters of modern technology if they were to have a wide impact on the world. The stark contrast between industrial education as teaching subservience, as many whites implicitly would have had it, or as teaching the key to innovative entrance into modernity on terms of equality is presented clearly.

Thus, the debate over industrial education in Africa is not centered on the terms set forth by W. E. B. DuBois in the United States, as is often seen by African Americans. Even the hostility to Washington by certain Protestant clergy, a major factor in the United States, played out differently in Africa where the mostly white Christian clergy was seen as providing ideological cover for European imperialists.

Barnes illuminates a new angle on the oft discussed fraught relationship between South African Ethiopianists, led by James Dwane, and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, shepherded initially into a relationship with the Ethiopianists by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. Dwane, in his contacts with Turner during the 1890s, emphasized the need for a school like Tuskegee and clearly planned that the AME Church would provide one for them. The underresourced AME Church, modeling an African-Americanist hegemony all its own, never came close to providing such an institution for the South Africans. When the AME opened its Bethel Institute in South Africa in 1902, it never succeeded in teaching “Tuskegee-style” courses, especially when the chosen instructor for such courses got caught up in his own get-rich-quick schemes. Many Ethiopianists, including Dwane, abandoned the AME Church for other Christian denominations.

There would be other attempts in South Africa to provide education for black South Africans based on the Tuskegee model. John Tengo Jabavu attempted to create such an institution that would serve Africans across ethnic boundaries, whereas John Dube focused his efforts on creating a school for the Zulu people. In translating the model to the African context, certain changes occurred. Both Jabavu and Dube sought primarily to encourage agricultural entrepreneurship, for example. West African appreciation for Washington and Tuskegee is also a feature of this book.

The end result of all of this interest in industrial education was not the foundation of viable schools built around this model. Barnes sees the lack of philanthropy willing to aid such efforts as one reason that such schools did not flourish in Africa. A more important reason, however, was the hostility of the European colonial regimes to any form of industrial education along the lines of the vision of empowerment that the Ethiopianists championed. These movements were largely squelched by the colonial regimes.

The events and arguments explored in this volume illuminate American, African American, and African histories in several ways. Most obviously, this book continues to augment our understanding of transatlantic connections with Africa and the ways that African Americans were seen as role models by Africans suffering under European colonial regimes. It reminds us of the protean character of leading personages and institutions, such as Washington and Tuskegee, and fierce struggles to control and to shape their images from afar as means of empowerment, on the one hand, or of continued subjugation to European overlords, on the other hand, or of a variety of perspectives in between. Ultimately, it demonstrates the difficulty of replicating anyone else's inspiring entrepreneurial initiative. “Whatever the nature of the magic the wizard of Tuskegee used to create his school, no one else ever figured out how to copy it” (165). The model that came from Washington and Tuskegee ultimately would have to be only one source of inspiration for the Africans' own innovative anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist movements.