Gender, ethnicity, and unequal opportunity in colonial Uganda: European influences, African realities, and the pitfalls of parish register data
本文批判性审视了基于教区登记数据的殖民影响研究，通过对比1991年人口普查数据，发现乌干达坎帕拉地区在识字率和计算能力上的进步滞后于教会婚姻记录所显示的趋势，并揭示殖民时期教育机会存在性别和族裔不平等。
Abstract The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues for studying the long‐term social and economic development of Africa. A sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches is crucial. In this article, we engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda's 1991 census, and show that trends in the literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, and we argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule.