The Northern European Band: A Swedish school in Africa - An ethnographic study

ABSTRACT All over the world, there are schools that represent a different educational system and a different curriculum than the country these schools are situated in. Swedish Schools in turn are located in different parts of the world. The main purpose of this study is to describe and analyse some aspects of the social life at one of these schools, as well as some aspects of the relationship between the cultural life at the school and surrounding African environment. The school serves as a protected oasis where children can feel at home and cultivate new acquaintances in a small and safe environment. But the Swedish school also becomes the cultural hub for containing the Swedish teachers’ and parents’ value-system and identities, leaving them pretty much unaltered. Despite the end of formal colonial structures, the West still dominates and controls its former colonies discursively as well as economically and politically.