Strayer, Chapter 20 (pp. 607-614)

Education often provided social mobility and elite status within their own communities and an opportunity to achieve, or at least approach, equality with whites in racially defined societies.  Many such people ardently embraced European culture, dressing in European clothes, speaking French or English, building European-style and ways.  Religion too provide the basis for new or transformed identities during the colonial era.  The young, the poor, and many women all of them oppressed groups in many African societies, found new opportunities and greater freedom in some association with missions.