Libyan Schools: Individual Italian Colonial Schools -- El Agheila School
Figure 1.-Our Italian contributor tells us, " I found two photos more from this El Agheila School: a group of boys having gym activities and a group of girls. While the girls wore the traditional clothing, the boys wore only short pants." The boys wear the same white short pants for gym/exercises as they do for class, only with the additiion of a white camp. Notice that the boys are all perfectly outfitted. This is telling. It certainly means that the school has providded the outfits. But boys being boys we know that such uniformity is rarewly achieved in real life even with schools that have strict uniform regulatioins.
Our Italian contributor tells us, " I found two photos more from this El Agheila School: a group of boys having gym activities and a group of girls. While the girls wore the traditional clothing, the boys wore only short pants." The boys wear the same white short pants for gym/exercises as they do for class, only with the additiion of a white camp. Notice that the boys are all perfectly outfitted. This is telling. It certainly means that the school has providded the outfits. But boys being boys we know that such uniformity is raeewly achieved in real life even with schools that have strict unifiom regulatioins. We suspect that the boys were dressed this way at the school just for the photographs. We have no idea if boys at at other schools were dressed like this. We doubt it.Rather this looks motr like propaganda images designed to give the idea that Muslim children were receiving a proper education.
We only have information from this one school at the time and we have no idea how relpresentative it was. But one aspect is crystal clear, the Libyans were kept separate from the Italaian settlers. We can assume that similar schools for the Libyans existed in the other coasatal cities as well as the two largest cities, Benghazi and Tripoli. And we are not sure who these children were. We suspect that many of the families were assocciated with the Italian administration. . El Aghelia was also the site of an Italian concentration camp duriung the final phase of the pacification of Libya (1928-32). The Germans fought a brief rearguard action at El Agheila as part of their retreat from El Alamein (December 1942).
