This article uses a comparative historical approach to examine the Teachers for East Africa (TEA) and the Teacher Education in East Africa (TEEA) programs, an influential educational development effort that involved U.S. and British college graduates in East African schools and colleges during the decade of 1961-1971. Drawing on postcolonial theory and Andreas Kazamias's humanistic view of education, the "'Paideia' of the soul," it explores how U.S. teachers interpreted the education system they encountered in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda at the end of the colonial era, seeking to made sense of a radically different system of schooling. The comparison of U.S. and British teachers' views on pedagogy in this critical historical period as discerned in the TEA and TEAA archive illustrates deep fissures in the putative edifice of "Western" education.