An Anticolonial Development
Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in 20th Century West Africa
Forthcoming with the African Studies series of Cambridge University Press (May 2026). For more information on the book, click here.
Following independence, West Africans expanded public education more rapidly than any other world region before or since. In just over two decades, states transformed skeletal colonial infrastructure built for hundreds into national systems that welcomed upwards of a million schoolchildren. The breathtaking spread and scale of public education was a triumphant rebuke of colonial hierarchies. It also, in complex ways, perpetuated them.
An Anticolonial Development explores this dual legacy.
I argue that while racialized, colonial notions of development saw African bodies as the primary sites of economic value, anticolonial development imagined the minds of Africans as the key to economic productivity. Thus, the broadening of access to Europhone education (that is, using European languages) was a central component of anticolonial and antiracist visions of an emancipated African future.
But this educationally-driven a vision of the future had deep roots, calling back to other experiences of freedom, however partial, in the Black Atlantic world. Thus, the book further argues that the forms that decolonization took in coastal West Africa are best explained by framing decolonization as a Black Atlantic emancipation, akin to 19th century slavery abolitions. Although decolonization in West Africa shared parallels with what happened across other parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after World War II, a Black Atlantic frame accounts for certain regional specificities that the general process/category of decolonization does not.
Following independence, West Africans expanded public education more rapidly than any other world region before or since. In just over two decades, states transformed skeletal colonial infrastructure built for hundreds into national systems that welcomed upwards of a million schoolchildren. The breathtaking spread and scale of public education was a triumphant rebuke of colonial hierarchies. It also, in complex ways, perpetuated them.
An Anticolonial Development explores this dual legacy.
I argue that while racialized, colonial notions of development saw African bodies as the primary sites of economic value, anticolonial development imagined the minds of Africans as the key to economic productivity. Thus, the broadening of access to Europhone education (that is, using European languages) was a central component of anticolonial and antiracist visions of an emancipated African future.
But this educationally-driven a vision of the future had deep roots, calling back to other experiences of freedom, however partial, in the Black Atlantic world. Thus, the book further argues that the forms that decolonization took in coastal West Africa are best explained by framing decolonization as a Black Atlantic emancipation, akin to 19th century slavery abolitions. Although decolonization in West Africa shared parallels with what happened across other parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after World War II, a Black Atlantic frame accounts for certain regional specificities that the general process/category of decolonization does not.
Combining more than sixty interviews with former students, teachers, and school administrators with research in state and institutional archives in West Africa, Europe and the United States, An Anticolonial Development analyzes the rise and fall of public education as the principal project of anticolonial development in West Africa.