An Anticolonial Development
Public Schooling, Emancipation and Its Limits in 20th Century West Africa
Under contract with the African Studies series of Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming 2025.
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: Public Schooling, Emancipation, and its Limits in 20th Century West Africa 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.
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: Public Schooling, Emancipation, and its Limits in 20th Century West Africa 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.
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.