This panel seeks contributions exploring the ways in which educational projects originating beyond Africa sought to integrate African knowledge and ground themselves in the continent through partnerships with African higher learning institutions. The process of decolonization was intellectual and academic too, but never undertaken in isolation: various projects based in Africa and beyond sought to develop local African elites through professional and technical formation programs across a spectrum of disciplines, including agronomy, economics, business management, banking, and engineering.
By framing our discussion in the context of the era of African independence, we seek to foreground local agency and the co-construction of educational projects as components of concerted national and international development agendas. We therefore ask: How did non-African and African actors come together to negotiate and shape these projects? How were they stabilized and what afterlives did they have — be they co-owned processes or unilaterally undertaken? What sort of rationalities, disciplinary exchanges and subjects emerged from these exchanges?
We strive to look beyond the well-trodden grounds of state-led developmental aid circuits and large-scale projects mired in Cold War high politics. Instead, we are interested in what higher education offers as a lens: in practice, what generally unfolded as mid-sized, localized, and open-ended schemes, allowing us to map repertoires of low-modernist technocracy across the African continent. While aiming to explore these phenomena longitudinally and diachronically in their own terms, we envisage our panel as a synchronic and comparative map of such projects. We are especially keen to highlight local specificities while capturing the common ethos and heuristic frameworks found both among Africans and non-local actors interfacing with them.
We specifically seek contributions oriented towards uncovering how the educational interests of African nationalist modernisers and academics converged and how they were later subsumed (or not) in wider development agendas. Contributions that answer these questions through the tools of history, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and related fields are most welcome.
Closed for new submissions.
