Access to Higher Education in French Africa South of the Sahara

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

doi:10.3390/socsci10050173

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of the educational situation in French West Africa (FWA) and French Equatorial Africa (FEA) from the onset of colonization until independence. Our central theme is the tragic deprivation endured by the public school system, especially in FEA, which handed over primary education to Catholic missions and slowed down secondary education; in FWA, only one university was belatedly created in Senegal (1958). The education of girls remained non-existent. The article is based upon a large number of mostly unpublished doctoral works, a handful of published studies, and half a century of personal inquiries, conducted mainly in Gabon, Congo and Senegal. This paper establishes a connection between the lack of political skills based upon Western standards of the colonized peoples on the eve of independence to the training of their civil servants which was drastically limited to secondary school education and the major hurdles involved in obtaining French nationality except for the residents of the Four Communes of Senegal. At the time of independence, only a few thousand colonized people had reached the level of university that was being established in the early 1950s; even fewer received scholarships to study in France. This shortage of trained personnel in administration and education required massive recourse to French “coopérants”, whose presence would only gradually diminish from the 1970s.

Highlights

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This article examines the evolution of the educational situation in French West Africa (FWA) and French Equatorial Africa (FEA) from the onset of colonization until independence
Our central theme is the tragic deprivation endured by the public school system, especially in FEA, which handed over primary education to Catholic missions and slowed down secondary education; in FWA, only one university was belatedly created in Senegal (1958)

Summary

The Educational Deficit

This article examines the evolution of the educational situation in French West Africa (FWA) and French Equatorial Africa (FEA) from the onset of colonization until independence. The article is based upon a handful of published studies cited in the bibliography, a dozen of mostly unpublished doctoral dissertations (“theses de 3e cycle”), most of them written by Gabonese students and which may be found mainly at the Libreville university and in various French universities, and my own work (included in the bibliography) (Assa Mboulou 2003; Metegue 1974; Ndoume 2010; Nguema Ango 2010; Essone 2006; Mboumba 1972) They are based upon archival materials, found either in Africa or in France, dating back to a time when the colonial administration was attentive to keeping reports on schools. The very small number of “citizens” or those considered as citizens makes it possible to understand the tragic dearth of African political personnel at the time of independence Those who achieved a schooling level enabling them to go to university did so late because there were only a few dozen students from FEA and FWA in French universities in the 1930s—a relative boom that materialized only after 1945—and really applied only to West Africa. It is essential to understand the reasons for the lack of skills in the first twenty years of independence, essentially due to the extreme shortage of middle managers and assistants whose education was reduced to the bare minimum

The Situation in FEA

Findings

Conclusions