Between political reserve and scientific change: French geographers and decolonisation in tropical Africa, 1945–1967

Abstract

Between the end of World War II and the granting of independence to former French colonies in tropical Africa in 1960, a network of scientific research centres supported an emerging community of geographers. These scholars distinguished themselves by a strong commitment to fieldwork and empirical enquiry, rather than to theorization. Their investigations represented a break with the amateurism and relative lack of disciplinary rigour that characterized colonial geography, as practised by French administrators and military surveyors in inter-war Africa and Asia. Becoming connected to a broader scientific community in France and across the globe, many geographers at work during the post-war period of decolonization applied new scientific ideas to their research in tropical Africa. Through a detailed examination of institutions, researchers and publications, this paper shows how the activities of French geographers eschewed the exoticization of Africa and escaped the scholarly marginality of earlier research on tropical regions. However, although their investigations had started to be ‘decolonized’ in the 1950s, few French geographers were militant advocates of independence.