The Student-Intelligentsia in sub-Saharan Africa: Structural Adjustment, Activism and Transformation

Abstract

University students acquired a politically privileged status in much of sub-Saharan Africa; this was connected to the role the student-intelligentsia played in the struggles for independence. After independence, student activism became an important feature of the new states. However, higher education on the continent came under sustained attack in the 1980s and 1990s, with the policies of the IMF and World Bank reversing the generous funding national universities had received. This cast student activists into a world transformed by political and economic forces, contested in waves of popular protest. While students in many cases maintained their status as politically privileged actors, they now did so in countries where there had been a convergence of popular classes. This article charts some of these developments, and argues that the student-intelligentsia has played a diverse and contradictory role in the recent political and economic upheavals on the continent.