Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa: Policies, Paradigms, and Entanglements, 1890s–1980s Damiano Matasci , Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Hugo Gonçalves Dores, EDS., Palgrave Macmillan: 2020, 340 pages.

Abstract

How do the persisting effects of colonial education complicate contemporary, neoliberal narratives of “international development” sponsored by organizations like the United Nations, IMF, and World Bank? This is the central question investigated by Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa: Policies, Paradigms, and Entanglements, 1890s–1980s. Edited by Damiano Matasci, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, and Hugo Gonçalves Dores, this collection of essays covers an impressive geographical breadth: the essays address educational programs in the French, British, German, and Italian empires in Africa, as well as investigating how education translated on the ground in countries such as Mali, Senegal, Nambia, Mozambique, Morocco, and Tanzania. As the editors discuss in their introduction, the “question at stake is to determine how and why the raising of educational standards of indigenous populations and the training of local elites” became a priority for the “imperial, national and international agendas” of European colonial powers (p. 5), and how these agendas laid
the groundwork for today’s “’developmentalist’ discourse” (p. 9).