In what measure could education be an agent of African freedom? Combining histories of race, economics, and education, Elisa Prosperetti examines this question in two West African contexts, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, from the 1890s to the 1980s. She argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling's essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. Rejecting colonial exploitation of the African body, proponents of anticolonial development instead claimed the mind as the site of economic productivity for African people. An Anticolonial Development shows how, in the middle of the twentieth century, Africans proposed an original understanding of development that fused antiracism to economic theory, and human dignity to material productivity.
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In what measure could education be an agent of African freedom? This study examines schooling's role in aspirations of African emancipation.
Introduction: Moumouni on the seine;
1. 'Improvement of the highest
order': race, development, and education in colonial West Africa
(1880s1930s);
2. 'The duty of colonized people': forging an anticolonial
politics of West African emancipation (19451960);
3. 'Africa's most urgent
and vital need': human capital theory, UNESCO, and the ascendance of
anticolonial development (19581961);
4. 'The most important limiting
factor': the paradox of the postcolonial teacher (19571980s);
5. 'Let me
receive all that I ask': the precarity of school-going in postcolonial West
Africa (1950s1970s);
6. 'The African record is unique': the decline of
public schooling and the rise of neoliberalism (19661981); Conclusion:
stooped/upright; Bibliography; Index.
Elisa Prosperetti is Assistant Professor of History at the National Institute of Education, part of the Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore.
