Short Abstract

This panel explores colonial and postcolonial education in twentieth-century Africa, focusing on the circulation of concepts, actors, and models across imperial and international networks, and on their adaptation, contestation, and transformation in local contexts.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the changing meanings, institutions and practices of education in twentieth-century Africa, across colonial and postcolonial contexts. Bringing together different imperial and national settings, it explores how educational policies emerged from interactions among European and African administrations, religious institutions, international organisations, philanthropic foundations, employers, technical bodies, experts and pedagogues, political parties, but also activists, teachers, students and parents. Viewing education as a prism, it asks how educational models were transformed across imperial, international, and African contexts, and what this reveals about colonial and postcolonial knowledge, governance, and citizenship.

Particular attention is paid to the circulation of concepts, models, policies, funding, equipment, school personnel and students across imperial, transnational and international networks, and above all to the ways in which these were produced, appropriated, redirected or contested locally, where African actors did not simply adapt them but transformed their meanings and purposes.

The panel is especially interested in vocabularies such as adaptation, mass education, literacy, community development, fundamental education, and technical and vocational training, and in the meanings these acquired once translated into curricula, budgets, institutional arrangements and development plans. It also considers the racialised assumptions and classificatory practices that shaped access to schooling and its intended social and political purposes.

By combining conceptual, institutional, comparative and connected approaches, it asks how education became both an instrument of governance and a contested field, shaping competing visions of development, citizenship and social order from the classroom to the global arena, and examines the continuities and ruptures that accompanied decolonisation.

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