Paper short abstract:

When independence came to West Africa, it greeted a regional teacher scarcity. Given the centrality of education for development, staffing schools became a key challenge of statecraft. This paper analyzes the imaginative coalitions of teachers created by Kwame Nkrumah and Félix Houphouët-Boigny.

Paper long abstract:

In April 1957, Kwame Nkrumah and Félix Houphouët-Boigny made a bet. Eager modernizers both, they embraced the same goal—development—but disagreed on how to achieve it. The Ghanaian idealist affirmed the need for true political independence a priori while the Ivorian pragmatist asserted the primacy of continued economic assistance from France. In ten years, so went the wager, they would see who had developed faster.

For both leaders, education was the key to rapid development. Taking their 'bet' as a basis for comparison, this paper analyzes the key challenge facing education in postcolonial Africa, that of staffing the school. Independence, which came to most of West Africa by the early 1960s, greeted a small cadre of educated Africans, very few of whom chose teaching as a profession. Given the overriding imperative to "develop", and the centrality of education to that enterprise, the most pressing question facing newly-sovereign African statesmen was the following: how, and from where, will I get my teachers?

Félix Houphouët-Boigny and Kwame Nkrumah, each lacking (though in different measure) domestic educators, hit upon the same strategy. Blending political, ideological, and economic capital, both leaders constructed transnational coalitions of teaching talent, draining these unique configurations of human resources into their school systems. This paper examines the creation of these teaching coalitions, their dependence on particular sources of capital mobilized by Houphouët and Nkrumah, and their impermanence in a regional education context marked by teacher scarcity.