Enlightened Developments? Inter-imperial Organizations and the Issue of Colonial Education in Africa (1945–1957)

Abstract

After the Second World War, development and welfare abounded in the political imagination of European colonial empires. Efforts to rejuvenate their colonial projects entailed the redefinition of “native policies” on health, labor, and education. In relation to these, imperial states and colonial administrations sought varying levels of cooperation, recuperating some initiatives from past decades. This chapter studies how one of the institutional expressions of the will to collaborate through the circulation of ideas, plans, and experts, the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA), an inter-imperial organization created in 1950, addressed the problem of colonial education (focused on “native” communities). Colonial “native” education was used to foster forms of “enlightened neo-colonialism,” sustaining the language and repertoires of late colonial developmentalism and arguments legitimizing colonial rule. This text shows how this was done by focusing on a particular moment: the 1957 Inter-African Conference on Industrial, Commercial and Agricultural Education, in Luanda (Angola).