How do governments in Africa make decisions about language? What does language have to do with state-building, and what impact might it have on democracy? This manuscript provides a longue durée explanation for policies toward language in Africa, taking the reader through colonial, independence, and contemporary periods. It explains the growing trend toward the use of multiple languages in education as a result of new opportunities and incentives. The opportunities incorporate ideational relationships with former colonizers as well as the work of language NGOs on the ground. The incentives relate to the current requirements of democratic institutions, and the strategies leaders devise to win elections within these constraints. By contrasting the environment faced by African leaders with that faced by European state-builders, it explains the weakness of education and limited spread of standard languages on the continent. The work combines constructivist understanding about changing preferences with realist insights about the strategies leaders employ to maintain power.

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The choice of indigenous versus European languages in education should be a hotly contested issue. Surprisingly, in much of Africa it is not. African states have dramatically increased their use of local languages in education over the last decade. This increase, however, has not proceeded from vocal demands on government by various language groups. Instead, it is the result of two more subtle factors: the changed attitude of a former coloniser and the work of language NGOs on the ground. These two forces have altered governments' perceptions about the utility of African languages in their education strategies. Because this political process works through persuasion, rather than bargaining, it allows choices about language in education to be less contentious than popularly assumed, separating this process from the violent ethnolinguistic conflict that is so often associated with Africa.

Once viewing African languages as competitors to French, policymakers in France now welcome these languages openly in African schools. This is a dramatic policy reversal, and it contradicts expectations of path dependency and policy inertia. The policymakers’ conversion can be traced to the writing and advocacy of a strategic scholarly community, which began exercising influence over the leadership of France and la Francophonie in the 1990s. Their influence changed the perception of French leaders regarding the utility of local languages in education and caused them to include this element consistently in their education strategy for Africa. In contrast, a lack of comparable agreement within the intellectual communities of the Anglophone world has led to ambivalence in support for mother tongue education emanating from dominant English‐speaking states. Unlike traditional accounts of epistemic communities, this study highlights the strategic political activity of scholars. The major focus is on the process of idea change among policy makers in France. I suggest that this idea change altered the field of permissible options for African leaders, revealing a continued ideational dependency between metropole and periphery.

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