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).

Reconstructing policy transfer in adult and vocational education and training

“…To cooperate in the field of VET with other countries was based on the technocratic view that economic growth and welfare would need to be based on large infrastructure projects, active intervention in the economy and the labour market, in combination with social engineering techniques (Ekbladh, 2002;Kunkel, 2008). Another argument for a focus on education is based on experiences of the colonial powers in stabilising their rule after the First World War, reinforced after 1945 by the concepts of colonial development, which sought to maintain colonial rule against independence efforts through promises of development and social well-being (Ahmad, 2019;Jerónimo and Dores, 2020;Rempel, 2018;Van Laa, 2004) Development theory assumed a direct connection between technical and vocational education and training and the success of the industrialisation process, which should be actively established; a consideration that still holds ground today. In this context, the necessity of caught-up industrialisation according to the Western model was unquestioningly assumed as a law of nature.…”