Introduction: student activism in an era of decolonization

Abstract

Scholarship on student activism in Africa has tended to be understood according to broader historical periodizations of elite African politics. This has largely been because of student activists' historical claims to be 'aspirant elites' (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 172). As such, scholars have explored student activists' role in anti-colonial nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, anti-structural adjustment and democratization protests since the late 1980s, and more recently in the resurgence of 'Fallist' student protests in South Africa (Nyamnjoh 2016; Booysen 2016; Heffernan et al. 2016). This special issue challenges these periodizations by exploring the histories of student activism during the era of decolonization immediately before and after independence. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, unlike the first generation of nationalist leaders who had refined their emancipatory anticolonial politics on campuses abroad, African students in the era of decolonization did so through geographies that spanned both foreign institutions and newly created African universities. Inspired by Marxist-Leninism and Pan-African solidarity, these students often came to embrace transformational revolutionary politics during their university experiences. In many instances, their own expectations and political activities would come to challenge, upset and dramatically contest the designs of newly independent African states. The articles collected in this special issue, and first presented at a workshop entitled 'Student Activism Reconsidered' at the University of Oxford in July 2016, seek to develop understandings of African student activism during this critical period by revisiting postcolonial Africa's first student protests and experiences of university life. Many of the debates that these students initiated on campus would come, in subsequent decades, to be rearticulated on the national political stage through former students who went into prominent public positions or who set up or entered governing or opposition parties. As such, appreciating the ideas, behaviours and dreams that these people adopted during their university experiences can provide important insights into how they responded, as professionals and political leaders, to the challenges of economic crisis, structural adjustment and increasingly repressive authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s. From its inception as a form of subjectivity, African university studenthood gave its members a 'cosmopolitan mobility' over social and spatial orders that opened up a new sense of political possibility (Ivaska 2018

Agents of dissent: African student organizations in the German Democratic Republic

“…The students challenged not only East German leadership and its attempts to shape their opinions in various venues, but also the very governments that had sent them to the GDR in the first place. In the introduction to this special issue, Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre (2019) argue that, in this era, African students generally recognized that university education lent them power to harness nationalist and other political discourses in the same way that their leaders did. This was something that the students in East Germany certainly understood, as they confronted hierarchies of authority at home and abroad.…”

The political life of the dead Lumumba: Cold War histories and the Congolese student left

“…This article has argued that students’ extroverted political imagination (see Bayart 1999; Hodgkinson and Melchiorre 2019, this issue) explains Lumumba's posthumous popularity in Congolese universities. Through their affiliation with the figure of Lumumba, young Congolese – both at home and among the Congolese student diaspora on both sides of the Cold War divide – could expect to garner support and attention from real and imagined allies around the world.…”

Analyzing the rhetoric of contemporary BSMRSTU student movements: manifestations and social implications in Gopalganj, Bangladesh

“…The contentious nature of the topic of development and society is at the core of groups that seek to politicize it (McAdam and Su, 2002). The evidence has shown that a valid argument can be constructed by relying on well-established ideological resources from the cultural lexicon, as demonstrated by studies such as those conducted by Bellei et al (2014), Hodgkinson and Melchiorre (2019), and (Richter et al, 2020). Talking of the common good could be a strategic factor in decision-making, and how it could be used as a rallying cry for support.…”

“…Student movements have a broader impact than just achieving immediate political or social goals. They serve as a vital platform for younger generations to voice their discontent, provide alternative solutions, and actively engage in defining their future (Hodgkinson and Melchiorre, 2019). These phenomena have both immediate and indirect effects on societal norms and operations.…”