Access to Higher Education in French Africa South of the Sahara

This article examines the evolution of the educational situation in French West Africa (FWA) and French Equatorial Africa (FEA) from the onset of colonization until independence. Our central theme is the tragic deprivation endured by the public school system, especially in FEA, which handed over primary education to Catholic missions and slowed down secondary education; in FWA, only one university was belatedly created in Senegal (1958). The education of girls remained non-existent. The article is based upon a large number of mostly unpublished doctoral works, a handful of published studies, and half a century of personal inquiries, conducted mainly in Gabon, Congo and Senegal. This paper establishes a connection between the lack of political skills based upon Western standards of the colonized peoples on the eve of independence to the training of their civil servants which was drastically limited to secondary school education and the major hurdles involved in obtaining French nationality except for the residents of the Four Communes of Senegal. At the time of independence, only a few thousand colonized people had reached the level of university that was being established in the early 1950s; even fewer received scholarships to study in France. This shortage of trained personnel in administration and education required massive recourse to French “coopérants”, whose presence would only gradually diminish from the 1970s.