“Before Africa ceased to be colonized, it was already neocolonized": Students and Youth in French-Speaking West Africa

In 1960, the French speaking colonies of West Africa (known by the French as AOF—Afrique Occidentale Française) became independent nations. Young Africans had played a crucial role in achieving independence, and yet found themselves largely excluded from the political process in their new states. The older generation of political leaders viewed young peoples’ nationalist actions, and particularly their anti-French stance, as potentially unsettling to political stability. During the 1960s then, young people in states like Senegal sought to find new ways to articulate a position that, in part, highlighted the extent to which decolonization remained an incomplete process.

In this paper, I focus particularly on African student-led demonstrations at the University of Dakar in 1968, Here, I argue, young Africans pointed out that they were at once participating in a global youth movement and yet were explicitly not emulating their counterparts in France or elsewhere (as both their new leaders and the former colonizer portrayed them).  Student protestors issued memoranda that highlighted the continued structural connections between the Senegalese and French states, evident to them most obviously in the University itself, which they labeled “a French university installed in Senegal” and where over half the staff were French. [1] Ultimately, student actions led to a massive reform of the University, but not before these young people had called attention to the unfinished business of 1960, which one student leader explained had led to this “crisis of an unachieved decolonization.”[2]

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[1] UDES (Union Democratique des Etudiants Sénégalais; Democratic Union of Senegalese Students), Memorandum sur les événements à l’Université de Dakar, 26 mai 1968, CAC 19770510/2.

[2] Abdoulaye Bathily, Mai 68 à Dakar, ou la revolte universitaire et la democracie, Paris: Editions Chaka, 1992, 18, 19.

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