The Rise and Fall of Human Development Infrastructure in Southeastern Africa, 1960s–1990s

This paper examines early postcolonial efforts to construct a national infrastructure of higher education and hospital-based health care in Zambia and Tanzania, and it follows their active undoing through the implementation of structural adjustment policies mandating disinvestment from social services in the 1980s and beyond. My inquiry situates this regional story in the larger context of changing global approaches to development, starting with the decolonization-era emphasis on aggressively investing in high-level manpower production and concluding with the neoliberal ascendance of a human capital theory paradigm that promoted social disinvestment. The larger purpose of this presentation is to trace connections between the dismantling of higher education institutions and the workforces that serve them through the indirect form of austerity policies, as in southeastern Africa, and through direct acts of violence and targeted destruction, as in contemporary Gaza. The paper further considers the stakes of academic disinvestment and active scholasticide for projects of national development and prospect of national sovereignty across these sites.