The Student-Intelligentsia in sub-Saharan Africa: Structural Adjustment, Activism and Transformation

Abstract

University students acquired a politically privileged status in much of sub-Saharan Africa; this was connected to the role the student-intelligentsia played in the struggles for independence. After independence, student activism became an important feature of the new states. However, higher education on the continent came under sustained attack in the 1980s and 1990s, with the policies of the IMF and World Bank reversing the generous funding national universities had received. This cast student activists into a world transformed by political and economic forces, contested in waves of popular protest. While students in many cases maintained their status as politically privileged actors, they now did so in countries where there had been a convergence of popular classes. This article charts some of these developments, and argues that the student-intelligentsia has played a diverse and contradictory role in the recent political and economic upheavals on the continent.

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a larger project, ‘The development of student activism and higher education in sub-Saharan Africa, 1985–2006: cases from Senegal, South Africa, the DRC and Uganda’. This research is being conducted with the support and funding of the Institut Français d'Afrique du Sud (IFAS).

Notes

A document that emerged after independence committing ZANU-PF to a strict anti-corruption code.

Amutabi argues that the student movement managed, almost uniquely, to hold aloft the banner of democratisation.

There is much evidence disputing these conclusions (Mamdani 2007).

‘C'est nous [les étudiants] qui avons appris … à l'université. C'est nous qui avons compris c'est quoi l'ordinateur. Nos parents là aussi par modestie savent que nous savons quelque chose qu'ils ne comprennent pas’.

‘une culture africaine, [et nous] une culture qui nous vienne de l'Europe qu'on nous a apprise. Nous qui l'avons apprise, si on vient ils vont l'accepter’.

The three largest of these associations at the university in 2005 were the Association des Elèves et Etudiants Musulmans du Sénégal (AEEMS) and the Association des Etudiants Musulmans de l'Université de Dakar (AMEUD). Another was established in September 2001, the Mouvement des Elèves et Etudiants de la Jamaatou Ibadou Rahmane (MEEJIR). This structure is attached to a non-student group, the Jamaatou Ibodou Rahmane, the worshippers of God. The largest and most active of these groups, AEEMS, has almost 1000 members and it is well represented at the university and in many schools and colleges in Senegal.

Interviews with Muslim activist at the university in May 2001; and also Oumy Ndour January 2001.

The increase in private universities has exploited religious cleavages. A number of ‘not-for-profit’ universities cater for particular religious groups, there are two examples from Uganda: the Islamic University in Uganda (IUIU) and the Uganda Martyrs University (UMU).