Student movements in sub-Saharan Africa: Key socio-political stakeholders from corporatist mobilisations to avant-garde positions

ABSTRACT

Although they have played a key role in socio-political mobilizations in sub-Saharan Africa, and sometimes even in some revolutionary processes, student movements on the continent have not attracted a substantial academic interest. The main argument of the article is that in Africa, student movements structurally stand as counter-hegemonic actors who have strongly influenced the political field, a phenomenon conceptualized through the notion of ‘generative function of the political’. Then it summarizes the historical evolution of African student movements through a periodization into ‘three ages’. Finally, in reviewing the existing literature, it addresses certain debatable issues that deserve to be enlightened, in particular the scope of the demands of these movements between corporatism limited to the academic sphere and political avant-gardism or the use of violence on campuses.

KEYWORDS:

• Sub-Saharan Africa
• social movement
• students
• political field

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Not counting the fact that it would also be important to study the relatively significant interactions that sometimes took place between the student movement and workers’ unionism in certain post-colonial states in sub-Saharan Africa.

2 These include, for instance, the way British institutions handled student representation on student representative councils and student guilds, while at French institutions, student representation was not really historically organized as in Britain and appeared essentially as an institutional response to student protests.

3 In all three cases, the countries experienced struggles for decolonization, the influence of post-May 1968 student protest movements, and protests against structural adjustments from the late 1980s on.

4 In the same vein, it has been shown that during the 1970s, the anti-apartheid struggle was an important factor in the politicization of student mobilization at the University of Gaborone in Botswana (Mokopatgosi, 2008).

5 In continuity with this memorialist literature, other works were published by authors, including some who had once been part of the student movement, that can be described as academic. However, these focused exclusively on the anti-colonial period of the FEANF (Dieng, 2003; Dieng, 2009) and the events of May 1968 in Senegal (Bathily, 1992, 2018; Gueye, 2017).

6 On Senegal, see Bathily, Diouf & Mbodj, in D’Almeida-Topor et al., 1992, pp. 282–310; and Diop, 1992, in Diop, pp. 431–478. Another work focusing on Ivory Coast but not solely on students also contains a historical overview and some analysis that is worth noting (N’Da, 1987). One obvious indication of the lack of interest by France-based Africanists is the fact that the journal Politique Africaine, launched in 1980, has never devoted a special issue to student movements, though ‘politics from below’ is a constant leitmotif.

7 The papers for conference ‘Mouvements étudiants en Afrique francophone des indépendances à nos jours’ (Student movements in French-speaking Africa from independence to the present day) are available online at chs.univ-paris1.fr/Mvtsetudiants2014.pdf. Others are included in an edited volume based on the conference (Blum et al., 2016).

8 Some of the papers presented at this workshop have been published in: Africa, Journal of the International African Institute, supplement 89, 2019.

9 The term is loaded but there is no need to hark back to the classic theses of Hobson and Lenin to identify totally asymmetrical situations in terms of international relations, particularly in the case of France and its former colonies, still linked to the former colonial power in monetary and military terms.

10 Modern-day political figures with a background in student leadership include Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, Alpha Condé in Guinea and Mahamadou Issoufou in Niger. Mali offers a particularly interesting case study of the constitution of a multi-party political field from clandestine Marxist formations based on student trade unionism (Koné, 1998).

11 In Cameroon, the emergence of nationalism in schools, particularly pupils at the Ecole normale, took place even earlier, in the 1930s (Mbengue Nguime, 2005).

12 In February 1966, students in Dakar held an anti-imperialist demonstration against the fall of Nkrumah, targeting the American and British embassies. The episode has been analysed as a prelude to the events of May 1968 in Dakar (Thioub, in D’Almeida-Topor et al., 1992, pp. 267–281).

13 There are numerous examples, including Niger (Smirnova, 2015), Mali (Smith, 1997) and Senegal (Zeilig, 2005).

14 This remark does not mean that the politicization of the student activists was superficial and/or contingent. First, the majority of the regimes have remained pro-Western and consequently were fought as « imperialist » or « neocolonial valets ». Second, in the case of ‘revolutionary’ regimes, the issue that was at stake was the State power and its revolutionary orientation: if some student leaders chose to back the new regime, most of them stood in the opposition and dubbed the regime as ‘pseudo-revolutionary’ and/or ‘putschist’.

15 The arbitrary nature of ‘neatly sliced’ history is particularly clear in the case of movements and organizations that straddle two historical sequences, for instance the UGEAO, which came into being in the colonial context but then opposed Senghor’s regime, described by the students as ‘neo-colonial’ (Bianchini, 2018). The timetable for decolonization also varied between countries.

16 For more a more detailed comprehension of this periodization, see the table in annex that sums up the ‘structure of political opportunities’ for Francophone countries based on six criteria: the geopolitical context, environmental and geographic contexts, openness or closure of the polity, unity of fragmentation of the political elites, hegemony and coercion in the exercise of state power, and social status of students as a group and relationships with other social groups.

17 The activism of FEANF students did not only overspill the initial corporatist framework towards the political field, but also the related artistic and literary fields, as indicated by the July 1961 seminar on French-language Black African literature (Dieng, 2009).

18 While the circumstances are very different, this can be compared to South Africa, where the division along racial lines left a deep mark on student movements, including anti-apartheid activists in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) (Legassick, 1967). This gave rise shortly afterward to the establishment of the South African Student Organisation (SASO), which in turn led to the birth of the ‘Black Consciousness’ movement whose leader Steve Biko was initially a student leader (Hirschmann, 1990). However, the ideological roots of SASO and Black Consciousness are manifold, arising particularly from the radicalization of Christian militants under the influence of the New Left in the 1960s (Macqueen, 2011), while for others, the process of radicalization within SASO is only linked to events due to the repressive attitude of the authorities (Brown, 2010).

19 This was the backdrop to the development of revolutionary songs and poetry in national languages and the rise to prominence of anti-colonialist figures such as Aliin Sitoë Diatta, the ‘queen’ of Kabrousse who led a peasant uprising in 1942 against rice requisitions by the colonial administration, and Lamine Senghor, a Communist and anti-colonialist militant in 1920s France.

20 Not in my back yard.

21 See for instance the FEANF, which opposed the Franco-African Community and later the cooperation agreements (Blum, 2015). In English-speaking Africa, the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) protested against the Anglo-Nigerian defence pact (Babatope, 1991).

22 Cheikh Anta Diop spent most of his life more than a decade in France and was marginalized by the Senghor regime on his return to Senegal, but the University of Dakar now bears his name and numerous commemorations have been held in his honour, giving him pride of place in the Senegalese, and more broadly pan-African, pantheon.

23 See for instance the rise of Islamism in the Tunisian student movement (Dhifallah, 2014).

24 The brutality of the repression, with a series of murders, torture, and rapes, led a number of student who lived through Black Tuesday to join the National Resistance Army’s guerrilla forces (Bernard, in Blum et al., 2016, pp. 111–134).

25 For instance, the militias connected to the party in power and representatives of the state and local administration, tasked with physically intimidating opposition student activists in Togo and Cameroon, among others. The phenomenon of ‘secret cults’ in Nigeria serves a similar function: initially these were secret student societies that developed in opposition to colonial society, but then became increasingly violent and were instrumentalised for profit and used to intimidate student protesters in periods of confrontation with the authorities (Ellis, in Ellis & Van Kessel, 2009).

26 Violence by the Ivory Coast School and Student Federation (Fédération estudiantine et scolaire de Côte d’Ivoire, FESCI) (Konate, 2003; Goin Bi, 2001) and the Commission for Social Affairs and Order (Commission des Affaires Sociales et de l’Ordre, CASO), the armed wing of the Niger Student Union (Union des Etudiants Nigériens) at the Universitey of Niamey (Smirnova, 2015) are instances where student organizations seized power on campus. This same period of ‘democratisation’ also witnessed internal clashes between rival organizations within the student movement in Ouagadougou (Sory, 2012).

27 See the case of Sierra Leone: the thesis of a historical link between the radicalization of the student movement in the 1970s and exactions by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in the 1990s (Rashid, 1997) has been reframed in much more relative terms (Bolten, 2009).

28 In particular, it must not be forgotten that during the revolutionary years, the defence of corporatist claims has always been a key issue that has ignitated the most radical protests as in Dakar in 1968 when the government decided to reduce the grants for students.