Between empire and nation: francophone West African students and decolonization.

This article explores the movement of African university students from French West Africa to France during the last years of French colonial rule (1946–60). The author argues that the act of traveling between these spaces at a time when the new French Union supposedly produced greater equality within the imperial system allowed students to point out their continued inequalities, despite their so-called elite status. Indeed, the Atlantic voyages themselves were often a key place of protest, where young people symbolically connected their material circumstances (often forced to travel in third or fourth class) to the greater disparities within the colonial system. At the same time, French authorities viewed this movement as both necessary and dangerous – allowing the next generation of African leaders to study in France, but also enabling them to connect with a growing anti-colonial diaspora centered in Paris. The administration interpreted student political organization as a problem stemming from the psychological difficulties these young people faced in their adjustment to life in France. Such analyses resulted in policies designed to ease the transition on a local scale, but rarely acknowledged the deeper, systemic roots of political protest. Students, in contrast, increasingly saw themselves as part of a wider movement, particularly as events in Indo-China and Algeria revealed the power of anti-colonial nationalism. Joining, and often critiquing, their own nationalist movements, these young people used their transitory status to help bring down the structure that could not completely contain them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]