It is a moment of speculation, amid troves of firmer data, that best captures the argumentative thrust of Elisa Prosperetti’s An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, a study of how “freedom from colonial rule was inseparable from the freedom to go to school” (2) in this Black Atlantic region. Around the book’s midpoint, she observes that “Although the name Ghana was current in nationalist circles from the 1930s onwards, it is unclear whether it had much popular purchase until Nkrumah’s baptism of [Ghana National College]” upon his release from prison in 1948. Nkrumah himself had been educated at the elite Achimota School; founded as a joint British colonial and Gold Coast intelligentsia venture in the 1920s, his alma mater stands among the chief institutional emblems of an impulse to imperial reform. Nkrumah, harnessing the energy of student disenchantment with schools like his own, was set on gaining national independence now, and saw education as integral to this goal. If, Prosperetti observes, “the diffusion of the term [Ghana] beyond high political circles was a result of Nkrumah’s publicity campaign around the Ghana National College and, later, the associated Ghana Schools,” then his “fusion of education and emancipation is even more resolute than we could have imagined” (96). But decolonial theory be damned, Nkrumah’s Ghana Schools continued to use British colonial textbooks. An Anticolonial Development shows how that’s not nearly the contradiction it might look like now.

The book, in sum, meticulously revisits West African pursuits of Europhone education as freedom-seeking rather than naïve or deluded. Working between present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, Prosperetti shows how a priority on the trained mind has long fueled anti-colonial activism within otherwise contrasting contexts. Across clear differences of empire, language, and political paradigm at independence, a commitment to access to schooling persists as “the principal means to, and the primary end of, development” (17). Prosperetti’s intraregional pairing is one of the book’s foremost achievements, and she digs into national differences and similarities with equal acuity. Rather than rest easy with the truism of French imperial education as assimilationist and its British counterpart as culturally particularist, she works painstakingly through the relationship at each site between familiar temporal schema (i.e. Africans being “behind”) and misconceived notions of what Africans want and need. Her analysis may be richest on the subject of vocational educational initiatives, meant to tailor schooling to Africans’ supposed nonacademic character, and in which West Africans themselves had little interest. In the Gold Coast, this meant progressive visions of ushering Africans toward agricultural rather than “bookish” education, which found its fullest expression in the New York-based Phelps-Stokes Fund’s Commission on African Education report from 1922. In its “neat assimilation-adaptation binary” (35), Prosperetti suggests, the report forecasts the risks of anchoring African advancement in ideas of African difference. The same impulse in Côte d’Ivoire, after all, easily finds conservative ends: under the rural schools (école rurale) policy there in the 1930s, African students were coerced into performing unpaid labor for the French colonial state. As the French “harnessed rural schools as a tool to expand, not collapse, the temporal distance between Africans and Europeans” (63), Ivorians’ insistence on their right to French academics became a way of routing claims to full humanness through the capacity to learn.

The comparative focus of An Anticolonial Development offers many such examples of how adaptationist educational thinking—the idea that Africans must be educated in some special African way—has historically been used to different kinds of racist ends. As a result, it is also a book about how West African thinking about race in the late-colonial period and beyond becomes part of a Black Atlantic circuit on its own terms. African attachments to Europhone education, in this frame, are often anti-racist as well as anti-colonial. It is true that imported educational models, from French and British colonial ones to Tuskegee from the US South, were the immediate points of nineteenth- and twentieth-century transnational reference. But, as Prosperetti contends, “colonial, Europhone education was the discursive terrain on which debates over race and development were waged” (28) in a broader sense. In making this point through local archives like report cards, school committee reports, and interviews with former West African students and teachers, she puts historical meat on the bones of what is often a hazy theoretical construct. Throughout the book, this inside-out, bi-nodal addition to West Africa’s Black Atlantic imbrication also leaves room to follow the development of Afro-centric educational politics in different and less galvanizing directions. Its later chapters chart the devolution of West African public education through its postcolonial boom years and the onset of World Bank and IMF-led structural adjustment policies, from the 1961 Conference on African Education in Addis Ababa to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Prosperetti works compellingly—and contrapuntally—from two hubs of anti-colonial nation-building toward what it calls “comparison in a global key,” showing how Europhone education as a counter-hegemonic ideal of West African modernity shades into a dominant and homogenizing transnational development discourse. In bringing together, for instance, Ghana’s reliance on sympathetic short-term foreigners to staff their expanded school system and postcolonial Côte d’Ivoire’s dependence on colonially minded French instructors, An Anticolonial Development shows how politically divergent symptoms converge in the same long-term systemic untenability. The straits of its subject aside, it is a powerful and sensitive addition to the African historical field.