The Colonial Image Reversed: Language Preferences and Policy Outcomes in African Education

Abstract

Once viewing African languages as competitors to French, policymakers in France now welcome these languages openly in African schools. This is a dramatic policy reversal, and it contradicts expectations of path dependency and policy inertia. The policymakers’ conversion can be traced to the writing and advocacy of a strategic scholarly community, which began exercising influence over the leadership of France and la Francophonie in the 1990s. Their influence changed the perception of French leaders regarding the utility of local languages in education and caused them to include this element consistently in their education strategy for Africa. In contrast, a lack of comparable agreement within the intellectual communities of the Anglophone world has led to ambivalence in support for mother tongue education emanating from dominant English-speaking states. Unlike traditional accounts of epistemic communities, this study highlights the strategic political activity of scholars. The major focus is on the process of idea change among policy makers in France. I suggest that this idea change altered the field of permissible options for African leaders, revealing a continued ideational dependency between metropole and periphery.

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