CHAPTER 5 Forging Global Connections

Youth Internationalism during the Early Cold War

Toward the end of World War II, French policymakers and educators hailed youth internationalism as a crucial means of securing a peaceful postwar global order. In mid-1944, the Free French commission on education reform in Algiers confidently predicted that international youth exchanges would foster “mutual comprehension of peoples based on familiarity and respect. Union of peoples through youth, through the elites of the future, is the surest guarantee of peace between nations.”¹⁵ Such sweeping optimism did not last long, as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated at the war’s end. Shortly after its founding in London in 1945, the World Federation of Democratic Youth aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Four years later, the United States promoted the World Association of Youth as an anti-Communist alternative for international youth mobilization. These rival forums anchored sprawling networks of youth and student movements and a seemingly endless stream of conferences, congresses, and youth festivals in the 1950s that were attended by tens of thousands of young people in the United States and the Soviet Union, in Western and Eastern Europe, and in Africa and Asia.

Both forums aggressively courted European youth. The Cold War contest for young Europeans’ allegiance added an extra impetus for French officials and pro-Europe activists to quickly establish their own youth movements and educational exchanges that would support not just European integration but also Europe’s independence in the postwar order. These Cold War dynamics were laid bare in divided Germany. In the French occupation zone, Europe-minded youth and education officials found themselves in possession of a captive audience to promote their vision of united Europe. By the time Amadou Sadji Booker and several dozen other francophone Africans found their way to the GDR in the late 1950s, tens of thousands of young metropolitan French had traveled to West Germany through state-sponsored youth exchanges that sought to achieve Franco-German reconciliation within an explicit transnational European framework.

Islamic Education in French Africa

The French colonial archive contains a stream of frenzied missives, reports, and administrative correspondence from the 1950s on the “exodus” and “flood” of African Muslims to al-Azhar, primarily from Muslim-majority regions in AOF and Chad.⁷⁷ The prospect of al-Azhar alumni bringing back pan-Islamism, Salafism, or other supposedly “anti-French” Muslim currents to their home territories put colonial officials in a perpetual state of panic. Indeed, many of them viewed political Islam and the theological reform movements as detrimental to French interests in Africa—worse even than Communism. French anxieties about Islam in Africa, reflected in the mythic depiction of African enrollment at al-Azhar, became a dominant frame for French interpretations of South-South connections and Third Worldism more broadly. On the eve of the Bandung Conference, Minister of Overseas France Pierre-Henri Teitgen, a leading Christian Democrat and an ardent partisan of European integration, alluded to Africans at al-Azhar when he characterized Bandung as a specifically Muslim threat to French rule south of the Sahara.⁷⁸

Muslims in France’s African colonies had been drawn to al-Azhar long before Bandung and Nasser’s Africa policy, for the same reason some were drawn to it afterward: a desire to pursue advanced Islamic study and the increased social status that would bring. Prior to World War II, African Muslims who had the means or opportunity to embark on the hajj would sometimes stop in Cairo on their way back to study at al-Azhar, in some cases for many years.⁷⁹ After the war, French colonial and military officials consciously attempted to manage the pilgrimage to Mecca, providing African pilgrims with financial and logistical support in order to propagate an image of the French Union that was favorable to Muslim interests and open to at least certain forms of Muslim religious practice.⁸⁰ As more African pilgrims went to Mecca, more passed through Cairo, some of whom also ended up at al-Azhar.

Still, contrary to the overheated rhetoric conjuring up images of floods and tidal waves, the number of Africans who actually went to al-Azhar in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though perhaps more significant than in years past, nonetheless remained quite small. Even by French accounts, the figures were modest: colonial officials claimed that by 1952, there were 105 West Africans at al-Azhar (out of AOF’s total population of some 16 million), and another 90 “non-Arab” Africans from Chad.⁸¹ Oral interviews with al-Azhar alumni conducted by Lansiné Kaba in Mali in the 1960s indicate that even those paltry figures may have been exaggerated. Kaba’s informants recalled that there were around 20 students from AOF at al-Azhar in the late 1940s.⁸²

The French colonial regime’s obsession with African enrollment at al-Azhar reflects the postwar administration’s ambivalent, often deeply confused stance toward Islam in Africa generally and toward traditional Qur’anic schooling in particular. In precolonial West Africa, access to Islamic knowledge was limited to people of status: high castes, the wealthy, and the freeborn. Colonization in the late nineteenth century destroyed the old social order—dissolving the martial monarchies, upending local hierarchies, and abolishing slavery—but French rule put little in its place. Access to Islamic knowledge increasingly came to fill that void. By the 1910s, Sufism had become a mass movement offering personal dignity and Muslim identity to previously excluded populations, and its chief vehicle for doing so was the Qur’an school. As Butch Ware has argued, French officials doubly misread the success of Sufism around the turn of the century as the “conversion” of previously non-Muslim populations on the one hand and as a political reaction to French conquest on the other, whereas the “Sufi revolution” was really about the democratization of religious knowledge in post-slavery societies.⁸³

During the conquest, colonial officials promoted French schools in direct opposition to Qur’an schools and considered French schooling essential to legitimizing French colonial rule and supremacy in the region. The French position on Qur’anic schooling changed in the early twentieth century from a stance of competition and hostility to benign neglect. Qur’an schools, faithful to traditional Islamic education methods, transmitted embodied forms of Islamic knowledge to their pupils through corporeal discipline and practices like drinking the ink that students had used to write out Qur’anic verses in their lessons—literally ingesting God’s word. The French interpreted the emphasis on embodiment in Qur’anic schooling through “the dual lenses of race and Orientalism … which equated Islam with texts and Africans with idolatry and ancestor worship.”⁸⁴ As a result, colonial observers saw local Islam, which they referred to as Islam noir, as syncretic, heterodox, and ultimately less threatening than its Arab variants. In this view, the key to maintaining the colonial order was to isolate this “harmless” form of African Islam from currents in the wider Muslim world. Thus, in the early 1900s, the French administration cultivated increasingly close relationships with the leaders of the Sufi brotherhoods, whom the French called marabouts, as a means of securing French control and social stability in the region.⁸⁵

French understandings of African Islam changed again in the postwar era, when colonial officials like Marcel Cardaire began to argue that Islam noir was a colonial delusion that had bred dangerous administrative complacency that outside agitators could now exploit.⁸⁶ The French colonial “quarantine” of Islam noir had indeed coincided with dramatic changes in Islamic education and Arabic-language instruction elsewhere in the Muslim world.⁸⁷ For a small minority of French observers, including some progressive priests, a fortified and purified local Islam could potentially serve as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in Africa. They consequently advocated for the reform and modernization of Islamic education in French Africa, making common cause with reformist milieus within African Muslim communities.⁸⁸

The Salafi and Wahhabi theological reform movements then spreading across the Middle East were exactly the kinds of “spiritual movements of the age” the provisional government had feared so intensely in 1945. French colonial officials viewed those movements—which they tended to indiscriminately lump together under the label “Wahhabism”—as fanatical, “xenophobic,” and fundamentally incompatible with French culture and values.⁸⁹ Because most colonial officials still retained a sense of Islam noir in the exact opposite terms, as distinctively pliable and tolerant, they tended to read all reformist impulses among African Muslims as necessarily “based on Middle Eastern ideas.”⁹⁰ Here again was a fundamental misreading of the complex dynamics and the dynamism of African Muslim communities. Some local Muslim reformers had indeed been exposed to Salafi and Wahhabi conceptions of Islam, which saw the Sufi orders as corruptions of the Sunna, but others were French-educated reformers who viewed Sufi leaders as neo-feudal figures who were holding back African progress and development.⁹¹ It was precisely the convergence of these two groups of reformers that led to the opening of a spate of new Muslim schools in French Africa in the immediate postwar years (c. 1945–1950).

In 1951, the colonial administration in French Soudan (contemporary Mali) shut down a private Muslim school that four al-Azhar graduates had established in the capital, Bamako, the year before. The Azharists’ vision for the school was to teach Arabic and the Qur’an in addition to the French secular curriculum. The administration rejected the Azharists’ proposal to hire French-educated personnel to teach French and other subjects, which would have obliged the administration to provide the institution with the same financial support it provided to mission schools. Despite this setback, the Azharists’ school was a smashing success during its brief existence. When it opened, it welcomed sixty pupils from the Bamako area; when it was shuttered the following year, officially for exceeding the maximum number of hours of Arabic instruction the French administration had agreed to, the school had more than four hundred pupils from across AOF. The Azharists’ syncretic École Coranique Supérieure de Bamako clearly appealed to a large segment of the urban West African Muslim bourgeoisie who wanted their children to be raised in their faith but also to acquire the skills they would need to participate in the modern colonial economy.⁹²

Al-Azhar alumni were not the only West Africans seeking to open new Muslim schools with more modern pedagogical methods and curricula after the war. Others, like Saada Oumar Touré, who opened a Qur’an school in 1946 in Ségou (also in French Soudan), had never left their home territories. Rather, these reformers were motivated by their own educational experiences in French schools to modernize Islamic education.⁹³ As Ware has shown, this impetus had already begun to take hold in the interwar period. When asked to reflect on their prior religious schooling, students at the École William Ponty in the early 1930s clearly conveyed that they had internalized French rationalist epistemology and the opposition between the embodied practices and rote memorization in traditional Qur’an schools, which they referred to as “indoctrination,” and the intelligent and thoughtful teaching they encountered in their French education.⁹⁴ After the war, Senegalese writer Cheick Hamidou Kane poignantly depicted the stark opposition between the Qur’an school and French education in his classic coming-of-age novel, L’aventure ambiguë (1961). In that autobiographical novel, which Kane had begun writing in 1952 while pursuing his studies in Paris, the protagonist Samba Diallo experiences French schooling as an existential crisis; detached from his culture and Islamic faith, he feels that he belongs nowhere.⁹⁵ Such feelings of cultural deracination and specifically religious alienation are precisely what the endogenous postwar experiments with new kinds of Franco-Muslim schools in the Sahel and Chad sought to avoid.

The École Coranique de Bamako appears to have been the only school opened by local Muslims trained at al-Azhar after the war, but it was the Azharists’ school that became the ultimate cautionary tale for French colonial officials and eventually prompted a major shift in French colonial Islamic education policy. The colonial administration made sure that no more such schools were opened and went a step further. Under Cardaire’s leadership, the federal administration in AOF launched its own “counter-reform movement” in Qur’anic schooling. The colonial state opened its own Qur’an schools that would conduct lessons in African vernacular languages, as opposed to Arabic, in urban centers where pedagogical innovation or reformist tendencies seemed to be on the rise.

As local Muslims gained greater access to postelementary education in the early 1950s, they inserted themselves into the debate about Islamic education in AOF and vocally condemned the administration’s Islamic school policy. In the summer of 1956, the reformist-leaning Association Musulmane des Étudiants d’Afrique Noire (AMEAN) brought together African Muslim students studying locally in AOF and in France for a five-day conference in Dakar. In their manifesto, they denounced French efforts “to isolate us from the Muslim world by all means necessary.” They also called out their representatives in the local assemblies and in the national government in Paris for supporting subsidies to mission schools while refusing to defend local Muslims’ right to Islamic education, either because the representatives themselves were not Muslim or because they were acquiescing to French pressure.⁹⁶ Most important, the conference participants passionately protested the way French officials construed Islam as a foreign import in the region and offered a stinging refutation of the French fiction of Islam noir:

Looking back at history, we Muslim students attest that the diffusion of Islam in Black Africa goes back a millennium, and that black writers expressed themselves exclusively in Arabic until the last century. Our Congress denounces as particularly pernicious and offensive all publications in European languages by Africans or others that neglect, obscure, or willfully ignore Islamic culture and the fact that Islam represents an important common sociological and political influence in Black Africa.⁹⁷

In this spirit, the AMEAN’s formal resolutions called on the administration to reverse course on virtually every aspect of its policies toward Islamic education, and thereby dismantle the infrastructure that had been built on the premise of Islam noir. AMEAN’s five motions stipulated (1) the inclusion of Arabic instruction in the official French curriculum in primary schools; (2) that young Africans be taught “the true history of African pioneers”; (3) the inclusion of some religious instruction in public secondary schools; (4) support for high school graduates to attend universities elsewhere in the Muslim world; and (5) an end to the prohibition on teaching Arabic in Qur’an schools.⁹⁸ The nonconfessional Rassemblement de Jeunesse Démocratique Africain, which was aligned with the Soviet-backed WFDY, publicly and aggressively called for similar measures in solidarity with Muslim African youth.⁹⁹

Those demands were also a cornerstone of the platform of the Muslim Cultural Union, an organization of reformist Muslim Senegalese founded by Cheikh Touré in Dakar in 1953, largely in response to the French administration’s Islamic education policies.¹⁰⁰ Two weeks after the AMEAN conference in Dakar, the Muslim Cultural Union held an assembly in Thiès that was attended by some three hundred people. In its final resolution, the union called for the creation of modern Arabic-language schools that would teach a secular curriculum—precisely the kind of school the Azharists had tried to open in Bamako. Such schools, the writers of the resolution argued, would not be “religious schools” and, therefore, would be perfectly in line with laïcité, providing the population with a “valuable, modern education.” The union then called on all Africans in the French parliament, local religious leaders, and syndicalist organizations to join the union in denouncing “the maneuvers taken by the administration in Senegal that aim to curb the right of African citizens to educate themselves in the language of their religion.”¹⁰¹ Though the members of both the Muslim Cultural Union and the AMEAN were primarily francophone elites, the Muslim population at large evidently shared these sentiments. The “counter-reform” Qur’an schools never attracted much local interest, and most had closed by independence.¹⁰²

Arabic-language instruction also dominated the debate about Islamic education in AEF. Most of the Muslim population in AEF resided in northern Chad, where large communities of Arab merchants had been established for centuries and Arabic was used as a vernacular language.¹⁰³ There were also Muslim communities in the southern regions of the territory, but most people in the south were Christian or animist. After Bandung, AEF governor general Paul Chauvet urged Chad’s territorial governor, Ignace Colombani, to fund new mission schools in the southern regions specifically to prevent new conversions to Islam. Colombani replied that he did not think it mattered whether they opened new public schools or private Christian ones. For Colombani, the spread of Islam was not really about religion. Conversions to Islam, he argued, were not the result of some “metaphysical anguish.” Rather, it was the spread of Arabic that held such great appeal, and attached to the language, “the seduction of rules for everyday life, a way of dressing, certain attitudes—a form of dogmatic thought that is more concerned with the preoccupations of this earth than those of the heavens.” This clear reformulation of Islam as culture led Colombani to a corresponding culturalization of Christianity: “To this seduction, we are continually countering with the use of French, and, without always realizing it ourselves, a form of Cartesian thought that rests on a Christian substratum, a material way of life that extends from what we eat to how we dress, which is the same in public schools and private ones.”¹⁰⁴ Much as Chad’s most famous governor, Félix Éboué, had done fifteen years earlier, Colombani completely equated the student experience in French schools and mission schools—but this equation led him to a different conclusion. Facing a recent burst of pressure from the teachers’ corps to uphold laïcité, Colombani felt that expanding the network of public schools in Chad would be the most politically expedient course of action.¹⁰⁵

Chauvet dismissed opposition to his proposal on the grounds of laïcité out of hand. He fired back, “To be concerned with passive neutrality in religious matters, at a time when Islam is bringing anti-French political propaganda to our door—and has already brought it among us—would only further work to its favor.” Chauvet elaborated on why he thought Christianization was the most effective weapon in their arsenal: “Whether we intended it or not, in animist regions, western influence is wearing away at traditional beliefs that are linked to a social and political system that is disintegrating. If he is not tormented by ‘a certain metaphysical anguish,’ the Black nevertheless has religious needs … elementary needs, which, in their very simplicity, Islam can satisfy.” Chauvet concluded by reiterating his firm conviction that the active Christianization of the population was the only viable path to stanch the spread of what he considered an increasingly “political and aggressive” Islam.¹⁰⁶

If Chauvet and Colombani disagreed on how to stop the spread of Islam in Chad’s southern regions, they nonetheless shared the same racist repertoire for thinking about young Africans’ spiritual and intellectual needs. Just as Chauvet had emphasized Africans’ innate simplicity in his exposition on why Africans might be drawn to Islam, Colombani characterized the vast majority of the one million Muslims in his territory as “illiterate islamisés of the bush, for whom a rudimentary, superficial Islam that incorporates properly African customs, constitutes above all a simple and convenient assortment of rules for collective life and a small spiritual comfort, free of complexities.” He added that this syncretic, heterodox version of Islam “is perfectly suited to these latitudes and these populations.”¹⁰⁷

That stark racial paternalism governed Colombani’s overarching approach to educating Muslims in Chad. He maintained that the smattering of Qur’an schools that dotted the countryside was wholly sufficient for the “islamisés of the bush,” both in terms of their religious instruction and their general education. For the “handful” of Chadians who aspired to higher study, Colombani cited the founding of a new Franco-Muslim middle school in Ouddaï in the Arab north. He also conceded that a course could be offered in modern Arabic in the lone middle school in Chad’s capital, Fort Lamy (contemporary N’Djamena), in the future, specifically to discourage Muslims in the territory from heading to al-Azhar. He had no doubt that these two middle schools (collèges) and the traditional Qur’an schools in rural areas would “surely suffice” for educating Chad’s one million “illiterate, Islamicized” Africans.¹⁰⁸

Global events had directly precipitated this exchange of views. On the eve of the Bandung Conference, Minister of Overseas France Pierre-Henri Teitgen asked Chauvet to increase surveillance of potential “Islamist” agents and political movements in AEF. At the same time, Teitgen also insisted that they must find a way to “retain our Muslim co-citizens within the French community by emotional ties, freely accepted.” In that vein, he urged Chauvet to focus on education reform. Following the “theory of the specificity of Islam noir,” Teitgen called on Chauvet to devise some kind of “adapted” religious instruction that would “attract children and adolescents to our culture, our techniques, and more generally, our civilization.”¹⁰⁹ The Colombani-Chauvet exchange was a response to that directive. Like the ill-conceived “counter-reform” campaign in AOF, their correspondence illustrates how international pressure from Bandung to Cairo strengthened some French officials’ investment in Islam noir, even as it encouraged others, especially those who considered Islam a potential ally in the global struggle against Communism, to consider alternative approaches to educating African Muslims. But the window for French-directed experimentation with Franco-Muslim or Franco-Arabic schooling was closing quickly. The 1956 Loi Cadre gave the territorial assemblies more control over primary and secondary education. Two years later, the Algerian crisis in May 1958 led to the total dissolution of the Fourth Republic and French Union. The looser framework of the French Community that took its place devolved even more authority over school policy to the African-led governments of “member-states,” which were not part of the new Fifth Republic.¹¹⁰ That institutional arrangement was also short-lived. All African member-states acceded to independence during 1960, and the French Community was effectively defunct by the end of the following year.

Colonial anxieties about young Africans on the world stage, fueled by a potent combination of Cold War and Third Worldist geopolitics and racist stereotypes about Africa, Africans, and Islam, inhibited educational development in France’s African territories in the crucial years in the run-up to independence. Given Colombani’s dim view of his constituents’ educational needs, it should not be surprising that when he stepped down as Chad’s governor in 1956—the same year that the territories assumed more responsibility for local schooling—only 4.8 percent of school-age children in the territory attended primary school.¹¹¹ The situation did not improve in the liminal years that followed. Raising the rates of schooling as quickly as possible was therefore a vital national priority in postindependence Chad.

The swift disintegration of the French Community in 1959–1960 pushed Chad’s leaders to look beyond France for educational support. In June 1961, Marc Dounia, who had represented Chad in the ephemeral Senate of the French Community and was then vice president of Chad’s National Assembly, returned to his former metropole with an urgent appeal for investment in Chad’s educational infrastructure. “Everything” remains to be done, he lamented, despite the efforts made by France, “our tutor until now.”¹¹² This appeal was pitched not to France but to Europe during a five-day “Eurafrican Parliamentary Conference” at the European Assembly in Strasbourg that included representatives of sixteen associated African states and Madagascar (EAMA) that had been attached to the European Communities in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.¹¹³ Dounia endorsed the old idea of a “Europe-Africa Community,” but he cautioned that Chad could not afford to wait until that grand dream was realized. He asked instead for immediate European aid for student scholarships, professional training, and local schools.¹¹⁴

Dounia found a sympathetic audience. Italian Christian Democrat Mario Pedini invoked the “humanism of the European tradition” in his call for the European Communities to prioritize the development of education in the associated states. Expanding African access to education was the fundamental prerequisite for any further “cultural exchange” and “technical cooperation” between Europe and Africa, Pedini argued; increasing the number of the schools in the EAMA should therefore be the focal point of European development policy. In his detailed proposals, Pedini emphasized reciprocity and the mutual benefits of cultural cooperation. He hoped that more Europeans would study and train in Africa and that European universities would create centers and professorships in African Studies. Like Senghor, he proclaimed that all cultures and civilizations possess “universal values” that should be shared and passed on. In that spirit, Pedini urged that schools in the EAMA “embrace their ‘Africanness’ and the universal cultural values within.” However, his affirmation of cultural pluralism rested on the reassertion of European particularism. Pedini concluded, “At the end of the day, the school should produce Africans, not black Europeans.”¹¹⁵ According to the logic of postwar racial common sense, the very notion of “Black Europeans” had already become a contradiction in terms. With African independence and the rise of a more mature institutional Europe, that could be admitted more freely.

For close to two decades, French and African leaders, policymakers, educators, and students fought bitterly over how to reconfigure youth and education policy to sustain new modes of belonging across African and European France. The ostensible object was to transcend historic racial and religious divides, but those divisions hardened as the imperatives of Franco-African and European integration collided and converged. While some African leaders held out hope that the establishment of the French Community might turn things around, younger generations of Africans were less optimistic, if not outright hostile, to continuing France-Africa relations in that form. For many, that stance may have been ideological, reflecting deeply held nationalist or pan-Africanist commitments; but it was also rooted in more than a decade of lived experience of enduring racial and religious domination across African and European France and beyond, specifically as young people trying to pursue their educations, obtain professional training, and participate in the wider world of organized youth and youth internationalism.¹¹⁶ The failure of Franco-African integration precisely as a generational project preceded, and helps us better understand, the astonishingly rapid unraveling of France’s African empire in just a few short years.

The breakdown of the Franco-African generational project breathed new life into the faltering European one. The cascading political and institutional denouement of African France in 1956–1960, from the Loi Cadre to formal independence, coincided with the acceleration and intensification of European institution building. Disappointed hopes for political European unification with the failure of the European Defense and Political Communities in 1954 were channeled into cultural integration projects that aggressively targeted young people. In 1956, pro-Europe educators formed the Association of European Teachers, whose transnational membership ran into the tens of thousands by the mid-1960s. The 1957 Treaty of Rome stipulated the creation of an explicitly transnational European university as part of EURATOM, the planning for which began the following year. Then, in 1960, the Council of Europe set up several permanent education committees, established the European Cultural Fund, and began preparations for a permanent European Youth Office to coordinate regular and expansive youth and student exchanges. The elaboration of European development policy, first laid out in the articles of association with the EAMA in the Treaty of Rome, initially ran parallel to this burst of transnational youth and education initiatives, but European youth and development policy converged in the 1960s. After more than a decade of failing to get young people excited about the European project, pro-Europe officials saw development, especially in Africa, as a new opportunity to engage European youth in transnational politics and encourage them to feel more “European.” Inspired by the founding of the US Peace Corps (1961), from 1962 onward the Council of Europe enlisted European youth as the frontline workers of European development aid, hopeful that “by responding to the needs of developing countries, young Europeans can find the sense of purpose they are looking for.”¹¹⁷ As the opening of this book made clear, the proposition that young Europeans would best appreciate their distinctive Europeanness by traveling to French Africa had been fiercely contested at the gathering of European youth in Brest in the early 1950s. A decade later, the cleavage between Europe and Africa was institutionally instantiated and back to being common sense.

1. 1. Enrico Serra, ed., The Relaunching of Europe and the Treaties of Rome: Actes du Colloque de Rome 25–28 Mars 1987 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1989).

2. 2. See chapter 4. On the European Communities and Eurafricanism beyond the education sphere, see Brown, The Seventh Member State; Pierre Guillen, “L’avenir de l’Union française dans la négociation des traités de Rome,” Relations internationales 57 (Spring 1989): 103–112, https://www.jstor.org/stable/45344281; Rik Schreurs, “L’Eurafrique dans les négociations du Traité de Rome, 1956–1957,” Politique africaine 49 (1993): 82–92, http://www.politique-africaine.com/numeros/pdf/049082.pdf.

3. 3. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 191–196.

4. 4. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 250–254.

5. 5. Many more would do so after independence. See Monique de Saint Martin, Grazia Scarfò Ghellab, and Kamal Mellakh, eds., Étudier à l’Est: Expériences de diplômés africains (Paris: Karthala, 2015); Constantin Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter: Tensions in the Friendship with Afro-Asian Partners, 1945–1965,” in Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014): 134–165.

6. 6. Christopher Sutton, “Britain, Empire and the Origins of the Cold War Youth Race,” Contemporary British History 30, no. 2 (2016): 224–241, https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2015.1079489.

7. 7. Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution; Westad, The Global Cold War.

8. 8. Anne-Isabelle Richard, “The Limits of Solidarity: Europeanism, Anticolonialism, and Socialism at the Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948,” European History Review 21, no. 4 (2014): 519–537, https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2014.933187.

9. 9. Congrès des Peuples d’Europe, d’Asie, et d’Afrique, Puteaux 16–21 juin 1948: Liste des délégués et des observateurs, AHUE: ME-704. Notable participants included Guy Mollet, Alain Savary, Émile Zinsou, and Léopold Senghor (French parliamentary delegation), Frenchmen Alexandre Marc and Henri Frenay and Belgian Hendrik Brugmans (Union of European Federalists), and diverse delegations from Algeria, Néo-Destour, UGT-Tunisia, Istiqlal, Cameroon, and Madagascar, as well as observers from the West African Student Union (the primary association of students from British West Africa) and the Pan-African Congress.

10. 10. Rapport Politique, Congrès des Peuples d’Europe, d’Asie, et d’Afrique, Puteaux 16–21 juin 1948, AHUE: ME-704.

11. 11. Comité d’Études et d’Action pour les États-Unis Socialistes d’Europe, Rapport sur le Congrès des Peuples, undated, AHUE: ME-704.

12. 12. French Communists did not fare much better in this regard. They experienced similar disappointment and disillusionment with their African comrades at the 1952 Congress of Peoples for Peace in Vienna, organized by two French Communists, Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Jean Lafitte. Two francophone African participants, Jacques N’Gom and Latyr Camara, denounced US imperialism and racism—the main objective of the gathering—but had no less vitriol for the imperialist French Union and called for independence for colonial territories. See Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter,” 139.

13. 13. Richard, “The Limits of Solidarity”; Shaev, “The Algerian War.”

14. 14. Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of the Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization; Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution.

15. 15. Robert Prigent, Rapport au nom de la Commission de l’Éducation nationale, annexe au procès-verbal du 17 mai 1944, AN: C//15255.

16. 16. Ambassadeur de France en Grande Bretagne to Raymond Schmittlein, Baden-Baden a/s appréciation britannique sur notre politique culturelle en Allemagne, September 21, 1949, AMAE: Série HCRFA, Affaires Culturelles, Cabinet: 1AC/168/3.

17. 17. Sir Basil Bartlett, “Hitler’s Lost Generation,” Time and Tide, September 10, 1949.

18. 18. That said, both the British and the US occupation authorities did promote active pedagogical methods in education as part of their broader democratization project. In general, the French authorities emphasized democracy much less, but Sonja Levsen characterizes Schmittlein as an exception in this regard, for he did consider renovated pedagogical methods as a democratizing tool. Sonja Levsen, “Authority and Democracy in Postwar France and West Germany, 1945–1968,” Journal of Modern History 89 (December 2017): 812–850, https://doi.org/10.1086/694614.

19. 19. Significantly, these colonies de vacances had an explicit Christian orientation; Jewish children, many of whom had been orphaned during the war, were sent to separate colonies israélites, which were privately organized and sponsored by Jewish charities. See Karen Adler, “Children as a Tool of Occupation in the French Zone of Occupation of Germany, from 1945 to 1949,” Nottingham French Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 191–205, https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2020.0284.

20. 20. Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors, 62–65.

21. 21. His other achievements included the founding of several modern middle schools, Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, and what is today the Deutsche Universität für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer. On Schmittlein and French youth and education policy in occupied Germany more generally, see Jerôme Valliant, ed., La Dénazification par les vainqueurs: la politique culturelle des occupants en Allemagne 1945–1949 (Lille: Université de Lille, 1981); Stefan Zauner, Erziehung und Kulturmission: Fransreichs Bildungs-Politik in Deutschland, 1945–1949 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994).

22. 22. For a typical program of the Franco-German rencontres of the period, see the schedule of the Centre d’Action Culturelle de Spire, Session d’études du 16 août–16 septembre 1949: “L’Europe à la recherche de l’unité: Ses éléments constitutifs dans l’Histoire, Perspectives d’avenir,” AHUE: ME-1920. On Brugmans’s involvement, see André Decamps, Consul de France à Francfort, to M. Tarbe de Saint Hardouin, Ambassadeur de France à Berlin, May 26, 1948, a/s Commémoration des événements de 1848, AMAE: Série HCRFA, Affaires Culturelles, Cabinet: 1AC/168/3.

23. 23. Raymond Schmittlein, Note pour M. le Général d’Armée, Commandant en Chef Français en Allemagne, December 24, 1948, AMAE: Série HCRFA, Affaires Culturelles, Cabinet: 1AC/168/2. The textbook reform project continued and expanded after the end of the French occupation with the 1951 Franco-German Historians Agreement, which Mona Siegal and Kirsten Harjes describe as “one of the most successful models of cultural diplomacy and peace education worldwide.” Although they acknowledge its significance as a “lynchpin of the New Europe” and a powerful symbol of “postnationalist Europe,” they also emphasize that the success of the venture was rooted in a longer, specifically Franco-German history of conflict and reconciliation going back to World War I. See Mona Siegal and Kristen Harjes, “Disarming Hatred: History Education, National Memories, and Franco-German Reconciliation from World War I to the Cold War,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 3 (August 2012): 371–372, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748–5959.2012.00404.x.

24. 24. Alain Peyrefitte, Note a/s jeunesse allemande et jeunesse européenne, undated (c. 1950), AHUE: ME-1920.

25. 25. Norwig, “A First European Generation?”

26. 26. Peyrefitte’s clear articulation of this conceptual shift demonstrates that it was not just elder statesmen and established politicians who were framing European unity as a generational project, but elite European youth themselves. (Peyrefitte was only twenty-five when he penned this position, which, according to his own rubric, slotted him in the category of youth.)

27. 27. Cited in Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors, 36. Jobs also cites a 1946 article by twenty-one-year-old Dieter Danckwortt, blaming Germany’s situation on the older generation and proposing identification with Europe and a new kind of camaraderie for “young Europe” as a way forward for German youth (34). Danckwortt remained committed to this political ideal more than a decade later. He became a specialist and researcher of youth exchanges and intercultural contact and frequently worked on projects for European entities. Notably, he conducted a major study on African and Asian students in Europe, one of the first big projects commissioned by the Foundation of European Culture shortly after its founding in 1959, which preempted many of the conceptual shifts discussed at the end of chapter 4. See his Une jeune élite de l’Asie et de l’Afrique comme hôtes et élèves en Europe (problèmes de la communication d’une image de la culture européenne aux étudiants et stagiaires en Europe, venus de pays en voie de développement de l’Asie et de l’Afrique): Une étude sociologique sur l’ordre de la Fondation Européenne de la Culture (Institut Psychologique de Hambourg, August 1959).

28. 28. Peyrefitte, Note a/s jeunesse allemande, AHUE: ME-1920.

29. 29. Travail de synthèse sur les questions de reconfessionalisation des écoles primaires allemandes dans la Province du Palatinat, December 8, 1949, AMAE: Série HCRFA, Affaires Culturelles: 1AC/198/2a. In 1933 in Rhineland-Palatinate, there were 305 Catholic schools, 421 Protestant schools, six Jewish schools, and 74 “simultaneous schools” (where religious instruction was offered in multiple faiths). The government’s proposal to reopen confessional schools in 1949 called for the establishment of 273 Catholic schools, 401 Protestant schools, 103 simultaneous schools, and no Jewish schools.

30. 30. See the dossier “Jeunesses européennes fédéralistes, création et activités, 1950–1951,” AHUE: UEF-175.

31. 31. Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors, 68–81.

32. 32. See the dossier “Campagne européenne de la jeunesse—projets de rallye ou rassemblement européen de la jeunesse, 1951–1954, Correspondance et notes,” AHUE: ME-134. The EYC continued to organize smaller-scale events along the model of Schmittlein’s rencontres as well, like the 1953 European Youth Gathering in Brest discussed at the beginning of this book.

33. 33. The six original members of the ECSC, as well as the EEC and EURATOM, were France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

34. 34. Nick Rutter, “The Western Wall: The Iron Curtain Recast in Summer 1951,” in Cold War Crossings, ed. Babiracki and Zimmer, 78–107.

35. 35. This has come to light in recent years with a newly declassified cache of documents, referenced in both Norwig, “A First European Generation?,” and McKenzie, “The European Youth Campaign in Ireland.” This obviously compromised the EYC’s ostensible independence, but in my research, I have found that many, if not most, of the people who volunteered with the EYC were genuinely committed to an independent Europe and were unaware of the CIA connection.

36. 36. On the evolution of the Soviet side of this campaign, from the late 1940s into the post-independence period, see Nick Rutter, “Unity and Conflict in the Socialist Scramble for Africa,” in The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest, Counterculture, ed. Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney (New York: Routledge, 2018): 33–51.

37. 37. Metropolitan French and French Africans were fully aware of US hypocrisy in this regard, but Francophone Africans’ experience of racism, including racist violence, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the Eastern bloc was a painful shock, as was Soviet suspicion and derision when African visitors tested Soviet claims of religious liberty by seeking out Catholic churches or mosques. See Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter,” 135–141. For personal and eyewitness accounts, see Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 250–276.

38. 38. “Bulletin de renseignements: Étude a/s Islam et Afrique Noire; Les grands courants politiques dans le monde islamique et en Afrique Noire,” July 25, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2260.

39. 39. Letter from Paul Chauvet [Gougal AEF] to the Directeur-Affaires Politiques, MFOM, June 6, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

40. 40. Whitehead, “The Impact of the Second World War.”

41. 41. Matasci, “Une ‘UNESCO africaine’?” See also Hugo Gonçalves Dores and Miguel Bandeira Jéronimo, “Un ‘développement’ éclairé? La question de l’éducation coloniale en Afrique et les organisations interimpériales (1945–1957),” in Repenser la mission civilisatrice, ed. Matasci et al., 85–103.

42. 42. For a Cold War perspective on the UNESCO campaign for universal education, see Dorn and Ghodsee, “The Cold War Politicization of Literacy.”

43. 43. Paul Henry, Note sur les Sessions d’études coloniales, Oxford, April 17, 1946, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/1296.

44. 44. On this strategy of tokenism in the international arena, see Marker, “Obscuring Race.”

45. 45. Young Africans themselves possessed a strong generational identity. Sadji’s memoir, Le rôle de la génération charnière, is also a collective biography of African youth and student activists in the 1940s–1960s; “la génération charnière” translates as “the hinge generation.”

46. 46. Rutter, “Unity and Conflict in the Socialist Scramble for Africa,” 35.

47. 47. Odile Goerg notes that a young Sékou Touré attended the 1951 Festival in Berlin. See her “Les mouvements de jeunesse en Guinée de la colonisation à la constitution de la JRDA, 1890–1959,” in Le mouvement associatif des jeunes, ed. d’Almeida-Topor and Goerg, 35.

48. 48. The evolution of the group’s stance can be traced in their publication La Voix des Jeunes: Bulletin officiel du RJDA, ANOM: BIB SOM POM/d/174. On the RJDA and Cold War politics, see Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea.

49. 49. Bulletin de renseignement, SDECE, November 30, 1957, ANS: 17G/604 (152). French security services also tracked French Communist youth who traveled to the African Federations. See multiple dossiers in ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2265.

50. 50. Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter,” 145.

51. 51. Pelikán found asylum in Italy after the Prague Spring (1968) and served in the European Parliament on behalf of the Italian Sociality Party from 1979 to 1989.

52. 52. Letter from Dir-Services de Sécurité AOF to Chefs des Services de Police a/s Résolution sur la FEANF par le Comité Exécutif de l’UIE, July 23, 1957, ANS: 21G/210 (178).

53. 53. Haut-Commissaire AOF—Décision du 27 août 1957, ANS: 18G/210 (160).

54. 54. Budget du Conseil Français pour l’Assemblée mondiale de la jeunesse, 1950, CAC: 19880437/24.

55. 55. For a longer discussion, see Héléne d’Almeida-Topor, “Les associations de jeunesse en AOF (1946–1960): Évolution d’ensemble et particularités locales,” in Le mouvement associatif des jeunes, ed. d’Almeida-Topor and Goerg, 61–62.

56. 56. Conseil Français pour le WAY, Exposé des motifs (1952), CAC: 19880437/24.

57. 57. Conseil Français pour le WAY, Exposé des motifs (1953), CAC: 19880437/24.

58. 58. Jean Marc Ekoh, “La Jeunesse de tous les coins du monde découvre l’Afrique française,” undated (enclosed in a missive from Gougal-AEF to MFOM, September 26, 1952), ANOM 1AFFPOL/2265.

59. 59. Zinsou was also a participant at the Congress of Peoples in Puteaux in 1948.

60. 60. Atelier 1: Discrimination Raciale, Texte Définitif, Congrès de la WAY, Ithaca, August 1951, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2265. This reflected francophone African demands for the Africanization of the colonial bureaucracy, which became a key point of contention in the broader project of colonial reform. See Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.

61. 61. Note d’Information a/s reunion de la WAY, January 16, 1952, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2265.

62. 62. SDECE, Notice d’Information—La WAY, August 18, 1958, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2398.

63. 63. Goerg, “Les movements de jeunesse,” in Le mouvement associatif des jeunes, ed. d’Almeida-Topor and Goerg, 27. For a scathing critique of the WAY and its conference in Dakar alongside a withering resume of stalled education reform, see Alioune Paye, “Rapport Moral du RJDA,” undated (transmitted from the Gougal AOF to MFOM, February 22, 1956), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2265.

64. 64. SDECE, Notice d’Information—La WAY, August 18, 1958.

65. 65. De la Fournière, Note a/s Festival de la Jeunesse d’Afrique, Bamako, 6–12 septembre 1958 (September 16, 1958), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2189, dossier 2.

66. 66. On the United States, see the dossier “Envoi d’étudiants camerounais et africains aux USA,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2199; see also Anton Tarradellas, “La formation des étudiants africains aux Etats-Unis: ‘Mission civilisatrice,’ connexions panafricanistes, et aide au développement (1880–1980),” in Repenser la mission civilisatrice, ed. Matasci et al., 157–170; and Louisa Rice, “Cowboys and Communists: Cultural Diplomacy, Decolonization and the Cold War in French West Africa,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonialism History 11, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2010.0023. On the Soviet Union, see Saint Martin et al., Étudier à l’Est.

67. 67. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 250–276. Guinée became a prime destination for Soviet-backed youth and student movement events. In 1960 alone, Conakry (capital of Guinée) hosted a meeting of the Soviet-backed International Teacher’s Federation, an executive committee meeting of the WFDY, and the WFDY-sponsored All African Youth Conference. That Soviet-linked activity raised Guinée’s profile in South-South organizing as well. Conakry also hosted the second conference of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization later that year. Rutter, “Unity and Conflict in the Socialist Scramble for Africa,” 36.

68. 68. Lee, Making a World after Empire.

69. 69. Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung (24 April 1955), part B, 2 and 4, https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html.

70. 70. Nasser’s push for dominance in Africa may be read as one aspect of the conflict between Nasser’s Egypt and Saudi Arabia c. 1957–1962, which Reinhard Schulze has called “an inter-Arab Cold War.” See his “La da’wa saoudienne en Afrique de l’Ouest,” in Le radicalisme islamique au sud du Sahara: Da’wa, arabisation et critique de l’Occident, ed. René Otayek (Paris: Karthala, 1993). On Suez, see William Roger Louis and Roger Owen, eds., Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

71. 71. See Fathi Al Dib, Abd El Nasser et la révolution algérienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985); Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution.

72. 72. Note a/s la “Conférence de la jeunesse africaine,” January 11, 1956, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2265.

73. 73. Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction: Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,” and James R. Brennan, “Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 1954–64,” in Making a World after Empire, ed. Lee, 12–15, 65. Katsakioris notes that the preliminary 1957 conference that led to the founding of AAPSO was sponsored by the Soviets. However, subsequent Soviet Afro-Asian organizing accentuated, rather than overcame, rifts between Soviet and Afro-Asian intellectuals. Arabs boycotted the Soviet Solidarity Committee’s Afro-Asian writers conference in Tashkent in 1958 over its weak stance on the Algerian question; and the Société Africaine de la Culture, led by Alioune Diop, withdrew in the conference’s preparatory stages over its Soviet organizers’ refusal to let the group select its own delegates. Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter,” 147.

74. 74. Tareq Y. Ismael, “Religion and UAR African Policy,” Journal of Modern African Studies 6, no. 1 (1968): 52–53. See also Ali A. Mazrui, “Africa and the Egyptian’s Four Circles,” African Affairs 63, no. 251 (April 1964): 129–141. On Nasser’s nationalization of Al-Azhar in the early 1960s and the position of the university in modern Egyptian religious politics, see Malika Zeghal, “Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952–1994),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31, no. 3 (August 1999): 371–399, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743800055483.

75. 75. Ismael, “Religion and UAR African Policy,” 56; Brennan, “Radio Cairo,” in Making a World after Empire, ed. Lee, 187.

76. 76. Abdoulaye Niandou Souley, “Les ‘licenciés du Caire’ et l’État au Niger,” in Le radicalisme islamique, ed. Otayek.

77. 77. For some of the most concentrated documentation with such references, see ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256 and 1AFFPOL/2260 for AOF; and ANOM: AEF/GGAEF 5D/269 for AEF.

78. 78. Letter from Pierre-Henri Teitgen to Governor-General of AEF a/s des affaires musulmanes et Bandoeng, April 8, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

79. 79. Lansiné Kaba, The Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), chap. 3; Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), epilogue.

80. 80. Gregory Mann and Jean Sébastien Lecocq, “Between Empire, Umma, and the Muslim Third World: The French Union and African Pilgrims to Mecca, 1946–1958,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 367–383, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/220772.

81. 81. “L’Islam en Afrique Noire,” April 27, 1954, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2260; G. Medina, “Les Étudiants tchadiens de l’Azhar ou contribution à l’étude de l’enseignement franco-arabe au Tchad,” Fort-Lamy, January 1953, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269. Of the 150 Chadians the administration counted at al-Azhar, 60 were described as “Arabs.”

82. 82. Kaba, The Wahhabiyya, 77n13.

83. 83. Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 163–165, 170–171, 185–186.

84. 84. Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 191–196.

85. 85. David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

86. 86. Marcel Cardaire, L’Islam et le terroir africain (Dakar: Institut français d’Afrique Noire, 1954).

87. 87. Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 38.

88. 88. Foster, African Catholic, chap. 6, esp. 201–202, 217, 220–221.

89. 89. “Wahhabism” refers to the religious doctrines attributed to Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, (1703–1792). This form of Islam was officially adopted by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Crucially, most African Islamic reformers did not self-identify as “Wahhabi,” and many were not familiar with the teachings of al-Wahhab; rather this label was leveled at them by both the French and traditional Sufi leaders as an epithet to discredit their projects of reform.

90. 90. Haut-Commissaire AOF Cornut-Gentille au MFOM, Rapport confidentiel, February 1, 1954, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/1014.

91. 91. Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 212.

92. 92. Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power, and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 55–59.

93. 93. Touré’s school proved equally attractive to local parents—by the early 1950s, it had more than three hundred pupils. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge.

94. 94. Ware, The Walking Qur’an, 194–195.

95. 95. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961). See also Samba Gadjigo, École blanche, Afrique noire: L’école coloniale dans le roman d’Afrique noire francophone (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990).

96. 96. A disproportionate number of Catholics figured among the first cohort of African political leaders, a direct consequence of policies that had long relied on and actively promoted mission schooling.

97. 97. AMEAN, Manifeste, July 1956, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256, dossier 3.

98. 98. AMEAN, Motions, July 15, 1956, Dakar, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256, dossier 4.

99. 99. “Appel à la jeunesse d’AOF,” unsigned editorial, La Voix des Jeunes: Bulletin officiel du RJDA, no. 12, August 1954, ANOM: BIB SOM POM/d/174.

100. 100. On the Muslim Cultural Union, see Ousman Kobo, Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2012), 123.

101. 101. Motion des membres de l’UCM réunis en Assemblée générale le 28 juillet 1956, Thiès, ANS: 17G/596.

102. 102. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge.

103. 103. The debate over “Franco-Muslim” or “Franco-Arabic” schooling also took place in Cameroon, where the population was similarly divided between a largely Muslim north and Christian south. See, for instance, Robert Coquereaux, “Ecole franco-arabe ou École franco-musulmane dans le nord du Cameroun?” Mémoire de thèse, CHEAM, Received by the Dir-AFFPOL 15 February 1950 and stamped “confidential,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256, dossier 1.

104. 104. Report from Ignace Colombani to Paul Chauvet, June 24, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

105. 105. On the opposition of the French teaching corps to the ongoing funding of mission schools in AEF in the mid-1950s, see Adolphe Baillet, “L’école libératrice: La législation scolaire français bafouée en AEF,” May 7, 1954, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/234.

106. 106. Response from Chauvet to Colombani, August 12, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

107. 107. Chef du Territoire du Tchad Ignace Colombani à Gougal-AEF Paul Chauvet, May 23, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

108. 108. Chef du Territoire du Tchad Ignace Colombani à Gougal-AEF Paul Chauvet, May 23, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

109. 109. Ministre Teitgen à Gougal-AEF Chauvet a/s affaires musulmanes et Bandoeng, April 8, 1955, ANOM: AEF GGAEF 5D/269.

110. 110. Laurent Manière, “La politique française pour l’adaptation de l’enseignement en Afrique après les indépendances (1958–1964),” Histoire de l’éducation, no. 128 (2010): 163–190, https://doi.org/10.4000/histoire-education.2281.

111. 111. Note a/s le développement de l’Enseignement primaire dans les TOM et le problème de la langue arabe, unsigned (1956), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2256. This report tabulated combined rates of schooling in the territoires d’outre mer with Muslim majorities (Chad, Mauritania, Soudan, Guinée, Senegal, and Niger) and those with Muslim minorities (Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Dahomey, Cameroon, Madagascar, Togo, Gabon, Moyen Congo, and Oubangui-Chari). The contrast—8.4 percent in Muslim-majority territories versus 31.8 percent in Muslim-minority ones—is stark.

112. 112. Exposé sur la coopération technique et les échanges culturels, presenté par M. Dounia, Conférence de l’APE avec les parlements d’États Africains et de Madagascar, Strasbourg, June 19–24, 1961, CAC: 19771470/100.

113. 113. The EAMA included all of France’s ex-African colonies, including trust territories Togo and Cameroon, as well as Madagascar, Congo-Léopoldville, Rwanda, and Italian Somalia.

114. 114. Dounia, Exposé sur la coopération technique et les échanges culturels, CAC: 19771470/100.

115. 115. “La coopération technique et les échanges culturels” document du travail élaboré par Mario Pedini, Conférence APE avec les Parlements EAMA, June 1961, European Commission Archives: CEAB 5, no 888. Alain Peyrefitte, whom we encountered at the beginning of this chapter promoting European unity in French-occupied Germany, was a colleague of Pedini’s on the European Assembly’s Committee on Cooperation with Developing Countries. In preparation for the 1961 Eurafrican Conference, Peyrefitte compiled a summary of the European Development Fund’s activities since it came into force with the Treaty of Rome. According to his accounting, the fund had supported, at the cost of $122 million, 132 projects, 108 of which were in ex-French Africa and Madagascar. Social programs, primarily in education and professional development, accounted for more than half of the projects, but cost only $54 million. In his report, Peyrefitte characterized the goal of the fund in exclusively economic terms: to raise the national revenue and internal generation of capital in the associated states as quickly as possible. “Le Fonds de développement et sa gestion,” document de travail élaboré par Alain Peyrefitte, Conférence APE avec les Parlements EAMA, June 1961, European Commission Archives: CEAB 5, no 888.

116. 116. Marker, “African Youth on the Move.”

117. 117. Jeunesse et Aide au Développement, Étude introductive, préparée par le Secrétaire du Conseil de l’Europe sur l’aide que de jeunes Européens commencent à porter aux PVD, unsigned, Colloque Conseil de l’Europe/OCDE, Paris, December 3–4, 1962, CAC: 19780596/65.