Introduction: student activism in an era of decolonization

Scholarship on student activism in Africa has tended to be understood according to broader historical periodizations of elite African politics. This has largely been because of student activists' historical claims to be 'aspirant elites' (Cruise O'Brien 2003: 172). As such, scholars have explored student activists' role in anti-colonial nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, anti-structural adjustment and democratization protests since the late 1980s, and more recently in the resurgence of 'Fallist' student protests in South Africa (Nyamnjoh 2016; Booysen 2016; Heffernan et al. 2016). This special issue challenges these periodizations by exploring the histories of student activism during the era of decolonization immediately before and after independence. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, unlike the first generation of nationalist leaders who had refined their emancipatory anti-colonial politics on campuses abroad, African students in the era of decolonization did so through geographies that spanned both foreign institutions and newly created African universities. Inspired by Marxist-Leninism and Pan-African solidarity, these students often came to embrace transformational revolutionary politics during their university experiences. In many instances, their own expectations and political activities would come to challenge, upset and dramatically contest the designs of newly independent African states. The articles collected in this special issue, and first presented at a workshop entitled 'Student Activism Reconsidered' at the University of Oxford in July 2016, seek to develop understandings of African student activism during this critical period by revisiting postcolonial Africa's first student protests and experiences of university life. Many of the debates that these students initiated on campus would come, in subsequent decades, to be rearticulated on the national political stage through former students who went into prominent public positions or who set up or entered governing or opposition parties. As such, appreciating the ideas, behaviours and dreams that these people adopted during their university experiences can provide important insights into how they responded, as professionals and political leaders, to the challenges of economic crisis, structural adjustment and increasingly repressive authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s.

From its inception as a form of subjectivity, African university studenthood gave its members a 'cosmopolitan mobility' over social and spatial orders that opened up a new sense of political possibility (Ivaska 2018). Aside from Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, some universities in North Africa and a clutch of South African universities established by settlers, the idea of universities on the continent did not seriously 'enter the colonial imagination until quite late' (Cooper 2002: 111).¹ As a result, educated Africans who became university students prior to World War Two were most often educated at institutions of higher learning in the metropole (Goebel 2015; Matera 2015). In London, for example, the Nigerian student Ladipo Solanke, with a small coterie of other West African students (most of whom were studying law), set up the West African Students' Union (WASU) in 1925, which became a fulcrum for elite African debate of anti-colonial ideas (Adi 1998).² To these early students, their 'legal studies provided the basis for their criticism of British colonial rule', which was recognized by colonial authorities, as well as the belief that 'it was they, the intellectuals, who would become the leaders of the people' in independent Africa (Garigue 1953: 57). Many scholars have shown how WASU and other African university students during this period went on to play central roles leading anti-colonial nationalist movements (Anderson 2006; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009; Boehmer 2012; Livsey 2017). These metropolitan universities were troubling places of alienation and temptation within which many of the continent's foremost nationalist leaders, such Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, faced European racism and developed their own anti-colonial politics. In this way, these formative experiences of higher education abroad served to inform these leaders' involvement in their respective colonies' fight for decolonization (Adi 1998; Schatman 2009; Blum et al. 2016; Molony 2014).

The elite status that underpinned anti-colonial student activism, as well as its subsequent manifestations covered in this special issue, was eroded in the late 1980s and 1990s. Over the last...