An Anticolonial Development

• Department of History

This book launch organised by the African History Working Group features a talk with Elisa Prosperetti (Nanyang Technological University).

In what measure could Europhone education be an agent of African freedom? An Anticolonial Development examines the rise and fall of that premise in two West African contexts, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, from roughly the 1890s to the 1980s. In doing so, it offers a fresh approach to the history of development, for what is under investigation here is a development paradigm—not an infrastructure project or top-down expertise—shaped by Africans themselves. Anticolonial development imagined a wholesale repurposing of the colonial economy, from one based on the bodily exploitation of African people to one powered by their intellect. Combining histories of race, development economics, and neoliberalism, An Anticolonial Development shows how, in the era of decolonization, Africans proposed an original understanding of development that fused antiracism to economic theory, and human dignity to material productivity. The basic infrastructure of schooling, quite apart from the flashy hydroelectric dams or agricultural mechanisation schemes, fired people’s imagination of how bright their future could be.

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of international history at the National Institute of Education, part of the Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. She specializes in histories of development and decolonization in Africa and the Global South. Her work has appeared in publications including the Journal of Contemporary History and the Journal of African History. She recently co-edited a special issue of Ghana Studies devoted to the long 1970s in Ghana. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 2020 and taught at SciencesPo (France) and Mount Holyoke College (USA) before moving to Singapore.

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