Triangulating between Church, State, and Postcolony

After decolonization, coopérants went to West Africa to teach under the French development program Cooperation. France’s investment in the culturally charged realm of education demonstrates how ties deepened between France and West Africa at the very moment that many spoke of loosening or severing them. While scholars often look at Franco-African relations from an official or diplomatic angle, this article reveals how these relations were a product of everyday negotiations between coopérants, local teachers, clergy, and transnational Catholic organizations as much as they were shaped by the decisions of French and African governments. Coopérants played many roles: they were the cultural currency of a newly technocratic French culture, religious representatives of the Church, putative experts, and indispensable teachers in countries not able to fully staff their schools with locals. Coopérants reveal how France’s presence abroad after decolonization was intertwined with the Church, even in majority Muslim and multi-religious countries such as Senegal and Dahomey. France’s involvement and coopérants’ presence have had important consequences for education in the region, including on the curriculum, the fact that French remains the language of instruction, and the prominent place that many Cooperation-funded Catholic schools maintain today.