Decolonizing the University: Postal Politics, The Student Movement, and Global 1968 in the Congo.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the Congolese student movement at the time of decolonization and global 1968. Educated youth played an important, yet understudied, role in Congo’s crisis of decolonization. How did students experience Congo’s independence and the series of violent events that opposed them to the state at the end of the 1960s? This work shows how university students individually and collectively shaped politics in crucial ways in the Congo.

Throughout the 1960s, students denounced the unfinished decolonization of higher education and the unrealized promises of national independence. The two issues crossed in the demonstration of June 4th, 1969. Violently repressed by the police, the demonstration triggered a series of transformations in higher education and the configuration of power in the postcolony.

This dissertation situates the violent struggle between students and the state at the end of the 1960s within a longer history that starts with Belgian colonial educational policies in the 1920s. A first part introduces the historiographical stakes; reflects on methodology, interrogates the memory of the student movement and the left, and articulates the notion of postal politics, which serves to problematize global mediations at the time of Congo’s decolonization. A second part retraces the long genesis of higher education in colonial Congo, and establishes the institutional and ideological context in which student politics emerged before independence. A third part investigates the student turn to the Left in the 1960s, particularly after the assassination of nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, a time when many young Congolese achieved access to foreign universities, and supported the revolutionary uprisings led by Pierre Mulele. The last part focuses on the demonstration of June 4, 1969 and global 1968 in the Congo.

Based on 18 months of field research in the Congo, the dissertation combines archival work and interviews with former actors in the student movement. Further interviews and archival research were conducted in Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, and the United States.