Although it is often claimed that Africa has “fallen off the globalization map” in the 1990s, the globalization process has had more dramatic consequences for the African continent than for any other region on the planet. African nations have been among the first targets of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have imposed on indebted countries across the South. African nations have also been subjected to systematic “disinvestment,” which has reduced them to their former colonial role as producers of raw materials and labor power for the international economy. These developments have torn African societies apart. The dismantling of local industries, the privatization of economic assets, and the defunding of the public sector have stripped Africans across the continent of their most basic means of subsistence, leading to an unprecedented increase in unemployment, poverty, migration, and social conflict. The situation has also profoundly altered the schooling process. In the aftermath of adjustment and economic disinvestment, there has been an attempt to replace the educational and professionalization systems that had been constructed in postindependence Africa with a technocratic system of professional formation aimed at producing political and economic elites aligned with the interests of international capital and the goals of structural adjustment. This program so far has not succeeded, given the tremendous resistance to it from students and faculty across Africa. Nevertheless, it has already irreversibly transformed the “social contract” that had prevailed between the new generations of Africans and the state, in which education and professionalization played a crucial role. It has also made African societies more vulnerable to the “recolonization” drive at the core of globalization and the neoliberal agenda. Not least, it has undermined the production and distribution of knowledge in Africa, making it increasingly difficult for African intellectuals and professionals to carry on their work and participate in the global exchange of ideas.
