This article examines Patrice Lumumba's afterlife among Congolese students in the 1960s. Mobilizing oral histories, it also interrogates the stakes of remembering Lumumba at different moments in Congo's postcolonial history. It shows how Lumumba's assassination became a collective and personal landmark in the biographies of a generation of student activists and clearly helped facilitate a turn towards the left in 1961 and in the years that followed. Overlooked by Cold War histories, this political process was nonetheless also a by-product of the internationalization of the Congo crisis and proved central to the historical imagination of a generation of educated Congolese. The dead Lumumba pushed young educated Congolese to revisit the meaning of decolonization. The article argues that the students’ extroverted political imagination was an important explanation for Lumumba's posthumous popularity in Congolese universities. Through their affiliation with the figure of Lumumba, young Congolese could expect to receive support and attention from real and imagined allies around the world. The international communion around Lumumba's name was sometimes the result of productive misunderstandings; nonetheless, his legacy played a crucial role in transnational mediation throughout the 1960s and made possible the circulation of new political repertoires among Congolese students.

In Zimbabwe after 2000, ZANU(PF) leaders’ past experiences of student activism in Rhodesia were celebrated by the state-owned media as personifications of anti-colonial, nationalist leadership in the struggle to liberate the country. This article examines the history behind this narrative by exploring the entangled realities of student activism in Rhodesia throughout the 1960s and 1970s and its role as a mechanism of elite formation in ZANU(PF). Building on the historiography of African student movements, I show how the persistence of nationalist anti-colonial organizing and liberal traditions on campus made student activism in Rhodesia distinct from that in South Africa and independent African countries to its north. The article then examines how and why three former activists, who took up elite political careers in the party that they subsequently left, contested the ruling party's anti-colonial, ‘patriotic’ rendering of these experiences. These three men's stories invoked imagined and older forms of nationalism or institutional ethic that had been abandoned by the party as it turned to more authoritarian rule. Stories of Rhodesian student activism thus provided space for justifying alternative political possibilities of nationalism, which implicitly critiqued the ruling party's ‘patriotic’ narrative, as well as for nostalgic anecdotes of life on campus, their journeys into adulthood, and the excitement of being part of a dynamic, transformational political project.

In May 1984, the Kenyan government of Daniel arap Moi introduced a National Youth Service pre-university training programme (NYSPUT) for prospective university students. The programme was designed to instil discipline in Kenyan university students and inculcate them with a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Moi regime prior to their arrival on campus. This article argues that, in practice, however, the scheme had unintended consequences: it served to alienate student recruits from the ruling party and helped radicalize a small but vocal group of student activists, who, when they arrived on campus, confronted the Moi state with some of its most defiant political challenges of the 1980s. Relying on extensive interviews with former student recruits and archival research, this article highlights the key role that the NYSPUT played in shaping Kenya's young generation of 1980s student activists, who represented one of the most united and militant student movements in the country's history.

African students in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) often belonged to national student clubs (NHG) that were arranged for them by the East German government. Many were also members of an umbrella organization for all African students and workers in the GDR (UASA). While the GDR authorities thought that the NHG and UASA would adopt political positions that reflected those of the GDR, this article demonstrates that the students instead used them to criticize both their own governments and their host country. It shows that the students often held positions contrary to the GDR's, and were not shy about expressing them. Although they were usually unable to organize as openly as students in the West, African students in the GDR held meetings and wrote letters to protest about a variety of issues, including Sékou Touré’s repression of a teachers’ strike in Guinea, the Biafran crisis in Nigeria and ethnic separatism in Kenya. They also took the GDR to task for the racist behaviour of East German citizens. The GDR's Socialist Unity Party claimed that the country was anti-racist and anti-imperialist, and that all vestiges of Nazism had been expunged; the students, however, were able to point out multiple racist incidents, and through the UASA demanded that the GDR address its racism problem.

In 1968, the Democratic Front organized a folkloric dance recital at the University of Khartoum as a prelude to the upcoming student union elections, a recital that was opposed by the Islamic Movement. This dispute culminated in a riot in which a student was killed, an event referred to as the ‘Ajako incident’, which is discussed as the first recorded instance of inter-student violence at the university. Drawing on newspaper accounts from the time, secondary sources and first-hand interviews with participants, this article explores the clashing political and moral ideologies at stake within the University of Khartoum, and their links and affective power in relation to Khartoum politics more widely. In the process, it argues that the student political sphere did not simply function as a mirror to the wider political environment, but rather as a mobilizing ground for ideologically based parties, allowing more radical youth groups to influence national dialogues and put pressure on national political actors.

In Uganda, teaching and learning were important metaphors for colonial rule, suggesting a benign protectorate under Britain's guidance. Ugandans, though, repurposed images of teaching, studying and educational sponsorship. Drawing on indigenous ideas about effective education as a sort of experiential education in leadership, they perceived student activism as a resource for a new political and social system. Articulate Ugandans sought elite British education as a weapon. Others emphasized the harsh competitiveness of Uganda's elite schools as the basis for new class solidarities. And educated men saw their ownership of schools as a foundation on which to build political followings as they worked to guide the country. Student activism in Uganda emphasized educated Ugandans’ individual and collective practice in power and leadership.

This article traces the experiences of Angolan students who attended East German institutions of higher education between Angolan independence and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on oral histories collected in Luanda from twenty-one returned Angolan students in 2015, triangulated with archival material from Angola and the GDR, it argues that students negotiated between accommodation and resistance in their everyday life at the university and beyond. Conscious of the importance of academic success and adaptation to the East German learning culture, Angolan students drew a line when regulations infringed on their personal freedom and responded by engaging East German officials in discussion or simply by circumnavigating the rules. The life history of a female student illustrates how she negotiated between responsibility to formal learning and personal needs within a controlling society. When one considers the conditions of Angolan student life in East Germany as a whole, it becomes apparent that the East German notion of the model foreign student did not map onto the complexities of Angolan student lives. This article sheds light on the student migration of a generation of Angolan post-independence technocrats, many of whom studied in the former East during the Cold War. Through the eyes of Angolan educational migrants, we see the limits and possibilities of the lives of foreign students in the GDR.

This article revisits the modern political history of Niger during the 1960s to the 1980s through an analysis of relations between student activists and government authorities. It explores how a student organization, the Union des Scolaires Nigériens (USN), managed to bypass multiple layers of political control to become a well-structured political movement, capable of seriously challenging the legitimacy of the authorities. Specifically, the article examines interactions between the USN and different bodies of political power, including the Diori and Kountché governments, in the larger context of regional solidarities and the Cold War. It analyses key moments of this struggle by showing how two generations of student leaders (those of the 1960s to early 1970s and the late 1970 to early 1980s) nourished the creation of specific windows of political action, which found various outlets for expression depending on the form of state power as well as the form and methods of activist work.

The movement of school teachers to primary and secondary schools around South Africa and its Bantustans in the early and mid-1970s was an intentional part of the project of propagating Black Consciousness to school learners during this period. The movement of these educators played a key role in their ability to spread Black Consciousness philosophy, and in the political forms and methods they chose in teaching it. These were shaped by their own political conscientization and training in ethnically segregated colleges, but also in large part by the social realities of the areas to which they moved. Their efforts not only laid the foundation for Black Consciousness organization in communities across South Africa, they also influenced student and youth mechanisms for political action beyond the scope of Black Consciousness politics. This article explores three case studies of teachers who studied at the University of the North (Turfloop) and their trajectories after leaving university. All of these teachers moved to Turfloop as students, and then away from it thereafter. The article argues that this pattern of movement, which was a direct result of apartheid restrictions on where black South Africans could live, study and work, shaped the knowledge they transmitted in their classrooms, and thus influenced the political consciousness of a new generation.