Development and Decolonization: French Development Organizations and the Training of Senegalese Development Technicians at the Centre de Rufisque

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, territorial assemblies in the French Union’s Overseas Territories in Africa and, subsequently, the leaders of independent nation-states they became, hired private French “societies for organization and planning in Black Africa” to evaluate and implement various development projects. This paper uses these Franco-African programs in Senegal during this particularly tumultuous period to explore broader questions about decolonization as a historical process foregrounding the experience of Senegalese development “technicians” trained by these organizations.

In January 1959, Mamadou Dia, Senegal’s Prime Minister, signed a joint contract with two of these organizations: the Society for Economic and Social Study and Implementation in Agriculture (SERESA, f. 1954) and the Company for Industrial Studies and Territorial Development (CINAM, f. 1957). Dia and his cabinet tasked SERESA and CINAM with a series of “microanalyses'' of cities and as well as broader economic, financial, and social structures that shaped the development of the country to furnish Senegal with a “long-term plan” for “integral development.” These planners’ connections to theories of French economic humanism, espoused by Father Louis Joseph-Lebret and François Perroux, are well known. Yet the French and Senegalese individuals who surveyed, measured, and implemented these projects have received minimal scholarly attention. CINAM and SERESA were unique among these many French organizations working in Africa: they trained Senegalese men and women to conduct the research themselves. Drawing on archival research from Dakar and Paris, I focus on CINAM’s Center in Rufisque and the Senegalese development technicians it taught to explore the intwined histories of development and decolonization from the ground up. How did CINAM’s development pedagogy shift after Senegal declared independence from France in April 1960? Through the lens of development, I explore the continuities and ruptures of decolonization.