Étudier à l'Est

Étudier à l'Est: expériences de diplômés africains. [Studying in the East: the experience of African students]. Edited by Monique de Saint Martin, Grazia Scarfò Ghellab and Kamal Mellakh. Paris: Karthala. 2015. 300pp. €25.00. ISBN 978 2 81111 463 3. ‘Studying in the East’ is the product of an expanding field: the research of interactions between socialist eastern Europe and the global South in the aftermath of decolonization. The book deals with the experiences of African students in the Soviet Union, Romania, the Democratic Republic of Germany and Bulgaria. It discusses these individuals’ global exposure as their trajectories take them back to their home countries as well as to western Europe or North America. The volume is the result of France-based research project African Elites Formed in the Communist Bloc. Jean-Pierre Dozon remarks in his introduction that the itinerary followed by African students starting in the 1960s is a sign of their globalized status (p. 13). Coming from impoverished, newly independent states, these individuals reached countries where they encountered radically different societies, while also acquiring the expertise granting them upward social mobility at home. These peregrinations signal a symbolic shift. The West and the colonial metropolis as traditional destinations of higher education were supplanted by eastern Europe and the USSR. The phenomenon underlines simultaneous internationalizations: the decolonized world found a developmental alternative in the East and state socialism projected a global identity during the Cold War. The African students’ stories in communist countries and their later fates epitomize the vagaries of such intersecting globalizations. The trip to the East, as Monique de Saint Martin stresses, is ‘a genuinely major event in the biographic trajectory of the former students’ (p. 19)

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