By the late 1930s, France had a mere 385 colonial administrators commanding the destinies of 15 million African subjects. British Africa, with 43 million people, had a roughly comparable 1,200. By the late 1950s, the dawn of the independence era for the continent, out of a population of 200 million sub-Saharan Africans, European stewardship had produced only 8,000 secondary school graduates, half of whom were from just two colonies, Britain’s Ghana and Nigeria. In France’s territories only about a third of school-aged children received any primary education at all.
