Educating a transnational postcolonial elite

Abstract

Post-independence Nigerian university students have constituted an integral part of the volume of international migrants to the United States. This paper furthers this conversation by unpacking the exclusionary national structures that fostered a novel post-colonial transnational Nigerian elite class in the 1960s and 1970s through the African Scholarship Program of American Universities. By scrutinising the backgrounds of scholarship participants recovered from fragmentary and transnational sources, this article argues that the programme reinforced existing dichotomies in Nigeria.

Keywords

• women
• higher education
• elite
• transnational mobility
• postcolonial