Making Tradition Great Again: Educational Cadres, Rural Schools, and Decolonization

Despite the foundational role of rural communities in 20th-century revolutions, little research explores how mass education influenced agrarian mobilization under colonialism. By showing how Vietnam’s Confucian village education shaped persistent violent rural rebellion, whereas Senegal’s Islamic education system was associated with more peaceful agitation among the urban working class, I analyze the material and cultural conditions that shaped diverse decolonial trajectories resulting in Vietnam's independence from France in 1945 and Senegal's in 1960. Using a paired comparison, consisting of both correlational and process-based analysis, I examine colonial archival data collected over two years in Vietnam, Senegal, and France to understand the triadic interactions between rural indigenous teachers, colonial elites, and urban indigenous elites. Urban indigenous elites who underwent modern forms of schooling were perceived by colonial authorities to be a threat and source of decolonial thought. Yet, village schools were what anchored agrarian communities in intellectual, social, and religious traditions, equipping them with tools to govern autonomously. Findings suggest that village schools, rather than being mere vectors of colonial propaganda and urban-elite mobilization, played critical roles in fostering self-determination and mediating between tradition and modernity. Rural indigenous actors experimented with novel forms of educational practice as they faced a crisis of legitimacy from within precolonial traditions. These indigenous elites sought to make traditional institutions "great again" while confronting the issues it posed for indigenous communities. I thus argue that traditional indigenous teachings flourished alongside Western ones so that political ideologies, such as democratic Confucianism or pan-African socialism, could find resonance among the masses and re-constitute political community precisely through the work of educational cadres in traditional village institutions. This study confronts the well-worn binary of domination versus resistance often used to understand peasants by showing how rural indigenous elites enabled and constrained the emergent decolonial projects of their urban counterparts.