Overview:
Ambition and Adjustment reveals how responses to this human capital problem from the political left and right converged in unlikely ways to block Africa’s postcolonial progress. Focusing on nation-building projects in Zambia and Tanzania, Priya Lal recounts how the first generations of Africa’s professional class faced pressures on all sides–from foreign planners prioritizing economic growth and from local socialists decrying higher education and professionalization as wasteful and elitist. When African development stalled, international institutions like the World Bank took up parts of both approaches, justifying structural adjustment programs that defunded African universities and hospitals in the name of social equity. Indeed, Lal shows that neoliberal austerity in the 1990s was packaged in Africa’s socialist narratives from the 1960s.