‘Rien ne va Plus…’ The Collapse of the Colonial Educational Structures in Zaïre (1960-1995)

With the words the roulette croupier uses to announce that no more bets can be placed the title summarizes the enormous problems of the educational structures in Zaïre. Without wanting like some authors to assign the “guilt” for that bankruptcy exclusively to a failing colonial past (Mobutu, 1989; cf. also Celis, 1990) it appears that the foundations of the colonial training and educational system in the Belgian Congo, along with the economic decay, continued to contribute to the dysfunctioning of the Zaïre educational activities up to the present. This becomes clear not only for educational policy—Mobutu’s experiment of nationalization and Zaireization went totally wrong—but also for the educational effects. An essentially westernizing educational project is still being produced that has been inseparably linked to the 18th century idea of modernization, the uprooting phenomena in the subculture of the new rich, who, for that matter, have adopted the mental, social, and spatial structures of colonialism. In this sense, the striving for authenticity, which was also expressed in the more contemporary development models—not always without a touch of romanticism—can hardly be called successful.