98

This article is offering a comparative and interconnected reading of the events which took place in Senegal in May 1968, namely a strike by the students followed by a general strike by the workers, with the consequence that Senghor’s presidency was seriously shaken. The movements in Senegal and France are compared here with a particular focus on the similarities they present. The reasons for those similarities are the legal relationships that existed then between the former métropole and the former colony : the Agreements for Cooperation. The academic institutions in both countries were identical, their elites having often followed the same trajectories. The majority of the faculty at the University of Dakar was French. African students were enrolled in French universities while French students attended the University of Dakar. People and ideas circulated in many different ways. Nevertheless, the African context is not overlooked, characterised as it is by the one party rule in spite of the fierce resistance of students and unions eager to protect their autonomy. At that time, Congo-Brazzaville had already witnessed revolts in 1963, and so would Madagascar, a few years later, in 1972. The article places the movement in Dakar within the global context of youth revolts, those of a generation of students confronted with massive enrollments in universities, as well as different forms of neo-colonialism and/or imperialism, and sharing the same watchwords, icons, and struggles, under different forms, from Paris to Mexico, Berkeley to Berlin. So the aim of this article is to fill a gap in the historiography of the “years 1968” as Africa has been neglected, while it is, as much as the other continents, a terrain for what remains until now the latest global social movement.