VII. — The ENFOM, 1940-1959

The Ecole Coloniale had been closed during World War 1, but it continued to operate during the second world war. In fact, at no time in its history had there been as many graduates during a five-year period as between 1940 and 1945 approximately 350. The war confronted the school with a whole set of unusual circumstances. From 1939 on, in the face of vast changes overseas, the school's directors found a continuous need to readjust both the curriculum and the methods of recruitment. This chapter studies the efforts of the ENFOM to cope with a changing world from 1940 until it was transformed in 1959 into the Institut des hautes etudes d'outre-mer (IHEOM).
During the war, Delavignette who was the director at the time, persuaded the Vichy regime to continue recruiting a large number of students for the ENFOM in order to replace retiring officials and to enlarge the overseas personnel. Those measures were necessary, he argued, because the empire would play a central role after the war. In advocating the expansion of the student body, Delavignette was also motivated by a desire to spare as many young men as possible from labor service in Germany, for all the cadets of the school were exempted.
Considering its location in German-occupied Paris, the ENFOM enjoyed surprising liberty during the war. The school was virtually free of supervision from Vichy. The Pétain government appointed a new council of administration, but, significantly, it retained the director and most of the faculty. The full weight of Vichy control made itself felt, however, in regard to the recruitment of students. Since the cadets were civil servants, the Vichy civil service statute excluding Jews and other specified groups was enforced. By law the students were also required before entrance to have served a tour in the army or in the Vichy youth organization, the Chantiers de jeunesse 1. Although it was located directly across from the German Komrwndatura in the Luxemburg Palace and next to a German casern at Lycde Montaigne, the school was left relatively free of German intervention. Since the Germans had pron-dsed to respect the integrity of the French empire, the occupying authorities evidently decided that intervention in the institution that was training colonial officials might seem to indicate Nazi designs on the French possessions; and such a move would needlessly alarm the Vichy regime.
Because of the war, Delavignette was unable to carry out some of his far-reaching plans for curriculum reform. In 1941 he suggested that the program of studies be extended to four years. His plan was as follows: during the first year the cadets would complete their general education; in the second, they would choose the section they wished to enter (Indochinese, African, or Malgache) and would begin following specialized courses pertinent to those regions. At the end of the second year the cadets would be appointed as student administrators to the colonies. For a year they would serve in subordinate administrative positions overseas before returning to the ENFOM for their last year of studies. Delavignette saw this probationary period in the colonies as “a physical and moral test.” He placed it in the middle of the cadets' studies in order to “illuminate the studies, to give a concrete sense to education by giving our students contact with the men of the country in which they will practice their profession.” 2 During their probationary period the students were to be paid a salary of 24,000 francs per year. This would inculcate in them “professional morality” and a pride in earning their own living 3. After a year in the colonies, the cadets would return to the school where in light of their experience they would complete their studies.
Delavignette's suggestions were embodied in a decree 4, but it was soon rescinded. The plan survived in a somewhat emasculated form in which the curriculum was limited to two years. During the summer between the first and second year of studies, the cadets were sent overseas for a study trip, after which they returned for their last year at the ENFOM. Upon graduation, they served for a year as probationers, either overseas or in the central adndnistration of the undersecretariat of colonies, before being appointed to the Corps 5.
The reduction of the period of study and the emphasis on practical training overseas “served as a means of getting the students away from the Germans.” 6 Members of the school took an active part in opposing the German occupation. When war broke out, 135 students were mobilized, of whom fifteen were killed and sixty were taken prisoner. Especially toward the end of the war a number took art in resistance activities; seven of these were executed by the Germans 7.
Delavignette was an official of the Vichy regime, but he refused to report on the resistance activities of his students. In fact, he and his family provided help to the resistance 8. When called to Vichy and asked the whereabouts of a number of students, Delavignette answered that he could not be made responsible for his students' whereabouts. He told Admiral Henri Bléhaut, the undersecretary of colonies, that “these were difficult times when even parents could not be expected to control their own children.” This was an allusion to the admiral's own son, who had joined de Gaulle in London, and thenceforth Delavignette was not asked to account for his students 9. Perhaps because attendance at the school gave immunity from labor service in Germany and was a way of eventually getting away from war-torn France, the school's popularity increased during the war. Between 1940 and 1944 there was a yearly average of 360 candidates for seventy-three posts. This large number permitted the school to be very selective, and during those years only 20 percent of the candidates were admitted. Immediately after the war the school became even more popular; 618 candidates applied for eighty-five posts in 1945, 900 students competed for ninety-five posts in 1946.
In wartime France, the colonies looked attractive to young men who wanted to escape the stifling atmosphere of German-occupied or Vichy ruled France; but overseas duty also represented a patriotic activity. An entrant to the ENFOM in 1942 wrote that it was “the humiliation of defeat” that caused him to go to the colonies, and “if I had been strong in mathematics I would have become a naval officer.” A young man who entered the school three years later recalled that he chose the colonial career because “I wanted to participate in the reestablishment and the spread of influence of my country following the humiliating war, and I also wanted to leave this humiliated country.” Another young man who entered the school during the war wrote that he prepared for a colonial career because of his “desire to share in the tasks which France has taken upon herself to carry out in her colonial empire; namely, to bring civilization to people still submerged in the night of mankind's primeval age.” 10
A pamphlet published by an agency of the colonial ministry listed reasons why a young man should be interested in a colonial career:

The colonies attract you because of your reading and exotic movies, because you are tired of the pettiness of metropolitan existence, [and] because you have had disappointments.
You want to leave! You hope to find in these distant possessions a better life, which will be unrestricted and more attractive.
The colonial functionary ... participates in the great task of French expansion, he is in contact with the native environment on which he acts every day. He is in every post and at all times the representative of the civilizing nation 11.

A striking aspect of this pamphlet, and also of the statements by the former students of the ENFOM, is the persistence of certain ideas about the colonial vocation. In no way had they really changed during half a century. And perhaps those ideas which combined a desire to serve other peoples with a heavy interest in exoticism were the only ones capable of attracting Europeans overseas. But the very prejudice in the ideas toward modern society in France created an ambiguity toward modernization and made the administrators into less effective instruments of change than they otherwise might have been.
In addition to young students in France, there were others who gained admission to the ENFOM after the war; among them were men who had participated in the Free French movement. During the war the Free French developed a certain hostility toward the career civil servants. Had not most of the regular military officers and civilian officials collaborated with Vichy? The French bureaucracy should be reinvigorated by appointing the men who had participated in the arduous task of liberating France. René Pleven, the Gaullist commissioner of colonies, originally planned to appoint 400 men from the Free French forces to the colonial service, but eventually he appointed only about 150. And after receiving six months' training at the ENFOM and a year's probationary service overseas, they were named to the Corps.
Veterans of the Free French forces, former war deportees and prisoners, and regular veterans of World War II were favored in entering the normal training program of the ENFOM. While other candidates required the equivalent of one year's law study before applying to the school, the men belonging to the above-mentioned categories were only required to have the baccalauréat. They also received bonus points in their entrance examinations. By 1946, however, the special recruitment of resistance fighters and veterans came to an end 12. These men had a lower educational level than the average entrant 13, although many had had practical experience overseas and several, as colonial troop officers, had administered desert nomads.
After the war Delavignette continued to emphasize the need for practical experience, and in March 1945 he declared:

The school must form administrators, that is, men involved in our present world, accustomed to social contacts and not rigidified in a world apart. And these administrators must understand very different men.... Finally, our school is worth less through the sum of knowledge that it disyenses than by the ideas it suggests, and by the personal reflection it favors 14.

The men appointed to the staff of the school also reflected Delavignette's interest in bringing to the students the latest and best information available on the overseas territories. Immediately before the war he had appointed the brilliant young ethnologist Jacques Soustelle as a teacher. When war broke out, the latter was succeeded by Marcel Griaule, famed for his research on the Dogons in the Sudan. After the war, Hubert Deschamps, an authority on Malgache society and an experienced administrator, joined the school. It was Delavignette, too, who appointed the first African ever to teach at the school. This was Léopold Senghor, a deputy from Senegal, who was given the responsibility of teaching a course on African civilization and one on African linguistics.
After World War II a limited program, separate from the ENFOM, was instituted to give additional academic training to some of the most outstanding administrators. In 1936 the Popular Front government had established the Centre de hautes etudes d'administration musulmane (CHEAM) to provide additional training for some of the government functionaries serving in French North Africa and in the French mandates in the Middle East. The aim of the Center was to give the functionaries gathered from those different areas an opportunity to compare their experiences and mutual concerns, and thus gain a better understanding of the social, political, and economic problems of Moslem areas. Originally, no administrators serving in Black Africa were included; but in 1946 the Center enlarged its interests to include the study of Islam in Black Africa and Asia. While the Center remained strong in Islamic studies, it gradually enlarged its scope to include general problems of overseas territories and the underdeveloped world. In 1958 the name of the Center was changed to Centre de hautes etudes administratives sur l'Afrique et l'Asie modernes which was a belated recognition of the change in emphasis.
Government officials who had been in public service for six years, or more, at least four of them in Islamic areas overseas, were eligiblO, to compete for entrance to the Center. The competition consisted of two stages: first, the writing of an essay on some political, social, or economic , aspect of the area in which they had served and second, an oral examination in an African or Asian language. At the Center a series of seminars was offered dealing with contemporary problems, fundamentals of sociology, ethnology, economics, applied psychology, and the civilizations, religions, and ideologies of Africa and Asia. After attending the Center for three months its members had to present another mémoire, again dealing with some aspect of the area in which they had served, and had to pass examinations in the following fields: general problems of the Islamic world, the French colonies in general, the foreign empires, and an African or Asian language. Upon finishing those requirements, the students were awarded a brevet. Between 1946 and 1959, seventy-six overseas administrators received that degree from the Center. Although the Center accepted only officials who were already intellectually alert, its training helped update their information 15.

In 1946 Delavignette was appointed high commissioner of the French Cameroons, and was succeeded as director of the ENFOM by Paul Mus. The latter was a Far Eastern expert; in fact, he was one of the best-known French scholars on Far Eastern languages, religions, and archaeology. During World War II he played a leading role in the resistance movement in Indochina. His appointment to the ENFOM was in line with the traditional alternation of directors between men associated with Africa and those of Indochina. The war in Indochina also seemed to make it imperative that the administrators destined for service in that area be trained by a man who knew it intimately.
Delavignette had been director of the school in an era in which there was relatively little change in the methods of French rule. Within the authoritarian framework that existed until 1946, the teachings of the ENFOM seemed relatively progressive. The school was almost alone in offering courses dealing with overseas France. It advocated understanding of the overseas peoples, and taught the future administrators “how to command in order to serve better 16.”
Mus, on the other hand, became director of the school in a period of vast change. The ENFOM no longer retained the monopoly in giving advanced instruction on the overseas territories; universities and other institutions such as the Institut d'etudes politiques had also established their courses on the territories. And overseas vast social, political, and economic changes were going on at an unprecedented speed which not even the most sensitive observers could always appreciate.
Much of the spirit of the school after the war seemed somewhat atavistic. The emotion-laden “baptismal” of the class of 1944, named “Ebou6” after the governor-general who had just died, seemed to have little to do with the new challenges developing overseas. Kneeling on the ground in the ENFOM courtyard, the neophytes vowed to consecrate their lives “to the service of Empire, for the grandeur of France, and the development of our civilization 17.”
Mus, a man of liberal views, was never able to transform the school to fit the image he conceived for it 18. He shared responsibilities with the administrative council of the school, and as its director he could have influenced the council, but he left his powers largely unused. Some of Mus's personal friends, who still claim to be his warm admirers, have intimated that although a first-rate scholar and thinker, he lacked administrative skills 19.
In fact at no time in the history of the school was there such a discrepancy between the ideals of its director and the curriculum and spirit of the school as existed during this period. Most of the faculty at the ENFOM consisted of prewar colonial administrators or of university men, many of whom had not been overseas for a long time. For many teachers at the ENFOM the reforms of 1946 were not the beginning of an evolution in the overseas territories, but the last step in that evolution. Before the war many of the teachers at the ENFOM had advocated a change in the institutions of the overseas territories, but after 1946 the school became, instead, an upholder of the status quo.
Mus himself, however, was a vigorous proponent of change overseas. The colonial populations, he stated, did not want administrators who knew colonial customs; what they desired was the introduction of “social and political institutions, certainly adapted to the colon , but inspired by those existing in France and in the white man's world 20.”
Beginning in 1946 the students at the ENFOM tended to be less impressed with the curriculum of the school than their predecessors had been. Before the war colonial questions had been debated only among a small number of specialists, but after 1946 overseas problems increasingly became the topic of discussion among the educated classes. Thus the students coming to the school often had definite ideas on overseas policy. The summer months that they spent in the training program overseas also gave the cadets valuable insights into the changes occurring in the territories. Comparing their experiences and the knowledge acquired from associating with African students on the Left Bank, many cadets found themselves in conflict with their teachers.
The cadets who spent their summers overseas were required to write essays expressing their opinions on some of the problems connected with the territories. One of the cadets returned to Paris in 1948 after serving in Brazzaville, and chose as his topic “Some Reflections on the New French Colonial Policy.” It was an attack on French policy, arguing that the evolution overseas was so rapid that the provisions of the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 and of the French constitution of 1946 had become irrelevant. The essay pointed out the eventual need of granting the territories independence; but typically, it still insisted on the desirability of establishing a genuine liberal federation between France and her possessions. The teacher grading the essay thought the student a traitor to the French cause, and gave him the failing grade of nine out of a possible twenty points 21. These differences between students and the institution were to become even more apparent a few years later.
The curriculum of the ENFOM, compared with that of the pre-World War II period, no longer seemed impressive. Many of the postwar graduates felt that the curriculum of the ENFOM was in no way as challenging as the feat of gaining admission to the school. As one former administrator put it, the “school gave one a well-deserved two years' rest.” An important effort to make the school more relevant was made by decree in October 1950, when a series of reforms was introduced. The bachelor of law degree, requiring two years of study, became the diploma required for entrance to the school. Once they had gained admission, the students would thus have to spend only one additional year to acquire their licence in law and therefore could devote more time to studying strictly overseas subjects. The school also permitted an alternative to a legal degree; that was the possession of two certificates in the study of overseas peoples, a licence d'études des populations d'outre-mer (a new degree offered at the University of Paris) of which one certificate would be in droits et coutumes doutre-mer (overseas laws and customs). But since candidates for entrance to the ENFOM were required to study for either a bachelier en droit or a licence ditudes des populations doutre-mer before they knew whether they could gain admission to the school, most of them preferred the study of law. If they failed to enter the ENFOM, they could then complete their law studies and enter the metropolitan civil service, in which case the certificates in licence d'études des populations doutre-mer would, of course, be practically useless.
The decree of October 1950 set the apprenticeship—the on-the-job training program overseas—at eight months, following four months of orientation in Paris 23. The experience overseas was intended to acquaint the cadets with problems of overseas administration and to test their aptitude for that service. While those were the ultimate aims of the apprenticeship, the officials of the school also saw its effects in more modest, immediate terms; they described the eight months overseas not as a “period of apprenticeship, but [as an] introductory experience intended to prepare the student for the instruction which is to follow 24.”
After their orientation program in Paris, the cadets went out in pairs to rural areas in AOF, AEF, or Madagascar for four or five months. They served the rest of their assignment in the territorial capital, learning about the administrative services. They worked in different departments and were graded by their supervisors. Unfavorable grades could eliminate a student, but this rarely occurred. At the conclusion of their apprenticeship, the cadets were required to write an essay on an overseas problem—for example, peanut commercialization in Senegal, the process of urbanization in a particular region, or some particular ethnic grouping 25. After their overseas experience the cadets returned for two more years of study in Paris. During the third year they spent five weeks in on-the-job training in the ministry of overseas France, or in private industry 26.
The decree of 1950 lengthened the period of training required of lower civil servants wishing to become overseas administrators. Instead of one year, they now had to spend two years at the ENFOM, following the same curriculum as the other students returning from their overseas apprenticeship. Until World War II the majority of administrators were lower officials who had received supplementary training at the ENFOM, but after the war the overwhelming majority entering the Corps were cadets of the school. Only a small number of lower civil servants chose to go to the ENFOM for additional training.
Significantly, the reforms of 1950 made no changes regarding the learning of languages, and the traditional disregard for indigenous languages remained, except for a token bow toward the teaching of the most rudimentary and theoretical elements of African languages. Even during the overseas apprenticeship, no special provision was made for learning the local language. In fact, even the licence d'études des populations d'outre-mer did not require the knowledge of any language spoken overseas. A very weak incentive, the granting of a yearly supplement of 15,000 francs ($43.00), was made to the administrators who knew the local language 27.
While the reforms of 1950 attempted to bring about change, Paul Bouteille, the new director appointed in that year, was ill-suited to infuse the institution with a new and innovative spirit. Before becoming director, he had served as Mus's administrative assistant; earlier he had been an overseas administrator. While Delavignette and Mus were known for their liberal attitudes, Bouteille was more closely identified with the conservative wing of the overseas bureaucracy. He had occupied a high position in Madagascar during the brutal repression of the Malgache revolt in 1946-1947.
The school underwent a certain decline beginning in the 1950s, and by the mid-1950s, enrollment had dropped dramatically. The decline was due almost entirely to external forces rather than to any fault of the management, for the Corps was restricted in size by law, and therefore replacements were allowed only for those leaving the service. Further, by 1954, the French had lost control over Indochina and thus no longer recruited any functionaries for that region. In 1945 the ENFOM had had 367 students, but in 1947, only 240, and in 1953, 120 21.
In spite of the fact that entry into the school was highly selective, it did not enjoy the status of the Ecole nationale d'administration (ENA) which was founded in 1945. The two schools recruited students from similar social and educational background, but the ENA, which was training men for higher civil service positions within France, was more respected than was the ENFOM. To combat the situation Paul Mus had vainly suggested in 1948 that the ENFOM be incorporated as part of the ENA. The opposition to Mus's plan came from the ENA, which did not wish to expand its facilities, and from the alumni of the ENFOM, who were sentimentally committed to the continuation of their alma mater 29.
Thus the two institutions continued to exist side by side, with the ENA enjoying a higher status. Roy Jumper in his dissertation on the ENFOM has suggested several reasons for this disparity. The ENA, he argues, was connected with the metropolitan civil service, which traditionally has enjoyed higher prestige. Second, the curriculum and administration of the ENFOM lacked the stability of those of the ENA, for they were subject to changes deriving from varying overseas policy. Third, the positions for which the ENA trained tended to be better remunerated than those given the graduates of the ENFOM. Fourth, the entrance requirements to the ENA were stiffer than those of the ENFOM. Fifth, the staff and facilities at the ENA were of higher caliber than those of the ENFOM 30.
In spite of the differences between the two institutions, the students were similar since they came from the same social background (See Table 10). Probably the only difference in the type of men attracted to the two institutions was that the cadets of the ENFOM tended to be more adventurous and had a greater urge to live in a world of large horizons than did the'ENA students destined for the metropolitan civil service.

As to the ENFOM students themselves, there was little difference in social background between those of 1950 and of twenty years earlier, except for a decline in recruitment from families in the liberal professions (Table 7). Families belonging to the upper middle classes, especially to the higher civil service, continued to be the main source for the recruitment of the Corps.
This remarkable continuity in social background was due to the persistence of certain patterns of recruitment. In spite of the many reforms the school underwent after 1927, the method of the concours, with its heavy emphasis on general literary knowledge, continued. In 1936 the question in French composition had been to discuss “The pessimism of Leconte de Lisle in the Poèmes barbares; its nature, its limits.” In 1942 the assignment had been to comment on a long section chosen from Montaigne; in 1946, from Michelet's works. The concours of 1948 required a discussion of “Solitude in Rousseau's and Pascal's thought.” 32 Other topics included in the concours were the history of French colonization, economic and human geography, morale and sociology, and living languages. In the first field, i.e., French colonization, in 1952 the examination called for a description of “desirable constitutional changes in the French Union.” In the field of economic and human geography the question was about migration patterns within the empire, and in the last field, morale and sociology, the candidates were asked to discuss whether engagée literature was desirable 33. Living languages were tested, as in the late 1920s, orally. Only candidates with superior education, such as that received by the sons of the bourgeoisie at the better lycées, could usually pass the examinations.

In spite of the relatively homogeneous background of the cadets, they were as a rule alert and intelligent young men. Their apprenticeship overseas and their contacts in France made them increasingly aware of the gap between the realities overseas and the picture presented at the ENFOM. In 1952 some students formed a secret discussion group known as the Groupe d'éudes politiques de l'Afrique et Madagascar, also known by its acronym as GEPAM. With increasing anxiety this group saw that while the world was rapidly changing, the curriculum at the ENFOM and the institutions overseas were in no way taking account of those changes. The curriculum of the school still was aimed at forming “generalists,” men having a broad training, who knew how to command. Thus the curriculum, as in the late 1920s, included a smattering of subjects, such as tropical medicine, cattle raising, ethnology, and administrative law, but it did little to prepare the students for the changing world overseas. There were no serious courses on economic development, sociology, and contemporary events. In 1956 the student newspaper estimated that the three-year curriculum consisted of 872 hours of courses, of which only eighty-five were devoted to the study of economics, and even less (thirty-two hours) to the study of politics 34. No course, the student newspaper charged, mentioned the recent Bandung Conference of African and Asian peoples or the charges regarding Algeria brought against France in the United Nations. The issues that were really crucial to the evolution of the French Union, the paper charged, were being ignored 35.
In February 1956 three-fourths of the students issued a manifesto denouncing the overseas political institutions and the curriculum of the ENFOM as being irrelevant to the changes taking place overseas. They declared it desirable that the overseas territories achieve internal autonomy, that political power be “returned to the Africans and the Malagasy.” The role of the French administrator, they suggested, should be limited to that of economic adviser or to temporary administrative tasks. The signers of the statement, seventy-one of the ninety-seven students attending the school 36, asked that “a radical change be instituted both in the entrance examinations and in the training, by transforn-drig the school into a section of the ENA.” Or, alternatively, they suggested “the complete transformation of the spirit, the recruitment, and the training” of the ENFOM students. Furthermore, the manifesto demanded progressive Africanization of the Corps of Overseas Administrators, the introduction into the curriculum of specialized technical education and “of serious economic and sociological training 37.”
Most of the signatories, according to one of the sponsors of the manifesto, were Socialists. They reflected the ideas of the Socialist student movement which was ahead of the Socialist government in its demand for the establishment of territorial autonomy overseas. By spring the National Assembly was to pass a loi-cadre that made possible overseas autonomy. Yet there was a subtle difference: the Socialist government of Prime Minister Guy Mollet was to present autonomy as a generous reform, while the student manifesto had spoken of it as a measure which “returned” political power to the overseas populations. Though the published reports make no mention of it, witnesses claim that the declaration accompanying the publication of the manifesto also spoke of the need to “end the era of commandants mitrailleurs (machine-gun-toting commandants) 38.” This was an unnecessarily violent and patently unfair attack by the future administrators on the overseas service, but it guaranteed public attention 39.
Among the twenty-six who did not sign the manifesto were sixteen cadets in their last year of studies. They were undoubtedly more concerned than were their younger colleagues about the effect that participation in the manifesto might have on their careers. One of those not signing was an African student who found the wording too extreme. Ironically, he is now a cabinet minister in his independent country. In spite of the attention given the manifesto when it was published and the general perturbation it caused in the administration of the ENFOM, none of the signers (according to one of the instigators) suffered in his subsequent administrative career 40.
The manifesto caused no change in the curriculum of the ENFOM, but it was a measure of the degree to which the cadets were aware of overseas developments and favored a general shift in French policy 41. Clearly it was not as radical as both its opponents and its proponents had thought. But in any case, the loi-cadre adopted in the summer of 1956 paved the way for increased political autonomy overseas and the Africanization of the Corps.
There had never been many Africans in the Corps; nearly all of its members with black skin had come from the French Antilles. A small but steady stream of métis had entered the service, the majority of them born in Senegal. At most a half-dozen Africans entered the Corps from the time of its founding until 1945, but after 1951 Africans were eligible for entrance to the ENFOM on an equal basis with the inhabitants of metropolitan France. Africans, however, clearly had less opportunity to become successful candidates. Fewer educational facilities were available overseas than in France; until the late 1950s there was no preparatory class for the ENFOM overseas, and in addition the social and cultural milieu of African candidates prepared them poorly for the concours. Many Africans who were potentially qualified to enter the administration preferred to enter the liberal professions and local politics. In the early 1950s an average of two African students a year entered the school.
Hubert Deschamps noted in 1954 that as a teacher in the school he found fewer black students than he had thirty years earlier when he was a student. Most of the black students then had been Antilleans, but even they had declined in number. The failure of the school to attract black students, Deschamps claimed, was due to the unpopularity of the French administration overseas 42. An article in the student newspaper of the ENFOM in 1956 suggested that the odiousness of the ENFOM as a “colonialist institution” made it unattractive to Africans; it was not the educational and cultural disabilities of Africans that kept them away from the school, for a large proportion of those taking the entrance examination passed it; the real trouble lay in the fact that few Africans wished to apply. The solution, the paper suggested, was to end the affiliation of the school with such a patently colonial establishment as the ministry of overseas France. It suggested that an overseas training division be set up at the ENA, or that an Institut d'outre-mer be established as part of the University of Paris 43.

In 1957, the school began a program of Africanization 44. Alongside the regular competition for entrance, known as concours A, and the competition for entrance for lower government officials wishing to enter the Corps after a preliminary two years of training at the school, known as concours B, it established a new examination for entrance, known as concours C. This new competitive examination was open only to higher overseas officials who were indigenous to the overseas territories. The entrance requirements were relatively stiff; in addition to passing the entrance examinations, the candidates had to have the equivalent of two years of law studies or general university education and to have spent two years at the ENFOM receiving further training, before being appointed to the Corps.
The changes in 1957 also stipulated that 66 percent of all new appointees to the Corps of Overseas Administrators were to originate in the territories. Under these circumstances, the process of Africanizing the Corps would have been a long and painful one. The Corps in 1958 had approximately 1,700 administrators. With twenty-five new administrators being appointed yearly, of whom sixteen would have been Africans, it would have been long indeed before the majority of the Corps would be Africans 45. To speed up the process the school shut its doors in 1958 to all but Africans. In the following year, the ENFOM discontinued operation. A new institution, the Institut des hautes études d'outre-mer (IHEOM), administered by the office of the prime minister, took over the old quarters. Its role was to train young Africans for positions of responsibility in their countries, which were rapidly achieving independence. [???]
At first the Institut had to give low-level courses to prepare lower civil servants, some of whom had only an elementary education, for higher administrative posts. Some of the former teachers of the ENFOM, who had been retained, resigned on the grounds that the students lacked proper academic preparation. Others, like Delavignette, noted that there were difficulties in teaching the African students because of their uneven educational background (“inégalité de la culture des élèves”), but he also found that some of the best and most enthusiastic students had only an elementary education 46.
With the establishment of national schools of administration in each of the successor states, only the better educated students, or higher civil servants, continued to be sent to the IHEOM in Paris for more advanced, or additional, training. Other French-speaking states such as the former Belgian colonies also found it profitable to send their young men to the IHEOM. The enrollment of the school grew markedly: in 1959 it numbered 107 students; by 1963 there were 646 47.
Like the ENFOM, the IHEOM prepared young men for regional administration, for the magistracy, and for a number of other state services. Like the ENFOM, it gave the same training to all its students regardless of where they would serve. The training also combined course work with practical experience. But rather than being sent overseas, the Africans were sent for on-the-job training to a prefecture or an industrial plant in France.
Some of the general courses, such as African ethnology and administrative law, were still taught in much the same way as they had been before, and indeed by the same teachers from the ENFOM. In that way some continuity in administration overseas was assured. Furthermore, by training so many Africans in France the IHEOM created an administrative elite which continued to look to France for inspiration.
A visitor to the IHEOM in 1965 might have noticed two wooden Buddhas once located in the stairways of the old Ecole Coloniale. And it might have occurred to him that in times long past they must have gazed at the sons of the mandarins and the young prince of Porto Novo, and later on at the generations of young Frenchmen who studied to become “the real chiefs of the empire.” And now they gazed upon Africans who read many of the same books, attended similar lectures, and listened to some of the same professors, as they in their turn prepared to become the masters of a new Africa. As the halls continued to buzz with animated discussions about administrative law, about ethnology, about the differences between penal and customary law, about dreams and hopes for the future, the visitor might have imagined that he could hear through the din the Buddhas murmuring something about the immutability of time 48.
In 1966 a decree renamed the IHEOM and it became known as the Institut intemational d'administration publique (IIAP). While the IHEOM had been specifically intended to train men originating from the former colonies, the IIAP is a school for all foreigners wanting to prepare for an administrative career. A number of students come from Latin America, Asia, and English-speaking Africa, but most of the students still come from former colonies.
Much of the curriculum and the student body has changed since the Ecole Coloniale was first founded, but the school at the Rue Observatoire, as in bygone days, continues to ensure the spread of French influence overseas.