La formation technique et professionnelle a souvent été considérée comme un facteur déterminant dans le processus de développement des forces productives des pays en quête de progrès, de croissance et de modernité tel que le Gabon. C'est dans cette logique qu'elle fut institutionnalisée et légitimée dans la loi 16/66 portant organisation générale de l'enseignement dans la République gabonaise. Mais depuis la tenue des Etats Généraux de l'Education et de la formation de 1983 au Gabon, le bilan diagnostic et les perspectives de l'enseignement technique et professionnel scolaire conduisent au désenchantement. Ses effets, pervers ne cessent d'être relevés dans les discours tenus par la société civile nationale et internationale. La parole n'étant jusqu'à ce jour pas donnée à ses principaux bénéficiaires que sont les élèves et les enseignants, c'est tout l'objectif de la présente étude. Avec eux, nous débattons des attributs sociaux de l'enseignement technique et professionnel scolaire, afin de répondre à la question de son attractivité, en dépit des discours peu élogieux prononcés à son égard. Nous examinons aussi les causes de l'inefficacité de l'enseignement technique et professionnel scolaire en interrogeant les conditions de scolarité des élèves, les certifications, les rendements scolaires et le vécu de carrière enseignante. / Technical and vocational studies have often been considered as a major element in the development process leading to progress, growth and modernity in countries such as Gaboon. lt is in such a state of mind that it was institutionalized and became legitimate with the law 10/66 which dealt with the general organization of education in the Republic of Gaboon. Since the EtatsGénétaux de l'Education Formation in 1983, the balance and perspectives of technical and vocational education led to a disillusioned view. lts biased effects are examined by the civil national and international society. Although, up to now the main benefactors such as the students and the teachers have not been allowed to speak up, it is thus the main object of our study. With their comments, on one hand, we shall view the main social features of the technical and vocational school in order to check its interest, notwithstanding the lack of favorable comments in public speeches. On the other hand we shall examine the causes of the lack of efficiency of the technical and vocational schools regarding the schooling, the process of graduation, the output and the insight of a teacher's career concerning his wages.

My dissertation, “Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An Unusual Story of Redemption,” assesses the experience of American missionaries in the Cherokee nation and in Western Africa during the nineteenth century. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded in 1810, was the first successful foreign missionary society in the U.S., and its campaign among the Cherokees served as springboard for its activities in “Western Africa”—Liberia, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and South Africa. Although the Cherokees and the West Africans were two different peoples, the ABCFM used the same method to Christianize them: the Lancasterian method with which the missionaries planned to “civilize” the Cherokees and West Africans before Christianizing them. Scholars such as William McLoughlin and Theda Purdue studied the missionary perspective and the Cherokee perspective as separate entities and convincingly maintained that the Cherokees embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program partly to relieve the pressures on their lands and partly to adapt to the cultural pressures of their times. However, as my dissertation argues, the conversion story of the Cherokees takes a different turn if told simultaneously from the missionary and the Cherokee perspectives. Regarding the West African experience, authors such as Lamin Sanneh and Richard Gray have recently exposed the missionary and African sides of the stories with new questions that had been waiting to be asked for a long time. My dissertation, taking a unique comparative perspective, reveals first that West Africans did not face the same pressures as those faced by the Cherokees, yet, they still embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program, though with a lesser sense of urgency and with more assertiveness than did the Cherokees despite the white missionaries’ racism. More importantly, by way of a method I call parallel agency, my dissertation offers a revisionist interpretation of the history of missions, which has traditionally emphasized the power of the white missionaries by calling into question the very assumption that the white missionaries had significantly more power than did their Cherokee and African converts.