[1] Governors General Ernest Roume (1902–1908) and William Ponty (1908–1914) oversaw a reorganization of the French higher educational system in the colonies, and placing Georges Hardy in charge, moved the colonial administration into a model which used elements from both a "Direct", Assimilationist policy and an Indirect, rule by African proxy policy.
[3] Jules Brévié, governor of French West Africa from 1930 to 1936, wrote that "colonization needs scholars, impartial and disinterested researchers with broad vision, outside of the urgency and fire of action.
[4] The Popular Front government, in 1936, converted the Comite d'etudes historiques et scientifiques de l'AOF into the Dakar-based IFAN, and placed naturalist Théodore Monod at its head.
From the opening of the institute in 1938, Monod sought to promote Africans into positions of authority in IFAN, such as ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ.
With the end of the Second World War, an influx of African intellectuals and French radicals (such as Jean Suret-Canale) found homes in IFAN and its branches, some taking part in political agitation through organisations like the Senegalese Popular Front, the RDA, and the Communist Study Groups of the 1940s.
By independence IFAN had offices in Saint-Louis, Abidjan, Bamako, Cotonou, Niamey, Ouagadougou, associated centers in Douala and Lomé, and permanent scientific research stations in Atar, Diafarabé, and Mont-Nimba.
Most branches of IFAN, notably in Conakry (Guinea), Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire), and Bamako (Mali), became the basis for national archives and research centers.
It is for us a sort of intellectual duty and a requirement of colonial honour to study the countries that we must administer and the people that we must educate and protect.