After French president Emmanual Macron won reelection on 24 April, one of his surprise appointments to the new government was historian Pap Ndiaye as minister of education. The choice of a relative newcomer to politics, who presents himself as both a “symbol of diversity” and “a pure product of republican meritocracy,” came at a time when issues in race, gender, and identity politics have divided the French political class and public opinion.
Born to a French mother and a Senegalese father, Ndiaye is an internationally recognised academic specialising in US history and the history of minorities. A professor at the prestigious Sciences Po university and author of noted essays on African diasporas in the United States and France, he is considered a pioneer of “Black Studies à la française”, a field of studies whose goals and challenges he introduced in La Condition noire (The Black Condition, 2008).
In March 2021, Ndiaye was appointed director of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, France’s national immigration museum. He defined a clear mission statement for an institution housed in a building originally designed in the 1930s to promote the French colonial empire: “Our role is to make immigration a more essential part of the vision that the French have of their national history.”
