Until the nineteen-sixites the African "students novel" certainly showed the principal characters involved in educational processes. The article discusse how the Western model of the novel depicting only the unfolding of the individual has never been followed. Some essential areas - traditional education, the Koranic school - have rarely been treated in full. Interior evolution has been overruled by accompanying circumstances. Both the societies of origin and contact become more important than the individual's fate. The tendency is to leave the colonial past behind and make headway towards actual problems. The somewhat plaintive descriptions have been replaced by militant discussion and the readers seems to be much more the average person than the highly educated African or Westerner. True fiction begins to supercede the biographical substratum; pedagogical concern leaves the foreground to social and political complexes. The former desire for harmony fades away in favoour of a conflictual, even violent view of the world.