This article intends to establish a close link between the former pupils of the Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre-Mer (ENFOM) and the Franco-African cooperation policy from the establishment of the French Union to the abolition of a Ministry of Autonomous Cooperation. The idea of cooperation is progressively present within ENFOM from 1946, while the Africanisation of students from 1956 can be read as ‘reverse proto-cooperation’. Continuity factors make it possible to put the break in 1960 into perspective. While the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Outre-Mer (IHEOM) is a kind of ENFOM reserved for future African elites, the decree on the reclassification of former directors allows them to retain a management role for the new independent states in Africa or from France. The pathways of former colonial administrators who have become cooperating are analysed by means of the concept of ‘African career’, which allows account to be taken of all functions with a functional relationship with the administrations and/or governments of the new States, carried out for at least one year, in France and sub-Saharan Africa. These African careers of course include cooperation in the strict sense, but also many other post-colonial functions, some of which lie at the same level as the nebuleous African region. The statistical analysis of the public careers of 1826 former FOM staff after independence is supplemented by the presentation of three individual courses of former ENFOM students (oral sources) and by a study of a territory where the former FOM officials are ubiquitous, the independent Central African Republic. Hélary Julien. Emperors without empire: the colonial administrator becomes co-operative. In: Overseas, Volume 101, No 384-385,2014. Cooperating and cooperating in Africa: circulation of actors and cultural recompostitions (from the 1950s to the present day) pp. 37-63.