The Government-General of French West Africa (FWA) established a public education system in the colony by decree in 1903. This marked a new departure in education policy since, prior to that, education had largely been the preserve of the mission schools. From the outset, the new public education system was designed to meet a number of separate, though linked, objectives. The first of these was to consolidate French influence among the mass of the population by establishing a network of elementary rural schools throughout the colony—‘la conquête morale’ (moral conquest) of Africans, in the words of Director of Education Georges Hardy . The other goals of colonial education, as outlined by Hardy, were: to ensure that the education given to Africans was appropriate to their (presumed) level of intellectual development and met the needs of the colony; to teach Africans the value of manual work and impart the skills which were seen as necessary to make them more ‘productive’; to select and train loyal intermediaries to staff the lower levels of the colonial administration and European firms; to educate Africans without uprooting them from their family and religious environment; and to avoid education becoming a source of social unrest through the production of déclassés. 1 In short, the central objective of the new public education system was to dispense French education to Africans in carefully measured doses, so as to ensure that it met colonial needs without posing a threat to political stability. This policy was called ‘adapted education’.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘civilising mission’ (mission civilisatrice) was the official ideology of the Third Republic’s new empire. Yet the cultural and political assimilation of Africans was not one of its objectives, not even for the small indigenous elite that reached the pinnacle of the FWA education system. 2 In this respect, its impact—if not its express intent—was to legitimise a form of segregation between French and Africans: denied access to the same education and qualifications as French people, Africans could not apply for the same jobs.
Education was not in fact a priority for the Ministry of Colonies, with the result that the policy of adapted education was largely formulated by the Government-General in Dakar and its implementation overseen by the colonial administrations of the different territories. Africans had no say over policy and under the indigénat (native civil code that established their status as subjects) there was no possibility of mounting any serious political challenge. Only in the Four Communes of Senegal , where the residents had French citizenship, were there any sustained political campaigns on the issue of education before the Second World War. 3 As we shall see, this situation was to change fundamentally at the end of the conflict.
French colonial education policy has been the subject of a number of studies. Early works by Ray Autra, Denise Bouche and Paul Désalmand focused largely on policy and institutions. 4 African reactions to colonial education have, until recently, been little studied. Rémi Clignet and Philip Foster’s The Fortunate Few was in this respect an exception. 5 Their approach was to show how many Africans initially rejected colonial education, but then increasingly came to view it in a more positive light as they saw the opportunities for social mobility that it offered. The varying pace of acceptance by different communities was explained essentially by reference to the length of exposure to Europeans. However, as Jean-Hervé Jézéquel has pointed out, this is an over-simplification; African reactions to colonial education were complex, diverse and fluid, and the binary opposition between initial African rejection of colonial schools versus subsequent acceptance fails to capture this. 6 In seeking to address this problem, Jézéquel’s approach was to chart the different strategies of African families vis-à -vis French schools and trace the trajectories of a number of their pupils in order to illustrate the diversity of African responses. Taking this a step further, this chapter takes as its starting point the explicit recognition that education is not ‘just’ about education, but is both part of, and representative of, a wider picture of power relations and interactions. The focus is therefore on political interactions, rather than just on African perspectives and reactions, as in much of the previous literature. In adopting this approach, the chapter brings the history of education into recent broader trends in the study of colonial history by addressing wider issues of African agency and how Africans appropriated and (re)shaped European institutions—in this case colonial education—for their own purposes. 7
The chapter begins by tracing the development of the policy of adapted education through the inter-war period, focusing in particular on the rural popular schools initiative, and setting it in the wider context of France’s ‘civilising mission’. 8 It will also show how debates over colonial education policy during the Popular Front period (1936–1938) raised questions about who had the right to define colonial modernity and what this might mean for ‘traditional’ Africa. As such, they pre-figured some of the political conflicts over education that would emerge at the end of the Second World War. The chapter then goes on to examine how education came to be recast as part of France’s colonial ‘modernising mission’ after the war. In the new post-war political context, where Africans were citizens of the French Union and part of the ‘one and indivisible’ French Republic, education policy would no longer be the reserved domain of the colonial government. Instead, it became a key site of contestation, in which a range of French and African actors sought to take control of the policy agenda—with some advocating a renewed form of adapted education, while others demanded the introduction of full metropolitan-style French education. The complexity of these debates and struggles over education policy is not captured in a binary opposition of French versus African. As we shall see, divisions emerged that crossed this divide, notably between different French government departments and officials, with the result that French and African actors would on occasion come together to pursue their shared objectives against their opponents. 9 The chapter concludes by showing how these struggles were ultimately not just about education policy , but raised much wider questions about the means and ends of France’s post-war ‘modernising mission’: from incorporation, differentiation and exclusion within the ‘one and indivisible’ Republic to the future maintenance of French sovereignty in Africa.
Georges Hardy , Adapted Education and the Civilising Mission
Hardy was appointed Inspector of Education in FWA in 1912, at the age of 28. Called up in 1914, he was injured in 1915 and returned to the colony where he held the post of Director of Education until 1919. From there he moved to Morocco , where he served as Director of Education for seven years, and subsequently became Director of the Ecole Coloniale in Paris where he would play a key role in 1930s debates about colonial education policy .
Central to Hardy’s approach to education was the vital importance of adapting it to the local colonial situation: ‘native education cannot follow the same syllabus and adopt the same methods in Tonkin and the Congo; here education is aimed at a completely barbaric people (‘des populations tout à fait barbares’), whereas in the former it is aimed at races whose civilisation…is older than our own’. 10 Given the supposed backwardness of the populations in FWA, the ‘civilising mission’ could not mean transforming—or seeking to transform—Africans into ‘black Frenchmen’ in any foreseeable future. Education in FWA was not therefore assimilationist in the same way as in metropolitan France . Under the Third Republic, the introduction of universal, free and secular education aimed to produce a nation of loyal, patriotic, equal and enlightened citizens by moulding ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. 11 In the metropole, schools would thus create unity from diversity by teaching not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well. In FWA there were two crucial differences. First, whereas in the metropole the aim was to educate and train patriotic citizens as the foundation of a united Republic rooted in the shared values of the Enlightenment, in Africa it was to create loyal, ‘more civilised’ subjects. Second, education policy in FWA was informed by the belief that ‘Africans had to evolve within their own cultures rather than that of France’, which led to the constantly repeated mantra that education must be adapted to the special needs of Africans. 12
This had a number of ramifications. With regard to structures, a key feature was the non-equivalence between the French metropolitan and French West African education systems. While the stated objective was universal education as in the metropole, this rapidly proved an impossible dream. By 1922 there were just 25,249 pupils in 330 public schools in FWA, making the participation rate approximately 1.4%. By 1935–1936 this had risen to 53,155 pupils in 392 schools, which suggests a participation rate of between 2.5 and 3%. 13 Moreover, in France primary education up to the age of 13 had been compulsory since 1882 whereas in FWA the majority of pupils would spend just two or three years in school, with the declared aim of ‘establishing a point of contact between the indigenous population and ourselves’. 14 A minority of pupils might stay at the village school for up to six years, but in neither case was any diploma awarded. Only the very best of the village school pupils would be s...