French Fathers and Their “Indigenous Children”

2020

The choice of a marriage partner is one of the contexts in which racial arguments about the human difference between slave and master descendants are more likely to manifest themselves in contemporary Senegal. By drawing on oral history and ethnography from the Fulfulde-speaking context of the Kolda region, this article explores the dynamics that spark up when girls and boys hope to marry across the boundary between the two social categories. The discussions that follow provide an occasion to share recollections associated with the history of slavery and the slave trade across different generations. They also reveal concrete worries about the extension, solidity and development of family and political solidarities in post-slavery Senegal.

2019

The monograph discusses the relation between primary education in French West Africa in the first half of twentieth century and the attempts of colonial administration to identify the conquered African population with the French Empire. It primarily focuses on the way the pupils of diverse ethnic origin such as Wolof, Fulani, Bambara or Serer, who attended the French primary schools in the villages and towns in Senegal or French Soudan, learned to be Africans but also to be French. It puts particular emphasis on teaching history and inevitably addresses another important issues such as the implication of French nationalism, imperialism and colonial racism in the education of African pupils. By studying these relationships, the monograph aims to sheds more light on the roots of various stereotypes about Africa and Africans in the present day Western society and vice versa. In order to to better illustrate the most important aspects, most of this work focuses on colonial Senegal.

The Journal of African History, 2011

ABSTRACTThis article explores the politics of race and education in early twentieth-century urban Senegal, focusing on the exclusion of African students from certain schools and on the political controversy that grew out of a 1909 education reform. Based on letters from officials, politicians, and African residents, along with minutes from the General Council, it suggests that changes in urban society and colonial policy encouraged people to view access to schooling in terms of race. This article argues that in debating segregation and education quality, residents contributed to a discourse on race that reflected an increasing racial consciousness in the society at large.

Historical Reflections, 2011

Development and Change, 1998

This article analyses French assimilation policy towards the four communes of the colony of Senegal, placing it in a new conceptual framework of globalization' and`post-colonial studies'. Between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, the four cities of Saint-Louis, Gore e, Ru®sque and Dakar were granted municipal status, while their inhabitants acquired French citizenship. However, the acquisition of these political privileges went together with a refusal on the part of these`citizens' to submit themselves to the French code civil. Their resistance manifested itself in particular in the forging of an urban culture that diered from both the metropolitan model and the Senegambian models of the independent kingdoms on the colony's fringes or the societies integrated as protectorates. This article argues that, at the very heart of this colonial project and despite its marked assimilationist and jacobin overtones, a strong project of cultural and political hybridization developed. The inhabitants of the quatre communes forged their own civilite which enabled them to participate in a global colonial culture on the basis of local idioms.``W e have left Senegal, the ballot boxes colony, Blaise's Kingdom, the ten thousand citizens of the four`fully empowered' communes Ð empowered to practice prestidigitation, boxing and kickboxing! Here are the Blacks, the real ones, the pure ones, not the children of universal surage, but those of Old Cham. How polite they are! They rush out of the bush to say Hello to you!'' (Albert Londres, Terre d'eÂbeÁne, 1929) 1. This article is a heavily revised version of a piece that will appear in V. Y. Mudimbe (ed.) Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy, under the title`Islam, christianisme et assimilation: Histoires des religions dans les Quatre Communes du Senegal'. I thank Rene Collignon, who agreed to read and comment on this paper. 2. On this, see the classic studies of Michael Crowder (1962) and G. Wesley Johnson (1991/ 1971). The prevailing interpretation stresses that the natives lost their African identity.

Africa, 2018

in shifting circumstances. Second, it demonstrates that studies that treat racial politics as discrete local practices, impervious to external ideals, overlook the power of human agency in the rapidly globalizing world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Third, and most importantly, it puts the anti-colonial movement in its merited place in the history of sexuality. Whether it is the story of the 1919 race riot in which white men blamed black men for taking their jobs as well as their wives, or the case of Felicia Agnes Knight, who protested about the impending termination of her white husband's appointment in Ghana in 1961, the intersections of race, nationalism and sexuality come to life in an important manner. The 1919 race riot in Britain and its implications for black men's economic survival and immigration status assumed new meaning in the contestation over interracial marriage and sex in the 1920s and 1930s, as Gold Coasters decried the increasing 'enticement' of their women by 'irresponsible' white men who abandoned the children they had fathered. While cases of deliberate abandonment of multiracial children existed, the big questions about interracial affairs often dovetail with the core features of anti-colonial struggles that viewed white men's sexual relations with African women as another arm of capitalist expropriation. Thus, the contest over the injustice of colonialism in the Gold Coast included the exploitation of the sexual body, in addition to the abundant solid mineral and agricultural resources of the colony. The intersections of sex, race and antinationalism find another interesting dimension in Ray's analysis of interracial affairs between white women and members of the West African Students' Union (WASU), who shaped the anti-colonial movement and politics in the immediate post-independence era. Ray's observation that romantic affairs between WASU members and white women 'were not just personal, they were also political and politicized' (pp. 212-13) is compelling and apt. Crossing the Color Line is tier-one scholarship, capable of directing a new course in historical research on sex, gender, race, diaspora, empire and identity formation, among other themes and subfields of African colonial history. In Carina Ray's rigorous hands, the reader is introduced to stories of men and women across location and race as they encountered and contested shifting metropolitan and colonial conceptions of race relations, power and gender.

Cahiers d'études africaines, 1993

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

This article tells the story of a young Charleston physician, John W. Schmidt Jr., whose medical license was revoked in 1831 because he was accused of being of "mixed blood." The physician's ancestry was unusual: his grandmother Marie-Adélaïde Rossignol Dumont was born in Gorée, West Africa; she was not a slave but a wealthy merchant who came to the United States in the 1790s via the French colony of Saint Domingue, which she left in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The grandmother used various strategies of social and racial self-reinvention as she roamed the Atlantic world. Her acceptance into the Charleston elite was consistent with a traditional definition of race that was social and political rather than biological. The decision by the Medical Society of South Carolina to revoke her grandson's license following a denunciation by a fellow refugee from Saint Domingue and fellow physician, Vincent LeSeigneur, was a manifestation of the rising "scientific racism" whose early advocates were members of the medical profession. In 1772 two wealthy women from Gorée in West Africa, a mother and a daughter, moved to the French colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean. Twenty years later they settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where they became part of the local elite, although by 1831 one of their descendants would have his medical license revoked because of his African ancestry. Thanks to Christopher L. Brown, Mamadou Diouf, and Emmanuelle Saada for comments and suggestions.

The Journal of North African Studies, 2018

West Africa experienced extensive warfare and enslavement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Populations were scattered along the main slave trade routes in Western Sudan. This article analyzes how formerly enslaved populations used migration and diasporic practices to rebuild autonomous communities and social networks, and to overcome legacies of slavery away from their region of origin. This entailed renegotiations of kinship, marriage and religious practices in the Kayes region (Mali) and the Siin (Senegal) where stigmatization and vulnerability were deeply rooted in the history of slavery.