Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature: The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie 1793644446, 9781793644442

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Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature

Colonial Legacies in Francophone African Literature The School and the Invention of the Bourgeoisie Mohamed Kamara

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kamara, Mohamed, 1968- author.   Title: Colonial legacies in francophone African literature : the school and     the invention of the bourgeoisie / Mohamed Kamara.   Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes     bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023039543 (print) | LCCN 2023039544 (ebook) | ISBN     9781793644442 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793644459 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: African literature (French)--History and criticism. |     Postcolonialism in literature. | Education--Africa, French-speaking. |     Social classes--Africa, Sub-Saharan.  Classification: LCC PQ3980  (print) | LCC PQ3980  (ebook) | DDC     840.9/967--dc23/eng/20231010  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039543 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039544 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to Eric Sellin (1933–2021) Savant, scholar, writer, teacher, mentor, and above all, friend

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Colonialism, Colonial Education, and the Invention of a Subaltern Class Chapter 1: Pedagogy of the Colonized: Theories, Ideologies, and Policies of the Colonial School in Francophone Black Africa

1

27

Chapter 2: From Theory to Practice: The Colonial School in Francophone African Literature

55

Chapter 3: Making Good Wives and Good Mothers: The Education of African Women in Colonial West Africa

89

Chapter 4: When Slaves, Bastards, and Dogs Rule: The Colonial School as Agent of Social Transformation

123

Chapter 5: The Colonial School and the Emergence of New Human Types ‌‌‌

157

Chapter 6: Reality or Invention?: Literary Representation of the Bourgeoisie on Trial

189

Conclusion: A Literature about Failure

215

Bibliography Index



225

235

About the Author



247

vii

Acknowledgments

I am not a self-made man. Far from it! Many people have contributed, in one way or another, to this project. Each one of them deserves my thanks. My parents: Adama Kamara, Sheka Alimamy Bangura, Kadiatu Kamara, and Foday Momoh Kamara. My wife and friend, Tida Dramé: for being you and always being there. My children, Luba, Adama, and Musa: for being my role models. My siblings and friends: Kelfala Kamara, Umaru Bah, Mohamed Kanu, Patrick Bernard, Patrick Lamin Tongu, Nimatulai Bah, Abioseh Porter, Oumar Chérif Diop, and Kandioura Dramé: for being reliable traveling companions on one or more stages of my journey. My teachers from Koidu Secondary School, Fourah Bay College, Kalamazoo College, Purdue University, and Tulane University: James Kwasi Arthur-Yeboah, “Auntie” Laurel Turay, Henry Cohen, Paul Benhamou, Gaurav Desai, Hope Glidden, and Madeleine Dobie: for teaching me a thing or two about reading, thinking, and writing critically and humanely. Heartfelt thanks to Larry Boetsch, Hank Dobin, Suzanne Keen, Marc Conner, Lena Hill, and Chawne Kimber who, either as dean, provost, or president at Washington and Lee University, provided moral and professional support for this project. Thanks to Mr. H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest, Washington and Lee University alumnus whose generous donation via the Lenfest Grant funded much of the research for this book. Thank you, Auntie Gloria and Doctor Ben Idowu, for being just wonderful. Thank you, Cristina Pinto-Bailey, for your question and comment on the feminization of the social order that led me to recalibrate my understanding of the education of African women in the colonial period. Special thanks to Domenica Newell-Amato, whose professional and compassionate approach to copyediting and indexing simplified the final revisions of this book. ix

Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Class of 1956 Provost’s Faculty Development Endowment at Washington and Lee University. Thanks to all those not mentioned here by name, but whose impact on this work is no less significant.

x

Introduction Colonialism, Colonial Education, and the Invention of a Subaltern Class

As he approaches the end of his sprawling memoir, Amkoullel, l’enfant peul,1 Amadou Hampâté Bâ offers the following assessment of the colonial school: une entreprise de colonisation n’est jamais une entreprise philanthropique, sinon en paroles. L’un des buts de toute colonisation, sous quelques cieux et en quelque époque que ce soit, a toujours été de commencer par défricher le terrain conquis, car on ne sème bien ni dans un terrain planté ni dans la jachère. Il faut d’abord arracher des esprits, comme de mauvaises herbes, les valeurs, coutumes et cultures locales pour pouvoir y semer à leur place les valeurs, coutumes et la culture du colonisateur, considérées comme supérieures et seules valables. Et quel meilleur moyen d’y parvenir que l’école? (Bâ 1991, 382) Colonization is never philanthropic, except in words. One goal of every colonial enterprise, wherever and whenever it is undertaken, always starts by clearing the conquered territory, for one can sow neither in fallow nor in already cultivated land. Like weeds, the values, customs, and local cultures must be pulled up and replaced with the values, customs, and culture of the colonizer, which alone are considered to be superior and of greater value. And what better way to accomplish this than through the school? (Bâ 2021, 312)

If Bâ concludes the above retrospective with a specific reference to the school, he opens it with the broader question of the colonial project in which the school played arguably the central role. As is the case with all colonizing undertakings, the goal of French colonization was total cultural and economic domination and ultimate assimilation of the colonized into the universe of the colonizer. Once military conquest had been achieved, the colonizer realized that military supremacy alone was not enough to hold and govern subdued territories. And to effectively govern the colonized and achieve his goals, the colonizer had to somehow coopt the 1

2

Introduction

colonized into the work of their domination and destitution. It did not take long for the colonizer to determine that the school was the most effective way to achieve his objective. This stage in the process was referred to as the “conquête morale” by legendary colonial education administrator, Georges Hardy. Hardy expressed the above observation from Bâ even more bluntly: Pour transformer les peuples primitifs de nos colonies, pour les rendre le plus possible dévoués à notre cause et utiles à nos entreprises, nous n’avons à notre disposition qu’un nombre très limité de moyens, et le moyen le plus sûr, c’est de prendre l’indigène dès l’enfance, d’obtenir de lui qu’il nous fréquente assidûment et qu’il subisse nos habitudes intellectuelles et morales pendant plusieurs années de suite; en un mot, de lui ouvrir des écoles où son esprit se forme à nos intentions. (Hardy 1917, 54) To transform the primitive populations of our colonies, to make them more devoted to our cause and useful to our interests, we have few resources at our disposal. The most crucial of these involves taking in the native as a child, having him spend significant amount of time with us, and familiarizing him with our intellectual and moral habits for many years. In short, we should give him a school where his mind will be molded according to our intentions.2

The school—specifically, a basic knowledge of the White man’s language, as well as carefully selected aspects of culture and civilization—would make the conquest durable. In other words, it was through the school and the small army of middle figures it would engender that the colonizer planned to consolidate and make permanent his control over Africa. In a sense, I propose in this book what Samba Gadjigo calls “un socio-diagnostic de l’école coloniale française en Afrique noire” (“a social diagnosis of the French colonial school in Black Africa,” 21), especially as it relates to class formation through the colonial educational institution. African literature is a treasure trove of narratives about the colonial school and its impact on the individual and society alike.3 This book comprises an in-depth study of eighteen texts—sixteen prose narratives and two plays— from that corpus, produced mostly by writers who went through the colonial school. As will be seen in the synopsis of the texts below, the list includes works published between 1920 and 1997: three during the colonial period; three in the first decade of independence (the 1960s); seven in the 1970s; three in the 1980s; and three in the 1990s. Nine of the texts have the colonial period as their subject matter. With the exception of Pierre Sammy’s L’Odyssée de Mongou (Central African Republic) and Bernard Nanga’s Les Chauves-souris (Cameroon), all the texts are about West Africa, including Francis Bebey’s Le ministre et le griot. This novel, though written by a Cameroonian, is about a fictitious West African nation just a few years into its independence. I have



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included L’Odyssée de Mongou in this study for comparative purposes— mainly to show that when it comes to colonial policies and practices, regarding education more specifically, the difference between Afrique occidentale française (AOF) and Afrique équatoriale française (AEF; of which Central African Republic [Oubangui-Chari] was part) was merely geographic.4 As for Les Chauves-souris, its inclusion here shows how generalized corruption and inefficiency are in states run by elements trained in Western education. Even when the text is set in the postcolonial period (Traites, Les soleils des indépendances, Xala, Mhoi-Ceul, Les chauves-souris, Le ministre et le griot, and Les coupeurs de têtes), it operates on the unmistakable premise of the long durée of colonization, as is evident in the slow pace or lack of reforms of the educational system inherited at independence. SYNOPSIS OF TEXTS Amadou Mapaté Diagne’s Les trois volontés de Malic (1920) is about a Senegalese boy who is infatuated with French education during the colonial period. After resistance from his family and school authorities, Malic ends up having his three wishes fulfilled: attending the village school, going to the city to further his education, and becoming a blacksmith even if his caste precludes him from that profession. Malics’s personal success, which becomes a boon for his family and community, represents an effective propaganda for the “usefulness” of French colonial education. Furthermore, through Malic’s life story and educational odyssey, Amadou Mapaté Diagne accomplishes a larger project, namely the justification of French colonization. “Je suis une Africaine . . . j’ai vingt ans” (1942) is the anonymously published autobiography5 of Frida Lawson, a young Togolese woman whose quest for learning takes her through schools in Togo and Dahomey (present-day Benin), and finally to the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque, Senegal, the summit of French education for girls at the time. Graduating with a teacher’s diploma around age twenty, Frida concludes her autobiography promising to use her French education to make her own choices and to help liberate African girls from stifling traditions, while staying loyal to her African heritage. Climbié (1956) is Bernard Dadié’s autobiography retracing his journey from his idyllic village where he lived with his uncle and aunt through elementary and primary schools in the Côte d’Ivoire to the summum of colonial education, the École Normale William Ponty on Gorée Island in the Senegal colony. In Dadié’s novel, hardly anything positive is shown about the school and Climbié’s time in it. The novel also chronicles Dadié’s career as a clerk

4

Introduction

in the colonial administration in both Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, a career that ends in imprisonment for Dadié and others opposed to discriminatory and oppressive colonial policies and practices. Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961) is the story of Samba Diallo, a young, precocious Senegalese aristocrat forced to attend both the Koranic school and the French colonial school. He ends up at the Sorbonne, France, where his adventures into the labyrinths of Western philosophy, after interrupting his Islamic education back home in Diallobé country, leads him down the road of self-doubt, which ends fatally for him. In a larger sense, the novel is about a series of compromises that lead to varying outcomes for individuals and communities alike. Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances (1968) is about Fama Doumbouya, a surviving member of an ancient Malinke nobility dispossessed by colonial conquest and out of place in the new postcolonial dispensation. Fama spends all his time vituperating against the postcolonial African elite, which he characterizes as bastards and transgressors of ancestral African values. The unschooled and biologically sterile Fama’s inability to survive in the new society speaks eloquently to the indispensability of Western education in Africa. Bernard Binlin Dadié’s Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini (1970) is the story of a liberated enslaved African who returns to the continent and is appointed senior adviser to an African king. Thanks to his familiarity with a European language, Thôgô-gnini becomes the natural choice when a European trader and his associate come looking for African partners in the new so-called legitimate trade that has officially replaced the Atlantic slave trade. Through his overwhelming individualism and fraudulent business practices, Thôgô-gnini— whose bourgeoisification is a major theme in the play—becomes the richest and most powerful person in the society, before he is found guilty by a court, which he once had in his pocket, for crimes against the dignity of the individual and society. Aké Loba’s Les Fils de Kouretcha (1970) recounts the story of Pierre Dam’no, a clerk in the colonial administration who, in spite of his efforts, is unable to get the new postcolonial authorities to notice him. We are told that during his halcyon days in the colonial period he managed to build a very successful business. Dam’no stops at nothing to please his bosses while exploiting the dispossessed masses for his personal gain. If the primary purpose of colonial education was the creation of human robots in the colonized, it had a resounding success in Dam’no. Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre (1971) is a long letter written by Ramatoulaye, the protagonist, to her friend, Aïssatou who now lives in New York after her divorce from her husband, Mawdo. The epistle is instigated by the sudden death of Modou, Ramatoulaye’s husband who abandoned her and



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their children for his daughter’s classmate. The novel is about women, generally speaking, especially educated women like Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou, who are trapped between tradition and so-called Western modernity but who eventually assert their individuality. Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s L’Étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète africain (1973) chronicles the fortunes and misfortunes of Wangrin, a real-life West African colonial interpreter. Mostly through defrauding the rich and powerful, including his White superiors in the colonial administration, the graduate of the École des Otages rises to the summit of personal glory and financial success (with a quasi-business empire). Wangrin eventually sinks into alcoholism and adultery. Falling victim to the same tactics he used to defraud others, he loses his fortune and privilege. Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1973) is the story of El Hadji Abdou Kader Bèye, an opulent businessman and member of the Senegalese bourgeoisie that has taken over the economic administration of the new independent West African state. On the night of his marriage with his third wife, a girl younger than his daughter, the powerful member of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry suddenly realizes he is impotent. As he struggles to regain his virility, his friends desert him, his second wife starts sleeping with other men, his third wife leaves him, he loses his money and privileges, and, in the end, he finds himself at the mercy of beggars. Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même (1975) offers a panoramic and thoughtful insight into life for women under colonization, with specific reference to the challenges and opportunities colonial education presented for women in a heavily patriarchal society. The book is above all about Aoua Kéita’s personal experiences in the colonial school and administration, and how she dealt with pressures from her family, society, and colonial authorities. In Bernard Binlin Dadié’s play Mhoi-Ceul (1979), we see the brief trajectory of a young, overzealous, and egocentric state functionary. As a newly appointed director of a state department, the eponymous antihero engages in a self-assigned and self-aggrandizing mission of cleaning up the lethargy and inefficiency of African bureaucracies so often satirized by the literature. His own cupidity and bad faith become his undoing. Amadou Koné’s Sous le pouvoir des blakoros: Traites (1980), the first of two narratives in a series entitled Sous le pouvoir des Blakoros (under the domination of the uncircumcised), revolves around the suffering of the peasant family of old Mamadou, a coffee and cocoa planter. Like other peasants, Mamadou and his family live from hand to mouth. Their quest for relief from the constant exploitation and harassment by businessmen and government officials takes them on a journey to the city during which the reader becomes acquainted with an array of unattractive characters, many of whom

6

Introduction

are products of Western education. The notion of blakoroya (the state of being uncircumcised, immature, illegitimate, and inhumane) introduced in Traites finds further elaboration in Koné’s Courses and Les Coupeurs de têtes. Robert Bilanga, the protagonist of Bernard Nanga’s Les Chauves-souris (1980), is a civil servant in a postcolonial African administration. He represents the new crop of highly corrupt, immoral, and incompetent state functionaries in connivance with local as well as foreign business interests to exploit and impoverish their own people. Bilanga, lifted by education out of his peasant origins into the bourgeoisie like most of his colleagues, has turned his back on his own people. The novel ends in a historic Fanonian confrontation between the protagonist and a group of his peasant kin. Pierre Sammy’s novel L’Odyssée de Mongou (1983) describes the extraordinary journey of a young African chieftain who, like Malic, is in love with the White man’s learning. And like Malic, the orphan Mongou defies the traditions of his people and embarks on an odyssey that will take him away from his home in Limanguiagna in Central Africa and back to it triumphant; he returns as the beneficiary of French largesse. Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel, l’enfant peul (1991), the first of two volumes of the memoirs of this well-known writer and ethnologist, is about his experiences in the French colonial school and administration in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The book also provides deep insights into Malian (Sudanese at the time) society under colonial domination and African resistance to it. Like Samba Diallo, Hampâté Bâ partakes of Islamic education in tandem with French education. Unlike Samba, however, Hampâté completed his Islamic education and was also a devoted student of traditional mystic forms of knowledge. Francis Bebey’s Le ministre et le griot (1992) is about Demba Diabaté, a griot who, thanks to his Western education, becomes prime minister of his country, Kessebougou. Binta Madiallo, of noble origins, disapproves unequivocally of Demba’s newfound social status. As it turns out, her beloved son, Keita Dakouri, is Demba’s friend and minister of finance. Binta’s refusal to let her son invite Demba to his engagement party in her house devolves into a national crisis, pitting supporters of Binta and Demba in pitched battles on the streets of the country. The crisis is resolved thanks only to the intervention of a man simply referred to as “le marabout.” Amadou Koné’s Les coupeurs de têtes (1997) is a gallery of portraits of interesting personalities encountered by the main character, Kassi, on his return home to an African city (Blakorodougou) bedeviled by mysterious decapitations. The country is under the control of the “Parti-unique-d’avantgarde,” a party that is populated by corrupt and ruthless elements of the new post-independent bourgeoisie. One of the characters Kassi encounters is a medical doctor called Pita. Brother-in-law to the country’s ruler as well as the



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son of a renowned politician, Pita is a prominent member of the ruling party. Toward the end of the story, the reader learns that he has lost his virility. FROM THEORY TO SCHOOLING—AND SOCIETY My study of the above texts will be informed by colonial education theory and praxis between 1817, when the first government school was set up in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and 1956, when the loi-cadre (Reform act) accorded colonial territories a relatively high degree of autonomy over education policy. Geographically speaking, the texts under investigation here come from both the AOF and the AEF. The AEF was almost always behind the AOF in terms of colonial policy. Consequently, education policies initiated and tested in the AOF were the same ones, even if slightly modified in some cases, implemented in the AEF. To justify the school, the colonizer re-weaponized arguments already deployed in the larger colonial project—namely, the propagation of notions of the inferiority and backwardness of the colonized, an entity stuck in time. Naturally, the school paid little if any attention at all to the interests of the colonized indigenes. Moreover, there was a considerable gap, qualitatively speaking, between the curriculum designed for students in the metropolis and the one designed for Africans in the colonies. The colonial curriculum vigorously discouraged the dissemination of what it characterized as theoretical, secondary, and tertiary education to most colonial subjects who frequented the school. Even after the establishment of varying types of educational reforms proposed at the 1944 Brazzaville Conference, the majority of schools in the colonies still lagged behind schools in France. During this time, “[o]nly the urban primary schools found in most colonies and the two secondary schools of Senegal followed the metropolitan curriculum and therefore gave access to further secondary or to higher education in France” (Gardinier, 338). The primary purpose of the school was the creation, from the ranks of colonized natives, of a class of individuals who would serve at once as a buffer and a bridge between the colonizer and the colonized masses. In other words, they were trained to be collaborators of the colonizer. The French colonial school was thus used as the fabrication point of new social types, among whom could be identified what many African writers and critics alike have often characterized as a band of inept and unscrupulous individuals in the political, administrative, and commercial sectors of African colonial and postcolonial societies. These are the occupiers of the middle stratum, the members of the so-called African bourgeoisie. All said and done, Africans were “educated” in the colonial school neither for their African societies nor for admission into the society of the colonizer. Ultimately, the indigenous elite that came out of

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Introduction

the school seemed to be doomed from its very conception. Some critics and writers have insisted that this class, in spite of its role—or perhaps because of it—in the acquisition of African political independence, continues to serve as an intermediary between the former colonizers and independent countries in a relationship that has invariably been referred to as neocolonialist and neo-imperialist. It is my contention that the so-called colonial sub-Saharan indigenous bourgeoisie, unlike the European bourgeoisie that emerged organically out of historical forces in which it actively participated, was a calculated creation of the colonial enterprise and the ideology that framed and infused it; hence my use of the term “invention”—in relation to the bourgeoisie—in the title of this book. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre notes that the “European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite” (7). Colonial school policies were conceived and executed in the colonial laboratory with the sole purpose of creating such a class of évolués, men and women selected from the vast native populations and conditioned to be answerable only to the colonizer. Writing specifically about Jules Brévié and his 1930s reforms in French West Africa (AOF), Harry Gamble asserts that “the first priority of the new governor general was to quickly invent and implement a new type of school for the African masses” (780). Naturally, the school can only lead to what Aimé Césaire called in Discours sur le colonialisme “la fabrication hâtive” (“the hasty manufacture,” 42) of subaltern cadres (19). With regards to the education of women, Pascale Barthélémy insists on the invention imperative of the school: “l’ambition fut moins de former des institutrices que de forger de ‘nouvelles’ femmes. Telle est bien en effet la volonté des autorités, qui mettent les institutions scolaires au service du dressage d’une minorité chargée d’incarner, au féminin, une culture franco-africaine pensée par les colonisateurs” (“the objective was less about training teachers than it was about molding new women. Such was clearly the wish of authorities, who used educational institutions to fabricate a feminine minority conditioned to personify a Franco-African culture imagined by the colonizer,” 124). This creation of “new women” was, in turn, connected to the desire on the part of the colonizer to establish maximum control over the African family, which he saw as central to the perpetuation of the colonial enterprise: “La préservation de l’ordre est associée à l’invention (italics added) d’une nouvelle famille africaine dont le pivot est une mère ‘évoluée,’ qui emprunte aux cultures africaine et bourgeoise française” (“The preservation of order is linked to the invention of a new African family with the woman at its center, and which will borrow from both French and African middle class values,” 125).6 It is also my position that to more fully appreciate Francophone African literature’s engagement with the school and the class that emerged out of the



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new system of sociocultural, political, and economic reorganization, to understand the general evolution and problems of Black Africa during and after colonization, including the postcolonial crisis in education, one must necessarily examine in detail the French colonial school system, together with the philosophy and ideology that underwrote its conception and creation, as well as its structure, curriculum, and methodology. A BRIEF HISTORY OF COLONIAL EDUCATION IN FRANCOPHONE BLACK AFRICA The school established on the morrow of colonial conquest offers, arguably, the best window into the workings of the larger colonial project. Albert Sarrault, twice minister of the colonies, captured the centrality of the school and education in the colonial enterprise, at least from the perspective of the colonizer, when he wrote that among all of his concerns, “le problème de l’enseignement est sans doute le plus important et le plus complexe de ceux qui sollicitent l’esprit du colonisateur, car il contient plus ou moins en puissance tous les autres, ou il affecte leur solution” (“the question of education is without doubt the most complex and pressing one facing the colonizer for it contains more or less the potential of all the others, if it doesn’t affect their outcome,” 146). Speaking in similar terms about the school, but from the perspective of the colonized, Brigitte Alessandri notes that “de toutes les institutions, elle était de loin la plus visible, celle qui touchait au plus près la vie quotidienne des populations qu’elle atteignait” (“Of all the institutions, it was by far the most visible, the one which more profoundly affected the daily lives of the populations it came in contact with,” 6). The colonial institution was ubiquitous in its influence, even if it was physically absent in vast portions of France’s colonial possessions. The development and evolution of French colonial education policies and practices in sub-Saharan Africa spanned nearly a century and a half, with arguably the most consequential moments arriving during the last five decades of French colonial rule, that is from 1903 to 1958. The colonial administration’s interest in the early days of formal education in French territories was strictly limited to the training of a handful of interpreters and schoolteachers but mostly monitors (advanced students deployed to teach less advanced colleagues). However, starting in 1855 when the governor of Senegal, general Louis Faidherbe, founded what he called “l’École des Otages” (the School for Hostages) for the sons and relatives of chiefs (and promising students from lower castes), the school system became more and more institutionalized, more secular (even before the 1881–1882 Jules Ferry laws secularizing education in France) and more liberal in outlook.7 Nonetheless, it was not

10

Introduction

until 1903 that we would witness an intensive secularization of what used to be the jealously guarded domain of missionaries and religious orders. This radical turnaround was dictated by an urgent reality. Between 1903 and the end of World War II, the exploitation of Africa’s natural and human resources became more systematic and intensified. Consequently, colonial doctrine and policy became relatively more precise and coherent. The need for the expansion of the colonial administration revealed the need for a large number of indigenous subaltern cadres to second the miniscule European personnel. Hence, emphasis was shifted from the training of only teachers and monitors to the training of auxiliaries to fill up spaces in other sectors such as industry, agriculture, administration, and health. To effectively meet its new human resource needs, the colonial administration thought it necessary to put into place a uniform educational system for all its colonies in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. In general, the system consisted of elementary education, vocational education, middle and commercial education, as well as girls’ education. As noted earlier, the AEF federation was behind the AOF in the implementation and magnitude (and success) of colonial educational policies. For example, by 1941, there was only one école supérieure (upper primary school) for the entire federation, the École Edouard-Renard in Brazzaville, whereas every colonial territory in AOF already had its own (“Circulaire générale sur la politique indigène en A.E.F.,” 27). Also, while Jules Brévié was complaining in his prelude to instituting reforms in AOF in 1930–1931 about the glut of “des indigènes diplomés” (native graduates), authorities in AEF were complaining about an acute shortage of qualified native cadres (Éboué, 42). Given this situation and the lack of remedial resources at its disposal, the AEF government was forced, nearly forty years after the secularization of public education in Africa, to turn to religious missions for help (Éboué, 43). Moreover, whereas the AOF had three school options (elementary, primary, and secondary) the AEF had only elementary and primary schools. Regarding education in the AOF, the following could be surmised from the perspective of the governors-general. Roume supervised the first three years of the first phase; Ponty made that first phase a reality by clearly defining it, assisted by school administrators such as Georges Hardy; Clozel and Vollenhoven kept the status quo inherited from Ponty; Carde and Brevié put the process in reverse through their preference for rural education; and de Coppet realized the damage caused by Brévié but did not have the wherewithal or time to rectify the situation. As for the four or five governors-general that came after him, it was business as usual; nothing remarkable happened until the institution of the Fourth Republic in 1946. The frequent modifications to educational policies and practices and about-face turns, instigated by francocentric economic and political considerations, contributed significantly



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to preventing the school from attaining its potential and becoming an organic part of colonized societies for the duration of colonial rule. A review of the literature on the biography of colonial education in Africa reveals slightly different time frames. For example, in his Littérature et développement, Bernard Mouralis identifies four major phases in the evolution of the French colonial educational system in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa: the first period stretches from the early nineteenth century to 1903; the second, from 1903 to 1944; the third, from 1944 to 1960; and the fourth, from 1960 to the present. Jerry B. Bolibaugh, for his part, divided the history of French colonial education in sub-Saharan Africa into three periods: 18158 to the end of the First Republic in 1870; 1870 to the Brazzaville Conference of 1944; and 1944 to the de Gaulle referendum in 1958 and 19609 for the other colonies (3). As we shall soon see, within these large and different time frames proposed by Mouralis and Bolibaugh are located more or less the same momentous changes. I will now present a chronological précis of the French colonial school system, highlighting the various curricular reiterations and transformations its policies and practices went through. To this end, I propose the following periodization: 1817–1903; 1903–1930; 1930–1944; and 1944–1958/1960. Colonial Education: The First Phase, 1817–1903 This first phase, which spanned the entirety of the nineteenth century (1817– 1903), saw no serious elaboration of educational policy on the part of the colonial administration. French education of Africans in this early period was largely in the hands of Christian missionaries (including Portuguese missionaries) who, acting largely independently of the colonial administration, were interested mainly in evangelization and the training of future native priests for their missions, as well as a few monitors for the government to justify subsidies from the administration. The first official attempt at organized secular pedagogy by the government in French-controlled sub-Saharan Africa happened in 1817 when Jean Dard, a French linguist with extensive knowledge of and interest in Senegalese languages,10 started the first colonial school in Saint-Louis. The public objective of the school was to train “une génération d’Africains avec qui les explorateurs et les colonisateurs pourraient s’entendre et développer des échanges commerciaux et culturels” (“a generation of Africans with whom explorers and colonizers could agree on and develop commercial and cultural ties” Kadish, xxv–xxvi). Jean Dard’s efforts to use local languages, especially Wolof, as a language of instruction just like French, by all accounts successful, was frowned upon. After Jean Dard’s forced departure, the government hired a retired military officer to teach the handful of students available.

12

Introduction

However, he took ill and had to leave Senegal a few months into his job. It would not be until the mid-1840s, with the creation by Abbé Pierre David Boilat (1814–1901)11 of the Collège de France, that there would be a serious attempt at government-sponsored teaching of Africans. Unfortunately, Boilat’s vision of transforming the colony through secondary education, creating in the process a bona fide indigenous bourgeois elite, was short-lived. He was forced to abandon his project in 1850 (“Les ‘Esquisses Sénégalaises de l’Abbé Boilat,” 820). For the next five years, education went back squarely into the hands of religious orders. But then Louis Faidherbe became Governor of Senegal in 1854, and everything changed. Faidherbe founded the École des Otages. As the name suggests, the students in this boarding school were essentially captives of the administration, a ploy by Faidherbe to get the loyalty of their parents and local dignitaries. Revitalized in 1864 under a less forward moniker, École des fils de chef et des interprètes, the school trained interpreters, translators, and future local chiefs. Faidherbe’s plan would be replicated in major towns such as Kayes in the French Sudan.12 In the post-Faidherbe era, the school fell on hard times and was closed in 1872 (Suret-Canale, 464). It would take twenty years before it would be resurrected as the “Collège des fils de chefs et des interprètes.”13 The few public schools established in the nineteenth century had very few students and were concentrated in a small number of key towns in AOF and AEF—namely, Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Libreville (Suret-Canale, 464). Throughout the period, teaching was mostly disorganized and sporadic, and the quality of the education provided remained mediocre at best (Suret-Canale, 465). This was the state of education before 1903, the start of the most significant overhaul of public colonial education in AOF, and, eventually, in AEF also.14 Colonial Education: The Second Phase, 1903–1930 Governor-general Ernest Roume’s 1903 decree permanently formalized secular education in colonized territories. The order called for the creation of a four-tier educational system, two at the primary level (enseignement primaire élémentaire and enseignement primaire supérieur et commercial), one vocational (enseignement professionnel), and one teacher training school (École normale). The first three would have branches in all French colonies and territories in AOF. There would be only one École normale for all colonies and territories. This, like many federal schools that were created subsequently, would be based in Dakar, Gorée, or another town in the Senegal colony. It would take a few years before the new system reached the AEF (Guth, 74).



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L’Enseignement Primaire Élémentaire (Elementary School) There were three types of lower primary school: l’école du village (village school), l’école régionale (regional school), and l’école urbaine (urban school). Taught mostly by monitors, the rural or village school offered basic spoken French and rudiments of reading, writing, arithmetic, and the metric system, as well as agriculture and manual work. In addition to what was taught at the village school, students in regional schools also learned basic geometry, drawing, hygiene, and industry, as well as carefully selected and truncated lessons in French history. The length of study was three years. At the end of the three years, students received a school completion diploma (certificat de fin d’études). The urban primary school, accessible only to the children of European expatriates, local chiefs, and native members of the colonial administration,15 was the crown jewel of colonial education at the primary level (Guth, 75). The curriculum here is more or less similar to the one in the Metropolis, and classes were taught by Europeans. After receiving their diploma, interested students could pursue an additional year of studies in an advanced class available at the school. Only the urban primary school offered the Certificate of Elementary Studies (certificat d’études primaires élémentaire), which put its beneficiaries on the road to becoming members of the indigenous colonial elite. As for the vocational schools, there were special sections annexed to the regional schools. Admitting students with the Certificate of Junior Primary Studies and between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, its goal was to train artisans (maîtres-ouvriers) in wood, metal, and stone. After three years of study, graduates received a certificate of completion. L’Enseignement Primaire Supérieur et Commercial The upper primary school, located in Saint-Louis, was called École primaire supérieure commerciale Faidherbe. All students were required to take courses in languages (including English and Spanish), literature, history, geography, mathematics, basic physics and chemistry, drawing, and sports, as well as basic courses in accounting and bookkeeping, political economy and business law, transportation studies, economic geography, administrative law, AOF government, and stock accounting. Language courses in Greek were also available. The general length of study was three years. Administrative posts reserved for natives at the federal level were available only to graduates from this school.

14

Introduction

L’École Normale de Saint-Louis The training college located in Saint-Louis was a boarding school. It comprised two divisions—one trained teachers for indigenous schools in AOF, while the other, which was further subdivided into three sections, trained interpreters, judges (cadis), and chiefs. Students took classes in some of the principal local languages of AOF (for interpreters); Islamic law and French law (for future native judges); French constitutional law, administrative organization, and accounting (for future chiefs); and basic teaching methods (for teachers). At the end of three years of study, students received a diploma specific to their area of concentration. For example, those training to be teachers received the Elementary School Teaching Certificate (brevet élémentaire de capacité). L’Enseignement des Filles (Education of Girls) The education of girls was almost an afterthought in these early days. Where possible, girls would receive their education in village schools, home economics schools (écoles menagères) located in major hubs, urban schools, and special normal sections annexed to the urban schools. In addition to the course of study for village schools for boys, girls would also learn singing, child health, laundry, cooking, and sewing. The urban schools would be similar to those for boys, with additional classes in child care. The teacher training section (section normale) was located at the Saint-Louis secular girls’ school. The basic educational structure proposed by the 1903 decree—école de village; école régionale, école primaire supérieure (or école professionnelle), and école normale—would remain in place until independence (Bouche, 207), even if it was subjected to sporadic reforms intended to respond to the needs and realities of the time and colonial priorities.16 The next serious attempt at education reform would come in the second decade of the twentieth century, largely through the efforts of governor-general William Merlaud-Ponty (1908–1915), inspector-general under Ponty, Georges Hardy, and Ponty’s successor, François Joseph-Clozel. The period between 1903 and 1913 witnessed a gradual but chaotic implementation of the 1903 blueprint in other colonies outside of Senegal. And between Ponty’s departure in 1915 and the arrival of Martial Merlin in 1919, the AOF saw four different governors-general and no serious education reforms. The next consequential reforms would take place between 1918 and 1924 when, once again, the federal government would seek to homogenize and harmonize the system across the AOF. In the postwar period, colonial education was to be used as a means of expansive exploitation of the natural and human resources of the continent. For example, governor-general of



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AOF Jules Carde (1923–1930) in a May 1, 1924, circular (accompanying his reform decree of the same month), proposed three main goals for the school: the recruitment of indigenous functionaries, the spread of the use of spoken French to the mass of indigenes, and the provision of basic knowledge in hygiene and agriculture (Davesne,17 85). These were to be achieved through three types of primary schools—preparatory (two years), elementary (three years), and regional (six years)—leading to the certificat d’études primaires indigène (CEPI), a higher primary school (école primaire supérieure [three years]) located in the administrative seat of each colony and culminating in the diplôme d’études primaires supérieures (DEPS). Vocational training was to be dispensed in a vocational school, in public utility workshops, or in special sections annexed to the higher primary schools. There were only two secondary schools in the AOF, divided between Dakar and Saint-Louis, and open mainly to the children of European settlers and those of the inhabitants of the four communes of Senegal (Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque, and Dakar). Students of secondary schools graduated with a Colonial Certificate of Competency (Brevet de Capacité Colonial), equivalent to the Baccalauréat. Colonial Education: The Third Phase, 1930–1944 From Black Frenchmen to Lower-Level Cadres and Laborers If the first seventy or so years (1855–1930) of education policy and practice intended to produce an elite class of Africans more or less assimilated into the French way of life, the next fifteen years (1930–1944) clearly wanted to produce only laborers and lower-level cadres to whom the French way of life would be out of reach. The changes instigated principally by Carde in his decree of May 1, 1924, would be formalized and implemented by his successors, governors-general Jules Brévié (1930–1931) and those who came after him (except the Popular Front governor-general Marcel de Coppet). During this time, more weight was given to vocational education. Vocational Education The reform here was warranted by the need to more fully exploit the human and natural resources of colonial territories as encapsulated in the new policy of “mise en valeur,” or the exploitation and development of indigenous human and natural resources. One of the major consequences of the new focus was the proliferation of schools in rural Africa, established to ensure a constant and abundant supply of skilled labor needed to bring the “mise en valeur” plan to fruition, to lift Africa and Africans from their millennial misery and underdevelopment into a new society characterized by prosperity.

16

Introduction

While a school like École Normale William Ponty de Gorée should continue to produce a limited number of elite instructors armed with the BS and CAP, giving them the wherewithal to run a regional school, the administration must establish other training institutions geared toward the production of village teachers.18 The only qualification and value of the teachers would reside in their ability and readiness to train workers and farmers as well as to serve as one whenever the need arose. In fact, even teachers coming directly from France should be disabused of their fixation with diplomas. Instead, they should inculcate in their students only those ideas and practices that would augment agricultural and industrial production. Colonial Education: The Fourth Phase, 1944–1958/1960 Recommendations from the Brazzaville Conference of 1944: From Empire Français to Communauté Française Educational reforms proposed at the Brazzaville19 conference, or instigated thereby, were part of a larger package of reforms that promoted a replacement of the French empire with a loose federation between France and her former colonies. The reforms would also eventually allow, inter alia, the election of Africans into the French Assemblée Générale, and access to jobs in the colony, which were hitherto only available to White Europeans and a handful of Black French citizens. At the end of his report presented at the conference, Yves Aubineau, director general of education and fierce defender of rural education, recommended that if resources did not permit the building of many schools, the administration should then build schools that would serve France longer: “que notre école africaine soit à l’usage de la France future” (“May our African school remain useful to the France of the future,” 10). In general, and in the vast majority of French colonies, education development (in particular, access to secondary education) became a reality in the postwar era with the dissolution of the colonial education moniker. The reforms proposed at the Brazzaville conference, though representing an attempt on the part of French authorities at harmonizing African education with the metropolitan one, remained wedded to the idea of so-called practical education. The distinctive feature of the 1944 proposals was the absence of the anti-elite rhetoric and the related relegation to a distant second of the “education de qualité (qualitative education)” in favor of “education de quantité (quantitative education)” characteristic of the previous dispensation. Instead, there was the realization that both mattered and should be pursued concurrently. This shift in rhetoric and in policy was instigated by two related factors: 1) the need for more qualified natives to help in the administration and 2) the realization that if the African



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was to become “l’artisan de son propre progrès” (the architect of his own progress), a substantial number of them should be brought into direct administration, namely to fill subaltern posts (“Conférence française africaine de Brazzaville: Plan d’enseignement” 1). Regarding the education of women, the Brazzaville Conference recognized that to maximize the impact of France’s civilizing mission in Africa, women must also be the beneficiaries of the school. This was the only way to ensure children were raised in homes where proper hygiene practices were observed, for example. Because the education’s main goal was to produce capable housewives and mothers, women needed no more than the ability to read, write, and count. With a largely oral and direct method, women should be taught how to sew, knit, balance their budget, cultivate their gardens, keep their huts clean and inviting, and take good care of their children. For every educated man, an educated woman; otherwise, the men risked falling back into their old, uncivilized ways. After Brazzaville or l’Union Française, 1946–1958 The short duration of the Fourth Republic, as well as the increasing demands for autonomy and equal access by the colonized, saw a promise of rapid uniformization of education between the metropole and its colonies. Many of the changes in education between the Brazzaville conference and 1950 heavily favored what Brévié and Charton would have called qualitative education, or bookish education at the expense of rural education. However, between the end of 1949 and 1954, a slow but steady return toward a form of rural, agricultural education was being undertaken (Bouche, 217). All the same, gone were the days when teachers and students were required to spend more time on agriculture than on actual classroom learning (Bouche, 218). And with lingering suspicion by Africans of the policy of ruralization, coupled with their dream of escaping unrewarding rural life, the program of rural education was bound to be at best a pale ghost of its pre-1944 halcyon days. In 1953, the AOF École de médecine graduated its last batch of students and changed its name to l’École préparatoire de médecine et de pharmacie. An independent school for midwives was created, and the erstwhile title of auxiliary midwives became African midwives. The École normale for girls at Rufisque closed in 1956. The first university in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa was created in Dakar in 1957,20 affiliated to the universities of Paris and Bordeaux. The 1956 loi cadre that ushered in a relatively high degree of autonomy for colonial territories also changed attitudes toward education and access to it. For example, the law handed over control of primary and secondary education to the autonomous territories. With the attainment of independence four years later, the principle of rural education was on life

18

Introduction

support, while the preference for metropolitan-style education grew, even if the African system was not, and could not be, equivalent to the metropolitan system. A New Society According to Amadou Hampâté Bâ, the colonial school system sought to satisfy three sectorial needs of the colonial administration: 1) the public sector (with teachers, subaltern functionaries, auxiliary doctors, etc.), 2) the security sector, and 3) the domestic sector (Amkoullel, l’enfant peul, 239). The new class of “évolués”21 could be distinguished from the general mass of natives in three ways: 1) by their knowledge of the French language, which ranges from rudimentary to varying degrees of complexity, 2) by their proximity to the White man, thanks mainly to their adoption of the French language, and by their avowed, or feigned, loyalty to their bosses, and 3) by their manner of dress, food preferences, new moral values, relatively elevated standard of living and general material culture, marriage preferences—in short, their lifestyle. This class was in no way a homogenous group. The colonial middle class would constitute two identifiable groups: a class of subaltern cadres that would serve as auxiliaries, and a carefully chosen elite that would be closer to the colonizer. In L’odyssée de Mongou, Pierre Sammy makes an important distinction between “les évolués” and “les vrais évolués” (47). All said and done, the class was largely an underdevelopped bourgeoisie in whose ranks could be found “ni savants, ni ingénieurs, ni anthropologues, mais seulement des exécutants chargés, au niveau qui leur avait été assigné, de faire fonctionner le système colonial” (“Neither scholars, engineers, nor anthropologists; only yes-men responsible for the functioning of the colonial system in keeping with their station.” Mouralis, 104). The French colonial system, especially through its schools, intended to create a highly stratified society that would be characterized by a three-tier social hierarchy. It would be like a pyramid: the White colonials constituting the summit, and at the base the largely illiterate mass of natives. Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the totalitarian state is analogous to colonial society. In her use of the pyramid imagery to talk about class differentiations in totalitarian societies, Arendt proposes that between the tip of the pyramid and its base, there is no real intermediary group. What we have is instead a homogenous agglomeration of instruments of violence used by occupiers of the summit to keep the base in check: “the intervening layers between top and bottom were destroyed, so that the top remains suspended, supported only by the proverbial bayonets, over a mass of carefully isolated, disintegrated, and completely equal individuals” (Between Past and Future, 99). What Arendt’s observation points to is the existence of a dehumanized middle stratum that has become



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essentially an assemblage of human robots whose actions are programmed by the summit. Similarly, between them and the colonized masses, the French masters intended to put “something” that would at once separate and connect colonizer and colonized. The class that came out of the school was to be made up of automatons, mere executors of commands, lacking liberty, and under the total control and remote manipulation of the colonizer. For the new system of social hierarchy to function, it was necessary for each stratum of the hierarchy to be made conscious of the line of demarcation between it and the other classes; general consent, tacit or otherwise, is a precondition. The colonizer sought to get this consent through selective education of a middle and mediating class, and then use this class to help educate the rest of the population regarding their status, expectations, and role and responsibilities within the socioeconomic and political superstructure of the new society. The degree of contact between the various classes, the nature of the contact, and the style of life of each would be determined by the differentiating roles preassigned to each. The natives generally recognized and understood the clearly demarcated social boundaries. This is how Hampâté Bâ describes the situation in colonial Bandiagara: Les Blancs avaient leur quartier d’habitation sur la rive gauche du Yaamé, et les indigènes de Bandiagara sur la rive droite. Un grand pont de pierre séparait les deux agglomérations. On appelait le quartier des Blancs ‘sinci,’ c’est-à-dire ‘instauré.’ N’y vivaient que les Blancs eux-mêmes et leurs principaux auxiliaires indigènes: les gardes de cercle (agents de sécurité de l’administration civile chargés de la police) et les tirailleurs (militaires indigènes chargés de la défense territoriale). . . . Quant aux fonctionnaires civils indigènes et au personnel domestique des Blancs (boys, cuisiniers et autres), ils doivent impérativement regagner chaque soir la ville indigène sur la rive droite du Yaamé.22 (Bâ 1991, 184–85). The Whites had their residential quarters on the left bank of the Yaamé, while the natives of Bandiagara lived on the right bank. A great stone bridge separated the two communities. The White quarter was nicknamed Sinci, meaning, “established.” Only the Whites themselves and their principal native auxiliaries lived there. These were the district guards (security agents of the civil administration who handled policing) and the tirailleurs (indigenous military troops who handled the defense of the territory). . . . As for the native civil officials and the native domestic personnel employed by the Whites (houseboys, cooks, and others), they were required to return each evening to the native city on the right bank of the Yaamé. (Bâ 2021, 150)

While such rigid spatial configurations are true of all modern societies, they seemed to be more rigorously policed in the colonial period.23

20

Introduction

“Évolués”: Also Known as Middle Figures, Intermediaries, and Bourgeois24 With the expansion of European bourgeois consumerist and bureaucratic culture via colonization, bourgeois ethos was bound to spread to other parts of the world: “When British missionaries in South Africa converted locals to the Christian faith or colonial schools in Senegal educated the future middlemen of French West Africa, they were effectively instructing them in bourgeois culture, the work ethic, intimacy, domesticity, gendered orders and the notion of the monogamous family” (Tödt, 20). But who were the “évolués”? In general, the term referred to the group of intermediaries typical of colonial Africa who had completed upper primary or secondary education, oriented themselves towards European culture and mostly worked in the administration as auxiliaries. It first appeared in the French possessions in West Africa. Particularly in Senegal, which had enjoyed a special status among France’s overseas territories since 1848, the terms évolués and lettrés took hold for educated and French-speaking Africans who sought to embrace values and lifestyles propagated as French. (Tödt 2021, 15)

These were more or less Europeanized Blacks who were touched by the rayonnement (radiation of light outward) of the French, evolving out of their “primitive” culture toward the European North Star thanks to their adoption of European ways of life.. Without these “middlemen,” the colonizers would not have had half the success they had in governing their territories and their populations. If the colonizer was the squad captain, the indigenous middle figures born of the school were the foot soldiers. WHY THIS BOOK? The study of the colonial school and its impact is not new. Much valuable work has been done on the colonial education and the larger mission civilisatrice in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa (Moumouni 1964; Mouralis 1984; Gardinier 1985; Gadjigo 1990; Ki-Zerbo 1990; Conklin 1997; Alessandri 2004; Gamble 2017; and Tödt 2021, among others). Many of these scholars, Conklin and Gamble for example, both historians, have produced other scholarship that have proven quite useful to my own work. Tödt’s The Lumumba Generation: African Bourgeoisie and Colonial Distinction in the Belgian Congo provides an important sociohistorical perspective on the topic of this book from the point of view of Belgian colonization. The works of Gadjigo and Alessandri, for example, are both literary studies. While they interrogate, in varying degrees of focus and exegesis, the impact of the colonial school



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on the African individual and society, they do not focus on the relationship between colonial education and the emergence of the African bourgeois and bourgeoisie. This book, on the other hand, analyzes the various literary strategies used in the relevant texts to paint a portrait of the school as well as the class it produced to show the organic cause-effect relationship between the two—namely, the role of the school in the invention of the colonial and the immediate postcolonial bourgeois class. Ultimately, the book explores more deeply the politics and policies of the school, especially the ways in which they were informed by prevailing theories and discourses of race and difference. Why this project, and why now? While I have published articles on the topic of colonial education and the Francophone sub-Saharan bourgeoisie before, I decided to more forcefully address the question of colonial education for the following reason: Knowledge and history are never dead; they have a way of resurging in new and interesting ways. I have realized over the years that a deeper appreciation of the present-day realities in Africa and Africa’s relationship with the former colonial powers can be gained through a better understanding of the colonial school. In February, 2005, legislation requiring school history teachers to stress the “positive aspects” of French colonialism was introduced in the French legislative assembly. Two years after that, on July 27, 2007, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy, in a controversial speech at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, tried to minimize the negative effects of French colonization on Africa. Such attempts on the part of former colonizers to self-exonerate by continuing to rewrite history have the potential to remind us, especially humanistic scholars, of the necessity to delve deep into the same archives with the hope of unearthing more honest versions of that seismic and paradigm-shifting encounter called colonization. As the Igbo proverb reminds us, “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.” Until we can fully appreciate the significance of historical events such as the colonial school, we cannot expect to understand the present and move confidently into the future. Ultimately, this book contributes to the enduring debate in the humanities on the impact of colonialism on the colonized. More specifically, it complements current research regarding the intimate connection between the school and social transformation in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, even after over six decades of independence, many former French colonies are yet to satisfactorily reform the school systems they inherited from the colonizer. This book participates in ongoing discussions on education reform on the continent. My immediate audiences are scholars in the field of Francophone sub-Saharan studies and colonial education in Africa. However, given the fact that colonial education is a universal phenomenon, my work

22

Introduction

has relevance for constituencies beyond those interested in African Studies. Wherever there have been colonial contact and domination—in Africa, Australasia, the Americas, for example—deliberate attempts have been made by the colonizing power to impose its will, worldview, and practices on the colonized through some form of educational system, secular or religious. My research will thus be usable to all interested in the general questions of colonization, human rights, and education. Moreover, because of its historical, sociological, and literary analyses, I expect that my project will be more broadly relevant to scholarship in such important postcolonial cultural subfields as class, race, gender, and cross-cultural encounters. ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK Chapter 1: “Pedagogy of the Colonized: Theories, Ideologies, and Policies of the Colonial School in Francophone Black Africa” The French colonial educational system was founded on 1) the evident need of the colonizer to supplement its meager human resources with an army of middle people to assist him and 2) the stereotype of the backward Africans with no history, culture, or moral undergirdings. This chapter looks at the political and curricular policies of colonial education underwritten by the above-mentioned imperatives and the prevailing ideology and theories of race that informed their conception, concoction, and implementation. Chapter 2: “From Theory to Practice: The Colonial School in Francophone African Literature” Through an analysis of Amadou Mapaté Diagne’s Les trois volontés de Malic, Bernard Dadié’s Climbié, Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë, Pierre Sammy’s L’Odyssée de Mongou, and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel, l’enfant peul, this chapter focuses on sub-Saharan Francophone literature’s engagement with the colonial school. What are the attitudes of parents, other family members, and the communities vis-à-vis the school? What do the children attending the school, forced or willingly, think about the institution? Why is the school attractive to some yet repulsive to others? How do we explain the ambivalent attitude of those who detest and want the school at the same time? To what extent does the literary representation of the school jibe with the actual pedagogical theories, policies, and practices analyzed in chapter 1? Chapter 3: “Making Good Wives and Good Mothers: The Education of Women in Colonial West Africa”



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The education of women in the colonial period was markedly different from that of men. Schooled mostly in home economics to be wives to the “educated” male elite and mothers to their children, a sizeable number of women—especially those who attended the federal schools located mostly in Senegal—however went on to become teachers, midwives, and political activists. This chapter focuses on two issues: the education of women in the colonial period and the fictional and non-fictional representations of women members of the indigenous bourgeoisie that emerged from the school. Additionally, the chapter shows the fundamental practical and theoretical or ideological differences between the education of boys and that of girls. The texts examined here are Frida Lawson’s “Je suis une Africaine . . . j'ai vingt ans,” Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par ellemême, and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre. Special attention will be given to how women viewed themselves, their status, and their role in the changing Africa through the new lens provided by colonial education. Chapter 4: “When Slaves, Bastards, and Dogs Rule: The Colonial School as Agent of Social Transformation” Drawing from the main tenet of the book—namely, that the school was created to engender a new class of Africans to serve as intermediaries between colonizer and colonized—this chapter discusses the impact of colonial education on the society as a whole, with specific focus on the question of social transgression as it relates to the emergence of the new intermediary class in an erstwhile caste-based society. This phenomenon, convincingly portrayed in Amadou Koné’s Sous le pouvoir des Blakoros: Traites, Francis Bebey’s Le ministre et le griot, and Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances, among others, can also be seen in the three texts by women discussed in chapter 3—“Je suis une Africaine . . . j'ai vingt ans,” Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même, and Une si longue lettre. As we shall see, this transgression was occasioned mainly by the “open-door” policy of the school, which made it generally possible for elements of upper and lower castes to share the same space and education provided by the school, thus changing the continent’s social landscape forever. Chapter 5: “The Colonial School and the Emergence of New African Types” Much has been said of the impact of Africa’s encounter with the West, specifically in regard to the tension it creates between the individual and his traditional African society. However, the school, because of the access it provided to power, money, and privilege, also engendered a new individualism. While this chapter focuses preponderantly on the “arriviste,” depicted in such literary texts as Bernard Dadié’s Monsieur Thôgô-gnini and Mhoi-Ceul, we

24

Introduction

shall also look at other types engendered by the school in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Aventure ambiguë, Aké Loba’s Les fils de Kouretcha, and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s L’Étrange destin de Wangrin. Chapter 6: “Reality or Invention? Literary Representation of the Bourgeoisie on Trial” This chapter focuses more specifically on the modes of representation of the bourgeoisie adopted in literary texts and engages the following questions: Who and what are the Francophone sub-Saharan bourgeois and bourgeoisie that came out of the colonial school? How do we represent them in literature? To what extent does one member of the class represent or distinguish himself from the class? An important element in this chapter is the discussion of the relationship or tension between literary representation and the “reality” it seeks to portray. Bernard Dadié’s Monsieur Thôgô-gnini and Mhoi-Ceul, Ousmane Sembène’s Xala, Bernard Nanga’s Les Chauves-souris, Amadou Koné’s Les Coupeurs de têtes, and especially Hampâté Bâ’s L’Étrange destin de Wangrin are key texts discussed here. Conclusion: “A Literature about Failure” The book concludes with a retrospective on African literature’s representation of the school and the class that emerged from it. More specifically, it assesses the literature as a literature about failure: in the sense that much of the representation of the school and the underdeveloped (artificial) bourgeoisie that came out of it is about the failure of the class and its individual members to lead Africa to full decolonization, even decades after the official end of colonization. NOTES 1. This book, which won the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique Noire in 1991, is the first volume of Hampâté Bâ’s two-part memoirs, the second and final one being Oui, mon commandant (1994). 2. All translations without their own page numbers, here and elsewhere in the book, are mine. Where I use someone else’s translation, that translation comes after the page reference of the original to be followed by the page reference for the translation. 3. The question of colonial education and its legacy is also the concern of African films such as Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1975), Bassek ba Khobio’s Sango Malo (1990), and Dani Kouyaté’s Keita: L’héritage du griot (1995). 4. Following the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference that ushered in the so-called Scramble for Africa, the French sought to further solidify their political grip on their conquered territories by organizing them into two distinct administrative groups: the



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Afrique Occidentale Française or French West Africa (AOF henceforth) and the Afrique Équatoriale Française or French Equatorial Africa (AEF henceforth). Established in 1895, the AOF grew from an initial four (Senegal, French Sudan, French Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire) to eight by the start of World War II, when Dahomey (including the Togo territory), Mauritania, Upper Volta, and Niger were added to it. The 1,810,000-square-mile AOF had its capital in Saint-Louis until 1902 when it was moved to Dakar. The AEF, constituted in 1910, included the four colonial territories of central and equatorial Africa: Gabon, Chad, Ubangi-Shari (Central African Republic), and French Congo. The 870,000-square-mile territory had Brazzaville as its capital. The two contiguous administrative blocs constituted a vast swath of the continent that was over ten times the size of Metropolitan France. 5. It occupies only one page (11) of the March 12, 1942 issue of Dakar Jeunes. 6. All italics added by author. 7. It was Faidherbe’s belief that in order to facilitate the entry of the autochthons into the new imperial community envisaged by the colonizer, the kind of education given them must be less one-sided. In connection with that belief, Faidherbe also saw the need to increase the number of schools. However, his reformative ideas affected only a limited geographical area, mainly the towns of Saint-Louis, Dagana, and Podor in the Senegal colony. 8. The introduction and development of French education in Senegal (and by extension in Black Africa) in the early nineteenth century is closely linked to the 1815 Development Plan proposed by the French government for “the agricultural and mineral development of Senegal” (Bolibaugh, 3). “The plan’s social strategy,” notes Bolibaugh, “was to change the customs and mentality of the indigenous population through economic development and also through extensive Christian evangelization” (3–4). 9. With the exception of Guinea, which had already earned its independence in 1958 by voting no to Charles de Gaulle’s referendum, Comoros in 1975, and Djibouti in 1977. 10. In 1826, he published a French-Wolof dictionary as well as a Wolof grammar book (Suret-Canale). 11. Pierre David Boilat (1814–1901) was the son of a White Frenchman and a signare (mixed-race) woman. 12. One of the most famous graduates from the Kayes school was Wangrin, the main character of Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s L’Étrange destin de Wangrin, ou les roueries d’un interprète colonial. 13. Despite its success, or because of it, Faidherbe faced resistance to his efforts from local and metropolitan figures, including Napoleon III (Bolibaugh, 6). 14. Starting in this year, the colonial government stopped subsidizing missionary education. 15. The school Samba Diallo attends in the town of L in Aventure ambiguë is one such school. 16. It is worth noting that most of the major institutions of learning in the colonies, if not all, were established either before 1914 or after 1944.

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17. Davesne was Inspector of primary education in AOF and author of the report on the 1924 reforms and the proposed reforms by Brévié. 18. The title “instituteur” was reserved for graduates of l’École Normale William Ponty de Gorée. All other trained teachers, for example those trained at the École professionnelle de Bamako, were called “moniteur de l’enseignement primaire indigene” (Hampaté Bâ 256.) 19. Brazzaville seemed a natural choice for this important conference. With the defeat of France by the Nazis and the capitulation of Maréchal Pétain in 1940, the colonies in the AEF were some of the territories that answered positively to the call to resistance of Charles de Gaulle, President of the Comité français de libération nationale. During a visit to Brazzaville in October 1940 (one of many he would undertake between 1940 and the end of the war in 1945), de Gaulle declared Brazzaville, capital of the Congo colony and of the AEF federation, the capital of “la France libre.” Brazzaville would go on to become practically the base of the French resistance. https:​//​ www​.larevue​.info​/brazzaville​-capitale​-de​-la​-france​-libre​/. 20. Named l’Université de Dakar, the school would be renamed Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar in 1987. 21. Amadou Hampâté Bâ refers to them as “Blancs-Noirs, ou Africains européanisés,” as opposed to “Blancs-Blancs” or White Europeans (Amkoullel, 142). 22. Italics added by author. 23. See, for example, Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de Boy. Whereas movement from European quarters into African spaces was seamless, the opposite direction of movement was not. The system of passes in apartheid South Africa replicated the colonial systems of boundary and space policing. 24. In his introduction to The Lumumba Generation, Tödt notes that the “roots of the term évolués, the ‘developed,’ lie in a racist semantics of progress that construed African societies as civilizationally backward according to European standards, though a liberal variant of this idea proposed that this gap could be closed over the long term on an individual basis, through cultural assimilation” (15). He further summarizes the evolution of the terms from “évolués,” “élite,” and “lettrés” to “bourgeois.” For my own purposes, and much like Tödt, I will use these terms interchangeably.

Chapter 1

Pedagogy of the Colonized Theories, Ideologies, and Policies of the Colonial School in Francophone Black Africa

The goal of any education effort or system, informal or formal, is to guarantee the integrity of a society through the transmission by a people of its history, ethos, culture, and civilization from one generation to the next. Such a system or effort prioritizes the holistic quality of education by foregrounding its conscious and not-so-conscious, material and spiritual, moral and intellectual values. It should also focus on the interest of the collective as it tries to ensure and safeguard those interests as well as the identities and interests of the individual that are not inimical to the shared interest of the community. The following scene in Niane’s Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali provides an illuminating glimpse into traditional, precolonial education in an African context: Every evening, Sogolon Kedjou would gather Diata and his companions outside her hut. She would tell them stories about the beasts of the bush, the dumb brothers of man. Sogolon Diata learnt to distinguish between the animals; he knew why the buffalo was his mother’s wraith and also why the lion was the protector of his father’s family. He also listened to the history of the kings which Balla Fasséké told him; enraptured by the story of Alexander the Great, the mighty king of gold and silver, whose sun shone over quite half the world. Sogolon initiated her son into certain secrets and revealed to him the names of the medicinal plants which every hunter should know. Thus, between his mother and his griot, the child got to know all that needed to be known. (Niane 2006, 23)

At this point in his life, Sundiata, at least in Niane’s text, was barely ten and on the cusp of heading into exile. As the legend goes, he was eighteen years old 27

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when he returned to reclaim his homeland, defeating the mighty Soumaoro Diarasso and founding the powerful Mali Empire in 1235. Between his departure into exile and his return, Sundiata would go on to learn many other life lessons, thus building on the foundation laid by his mother and griot during his early childhood. He would be mentored by leaders who took him in during his peregrinations and trained him in warfare, governance, and diplomacy. To appreciate Sundiata’s education is to understand the role of the mother in African societies as is the case in other societies, as well as that of the griot more specifically in many traditional West African societies. The preteen Sundiata learned many things from his first two major teachers about family and community, the environment, the outside world, politics, mysticism, science, and history. The past, present, and the future all converge here in the formal and informal education he received. His education was complete because Sundiata “got to know all that needed to be known” (23). As is demonstrated in the example from Sundiata’s story, Africa had its own educational systems before the onset of European colonization. Like children in all traditional societies, African children have the opportunity to learn from all their interactions in family, the community, age-groups, secret societies, as well as in professional societies to become full-fledged members of their respective communities. Samba Gadjigo identifies two types of education in Manding country, for example “karan,” which is basic Koranic education given by a “Karamoko” and “marali,” which literally means “éduquer ou plus exactement ‘forger’ un individu, l’insérer dans sa communauté grâce à la ‘connaissance’ des usages, des mœurs, des coutumes et des interdits” (“educate or more specifically ‘mold’ an individual, place him into his community and allow him to imbibe its habits, mores, customs, and taboos,” Gadjigo, 36). Suret-Canale offers even more specifics about the status of Koranic education and writing in Africa: Regarding formal koranic education, the tradition of advanced formal Islamic education thrived in many parts of West Africa even at the height of colonization. In fact, the number of Islamic teachers and students far exceeded the number employed and produced by the colonial school for a good portion of its existence. . . . Additionally, syllabic scripts existed in the 19th century among the Vais of Sierra Leone1 and among the Toma in different parts of West Africa. (Suret-Canale 1971, 461–63)

In many cases, the French discouraged or simply prohibited these preexisting traditions and institutions of learning and writing. In “Le problème de la culture,” Léopold Sédar Senghor interrogates education’s central role in societal evolution during the education debates heating up in the 1940s and 1950s, the last two decades of French colonization.



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According to Senghor, education, which is another name for culture, is “à la base de toute évolution historique” (“at the root of every historical transformation” Liberté I . . ., 93). Furthermore, he underlines what he sees as the fundamental distinction between culture and civilization. He defines civilization as “d’une part, un ensemble de valeurs morales et techniques, d’autre part, la manière de s’en servir” (“on the one hand, a set of moral and technical values, on the other, the way these are utilized,” 93). Culture, on the hand, is “la civilisation en action . . . le résultat d’un double effort d’intégration de l’Homme à la nature et de la nature à l’Homme” (“civilization in action . . . the product of a combined effort to integrate man into nature and nature into man,” 93). Human beings and the environment they inhabit should mirror one another in a symbiotic relationship that should in turn be reflected in the education system created for and by that society. An educational program that does not transmit “la somme des connaissances acquises par les générations précédentes” (“the sum total of generational knowledges,” 94) cannot be acceptable, Senghor adds. From all this, Senghor concludes: Il ne saurait y avoir de culture pour les jeunes hommes et jeunes filles d’Outre-Mer, même et surtout pour les membres de l’élite s’ils ne sont instruits de leur propre civilisation: de leur langue, de leur philosophie, de leur art. . . . la théorie de la ‘table rase’ du Nègre est un non-sens, et l’enseignement d’Outremer qui ignore les civilisations autochtones, un contresens. (Senghor 1964, 94) There can be no culture for the young men and women of overseas territories, but especially for the members of the elite, if they are not instructed in their own civilization: in their language, in their philosophy, in their art. . . . the theory of the Negro as a ‘tabula rasa’ is nonsensical, and education in overseas territories that ignores indigenous civilizations, is an absurdity.

Senghor here attacks the very foundation of French colonial educational policy informed by racist and Afro-phobic notions. While Senghor neither discounts nor rejects the role of outside influences on the education of the members of a particular society, he insists that the educational system (its content and structure) must not be a mere transplant, a complete novelty to its supposed beneficiaries. Rather, it must grow organically out of the needs and vision of the society for which it is intended. It must also evolve with their time and place. In short, a good education program seeks above all to produce fully rounded human beings who will become useful to themselves and to their respective societies. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt develops the concepts of “action,” “speech,” and “individuality.” She proposes that education must encourage individuality given that human beings, unlike mass-produced and synthetic objects, can never be identical. Humans should be allowed to

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express their uniqueness, for this is where reside the power and possibility of societal progress. By what means then can and does the human express their individuality? The answer to this, writes Arendt, lies in “speech” and “action”: “speech and action reveal this unique distinctness” (176). It is only through these two values that humans in a community can understand each other, their past, their present, hence their future. Without them, Arendt cautions, human existence is nothing but a life without substance. Arendt further argues that “action” and “speech” are inseparable: Without the accompaniment of speech . . . action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of the words. . . . It [action] becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do. (Arendt 1958, 178–79)

Naturally, the situation Arendt describes presupposes contact with others, a community of living, thinking, and free beings. As positive educational values, “speech” and “action” are founded on the principles of dialogue, respect, and equality. Antipodal to the notion of action is that of “fabrication” (poiesis). Whereas action derives its validity from individual agency and the necessary contact between equal and free humans, the essence of fabrication, on the other hand, lies in the contact between a living, thinking being and an inanimate matter. The motivation behind fabrication is the desire on the part of an entity to control another through manipulation and domination, as if they were imposing a predetermined form on a dead material. As Arendt argues, the main characteristic of this imbalance of power is violence. After all, since inanimate objects cannot generate their own driving force as organic matter does, they can only be the victim of external stimuli. For his part, Brazilian philosopher of education Paolo Freire, in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, highlights this dehumanization process of fabrication expounded by Arendt, linking it to the idea of conquest and cultural indoctrination. He calls this antidialogical action: “The first characteristic of antidialogical action is the necessity for conquest. The antidialogical individual, in his relations with others, aims at conquering them—increasingly and by every means, from the toughest to the most refined, from the most repressive to the most solicitous (paternalism)” (Freire, 119). He further notes that “every act of conquest implies a conqueror and someone or something which is conquered. The conqueror imposes his objectives on the



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vanquished, and makes of them his possession. He imposes his own contours on the vanquished, who internalize this shape and become ambiguous beings ‘housing’ another” (119). It is worthy to note that Freire equates this desire for conquest to paternalism. Colonialist discourse is replete with references to Africans and other colonized as children in need of guidance, discipline, and surveillance; notions that are in turn internalized by many of the colonized. Borrowing from Erich Fromm, Freire further characterizes the desire for conquest of and domination over another as a manifestation of sadism: The pleasure in complete domination over another person (or other animate creature) is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Another way of formulating the same thought is to say that the aim of sadism is to transform man into a thing, something animate into something inanimate, since by complete and absolute control the living loses one essential quality of life—freedom. (Freire 1997, 41)

Complete domination of one over another, if achieved, discourages, if not destroys, creativity in the other—and with it, the desire for adventure and research. Inherent in sadism is the will to interpersonal violence, an essential characteristic of colonialism and the colonial school. THE RAISON D’ÊTRE OF COLONIAL EDUCATION From its inception as a government-mandated system in 1816–1817 to its dissolution in the 1950s, colonial public education was always necessarily an instrument of social engineering and transformation. This basic objective remained throughout colonization and was only modified according to the time and place of its implementation. When Jean Dard started teaching Senegalese children in 1817, French colonial ambitions in Africa south of the Sahara seemed limited to trading activities mostly along the coast. The Catholic missions of the Frères de Ploërmel and the Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny (who would remain influential in education until 1903) were interested in the propagation of Christianity and the training of a few native priests to facilitate their conversion efforts. The creation of the École des Otages by Faidherbe in 1855 marked the real beginning of an education policy geared toward the training of Africans for work in colonial administration: “pour y élever et y instruire des fils ou parents de chefs du pays désignés par le gouverneur, et des jeunes gens qui paraîtront assez intelligents pour devenir des interprètes” (“To therein raise and educate the sons or relatives of local chiefs handpicked by the governor, as well as young men who will be intelligent enough to become interpreters,” Feuille officielle du Sénégal et dépendances Mardi 26 MARS 1861, no. 65, 152).

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As a boarding school, it signaled an unequivocal intention on the part of the colonial government to use it as a locus of deculturation and re-acculturation, ultimately making collaborators out of the students. Governor General Roume’s 1903 reform secularizing public education (less than ten years after the creation of the AOF in 1895) brought into stark view the necessity of the government to expand the goals of education. Rather than limiting itself to training interpreters and monitors, the new system would seek to extend basic schooling to the masses and train a select group from them (starting with the sons of chiefs and local notables) to assist in every aspect of the expanding colonial administration. This blueprint inherited from Faidherbe and assumed by Governor-General Roume would remain in place until the 1940s. Governor-general William Merlaud-Ponty,2 with help from the indefatigable Inspector-General Georges Hardy, clarified and expanded the scope of the 1903 plan. Unlike his predecessor Roume, who simply assumed the basic ideological and political role of colonial education inherited from his own predecessors even as he ushered in the first major educational policy reform in the colonies,3 William Ponty was clear and deliberate about the role of education in the assertion of colonial authority and the pursuance of French colonial interests—and especially the central role of the French language in that endeavor.4 Starting in the mid-1920s, colonial education policy started experiencing wild swings even as it remained tethered to the original two-pronged goal of spreading access to French and creating a small army of intermediary figures. While governor-general Jules Carde’s May 10, 1924 decree made the education of the sons of chiefs and other indigenous notables compulsory, as his predecessors had done, it also outlined the goal of education at each of the three major stages established by the reform. Not surprisingly, the teaching of French remained central: “Le français doit être imposé au plus grand nombre d’indigènes. Son étude est rendue obligatoire pour les futurs chefs. Il faut, en outre, qu’on puisse rencontrer dans les villages les plus éloignés non seulement un chef mais au moins quelques indigènes s’exprimant en français sans prétentions académiques” (“French must be imposed upon the largest number of natives. Its study is required for future chiefs. Furthermore, we must be able to encounter, in the farthest-flung villages, not only a chief but at least some natives who can express themselves in unpretentious French,” Carde in Davesne, 86). The objective of village schools was to help create an army of French speakers—or “indigène francisé” (“Frenchified native,” Davesne. 86). Whereas the best students from the preparatory schools would be selected for further education at the elementary level, the vast majority would be sent back to their families and replaced by a fresh batch of children. The goal of the system called “roulement annuel” (continuous annual turnover)



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was to make as many natives as possible familiar with the French language within the shortest amount of time (Davesne, 86). To accomplish this goal, the 1930–1931 reforms increased the amount of time children should stay in school. Since officials realized students released back into their communities after only three years of learning French quickly forgot the language, children were now required to remain in school from age six to age fourteen, with a good portion of that time focused on so-called practical learning. The objective of lower primary education goes further than the acquisition of basic French. Conversely, the higher primary schools were intended to supplement the instruction of those who would assist the colonizers in their administrative work as local chiefs, candidates for the federation schools who would later fill lower-level positions in the federal administration, and subaltern cadres in various local governments in the colonies. As part of his proposed reforms, governor-general Jules Brévié insisted that education should go beyond simply familiarizing the masses with French and training subaltern native cadres; it should 1) guarantee the advancement of the carefully selected indigenous elite and 2) bring the natives closer to the French and to transform their way of life. In essence, the main objective of education was to transform the colonized populations into participants, producers, and consumers of Third Republic political and economic priorities and products. In his inaugural address to the Conseil de Gouvernement, Brévié celebrated the “success” of the original two-sided mission of colonial education. Thanks to the spread of the French language, the close and widespread contact of the colonized with French ways of doing things, and the creation of a loyal indigenous elite class, Brévié noted that “la ‘conquête morale’5 est vraiment une réalité” (“moral conquest is truly a reality,” BEAOF Juillet–Décembre 1930, 4). Seventy years after Faidherbe’s call to Africans to stop resisting French generosity and genius,6 Brévié could claim that Africans had finally seen the light and were now willing participants in their own colonization. However, even as they congratulated themselves on this achievement, colonial authorities complained that the prior system, too focused on making Frenchmen out of natives, may have unwittingly produced misfits of little use to France’s colonial interests. From the perspective of the colonizer complaining about the glut of diplomas, to the educated indigenes’ abhorrence for manual labor, and his general tendency toward laziness (Davesne, 87), two solutions existed: 1) educate more Africans toward the primary school certificate (“certificat d’études”) so as to destroy the fetish of the certificate and its accompanying prestige or 2) focus overwhelmingly more on so-called practical education in hygiene and agriculture, strongly recommended in the May 1 circular but never fully implemented7 (Davesne, 87). Colonial authorities decided to adopt the second option. In any case, after the achievement of

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the original goal of colonial education, which consisted in the establishment of the moral, intellectual, philosophical, and doctrinaire foundation of the colonizing enterprise, it was time to shift focus to a more practical, political, and economic vision of the program. Since colonial education should no longer necessarily lead to a civil service career, it was time for the educational system to divert attention and resources to two other pressing demands: vocational training and mass education. This shift, which quickly came on the heels of Carde’s 1924 reforms (as its logical consequence), was instigated by the new preferred colonial policy of mise en valeur. This new policy, with roots in the Métropole, was founded on the declared necessity for an active and deliberate exploitation of both the human and natural resources of the colonies purportedly for the colonies’ own development and progress. Brévié and his supporters argued that the quickest and surest way for the colonies to enter modernity was not by privileging the invention of an elite disconnected from their own people and from the French; it was rather by focusing on the development of technical knowledge and manual skills among natives. With this goal established, the stage was set for the transition from “l’enseignement individual (individual education)” and “l’enseignement de qualité (qualitative education)” to “l’enseignement collectif (collective education)” and “l’éducation massive (mass education)” (BEAOF, 1930). But what exactly is the new school? And what precisely is this “éducation massive” to be given through it? According to the government, “cette école indigène, qu’il faudra voir un jour dans chaque groupe de villages, c’est l’école rurale, affranchie des programmes ambitieux et scolaires, c’est une ferme et un atelier, un dispensaire et un champ d’expériences” (“This native school, which should one day be present in every village grouping, is the rural school, liberated from ambitious and academic programs. It is also a farm and a workshop, a dispensary and a field of experiences” BEAOF, no. 73, 1930, 7). The “ruralization” of education consisted essentially in the proliferation of mediocre schools, especially in rural Africa. The sole purpose of these schools was to ensure a constant and abundant supply of skilled labor needed to bring the mise en valeur plan to fruition—a plan that was to bring generalized prosperity to Africa. This politics of mass education or education of the masses would become a rallying cry in AEF one decade later where it was not a matter of reform (since there was frankly nothing to reform) but simply a matter of giving education the attention it deserved in the larger scheme of colonization. Talking about the economic role of the native, Eboué’s circular of 1941 noted that “la masse indigène, dans son ensemble, est et restera essentiellement agricole. Toute la politique que nous avons exposée suppose la fixation de l’indigène au sol, son développement au sein des institutions collectives traditionnelles; le travail de la terre est le plus propre et sans doute le seul à assurer ce progrès sur place,



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cet enrichissement social du village et de la tribu, cette stabilité féconde de la population indigène” (“In general, the native masses are and will remain essentially farmers. All our policies assume keeping the native in the farm, his development within collective traditional institutions. Working the land is the most appropriate and obviously the only thing that will guarantee the progress, social improvement, and productive stability of native populations,” Éboué, 47). Éboué cited the example of cotton production, which, according to him, had brought prosperity to the local populations (47). It is important to note the specific hostility toward the creation and promotion of an urban elite class in the Reforms of the 1930s. According to Henri Labouret, the village school, which is neither a preparatory school nor an elementary school, is “destinée à créer une mentalité paysanne, à ratacher la classe à la vie du groupement humain . . . une ‘école de quantité’ qui s’oppose à ‘l’école de qualité’ destinée à la formation d’élites” (“geared toward creating a peasant mentality, keeping the graduates attached to their communities . . . ‘a ‘school of quantity’ as opposed to a ‘school of quality’ geared toward the production of the elite,” Labouret, 100). Nonetheless, the colonial administration was not entirely opposed to the existence of an indigenous elite class. It could not be. This insistence on the ruralization of education was essentially aimed at drastically reducing the number and quality of diplomas to be granted as well as the influence of the elite with the “mentalité de bureaucrates [bureaucratic mentality]” while promoting a more subaltern class called “élite de travailleurs manuels [elite of manual workers]” (Davesne, 90). In short, this was simply a deliberate effort to keep a lid on African social mobility and urbanization—two important drivers and indicators of social differentiation and stratification. After realizing the failure of the assimilationist educational policy of prior regimes, more specifically its inherent danger to the colonial enterprise, France decided that instead of producing Black Frenchmen (fake Europeans) who may or may not serve and love France, they should instead produce nativized Africans who will serve and love France without asking questions. Indeed, as Tödt notes, “in colonial Africa, elite formation was meant to prevent the formation of an elite” (3). To fully appreciate the objective of colonial education, it will help to examine the specific means deployed to attain that objective: selection and recruitment of students, curriculum (content and structure), pedagogical methods, and the training of teachers and monitors. Selection and Recruitment Given the utilitarian nature of public colonial education, the process of recruiting and selecting students was always a vector of the colonizer’s anxieties and aspirations vis-à-vis the status and attitudes of the colonized.

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From the 1850s when Faidherbe’s École des Otages was available only to the sons of chiefs and other indigenous dignitaries to the 1930s politics of rural education, there was never a time when colonial education was not rationed. First of all, the number of children admitted to available schools remained very small throughout the duration of the colonial school project. The administration used a rigorous quota system at every stage of the process to determine which and how many students entered the school, or could move from one level into another. If we visualized the colonial education system as a pyramid, we would see the pyramid becoming disproportionately narrower as we got closer to the apex. In addition to the family origin of the children, the selection criteria included the character and personality of the students, as determined by school officials with direct access to the students. No one expressed the anxieties, priorities, and aspirations of the colonizer better than Georges Hardy. He noted that in order to avoid future social upheaval (“perturbation sociale”), access to higher primary education should be given only to the children of families with proven loyality to France. As for the rest, “il faut, surtout, éliminer avec un soin impitoyable tous ceux dont les facultés, même brillantes, sont insuffisamment équilibrées, tous ceux qui feront servir à la satisfaction de leurs appétits le savoir qu’on leur donnera, qui pousseront leurs congénères à des révoltes et qui garderont toute leur vie l’inquiétude et la cruauté de loups mis en cage (“In particular, we must eliminate with merciless care all those, even the brilliant ones, who are not sufficiently stable, who risk using the education received from us to their own ends as well as imbibing the anxiety and cruelty of caged wolves” Conquête morale, 12–13). The primary concern here is the preclusion of the use of education by the native for their self-expression and interest. The selection process became particularly brutal during the 1930s. In their effort to ruralize education, Brévié and many of his successors removed resources from the primary and federal schools that served as the pipelines to elite status. They argued that the best way to get the natives to school was to bring the school to the natives (Brévié, BEAOF, no. 73, 7). In 1941, three years before the Brazzaville Conference that would initiate the unravelling of colonial education as it was practiced until then, Felix Eboué, governor-general of AEF, deplored the particularly lamentable state of education in his federation.8 To remedy the situation, Eboué invoked the same selection strategies and tactics employed by his predecessors and counterparts in AOF: “Une sélection constante ne cessera cependant de s’exercer, et des déchets certains seront éliminés au fur et à mesure, afin d’alléger la classe et de ne pas risquer de faire des ratés” (“There will be a sustained selection process and the unwanted ones will be disposed of in order to unclutter the class and preempt failures,” Eboué, 44).



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An important difference worth noting between Eboué’s vision and those of other governors-general such as Brévié and Carde (and the coterie of their top education advisers) is that whereas the latter were worried about what Hardy called “perturbation sociale,” Eboué was more concerned about the quality of the middle class in his federation. The ultimate goal of his selection criteria and the education itself was the creation of a well-trained and undifferentiated class of workers by homogenizing the prestige associated with their respective professions (Éboué, 44). The Curriculum As a matter of principle and practice, the education given to the rare few selected from among the native populations should prevent the acquisition of knowledge considered potentially dangerous to imperial interests. To that end, extreme care was taken to outline as precisely and minutely as possible the subject matter to be taught, and the manner in which it was to be taught. Because the colonized pupil was a means to an end, his education could not be left to chance. The inaugural edition of the Bulletin de l’Enseignement de l’Afrique Occidentale Francaise9 (January 1913), featured an excerpt from a speech that governor-general William Ponty gave to the colonial Government Council. The excerpt, in which he also spoke of the docility of African populations and presented details about the achievements and challenges of education in the federation, opened and concluded with a reference to the teaching and learning of French. Ponty noted the special place of the French language in their work: “La diffusion de la langue française constituera un lien particulièrement souple entre nos sujets et nous. Grâce à lui, notre influence s’insinuera dans la masse, la pénètrera et l’enveloppera comme en un réseau ténu d’affinités nouvelles” (“The spreading of the French language is the dynamic link between our subjects and us. It is thanks to it that our influence will infuse the masses as well as penetrate and enwrap them in a network of new relationships,” Ponty, “Les Questions scolaires,” 20). If Ponty merely hinted at the indispensability of the French language in France’s colonial adventure, Georges Hardy, as his job dictated, was the one responsible for making specific curricular prescriptions for the federation. In his recommendation vis-à-vis the curriculum for the education of the indigenous elite, Hardy was categorical that students should not be introduced to the complex beauty of French literature. For example, no grandiloquence should be tolerated in writing classes, only concise and unembellished sentences and composition topics, and students should be grounded in their immediate environments (Conquête morale, 152–53). While acknowledging the inadequacy of this content, Hardy warned against exposing the native to the beauty and

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substance of French language and literature, arguing this approach was necessary to fight against the unruly imagination characteristic of savage races (Conquête morale, 153). Lessons in History and Geography If the teaching of language and literature withheld details that could potentially feed the fertile imagination of the colonized, the teaching of history took manipulation and indoctrination to a higher level through a carefully choreographed falsification and exaggeration of historical facts. The teaching of local history, which dates back to the 1910s (Conklin 1997; Genova 2004) offers probably the most powerful weapon of propaganda available to the colonizer.10 Western imperial historiography insisted that the history of African peoples started with the arrival of Europeans on the continent, and that Africa was the Dark Continent and terra nullius, a blank space stuck in primeval infancy and waiting to be redeemed from it. When and where colonizers conceded African history, cultures, and civilizations did exist prior to the arrival of Europeans, they sought to obscure these while portraying everything French in a positive light and claiming that Africans would do well to throw their lot with the French. Every occasion to reinforce this deliberate lie must be exploited. Regarding the teaching of French history and culture, the program should be as scanty as possible, selecting only those aspects of the history that present France in a positive light vis-à-vis Africa. The idea of African inferiority and concomitant French superiority was reinforced at every opportunity, including and especially in children’s books. Nowhere is this French propaganda more blatant than in the student reader, Moussa et Gi-gla.11 The intention of the authors of this reader was to make the native know and love France and to see it as the most glorious and advanced civilization, the one with the most courageous soldiers and historical figures and, above all, the land of those who have brought progress and prosperity to Africa (Sonolet et Pérès III). The reader features two African boys, Moussa (from the Sahel region) and Gi-gla (from Dahomey). They are servants of two French men, one an army officer, the other a trader. Their many adventures around French West Africa in the company of their masters allow the boys to see the diversity of regions, peoples, and customs in AOF. The book also makes sure to highlight aspects of agriculture, manual labor, and the military profession.12 To reinforce the colonialist propaganda, the book calls for Blacks to work and fight for France: Il y a avantage pour un Noir à se trouver au service d’un Blanc parce que les Blancs sont plus instruits, plus avancés en civilisation que les Noirs et que, grâce à eux, ceux-ci peuvent faire des progrès plus rapides . . . et devenir un



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jour des hommes vraiment utiles. De leur côté, les Noirs rendent service aux Blancs en leur apportant le secours de leurs bras, pour l’exécution des travaux de tous genres qu’ils ont entrepris, en cultivant la terre qui permet d’alimenter le commerce, et aussi en combattant pour la France dans les rangs des troupes indigènes. (Sonolet et Pérès 1916, 83) It is beneficial for a Black man to be at the service of a White man because Whites are better educated, more civilized than Blacks, and thanks to the former, the latter can progress more rapidly to one day become truly useful. As for Blacks, they can utilize their brute force to help Whites in their projects, to till the land in order to advance commerce, and to fight for France in the company of their fellow natives.

In the kumbaya universe the book depicts, it is possible for the superior French colonizer and the inferior colonized African to work together for the “prosperity and happiness” of all (“travaillent en commun pour la prospérité et le bonheur de tous,” 83). PEDAGOGICAL METHODS Language as a Vector of Civilization and Culture As we have seen with language and literature as content, the use of language as a pedagogical tool was equally political, if not more so. In a letter to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, Joseph Fleuriau13 wrote the following assessment of Jean Dard’s teaching method and the quality of Dard’s students: “La plupart parlent et écrivent le français assez correctement, et ont acquis en même temps une instruction première que leurs prédécesseurs sont loin d’avoir. Les plus âgés seront avant peu en état de tenir des comptes ou de se livrer à des affaires”14 (“The majority of them speak and write French rather well; they have also acquired knowledge not available to those before them. The oldest among them will soon be able to maintain an account and conduct business transactions,” Dioffo, 50). What Fleuriau did not mention in his letter is the means by which Jean Dard had accomplished that feat. During his short term as the first government appointed public educator in Senegal, Jean Dard noticed that his older students, those between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, were doing much better in French than many of the younger students. These students could read and write correctly in French but could not understand what they were reading. To get around the problem, Dard, who had written extensively on the grammar and vocabulary of the Senegalese language, realized he could use Wolof, which the children knew well, to teach French, mainly through translation activities. Unfortunately,

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urged by the influential Catholic missions in Senegal at that time, the local colonial administration terminated the policy of using local languages as a pedagogical tool in 1829 (L’enseignement aux Indigènes. Bruxelles, Etablissments Generaux d’imprimerie, 1931, Institut Colonial International, 264). Thereafter, African languages were absent as languages of instruction throughout the colonial period.15 The contentious debate over the use and usefulness of African languages in colonial schools never fully disappeared. Its ghost lurked at every turn, waiting to be resuscitated whenever major shifts in colonial education policy occurred. This debate played out quite spectacularly between 1924 and 1944, but especially in 1930 and 1931 with the arrival of Jules Brévié and his policy of rural schools. First, authorities admitted that, in theory, using African languages would ensure three things: “de sauvegarder l’originalité des races colonisées, leur permettre de se developer dans leur ‘climat,’ de conserver leur personnalité” (“safeguard the originality of the colonized races, allow them to develop within their own environment, preserve their personality,” Davesne, 100). The argument was that French would always be a foreign language to Africans, hence a force of alienation rather than of meaningful development and progress. Second, using French as a language of instruction would not significantly alter attitudes regarding French colonization. Since the African can never fully understand the language and what it represents, the civilizing effects (action civilisatrice) of the language will be lost (Davesne, 100–101). Conversely, if the colonized were taught in his own language, he stood a greater chance of understanding the lessons in his own language: “on n’agit vraiment sur une race qu’en s’adressant à elle dans son propre langage” (“there was no better way to influence a people than by dealing with them in their own language,” 101).16 Theoretical and practical arguments against using African languages as a tool of instruction were also presented. Theoretically speaking: 1) because African languages are not vectors of civilization (“les dialectes17 africains ne sont pas des langues de civilization [African dialects are not languages of civilization]”), and given the paucity of extant written materials in African languages, they are not an effective method to civilize Africans, to expand their horizon. This is important given the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonization in general, and of the school in particular; 2) French has opened up opportunities for the colonized as “une langue véhiculaire,” including allowing them to create creole languages); 3) The third theoretical argument presented has to do with the notion of civilizational osmosis, the idea that when distinct groups of people come into contact, it is natural that the less advanced ones adopt the ways of the more advanced ones.18 By this logic then, and by nature’s law, French should take precedence over African languages.19 This, evidently, is part of the bigger argument around assimilation; 4) The fourth theoretical



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counterargument sounds more practical. To teach a language, that language must first be codified and standardized. Who should do it? How does one codify a language whose grammar rules change from village to village? How will it be done? Furthermore, will the language, if codified, not become distorted, thus becoming essentially a foreign language to the student?20 5) The fifth and final argument: There are too many languages in Africa.21 To avoid the dilemma of which languages and how many of them to use, French should become the unifying language (Davesne, 103).22 Practically speaking, the following are arguments against using African languages as a teaching language (Davesne, 103–4): 1) the near impossibility of transcribing or translating the languages, 2) the problem of supervising the teachers using the languages, and 3) the absence of practical value in using native languages to teach when in three years maximum, a Black child can speak, write, and read French fluently. In the end, authorities argued, there are more benefits to using French than African languages. Why would France want to deprive itself of the single most important weapon it had in its arsenal? Since colonization was a long process and it would take time to establish French roots in French possessions, there was no time to waste.23 The next time the issue was raised again in any serious way was at the 1944 Brazzaville conference during which authorities merely reiterated the existing policy on the primacy and the practicality of the French language (“Plan d’enseignement,” 6). THE TEACHING CORPS In general, there were two different categories of teachers: European and native (Bouche, 208). For the colonial education project to succeed, the teachers, who naturally spend more time with the children, should be models in moral and practical terms, in addition to knowing their physical and cultural environment well, being reasonably grounded in notions of hygiene, agriculture, and manual work), as well as serving as ambassadors of France and its politics of “enseignement adapté” (Hardy, Conquête morale, 21). The second major reform proposed at the 1931 Paris conference had to do with the training of teachers. As the report notes, “l’adaptation de l’enseignement aux besoins des populations indigènes se ramène en définitive au problème de la formation professionnelle des maîtres” (“Adapting education to the needs of the native populations comes down to the question of the professional training of teachers, 98). In other words, no adaptation of education in the colonies would succeed without first tackling the problem concerning the teaching corps. Until 1930, the École Normale William Ponty was the only teacher training college for the entire AOF federation. The

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education reform of the 1930s considered the training of teachers at Gorée, and only there, as completely out of step with the demands of the time. Since it was counterproductive to bring students from all over AOF to be trained on Gorée island,24 a place vastly different from the places where the teacher-trainees would end up working, it made sense to train them in situ in their respective colonies so that they would be less disoriented. Accordingly, between 1935 and 1940, three new normal schools were opened: two in the French Sudan—l’École Normale Rurale de Katibougou in 1935 and l’École Normale Rurale de Sévaré in 1939 as well as one in Côte d’Ivoire: l’École Normale Rurale de Dabou in 1937 (Bouche 213). At the conference, authorities also recommended that the metropolitan teachers in the colonies should be stripped of their fetish of the diploma once on the ground in Africa. Everything in the method and the content of their lessons should be geared toward increasing agricultural and industrial output and converting the indigenous populations into people who love work, especially farmwork. This directive should of course be understood within the larger context of European discourse of the lazy African, first sanctioned during slavery, and then retooled for colonization, which also makes it an a priori justification of the indigénat and forced labor regimes in particular. Colonial Education: A Retrospective From its inception, colonialist discourse revolved around the colonizer’s claim of doing what is good for their colonized subjects, and this even at the expense of the colonizer’s own interests and well-being. Nowhere is this notion more strikingly represented than in the well-known poem “The White Man’s Burden”25 by poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling. In the poem, Kipling calls specifically for the imposition of good on “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” Kipling was not writing in a vacuum. His nod to the new player in the imperialist arena, the United States, was a wink to extant and thriving European imperialism founded on the myth of the heathenish and childish non-European. Indeed, by the time Kipling published his poem, the AOF was already four years old, and France was concluding its so-called military “pacification” of Africa, thereby solidifying its imperialist dreams. All colonial policies (assimilation, rayonnement, mise en valeur, association, cooperation) and their accompanying implementation were subsumed under the overarching principle of the mission civilisatrice (another name for the White man’s burden). These policies, announced with pomp and circumstance, came to life in what is referred to as the three Cs of colonialism: Civilization, Christianization, and Commerce. The school became the main instrument for the realization of these policies.



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To Assimilate or Not to Assimilate? The One-and-aHalf-Century Question To be assimilated, in its most expansive sense, means to no longer be a colonial subject, even if one is a non-European. Assimilation was a “régime d’exception” (a special privilege) that saw the extension of civil and civic equality (citizenship and nationality) to citizens of the four communes of Senegal (Billiard, 52). To be admitted into that sacrosanct community, Africans were required to demonstrate a willingness to shun their ancestral ways, as well as an unequivocal loyalty to France and Frenchness. While a select few were allowed nominal admission (since the stigma of being Black in the Métropole never disappears) into the master race (e.g., Félix Eboué, L. S. Senghor, Lamine Gueye, Blaise Diagne, Félix Houphouët Boigny), the vast majority of Africans, including the so-called évolués, had no chance to be. There are two main types of assimilation: forced assimilation (imposed by the colonizer upon the colonizer) and willing assimilation26 (effectuated by the colonized themselves). Willing assimilation is better called imitation: “L’imitation, le désir de ressembler et d’adopter les modes de vie de ce qui semble plus haut et plus beau, de bénéficier des mêmes avantages et de profiter des mêmes droits n’ont pas besoin de s’enseigner: le fleuve suit la pente” (“imitation, the desire to look like and adopt the lifestyles of the apparently more beautiful and superior entity. To enjoy and take advantage of the same goods and rights are things that need not be taught; the river flows downstream,” “Colonie du Soudan,” 1). All the same, colonization itself is anathema to the idea of assimilation (forced or willing): the wall between colonizer/White and colonized/colored/non-European makes assimilation a priori impossible. Colonial regimes are, by definition, exclusionary. The existence of the indigénat and forced labor laws, among many other colonial policies and discriminatory practices, made assimilation as proposed in theory impossible: once Black or African, always Black and African (to the French) and never quite Black or African (to so-called unfrenchified Africans). Critics of assimilation blamed it for many of the woes of the colonial project prior to the 1920s. One of the loudest critics of the policy was Jules Brévié. In his Islamisme contre naturisme au Soudan français: essai de psychologie politique, published before he became governor-general of AOF, Brévié lambastes assimilation and calls for its abandonment. In the introduction to his anti-Islamic treatise, the senior colonial administrator clarifies his position vis-à-vis two concepts that, in his view, stymie the imagination of the colonizer: assimilation and autonomy. Regarding assimilation, he says, Dans son acception actuelle courante, le mot assimilation représente la tendance des peuples colonisateurs à s’inspirer, dans l’organisation de leurs possessions

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d’outre-mer, des règles de leur propre constitution politique et de leurs lois civiles sans se préoccuper du statut particulier ni des aspirations des nations assujetties. (Brévié 1923, XIII) In its current meaning, the term assimilation denotes the tendency of colonizing peoples to impose their own political systems and laws, which they consider superior, on their subject nations with no regard for the status and aspirations of the latter.

Clearly, Brévié sees assimilation as a one-way street that allows the colonizer to impose his vision of things on the colonized, whose only input in the process is to accept the imposition quietly. As for autonomy, which he says can only be defined “à contrario,” it is “la tendance à faire prédominer dans les colonies les besoins et les intérêts locaux sur l’exclusivisme métropolitain” (“the tendency to allow local needs and interests to take precedence over those of the Metropole” XIII). Brévié addresses here what he considers two extreme (and impractical) points of colonial policy, neither of which he considers acceptable. Whereas assimilation for him is the “negation complète de la personnalité des races protégées (the complete negation of the personality of the protected races,” autonomy (especially absolute autonomy) “conduit fatalement à la secession” (“leads fatally to secession,” xiv). Since the colonizer had the intention neither of letting go of his possessions (preferring “un système durable de colonization”) nor that of turning the African into Europeans, he must look for alternatives. For Brévié, the alternative to assimilation and autonomy was the “politique d’association.” For him, only this new policy is capable of reconciling “les intérêts métropolitains et ceux des indigènes” while preparing “leur collaboration fructueuse dans l’ordre et la paix garantis par l’autorité française” (“Metropolitan interests and those of the natives . . . their productive partnership underwritten by the order and peace guaranteed by French authority,” xiv). Seeing colonization as a perpetual relationship between the superior races and the inferior races, and assimilation as a “danger et fausseté” (“a danger and falsehood,” xv) that threatens that relationship, Brévié proposes a radical reform of the school system as the antidote to the carnage inflicted upon it by bad policies and practices. Brévié concludes his introduction by indicating his preference for “un programme d’éducation collective (a collective education program”),” which is the only way to prevent “cette désagrégation des affinités ethniques sans lesquelles nous nous trouverons bientôt, dans toute l’Afrique occidentale, en face d’une poussière d’individus qui ne bénéficiant plus, dans leur formation morale, de la discipline de la famille et du clan, augmenterait considérablement les difficultés déjà grandes de notre œuvre civilisatrice” (“this disintegration of ethnic solidarity without



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which we shall soon find ourselves all over West Africa face-to-face with this scattering of individuals who, no longer benefitting from the discipline guaranteed by the family and clan, will considerably exacerbate the difficulties confronting our civilizing mission,” xvi). Given the frustration with the policy of assimilation, its detractors, like Brévié, turned to association as a more sensible, pragmatic policy. Based on the principle of ‘separate and unequal’ (which is foundational to colonization), association allowed the colonizer to govern more easily and costefficiently.27 The much-trumpeted politics of adaptation (as in enseignement adapté) in the 1930s was the soul of the new politics of association. In fact, the two concepts are interchangeable. The whole idea of enseignemnt adapté was to find the most efficient way to teach the colonized to accept colonization as well as serve the colonizer docilely, with rules conceived and set up by the colonizer. With association, the colonizer merely tried to assimilate the colonized into the universe he created for them while claiming he respected his wards’ culture and history. The only significant difference between assimilation and association or adaptation is that colonial policy shifted from one racist practice (tabula rasa) to another, more racist one (racial difference). In fact, colonial racism became more insidious because it became increasingly rationalized and codified. The period of colonial education from 1903 to the 1920s has been generally presented as the period of assimilation—a period during which, at least in theory, France proposed to culturally assimilate, through the colonial school, a small number of its colonial subjects into French way of life. Conversely, where Africa is concerned, the 1920s and 1930s are characterized as the anti-assimilation period. From as early as the 1920s, we can observe the emergence of vehement complaints against the school for its preference to produce “déclassé” and “déraciné” natives through “quality” and “individual” education. Anxieties surrounding transgressions of racial-cultural boundaries posed by assimilation—that is, the worry of keeping the races as separate from each other as possible—was largely responsible for the abandoning of the policy of assimilation and the adoption of so-called adapted education in the 1920s. Assimilation provided too much intellectual learning, which was ultimately bad for the integrity of the French state and its civilization. Rural popular education, as we have seen, was proposed as the antidote to the dangerous tendency toward assimilation. Assimilation was a program of erasure; indeed, the cover for a more sinister agenda that semantic acrobatics could not hide. It was a politics of bad faith. In his assessment of the imperial politics of the Third Republic in the twilight of colonization, Pierre-François Gonidec suggested that it was characterized by “beaucoup d’assujettissement, très peu d’autonomie et un soupçon d’assimilation” (“a lot of oppression, very little autonomy, and a

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whif of assimilation,” 93). For his part, Samba Gadjigo notes that far from being a project of true assimilation, the colonial enterprise consisted, as far as the European was concerned, “à se donner comme modèle mais, en même temps, à bloquer l’autochtone dans la voie d’accès à cet ‘idéale.’ Parler ‘d’assimilation,’ c’est prêter à l’indigène une initiative que la dialectique de la domination lui refuse” (“in presenting himself as a model while preventing the colonized native from becoming like him. So, to speak of assimilation is to dangle an ideal in front of the colonized that colonial domination denies him,” 13). In the grand scheme of things, France was simply a black hole that sought, through the school and other colonial practices, to absorb other peoples, their cultures, their resources, and their aspirations. Everything about educational policy and implementation was intended for one goal: the success of the colonial project—in other words, the interest of France presented as the default interest of everyone in the relationship. The myriad tweaks made to the system were driven by that single-minded goal. An idea better explained by the unflappable Georges Hardy: “L’A.O.F. n’est plus (elle ne l’a presque jamais été) une ‘terre conquise’ par la France, c’est un pays absorbé par la France, c’est une partie intégrante de la nation française, au même titre que l’Artois et le Roussillon” (“French West Africa is no longer or never was a land conquered by France; it is rather a land absorbed by France, an integral part of the French nation, just like Artois and Roussillon,” “Les deux routes”). True—except that no African colony would ever be like the White and European Artois or Roussillon. The 1944 Brazzaville Conference, like the 1931 Paris Congress before it, was a reassessment of colonial education policies and practices of the preceding decades. However, if the 1931 congress was filled with bombastic proclamations characteristic of an oblivious colonizer at the height of his power, the 1944 conference, while bullish about the future, was a bit more subdued in its tone. At the conference, colonial authorities seemed more clear-eyed about their legacy and prospects at the end of a war that had laid bare the limits of French power and authority, as well as cast serious doubts on the legitimacy of its colonial project. Accordingly, it was not uncommon to hear sentiments like the following regarding the school. “On ne conçoit pas une école qui serait en opposition déclarée avec les tendances dominantes de la famille et de la société, qui orienterait les esprits et les cœurs dans un sens autre que celui vers lequel se dirige le monde extérieur” (“One does not design a school and let it be in open contradiction to the prevailing trends of family and society or to turn hearts and minds away from where the outside world is leaning,” “Colonie du Soudan,” 1). In a 1944 government report on the Brazzaville Conference, it was noted that the structure of the school, its objectives, and methods were shaped by the question de “bonheur” et de “progrès” (“Rapport a/s de la conférence de



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Brazzaville,” 1). It was further suggested that to really understand the significance of these two concepts (happiness and progress), and to know and do what is right for the native, one must thoroughly know him (“connaître admirablement l’indigène”), and have lived alongside him long enough to gain his trust. Conceding that Africans might have a different conception of happiness and progress, colonial authorities noted thusly: Nous voulons véritablement faire leur Bonheur, mais leur conception du Bonheur n’est pas la nôtre et c’est notre force de Bonheur que nous risquons de leur imposer. De même lorsque nous parlons de progrès, savons-nous exactement ce que ce mot peut représenter pour l’indigène? Ce qui peut être le progrès pour l’Européen ne l’est pas pour le Noir. En bref considère-t-on comme un progrès de voir les indigènes copier l’Européen? Toute notre action ultérieure dépendra en fin de compte de la définition africaine que nous voudrons bien donner à ces deux mots. (“Rapport a/s de la conférence de Brazzaville,” 1944, 1–2) We wish to give them Happiness. But their conception of Happiness is not the same as ours and we risk imposing on them our idea of Happiness. Similarly, when we speak of progress, do we know for certain what the word means for the native? What is progress for the European may not be the same for the Black. In sum, do we consider as progress their imitation of us? In the final analysis, all our future actions will depend on what we consider as African perceptions of these two notions.

This, at least in theory, is different from what transpired in the early days of colonization. It is a clear repudiation of previous policies that excluded the consideration of (or the existence of) African identity and African input in policymaking. Even if it is still the colonizer defining African happiness and progress, here, at the very least, he acknowledges difference that could put into question the very notion of civilization, as well as notions of race and cultural hierarchy upon which rested the colonial edifice. This kind of self-critique, even if unwitting, was not without precedent. Indeed, in 1941, three years before the conference, governor-general Felix Éboué had already set the tone for a high degree of imperial self-reflection. Arguably, Félix Éboué’s November 8, 1941 circular, La nouvelle politique indigène pour l’Afrique Equatoriale française,28 is a revolutionary political document—revolutionary not because Eboué truly believed colonization was wrong or that the African was equal to the French, but rather because of his unabashed admission that the colonizer had been going about the whole business of education wrong. In the circular, the governor-general of AEF presented a scathing indictment of colonialism as practiced up to that point. While noting there was no point in crying over spilled milk (“sur les erreurs du passé, il est inutile de revenir” [1]), he criticized the school as an

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institution executed on bad faith and missed opportunities. A repudiation of the politique des races, the text advocates for the respect of Africans, their traditions, and their precolonial political systems, as well as for measures aimed at improving the conditions of workers. This, in his view, was the only viable way forward for French colonization. In his opening remarks to the commission, Félix Éboué specifically decried the French colonial policy of assimilation: Faire ou refaire une société, sinon à notre image, du moins selon nos habitudes mentales, c’est aller à un échec certain. L’indigène à un comportement, des lois, une patrie qui ne sont pas les nôtres. Nous ne ferons son bonheur, ni selon les principes de la Révolution Française, qui est nôtre révolution, ni en lui appliquant le code Napoléon, qui est notre code, ni en substituant nos fonctionnaires à ses chefs, car nos fonctionnaires penseront pour lui, mais non en lui. (Éboué 1945, 12) To make or unmake a society, if not in our image, at least according to our habits, will lead to certain failure. The native has an attitude, laws, and a homeland that are not ours. We will guarantee his happiness neither through the principles of the Revolution, which is ours, nor by applying the Napoleonic Code on him, which is our code, nor by replacing his chiefs with our functionaries, since our functionaries will think on his behalf.

For Eboué, the politics of assimilation was bound to fail because of its denial of a fundamental reality, namely the existence of time-anchored African difference and agency. Eboué proposed a way out of the entropy occasioned by colonial hubris and misguided self-interest: “Nous assurerons au contraire son équilibre en le traitant à partir de lui-même, c’est-à-dire non pas comme individu isolé et interchangeable, mais comme personnage humain, chargé de traditions, membre d’une famille, d’un village et d’une tribu, capable de progrès dans son milieu et très probablement perdu s’il en est extrait” (“On the contrary, we will guarantee his stability by treating him from his own standpoint, that is not as an isolated or replaceable individual, but as a human person gifted with traditions, family, a village and tribe, capable of making progress on his own and most likely lost when taken out of his habitat,” 12). By recognizing the humanity and personhood of the African and helping him recover his potential for organic development and progress, the colonizer would simply be giving back to the African what the colonizer had wrongfully taken from him to start with. In other words, France would be making amends, a kind of moral reparation. It is possible to argue that any intentional education (including informal education) is a means to an end—namely, the creation of a specific kind of individual in a specific kind of society. Consequently, there is always already



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a certain degree of instrumentalization and social engineering inherent to all educational systems.29 However, the problem with colonial education, as with all systems engineered for indoctrination, oppression, and exploitation of one group by another, is that from its conception to its implementation, the interest of its wards (hostages) was at best an afterthought. If traditional, precolonial education in Africa (despite its shortcomings) was homegrown (as in Sundiata’s example) or adapted (as in the case of Islamic education), and thus focused for the most part on the needs and realities of its creators and beneficiaries, colonial education, for its part, was blatantly doctrinaire in its philosophy and practice. In Afrique et Occident: heurs et malheurs d’une rencontre, Hubert de Leusse offers the following assessment of colonial education: “Sauf exception trop rare, l’école n’est donc pas à la hauteur de sa mission éducatrice. Par la rudesse excessive de sa discipline, au lieu de former les enfants, elle les déforme. Elle en fait des esclaves ou des révoltés. Elle ne leur donne pas le sens de la responsabilité personnelle, le goût de l’initiative. Elle n’en fait pas des hommes” (“With rare exception, the school does not live up to its assigned mission. Instead of educating children, it distorts them through the harshness of its discipline. It does not inculcate in them a sense of personal responsibility or the desire for initiative. It doesn’t make men out of them,” 185). While de Leusse has a point regarding the negative outcomes of colonial education, it is not entirely correct to say the school failed in its mission. All colonial systems, by their very raison d’être, operate on the premise of inequality between colonizer and colonized. The colonial education system is no exception. Every education policy conceived or reform undertaken was informed by the mission civilisatrice, an effectual cover for the imperative of economic, political, and sociocultural domination and exploitation. As Aimé Césaire so aptly reminds us in Discours sur le colonialisme: “qu’est-ce que la colonization? . . . De convener de ce qu’elle n’est point: ni évangélisation, ni entreprise philanthropique, ni volonté de reculer les frontières de l’ignorance, de la maladie, de la tyrannie, ni élargissement de Dieu, ni extension du Droit” (8, “What, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor philanthropy, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law,” 32). Therefore, the defect and, eventually the failure of the school, as Suret-Canale tells us, are “une nécessité inhérente au régime colonial” (“an inherent necessity of the colonial system,” 460). It would be irrational to expect anything different from it. Colonial education was invented at a specific time for a specific need. It was conceived, planned far away from its place of practice, and then brought to the colonies like an invasive species specifically designed to stultify the potential of indigenous species. Despite the many grandiose declarations

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proclaiming interest in the colonized natives, its singular focus was the success of the colonial mission, which was in all accounts a for-profit enterprise created principally to benefit the colonizer and to force the colonized to conform to the colonizer’s worldview. Rarely were educators in the annals of French colonization honest enough about the hypocrisy and the unwillingness of France to give what came close to true education to its colonial subjects. Two such were Abbé David Boilat and Germaine Le Goff. As discussed in the introduction and earlier in this chapter, Boilat founded the first real secondary school in colonial Senegal. He told parents whom he was trying to convince that while primary education (the highest given to native Africans at the time) was absolutely necessary as “la base, le fondement de l’éducation,” it was essential for Africans to go beyond it (236). He explained that in the school he had created, the African children would receive “toute l’éducation qu’on donne en France (the same instruction given in France).”30 He assured parents that their children would end up being more than half-baked; that secondary education would open the doors to greater opportunities for them; that they could go to Saint-Cyr and one day become military officers, even generals; or that they could simply have careers in navigation or even become commanders of warships or religious leaders (236–37). While he considered his students uncivilized by virtue of their Blackness,31 Abbé Boilat did not see their lack of civilization as an essential element of their Blackness, or as an impediment to their capacity for learning. Consequently, he saw no limits to their potential. About a century later, Germaine Le Goff did for African girls what Abbé Boilat wanted to do for African boys. The legendary inaugural director of the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque. Herself an escapee of poverty, religious obscurantism, and discrimination in her sexist France, Le Goff seemed blessed with empathy, which allowed her to identify with the dispossessed, the powerless, and the colonized. This is true especially in regards to women. Throughout her career, whether she was training them to be teachers or preparing them to go into other public functions, Le Goff’s interest was in the education of well-rounded and useful women with agency rather than robots brought into existence according to a specific blueprint drawn by a masculine mind. Education, informal or formal, must respond to and reflect the social, economic, political, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and material needs of the individuals for whom it is intended. It goes without saying that education should not be a program catering only to specific political and economic priorities of a particular group, especially if the group controlling the education system is an entity foreign to the place of implementation. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire reframes the domination/ submission dialectic in what he calls the banking concept of education. The



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concept presupposes an initial state of emptiness and subsequent state of filling. For the system to work, there must be a “depositor” (the teacher), a “depository” (the student), and between them, the thing deposited (for our purposes, the content of colonial education). The foundational principle of the relationship is that the depositor is human whereas the depository is not. The depositor, the fully active participant in this process, does two things; he deposits and withdraws his deposits how and when he sees fit. As for the depository, the passive one in the relationship, he receives, stows away, and then reproduces or delivers as and when the depositor demands. In this anti-dialogical relationship, only the depositor truly acts. Whatever the depository does cannot be true action since it is an automatic or preprogrammed reaction to the depositor. In the absence of partnership and dialogue, the depository has only to obey without question; they have or should show no true agency. “In the banking concept of education,” noted Freire, “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. . . . The capability of banking education to minimize or annul students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed” (53–54). The application of Paolo Freire’s concept to colonial education here, beyond the obvious metaphor that it is, further highlights the economic imperative of the larger colonial project. First of all, it is worth remembering that colonization was principally a commercial endeavor masquerading as a civilizing mission. While the colonizer presented the school as an institution for the moral and cultural expansion of the colonized, the reality, as Aimé Césaire points out in Discours sur le colonialisme, was something else: Sécurité? Culture? Juridisme? En attendant, je regarde et je vois, partout où il y a, face à face, colonisateurs et colonisés, la force, la brutalité, la cruauté, le sadisme, le heurt et, en parodie de la formation culturelle, la fabrication hâtive de quelques milliers de fonctionnaires subalternes, de boys, d’artisans, d’employés de commerce et d’interprètes nécessaires à la bonne marche des affaires. (Césaire 1989, 9)32 Security? Culture? The rule of law? In the meantime, I look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business. (Césaire 1972, 42)

If the school taught culture and morality at all, it was culture and morality intricately linked to the capitalist and profiteering ethos of the Western bourgeoisie.

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In sum, the colonial education system was an instrument for advancing the goals of the imperialist whose project, according to Aimé Césaire, was no less than that of “de l’aventurier et du pirate, de l’épicier en grand et de l’armateur, du chercheur d’or et du marchand, de l’appétit et de la force” (8–9, “the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force,” 33). It is no surprise, therefore, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, that the colonial school and everything and everyone associated with it (with rare exceptions) are consistently represented in a mostly negative light in African literature. NOTES 1. See Tuchscherer. 2. Ponty, who served as governor-general from 1908 to 1914, was a decorated military officer credited with the transition from military to civilian control of the colonial administration. 3. Roume relied heavily on historian and geographer Camille Guy, then Lieutenant-Governor of the Senegal colony (1902–1903), for the crafting and implementation of his education decree. 4. We shall return to the question of the French language later in this chapter. 5. Georges Hardy dedicated an entire monograph titled Une conquête morale: l’enseignement en AOF (1917) to the idea of “moral conquest” located at the core of France’s civilizing mission and to be achieved through the school. 6. “Ne résistez pas au mouvement . . . acceptez le bien qu’on veut vous faire” (Haut-Sénégal, 268–69). 7. The circular in question recommended the teaching of hygiene in all preparatory and lower elementary schools as well as the creation of school gardens in all higher elementary schools (1931 Congress, 87). 8. “Nous n’avons pas un médecin, pas un vétérinaire indigène; nous manquons d’une grande quantité d’ouvriers spécialisés, et plus encore de contremaîtres. Je ne parle pas des ingénieurs ou des rédacteurs inexistants, mais combien avons-nous des secrétaires, de comptables, de commis d’ordre dignes de ce nom? Quelques-uns seulement. La médiocrité, nous devons le reconnaître, est la règle, et le perfectionnement est impossible, sinon par la base” (Éboué, 25). 9. This bulletin was created by Georges Hardy. 10. Nowhere is this doctrinaire lesson more uncritically rehashed than in Amadou Mapaté Diagne’s Les trois volontés de Malic, discussed in chapter 2. 11. First published in 1916 for use in AOF regional schools, the reader would see several reissues and remain in use until the 1950s, just before the vast majority of French colonies gained their independence. 12. It is no surprise that in the end Moussa decides to become a farmer while Gi-gla opts for the military as a tirailleur.



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13. A French navy commander who also served as Acting Governor of Senegal from January 1818 to July 1819. 14. This was a time when colonial education was limited to the training of indigenous traders. 15. The 1903 education decree allowed the teaching of European languages such as Spanish and English in the upper primary schools, Arabic at the lower elementary level, and some local languages at the normal school for students training to become interpreters. 16. As Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” 17. While the word “dialecte,” used more often than “langue” to talk about African languages, also translates as language, its use here is however intended to diminish the value of African languages as fully autonomous languages. The word ‘langue” is used for French. 18. “Quand plusieurs races sont en présence, la race la moins avancée en civilisation tend à adopter les modes de vie, les traditions, le langage de la race la plus avancée” (102). This underscores the universalizing will of the French, as is evident in the statement “la civilisation tend vers l’unité.” 19. “La langue française s’imposera d’elle-même dans les possessions françaises . . . une loi naturelle” (102). 20. “Enseigner un dialecte indigène, l’écrire, c’est le fixer? Mais qui donc le fixera? Comment établir, codifier des règles de grammaire presque toujours imprécises, mouvantes, variant pour un même dialecte d’un village au village voisin. On peut craindre que la langue ainsi fixée et enseignée soit plus ou moins déformée” (102). 21. “Les dialectes sont trop nombreux pour les enseigner tous” (102). 22. Amadou Hampâté Bâ addresses this language question in Amkoullel. Arguing that colonization, like everything else in this world, was not entirely bad, he cited the French language as one of the positive things, even if unintended, that accrued to the African from colonization: “la colonisation eut aussi des aspects positifs, qui ne nous étaient peut-être pas destinés à l’origine mais dont nous avons hérité et qu’il nous appartient d’utiliser au mieux. Parmi eux, je citerai surtout l’héritage de la langue du colonisateur en tant qu’instrument précieux de communication entre ethnies qui ne parlaient pas la même langue et moyen d’ouverture sur le monde extérieur—à condition de ne pas laisser mourir les langues locales, qui sont le véhicule de notre culture et de notre civilisation” (382–83). Dadié makes a similar argument in Climbié when he notes that the school “placed in his hands a tool, an instrument: knowledge of how to make the most for himself” (86). 23. By using local languages, “la France se prive ainsi d’un des moyens les plus justifiés d’étendre son rayonnement dans le monde. Quel que soit le sort que l’avenir réserve à nos colonies, il est bon que dans cette Afrique noire la langue française soit assez solidement implantée pour pouvoir résister éventuellement?” (106). 24. The authorities called it a necropolis completely inappropriate for training teachers toward the new focus on agriculture. The 1938 transfer of the school to Sébikotane made sense within the context of school ruralization.

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25. The full title of the 1899 poem is “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands.” It was an open encouragement to the United States to participate in imperialism, which at this time, was asserting control over Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines. 26. Given the context of colonization in which the colonized have little to no room for exercising their agency, the idea of willing assimilation as I suggest here is problematic. 27. To a large extent, the French policy of association was inspired by the British policy of indirect rule which, instead of imposing a blanket centralized system of government in its colonies, used existing systems of governance (modified and weakened, of course) to govern on the cheap. 28. The circular was the end product of three days of intense deliberation by a commission Eboué had set up consisting of governors of respective AEF colonies, other members of the colonial administration, as well as religious and business leaders in the federation. The commission would set the groundwork and tone for the Brazzaville conference that would take place three years later. The 1944 conference, as discussed in chapter 1, represented a significant shift in colonial policy and politics. 29. The word “instrument” appears often in colonial educational discourse. See for example “L’instrument se trouve donc entre nos mains: ce sont toutes les écoles françaises de la colonie” (Eboué, 44). 30. As ambitious and revolutionary as this effort by Boilat might seem, there was already precedence for this in the larger colonial context in Africa. For example, by the end of the 1820s, there was a tertiary institution of learning in Sierra Leone, the legendary Fourah Bay College, nicknamed “The Athens of West Africa.” This was in addition to a substantial number of secondary schools in that and other British colonies. 31. “Cette terre d’Afrique, aujourd’hui si barbare et si sauvage. . . . cette partie du monde la plus inconnue et jusqu’ici la plus délaissée, a eu son temps de gloire et de prospérité. . . . Il est de fait que ce n’est ni la couleur ni la forme extérieure qui font l’homme, mais l’âme créée à l’image de Dieu. Il est de fait encore que tous les hommes façonnés par l’instruction peuvent parvenir à faire des sujets distingués” (231–35). 32. Italics added by author.

Chapter 2

From Theory to Practice The Colonial School in Francophone African Literature

Thus far, I have offered a précis of the history of colonial education (Introduction) as well as a discussion of discourses that guided the praxis of colonial education (chapter 1). The present chapter looks closely at the representation in African literature of the school as a physical and ideological space within and outside of which the angsts, anxieties, hopes, and expectations of colonizer and colonized alike played out in real time. DIAGNE’S LES TROIS VOLONTÉS DE MALIC “Que de bruit et de mouvement dans le village de Diamagueune? Quel évènement a donc excité à ce point la curiosité des habitants . . . ? Un mot est sur toutes les lèvres, mot que les uns prononcent avec une sorte de crainte, les autres avec amusante curiosité, c’est le mot ‘l’écone’ qui est la déformation du mot ‘l’école’” (“What’s all that brouhaha in the village of Diamagueune? What event has managed to arouse the curiosity of the inhabitants to such a degree . . . ? One word is on everyone’s lips, a word some utter with trepidation, others with curious amusement. It is the word ‘écone,’ which is a mispronunciation of the word ‘school,’” Les trois volontés de Malic, 1). This opening paragraph of Diagne’s novella sets the tone for the rest of the story. Over the next twenty-odd pages of the narrative, the writer succinctly and meticulously, following the French rhetorical tradition, presents his case for why French colonization and the Republican ideals it claims to vehicle through its educational system are the best chance for Africans not only to attain individual and societal salvation and progress, but also to emerge out of millennia of violence and uncertainty under petty homegrown tyrants. From 55

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the initial apprehension, curiosity, and ignorance that greeted the arrival of the school, the inhabitants of Diamagueune end up embracing the school as an inevitability and a necessity. The importance of the school, namely its centrality to the colonial project, is on full display in Diagne’s book. In the absence of his father, Malic’s support network is two old men and a woman, Malic’s mother (14).1 The reader of the story is left with the impression that if it were not for the genius and largesse of the French educational system, as well as the attentiveness of the inspector and teacher (transmitters of the benevolent French mission civilisatrice), the boy would have ended up like his own people, mired in underdevelopment and moral and social backwardness. Malic’s salvation from this uncivilized way of life in this sense becomes a boon for himself, for his family, and for his community. The young Senegalese boy’s rags-to-riches story highlights the colonial policy of mise en valeur that purports to transform raw potential (human and natural) into the progress of French modernity. The School and School Authorities Even with the village elders already sold on French colonialism, a case must be made for the newly implanted school by representatives of the institution: the commandant, the school inspector, and the native schoolteacher. They are presented as being personable and kind. The school inspector (“le bon inspecteur” the good inspector) is described as being “souriant,” “paternel,” and he speaks with a “ton si doux” (“so soft a voice,” 18). As for the commandant, the chief representative of France in the “cercle,” he is the epitome of gentility and thoughtfulness. When he arrives in the village for the school opening ceremony, he shakes all the hands extended toward him (4). In his speech inaugurating the newly completed school, the commandant tells the audience: Nous avons dépensé beaucoup d’argent pour construire votre école. . . . Les petits qui auront passé par l’école seront plus tard des hommes travailleurs, honnêtes, justes et bons. Ils n’auront pas besoin d’interprète pour causer avec les blancs: ils ne seront plus trompés par des marchands malhonnêtes. À l’école, vos petits développeront leurs habitudes de politesse et de respect. (Diagne 1973, 6) We have spent a lot of money to build your school. . . . The children who will graduate from the school will be hardworking, honest, fair, and good men. They will not need interpreters to communicate with Whites; they will no longer be cheated by dishonest traders.2 At the school, your children will learn polite and respectful behavior.



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In this summary of the benefits of the school to the African individual and society, two things stand out: 1) the generosity and altruism of the colonizer (spending their own money on a school for the village) and 2) the real-life benefits of the school: discipline (politeness and respect), culture, civilization, and in particular the French language, which the children will be able to read, write, and speak. Consequently, they will become honest and hardworking citizens. As for the colonial school itself, it is presented as superior to existing systems of knowledge transmission, whether Islamic (the dara, or the Koranic school) or traditional African (oral tradition). In fact, the school appears mainly in opposition to the dara. Excepting the rare storytelling sessions with elders and children’s wrestling matches, traditional forms of learning—such as those privileged in the role of griots, parents and other grown-ups, initiation ceremonies, and age-group cohorts—are excluded from the education debate in Les trois volontés de Malic. It is more than symbolic that the commandant’s arrival in the village for the inauguration of the new school interrupts one of the village griot’s session with the children. And since this interruption, the sessions all but disappear, replaced by Malic’s own lessons about French and France to the erstwhile traditional keepers and dispensers of knowledge. It is therefore no surprise that the new school sits right across from the dara. Except for the occasional returns of the children to the dara (mentioned only once or twice in the story) during the holidays, the dara is practically absent in the lives of the children. By giving the Koranic school such short shrift in his narrative, Diagne seems to be dismissing it as insignificant. Considering the place of Islam and the dara as an alternative form of learning that is more or less formal, the French saw in them a greater threat to their rule than the less institutionalized griotic traditions or other forms of orality.3 The narrator himself opens the comparison between the two institutions: “Sans doute, l’école n’est pas la maison de l’éternel festin, mais en tout cas elle est fort différente de l’établissement d’en face, du dara du marabout” (“Of course, the school is not the house of endless fun; all the same, it is very different from the building opposite, the marabout’s dara,” 8). What difference is the author referring to? Through the eyes of the children, Diagne presents the school as a spacious, clean, safe, and inviting place with “les belles images fixées aux murs (beautiful pictures on the walls)” suggesting by omission that the dara is none of those things. The school is also an architectural wonder that protects from the elements: “À l’école . . . nous sommes à l’abri du soleil, du vent et du froid” (“At the school, we are protected from the sun, the wind, and the cold,” 8). Surely, a place capable of guaranteeing well-being in such an effortless fashion must be a superior space.

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The initial trepidation some of the villagers had about the school when strangers first appeared unannounced in their village and started building an unknown structure quickly dissipates, to be replaced by universal acceptance of the finished school. We are told that the workers sing and whistle and their supervisor, a White man, is not in the least frightening to the children (2). Furthermore, the technological superiority of the White man is also on full display, evident in the implements of the school’s construction: tools that cut and shape wood, metal, and stone effortlessly (2). Nature itself is excited and celebrates, as it were, the arrival of the school: à l’horizon, derrière la touffe toujours verte des palmiers, disparaît petit à petit le disque vermeil du brûlant soleil de fin d’hivernage. L’air se rafraîchit. Une atmosphère nouvelle semble sortir du sol, monte vers le ciel fauve à Manitoni. Les herbes murmurent, les feuilles et écorches craquent. Un nuage de fumée plane au-dessus du village. Dans le calme du soir, la continuelle musique des cocotiers devient plus perceptible. Les étoiles s’allument une à une. À l’orient brille la grosse lune. On la dirait suspendue sur les branches dansantes des cocotiers élancés. (Diagne 1973, 3) on the horizon, beyond the evergreen clump of palm trees, the vermilion disc of the scorching sun at the end of the rainy season is gradually disappearing. The air is getting cooler. A new vibe seems to be emanating from the earth, rising toward the tawny sky in Manitoni. The grass whispers, the leaves and scratches crackle. A cloud of smoke hangs over the village. In the calm of the evening, the continual music of the coconut trees becomes more perceptible. The stars light up one by one. In the east shines the big moon. It seems to be suspended on the dancing branches of the slender coconut trees.

An unequivocal panegyric to the new times! The cool, bright, peaceful moon is serenaded by plants and stars as it replaces the hot reddish sun of the end of the rainy season. Convinced already of the positive presence of the French, seen as bringers of peace, the inhabitants of Diamagueune, adults and children alike, accept the new school enthusiastically. Malic becomes the most passionate advocate for the school. Even before the school takes full shape, he is drawn to the construction site in his eagerness to commune with the workers there, hoping to become friends with the strangers, helping them with small tasks here and there (2). When he fails to make the initial school roster, Malic becomes a shadow pupil, sitting outside the school mimicking everything going on inside of it. Moreover, he can tell from a distance that “l’école est bien gaie et le maître est très bon” (“the school is very cheerful and the teacher is very nice,” 8). While other children are back at the dara or helping their parents



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with farmwork during the holidays, Malic stays behind to edify the elders and to guard the school (19). As far as the village is concerned, the greatest case for the school is made by a demonstration of its power of transformation and progress. Where the elders, in African tradition, are supposed to be the teachers, the child is now the father of the man, thanks to the school. Transformed in no time by the French school into a wonder child, Malic holds court with the village elders and impresses them with his knowledge of French langage and history (16). As Yakham, the village griot, puts it, “le petit Malic est devenu l’instituteur de trois vieux élèves” (“little Malic has become the teacher of three old pupils,” 17), which allows them, in turn, to expand their knowledge and horizon. Colonial education becomes then the gift that keeps on giving. When compared to later texts such as Batouala (1921), Force-Bonté (1926), L’enfant noir (1953), and L’Aventure ambiguë (1961), Diagne’s text is by all metrics a simple, straightforward, and monological text that proposes no real debate between opposing visions of colonialism. That said, it is an important text for what it tells us about the power of French colonization and the significance of the relationships of power it engendered. Central to the debates around education reforms, especially during the interwar years, was the question as to how to best achieve the goals of education by spreading knowledge of French language and culture. In a way, Diagne, like the teacher in his story, symbolizes the victory of colonial ideology in general, and education policy and praxis more specifically. Unlike the earlier policy of assimilation that sought (even if in theory) to frenchify the colonized, the French educational policy of l’enseignement adapté sought to ground education in local geography and culture, Africanizing French colonial education as it were. Instigated by William Ponty and extensively theorized, promoted, and applied by Georges Hardy, the new policy pushed the French to training a handful of Africans, who would then go on to spread the gospel of their employer-benefactor. In addition to being grounded in their physical and cultural environment and in notions of hygiene, agriculture, and manual work, as ambassadors of France, the schoolteacher must be a model of discipline, probity, and generosity. The colonizer hoped that the graduates of his schools, once back among their own people, would become what Davesne called “de précieux agents de propagande en faveur de la civilisation européenne” (“invaluable agents of propaganda on behalf of European civilization,” 97). In presenting the teacher of the new school to the community, the commandant tries to assuage any concerns of credibility and trust the villagers might have vis-à-vis the school. First, he points out the race of the schoolteacher, hence the latter’s proximity to the community (6)—not that by any stretch of the imagination the race of the teacher makes him any more or less trustworthy. However, by pointing out the obvious, the commandant is suggesting,

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for those who may not have noticed the significance of the gesture, that the colonizer is not insensitive to the realities and interests of the colonized. In addition to signaling the racial affinity between the teacher and the community, the commandant points out how and why the colonial teacher is different from what they are used to: “Cet homme que nous vous amenons ne maltraitera jamais vos enfants. Il ne leur imposera aucune corvée pour son intérêt personnel, il ne réclamera aucun salaire en échange de sa peine” (“This man we bring you will never maltreat your children. He will not impose any drudgery on them for his own benefit, nor will he ask for compensation in exchange for his labor,” 6). Here, even without mentioning him, the commandant pits the marabout of the dara against the schoolteacher, making sure to show the kindness and selflessness of the latter. If the commandant prefers to offer an indirect critique of the dara and the marabout, the children, for their part, pull no punches. Madiop, one of Malic’s cousins, goes straight to the heart of the matter: “l’instituteur n’est pas comme le marabout. Il ne torture pas les enfants: . . . auprès de lui on ne voit ni cravache ni martinet ni baguettes de tamarin. L’instituteur est l’ami de ses élèves, il est leur grand camarade” (“the teacher is not like the marabout. He doesn’t torture children: . . . around him you don’t see whips or martinets or tamarind sticks. The teacher is the friend of his pupils, as well as their great pal,” 8). To buttress this point, the narrator tells us that Malic is not afraid of the teacher even though it is his first day of school. The narrator asks: how could he be afraid of a teacher who smiles to the children, speaks to them softly, and taps them gently (12)? Furthermore, the school teacher, unlike the marabout, allows his students to express their individuality by giving them “la plus grande liberté” (“the greatest freedom,” 13). For example, he asks each one of them to draw the domestic animal of their preference (13). This allows Malic to draw not only one animal, but “un petit tableau plein de vie” with a palm tree, a hut with smoke coming out of its pointed roof, and a hen with about twenty chicks—creativity to be assured only by the freedom to think and make one’s own choices. In his insistence on the encouragement of liberty and freedom of expression in the school, Diagne glosses over the process by which the school was built and the manner of recruitment of its students: There is no indication that the villagers were consulted or informed about the imminent construction of the school, nor is there one regarding request for parental permission for the list of students drawn to attend the school. Not only does the dara provide the perfect foil to the new school in terms of its location, physical attributes, and its teacher, the two institutions are juxtaposed in terms of the usefulness of the content of their education and the way that content is transmitted. The schoolteacher, who is a “friend” of his pupils, chats with them, explains everything to them, and teaches things that are “utiles et très amusantes” (“useful and fun,” 8).4 As the children have already



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established, because it is a place of violence and questionable hygiene, the dara certainly cannot be a fun place to learn. And the likelihood that one can learn something useful and usable in this kind of environment is minimal at best. The benefits of the school are not only intellectual and moral, they are also practical (8). While the dara tends to promise bliss in the hereafter (calling for self-deprivation on earth for a promised better afterlife), the colonial school, at least in the eyes of the supposed beneficiaries, promises material fulfillment here and now. The lessons Malic shares with his grandparents and the trade he learns in the end become like manna for him, his family, and larger community. The Power and Usefulness of Colonial Education The debate about the usefulness of colonial education is a running theme in African literature where the representation of the school is concerned. In Malic, this debate is raised especially by Malic’s mother, Sokhatile. If Malic is the most enthusiastic advocate for the colonial school, his mother is its most ardent detractor. As it is for her son, the school is a matter of life and death for the woman. She is suspicious of the school, seeing in it an instrument of alienation and death (real and metaphorical). When she finally relents and allows her son to attend the school, she does so only out of love for Malic and the desire to preserve him, not because she is convinced of any future benefit the institution promises. She opposes the school for two reasons: firstly, having lost her husband, Malic’s father, to French wars of pacification, she does not want her son to go to school because she sees the school as a doorway into the native French colonial army, and possible death. Secondly, she is concerned that the school will take him far away from the village and his ancestors, and from the path of God. She wants Malic to learn the Koran instead, become a marabout, stay in the village, and die among his own people (10). In her unequivocal opposition to the school, Sokhatile becomes the only staunch defender of their ancestral heritage, which combines Islam and Tiedo5 traditions. This crisis of competing notions of “utilité” in education—colonial versus ancestral—is resolved ultimately in Malic’s individual choice. Malic insists he wants to learn to read, telling his mother that he will drown himself in the sea if she does not let him go to the White man’s school. The mother relents when the village elders intervene and propose a compromise: Malic will attend both the French school and the dara. Given the inflexibility of French colonialism, this is a false compromise, for we see quickly the dominance of the school not only in Malic’s life but in that of the community. Diagne is not content simply with presenting the school as a positive, benign, liberating force from his own perspective; he locates the debate about

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the school squarely within the larger colonial context. If the school is new in the village, the colonial enterprise of which it is the soft power is already present in Malic’s community in a sleeper cell version represented in the three village elders. The village elders make the case for the school when, after their initial resistance to it, they see the institution as an extension of what they consider benevolent French colonialism practiced by Faidherbe. While it is easy to dismiss the village elders’ explicit approval of colonization, their attitude must be assessed from the perspective of local politics. The vision of the elders in Les trois volontés de Malic is clearly influenced by their experiences with local wielders of power over others. They see Faidherbe, synonymous with French colonialism, not as a conquering foreign power but rather as a divine instrument sent for their liberation from homegrown terrorism and despotism. The enemy of their enemy is their friend! The word paix (“peace”) becomes at once a refrain and a leitmotif in the first chapter of the book, setting the stage for future attitudes toward the school. The notion of peace is a drumbeat of the colonizer seeking to justify his will to dominate and exploit. Naturally, the colonizer presented colonization as a mission civilisatrice, a divinely sanctioned endeavor that sought—through its so-called philanthropic enterprise and desire to eliminate ignorance, superstition, and disease—to bring light, peace, and God to the heathen savages of the world. Diagne’s book gives legitimacy to this colonialist mantra. By standing up to time-honored tradition and in short order coming out victorious, Malic is the greatest spokesperson and foot soldier for the French and their educational system. A demonstration of the effectiveness of France’s soft power, the school becomes the locus, generator, and guarantor of “liberté” and “égalité” for all. Its victory is further solidified by the condition of the three elders of Diamagueune upon Malic’s return to his hometown at the end of his training: “Yakham est mort, Dargueune et Manoté sont très vieux. Mais Malic est maintenant grand et gagne beaucoup d’argent. Il soigne ses vieux parents qui ne regrettent pas de l’avoir laissé apprendre un métier” (“Yakham is dead, Dargueune and Manoté are very old. But Malic is now big and earns a lot of money. He takes care of his elderly relatives who do not regret having let him learn a trade,” 28). The diminution or disappearance of his former guardians and the concomitant rise and dominance of Malic speak for themselves. The passing of Yakham is particularly significant. As the griot of the community, hence the strongest link between the past and the present, his death—coinciding with Malic’s “triumphant” return to Diamagueune— signals perhaps the impossibility of the coexistence of the old and the new in Diagne’s universe dominated by the French. We do see Malic at the end, when the fancy takes him, taking evening walks among the baobabs and coconut trees of Diamagueune, clad in “grands boubous damassés” (“ample



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damask boubous,” 27). He also takes care of his mother and grandparents and helps his friends; all hallmark of African social praxis. However, given the trail of debris Malic’s evolution leaves behind him, these gestures seem to be token concessions to his Africa before the onset of the school. Published in 1920, Diagne’s twenty-eight-page novella is considered by many as the first full-length Francophone prose fiction. The work was commissioned by publishing house Larousse as a reader for African schools in AOF (Watts, 28). Worthy of note is that Diagne worked as secretary for the legendary school inspector from 1915 until Hardy left AOF in 1919. In 1919, Hardy sent him to France to study at the École normale d’Auteuil. Thanks to this direct access to education in France, Diagne attained the status of “cadre métropolitain,” a rare achievement for a colonized native at the time.6 He became the first African inspector of education in Senegal in 1942. There is, among critics of the book, a consensus on Diagne’s ideological project in Les trois volontés de Malic. While Dorothy Blair labels Les trois volontés de Malic “procolonial,” Richard Watts calls it “a paean to the benefits of colonialism.” Diagne was clearly a firm believer in the civilizing mission. In one of his ethnographic essays, he wrote, “Notre occupation a fait disparaitre l’anarchie, assuré la paix, imposé le respect des individus et de leur bien. Plus de pillage, de vols à main armée, d’assassinat prémédité” (“Our occupation has eliminated anarchy, ensured peace, imposed respect for individuals and their property. No more looting, armed robbery, premeditated assassination” “Contributions à l’étude”). With the use of the first-person plural possessive adjective “notre” in his assessment, Diagne separates himself from his Senegalese people and considers himself French. Whatever Diagne’s own personal convictions may have been vis-à-vis colonialism in general, and colonial education more specifically, or the reasons for his undisguised support for French colonization, there is no doubt that he is what Oumar Chérif Diop labels “an apologist of the French colonial agenda” (236).7 DADIÉ’S CLIMBIÉ The incipit of Climbié is similar to that of Aventure Ambiguë, as both novels open with a moment of violence associated with an educational institution. Whereas for Samba Diallo the violence takes place at the Koranic school, for Climbié, it is at the colonizers’ school. In Dadié’s novel, hardly anything positive is shown about the school and Climbé’s time in it. The school, the school authorities (teachers, principals, and other students with power of enforcement of school rules) all seem to be there to make the lives of the students unbearable. The system of reward and punishment at the school functions on a relationship of power that pits not only administrator and teacher against

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student, but also student against student. The idyllic environment of clean and inviting spaces and objects in addition to friendly teachers and administrators seen in Les trois volontés de Malic are nowhere to be found in Dadié’s autobiographical novel. While Climbié eventually accepts the school, he does so only grudgingly and upon realizing its inevitability in the new dispensation. Climbié opens with the eponymous hero running away from the school with two “big” school monitors in hot pursuit. As he runs, he hears “the imperious voice of the schoolmaster” with his “forefinger . . . raised aggressively at the end of his arm, like the bayonet on a musket ready to belch its leaden charge,” saying “bring that sandfly back here” (1). Having witnessed only the day before the schoolmaster beating another student until he bled (2), Climbié had no intention of meeting the same fate for his “crime” of writing on the school wall. So, in his flight, Climbié wishes for “miraculous powers” that would make him disappear to a more hospitable reality (1). Such a place does exist for Climbié, and after returning to this salutary space, “Climbié never went back to that school where children were cruelly beaten, where every evening after class they had to go the seashore and empty the latrine buckets” (3). The rest of Climbié’s time in the colonial school (he does resume his education) will be marked by his negative experience at the village school. The school in Grand Bassam is not much different from the school he ran away from at the opening of the novel. Described as being “encircled by barbed wire and white posts” (9), it is a space of exclusion and oppression. This becomes evident to Climbié on his first day there. The school headmaster here, like the schoolteacher in his old school, finds pleasure in abusing his wards. When he enters his class, he acknowledges the children’s greetings, smiles at them, then picks up a switch which he intends to use to make “dull-witted minds learn the elements of French grammar and other subjects” (10). The Language Question Language is by its very nature the nutshell of the culture that produced it and that it produces. It is the guarantor of its past, enricher of its present, and the promise of its future. Moreover, the linguistic universe of any language is inevitably and organically linked to its nonlinguistic milieu or environment. The centrality of the French language to the colonial project is beyond debate. Since the colonizer saw African languages, which he labeled often as dialects or vernaculars (also patois), as devoid of history and practical worth—unlike French, which was seen as a natural vector of culture and civilization—their use was strictly forbidden on school grounds. A second reason for the insistence on the use of French all the time is that privileging African languages in any way is counterproductive to the objective of colonization, namely the social, cultural, and economic assimilation of the African into the new



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colonial economy and sociopolitical reality.8 So, to put an end to “the collective sabotage of the French language” (13) and ensure that French is learned and spoken well enough in school and beyond, the use of native languages was banned on school grounds. The French were particularly peevish about what they viewed as native disrespect of their language. Fearful of the way the French will react upon hearing their language mangled in African mouths, “people no longer felt safe facing a European” (14). In this context, the token, a small object of any shape (a cube in this case), becomes the most powerful symbol of French ethnocentric hubris and bias. For the colonized, the token was a concrete and powerful manifestation of the school as an oppressive space, which uses physical and psychological violence to achieve its end. Climbié describes the token as “a nightmare. It stops you from laughing, feeling alive at school, because everybody is always thinking about it. The bearer of the token is the only one people hunt and watch for. . . . They all look at each other suspiciously. The token has poisoned the environment, tainted the air, and frozen everyone’s heart” (13). The opprobrium of being the bearer of the token becomes palpable. Whoever has the cube at the end of the school day must stay behind to clean the schoolyard and sweep all the classrooms, unaided by anyone (12). For Climbié and her schoolmates, the token places a pall on the entire school day for it makes students suspicious of one another while the headmaster smiles on as students torment other students for speaking their native languages (12). To get rid of the object, a student (generally avoided even by friends) spends the rest of his school day spying on other students in hopes of passing the “heavy” (12) little cube to the next student caught speaking a local language.9 Climbié is by nature restless and rebellious, hence his dissatisfaction with the regimental nature of the school. Dadié is deliberate about the representation of the school as being diametrically opposed to Climbié's village. At the opening of the book, when we see him running away from the school, Climbié is running toward his village. He does this for a good reason. If the school stifles the joy of living out of him, the village environment guarantees him life, liberty, and happiness. Climbié’s time in the village with his uncle and his uncle’s wife is completely antithetical to the colonial school universe, which is marked by the drudgery of academic and physical labor, as well as stringent rules of comportment and punishment that take the fun out of childhood. Reminiscent of Camara Laye’s representation of his mother’s village of Tindican three years earlier,10 life in Climbié’s village is presented as an “oasis de paix” where one is “en parfaite harmonie avec lui-même et avec son environnement” (“in perfect harmony with himself and with his surroundings,” Gadjigo, 25). Here, life is not only practical; it is fun. In this “kingdom of childhood,” Climbié communes with nature while spending time “learning

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a man’s work” (3) under the caring mentorship of his uncle with whom he has a relationship of deep mutual love. When he is not helping his uncle getting the land ready for planting or harvesting, Climbié immerses himself in the natural environment. Whereas at school he must worry about grades and class ranking, life in the village was “one of plenty, happy freedom from care, splendid liberality, and beautiful colors. He laughed hard and played hard, slept soundly, came and went with confidence” (11). The more time he spent at the school learning foreign things, the more he “forgot his origins on a rice plantation, and the thrilling hunts for birds, insects, and butterflies” (11). As Georges Hardy, among countless colonial administrators, cautioned, everything must be done to prevent the colonized indigene from becoming “un instrument de perturbation sociale” (Conquête morale, 12). Naturally, the school’s curriculum also left much to be desired. Even at the École William Ponty on Gorée, the pinnacle of colonial education and the principal breeding ground for African auxiliaries of the colonial administration, Climbié complains about the paucity of the curriculum. It was during his many eye-opening conversations with young Popular Front11 and other colonial administrators in Dakar about politics that he learned about “Karl Marx and Engels, Dialectic and Scientific Materialism,” among other novelties (86). He notes that “at Ponty, none of these problems had been studied. These names had been ignored. Philosophy, sociology, civic instruction? Outside the programme. Only a higher elementary education had been given to him in preparation for his career as a civil servant” (86). Climbié’s disdain for the school has already been established. Left to him alone, unlike the little Malic who cajoled and blackmailed his guardians into sending him to school, Climbié has to be forced into it. If the experience at the colonial school is so traumatic and depersonalizing for Climbié, why then does he return to it after he ran away the first time, and why does he stay in school afterwards? The Indispensability of the School The colonizer came to Africa with the mantra that the African had no past (history, culture, civilization) and could have no future without him. It was thus his mission to inscribe on this human tabula rasa. Using this as his foundation for engagement with the primeval other, the colonizer’s warped logic made sense to him as he proceeded to create a world for the colonized peoples after his own imagination. He then invented new rules of engagement for his newly created world and the reality it has engendered. The school, being the central element of the new universe, became practically inevitable to one’s success in the new society, especially after all other avenues for survival and success have either been blocked or made unprofitable.



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Parents and guardians are the first to realize the inevitability of the school, hence the scramble by families in some cases to get their children enrolled. For example, on the first day of school in Grand Bassam, due to limited space, not all children are accepted into the school despite the plea of parents and some of the children who want to attend school. Climbié is one of the “lucky” ones to get a seat. Climbié’s uncle and guardian, Ndaiban, who blames his own parents for failing to send him to school, decides to send his nephew to school for the simple reason that “in the real world12 you have to know how to read and write in order to be somebody” (8). He knows that “l’homme instruit est un lion” and that “un lion même mort effraie encore plus qu’un brebis” (140). Ironically, one of the arguments made for sending Climbié to school is the very reason he does not want to go to school. His uncle’s wife, worried Climbié is “always having fun, running after butterflies, birds, and grasshoppers,” while developing “sores on his feet,” urges her husband to send the boy back to school (8). Climbié himself, like many of his schoolmates, acknowledges the new dispensation and the compromise it forces them to make. With his goal of completing school and gaining employment so he can take care of his mother, Climbié has to suppress his natural inclination to rebellion: “If he had never rebelled against the many punishments inflicted on him, most of them truly absurd, it was to be able to go to the EPS” (49), realizing that good behavior was probably a more important criterion than good grades for admission to the school. Indeed, Hardy recommended that troublemakers like Climbié be weeded out of the school with merciless care (“avec un soin impitoyable”). Yet, given Climbié’s proclivity for rebellion, this is only a temporary truce between him and colonial authorities. The Price of Rebellion Climbié’s disenchantment with the school carries over into his preordained work in the colonial administration as a clerk, a job in which he finds no fulfilment. The question Climbié and his coworkers ask themselves is this: who benefits from their education? The answer is obvious, embedded in the very core of colonization and the school. The latter prepares students to be cogs in a monumental machine of exploitation of the human and the natural resources of the colony for the benefit of the colonizer. In his gloomy assessment of Africa under Europe’s colonizing grip, Climbié asserts that the continent was “but a huge vat over which Europe had placed her authority, her domination, like a bronze cover” (111). As they consider looming retirement, Climbié and his African colleagues realize that their jobs have become a dead end. They have hit the bronze ceiling, as it were. What most symbolizes the discrimination, inequality, and inequity of their situation is what is called the “zone,” a cash allowance given to civil servants that is determined by their location and

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social status (Climbié, 155). According to Climbié, the zone “is a little like the Messiah for whom the whole world waits and waits, but a Messiah who comes, though many people do not see him, not because they are not awake, but because they are not qualified, because they have not assembled all the references which would entitle the ‘zone’ to stop at their house, to stir hope in their hearts and to light up their inner beings” (100). KANE’S AVENTURE AMBIGUË There is arguably nowhere else in African literature where the debate about colonial education is as intense as it is in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel. One of the major characters in Aventure ambiguë, the Grande Royale (the Most Royal lady), Samba’s cousin, observes that the real power of French colonization does not lie in the roaring canons that preceded the landfall of the French colonizer. It is rather in the school that was built on the morrow of colonial conquest. The school is what gives staying power to the colonization enterprise: “Ainsi, derrière les canonnières, le clair regard de la Grande Royale des Diallobé avait vu l’école nouvelle. . . . Mieux que le canon, elle pérennise la conquête. Le canon contraint les corps, l’école fascine les âmes” (60, “Thus behind the gunboats, the clear gaze of the Most Royal Lady of the Diallobé had seen the new school. . . . Better than the cannon, it makes conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body, the school bewitches the soul,” 49). If military conquest manifests its power in physical destruction, the school, presented by the colonizer and some colonized as the rebuilder and the bringer of peace, causes psychological, moral, and spiritual anguish that will touch the very soul of the Diallobé community. According to Kane, the Europeans who disembarked uninvited on African soil gave the inhabitants of the continent two choices: war or friendship (59). These were false choices, for in one way or another war was unavoidable. As for friendship, it was not possible as a relationship of equals. Kane notes that for the two choices, the outcome was the same: “Ceux qui avaient combattu et ceux qui s’étaient rendus, ceux qui avaient composés et ceux qui s’étaient obstinés se retrouvèrent le jour venu, recensés, répartis, classés, étiquetés, conscrits, administrés” (60, “Those who had shown fight and those who had surrendered, those who had come to terms and those who had been obstinate—they all found themselves classified, labeled, conscripted, administered,” 49). As is the case in Les trois volontés de Malic and other texts analyzed here, the colonizer did not come to compromise; his modus operandi was not set up for that. Or, as Albert Memmi puts it, “the colonized is not free to choose between being colonized or not being colonized” (86).



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The installation of the school in Diallobé country is a traumatic and traumatizing event for the Diallobé: “Le pays Diallobé, désemparé, tournait sur lui-même comme un pur-sang pris dans un incendie” (22, “The Diallobé country, helpless, was turning around and around on itself like a thoroughbred horse caught in a fire,” 12). For a society that always privileged the spiritual over the material, the realization that their world has been shaken and will never again be the same requires the making of important and difficult choices. The debate provoked by the new school is presented mostly as a matter of life and death, a battle between materialism and spirituality, between the body and the soul. The Diallobé know that the school will teach their children to become masters of the physical universe (how to better “join wood to wood,” 9). As the Grande Royale observes, because of her people’s inability to save the body, “there are more deaths than births among the Diallobé,” which has a nefarious effect on the soul since the hearths themselves are “becoming extinct” (35). Yet, the Diallobé know that by sending their children to the new school, they are sacrificing part or all of the heritage they have fought for centuries to preserve. This debate plays out much more vehemently among the aristocracy whose principal members cannot agree on a course of action. Four major attitudes toward the school emerge: that of the Grande Royale, the teacher, the knight, and Samba.13 The Grande Royale The Grande Royale is the only Diallobé who operates outside of the sphere of influence of the Teacher, considered by all as the moral compass and director of the Diallobé. She made her reputation as a decisive leader, defending the Diallobé aristocracy and its interests against its detractors. Where men hesitate, she acts decisively without second-guessing herself. The whole country fears her. From her warrior perspective, “l’école étrangère est la forme nouvelle de la guerre” (47, “The foreign school is the new form of the war,” 37) from which they must not run. Without her, no firm decisions about the school will be made by the Diallobé. The first time we meet her, she impresses by her regal appearance and carriage. She is presented as an epic figure. Her face, framed by a light gauze veil, was like “une page vivante de l’histoire des Diallobé. Tout ce que le pays compte de tradition épique s’y lisait” (31, “a living page from the history of the Diallobé country. Everything that the country treasured of epic tradition could be read there,” 20). If the Grande Royale is the paragon of Diallobé history and tradition, she is also an inveterate iconoclast willing to bend tradition to suit her objectives. Her decision to send Samba to the school (and consequently other Diallobé children) is not that surprising: besides being a pragmatic person and someone who sees as a vocation the preservation of caste

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and people (without whom there is no aristocracy), she is not very enamored with the Koranic school. She calls Samba’s father a fool for sending his son to the Glowing Hearth and chides Samba for terrorizing people with his “imprécations contre la vie” (32, “imprecations against life,” 22). She vows not to allow the Teacher to “tuer la vie” (32, “kill the life,” 22) in Samba. When the teacher tells her a story of her father’s greatness in the face of death, the Grande Royale replies, “Je vénère mon père et le souvenir que vous en avez. Mais je crois que le temps est venu d’apprendre à nos fils à vivre” (38, “I revere my father, and the memory you have of him, but I believe that the time has come to teach our sons to live,” 27). She implores the teacher to liberate the people14 and to give them the permission to send their children to the foreign school. While the teacher decides not to decide, the Grande Royale acts with a resolve that is as merciless as the creators of the school to which she agrees unequivocally to send their children (48). She forcefully removes Samba from the Glowing Hearth and prepares him for the new school. The fact that she keeps the boy at her house for a week, pampering him as if to undo the damages of the Glowing Hearth (49), shows how strongly she feels about the place. To make her case for the school to the people, she convenes a general meeting to which women are invited (56), which is against Diallobé custom. In a clear-eyed recognition of what Lilyan Kesteloot calls “la mutation obligatoire d’une société techniquement faible” (“the obligatory change of a technologically weak society,” 51), she tells those assembled that because the world is changing, the people of Diallobé will have to do things they hate and that go contrary to their customs (56, 45). For the Grande Royale, the reasons for sending Diallobé children to the colonizers’ school (even though, personally speaking, she does not like the institution), are too compelling to be given no decisive voice. First, there is the question of basic survival: the need to learn how to better join wood to wood. In other words, “pouvoir vivre” versus “savoir vivre” (Gadjigo, 61). Then there is the desire to win at all cost. As one who, like the French, has waged wars of pacification to assert the dominance of her caste, she is interested in the art of military conquest. In her assessment, the question before them is one of choosing between what she considers to be two presents: a decaying present too closely connected to a sterile past (evident in their defeat by the colonizer) and a promising present (the new school) that carries the germ of a productive, progressive future. As Samba leaves for the Sorbonne, she tells him to go find out from White people how to conquer without being in the right (165, 152). The Grande Royale has no illusions about the weight of her decision or the perilous journey on which she is about to launch Diallobé children. Yet, she is willing to sacrifice everything for it: “L’école où je pousse nos enfants tuera en eux ce qu’aujourd’hui nous aimons et conservons avec soin, à juste titre.



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. . . Ce que je propose, c’est que nous acceptions de mourir en nos enfants et les étrangers qui nous ont défaits prennent en eux toute la place que nous aurons laissée libre” (57, “The school in which I would place our children will kill in them what today we love and rightly conserve with care. . . . What I am proposing is that we should agree to die in our children’s hearts and that the foreigners who have defeated us should fill the place, wholly, which we shall have left free,” 46). Arguably, what drives the Grande Royale the most is her desire to maintain the reign of her class and family. She proposes that the children of the elite should be sent to the school before others because they are better equipped to handle any risks involved and should be the first to reap whatever benefits accrue from the school (47, 37). The school becomes a despised but useful instrument for the perpetuation of the aristocracy’s hegemony. In keeping with her pragmatism, she provides unequivocal endorsement to the teacher’s choice of Demba as his replacement. She sees Demba as the polar opposite of the one he is replacing because unlike the old teacher who prefers moribund traditions to triumphant modernity, Demba will know how to embrace the new reality (133, 121). Being a member of the lower caste, Demba’s becoming a teacher of the Diallobé is another sign of the passing of old values. La Grande Royale prefers him to her family for she sees in him a replication of her decisiveness, boldness, and pragmatism. She is not mistaken; Demba’s first action upon taking over is to change the schedule at the Glowing Hearth, which will allow parents who so desire to send their children to the new school. He justifies his action with the Prophet’s injunction to all believers to seek knowledge wherever it may take them (134, 122). By this decision, he becomes arguably the most practical character in the novel. The Knight (Samba’s Father) For Samba’s father, the debate about the school is the struggle to find the “juste milieu,” the golden mean. Unlike the Grande Royale, who has chosen the physical over the metaphysical, or the Teacher, who prefers saving the soul at the expense of the body, Samba’s father prefers harmony and equilibrium between the physical and the spiritual: “Lorsque la main est faible, l’esprit court de grands risques” (20, “When the hand is feeble, the spirit runs great risks,” 10). Himself a graduate of the colonial school, the chevalier (knight) knows what the school can do to the colonized, so he does not want his son near it at all. He is disappointed that his family has decided to bow before what he labels the “éclat d’un feu d’artifice” (80). What the world needs, he argues, is not additional speed represented in European notions of progress and modernity; it is rather to slow down. However, unable to stand up to his family, he allows Samba to go to the school.

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If the Grande Royale only thinks about the survival of her aristocracy even if that means the Europeanization of the world, what the knight hopes for is cosmopolitanism, the construction of the city of tomorrow with input from all races. Happiness, he says “n’est pas fonction de la masse des réponses, mais de leur repartition” (82, “is not a function of the mass of responses, but of their distribution,” 69). He regrets that instead of resisting the “folie” of the West, the world is succumbing to the West’s superficial allure: “l’Occident est possédé et le monde s’occidentalise” (82, “the West is possessed by its own compulsion, and the world is becoming westernized,” 69). He does not wish for his son to be part of what he sees as mass genuflection to the West. He proposes, as an antidote to this European homogenization of the world that the school is intended to ensure, the construction of a new world where the happiness of all is guaranteed and whose survival and success will depend on the equal contribution of all according to what they can offer: “Nous n’avons pas eu le même passé . . . mais nous aurons le même avenir” (92, “We have not had the same past, . . . but we shall have, strictly, the same future,” 79), he tells a European colleague.15 He is prepared to sacrifice his son to the building of this future community: “Cet avenir, je l’accepte. Mon fils en est le gage. Il contribuera à le bâtir” (92, “this future—I accept it. My son is the pledge of that,” 80). Unfortunately, things do not work out as the knight hopes. Once he determines that Samba’s forays into Western civilization at the Sorbonne are not allowing him to “give God the entire place that is due Him,” he recalls him (163). The Teacher The Teacher is described as the “conscience” of the Diallobé even if his house is “la plus démunie du pays” and his body “la plus fragile” (45 and English 35). He has no illusions about the power he wields over the people, which has become more evident during the debate about the school. The teacher is the opposite of the Grande Royale regarding his attitude to the school, even if they are similar in their intransigence (45, 35). His attitude toward the school ends up being the most ambivalent, as demonstrated in his refusal to decide for or against the school (137). He concedes that the new school could help his people build homes capable of withstanding the ravages of time (21). In this, he is in agreement with the Grande Royale. And he knows that if he says no to the school, the people will not send their children to the school, which will have a devastating outcome for the community (44). Like the knight, he underscores the need for a balanced existence: “Il faut construire des demeures solides pour les hommes et il faut sauver Dieu à l’intérieur de ces demeures” (21, “we must build solid dwellings for men, and within those dwellings we must save God,” 11). Since



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no one can assure him that acceptance of the school will preserve God, he is hesitant to entrust the children of Diallobé to those for whom “la révolte contre la misère ne se distingue pas de la révolte contre Dieu” (21, “the revolt against poverty and misery is not distinguished from the revolt against God,” 11). Ironically, though, the Teacher, even if he never expresses it in words, may have wanted Samba to make a categorical choice (79). The Teacher gives his Thoroughbred horse, Tourbillon,16 to the director of the new school in L (79). In presenting the animal, he remarks: “Cette bête sémillante . . . serait mieux à sa place à l’école nouvelle qu’au Foyer Ardent” (79, “This engaging animal will be more in place at the new school than at the Glowing Hearth,” 67). A symbolic handing over of Samba to the new school and admission of defeat? Recognition of the necessity of the school? A last-ditch attempt to salvage Samba from indecisiveness? The passing of the teacher after Samba’s departure for France and Demba’s decision about school attendance of his students at the Foyer Ardent represent the true end of that chapter of Diallobé history and the last major resistance to the school. As is the case for all major participants in the battle over the school, Samba is the Teacher’s principal concern. If the Grande Royale epitomizes, physically and temperamentally, the history and customs of the Diallobé, Samba, according to the Teacher, “is of the seed from which the country of Diallobé produces its masters” (12). Naturally, the Teacher seeks to nourish that seed into fruition. Samba is to be the Teacher’s magnum opus, his last disciple, the one he will leave behind to save the Diallobé from themselves and from the relentless pressure of the colonizer. Suspecting in him the weakness he sees in men of the nobility, namely, “l’exaltation de l’homme” at the expense of God, he assumes the responsibility to rid the boy of the “infirmités morales” and impress on his soul and body humility and humiliation, and concomitant subservience to God above all (33, 23). Samba’s precariousness is already evident to the teacher (15, 5), yet he sees the potential for greatness in the boy. The Teacher, like the colonizer to the colonized, has decided he knows what is best for the child and will do anything to make that a reality—including the use of extreme psychological and physical violence such as is seen at the opening of the novel. Unfortunately, Samba cannot fulfil the dream the teacher has for him. Samba Samba is a tragic figure. The young aristocrat, it seems, has always had a morbid love relationship with death, which, according to the Grande Royale, is not commensurate with his age (35), but which pleases the teacher. The reader’s insight into Samba’s personality comes quite early on in the novel when we see him in the company of other students of the Glowing Hearth

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traversing the community while exhorting people to remember God and fear death. Already endowed with this propensity for the somber, Samba’s eventual choice of philosophy as course of study in France opens him further into the abyss of existentialist angst. In this, he is not much different from his father, a man who, we realize, is himself drawn to the abyss (90). The tragic hero he is, Samba is caught, helpless, in a whirlwind of opposing views and aspirations concerning him and the school. Like his country and people, he is a Thoroughbred caught in a fire he did not ignite and over which he has no control. Samba, who clearly has not been raised to be independent enough to exercise meaningful agency, succumbs to the will of his guardians with their competing visions of humanity, progress, and power. Since his birth, Samba has been someone else’s object to dispose of as they deem necessary whether it be his father, his cousin, or his teacher. At age seven, he is transferred from his parents to his teacher (22).17 At the Glowing Hearth, he is at the mercy of the teacher who forces him to learn things he does not understand: “Cette phrase qu’il ne comprenait pas, pour laquelle il souffrait le martyre” (14, “This sentence—which he did not understand, for which he was suffering martyrdom,” 4). Even when he is in France immersing himself in Western thought, and the teacher is no longer alive, Samba acknowledges the stranglehold of the teacher over him (74–75). This is what Western education, despite the Grande Royale’s wish, is unable to evacuate from Samba. Only once does Samba make a decision that is truly his. Ironically, this decision leads to his death. Upon his premature return home from France, the Fool, the teacher’s friend in his last days, sees Samba as the teacher’s heir. When Samba refuses to pray with him as the teacher would have done, the Fool stabs him. Among the many actions by others that Samba suffers, two are particularly significant as they point to the heart of Samba’s tragedy. These are interruptions in his education. First, he is forced to terminate his Koranic studies at the moment the teacher was going to introduce him to “a rational understanding” of the Koran (160). The absence of a rational understanding of the holy book leaves Samba with no defenses in the face of the onslaught of Cartesian rationalism. Second, in the middle of his studies in France, his father recalls him. Where the teacher had given up, admitting he may be wrong about the relationship of man to God, the knight—who had on two occasions relented in the face of the assault (letting the Grande Royale and the chief send Samba to the school in L and then allowing Samba to go to France to deepen his understanding of the West)—has now decided to put an end to all his doubts about Western education’s power to evacuate God and Diallobé ethos from his son. Thus, twice interrupted, Samba ends up a half-breed, caught in an incomplete metamorphosis, like the “American Negro” W. E. B. Du Bois speaks of in The Souls of Black Folk, inhabited by “two souls, two thoughts,



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two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals” (3). Having imbibed elements from both worlds, Samba, like the Black man in the new world, cannot choose, and does not have to choose, between Diallobé and the West, between the body and the soul. Like the American Black, what exacerbates this condition of “twoness” is Samba’s awareness of it. Samba himself expresses this perfectly: “Je ne suis pas un pays des Diallobés distinct, face à un Occident distinct, et appréciant d’une tête froide ce que je puis lui prendre et ce qu’il faut que je lui laisse en contrepartie. Je suis devenu les deux. Il n’y a pas une tête lucide entre les deux termes d’un choix. Il y a une nature étrange, en détresse de n’être pas deux” (164, “I am not a distinct country of the Diallobé facing a distinct Occident, and appreciating with a cool head what I must take from it and what I must leave with it by way of counterbalance. There is not a clear mind deciding between the two factors of a choice. There is a strange nature, in distress over not being two,” 151). However, unlike the American Black man “whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder,” Samba does not keep from being destroyed by the “two warring ideals” holding him hostage. Samba’s inability to harmoniously marry the two, to actionize the potential complementarity of the two, to choose one, or to keep both at bay in order to carve out a third, viable space for himself, has one logical conclusion: death, both real and symbolic. For Samba, therefore, death becomes the space where all doubts and ambiguities are resolved. A situation that is not of much use to the living. Samba becomes the vessel for everyone’s dreams, except his own. Unlike Malic, who gets his three wishes (trois volontés) granted by the French and his family, Samba becomes the genie unable to grant the wishes of the three people who count on him to save their vision of humanity: his father, who wants him to contribute to the construction of the future cosmopolis; his teacher, who wants him to stay entirely submitted to God; and his cousin, who wants him to forget the Diallobé in him and adopt the ways of the conqueror. His tragedy is born of his internal, personal deficiency (mainly his lack of true agency) and the selfish instrumentalization of him by his family. SAMMY’S L’ODYSSÉE DE MONGOU The first encounter of the people of Limanguiagna with a White man was with Danjou, who one day appeared in their village unannounced. Before then, their universe ended on the edges of the forest surrounding their village. And beyond that point, as far as the Bandias were concerned, “c’était le néant” (“it was nothingness,” 3). This was perfectly fine with them since the found everything they needed within the frontiers of their land (3). However, with the appearance of Danjou, whom the locals call “Toroh,” or devil (5),

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and his obsession with surveying and demarcating territory accompanied by monologues about possibilities and potential for development, the “barrière érigée par des générations d’une vie endogène” (“barrier erected by generations of insular living,” 3) was brought down forever. The First White Man in Limanguigna The arrival of Danjou coincides with the passing of Mongou’s father, the patriarch of the Bandias. Mongou was only ten years old at this time. The White man and the boy quickly adopt each other as father and son. Mongou, the youngster who does not understand his mysterious friend and his strange ways, follows the White man around like a robot (6), thinking, like a typical Bandia, that the eccentric stranger will eventually tire of his meanderings (6).18 Often, he would tell Mongou (mostly speaking to himself) about his dreams and wishes for Limanguiagna, about transforming the huge wilderness into a “jardin d’Eden” (“Garden of Eden,” 5). In the manner of the typical colonizer of which he is the visionary and trailblazer, he sees the land as he sees the orphan Mongou not belonging to anyone, a gift from God to be fashioned after the desire of the one who possesses it. Through this vision of mise en valeur, he tells Mongou of what is to come: “des routes, des maisons autrement plus grandes que vos huttes, des hôpitaux, des écoles, des services . . . il viendra ici des hommes comme moi, à la peau blanche, avec beaucoup de richesses et des machines . . . Tu seras un grand chef” (“roads, houses far bigger than your huts, hospitals, schools, services . . . men like me, with white skin, will come here with lots of riches and machines . . . You will be a great chief,” 6). From atop his superiority complex, Danjou dismisses Mongou’s advice to slow down, reminding the boy that his race “était incapable de raisonnement et de logique” (“was incapable of reasoning and logic,” 6). For him, the boy is merely “un élément non-pensant du décor à la fois sauvage et féerique qu’il voulait transformer à sa manière” (“a non-thinking element of the decor, both wild and magical, that he wanted to transform after his fashion,” 6). By the time Danjou accepts that all men are equal (12), it is too late for Mongou; the White man is already a god in the eyes of the boy. Even before going to school, the encounter with Danjou produced a profound change in him: “L’ombre de Danjou hantait Mongou et le guidait dans ses actes” (“Danjou’s shadow haunted him and guided him in his actions,” 22). This adoration of his self-designated mentor explains the determination and rapidity with which Mongou cooperates with the colonizer in projects he believes will be beneficial to his people, even when he knows such projects go against the traditions and immediate preferences of his people. Based on the informal teachings of Danjou, his exposure to other communities, and his powers of observation, Mongou embarks on the transformation



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of his chiefdom: he reorganizes village life, forbids human sacrifice, institutes collective work, encourages scattered and vulnerable families to come together to form large villages (22). Convinced of the positive transforming power of the White man’s knowledge, he implores the soul of Danjou, which he believes to inhabit the flag the latter left behind, to help him: “Prête-moi ta lumière pour que je conduise mon peuple vers le bonheur que tu m’as promis” (“Lend me your light so I can lead my people to the happiness you promised me,” 23). The answer to Mongou’s question is the school established long after Danjou had faded in the memory of Mongou’s fellow Bandias. Enter the School With the expansion of colonial presence in Mongou’s chiefdom came auxiliaries hired by companies and the colonial administration. These elements of the new and growing class of “évolués,” characterized as “une nouvelle secte de sorciers, inspirés de la magie des Bawés” (“a new sect of wizards empowered by the magic of the Bawés,” 7)19 became quickly feared and hated by the people for their corrupt practices and abuse of power. Concerned about the welfare of his subjects, Mongou enthusiastically accepts the commandant’s request to send Limanguiagna’s children to the colonial school. This, despite the unanimous opposition from his people who think the school will destroy the souls of their children and the Bandia identity (35). Even Mongou had to rid himself of his initial suspicion of the school, mainly in its capacity to produce inept and unscrupulous characters like the évolués described above. Once he was told by the local commandant that the school would remove the intermediaries between him and the colonizer, he concludes that to protect his people from both evil traditional forces and the more sinister new elite, he must himself possess “la magie des Bawés” through speaking their language. So, he enrolls in the school. Bobichon, the commandant of Limanguiagna, whom the locals call “usurpateur” for having assumed all of Mongou’s powers (30), explains to him all the benefits of the school. In addition to making the children better than their parents and more human (41), the school will offer “une éducation rationnelle” that will break their “égocentrisme” and transport them to “universel grâce” and “un jugement et un sens critique qui ne seront plus entachés de superstitions, de magie, de sorcellerie” (“a judgment and a critical sense that will no longer be tainted by superstitions, magic, witchcraft,” 36). He calls the children, attached together by a rope (40) after being forcefully removed from their families for enrollment in the new school, a “troupeau de négrillons” (“a herd of little niggers,” 41). As for Mongou, once he decides to join the children at school, there was a cry of indignation from the elders, consternation on the part of the women, and incredulity from the children

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(46). The school, according to his subjects, is a “jeu d’enfants” and he, their supreme leader, has gone completely mad for wanting to partake of it (46). But Mongou remains unperturbed to the mockery and insults. In what is clearly an echo of the official colonial education policy, the commandant in L’Odyssée de Mongou gives the teacher of the first group of students the following warning which underlines both the limits and goal of the curriculum: Je ne vous demande pas de faire de ces nègres des savants. Ne nous empoisonnez pas l’existence avec une classe de lettrés prétentieux et vantards. . . . Il me faut des auxiliaires, des gens qui servent d’intermédiaires entre nous et la population. Apprenez-leur des choses empruntées à leur milieu, à leur vie. Pas de grandes théories, surtout pas de philosophie. Ce ne sont pas des hommes de tête qu’il nous faut, mais des hommes de mains. Qu’ils nous servent sans poser des questions et qu’ils obéissent avant de comprendre. S’ils arrivent de distinguer leur main droite de la gauche, c’est largement suffisant, il n’en faut pas plus. (Sammy 1983, 42–43) I am not asking you to turn these niggers into learned men. Do not poison our existence with a class of pretentious and boastful scholars. . . . I need auxiliaries, people who serve as intermediaries between us and the population. Teach them things borrowed from their environment, from their life. No grand theories, especially no philosophy. We don’t need leaders, but henchmen. Let them serve us without asking questions and obey before understanding. If they manage to distinguish their right hand from their left, it is more than enough, no need for more.

Another method of selection of students consisted in a careful physical examination of the children. To ensure the maximum number of qualified children are recruited, the commandant asks that all eligible children in the villages under his jurisdiction be sent to him (37). Those who are not considered to be physically fit to endure the exertions of their future job in the colonial service are summarily sent back home to their parents. Yet another weeding-out process consisted in the preference for educating only children. When Mongou first suggests to the commandant that he too would like to go to school in order to possess the key to unlock the mystery of the White man’s power, the colonial administrator replies, “tu es un homme fini, tu n’es plus malléable comme un enfant” (“You are a grown man, you are no longer malleable like a child,” 38). For the kind of society the colonialist wished to construct, he must, through the education of children, create and nurture an elite that will assist for a long time, if not forever, in the administration and exploitation of its vast overseas territories—thus a further indication of the instrumentalization of the school by the colonizer for his interests.



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In demonstration of the power of the school, after only a few months of attendance there, the children already have a superiority complex. In their view, the rest of the unschooled population has become the uncivilized other: “nous n’étions plus comme les autres, c’est-à-dire de sauvages incultes, des Bandias sans lumière, mais des Bawés en puissance” (“we are no longer like the others, that is to say uneducated savages, Bandias without light, but elevated White men,” 46). They are already visualizing the promised land even as they take their first steps in their journey. If the school gives Mongou the hope to better his people’s lives, it also becomes for him personally the means to his bourgeoisification. We are told that Mongou glissait insensiblement mais sûrement dans le camp des évolués, des vrais évolués. Au bout de trois ans d’effort et de volonté, Mongou parlait désormais couramment la langue des Bawés, écrivait lui-même ses lettres, montrait plus de logique dans ces jugements et ses actes. . . . Mongou avait désormais une double vue. Ainsi, il fut nommé commis expéditionnaire de l’administration de Limangiagna, en plus de son titre de chef Bandia. Plus tard il devint juge coutumier. . . . Ce n’était plus Mongou tout court, mais Monsieur Mongou. (Sammy 1983, 47) was slipping imperceptibly but surely into the ranks of the evolved, the truly evolved. After three years of hardwork and determination, Mongou was now fluent in the language of the Bawés, wrote his own letters, showed more logic in his judgments and actions. . . . Mongou now had a double vision. Accordingly, he was appointed expeditionary clerk of the administration of Limangiagna, in addition to his title of Chief of the Bandia. Later, he became a customary judge. . . . He was no longer just Mongou, but Monsieur Mongou.

The distance separating Mongou from the White man has become considerably shorter and will continue to be in proportion to his mastery of the French language and French way of life as well as his continued desire to accommodate the French. For his survival and the survival of his people, Mongou needs a “double vue,” the ability to look at things from more than a single perspective and the ability to reconcile seemingly opposing worldviews. Mongou’s “glissement” into the new way of life endorsed by the French culminates in his adoption of the Christian name Pierre-Simon, a name he requires everyone to call him. Additionally, he divorces four of his five wives, and remarries the first and only remaining one in church. She takes the name of Antoinette (52–53).

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Then Everything Changed Beyond this evident effect of the school on individuals such as Mongou, the society as a whole is also undergoing tremendous changes under the relentless pressure of colonization. For example, money and its attendant consumerist ethos has established a firm grip on the imagination and lives of the Bandias. The Bandias quickly learned that with the “pièces de métal,” they can get any of the newly introduced products by the Europeans. With money, which has replaced the old barter system, was born “un nouvel esprit, celui de l’accumulation des richesses, d’un bonheur matériel extravagant et d’une détérioration de l’âme Bandia” (“a new zeitgeist, which involves wealth accumulation, extravagant material happiness, and the destruction of the Bandia soul,” 35). The social transformation pushing the Bandia away from their ancestral roots and family values is particularly evident among the new crop of indigenous Africans working in the colonial administration (48). As we have seen in Climbié, attitudes toward the colonizers’ language reveal anxieties and aspirations about belonging (or not) in one society or another: dans les milieux dits “évolués” et qui comprenaient les ‘boys,’ les cuisiniers, les jardiniers, les gardes à “chechia” rouge, les plantons, les employés de bureau, les auxiliaires du service de santé et de l’agriculture, les gens prenaient un malin plaisir à situer leur degré d’évolution par la substitution pure et simple à leur langue maternelle d’un jargon inintelligible qu’ils prétendaient être la langue des Bawés. (Sammy 1983, 48) in so-called “superior” circles, which included houseboys, cooks, gardeners, guards with red “chechia,” orderlies, office workers, health service and agricultural aides, people took a malicious pleasure in demonstrating their degree of evolution by simply substituting their mother tongue with an unintelligible jargon which they claimed to be the language of the Bawés.

Mongou’s path to the school is markedly different from those of the others we examine here. By the time the actual colonizers and the school came to his village, he was already familiar with the White man and had developed a long and close personal relationship with one of them. As a chief who is already familiar with the act of governing his people and who develops deep relationships with neighboring tribes and communities, he seems less prone to depersonalization and more likely to have and exercise agency. In this sense, L’Odyssée de Mongou is a study in political leadership. The question of colonial education and its relation to political leadership intimated in the Grande Royal’s acceptance of the school and her choice of Samba as the seeker of the holy grail becomes prominent in this work. In his depiction of Mongou as a successful product of the school, Pierre Sammy may be suggesting that if all



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able-bodied African chieftains had chosen to learn the colonizer’s language and way of doing, the state of the continent may have been different today. Because of their maturity and traditional legitimacy, chiefs like Mongou would not have been as malleable or impressionable as their children were in the hands of the colonizer. Hence, the high probability that the colonizer’s project of fabricating a class that would answer only to his every whim and caprice would have been half as successful. Even though he is still under the influence of the colonizer, his agency—going to the school willingly, joining the French colonial army as an example to his people and an opportunity to know other peoples and learn new and better ways of doing things, and his willingness to compromise—makes him less vulnerable to the negative effects of the unbalanced power relations sanctioned by colonization. In response to complaints from some of his close advisers that he is ceding too much power to the colonizer, Mongou says, “l’essentiel est de s’accommoder du temps que l’on vit” (“the trick is to adapt to the times we live in,” 31). Mongou understands where power lies, and uses compromise as the stepping stone to an equilibrium between old (Bandia) and new (colonial) ways (35). A vision somewhat similar to the compromise inherent in the cosmopolitanism proposed by Samba’s father. In a way, his loyalty to the White man is a performance, for his ultimate loyalty lies with his people and himself. HAMPÂTÉ BÂ’S AMKOULLEL, L’ENFANT PEUL Amkoullel is the real-life odyssey of Amkoullel (Amadou Hampâté Bâ) through the French colonial school and administration in the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century. Of aristocratic Fula stock, Hampâté Bâ was born in 1901 in Bandiagra, capital of the precolonial Macina empire. After three years at the school in Bandiagara, he left for Djenné in 1913 where he successfully completed his coursework in 1915. However, because he left Djenné (to be with his mother in Kati) without permission from the authorities, he was denied his school certificate. Consequently, inspired by the encounter with an old friend from the École Normale in Gorée, he resumed primary school in Kati. From Kati, he went to the École Régionale de Bamako. Upon his successful completion of his studies in Bamako, his mother refused to let him go to the École normale on Gorée island. According to her, he had studied French enough and must now learn to become a real Fula. When the governor found out about Hampâté Bâ’s refusal to disobey his mother, he asked the school inspector to punish Hampâté Bâ by sending him to work as a temporary secretary as far away from Bamako as possible, which happened to be the newly established colony of Haute-Volta

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Of all the texts under review here, Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel offers the most comprehensive view of the education question, in which his corner of Africa is presented as a confluence of competing visions of learning: Islamic, animistic, and Western secular traditions. That Hampâté Bâ was raised in all of these traditions gives him an insight into how each one of them works, their potential as well as their limitations. The book also opens an expansive and clear window into the workings of French colonization in an Africa writhing under the merciless blows of European imperialism. Traditional (Precolonial) African and Islamic Schools Africa has often been characterized as a society of oral traditions, something seen by some, including the colonizer, as a weakness. Hampâtê Bâ makes a point of questioning the conflation of the written word with knowledge and cultural superiority: “Le fait de n’avoir pas eu d’écriture n’a donc jamais privé l’Afrique d’avoir un passé, une histoire et une culture” (“The fact of never having had writing has thus never deprived Africa of having a past, a history, and a culture,” 197). According to Hampâté Bâ, the need for Western education is an artificiality and imposition that created its own justification by denigrating and suppressing what existed before. He thus devotes a good portion of his book to establishing the fact that Africans did not need European-style education to be educated and civilized or to live fully and freely. In addition to various systems of informal learning, Hampâté Bâ also shows that there were more sophisticated, (semi-)formal systems of education in the form of initiatory schools covering every branch of knowledge. Hampâté Bâ owed much of his learning to such systems, to his mother and other relatives, to Koranic teachers like Tierno Kounta and Tierno Bokar, probably more than he owed it to formal learning in the colonial school. He notes that he had the privilege of being born and growing up “dans un milieu qui était pour moi une sorte de grande école permanente pour tout ce qui touchait à l’histoire et aux traditions africaines” (156, “in an environment that was a permanent academy of everything concerning African history and traditions,” 127). In fact, much of his work in the colonial administration consisted of his lifelong learning under their wings. Hampâté Bâ himself would spend the rest of his life and career preserving and promoting traditional African knowledges and knowledge systems. It is against this backdrop of endogenous educational praxis that Hampâté Bâ engages the arrival and practice of French colonial education in his corner of West Africa. His goal in Amkoullel is to show that the colonial school, despite the proclamations of the colonizer to the contrary, did not come into a vacuum waiting to be filled.



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School recruitment at the time operated on a quota system put in place by the colonial authorities to ensure there was adequate supply of students to satisfy the needs of the top three sectors of the colonial administration: the public sector, the military sector, and the domestic sector.20 A minimal acquaintance with the French language (at the most rudimentary level) is necessary for any degree of direct entry into the colonial administration. It was the practice by the colonial administration to recruit or conscript Africans not only for the school but for the army and forced labor (242). There was limited room, if any, for negotiation or dissent in the process. As one of the characters in Hampâtê Bâ’s novel remarks, “Quand le toubab commande, Dieu ferme les yeux et laisse faire” (242, “When the toubab is in command, God closes his eyes and looks the other way,” 198). The commandant de cercle, acting upon orders from the governor, asks the traditional chief of Hampâté Bâ’s town to supply two boys from a respectable family to fill two open slots in the local primary school at Bandiagara (240). As it turned out, it was the turn of Hampâté Bâ’s section of the town to contribute the pupils required by the administration. The section chief, Koniba Kondala, who harbors a grudge toward the guardian of Hampâté Bâ and his brother, has always wanted revenge on the Hampâté Bâ family. As brothers from the same father and mother and the only male descendants of sworn enemies of Kondala, Amadou and his brother are prime candidates for his long-planned revenge, even though there is an unwritten code that stipulates against this. Victims of personal vendettas and rivalries, some of which predate their birth, Hampâté Bâ and his brother are rounded up for the school. To understand Hampâté Bâ’s initial distress—even if he eventually asks to be enrolled in the school when he realizes how much power the school can bestow upon him—is to understand the attitude of his community toward colonial education. As is common in most of the texts under examination here, families—especially those in predominant Muslim communities—did not want to send their children to the White man’s school. Many of the children share the sentiments of their families vis-à-vis the school. Members of the Muslim community of Bandiagara viewed the school as the surest way to go to hell (239), since what the children would learn at the school of “mangeurs de porcs” (241, “pork eaters,” 196) would lead them to renounce their Islamic faith, which in turn will make them infidels, excellent candidates for ostracization (242). Competency in Koranic studies leading to the title of marabout brings prestige and honor to oneself and one’s family. Accompanied by Koniba, who tells them along the way that he is taking them to the White man’s pigsty where they will be transformed into piglets or faggots to feed the fires of hell, Hampâté Bâ tells us he and his brother arrive at the chief’s palace “l’âme envahie d’une angoisse de condamnés à mort” (244, “our hearts heavy with the dread of those condemned to die,” 199).

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The paramount chief, Alfa Maki Tall, will eventually release the older boy, Hammadoun, on account of his advanced Koranic studies, replacing him with his own seven-year-old son, Madani. At the commandant’s residence, the two boys (Madani and Amadou Hampâté, seven and twelve years of age, respectively) react differently to the situation. One can imagine the boys’ confusion and dread in the office of the commandant, in front of a White man, the most powerful man in the cercle who happens to be a total stranger to them. When asked if he is happy to go to school, Madani replies he prefers death to the school and would like to be with his mother. Even when the commandant tells him 1) going to school will allow him to learn to read, write, and speak French, the beautiful language every chief should know because it guarantees power and wealth and 2) that he can still go to the Koranic school on Thursdays and Sundays, as well as early in the morning before going to the colonial school, Madani insists on being sent back to his mother and the Koranic school right away (251).21 Amkoullel, on the other hand, is like Malic; he is more curious about the commandant and the school than intimidated by them (251). Contrary to Madani, Hampâté Bâ begs the commandant to send him to school. When the commandant asks him why he so badly wants to go to school, Amkoullel responds: “D’abord, je veux apprendre la langue du Commandant pour pouvoir parler directement avec lui, sans passer par un interprète. Ensuite, je voudrais devenir chef pour pouvoir casser la figure de Koniba Kondala, cet ancien captif de mes ancêtres qui se permet, parce qu’il est envoyé par le commandant, de couvrir d’insultes toute ma famille” (253, “First of all, I wish to learn the language of the commandant in order to speak to him directly without going through an interpreter. Second, I would like to become a chief so that I can break Koniba Kondala’s face. He is a former captive of my ancestors who, because he is the commandant’s envoy, presumes to cover my entire family in insults,” 206). Thanks to the commandant’s reaction to Koniba’s treatment of Amadou, the boy realizes the benefits of proximity to the White man that the school can ensure in the new Africa. The reaction of Amkoullel’s mother to their abduction further reveals her animosity toward the school. Kadidja vows to do everything to get her son back, even if that means selling half of her livestock to raise the necessary funds to do so (260): The mother’s effort to “racheter” Hampâté from school involves bribing those with access to the colonial administration, especially the local interpreter and the teacher. However, Tierno Bokar, the man Amadou calls his family’s conscience guide (260) is able to convince Kadidja to leave her son in the school. Later, Amadou’s admission to the École régionale de Djenné for the certificat d’études indigène (“première étape sur la route qui devait nous mener vers le pouvoir et la richesse,” 274, “the first step on the road that was to lead us toward wealth and power,” 224) was



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greeted as bad news by his guardian, Beydari, who falls literally ill. Having lost Hammadoun, Amadou’s brother, the family has a hard time parting with another son. Yet, not everyone is against the school, even if they do not actively encourage it. If others use Islam as a potent reason for their opposition to French colonial education, Tierno Bokar, for his part, uses the same religion as an argument to get Kadidja to let her son stay in the school. In the first instance, he quotes the prophet of Islam who said “knowledge of something is preferable to ignorance of it” and “always seek knowledge even if it takes you all the way to China.”22 A second argument he uses is one familiar to all Muslims and fundamental to their faith: Leave everything to God for he alone can determine the fate of humans (261). Unlike his family, the thirteen-year-old boy is not bothered at all by his imminent departure. He sees this as an opportunity to grow in greater autonomy and power: “Je pars pour étudier, et pour devenir un chef” (276, “I am leaving to go study so that I can become a chief,” 226). The power of this promotion comes on full display when the time for departure comes for Amadou and his mates. Each student has access to a porter for the sixty-kilometer trek to Mopti to catch the boat to Djenné. To exercise his newly endowed powers and punish his erstwhile tormentor, Kondala Koniba, Amadou refuses the first three porters found for him by Kondala. He relishes his new power: “à peine mon orteil gauche engagé dans l’étrier du commandant, je pouvais inquiéter un fauve comme Koniba Kondala, la terreur de la ville” (275, “having just placed my left toe in the stirrup of command, I was already able to antagonize a beast like Koniba Kondala, who was the terror of the town,” 225). Kondala, who thought that by sending the boy to the colonial school he was punishing his family and sending him to perdition, quickly realizes his miscalculation (275). This scenario is an example of what happened to rulers who underestimated the power of the school and refused to send their own children to it, sending instead their slaves. Being a student of the colonial school came with power and privilege. This is especially the case if the beneficiary of French education demonstrates or performs loyalty to the benefactor. Even after his punishment for disobeying orders to pursue his education at William Ponty in Gorée, Hampâté Bâ continues to enjoy the privileges of being educated and employed by the administration. For the trip to Mopti from Bamako en route to his disciplinary assignment in Ouagadougou, the commandant puts at Hampâté Bâ’s disposal a large, comfortably furnished canoe with six rowers (399). Once in Mopti, from where he will continue to Ouagadougou, Hampâté is already deeply cognizant of the power and privilege conferred upon him by his newfound status: “coiffé de mon casque colonial, oubliant pour un instant mon statut d’écrivain temporaire à titre essentiellement précaire et révocable, je

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me prenais pour un grand chef” (402, “With my colonial pith helmet on my head, I forgot for a moment that I was only a temporary secretary classified as essentially revocable and subject to repeal and took myself for a great chief,” 328). With “un garde de cercle” armed with “un mousqueton à baïonnette et six laptots” who call him “monsieur patron,” the twenty-year-old educated African has every reason to feel like a chief. The rest of Amadou’s passage through the school as well as his interactions with elements of colonial and indigenous life confirm his original instincts about the institution’s power. They also show him how much the colonizer is intolerant of disobedience and rebellion. By the time he ends his education and enters the administration (which becomes for him a school in its own right) as an évolué, Hampâté Bâ had run the full gamut of experiences as a colonized indigene. THE END OF THE WORLD AS AFRICANS KNEW IT From the unqualified praise of the French colonizer and his school in Malic, through the more or less indifferent attitude to the school in Mongou, to its unflattering depiction in Climbié, and the critical and expansive view of the institution and its purveyors and detractors in Aventure ambiguë and Amkoullel, we have seen the impossibility for Africans to stay indifferent to the presence and impact of the foreign institution. The Africa these five novels depict is a “world irrevocably altered by colonialism” (Adejunmobi, 28). As this study progresses, we shall examine in detail how the school changed Africa and Africans and what the change meant and continues to mean for the continent and its peoples. NOTES 1. All translations without page numbers, here and elsewhere, are mine. 2. This hint at dishonest African traders will take center stage later in the narrative when Malic presents a primer of the history of Senegalese-French relations to the elders of the village. 3. Consider the exile of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, for example. 4. Daras are notorious for their focus on rote learning. 5. The Tiédos she refers to were a politico-religious military elite of Wolof origin that opposed both Islamic and French expansion. They were also known for their bravery, drunkenness, and cruelty. According to Abbé David Boilat, a Tiédo is “l’opposé de marabout . . . un incrédule, un impie, un homme sans foi ni probité” who lives only by “vol et de pillage sur les grands chemins” (Esquisses sénégalaises,



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308). Sembène Ousmane dedicates his film Ceddo (1977) to one episode in the life and career of the Tiédos. 6. See Hypothèses, “Amadou Mapaté Diagne (1886–1976).” 7. Of note is the dedication of the book to Georges Hardy, patron saint of many “évolué” products of the colonial school. We recall also that Hardy wrote the prefaces to many of the early productions of African writing in French West Africa. 8. To be sure, African languages were taught at federal schools such as École normale of Gorée, but only as part of the curriculum for those destined to be interpreters. 9. This practice of shaming and punishing students for speaking their local languages in school happened in all colonies (English, French, Portuguese, etc.) and continued well after independence. 10. Laye’s nostalgia for the peace and tranquility of his childhood in a strong, loving family and bucolic settings, which Eric Sellin describes as “reverse alienation” (459), and as Gadjigo argues, presents one of the strongest criticisms of colonization, and especially the school, an alien force inserting itself uninvited into this kingdom of childhood that only now exists in memory. See Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir (1953). 11. The liberal leaning short-lived Front Populaire government in AOF (1936–1938). 12. Even though I am using this translation here, I prefer “today’s world” as the translation of Dadié’s original French phrase, “le monde actuel.” 13. As we shall see, there is a fifth voice in this debate, that of Demba, whose attitude toward the school may be seen as more consequential for the Diallobé outside of the aristocracy. 14. The “people” of Diallobé are all but absent in the novel. With the exception of Demba, a commoner who becomes a key player in decision-making related to the school, the Diallobé are conflated with the ruling aristocracy and the Koranic school. The people appear mostly as props and pieces in the chess game triangulating among the colonizer, the ruling elite, and the teacher. 15. A member of the generation that coincides with the rise of Negritude, Kane’s vision, as expressed here by the Knight, recalls the poetics of the Civilization of the Universal and the Beloved Community espoused and promoted by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Martin Luther King Jr., respectively. 16. A parting gift from Samba as he departs the Foyer Ardent for the school in L, where his parents live. 17. Italics added by author. 18. “The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart” (Things Fall Apart, end of chapter 20). 19. “Bawé” is a Bandia term which literally means “master of fire” (7). 20. “A l’époque, les commandants de cercle avaient trois secteurs à alimenter par le biais de l’école: le secteur public (enseignants, fonctionnaires subalternes de l’administration coloniale, médecins auxiliaires, etc.) où allaient les meilleurs élèves; le secteur militaire, car on souhaitait que les tirailleurs, spahis et goumiers aient une connaissance de base du français; enfin le secteur domestique, qui héritaient des élèves les moins doués” (239).

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21. The question of choice and/or compromise is always central to the decision to go to school in all the texts studied here. 22. This is the same hadith Demba invokes in Aventure ambiguë to justify his support for enrolling Diallobé children in the colonial school.

Chapter 3

Making Good Wives and Good Mothers The Education of African Women in Colonial West Africa

Just after her arrival at the collège mixte de Saint-Louis (coeducational junior high school) in 1928, the legendary teacher, Germaine Le Goff, was asked the following question by a male student: “Qui épouserons-nous demain, dans notre pays où la France ne fait pas grand-chose pour l’éducation de la femme africaine” (“Who will we marry tomorrow in our country where France does not do enough for the education of African women?” in Freland, 64). Until this point, the woman who had been transforming education and teaching in Africa since her arrival on the continent in 1923 had not given thought to this specific angle to the question of training girls to become wives and homemakers. France’s reticence in educating women, especially in Muslimdominated territories like Senegal, was dictated mainly by its unwillingness to ruffle Muslim sensibilities. In the absence of qualified African women (read: schooled women), the educated élites, the best students ending up in France for advance studies, usually resorted to marrying White women (64). But the student’s question to Le Goff also pushed her to think more concretely and broadly about the lack of interest in the education of women. Her research on the problem led her to conclude that “la femme noire africaine n’existe pas dans l’esprit du colonisateur” (“The black African woman doesn’t exist in the mind of the colonizer,” 64). As early as 1917, in Une conquête morale, Georges Hardy had already made the case for girls to be educated in tandem with boys. He argued that you gain only one value by educating a boy, whereas by educating a girl, you multiply the value added by the number of children she will have (65). Since marriage and motherhood constituted the main justification for the 89

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investment in girls’ education, the colonizer realized the surest way to keep the educated African male “civilized” and from marrying White women was by educating women also, thereby making them potential wives to the new male elite. This chapter studies three texts: Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique: la vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même, Frida Lawson’s “Je suis une Africaine . . . j'ai vingt ans,” and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre. These texts illustrate, in different but acutely similar ways, the presence of the school, its role in Africa, its effects on individuals (especially women). Further, the texts depict the school's influence on relationships between those individuals and the school on the one hand, and between them and their immediate and extended African communities on the other. Written by three women from three different colonial territories and at relatively three different periods in AOF’s history, all going to school at the highest level of their time, and coming from families deeply connected to the colonial system. The first two are autobiographical texts. Une si longue lettre, thanks to its epistolary form and the convergences between the lives of author and protagonist—both Muslim, married, divorced, or separated from husbands, with many children, educated in the same institution, exercising the same profession—can be read as autofiction. As we shall see, each woman (Sankofa-like) insists on the need to remain sanely grounded in their Africanness even as they develop new wings to fly out and away. Our discussion will also reveal the centrality of marriage and motherhood in the narratives and in the lives of the women concerned. Before the establishment of public schools in French-controlled sub-Saharan Africa at the start of the twentieth century, the mission-run schools focused exclusively on moral and practical education for girls, with no opportunity for intellectual growth. These schools were characterized by Judeo-Christian indoctrination and manual labor—cooking, sewing, washing, ironing— mostly for the profit of the missions and other Europeans living in the colonies. For these reasons, especially in Muslim-majority colonies, families did not want to send their girls to the colonial schools. The secular public schools established after 1903 were a bit more generous in the area of intellectual learning. Yet, because of the focus on creating indigenous women in the pale image of French women, the objective was not much different: If the mission schools hoped to create Christian women who loved Christ and France, the secular government schools also hoped to produce women who loved France and were useful to its political and socioeconomic ambitions. In the final analysis, the goal in either case is complete depersonalization of the girls, to make them useful to France and to its ideals, and certainly not to the families and communities the women came from and to which most of them returned at the end of their studies.



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All throughout the colonial period, between the colonies and the Metropole, there was no real equivalency in certificates obtained by women, even after the 1944 Brazzaville conference. Any semblance of real reform happened only during the second half of the 1940s. During this period, there was a tightening of the entrance requirements to both the École de Médecine and the ENJFR, which reduced the passing rate, even as it created a greater diversity of options for women. Concerned by the diminishing number of girls able to continue their education to Rufisque, the then assembly delegate from Senegal,  Léopold Sédar Senghor, complained thusly in a May 1950 letter to the director of public education: “L’École normale qui peut recevoir cent trente élèves dans les meilleures conditions d’éducation morale, de travail intellectuel et de confort matériel n’en a actuellement que soixante et une,” warning that “la situation sera catastrophique si l’on n’y apporte des solutions rapides et énergiques” (“The Normal School, which can accommodate one hundred and thirty students while offering them the right conditions for moral education, intellectual work and material comfort, currently has only sixtyone . . . the situation will be catastrophic if we do not find quick and forceful solutions to the problem” in Africaines et diplômées . . ., 73). There were a few disruptions in the colonies after World War I, including the clamor on the part of Africans for better conditions and a minimum of autonomy as well as the growing presence of White women in the colonies [mostly the wives of colonial administrators] (Conklin, “Redefining ‘Frenchness,’” 83). These disruptions saw tremendous changes in the relationship between France and its colonies and within the colonies themselves. The debate around citizenship and subjecthood, and everything in between, already addressed before the start of the war in 1914, became even more pronounced after the end of the war in 1918. In their heightened nationalism and sense of racial distinction, “nervous white males did everything to stay on top” by adopting “a process of cultural, racial, and sexual realignment” (Conklin, 68) in the home country as well as in the colonies. The strongest manifestation of this anxiety is the renewed interest in hygiene, as seen in the creation in France of the Office of Social Hygiene in 1925, with a satellite, Colonial Social Hygiene Service (“‘Redefining’ Frenchness . . .,” 71). To preserve the race, women must be prepared to marry, bear children, and to take care of the children and their homes. This applied to both French women and colonized African women. A new gender politics was born in West Africa. After 1918, the French started looking at African women as “the primary bearers of archaic cultures” and as “impediments to genuine male acculturation to metropolitan values” (Conklin, 75). If French women were sent to the colonies to retrieve their men who were being decivilized by their interracial relationships with native women, native women were also made to carry the burden of protecting the investment of civilization made by the colonial

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school in their men. If colonial education was the soft power intended to solidify their military pacification, the education of women at a higher level was the soul of that power: “African women would be bearers of a new social and cultural order; they were to be the second front to colonial conquest” (Cole, 115). Part of the motivation for the creation of the École de Médecine was the critical shortage of qualified European doctors, nurses, and other healthcare auxiliaries in the colonies. The École de Médecine de Dakar was created in 1918, with a section for sages-femmes (midwives) which admitted its first batch of students that same year. The section for infirmièresvisiteuses (home-visitation nurses) was added in 1930. Midwives graduated after three years of study whereas home-visitation nurses took only two years. In creating these schools for girls, especially the École de médecine and the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque, the colonizer had no intention to empower the students. Rather, they were to be used for the creation of “des ménages modèles, loyaux à l’égard du metropole” (“Écrits féminins et modernité . . .,” 831). This was an importation of the principle underlying the education of women policy of 1879 under Third Republic France. MAKING GOOD WIVES AND MOTHERS The argument regarding the use of French as the vehicle of access to French culture and civilization as well as for transmitting practical skills became relevant to the debate about girls’ education as it was for that of boys. To guarantee “la cohésion de notre empire” (“the cohesion of our empire” Hardy, Conquête morale, 65) and facilitate colonizer-colonized relations, especially to bring the natives closer to the French, the use of the French language must be expanded. And what better way to do this than to educate girls who would one day become wives and mothers: “Quand les mères parleront le français,” Hardy argued, “les enfants l’apprendront sans effort et nous arriveront déjà dégrossis,” and French will ultimately become “une langue maternelle” for the children (“When mothers speak French, their children will learn it effortlessly and will come to us already less crude,” 65). French became the vehicle par excellence for achieving other objectives fixed by the colonizer. In general, education for girls comprised a basic, everyday French, arithmetic, the metric system, enough for the future wives and mothers to create and maintain a budget and spending plan (Hardy, 69). However, the greater part of the school day was dedicated to sewing, cleaning, childcare, hygiene, and housekeeping (69). The instructor, unmistakably feminine, should model “une bonne ménagère” (a good housewife), with her blue apron, rolled-up sleeves, tables arranged as if in a house, placing drawers against the wall, flowers at the windows, singing between two strokes of the broom. In short,



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the school for girls is not a schoolhouse; it is rather “une école dans une maison” (a school within a house) (Conquête morale, 69–70). The focus on home economics and hygiene underscores a much bigger concern for the colonizer, namely that of the preservation of the empire. An empire that cannot keep a population cannot survive. With a high infant mortality rate in the colonies, the ability of women to bear children and to raise those children into productive workers, soldiers, and consumers for the empire became all the more urgent. Hence the pressing need for midwives and nurses. Between 1918 and 1956, 1,286 students were enrolled in the two big professional training schools, out of which 990 obtained their completion certificates: 633 midwives, 63 homevisit nurses, and 294 teachers (Africaines et diplômées . . ., 18). If, as intermediaries and vectors of new ideas about health and hygiene, teachers, midwives, and nurses served as a much-needed link between the colonizer and local indigenous populations (Cole, 120), the institutions from which they graduated also provided women a much-coveted entry into the privileged colonial space and its accompanying access to power and material security. Arguably the most significant effort in this direction was the creation in 1938 of the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque. As a teacher, the woman can reach exponentially more Africans (children, their families, and their communities). The girls came from every corner of the federation, and could be sent back after graduation to work in places far from their hometowns or home countries. They would be the new missionaries embedded in the recesses of uncivilized Africa plagued by ignorance, disease, all factors that threatened the viability of the empire. THE SELECTION PROCESS Behind every girl who entered the colonial school, there was the colonizer who decided their education was necessary for the success of their “civilizing mission;” there were parents who saw the value or inevitability of French education in the new dispensation and who were prepared to defy tradition; and there were girls who were determined to be something other than what society had predestined for them. And these girls, willing or not, were all, by their very attendance at the school, iconoclasts and pioneers. There was a certain inevitability about most of the girls who ended up in the colonial school. The chance of a girl going to school grew exponentially greater by the degree of their father’s education and proximity to the colonial administration and the colonial enterprise writ large. For example, between 1938 and 1957, 54 percent of the 150 girls enrolled at the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque (ENJFR) had a functionary father. The daughters of

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chiefs who hadn’t been to school constituted a small minority of the students at the school (Africaines et diplômées, 91). In addition to geographical considerations, the girl’s family, her health status, as well as her potential to be a good subject were important criteria for admission to the federal schools.1 That said, decisions as to which girls got admitted to the few available seats at federal schools were not always based on the individual competence of the student (Africaines et diplômées, 53). Pascale Barthélémy cites the case of two girls from Saint-Louis unilaterally accepted by the inspector general of schools; one of them hadn’t even taken the entrance exam or gone through the required health inspection (58–59). Starting in 1927, school principals and administrators were allowed to make their own recommendations;2 naturally, they tended to recommend girls who are more likely to return and work in their home colonies. Candidates and their fathers also signed a ten-year contract. If the contract was broken, they were required to repay the cost of the girl’s education. Ultimately, the goal was not to recruit the best students academically speaking, but “d’excellents sujets, provenant de bonnes familles” (“exemplary subjets from good families,” quoted in Africaines et diplômées, 57). RESISTANCE TO THE SCHOOL While certain segments of the colonized populations were eager to send their daughters to school, the colonial administration faced resistance to its education project from other quarters.3 If the argument against the education of boys was the fear of having them sent to fight in wars or making them lose their Africanness, the opposition to girls’ education was for a reason that reflects back on the power and privilege associated with being male. According to Hardy, resistance to French education of girls was strongest among women (Hardy, 68). Beyond religious concerns cited by Hardy, there were other practical reasons for resistance to the school. “La perte d’une aide-ménagère” (“the loss of a domestic help”) was a big reason mothers did not want to send their daughters to school (Freland, 96). Another reason parents resisted the school had to do with the perception that French-educated women tended to be more uncouth and more permissive in their amorous relationships than nonliterate women. In her autobiography, Aoua Kéita argues that mothers who resisted the school for this reason were not entirely wrong since there was no shortage of promiscuous educated women around (94). In the face of resistance, the colonizer adopted certain measures that made sending girls to school more attractive or “reasonable” to parents. Colonial authorities used as needed the proverbial carrot and stick (the carrot sometimes being blackmail in disguise, Conquête morale, 68). For what



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Hardy calls “avantages pécunières ou honorifiques” (monetary and honorific benefits),” men who would otherwise let their wives hold their daughters back from the school suddenly reassert their male authority (69). In making his case for the education of girls, Hardy argues that girls themselves are never the problem. In fact, he writes, they are happy to be in school and can adjust as quickly as boys to the new environment. He also claims that mothers who originally resisted giving up hours from home chores to the school quickly relent after realizing the school’s potential to transform their children (Conquête morale, 69). WHAT TO TEACH GIRLS? Even though, as we see in Hardy’s claim, the school’s demonstrated capacity for individual improvement is its strongest justification, the colonizer argues there are traps to be avoided. Similar to that for boys, education programs for girls should be crafted such that they do not produce “de petites prétentieuses qui ne pourraient exercer sur leur famille qu’une influence dissolvante et démoralisatrice” (“little pretentious women who could only have a diminishing and demoralizing influence on their families,” quoted in Africaines et diplômées, 38). The main concern here is the maintenance of a social hierarchy in which men and elders keep their privilege, including access to esoteric and intellectual knowledge. In short, the education dispensed to girls shouldn’t make women equal to men. This attitude on the part of the colonizer led to a domestication of women in ways not seen before colonization: “En projetant leur propre système de division sexuelle du travail, les colonisateurs restreignent l’intervention des femmes au foyer tel qu’il était conçu en Europe aux XIXe siècle” (“By projecting their own system of sexual division of labor, the colonizers restricted the input of women in the home the same way it was done in Europe in the 19th century,” Africaines et diplômées, 39). There was little, if any, shift in the twentieth century from this education policy. This laser focus on the mother (mostly the biological mother) as caregiver is fundamentally linked to Western notions of the nuclear family (Africaines et diplômées, 233). This attitude completely disregards norms and practices on the ground, especially the one which makes it possible for women within or outside of the biological mother’s immediate blood family to serve as mothers to the child. This conception of the nuclear family and the role of the woman in it was a driving force behind colonial education policy regarding women. As Jonathan Cole argues in the case of Senegal, “colonial health policies . . . aimed at remaking the African family in Senegal, and in particular at changing African child-rearing and birthing practices, provided a crucial impetus for the expansion of female education

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and marked the point of entry for women into medicine in the 1920s and 1930s as nurses and midwives” (115). Who were these women supposedly educated to become wives to the graduates of the brother institutions of William Ponty and the École de Médecine? These members of the new class of “évoluées” were called various names by their detractors, men and other women alike: “femmes savantes” (an allusion to Molière’s 1672 play of the same name), “demoiselles frigidaires”— invoking their material culture and so-called modernity represented in their desire for luxurious home appliances—“toubab évoluée,” and “marionnettes nègres.” “Triplement subalterns” (Africaines et diplômés . . ., 16) as colonized, Black, and female, many refused to continue to be limited by the dictates of patriarchy, European or African. They became instead “turbulentes” (Faladé), charting their own course. Many went on to become agents of their own story and destiny. Pascale Barthélémy summarized their revolutionary achievements thusly: “Devenues romancières, journalistes, universitaires, diplomates, artistes, députés, ministres, directrices d’école ou de protection maternelle et infantile, elles furent aussi les premières africaines à jouer au tennis ou au basket, à enfourcher des bicyclettes et conduire leur propre voiture en Afrique occidentale française” (“Having become novelists, journalists, academics, diplomats, artists, deputies, ministers, directors of schools or maternal and child protection agencies, they were also the first Africans to play tennis or basketball, to ride bicycles and drive their own cars in French West Africa” Africaines et diplômées, 13). By these practices, they intentionally impacted their communities and their respective nations. They took seriously the responsibility to self, family, community, and nation that came with successful passage through the school. Being among the first Pan-Africanists, one can only imagine what the continent would be today if they had been numerous enough and had managed to occupy the top leadership positions in their respective countries. How did this extraordinary reality come to be? Who, outside of themselves and their families, made these women possible? The answer to these questions points inevitably to one woman in particular: Germaine Le Goff. Germaine Le Goff had quite an expansive view of the notions of liberty and personal responsibility relative to the colonial status quo. Le Goff began thinking about how the African woman could occupy a prominent space in the colonial imaginary even before she took over as the inaugural head of the ENJFR. In 1934, she wrote about the need for equilibrium in native communities, arguing that the only way to find it was to prepare cultivated wives for the cultivated men the French were producing.4 For Germaine Le Goff, the education of women was also a matter of fairness, a sine qua non of equality among the sexes everywhere, the absence of which would hamper progress.



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In a society where the power and privilege gap between men and women was already large, the education of men but not women only exacerbated the gap. When she took the helm of the newly created École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque in 1938, fifteen years after her arrival on the continent and a stellar career in education in other parts of Afrique Occidental Française, the then inspector general of public education in AOF reminded Le Goff of the official education objective: “La France veut des femmes évoluées, des sagesfemmes et des infirmières. Mais attention, pas des intellectuels” (“France wants educated women, midwives and nurses. But beware, no intellectuals,” in Freland, 5). Instead of obeying this thinly veiled order from a superior, Le Goff listened to her heart and experience as a woman in a man’s world. To be sure, Le Goff taught her wards that France was their “mère patrie.” Yet, a profoundly sincere person, she saw her students as autonomous entities, respected their religions, their cultural origins and identities, and their individual personalities. She insisted they know the physical and cultural geography of their home continent (101). In short, she created an environment in which the young women coming from all corners of the AOF felt at home, and not in exile. By the time Le Goff retired and departed Africa in 1946, she had educated a cohort of self-respecting African women who would remain thoroughly African while being her greatest fans. As Mariama Bâ wrote in one of her school compositions, “on a blanchi ma raison; mais ma tête est noire, mais mon sang inattaquable est demeuré pur, comme le soleil, pur, conservé de tout contact. Mon sang est resté païen dans mes veines civilisées et se révolte et piaffe aux sons des tam-tams noirs” (“they whitewashed my reason; but my head remains Black, and my unassailable blood has remained pure, like the sun, pure, preserved from all adulteration. My pagan blood has remained in my civilized veins and revolts and I dance to the sounds of Black drums,” Les allés d’un destin, 124). Le Goff was a colonialist, a Westerner who believed in the superiority of Western civilization. She saw in French civilization, if practiced honestly and diligently (especially education), a way to progress for Africans. She was an “ardente patriote” who believed in France’s potential to live up to its greatness by offering education to her African wards. She was also capable of making generalizations about African women: “La femme africaine était une esclave miserable, elle est élevée par l’école à sa dignité de femme” (“The African woman was a miserable slave that the school raises to her dignity as a woman,” Freland, 128). Yet, to say Le Goff was just another colonial European educator in AOF would be doing her life and career a great disservice. She did not see her wards or Africans in general as essentially inferior beings, but rather as entities in need of the instruments of progress a country like France could offer. In a speech at the 1976 inauguration of the École Normale Germaine Le Goff, the old École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque now moved to Thiès, she noted that

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her difference from other colonial educators was that she merely recognized Africa’s natural potential and worked to actualize it: “On ne crée pas les richesses naturelles, on les découvre, on les exploites” (“One does not create natural resources, one discovers and develops them,” Freland, 146). Looking at the impressive list of women who graduated from her school and who went on to have careers in politics, government, and education, one can be justified in saying that were it not for the French woman, their story would never have happened in the new world created by the colonizer. These women, like millions of their sisters across the AOF and AEF, would have gone to swell the ranks of women subservient to patriarchy. She took her time to establish a relationship of mutual trust with her students. She knew every student by name, collected personal information from their families so as to know and serve them better. Le Goff became for these young African women, far away from their families, a “maman” who happened to be a White woman and their teacher. She also taught them to see their diversity as their strength and called upon them to be united: “Unissez vos voix, vos mains, vos cœurs” (“Unite your voices, your hands, your hearts,” 94). She enhanced this lesson by deliberately selecting her students from diverse cultural and social backgrounds from all corners of the federation. January 3, 1946, was Le Goff ’s last day at the school where, for seven years (1938–1945) and after twenty-five years of dedicated and humble service in Africa to Africans and the French colonizer, in the school that emerged out of her dream and perseverance, she trained a cohort of young women that would go on to change Africa forever. As Ramatoulaye reminisces on her time at Le Goff’s school, she notes “Des amities s’y nouaient . . . Nous étions de véritables sœurs destinées à la même mission emancipatrice” (“Friendships were forged there . . . We were true sisters destined for the same emancipatory mission,” Une si longue lettre, 38). AOUA KÉITA’S FEMME D’AFRIQUE: LA VIE D’AOUA KÉITA RACONTÉE PAR ELLE-MÊME Outside of Marie-Claire Matip’s 1958 fifty-page Ngonda,5 Aoua Kéita’s autobiography is the first full-length autobiography published in French by a sub-Saharan African woman.6 Aoua Kéita was born in 1912 in a polygamous Muslim family in Bamako, the French Sudan (present-day Mali). Her nonliterate mother was a homemaker whom she describes as “pronfondément traditionnaliste” (“deeply traditionalist,” Kéita, 27). Her father, Karamoko Kéita, a veteran of the French colonial army from Guinea-Conakry, decided to settle in the French Sudan where he worked in the colonial administration as a health officer. Aoua describes her father as a “progressiste dans son



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genre” (“a progressive before his time,” 27). In 1923, at age eleven, she was one of the first girls admitted to the newly created Orphelinat de métisses (orphanage for mixed-race girls), the first girl’s school in Bamako, annexed to the École régionale. At the end of her studies in Bamako (1928), finishing first in Sudan and fourth in AOF, Aoua headed to Dakar for three years of study at the École de médecine. At nineteen years of age, she graduated with her “diplôme de sage-femme” in 1931, seven years before the creation of the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque. Her first posting was in Gao. She would be posted to many other towns in Mali and other French colonies in AOF. Between 1931 when she started her career as the first midwife in the French Sudan, and 1932 when she became a full-time social activist and politician, Aoua moonlighted as a political activist under the banner of the French Sudan branch of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (US-RDA). In 1959, one year before the French Sudan became independent and changed its name to Mali, Aoua Kéita became the first woman in French West Africa to be elected to her country’s parliament. In addition to serving as her unique voice, Kéita’s autobiography gives voice to nonliterate women, effectively making them active partners in her writing as well as active agents in the decolonization process. Before enrolling in the orphanage, Aoua, like the rest of her many siblings, received practical education from her family. As Hampâte Bâ does in Amkoullel, Aoua Kéita places her encounter with the colonial school in the context of traditional African education so as to undercut the colonizer’s claim of the African as a tabula rasa waiting passively to be inscribed with new ideas and ways of being. Aoua’s traditional education consists of “légendes, historiettes et devinettes à la fois drôles et éducatives” (“legends, stories, and riddles funny and educational at the same time,” 16). She receives much of this education from her mother, a prolific traditionalist and raconteur (21). In her use of folktales for the amusement and instruction of her children, Aoua’s mother leaves nothing to chance; she always ends her stories with “des conseils de politesse, d’obéissance, de serviabilité, de respect envers les parents, les personnes âgées et les nécessiteux” (“advice on politeness, obedience, helpfulness, respect for parents, the elderly and the needy,” 21). Aoua is also taught cleanliness, and by helping his family with chores, she learns how to be useful as a woman, daughter, wife, and mother. So, without sitting in a classroom or leaving the confines of her family’s compound, Aoua is getting all the education she needs to live a “meaningful” life as a member of her community. However, Aoua makes clear that this homegrown education is not perfect. Just like the colonial education she would soon engage, traditional education has its share of questionable aspects. For example, Aoua and her sisters are routinely indoctrinated into subservience to family. Her mother’s favorite theme to illustrate the importance of obedience to parents

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involves the misadventures of a disobedient girl who, desirous of a marriage of love, invariably ends up unhappy in marriage or killed by the man of her preference (16). To illustrate this lesson, a character in one of her mother’s stories, a disobedient girl called Diadiaratou, returns home after six months of roaming in the forest after being abandoned by the man of her choice, who turns out to be a jinn. At the end of the story, the reformed Diadiaratou says to young girls: “A l’avenir, je ne contredirai plus mes parents. Quand bien même ils accordèrent ma main à un crapaud, je l’accepterai avec plaisir” (“I will never again contradict my parents. Even if they marry me to a toad, I will gladly accept it,” 19).7 To Enroll or Not to Enroll Aoua’s initial encounter with colonial education at the orphanage in Bamako is a bit traumatic for her. Because of some suspicious spots on her arms and legs, she is not allowed to stay in school after her enrollment. Determined that her daughter will go to school, especially given the limited options available to girls,8 Aoua’s father takes her to a traditional healer where the little girl stays for treatment for three months among total strangers. Once she is back at school, she has to deal with fresh challenges. In general, the school authorities do everything to keep the girls in school, including bribing them with treats and other enticements (25). If her teachers and school administrators are generous in their treatment of her, some of her classmates, on the other hand, harass her; especially the métisse girls who do not think a Black girl should be better than they are at French (25). Thanks to the rapid intervention of her family, the school administration is forced to address the situation. The inspector of schools at the time imposes peace between Aoua and the other girls (26). Kéita’s refusal, at this early age, to succumb to threats and oppression from others could be seen as a harbinger of her future social and political activism. In fact, according to Joseph-Gabriel, the elementary school in Bamako “became the site of one of Kéita’s earliest experiences of community-based solidarity and resistance rooted first and foremost in the family unit” (125), solidarity and resistance that will see their full blossom in her political and social engagement alongside comrades in the Union Soudanaise du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (US-RDA) party, which became an extended family for Kéita. Aoua has her father to thank for her attendance at the school. Aware of the multilayered transgression he is about to commit, his decision to enroll his daughter in the school is made known only to her mother at night in a hushed and grave voice. Yet, his daughter is his most important audience in the process. He offers the reason for his decision directly to the little Aoua: “L’avenir de ta mère constitue un gros souci pour moi. . . . ta mère restera sans soutien



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si entre-temps elle n’a pas un garçon . . . C’est pourquoi je remercie Dieu par la grâce duquel les français ont créé une école de filles à Bamako” (“Your mother’s future worries me a lot. . . . Your mother will be without support if in the meantime she does not have a son. . . . This is why I thank God by whose grace the French have created a school for girls in Bamako,” 23). He advises his daughter to do well in school, impressing upon her that in the absence of a son to take care of his wife when he is no longer able to do so, that responsibility falls to her. With his knowledge of French education and its potential for empowerment, Karamoko Kéita’s iconoclastic decision is a practical and prescient one. He sees in the school an opportunity for consequential change, not only for his daughter, but for the family and society as a whole. At the end, his calculus pays off in many ways. In the context of intransigent African masculinist traditions and colonialism’s own patriarchal praxis, and given Aoua Kéita’s incapacity to bear children, coupled with her refusal to be silenced or disrespected, her French education becomes her saving grace, so to speak. She is told many times that she is better off playing her role as a woman. Even though one does not have to be an “évoluée” to be a strong woman (as Kéita demonstrates in the many examples of strong unlettered women in her autobiography), a woman cannot be left to the mercy of men like Diawara, Aoua's husband, who are too weak to stand up to their parents and to tradition. One wonders what would have become of a woman with a rebellious spirit like Aoua if she hadn’t been to school. The resistance she encounters to her selfexpression throughout her life and career attests to the value of the school and the potential it holds for women. Education gives Aoua the independence she was less likely to have had in a gerontocratic or patriarchal world. Aoua’s mother is the complete opposite of her father when it comes to the White man’s school; she considers it scandalous to send her daughter to the school (24). What is especially inacceptable for Aoua’s mother is the fact that Aoua leaves the house for school while her sisters stay behind to do chores. The mother does everything to stop Aoua from going to school, including using blackmail, maltreating her daughter even though she is an otherwise kind mother, and actually keeping her at home until her father finds out and intervenes (24). When Aoua tries to help her mother in the kitchen (so she can learn how to cook), her mother tells her: “Va-t’en t’occuper de tes papiers et crayons, c’est ce que tu donneras à manger à l’homme malheureux qui acceptera de te prendre” (“Go take care of your papers and pencils, that’s what you’ll feed the unfortunate man who agrees to marry you,” 25). Aoua thus finds herself caught between two powerful forces: her mother and the weight of tradition on one side and, on the other, her father and the school administration interested in educating girls. As outrageous as the mother’s behavior is toward her child, she, like her husband, is fighting to secure her

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daughter’s future. What differentiates the two, however, is that whereas the mother sees Aoua’s salvation in subservience as a housewife, the father, having gone through the school himself and thanks to his perceptiveness vis-à-vis the new dispensation, views the school as a guarantor of economic independence for her daughter. Professional Career After graduating from the School of Medicine in Dakar, Aoua is posted to Gao, located in Eastern Mali, nearly six hundred miles northeast of Bamako. Most of her relatives and friends don’t want her to go to a place considered by inhabitants of Bamako as “un autre monde,” a place too far away and potentially dangerous for a young, single woman. As for Aoua, she makes it clear she is going to Gao because she has “confiance en moi-même” (“confidence in myself,” 27) and feels attracted to the place for the same reasons her people are opposed to it. The rest of her family asks her father to use his paternal authority and his connections in the colonial administration, especially to the colonial chief medical officer, to stop Aoua from being sent to Gao. Aoua’s progressive father refuses to do this. In justifying his decision, Karamoko Kéita says, “J’ai fait une aventurière, laissons-la aller jusqu’au bout” (“I brought an adventurer into the world, let her go all the way,” 28). He notes that the only thing the family can do now is to pray for Aoua’s success (28). Having failed to dissuade her daughter and her husband from the Gao trip, Aoua’s mother tries to convince her husband to force their daughter to get married as soon as possible, and to a man she wants for her. But Aoua already loves someone else, and her father supports her choice. The difficulties Aoua faces during her eight-day journey by train and boat from Bamako to her post in Gao is symbolic of her journey from home to the school and into the colonial professional world. On a boat to Gao from Bamako via Koulikoro, first and second classes are reserved for Europeans, Syrians, and Lebanese. Aoua’s presence among these elite passengers disrupts the status quo: “Quelques rares hommes me disaient bonjour timidement . . . Toutes les femmes sans exception me regardaient de travers. Elles poussèrent leur stupidité jusqu’à demander au commissaire du bord certaines mesures discriminatoires à mon egard, comme me servir en dernier lieu à table, etc.” (“A few rare men said hello to me tentatively . . . All the women without exception looked at me askance. They pushed their stupidity to the point of asking the purser to discriminatory against me, such as serving me last at the table, etc.,” 29). As a Black African woman, she is out of place in this world structured according to caste, gender, and race. But the fearless transgressor she is, and bolstered by her education, Aoua remains unperturbed. On the boat from Koulikoro to Kabara, she is the lone French-schooled Black



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woman in second class. As a woman she cannot chat with men, and since she doesn’t speak poulare or sonrai,9 she cannot talk to the other women on the boat (29). Despite these unpleasant experiences, Aoua’s journey reveals something important about her changed status, namely, the fact that she can travel first or second class, sharing the same space with Europeans and nonBlack businessmen and their families. And even though there is no welcoming committee waiting for her when she arrives in Gao, she is given a guard and four prisoners to help her with her belongings (30). Privileges such as these accrue only to those with power or with direct access to it. In Aoua’s case, her power is her diploma from the École de médecine, which comes with the full weight of the French colonial administration. Until, of course, she ceases to be in the good graces of the administration. Aoua faces many challenges in Gao and in other places to which her job takes her. Her supervisor refuses to see her (50) and she is forced to deal with inadequate resources and native women suspicious of Western medicine and her “manières toubabes” (“White ways,” 95). When she arrives in Gao as the first-ever colonial-educated midwife in that part of the French Sudan, she has to build her clinic from the ground up, both materially and morally. Despite all the difficulties she faces, she doesn’t ask to be transferred from Gao. Instead, she asks for and obtains permission to open a maternity ward in the town (45). Aoua’s Personal Life Aoua’s personal life is as complicated as her political and professional lives. Without being necessarily intentional about it, she displays her freedom unabashedly. At age 19, she rides horses on Sundays with men (41). Aoua’s official residence in Gao becomes the meeting place of many members of the “évolué” community in the town. Being “la seule jeune fille émancipée de Gao à l’époque” (“the only emancipated young woman of Gao in those days,” 31), her friends are almost exclusively men, including pleasant and unpleasant characters. The gatherings in her house serve a purpose beyond entertainment and conviviality; they also make evident the expansiveness and acuteness of Kéita’s critical gaze vis-à-vis the ingrained misogynistic and sexist culture of her time. For example, during one of her conversations about politics, a friend of Aoua’s tells his wife, who tries to participate in their conversation, that she would do better to go to the kitchen and make him something to eat rather than get involved in “l’affaire des hommes” (“the affairs of men,” 56). In 1935, after four years of celibacy in Gao, Aoua marries a native doctor named Diawara. Yet, Aoua and Diawara cannot be more different one from the other. Unlike her husband, who is always “plus posé” (“more discreet”), Aoua does not tolerate bad behavior or disrespect from anyone. She speaks

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her mind and is afraid of no one, including “certains Européens racistes ou mal élevés” (“certain racist and uncouth Europeans,” 46). As it turns out, Diawara’s regard for his wife is superficial. Even as an “évolué,” Diawara is still prisoner to certain traditions, more specifically the one which stipulates that a child can never disobey his or her mother. Since Aoua cannot bear children, her mother-in-law, who already has many grandchildren, urges her son to take another wife. Diawara refuses to do this. Furious at the couple (Aoua for her incapacity to bear children and Diawara for respecting his monogamous marriage), Diawara’s mother exploits one insignificant misunderstanding between husband and wife to sway her son in her favor. Diawara also seems to be using this incident as his ticket out of his commitment to the life of the couple. During one of her visits to Bamako, because she needs to return to Gao posthaste, Aoua has no time to visit her mother-in-law as she had intended to do. As a result, the mother writes to her son telling him to divorce Aoua if he doesn’t want her to curse him (76–77). Diawara obeys his mother. After their divorce, he marries another woman. And then another. Tradition, as the saying goes, dies hard. As for Aoua, she remains celibate for the rest of her life. Political Engagement, or What Business Does a Woman Have Meddling in Man’s Business Feminist. Community organizer. Social justice crusader. Anticolonialist. Women’s health pioneer and advocate.10 Kéita shies away from talking about her personal life in her book, preferring to focus instead on her professional career and political activism. She makes her preference clear early on in the novel: “For certain reasons, I would prefer not to talk about my love life” (45). The unapologetically outward-looking text distinguishes Kéita’s story from many written by women in which personal and family concerns dominate. This amalgamation of private-public discourse and praxis on the part of Kéita makes it hard, if not impossible, to separate Aoua Kéita’s professional and personal lives from her political engagement. For example, after delivering babies at the government clinic during the day, she uses the place for political meetings for women at night. Kéita was one among many women in the colonial period who defied the stereotype of the African woman as an apolitical being. Before and during her time, African women who had been through the colonial school were making their mark on the political landscape. This was particularly true in British colonial territories, where the policy of indirect rule made it more likely there than in French colonies for women to participate in public life. A few cases in point. As early as 1918, Rose Palmer became vice president of the women’s branch of the National Congress of British West Africa. Adelaide Smith



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Casely-Hayford served as the president of the female wing of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded in 1921. Casely-Hayford also founded a short-lived school for girls in 1923, the year Aoua first entered the colonial school. In 1938, A. Constance Cummings-John became a city councilor under the banner of the West African Youth League. Then there was Funmilayo Anikulapo Ransome-Kuti who, among other political activities, founded in 1946 the Abeokuta Women’s Union (originally the Abeokuta Ladies Club) which brought together literate and nonliterate Nigerian women (Faladé, 30). But there were also exemplary African women graduates of the French colonial school from Francophone Africa. There was the Guinean Jeanne Martin-Cissé: one of the first graduates of the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque, teacher, trade unionist, first woman to be appointed government minister in Africa, Guinea’s ambassador to the UN, the first woman to serve as president of the UN Security Council. And there was Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, legendary Senegalese journalist who became the first woman to lead a major news outlet.11 When Aoua Kéita started her political activism in 1932, she was barely twenty years old. One of the earliest partisans of the Union Soudanaise du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, she remained loyal to the struggle for self-determination and self-governance till the end. Describing the degradation of life for villagers and other poor people, which was her principal motivation for entering politics, Kéita notes that “les progrès de la science et de la technique qui évoluaient rapidement dans les autres continents en ce plein XXe siècle, surtout en Europe et en Amérique, étaient peu ou pas connus en Afrique” (“the scientific and technological advances which were progressing fast in other continents in the middle of the 20th century, especially in Europe and America, were little or not known in Africa,” 93). Her direct engagement with the “paysans du Soudan français, à 95 % illetrés à l’époque” (“peasants of French Sudan, 95 percent illiterate at the time,” 186) thanks to her work, she gained direct insight into their lives. She criticized Casamancebased civil servants originally from Saint-Louis and Dakar12 who treated the uneducated masses with contempt. Some of these “évolués” would speak of the Diolas as savages who understood only violence (208). Instead of lifting up their compatriots, Aoua complained, they maltreated their servants, sometimes having them work without pay. The situation was so bad that some Diolas would express their preference for working for a White man than for a Black man from Saint-Louis (209). Two incidents during the 1951 legislative elections—which found Kéita in Gao—reveal the political and personal headwinds Aoua faces as an unflappable social and political activist. At one of the polling stations where she is working as an election observer, Aoua openly expresses her disapproval of the behavior of a group of White and Black army officers. A White officer

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among the men, obviously unused to being confronted this way by a woman, especially a Black woman, complains that things were different before (119–20). The second incident takes place in the same polling station. This time, Aoua stands up to the most powerful man in Gao, the commandant. The commandant, in full military uniform, comes in with a clear intention of influencing the outcome of the vote. Aoua asks him to leave as soon as he has cast his vote. He refuses to leave, claiming he had the right to be in his office.13 Deploying her knowledge of election laws, Kéita tells the commandant that on that election day, the space belonged to the people (121). When the French created their educational system, they certainly did not want it to produce conscientized subjects like Aoua Kéita. As an unwitting tribute to her resilience, one detractor comments, “Elle est terrible cette femme” (“This woman is untamable,” 128). Feminist Activism Politics is a team sport. Joseph-Gabriel notes that Aoua Kéita’s memoir “bends many of the generic conventions that define the autobiography as the single-voiced narrative of an individual protagonist” (130). Aoua Kéita’s story starts with her mother telling her and her siblings stories from the traditional repertoire. Her own writing, made possible by the colonial school, could be seen as an extension of her mother’s storytelling enterprise. There are, however, some fundamental differences between Aoua and her mother and their archival practices. First, if her mother’s narratives are inspired by tradition and reflect back to the same tradition, hence perpetuating conformity to them, Aoua’s narrative, even if inspired by the traditional storytelling impetus, represents a form of revolt. She tells a different kind of story: a story in which women do not automatically bend to gerontocracy or other forms of authority, especially masculine authority. Unlike oral performance which thrives in a community setting, writing can be an individual, solitary, and solipsistic enterprise. Autobiography, in the Western sense, fits this description. In a critique of Lejeune’s definition of autobiography (“retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality”), d’Almeida argues that in “the African context autofiction is generally turned into socio-fiction, and within African societies, recounting the story of an individual life is often a pretext for reviving a historical moment depicting a whole society” (35). Nowhere is Kéita’s preference for the collective more evident than in her feminist activism. Kétia, Joseph-Gabriel argues, sees herself as a scribe to the many nonliterate rural women with whom she wages a necessary war against colonization and patriarchy. Instead of speaking for these women, she lets



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them speak through her (131). Thanks to her work, and the fact that there were very few “evoluée” women in her time and the spaces where she operated, Kéita spends more time with poor and unschooled rural women. Aoua’s grassroots activism, like Ransome-Kuti’s before her, allows these otherwise forgotten women to tell their own stories, to voice their opinions verbally or through the ballot box. Aoua Kéita used her membership in the US-RDA to activate many initiatives aimed at promoting the interest and visibility of women in the public sphere. She helped establish women’s wings within the party. Thanks to her hard-earned credentials, Kéita was the natural choice to lead the creation of electoral campaign literature in the various towns she worked. She also became heavily involved in grassroots campaigning, including voter registration drives specifically targeting women. By the time she became the US-RDA’s Commissioner for Women in 1958, the same year she was appointed to the committee tasked with drawing up a constitution for the future Republic of Mali, Kéita had already spearheaded the setting up of organizations promoting the emancipation of women. One such organization was the Comité des femmes travailleuses created in 1956 with Sow Assitan Coulibaly, another women’s activist of the US-RDA (de Jorio, 68). Her extensive travels outside of the French Soudan, either as an exile of the colonial administration or as a representative of her party, allowed her to see the ubiquity of women’s struggles, and gave her the motivation to transform the Comité into the Pan-Africanist Intersyndicat des femmes travailleuses in 1958. She traveled to Bamako, Dakar, Paris, and Leipzig for meetings on women’s interests and rights. As a capstone to her anticolonial struggle, Kéita became, in 1959, the first woman in the French Sudan to be elected to her country’s parliament. For Kéita, naturally, the struggle for emancipation of women did not end at independence. Fighting for an improvement in the living conditions of African women, she played a major role in the promotion of Mali’s Marriage and Guardianship Code, which became law in 1962. Unfortunately, Aoua Kéita’s struggle for human and civil rights on the ground in Mali ended in 1969 with the violent military overthrow of Modibo Kéita by Moussa Traoré. She chose exile in Brazzaville to life under military rule. FRIDA LAWSON’S “JE SUIS UNE AFRICAINE . . . J’AI VINGT ANS” The short autobiographical piece was published anonymously in the Senegalese weekly, Dakar Jeunes.14 For convenience, we will accept Pascale Barthélémy’s suggestion that the author is Frida Lawson, one of two Togolese

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sisters who attended the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque (“Écrits féminins et modernité en Afrique occidentale française,” 838). Frida starts school at age five. Three years later, her father thinks she needs discipline, so he dispatches her to an aunt who Frida describes as “acariâtre et despotique” (grumpy and despotic). Here, she is forced to endure hard labor and mistreatment until an illness forced her return to her mother after two years with her aunt. Frida’s mother passes away a year afterward. She obtains her Certificat d’études primaires (CEP), which allows her to enter the École Primaire Supérieure in Porto Novo, Dahomey. In 1938, around age seventeen, Frida heads to the École Normale de Jeunes Filles de Rufisque as a member of the first batch of students admitted to the most prestigious school for girls in the AOF. She graduates four years later with a teaching diploma.15 Leaving Home for School In the first three paragraphs of her autobiography, Frida Lawson succintly anchors herself in history, place, and family: “Je suis une jeune Togolaise. Ma famille, fort ancienne, est originaire de la Gold-Coast. . . . l’ancêtre connu de ma famille (du Gold Coast) arriva au Dahomey” (I am a young Togolese. My family, very old, is originally from the Gold-Coast). In the changing context of colonization, Frida emphasizes her Africanness and her family’s mobility within the subregion. It is no accident that she starts her autobiography this way. From this panoramic view, she gradually zooms in on herself, while maintaining her unbroken link to her immediate family, especially her mother, and then between her and the colonial school. Frida’s story highlights the central role of the family in the education of women in the colonial period. If Aoua Kéita’s father is the instigator of her education, Frida’s mother is the driving force behind Frida's entry into the White man’s school. She recalls her mother’s words, “Elle m’appelait ‘my friend’ (mon amie) et me disait de vite grandir pour aller à l’école” (“She called me ‘my friend’ and told me to grow up fast so I could go to school”). This is significant since mothers are usually the biggest opponents to the education of girls. While it is not mentioned in the piece that any of her parents went to school, there are clear indications that her family has a history of direct contact with Europeans and their values. First, her mother calls her “my friend,” and asks her to grow up fast so she can start school. Secondly, even though the father’s direct role in the initial decision to enroll Frida is not referenced in the story, it is safe to assume he approved of that decision. Thirdly, and most noteworthy, is her family’s historic relationship with the White man as evident in the friendship between her ancestor and a slavedealing Portuguese.16 Finally, her decision to leave home for Dahomey, and



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eventually for Senegal, says something about the trust Frida’s family (including her father) has in her. Frida offers an idyllic vision of her childhood, in a loving and peaceful environment and with a doting mother. This is the case mostly because of her mother who calls her “my friend.” When the decision is made for her to start school, Frida has to move from this space of confort and safety into a space of trauma at school: “Pour la première fois, j’allais quitter ‘nanan’ toute une journée. Je voulais refuser d’aller en classe. L’école me faisait peur. J’avais vu la maîtresse battre mes petites compagnes avec un gros et long bâton. Ma mère ne me battait jamais, elle!” (For the first time, I was going to leave “nanan” for a whole day. I wanted to refuse to go to class. School frightened me. I had seen the mistress beat my little companions with a big, long stick. My mother never beat me!).” “Je suis une Africaine . . . ” reminds us of autobiographical narratives such as Climbié and L’enfant noir, which lament the exile of the protagonist from the kingdom of childhood to the colonial school. For the first time, Frida is surrounded by total strangers and by violence.17 Yet, she continues to go to school. If at this early stage of her education she persists, it is neither for love of the school nor because she is forced to stay in school. Rather, it has more to do with her own self-awareness: “j’étais déjà fière et susceptible, et je craignais les moqueries” (“I was already proud and sensitive, and I was afraid of being mocked”). This personal strength and resolve will serve her well throughout her education career and beyond. When at the end she talks about making her own choice of a lifelong partner, it is not necessarily the school giving her the strength to do so. While it is true the school provides her the indispensable instruments of her self-expression and full participation in colonization-induced modernity; she came into the school with an undaunted personality and a solid foundation of support, trust, and respect from her African family. After the trauma provoked by the initial encounter with the school, the alien space becomes a more tolerable and normal experience for Frida: “Je m’habituai rapidement à ma nouvelle vie. A la timidité craintive que j’éprouvais devant ma tante, firent place le naturel et la joie de vivre” (I quickly got used to my new life. The uneasy shyness that I felt in front of my aunt gave way to self-confidence and the joy of living). Why this shift from trepidation occasioned by her premature departure from the childhood kingdom to enthusiastic acceptance? One can extrapolate a few reasons for this transformation. The more learning she gains, the more Frida seems to cherish the school. This change becomes first evident after her return from her aunt’s. Perhaps the two years of suffering spent with her aunt have something to do with this. Yet, the change becomes more prominent at the school in Rufisque where the teachers treat Frida and her schoolmates with care, respect, and affection. Moreover, being of a curious and adventurous disposition, the

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contact with other people, places, and ideas made possible by the school also serves as a draw for Frida. Finally, Frida’s resilience, like that of many of her fellow “normaliennes,” is her most precious asset, a quality that is indispensable in the changing world and for the challenge their very education and newfound identity will pose to them after graduation. The Education Imperative for Frida Why is Frida sent to school and why does she stay in school? Frida’s mother seems already sold on the idea of Western education as a way to valorize the individual and the race. Pascale Barthélémy speaks to the need on the part of mothers familiar with European “modernity” to expose their daughters to it: “Nombreuses parmi les auxiliaires féminines sont les jeunes filles issues de familles eurafricaines qui, du fait de relations anciennes avec les Européens, scolarisent leurs garçons depuis au moins une génération. L’inscription des filles à l’école devient alors le moyen de consolider une position sociale et économique” (“Many of the women auxiliaries are young girls from Euro-African families who, because of long-standing relations with Europeans, have been educating their boys for at least a generation. Sending girls to school then becomes the means of consolidating a social and economic status,” Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées). In her eagerness to send her daughter to school, Frida’s mother tells her to “vite grandir.” She wants her to go to school so she can become smart by learning new things. Why does she want her to be smart and to be protected? “Tu seras ma petite Européenne, tu seras distinguée comme ta race dans le pays de ton père. Tu réaliseras mon rêve” (“You will be my little European, you will be distinguished like your race in your father’s country. You will make my dream come true”). At school, Frida will learn to be European, a status that can only produce good, namely in the form of racial advancement and distinction. Here we see Europe as the giver of light (progress through Western education) and Africa (“le pays de ton père”) as the potential beneficiary of Europe’s munificence. This is her dream for her daughter; to continue the family legacy of distinction. But beyond this patrimonial imperative, there is also the concern for Frida’s future individual happiness and success. In this light then, Frida’s mother, very much like Aoua Kéita’s father, sees the school as an insurance policy in case she is no longer there to support her child: “je ne sais pas si je vivrai longtemps pour te voir grandir. Mais quoi qu’il advienne, tu seras heureuse!” (“I don’t know if I will live long enough to see you grow. But come what may, you will be happy”). The mother’s certainty that even in her absence Frida will be fine is the greatest demonstration of her confidence in the usefulness of the school. Furthermore, it is clear that Frida’s mother sees



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Western education as a guarantor of happiness, a claim the colonizers also made in their bid to sell their education to doubtful Africans. As it turns out, Frida’s mother passes away the following year. Obviously, the departure of her “friend” long before she finishes her education creates a challenge for Frida. Nonetheless, thanks to her mother’s legacy of love and care, as well as her own personal strength, Frida is psychologically and emotionally prepared to face whatever the present and the future throw at her. And then, there is Frida’s own dream. Three years after her mother’s passing, when she receives her certificat d’études primaires, Frida continues to think about her mother and her family, a continued source of inspiration for her: “Je faisais leur orgueil!” (“I was their pride”). All the same, after being bitten by the learning bug and with her awareness of its power, she creates her own dream and her own vision of progress and success. Deciding her certificat is too valuable to underutilize, her ultimate objective is to get to Dakar, the Athens of French colonial education: “Mon unique but? Découvrir une issue qui me conduirait à Dakar, comme l’avait désiré ma ‘nanan’” (“My only objective? Find my way to Dakar, as my ‘nanan’ had wanted”). But to get to Dakar, she needs to go through the École Primaire Supérieure “Ballot” de Porto-Novo. Determined more than ever to fulfil her mother’s dream, which has now become hers as well, she registers herself for the entrance exam to Porto Novo when the nuns at the religious school she attends refuse to register her.18 Frida’s determination and positive outlook on life will continue to help her surmount any obstacle in her way. One of fourteen girls out of eighty students at Victor Ballot, she passes her entrance exam—top of her class—for the École Normale in Rufisque. “Malgré le dépaysement et les brimades des anciens,” she remarks, “je travaillais avec joie et persévérance” (Despite the disorientation and the harassment by the older girls, I worked joyfully and patiently). In the same vein, the austere aspect of the federal school at Rufisque is not enough to deter her; on the contrary, she finds it attractive. Frida’s attitude to the school, her teachers, and the curriculum tells us as much about her as it does about them. At the start of her studies at Rufisque, there is only one teacher (Germaine Le Goff), who also happens to be the school’s headmistress, and who they girls call “notre ‘nanan.’” The other French women who join Le Goff later as teachers are also described as devoted and caring. This school becomes home away from home for Frida and her forty-five schoolmates coming from all corners of the AOF federation. Here, they are taught to remain Africans while loving and being loyal and grateful to France, “la mère patrie.” According to Frida, learning in such a space can only produce good results. Extolling the transformational power of the school, Frida notes: “L’école me formait, me modelait” (school was training me, molding me).  She goes on to present the two-prong objective of Le Goff’s school as an institution of

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teaching and education as well as the school’s effect on her personally: First, the efficacy of instruction by her teachers allows her to achieve the primordial objectif of the school conceived specifically for them, that is becoming a homemaker and a modern woman: “J’appris à donner des soins aux malades, à soigner les enfants; j’appris à orner, à décorer une maison” (“I learned to take care of the sick, to look after children; I learned to adorn, to decorate a house”). But in addition to this, she also learns humane letters: “Moi, j’aimais par-dessus tout le français, la littérature. Certains auteurs me passionnaient et je m’imprégnais des beaux et nobles sentiments qu’ils exprimaient. L’esprit de curiosité s’accrut en moi; je voulais savoir encore et encore” (“Above all, I loved the French language and literature. I was passionate about certain authors and I soaked up the beautiful and noble sentiments they expressed. My curiosity increased; I wanted to know more and more”). This intellectual appetite generated by humane letters, and engendered by Germaine Le Goff’s specific interest in graduating strong and courageous women, is precisely what the colonizer did not want the education to ignite in the students, especially in women. MARIAMA BÂ’S UNE SI LONGUE LETTRE According to Donald Murray, “all writing, in many different ways, is autobiographical, and that our autobiography grows from a few deep taproots that are set down into our past in childhood” (67). While Une si longue lettre, unlike the two texts discussed so far in this chapter, is fictional, the life of the epistolary novel’s main character is similar in many ways to that of the author. Furthermore, in telling Ramatoulaye’s (and Aïssatou’s) story, not only is Bâ telling her own story, she is also telling the story of women pioneers like Frida Lawson who emerged out of the girls’ normal school in Rufisque and that crucial period in Francophone sub-Sahara’s colonial history. With, of course, the added picture of the immediate postindependence period in Une si longue lettre. Mariama Bâ’s life before entering the colonial school can be read as Ramatoulaye’s prehistory. Born in 1929, Mariama Bâ lost her mother before she entered the colonial school. Raised by maternal grandparents, her colonial functionary father came into her life only to extricate her from her blissful childhood. Like her father, Mariama Bâ’s paternal grandfather worked for the government as an interpreter and a tirailleur sénégalais. Education for her became a family heritage to preserve. While Mariama’s father was mostly absent in his daughter’s life, he did have a significant impact on her; he “made sure to foster his precocious daughter’s intellect by bringing her books, conversing with her in scrupulously grammatical French instead of Wolof . . . and ensuring . . .



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that she remain in school after age fourteen” (Garman). Mariama Bâ enters ENJFR in 1943, five years after Frida Lawson and twelve years after Aoua Kéita’s graduation from the École de Médecine. She was also one of the last batch of students to study under the guidance of Germaine Le Goff. Mariama Bâ was a teacher, wife, and mother. Unlike her protagonist, Ramatoulaye, who refuses to divorce her husband or to remarry after his passing, Mariama Bâ married three times. True to the foundational values of her education at the École normale, which insisted on “parité” in the household, she married her own choices and ended each marriage when she was convinced the couple no longer worked. Her third marriage, though not without hiccups, lasted twenty-five years. She had nine children, three fewer than Ramatoulaye. Mariama Bâ was also an activist who was keenly aware of the stakes involved in French education for women. As she said in her Frankfurt speech upon accepting the Noma award for Une si longue lettre: “In all cultures the woman who makes demands or protests is devalued” (quoted in Garman). Like Aoua Kéita and Frida Lawson, Bâ saw no moral or practical contradiction in the French education of African women. In her life and career (like those of her protagonists), she comfortably straddled the two seemingly opposing worlds of so-called French modernity and Afro-Islamic traditions. Furthermore, while she rejected the French assimilationist project in West Africa, she valued the colonial school system for its narrowing of the opportunity gap between the sexes. Une si longue lettre is a superbly written epistolary novel, a powerful meditation on love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, and politics in light of the turbulent clash between age-old African traditions and colonization-induced modernity in Senegal mainly in the immediate postindependence period. As the title reveals, it is a long letter written by Ramatoulaye (Rama), the protagonist, to her friend Aïssatou, who now lives in New York after her own divorce from her husband, Mawdo. Aïssatou’s voice is filtered through Rama’s letter. The two friends came of age through the colonial school during the last two and a half decades of French colonial domination of West Africa. Thanks to their passage through the ENJFR, Rama and Aïssatou became members of the small but growing cadre of women who helped constitute the colonial and postcolonial indigenous bourgeoisie. The friendship between the two women, evident from the incipit of Ramatoulaye’s letter, was forged in childhood and grew stronger in adolescence and adulthood (12). In her reference to their teenage years and adulthood, traveling the same literal and metaphorical road, Ramatoulaye is making an oblique reference to their passage through the colonial school. The school, because it was the venue where elements from different castes and colonies could congregate without worrying too much about the age-old wall that separated them outside of the school, became the place where

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intra-class, intra-country, and intra-regional friendships were forged, or strengthened as in the case of Rama and Aïssatou. Thanks to a friendship that has survived the vicissitudes of life in a society plagued by seismic cultural realignments, the two women can count on each other. More specifically, after Rama’s own divorce and the death of her husband, Aïssatou in a way becomes Rama’s North Star, the only person, in spite of the physical distance between them, who can fully understand her. “La confidence,” Rama tells us, “noie la douleur” (11, “confiding in others allays pain,” 1). The Value of the School In his introduction to Modupé Bodé-Thomas’s translation of Bâ’s novel, Kenneth Harrow observes that “Bâ’s judgement of the colonial school stands in radical opposition to those voiced by the anticolonial, national liberationist authors of the 1950s and 1960s” (iii). Where male writers like Bernard Dadié (Climbié), Mongo Beti (Mission terminée), Camara Laye (L’Enfant noir), and Cheikh Hamidou Kane (L’Aventure ambigüe) “saw in the colonial educational institutions an extension of the repressive mechanisms of the colonial enterprise” (Harrow, iii), Mariama Bâ saw something positive in the education women like her received. Even though Rama writes sparingly about the colonial school, what she does say about it reveals a lot about the institution and the impact it had on her and her fellow graduates like Aïssatou. “Notre école . . . verte, rose, bleue, et jaune, veritable arc-en-ciel: verte, bleue, et jaune, couleurs des fleurs qui envahissaient la cour; rose: couleurs des dortoirs aux lits impéccablement dressés” (37, “our school, green, pink, blue, yellow, a veritable rainbow: green, blue and yellow, the colors of the flowers everywhere in the compound: pink the color of the dormitories, with the beds impeccably made,” 16). Rama pays a special tribute to the woman, Germaine le Goff, who made the school and their experience there worthwhile: “Je n’oublierai jamais la femme blanche qui, la première, a voulu pour nous un destin ‘hors du commun’” (37, “I will never forget the white woman who was the first to desire for us an ‘uncommon’ destiny,’” 15). Unlike education for boys which tended to be presented largely as a depersonalizing agent, the school for girls, more specifically the École Normale under Germaine Le Goff, appears in the literature as a nourishing place: “Elle nous aima sans paternalisme, avec nos tresses debout ou pliées, avec nos camisoles, nos pagnes. Elle sut découvrir et apprécier nos qualités” (38, “She loved us without patronizing us, with our plaits either standing on end or bent down, with our loose blouses, our wrappers. She knew how to discover and appreciate our qualities,” 16). The school also provided a safe haven to the girls. Since women were not automatically expected to be in the agora (and the majority of them were not), their education did not come with the same political



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scrutiny by the administration as that of men. Additionally, the character and credentials of Le Goff ensured she was an institution all by herself, mostly left to conduct business as she seemed fit. Even as she shows her appreciation for the education she earned, Ramatoulaye acknowledges the traps European modernity poses for the precarious, unsuspecting African. Recounting the pre-independence debates around Africa’s future in light of colonization’s legacy, Ramatoulaye raises the question of balance and equilibrium: how much modernity to allow into the space of tradition without precipitating a crisis of depersonalization of which colonial education was capable? “Eternelles interrogations de nos éternels débats. Nous étions tous d’accord qu’il fallait bien des craquements pour asseoir la modernité dans les traditions. Écartelés entre le passé et le présent, nous déplorions les ‘suintements’ qui ne manqueraient pas . . . Nous dénombrions les pertes possible. Mais nous sentions que plus rien ne serait comme avant. Nous étions plein de nostalgie, mais résolument progressistes” (43, “Eternal questions of our eternal debates. We all agreed that much dismantling was needed to introduce modernity within our traditions. Torn between the past and the present, we deplored the ‘hard sweat’ that would be inevitable. We counted the possible losses. But we knew nothing would be as before. We were full of nostalgia but were resolutely progressive,” 19). Much like the Diallobé in L’Aventure ambiguë in their debate about whether or not to send their children to the French school, Une si longue lettre asks the question: Is what is gained worth what is lost? For women like Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou, active participants in their own metamorphosis, there is no doubt about the necessary trade-offs that need to be made. This is part of the inevitable trauma that comes with the awareness and acceptance of irreversible change. Marriage The individual responses of the two ENJFR graduates to their respective husbands’ decision to take a second wife seem to be poles apart. Aïssatou’s letter to her soon-to-be ex-husband is particularly significant; it tells us as much about her as it does about Mawdo and the society they both call their own. She holds jealously on to the agency, critical thinking, and open-mindedness she honed at the school. She lambasts what she labels the “reglement intétrieur de notre société avec ses clivages insensés” (65, “the internal ordering of our society with its absurd divisions,” 32) and refuses to submit to it. Rather than compromise and accept second-hand happiness in a “prison dorée” (95, “gilded prison,” 50), she leaves Mawdo and the more than two decades of investment in their marriage, preferring to chart a whole new course for herself. And it is important that during this ordeal, books become a

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reliable companion to her for they offer her what society has denied her (66). Through her inner strength and determination, Aïssatou is able to overcome her disappointment (66), thus becoming a “pionnière hardie d’une nouvelle vie” (69, “courageous pioneer of a new life,” 35). Aïssatou’s bold move becomes a panegyric to the school which laid in her the germ of adventure and self-discovery and discovery of other worlds and possibilities outside of the couple. Moreover, one easily understands Aïssatou’s recalcitrance and revolt. After all, unlike her friend Rama, she comes from a perennial lower caste, and she has no tolerance for traditions that seek to return her to the subalternity of her ascendants from which the school has at least partially liberated her. Faced, like her friend, with two options: 1) leave Modou and with him over two decades of marriage and its attendant depreciation of her body occasioned by multiple childbirths and professional work or 2) stay in faithfulness to tradition and her own ideal of marriage—Ramatoulaye chooses the latter (88). It can be argued that Rama has a stronger reason to react more aggressively to her husband’s betrayal than does Aïssatou to hers. If Mawdo’s betrayal is instigated in part by a powerful external force (his intransigent mother and centuries of cultural conditioning), Modou’s originates deep within him: his weakness of character, lack of principle, and inability to control his carnal desires, blaming God and destiny (73) for his own victimization of his wife and the teenage Binetou (77). After serving the man for twenty-five years, coming home to do chores after a full day’s work as a teacher, with no time to breathe (46), Rama is left alone to care for their twelve children. Not to mention the impact of Modou’s action on his children, especially his daughter, who now has her friend and classmate as a stepmother. Ironically, Rama deploys these same reasons to justify her decision not to end a marriage that is already manifestly broken. Rama’s Revolt, at Long Last! It is tempting to dismiss Rama’s decision to keep her marriage as a sign of unconditional submission to tradition, in her effort to fulfill her social obligations as a Muslim woman, wife, mother, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, and widow. Kenneth Harrow is right to claim that Ramatoulaye “does not challenge the order that imposes those obligations, even though she sees herself having been liberated as a child” (v). Rama does indeed reiterate her desire to honor the obligations inculcated in her from childhood (25). She does this because she does not see “such a path of liberation as conflicting with the social conventions of the Senegalese Muslim traditions” (Harrow, v). Nonetheless, when tradition takes its hubris and tyranny a step too far, the woman reacts with unequivocal resolve. The reader ultimately understands



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that Ramatoulaye’s respect for tradition is not unconditional. Hers is loyalty to a certain vision of life, love, family, and marriage. After thirty years of silence, of being the good wife and woman, Ramatoulaye’s voice explodes (“éclate, violente”). This explosion is instigated by marriage requests from two men after the passing of Modou: First, there is Modou’s brother, Tamsir, who, according to a particular tradition should inherit his brother’s property (including Modou’s wife). Then comes Daouda Dieng, the man Ramatoulaye’s mother preferred to Modou and to whom Rama preferred Modou. Refusing both men, the widow breaks her silence: “cette fois, je parlerai” (109, “this time, I shall speak out,” 60). And speak she does. She vituperates “la minceur de la liberté accordée aux femmes” (99, “the slender liberty granted to women,” 54) and asserts that “la femme ne doit plus être l’accessoire qui orne” (116, “Women should no longer be decorative accessories,” 64). In saying no to these men, Ramatoulaye is criticizing marriage as it has been practiced in her community, marriage that has nothing to do with love and altruistic commitment, but of possession and instrumentalization of the woman by men with their “rêves de conquérant” (110, “dreams of conquest,” 61). By staying in her marriage with Modou, she is remaining faithful to her ideal of the couple and the love forged between them in youth (107), an ideal reinforced by the education she received at the school in Rufisque. For Rama, marriage is “un acte de foie et d’amour, un don total de soi à l’être que l’on a choisi et qui vous a choisi” (109–10, “an act of faith and of love, the total surrender of oneself to the person one has chosen and who has chosen you,” 60). She holds on too dearly to this ideal to abandon it now because of Modou’s weakness and betrayal or the promise of financial security by men like Daouda Dieng. It becomes clear at this point that Rama’s decision to stay in the marriage with Modou, even when he is no longer materially and morally present in it, has little if anything to do with tradition or Modou. Instead, it has everything to do with her as an individual. It is no surprise that later on, in another instructive defiance of stifling tradition, she refuses to abandon her teenage daughter when the girl needs her mother the most. When confronted with the girl’s premature pregnancy, Ramatoulaye embraces her child “with a force multiplied tenfold by pagan revolt and primitive tenderness” in the face of a society that would have her punish her own child in the defense of tradition. The value of education is manifest in the lives of all the women we see in Une si longue lettre. If their education is what makes Rama and Aïssatou independent and able to survive their husbands’ betrayal, it is lack of education that becomes Binetou’s undoing after the disappearance of her husband, the sole breadwinner of her and her extended family. This, of course, is not to suggest that Western education is the only sure way to succeed materially in life. Yet, the value of education for Binetou in particular is underscored

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by the fact that Modou, for having caused her to discontinue her education, is required to provide her what amounts to damages in lieu of the salary she would have earned every month had she completed her schooling. Marriage, Motherhood, and the Fate of an Empire Colonization was, by its very raison d’être, a project of marginalization of the colonized. And colonial policies ensured that women suffered double marginalization. In many African societies, the condition of women worsened under colonization. Women in West Africa have always participated in public life, economically, culturally, and even politically. The colonizer came to Africa steeped in preconceived notions about gender, and more specifically about the status of the African woman: “La lecture des sociétés africaines selon le filtre des valeurs victoriennes aboutit au refus de reconnaître aux femmes un rôle actif dans les sociétés africaines tant sur le plan économique que politique” (“The reading of African societies according to the filter of Victorian values ​​leads to the refusal to accord women an active role in African societies both economically and politically,” Goerg, 106). The colonizers’ vision of the woman was that of an ahistorical being trapped in time. Ignoring the prolific diversity of African societies and extant sociopolitical realities, the colonizer treated women wherever they encountered them as the same: inferior beings even to the inferior African male, incapable of producing anything of value (besides children) or of participating meaningfully in the life of their respective societies. No regard was paid to differences among women in age, sociocultural, and economic status. Guided by this largely erroneous view of women, the colonizers preferred dealing only with men, including in societies where women were used to making important economic decisions. Talking specifically about the “turbulentes,” that is women who went to school in the colonial period and actively participated in the struggle for the equal treatment of women, Géraldine Faladé writes, Ce qu’on appelle le féminisme dans l’Occident du xxe siècle, a pris, en Afrique, une forme particulière. Il ne s’agissait pas alors, pour les pionnières, d’un movement qui n’a pas porté son nom, de renier la culture traditionnelle, mais au contraire de s’en server comme d’un moteur pour aller de l’avant. Loin de refuser la maternité, de vouloir bousculer le rôle de mère dans l’existence d’une femme comme au sein de la société, elles ont voulu faire de sorte que cette phase naturelle de la vie humaine ne prenne pas le pas sur l’épanouissment des femmes, qui passe aussi par le fait d’avoir une vie professionnelle, d’acquérir une indépendance fiancière et d’être une voix qui compte dans la vie de la nation. (Faladé 2020, 12–13)



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What is called feminism in the West in the twentieth century has taken on a specific form in Africa. For pioneering African women, it was not about rejecting traditional culture, it was rather about using it as a driving force for progress. Far from refusing motherhood, from wanting to upend the mother’s role in a woman’s life as well as in society, they [the pioneers] wanted to ensure that this natural phase of human life did not take precedence over the progress of women, which also involves having a professional life, acquiring financial independence, and being a voice that counts in the life of the nation.

In the three texts studied here, marriage and motherhood become a useful pretext to talk about other matters affecting women and society. In Une si longue lettre, the perversion and failure of the couple are the driving force behind Ramatoulaye’s letter to her friend, Aïssatou. In “Je suis Africaine,” when Frida talks about biding her time and choosing well, we have the feeling she is only delaying the inevitable. Even in a text like Femme d’Afrique, where Kéita goes to lengths to avoid the question, marriage hangs over the narrative as seen, for example, in Diadiaratou’s story that comes at the very beginning of her memoir. The interest in marriage and motherhood is what unites and separates the colonizer from the colonized. The colonial school, like the African family, has as primordial responsibility (and anxiety) preparing the girl-child for life as a wife and mother. Neither institution seems to care about the individual interest of the woman, even if both may claim otherwise. It is clear that both marriage and motherhood constitute a mechanism by which to control women and ensure the continued hegemony of patriarchy. The choices made by Diawara (Femme d’Afrique), as well as Modou and Mawdo (Une si longue lettre) underscore the uphill task women still face. These are intelligent, practical, and strong men, yet not strong enough to resist their base desires and unforgiven tradition. Their individual and collective inadequacy puts into perspective Frida’s “misovire”19 caution in her selection of a husband. To be sure, there is no guarantee that her choice will live up to her expectations and standard. Yet, the astuteness of her observations speaks to the problems, real or potential, that plague the African couple so prized by both African and colonialist ethos. If women were educated so as to prevent their “évolué” husbands from going back to the old ways in which they are beholden to their families and tradition, clearly in the case of Aoua, Rama, and Aïssatou, things did not turn out as hoped for. Women such as Aoua Kéita, Frida Lawson, Mariama Bâ (and her protagonists, Ramatoulaye and Aïssatou) are part of a long and unbroken chain of activist African women forged in the crucible of opposing and intersecting Western education and African traditions. Their legacy remains alive.

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NOTES 1. This was not different from colonial education policy in general. 2. Mariama Bâ was asked by her headmistress in Saint-Louis to prepare the concours for the ENJFR (Pascale Barthélémy, 65). 3. Some of the greatest opposition to Western education came from Muslim communities. Georges Hardy, while citing a requirement in Islam for women to be subservient to men (66), cautions that one cannot generalize about the status of women in Africa and Islam. He cites examples of matriarchy among the Peulhs and Wolof among whom a woman is not automatically “une servante silencieuse (a silent servant)” in her house (67–68). “Tout dépend de la region qu’on a vue, ou de la saison” (“Everything depends on the region or on the time of year,” 68), he adds. 4. This idea is so important to Germaine Le Goff that a play performed during a send-off reception for her is titled “À homme évolué, femme évoluée” (“To an educated man an educated woman” Freland, 122). 5. Ngonda, young girl in Matip’s maternal language, is the story of the author’s life from childhood to adolescence. 6. Kéita’s autobiography won her the Grand prix littéraire d’Afrique noire. This was the first time the award went to a woman. 7. It is interesting to note that both Aoua Kéita and Mariama Bâ’s Ramatoulaye choose their husbands, and both are ultimately abandoned by their husbands. 8. There is only one class in the entire city, with thirty-two girls enrolled in it (24). 9. Two local languages spoken in this part of Mali. 10. I will return to Kéita’s political engagement in chapter 5, where I discuss the colonial school as a catalyst for transgression. 11. See Géraldine Faladé’s Turbulentes for the biography of African women who were ahead of their time. 12. These were among the first to benefit from colonial education and the jobs and privileges that came with it. 13. On this day, his office building doubles as a polling station. 14. Founded in January 1942 as a supplement to the daily Paris-Dakar by the Vichy regime as an instrument of propaganda for its so-called National Revolution, the weekly also became an important site for important cultural debates among members of the emergent indigenous elite (Gamble “Dakar-Jeunes,” 86). The paper published essays by Ousmane Socé Diop and Léopold Sédar Senghor, among others, and occasionally by women. “Je suis une Africaine . . . ,” one of those rare texts by women that Dakar-Jeunes published, appeared anonymously. All quotations from Lawson’s autobiography are from page 11 of the March 12, 1942, edition of Dakar-Jeunes. 15. See Pascale Barthélémy’s “‘Je suis une Africaine… j'ai vingt ans’: Écrits féminins et modernité en Afrique occidentale française” (c. 1940–c. 1950), for a slightly more extensive biography of Frida Lawson. 16. This relationship reminds us somewhat of the friendship between Malic’s grandfathers and Faidherbe that preceded and facilitated his entry into the school, even if not in the same personal sense as in the case of Lawson’s family.



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17. With the exception of the trauma she will experience during the two years spent at her aunt’s. 18. This is a reminder that the church did not believe in the intellectual improvement of women. 19. This is a term coined by Were-Were Liking for a woman who cannot find a man worthy of her admiration.

Chapter 4

When Slaves, Bastards, and Dogs Rule The Colonial School as Agent of Social Transformation

In Amkoullel, l’enfant peul, Hampâté Bâ writes about the resistance and resilience of Africans in the face of Europe’s assault on their cultures, civilizations, and humanity. Of the Fula people, he writes: Quoi qu’il en soit, et c’est là l’originalité profonde des Peuls, à travers le temps et l’espace, à travers les migrations, les métissages, les apports extérieurs et les inévitables adaptations aux milieux environnants, ils ont su rester eux-mêmes et préserver leur langue, leur fonds culturel très riche et, jusqu’à leur islamisation, leurs traditions religieuses et initiatiques propres, le tout lié à un sentiment aigu de leur identité et de leur noblesse. Sans doute ne savent-ils plus d’où ils viennent, mais ils savent qui ils sont. (Bâ 1991, 18) Whatever the case may be, and this is the profound originality of the Fula, over time and space, and throughout their migrations, their intermixing, the contributions from outside elements, and the inevitable adaptations they have made to their surrounding environments, they have been able to retain their identity and preserve their language. They have retained their cultural heritage and, even with their conversion to Islam, have maintained their own initiatory and religious traditions, each of which is connected to their deep conviction regarding their identity and their nobility. While they may not know where they came from, they know who they are. (Bâ 2021, 13)

That the Fula were able to preserve their core identity (language, customs, Islamic and animistic religious traditions, etc.) speaks to a truth larger than this specific ethnicity. The resilience of Africa-descended peoples, on the continent and in the diaspora, is no longer debatable. Every group that has 123

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lived organically together for a long time develops values and practices specific to them, as well as an ability to remain themselves even as they change across time and space. Like a palimpsest, they assimilate new influences but are never assimilated into those new ways. While it may be true that the Peuls, like many other peoples of Africa, have managed to preserve important elements of their “original” way of life, there is no denying the seismic impact of colonialism on social and cultural formations on the continent. No one, no matter how resilient, can remain impervious to pressures such as those engendered by colonialist violence. To talk about colonialism is to talk, intentionally or not, about society and cultural and sociopolitical transformations. The forced interactions of different peoples that colonization, like the slave trade before it, occasioned, was founded on an unequal power relation that was bound to produce a lopsided result. The specific, deliberate violence of slavery and colonization made this historical truth all the more spectacular.1 Colonialism’s carefully planned and choreographed agenda of political domination and economic exploitation as well as cultural erasure was unlike anything the continent had seen even with its long history of intracontinental rivalries. When children are put through an educational system built upon a policy of deprecation and depreciation of Africans, their cultures, their way of life, and their humanity, what outcome should we expect? As Gadjigo asserts, “l’école attire l’indigène, le sépare des siens puis l’isole dans une ‘situation ambiguëe’” (the school attracts the native, separates him from his family and then traps him in an ‘ambiguous situation,’” 135). More than an ambiguity, the school deposits its graduate in a sort of no-man’s-land; into that liminal space from which return to the preliminal is no longer possible. The colonial school touched not only those who attended the school but also their families and the communities they came from and in which they lived. The interactions between students and immediate family and the larger society were forever transformed by the school, and often in traumatic ways. Going to school, the time spent there, is time not spent at home, in one’s family and community. Is what one gains at the school better than what one loses from home? Does one lose everything from home by going to the school? Is it possible to learn the new without forgetting the old, or to relearn the old if one has forgotten it? In L’Aventure ambiguë, while some like the Grande Royale are willing to divest from the status quo of their African past and assume new ideas and identities, others like the Teacher and the Knight would rather remain themselves or find a middle ground when remaining oneself is no longer an option. This chapter focuses on the discourse of bourgeois transgression and non-authenticity as exemplified in three texts by men and three by women: Amadou Koné’s Sous le pouvoir des Blakoros: Traites, Francis



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Bebey’s Le ministre et le griot, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances, Frida Lawson’s “Je suis une Africaine, j’ai vingt ans . . . ,” Aoua Kéita’s Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par ellemême, and Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre. I shall show how the notions of “blakoroya”2 and “bâtardise” are woven by Amadou Koné and Ahmadou Kourouma as effective theoretical frameworks into their representations of bourgeois transgression, immaturity, and non-authenticity, but also how these notions, especially that of “bâtardise” as analyzed here, can be applied to Bebey’s novel and to the three works by women. COLONIALISM IS DEAD; LONG LIVE COLONIALISM! Commenting on George Balandier’s conception of colonial discourse in his famous coinage “situation coloniale,” Iheanyi J. Samuel-Mbaekwe argues that “a major limitation of the concept of the ‘colonial situation’ is that it does not make sufficient allowance for the supra-individual consequences that flow from the colonial situation and that transcend the space-and-time specifications of colonization and reactions to colonization” (83). While it is possible, and for ease of historical framing, to locate events like colonialization within a specific time map, the impact of such events outlives the events, and they also escape the time frames we construct around them. To be clear, Balandier does somewhat acknowledge colonialism’s long durée when he talks not only about “des peuples ‘dépendants’” but also about “des peuples récemment émancipés” (“recently liberated peoples,” Balandier, 9). Indeed, the “situation coloniale” overflows into and taints the postcolony, manifesting aftershocks that could be just as impactful as the seism that ignited them. Recent events in Africa (and elsewhere) have shown colonialism as the undead: efforts to dismantle the stubborn legacies of colonialism (Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa), calls for the repatriation of stolen material culture (Benin bronzes, for example) or the return of Patrice Lumumba’s tooth, the only part of him that survived his erasure by acid, as well as recent anti-France demonstrations in Senegal and other former French colonies in West Africa. In February 2015,3 during an interview at his private residence in Dakar, Abdoulaye Wade, president of Senegal from 2000 to 2012, shocked and infuriated many in the country when he claimed that Macky Sall—the man who unseated him in the presidential elections of 2012—was a descendant of slaves and cannibals:4 C’est un descendant d’esclaves. Les villageois l’ont sorti de là-bas. Il n’était pas sorcier, mais ses parents étaient anthropophages. Ses parents mangeaient des

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bébés et on les a chassés du village. C’est progressivement qu’ils ont commencé à fréquenter les êtres humains normalement. . . . Vous pouvez accepter vous les Sénégalais qu’il soit au-dessus de vous, mais moi, jamais je n’accepterai que Macky Sall soit au-dessus de moi. Jamais mon fils Karim n’acceptera que Macky Sall soit au-dessus de lui. On serait dans d’autres situations, je l’aurai vendu en tant qu’esclave. (Wade 2015) He is a descendant of slaves. The villagers drove him out of there. He was not a sorcerer, but his parents were cannibals. His parents were eating babies and they were chased out of the village. It was only gradually that they began to have a normal relationship with human beings. . . . You Senegalese can accept that he is above you, but I will never accept that Macky Sall is above me. My son Karim will never accept Macky Sall above him. If we were in different times, I would have sold him as a slave.

That Abdoulaye Wade could be wrong about the real origins of Macky Sall5 mattered less than the mentality that provoked the statement in the first place. The fact that in the twenty-first century an educated man such as Wade could utter such a statement attests to the salience of social origins and hierarchy in human interactions, especially when it comes to politics. As Amadou Ndiaye reminds us in his opinion piece in Le Monde, Wade’s statement, as outrageous as it sounds, was not that outlandish, after all: Mais curieusement, toutes les réactions n’ont pas été défavorables à Abdoulaye Wade, 88 ans. Car l’ancien président a touché un point sensible. La société sénégalaise, sous un vernis de modernité, garde les stigmates d’une société organisée selon une hiérarchie implacable, héritée de l’ère précoloniale et dont les “maccubé” (esclaves) constituaient la caste la plus basse, en particulier dans le Fouta (nord du pays), région d’où est originaire Macky Sall. (Ndiaye 2019) But curiously, not all reactions were unfavorable to the 88-year-old Abdoulaye Wade. The former president has touched a sensitive nerve. Senegalese society, under a veneer of modernity, still bears the marks of a society organized according to an implacable hierarchy, inherited from the pre-colonial era during which the “maccubé” (slaves) comprised the lowest caste, in particular in Fouta, in the north of the country, the region Macky Sall is from.

What we see in Wade’s public display of animus toward Sall is the resurfacing of age-old complexes whose ghosts are always lurking just beneath the surface of contemporary social and political discourse and praxis.6 In Les castes au Mali, Bokar N’Diaye notes, “Sans doute les castes finiront-elles, un jour, par disparaître, cédant ainsi aux rudes assauts engendrés par les contingences de la Société Nouvelle. Mais, pour le moment, il faut bien le dire, au Mali, comme dans bien d’autres parties de l’Afrique Occidentale, il faut



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encore incontestablement compter avec elles dans toutes les circonstances de la vie” (“The caste system will doubtless one day disappear, succumbing to the harsh attacks generated by the contingencies of the New Society. For the time being, however, it must be said that in Mali, as in many other parts of West Africa, we are forced to live with it in every aspect of life,” 11). A DISCOURSE OF BASTARDY In his monumental œuvre La comédie humaine, Honoré de Balzac7 paints a portrait, novel after novel, of the “grande bourgeoisie” (mostly Parisian, opulent, and cultured) and the “petite bourgeoisie” (largely provincial and mediocre). Max Andréoli points out that in the Scènes de la vie politique of La Comédie humaine, Balzac lambasts the “grande bourgeoisie” for joining forces with the “mediocre” petite bourgeoisie in order to bring down the old nobility: “ce dont le romancier fait surtout grief à la grande bourgeoisie, c’est de chercher appui sur la petite bourgeoisie contre l’ancienne noblesse, au lieu de faire alliance avec les vestiges de cette dernière” (“The main complaint the novelist has against the grand bourgeoisie is the fact that this class connived with the petty bourgeoisie against the old nobility, instead of forming an alliance with the vestiges of the latter,” 54–55). Balzac sees in this alliance the principal cause of social and political degeneration, thus precipitating the transfer of authority from the real (noble, that is) aristocracy to what he scornfully calls (for the first time in Les paysans) “la médiocratie” populated by a heteroclitic coalition of parvenus, businessmen, and others of that ilk. Andréoli summarizes Balzac’s representation of the degradation of political power resulting from bourgeois transgression in France in this way: Le pouvoir, maintenu intact par Robespierre, Napoléon, et même Louis XVIII, au-dessus des affairistes, des thermidoriens et des ultras, tombe sous Charles X, faute d’un grand homme, entre les mains des gérontes, avant d’échoir aux banquiers parisiens de Juillet 1830, pour descendre enfin à portée des démocrates, des masses populaires émancipées. (Andréoli 1998, 58) Power, kept intact by Robespierre, Napoleon, and even Louis XVIII, above profiteers, Thermidorians, and extremists, fell, for lack of a great man, under Charles X, into the hands of the gerontes, before falling to the Parisian bankers of July 1830, to finally succumb to democrats, emancipated popular masses.

Power, it seems for Balzac, is so sacred, it should not be allowed to fall into the hands of the bourgeoisie, which he generally paints as representing mediocrity. To a certain degree, the notion of bastardy, and its various avatars, as

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exemplified in Kourouma’s and Bebey’s novels, function like “médiocratie” in Balzac’s œuvre; both illustrate the general disintegration of society under bourgeois hegemony, at least as seen by a segment of the population. Bastardy is both cause and effect. In a general sense, illegitimacy occurs when two or more entities that are expected, by a certain mindset or policy, to be morally or legally incompatible come together. It also denotes the by-product of such an “unholy” union or alliance. The very mention of the word bastardy is premised upon supposedly opposite notions of purity and identity. Terminologies like hybridity and “métissage” are just other names for bastardy, though with usually positive connotations today. In his discussion of “bâtardise” in Kourouma’s text, Memel-Fotê tackles two aspects of the notion: its essence and its sociological significance: De fait, à l’analyse, l’idéologie de la bâtardise traduit les contradictions de la société traditionnelle en crise dans les jeunes formations nationales de la Côte d’Ivoire et de la Guinée.8 En même temps, elle masque, au cœur de ces jeunes formations où de nouvelles classes sociales commencent à éclore, la position nostalgique, réactionnaire et impuissante d’une vieille classe sociale dépossédée par l’histoire de ses prérogatives économiques, politiques et intellectuelles. (Memel-Fotê 1977, 54) In fact, upon analysis, the ideology of bastardy reveals the contradictions inherent in embattled traditional societies in newly independent Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea. At the same time, it masks, at the heart of these young nations where new social classes are beginning to emerge, the nostalgic, reactionary and powerless condition of an old social class deprived by history of its economic, political, and intellectual privileges.

In addition to creating artificial boundaries that practically split Fama’s kingdom, Horodougou, between two separate independent states (Guinea-Conakry and Côte d’Ivoire), French colonization triggered the unravelling of the basis of Malinké life. Fama hated colonization because, according to him, it outlawed war, the lifeblood of the Malinke. He spared no resources, financial or otherwise, in the fight against it. Fama hoped that the defeat and departure of the colonizer, and the eventual restauration of Black governance, would give him back his princely privileges. The advent of independence was for the dethroned Malinké prince the epitome of disappointments. Independence completed the destitution of the Malinké initiated by colonization: “la colonisation a banni et tué la guerre mais favorisé le négoce, les Indépendances ont cassé le négoce et la guerre ne venait pas. Et l’espèce Malinké, les tribus, la terre, la civilisation se meurent, percluses, sourdes et aveugles . . . et stériles,” 21 (“Colonization outlawed and killed war, but favored trade; Independence ruined trade, and war was nowhere to be seen. So, the Malinke species, tribes,



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land, and civilization, are dying out: crippled, deaf, blind . . . and barren”). Fama may no longer have the material resources to combat the abuses of the postcolonial era—having used up his entire financial heritage in the fight for independence—but his reserves of bitterness and anger against what he characterizes as the bastardization of values and politics by Africans are far from being exhausted. However, probably the single most significant change occasioned by colonization is in the area of social structure, which naturally brings us to the most pertinent aspect of bastardy: the transformation of the Malinké social structure. Social structure implies a hierarchical framework within which certain groups dominate others materially and ideologically (58). The way the hierarchy functions within itself, and how it relates to other hierarchies are also important for a deeper appreciation of the system of differentiation. In the precolonial era, the lines that separated one category from another were clear and mostly immutable. To fully appreciate how much the Malinké society described in Les Soleils, for example, has changed, one must have an idea of how it looked before the transformation. This is how Memel-Fotê describes the precolonial Malinké social hierarchy: Au sommet, les famade et les horon, les nobles et les assimilés, c’est-à-dire, les chefs politiques et les soldats, les nobles de terre et les nobles du livre (les marabouts); au centre, les artisans, spécialistes de l’industrie et de l’art (numu ou forgerons, garangè ou cordonniers, dyéli ou griots, etc.); au rez-de-chaussée, les dyon, les esclaves. Auxiliaires dans les travaux domestiques et agricoles, l’industrie et le commerce (les palfreniers). (Memel-Fotê 1977, 58) At the top, the famade and the horon, the nobles and the assimilated, that is to say, the political leaders and the warriors, the land nobles and the nobles of the book (the marabouts); in the middle, craftsmen, specialists in industry and art (numu or blacksmiths, garangè or shoemakers, dyéli or griots, etc.); at the bottom, the dyons, the slaves. Auxiliaries in domestic and agricultural work, industry and commerce (stable keepers).

At the head of each Malinké kingdom was a fama who wielded near absolute power. With colonization, and eventual independence, came the unraveling of this social structure. According to David Grusky, “the rigidity of a stratification system is indexed by the continuity (over time) in the social standing of its members. The stratification system is said to be highly rigid, for example, if the current wealth, power, or prestige of individuals can be accurately predicted on the basis of their prior statuses or those of their parents” (6). To be sure, colonization in Africa shook the very foundation of the predictability upon which the caste system depended. A new system of social stratification was born, and with it a new social class that would take over

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the reins of economic, social, intellectual, and political power in independent Africa. This class, which includes members of the ancient nobility, is the new African bourgeoisie, made up principally, if not entirely, of graduates from the colonial school. In Kourouma’s novel, the notion of bastardy is indispensable to the deciphering of both the novelist and protagonist’s points of view. For Fama, bastardy is a distinctive mark of the times. Like a contagious disease, it has touched every aspect of life: people, the environment, the weather, and so forth. It is the trademark of his temperament and character. He understands and describes everything under the African suns of Independence within the framework of bastardy. One of the earliest explosions of Fama’s anger is directed against a griot. The late arrival of the destitute prince of Horodougou9 for the funeral ceremony of another Malinké in the capital city does not leave the audience indifferent. An old and sickly griot’s remarks—“Le prince du Horodougou, le dernier légitime Doumbouya, s’ajoute à nous . . . quelque peu tard” (11, “The prince of Horodugu, the last legitimate Dumbuya, has finally joined us . . . a bit late”)—wound Fama’s princely pride. Thanks to Kourouma’s use of the technique of internal focalization, the reader is privy to Fama’s reaction to the griot’s statement: “Bâtard de griot! Plus de vrai griot; les réels sont morts avec les grands maîtres de guerre d’avant la conquête des toubabs” (12, “Bastard of a griot! There are no real griots left; the real ones died with the great masters of war, before the European conquest”). Against the city traffic, he exclaims “bâtard de bâtardise!” (9, “Bastard of bastardy!); against gawpers, “les bâtards de bâdauds plantés en plein trottoir comme dans la case de leur papa” (9, “the bastard gawpers lounging about in the middle of the pavement as if it were their old man’s hut”). Not even the weather is spared Fama’s anger: “Bâtardes! Déroutantes, dégoutantes, les entre-saisons de ce pays mélangeant soleils et pluies” (11, “Bastard of a weather! What a confusing and nasty time of year this in-between-seasons are, mingling sunshine and rain!”). However, it is especially against the postcolonial sociopolitical system headed by the new elite that Fama unleashes his most vehement critique. “Fils d’esclave! Bâtards de fils de chien (“Sons of slaves! Bastard sons of dogs!)” is the formula of contempt par excellence used by the dethroned Malinké prince to designate the bourgeois(ified) elites of the new Africa. He feels personally threatened by the reign of this elite: “ces soleils sur les têtes, ces politiciens, tous ces voleurs et menteurs, tous ces déhontés ne sont-ils pas le désert bâtard où doit mourir le fleuve Doumbouya?” (“All these suns over our heads, these politicians, robbers, liars, and shameless idiots seem to be the accursed desert that will swallow up the Dumbuya river,” 99). Acknowledging his powerlessness vis-à-vis the new rulers, Fama hopes that some calamity will befall “les



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pouvoirs des illégitimes et fils d’esclaves” (“illegitimate powers and sons of slaves,” 160). Even though the word “bâtard” does not figure in Le ministe et le griot, Bebey’s novel easily lends itself to the same reading as Kourouma’s vis-à-vis the attitude of remnants of the old nobility toward the new aristocracy. Very early on in the novel, the reader encounters a vehement critique by Binta of the new status quo represented in the prime minister: “Et c’est lui, le chef du gouvernement, et c’est ce griot, ce pauvre griot, ce chien, qui est le patron de mon fils, de mon fils à moi Binta Madiallo, la fille du grand Madiallo qui avait des dizaines de griots à son service! Et c’est ce vaurien qui dirige le pays de mes ancêtres!” (“It has to be him at the head of the government, this griot, this despicable griot, this dog, who is the boss of my son, my very own son, me Binta Madiallo, daughter of the great Madiallo, master of dozens of griots! And it is this good-for-nothing who must govern the land of my ancestors,” 26). Binta tries to make his son understand what she sees as the perversion of the natural order of things. She points out to him that as the son of a prince, he had no business serving in a government headed by a griot. “‘Et si, tout au moins, c’était lui le premier ministre d’un tel gouvernement d’esclave mal affranchis!’. . . . Mais non, il fallait par-dessus le marché que le premier ministre fût ‘cette espèce de parvenu créé de toutes pièces par les mauvais temps d’aujourd’hui!” (“And what if he were the prime minister of this government of freed slaves! But no! The prime minister had to be the upstart crow fabricated by the bastard times of today!,” 27). If the griot in Les Soleils des indépendances is simply a “perverted” griot, the griot in Bebey’s novel is no longer a griot but an aristocrat. To truly appreciate Fama and Binta’s ire and disdain, it might help to review two things: the role of the griot in traditional West African societies, and the significance of the notion of “bâtardise” especially in the Malinké context in which both texts operate. Today, the griot (griotte, in the feminine) is generally considered a mere praise singer. In the past, this “master of the word” was an intermediary, a translator, a storyteller, the community historian. As possessor and guardian of ancestral wisdom and memory, he was an important adviser to his masters in the aristocracy. Every king, prince, and chief worthy of his title, had his griot.10 Not unlike the court jester, the griot had the rare privilege of joking with and speaking truth to power not available to others.11 Notwithstanding, the primary function of the griot remained that of serving (especially praising and informing) his king or chief. He had no right to criticize the king, or any member of the nobility for that matter, in a manner that could hurt the latter’s pride and prestige in public. So, for Fama and Binta, the state of affairs in which a griot can say or do to a “noble” what he wants (criticize him in public or, worse, give him orders) is an unequivocal statement on the emasculation, demystification, and degradation of Africa and its traditional values. For the

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nobles in the colonial or postcolonial dispensation, what Binta calls “les mauvais temps d’aujourd’hui” (27), things have indeed fallen apart. What used to be an identifiable center, purportedly keeping the social edifice together and jealously guarded by the aristocratic nobility, no longer holds. The notion of “bâtardise” is also a coherent theoretical framework within which the novelist executes a vehement critique of post-independent African realities. In an article on Les Soleils des indépendances, Matiu Nnoruka accuses Kourouma of tribalism and takes him to task for what he considers shameless collusion between writer and protagonist: “On a l’impression qu’il a fait avec son héros un bout de chemin. Comme celui-ci, il est nostalgique du passé africain, du moins celui des Malinké” (“One has the impression that the author sympathizes with his character. Like Fama, he is nostalgic of the African past, at least the Malinke past,” 98). This does not seem a fair and accurate reading of Kourouma’s novel.12 There is, for example, a fundamental difference between the protagonist’s use of the notion of bastardy and that of the author. Marie-Paule Jeusse explains this difference: “Sous la plume de Kourouma, bâtard ne signifie pas illégitime au sens où l’entend Fama, mais désigne la dégénérescence” (“In Kourouma’s critical orbit, the term ‘bastard’ does not mean illegitimate in the sense understood by Fama; it simple denotes degeneration,” 70). It is safe to say that, unlike some of their characters who see bourgeois transgression in terms of what Mohamadou Kane calls “le viol de la stratification de la société en castes étanches” (“the violation of social hierarchy in societies with rigid caste systems,” 239), Kourouma (and Bebey, as we shall see) is far from endorsing the retrograde perspective of his character. He presents the emergence and hegemony of the bourgeoisie not as a usurpation of legitimate, traditional authority, but as a historically inevitable disruption of precolonial caste-based hierarchies. If Fama is incensed by what he considers the “base” origin of the new leaders, what enrages the novelist is the inadequacies of those leaders presiding over a system marked by the reign of total confusion, in which there is no distinction between moral and immoral: “La politique n’a ni yeux, ni oreilles, ni cœur; en politique le vrai et le mensonge porte le même pagne, le juste et l’injuste marchent de pair, le bien et le mal s’achètent ou se vendent au même prix” (“Politics has no eyes, no ears, no heart. In politics, truth and falsehood wear the same cloth, right and wrong walk together, good and evil are bought and sold at the same price,” 164). The novelist unleashes a biting criticism against the corruption, wastefulness, and cupidity of the new African elite comprising mainly politicians and state functionaries: “Ils étaient tous enrichis avec l’indépendance, roulaient en voiture, dépensaient des billets de banque comme des feuilles mortes ramassées par terre” (“They have all utilized independence to enrich themselves, and they spend banknotes as if they were dead leaves collected from the ground,” 164). According to Kourouma, the new leaders stop at



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nothing to perpetuate their stranglehold on power at the expense of their opponents or constituents, including consulting marabouts and witch doctors (163). We see a similar criticism of the postcolonial bourgeoisie in Le ministre et le griot; more indirect though no less biting. Bebey frequently uses the impersonal pronoun “on” in phrases like “on sait que . . . ,” “on racontait . . . ,” and so forth. For example, in the opening chapter of the novel, on the occasion of the inauguration of a bridge linking the two sections of the Capital of Kessébougou, we encounter the first instance of Bebey’s subtle criticism: que l’on se montre critique en reconnaissant que la construction du pont aurait dû préoccuper plus tôt ‘ces intellectuels bourgeois qui sont au pouvoir et qui, des années et des années durant, n’ont pas une seule fois oublié d’investir l’argent des contribuables dans des affaires commerciales pour leur intérêt à eux seuls. (Bebey 1992, 16) Let one be critical by admitting that the construction of the bridge should have earlier caught the attention of those bourgeois intellectuals who are in power and who, for years and years, have not once forgotten to invest taxpayers’ money in businesses that serve only their interests.

And later in the novel, government officials are criticized for the same issue of the bridge: “On racontait, par exemple, que le budget, originellement prévu pour la construction du célèbre pont de Ta-Loma, était passé par le Club.13 Il paraît qu’en sortant de là, il avait considérablement maigri” (“It was said, for example, that the budget originally planned for the construction of the famous Ta-Loma bridge had gone through the Club. It seems that when it came out of there, it had lost considerable weight,” 66). At the head of the dysfunction and the parade of bastardy described in Les Soleils des indépendances and Le ministre et le griot is the one-party political system. Installed in most African countries after independence, the one party became quickly the bastion of corruption, nepotism, and violence. The narrator in Kourouma’s novel describes it as a cannibalistic institution: “Le parti unique, le savez-vous? ressemble à une société de sorcières, les grandes initiées dévorent les enfants des autres” (“The single party, in case you didn’t know, is like a society of witches, the senior members devour the children of the others,” 23). As for Bebey, his strongest criticism is reserved for the totalitarian tendencies of the single party in power called the “Parti de l’Authenticité Nouvelle (Party of the New Authenticity).” Bebey criticizes the efforts of the party brass to homogenize the population when they require all citizens of Kessébougou to be members of the party, have the same opinion and perspective on everything both during and outside of party meetings (74).

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So, what has made this rise of bastards, griots, and slaves possible? As has already been suggested above, colonial education was the single most important factor responsible for the emergence of the bourgeoisie. In certain respects, the pedagogical institution installed by the colonizer could be likened to the marketplace. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White describe the marketplace, the site of the fair, as the supreme disrupter of traditional classifications: A marketplace is the epitome of local identity (often indeed it is what defined a place as more significant than surrounding communities) and the unsettling of that identity by the trade and traffic of goods from elsewhere. At the market center of the polis we discover a commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed: centre and periphery, inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low. In the marketplace pure and simple categories of thought find themselves perplexed and one-sided. Only hybrid notions are appropriate to such a hybrid place. (Stallybrass and White 1986, 27)

Like the marketplace described by Stallybrass and White, the school became a locus of previously unheard-of commingling of the sons of chiefs and the sons of their griots and other subjects. This phenomenon is vividly illustrated in Le ministre et le griot: “L’école avait été construite à Ta-Loma par Monsieur Cravachon, administrateur des colonies qui y régnait en maître. C’était lui qui avait décidé que fils de riches, de nobles, ou de paysans recevraient sans discrimination la même instruction, et dans les mêmes conditions matérielles, du début à la fin de leur scolarité” (“The school had been built in Ta-Loma by Monsieur Cravachon, administrator of the colonies who reigned supreme there. It was he who had decided that the sons of the rich, noble, or peasants would receive the same education without discrimination, and under the same material conditions, from the beginning to the end of their studies,” 58). The members of chiefly castes consider such disregard for social hierarchy as an act of abomination (Bebey, 58). The children themselves imbibe and demonstrate this disapproval of social mixing. For example, one of Demba’s classmates, a noble, shows his indignation not only for the mixture but also for the fact that Demba is top of their class. “Voici Diabaté, le griot qui oublie toujours d’apporter son tama [tam-tam] avec lui. C’est le griot muet de notre classe” (“I present to you Diabaté, the griot who always forgets to bring his drum along with him. He is the mute griot of our class,” 59). The caste system is so entrenched that even the children from lower castes express their discomfiture with the new order. Such is the case of Demba: “Lorsque Demba Diabaté entra à l’école il y trouva des enfants d’un rang social supérieur au sien. Lui, étant fils de griot lui-même, se situait automatiquement au bas de l’échelle, comme le voulait la tradition” (“When Demba first arrived



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at the school he met children that were above him on the social ladder. Being the son of a griot, he automatically placed himself at the bottom of the ladder out of respect for tradition,” 58).14 That it brought under the same roof elements from disparate social backgrounds made the school, like the marketplace, the institution of bastardy and transgression par excellence. There is, nonetheless, an important difference between the marketplace or the fair and the school. The former, very much like the Bakhtinian carnival,15 represents only a short-lived disruption of social hierarchies, “an intersection, a crossing of ways” (Stallybrass and White, 27). At the end of the market and the carnival, participants stow away their wares and paraphernalia and retreat to their former categories. Only fading memories linger until the next market day or carnival. Consequently, the transgression manifested here is short-lived, at best “an occasional event which in itself left few permanent traces” (Stallybrass and White, 32). According to Bakhtin, “as opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (109). Conversely, the disruption of existing social categorizations and interactions occasioned by the colonial school was more profound than the Rabelaisian transgression privileged in the realm of fantasy and playfulness capable of engendering laughter even in those that are the target of the transgressive practices. The colonial school left an indelible imprint on society. The bourgeois elite that came out of the school not only replaced the ancient nobility, it also assured the gradual dissolution of precolonial distinctions of upper and lower castes (though, ironically, its hegemony would eventually produce its own high and low dialectical contradictions). Thanks to the colonial school, not only griots and slaves were bourgeoisified, nobles were too. As the marabout in Bebey’s novel observes, “Le livre, leur livre . . . il est venu pour toujours. C’est lui qui désormais nous impose une vie nouvelle” (“The book, their book . . . It is here to stay. It is the one which now imposes a new existence on us,” 187). More than anything else in the colonial arsenal, Western learning guaranteed the permanent disruption of precolonial caste-based hierarchies,16 turning reality on its head, as it were. Consequently, the marabout argues, it is those who know the White man’s book that will naturally be the leaders of the new society: “Et tu n’y pourras rien. Même du haut de ta classe la plus privilégiée. Car aujourd’hui la classe privilégiée, c’est celle qui possède ce savoir nouveau. Et le chef, c’est celui qui a le mieux appris à utiliser ce savoir-là. Voilà notre vérité nouvellement forgée par le temps.” (“And there is nothing you can do about it. Even from the pinnacle of your most privileged class. Because today the privileged class is that which possesses this new knowledge. And the one at the summit is

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the one who has best learned how to use this knowledge. This is the new time-sanctioned truth,” 187–88). One thing led to another: to administer his colonies effectively and conveniently, the colonizer was bound to make changes in many of the traditional ruling structures. The nobility and their governing systems were gradually replaced by the new bourgeois elites and new bourgeois governing structures. This is particularly so in the French colonies where the system of direct rule17 was practiced. As a result, many traditional chiefs saw their power either weakened or lost altogether. In many instances, the French colonial authorities created new administrative chiefs with virtually no recognized traditional authority (Gardinier 334–35). Such chiefs were mostly drawn from the indigenous educated elite. The changes instituted in the sociopolitical structures of the colonial period carried over to the postcolony. So it was that at independence, governing authority was transferred definitively to the graduates of the White man’s school, many of whom originated from the erstwhile lower castes. At independence, Fama (who had exhausted his financial resources in the anti-colonial struggle) expects to be rewarded with a key appointment in the government. His expectations are unrealistic considering his complete lack of Western education, an excuse given by the new leaders for not bringing him into the new government.18 If Fama the noble is prevented from joining the ranks of the new elites because of his illiteracy, Demba the griot, thanks to his Western education, becomes a leader of the new class. “OÙ A-T-ON VU UN FILS D’ESCLAVE COMMANDER?” The members of the ancient nobility in Les Soleils des indépendances and Le ministre et le griot do not care very much, it appears, that the sociopolitical structure has changed. What is unthinkable and unacceptable to them is that they no longer exclusively constitute the aristocracy of that new society. Fama’s question “Où a-t-on vu un fils d’esclave commander?” (138)—when he realizes that the head of the committee that has replaced his village chieftaincy is the son of a slave—contains in it all the bitterness against and rejection of the new reality. Similarly, in Bebey’s novel, when Binta Madiallo expresses her refusal to allow Demba Diabaté to attend her son’s engagement party, Kéita Dakouri tries to reason with his mother thusly: “Tu n’as pas raison, Mère. Aujourd’hui, il est avant tout le Premier ministre, c’est-à-dire l’homme le plus influent après le président lui-même. Et n’oublie pas que c’est lui qui m’a appelé au gouvernement” (“You are mistaken, Mother. Today, he is above all the Prime Minister, that is to say the most influential man after the President himself. And don’t forget that he was the one who



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invited me into the government,” 39). The truth evident in Kéita’s statement is exactly what exasperates his mother: “C’est bien ce que je déplore, fils: que ce soit lui qui t’ait appelé, et non l’inverse. Mais qui donc autorise un griot à monter jusqu’à la place du chef” (“That’s precisely what irks me, son: that it was he who invited you, and not the other way around. But who authorizes a griot to occupy the position of chief!,” 39)? Binta Madiallo is not the only member of the old nobility in Kessébougou who considers the accession of Demba-the-griot to the position of authority in terms of transgression of ancestral values. In fact, according to the narrator, all the nobles in the country think like Kéita’s mother (28). The nobles are particularly baffled that one of their numbers, the president of the republic, has chosen a griot as his prime minister. Demba, in their view, is guilty of double transgression: not only has he joined the club of the privileged few, he has also practically become its second-in-command. Binta Madiallo would have no problem if her own son were the head of the government, with Demba, the griot, answering to him (as was the case in the olden days). The bourgeois is for both Binta and Fama, and all the nobles in Bebey’s novel, a parvenu, a usurper. UNCIRCUMCISED MEN AND REAL MEN The notion of bastardy exemplified in Les Soleils des indépendances and Le ministre et le griot becomes blakoroya in Koné’s Traites. Even as the two notions point to the transgressive character and practices of the bourgeoisie, the ideology and theoretical uses of blakoroya are not exactly the same as those of bastardy. While the works of Kourouma and Bebey feature the plaints and anger of the nobility, none of Koné’s characters suggests the reinstatement of the ancient nobility, or, for that matter, vilifies the ruling bourgeoisie because they have usurped someone’s authority. The main characters in this novel are peasants who have no interest in reinstating a bygone nobility. While old people like Mamadou wish for the reinstatement of ancestral values of love and respect, members of the young generation look to a future society based on equal access to all vital resources. Generally speaking, Koné’s vision of legitimacy and authenticity, like Kourouma’s notion of bastardy, has to do with the attitude of people toward others, not their class origin. In many African societies, circumcision19 is arguably one of the most important aspects of the rites of passage from boyhood to manhood. It is considered a cleansing act that prepares the child, the immature, the unclean, for acceptance into the circle of men, both dead and living. Circumcision is inevitably linked to the notions of respectability and legitimacy. One is not a real man, no matter how old, until one has been circumcised. Consider, for example, Toundi’s reaction in Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy upon

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discovering that his master, the local commandant, is uncircumcised. “Non, c’est impossible,” he exclaims, “j’ai mal vu. Un grand chef comme le commandant ne peut pas être incirconcis!” (“No, that is not possible; I must have seen wrong. A great chief like the commandant cannot be uncircumcised!,” 45). From this moment on, the commandant is no longer the awe-inspiring figure that Toundi used to know and fear. And indeed, Toundi no longer rushes to obey the orders of the commandant because for him, the colonial administrator has lost all claims to legitimate authority. In Traites, Koné makes an important distinction between two categories of men: “blakoros” and “dékissès” (39). In many West African societies, a blakoro is a young boy, a noninitiate who cannot speak in the company of grown men and the initated. To call a grown man a blakoro is to insult them in the most extreme fashion. Dékissès, on the other hand, are those Koné alternatively designate as “des hommes vrais” (17), or true men. These are men who have gone through the rites necessary to enter manhood. In Traites, the rise of blakoros and their influence is inversely proportional to the decline of real men and the values they represent. The fact that blakoros are now at the top of the social ladder signifies in itself that the world is upside down. In the novel, the comparison with a bygone world in which everything was in its place is more than implied. As the narrator puts it, “Bien sûr que maintenant et avant, c’était l’envers et l’endroit. Avant c’était mieux. Avant avant, c’était beaucoup mieux. Il n’y avait pas d’erreur possible. Le monde allait à sa fin. Les vrais hommes existaient-ils encore?” (“Of course, between now and before, there is a big difference. It was better before. And before that, it was even better. There was no doubt about it. The world was coming to an end. Did real men still exist?,” 26). It was the end indeed of the old order, courtesy of the colonizer and his school. Not only have blakoros and real men swapped places but real men, as the above comment from the narrator reveals, are becoming extinct. In the world dominated by blakoros there is no place for mogoya. Etymologically, in Bambara (or Malinke), “moh” (or its avatars “mogo” and “mah”) means the human person as distinct from other species (Glasman, 86). Mogoya is therefore a humanism, a certain attitude that puts the human person before and above anything else. As Glasman notes, “le ‘mogoya’ exige à la fois un certain comportement social, positif par definition, privilégeant les relations entre les hommes et un accord total de la personne avec elle-même” (“‘mogoya’ requires at once a certain social behavior—positive by definition—that favors relations between people as well as a total harmony between the individual and oneself,” 86). Mogoya includes the way one relates to one’s family as well as to strangers. Its qualities include respect for oneself and others, generosity toward others, altruism, and moral probity. In Koné’s critical orbit and epistemology, the opposite of mogoya is blakoroya, which is



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the state of being and doing specific to blakoros. In other words, it is the total absence of consideration for others and for one’s own integrity. The narrator of Traites laments that mogoya can only now be found in a few old people, and will die with them (42). The absence of mogoya is concurrent with moral perversion and social disintegration. Mamadou sees this mainly in the urban setting where, in his view, the power of the blakoro is closely linked to the libertinage of certain modern women, otherwise called “les filles de petite vertu” (14). The old man arrives at this conclusion after witnessing a scene in which the wife of a school headmaster berates her husband in his presence (38). Even before the disappearance of the last remaining vestiges of mogoya, something else, associated with representatives of the new bourgeois elite, has supplanted it already: “naforo” (money). Money is that which now regulates the relationship between humans, especially among members of the younger generation (42). The reign of money is so pervasive that some members of the older generation are squarely in its corrupting grip: “Si le mogoya n’a pas atteint les blakoros, il a quitté beaucoup de vieilles personnes, surtout les riches. Naforo les a étourdis et ils s’amusent à torturer les pauvres” (“If mogoya has not reached blakoros, it has abandoned many old people, especially the rich. Money has rendered them heartless and they now take pleasure in torturing the poor,” 51). Associated with the supremacy of money, “un dieu implacable” (“an implacable god,” 93), is the concept of haramou which the narrator defines as “la fraude, son fruit et le péché qui les accompagne”and which “grossit anormalement le ventre” (“fraud, its fruit and the sin that accompanies both . . . [and which] “enlarges the belly to an abnormal proportion,” 51). This physical abnormality (enormity of the belly) associated with the bourgeois corruption in much of African literature can be symbolic of the deformation in social relations engendered by bourgeois rule. Lassinan, like his father, is a disciple of Mogoya. But unlike his father, he sees no contradiction in respecting African values and earning Western education. Lassinan sees Western education as a way out of the present dystopia and the generational tension. Unlike Malic, who appears arrogant in his defense of France and French education, Lassinan remains respectful in his critique of his father and patriarchy. Lassinan thus represents a new type of mogoya inhabiting a new African. Elsewhere, Koné defines this new African as follows: “l’homme noir de demain se fait non pas par celui qui s’accroche désepérément au passé ni par celui que l’Europe dans son intérêt a perdu en l’éblouissant, mais simplement par celui qui est assez lucide pour advancer vers l’Europe tout en restant lui-même” (“the Black man of tomorrow is not the one who clings desperately to the past nor the one whom Europe has depersonalized for its own gain; he is rather the one who is lucid enough to open up to Europe while remaining himself” Le respect des morts, 39). This new African is imbued with confidence in himself.

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MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA If the Western school brought together the children of chiefs and the children of griots and slaves and, by this act, permanently altered social stratification, it did not succeed in entirely erasing the memories of the remnants of the old nobility. For nobles who, for one reason or another, refuse to accept the new reality, their memory of halcyon days becomes their last bastion of consolation. To escape what he deems the moral wilderness of the new order, Fama sometimes seeks refuge both in his mental and physical memories. The problem, however, is that attempts on his part to return to his physical past always end in disaster. First, his two remaining loyal servants in his native Horodougou are aging and useless to him. Furthermore, one of them, Diamourou, benefits from the current system and has no genuine interest in seeing it changed for the sake of Fama. Second, Fama realizes that the bastardy he is fleeing in the city has reached his ancestral village. The new-fangled elite there has dissolved old forms of political authority: “Les Indépendances avaient supprimé la chefferie, détrôné le cousin de Fama, constitué au village un comité avec un président. Un sacrilège, une honte” (“Independence eliminated the chieftaincy, overthrew Fama’s cousin, and created a committee with a chairman. What a sacrilege, what a shame!,” 116). The only return to the past Fama can effectuate with some degree of success is the mental one back to his childhood. Similarly, in Bebey’s novel, the nobles’ bitterness against the present reality stems from their remembrance of things past: “tous les nobles pensaient comme Binta Madiallo, et reconnaissaient avec amertume que, décidément, les temps d’aujourd’hui étaient bien différents de ceux d’autres-fois. ‘Un griot qui devient roi, qui donc aurait osé imaginer cela voici seulement trente ans!’” (“all the nobles shared Binta Madiallo’s sentiments, recognizing the unpalatable fact that certainly the current times are very different from before: ‘a griot who becomes king; who would have imagined that thirty years ago!” 28). However, in Bebey’s novel, we see no reference to a special physical space associated with the nobles’ past as is the case with Fama; thus, they can only travel to the past through time. A similar binary operates in Amadou Koné’s Traites. In the novel, the comparison between the city (the present) and the country (the past) is made by Tièfi, old Mamadou’s brother-in-law, the only one in the family who has actually lived in the capital city, Blakorodougou,20 before returning to the village for good. He cannot talk about the village without comparing it to the city: “Il fallait toujours que Tièfi parlât de Blakorodougou. Il ne pouvait pas dire deux mots sans comparer la capitale à la campagne” (“Tièfi has to always talk about Blakorodougou. He couldn’t say a word without comparing the city to



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the countryside,” 20). But, as Tièfi himself realizes, the village has become a microcosm of Blakorodougou. Blakoroya, like bastardy, has become an entrenched and pervasive discourse. “Pourquoi s’étonner,” asks the narrator, “puisque c’était le triomphe généralisé du blakoroya?” (“Nothing surprising about it; it is the widespread triumph of blakoroya,” 24). The race of jackals (as the bourgeois elite is referred to in the preface of Traites) in Blakorodougou have their representatives and accomplices in the country. The fact that the story opens outward from the village unlike in Les Soleils des indépendances where the movement is from the capital city to the village,21 attests to the universality of blakoroya in the former French colonies. There is El Hadj Doulaye, the village usurer. There is also Akafu, described by the narrator as “l’escroc de la pire espèce” (“the worst kind of crook,” 51), another money lender who has become rich by confiscating the plantations of those who cannot pay him back on time. These men, in cahoots with corrupt politicians and state functionaries, defraud peasants like old Mamadou. WHEN THE FALCON NO LONGER LISTENS TO THE FALCONER In the novels analyzed here, especially in Les Soleils des indépendances and Le ministre et le griot, we see a fixation with the head of society—the ruling class. Why this obsession? Two explanations can be proposed for this. First, in the caste system, but also in modern class systems, the notions of superiority and inferiority always occupy an important place in social relations. As such, over time, the superior caste or class considers itself the (natural) head that must control the rest of the body, determine its functioning, and maintain its wholesomeness, harmony, and equilibrium. The integrity of society depends on how much the class distinctions in that society are respected by the different components of the hierarchy. The inference from such a view then is that, when the head is sick or prevented in any other way from performing its “sacred” function, the entire body politic or economic becomes corrupted, or bastardized, as the nobles would put it. This first explanation applies particularly to Binta Madiallo, whose major concern22 is the restoration of what she considers sanity into the African body politic by reinstating the ancient nobility as its head. Secondly, the superiority complex of members of the upper caste puts them in the position where they inevitably demand first access to privileges. This is exactly what Fama does.23 Because Fama, unlike Binta, has lost both his “superior” social status together with its attendant material benefits, his immediate primary concern is not the restoration of the nobility per se, but his own personal wealth and privileges. Therefore, it appears here, at least in the case of Fama, that the primary value of being on top is not moral

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superiority; it is rather the access to power and material wealth guaranteed by being on top. Both Fama and Binta are lampooned for being anachronistic, maladjusted, and for deliberately refusing to understand and accept the contemporary postcolonial situation. They appear blinded by their disdain for the present and their suicidal attachment to what Max Andréoli labels the “emblème périmé du pouvoir” (“outdated symbol of power,” 52). Furthermore, they are ridiculed not only for their desire to resuscitate a sterile past (symbolized in Fama’s impotence and to some extent Kéita’s inability to stop his wife from running away with another man just as his mother is unable to rein him in), but also for their will to impose on a heterogeneous and rapidly changing society a restricted worldview carried over from a moribund past. Talking about the nobles in Balzac’s Comédie humaine who find themselves in a similar predicament as Fama and Binta, Andréoli notes that “leur noble refus, dépassé, privé d’expression politique, les entraîne sur un terrain douteux, plein d’embûches, très loin des épopées de la vieille chevalerie” (“their noble refusal, outdated, lacking political expression, leads them on a risky path filled with traps, and very far from their chivalrous halcyon days,” 53). Due to their unwillingness to see the new social reality for what it is, Fama and Binta end up calling upon themselves unwanted attention. Fama gets himself arrested, tortured, and jailed following a kangaroo trial that doubles as a commentary on his powerlessness and a vehement critique of the absurdity and heavy-handedness of the new political heavyweights.24 Binta’s stubbornness puts her and the entire country of Kessébougou in a precarious position. In the upheavals that follow her actions and Demba Diabaté’s refusal to expel his friend, Binta’s son, from his government,25 Kéita’s fiancée elopes with a French expatriate and perishes in the process, and Binta almost loses her beloved son. Despite their striking resemblances, important differences emerge between Kourouma and Bebey’s novels. Both novels begin with a challenge to bourgeois hegemony. By making Fama impotent, making him refuse to sell his pride to them (190), and killing him off at the end, Kourouma seems to suggest that there is no room for coexistence within the same bastard space between the new bourgeoisie and the die-hard ancient nobility. Bebey’s novel, on the contrary, ends with the active capitulation of the nobility, a capitulation borne out of the necessity of survival and the recognition of the historical social transformation occasioned by the school. Furthermore, Ahmadou Kourouma does not provide any explicit alternative to the present dystopia that he so vehemently lambastes. Francis Bebey, on the other hand, is more explicit about the shape he would prefer the future to take; namely, it is in the reconciliation of all antagonistic forces, regardless of their origins and present status.



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RECONCILING WITH THE NEW TIMES Le ministre et le griot opens with the inauguration of a modern bridge connecting the two sections of the capital city of Kessébougou, Ta and Loma. The bridge is a symbol of reconciliation for it connects the “upper town” (with only a few bicycles as signs of modernity) and the “lower town” (with all the amenities of modern life).26 But it is the upper town that produces the food on which the city depends. In fact, as the narrator suggests, if it were not for the upper town, the inhabitants of the lower town may never have allowed the construction of a bridge ensuring the free movement of the underprivileged into their privileged space (7). Everyone recognizes that the existence of the bridge changes forever the relationship between the two parts of the capital of Kessébougou. Like the colonial school to social categories, so is the bridge to geographical dichotomies also born of colonialism’s spatial policies; it could be the catalyst that eventually dissolves the differences that exist between the two segments of the city and their occupants. When his mother chides him for flouting his heritage by inviting the descendant of griots to his engagement party, Kéita responds, “Je sais, je sais qu’il porte un nom de griot. Je n’ai pas oublié notre tradition à ce point, crois-moi. Ce que je veux dire, c’est que, bien qu’étant en quelque sorte prédestiné à être griot comme son père et tous ses ancêtres, il a acquis aujourd’hui, grâce à son travail et à son intelligence, une place tout à fait exceptionnelle dans notre société” (“I know that he has a griot’s name; I assure you I am not that oblivious. My point is that even though it may be his destiny to be a griot like his father and ancestors, today, thanks to his hard work and intelligence, he has earned a special place for himself in our society,” 38–39). When the efforts of Kéita and a popular schoolteacher fail to dissuade Binta, the onerous task of convincing the woman falls upon a man, a neutral figure, respected by everyone in the country. This man is simply referred to as “le grand marabout.” A little over an hour after his return from his pilgrimage to Mecca, and disregarding the dangers posed by the curfew imposed by the authorities to calm tensions arising from popular revolts, he pays Binta a visit. In making his case to Binta, the marabout highlights the inevitability of change and all that it brings with it. He points out in particular the role of the school in social transformation (187). Furthermore, he explains to Binta specifically the status of Demba in the modern society: “Binta, Demba n’est pas un griot. C’est un homme rempli d’une autre intelligence. D’un savoir que ses ancêtres ne connaissaient pas. L’intelligence et le savoir des avions et des trains et des automobiles. Avec lesquels notre vie ne sera plus jamais la même” (“Binta, Demba is not a griot. He is a man endowed with a special intelligence. A knowledge unavailable to his ancestors. The science of

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planes, trains, and automobiles. These are things that have changed our lives forever,” 187). The marabout’s statement that Demba is not a griot but a man represents, in the context of Malinké philosophy, a revolutionary approach to the age-old idea of the status of the individual in society. What the statement posits in effect is that all men are born equal and that a griot is not an essential category, but rather a sociocultural construct that has managed, over time, to assume an essence. The marabout’s words are not without effect. The next morning, the noble Binta appears at the prime minister’s residence where she kneels in front of the son of a griot, “les yeux levés vers lui” (“Looking up at him,” 190), with a cross section of the nation watching. I have shown how Kourouma, Bebey, and Koné represent bourgeois transgression in similar, yet different ways.. I have also shown how Bebey’s preference for reconciliation dictates his generally lenient portrayal of both the bourgeoisie and the ancient nobility, whereas Kourouma’s rejection of the path of reconciliation allows him to execute a more caustic criticism of the two classes. In a way, at least a degree of “mogoya” is salvaged in Bebey’s novel as soon as both sides come together in recognition of their common humanity and interests. As for Koné’s Traites, we have seen that there is no nobility to pit against the representatives of the illegitimate and inefficient bourgeoisie. Therefore, the task of reconciling a dying antagonistic past with an unassailable present in terms of class is much less an issue. The rest of this chapter will examine the representation of transgression from the perspective of women. PIONNIÈRES OU DIABLESSES, OR WHEN THE TRANSGRESSOR IS A WOMAN At the 1944 Conférence de Brazzaville, colonial authorities reiterated their dilemma vis-à-vis the impact of their school on African society. While emphasizing that their education is indispensable to the moral and material progress of indigenous populations, the colonizer cautions against its potential to cause damage to the family and social fabric of African societies. If this anxiety is true in a general sense, it is even more so in the case of women: “Le problème devient plus difficile lorsque l’on pense à l’enseignement féminin. Que deviendra la cellule familiale indigène lorsqu’on aura appris à la femme nos principes fondamentaux d’égalité et de liberté? Le bouleversement complet semble bien à craindre” (“The issue becomes more complex when we talk about female education. What will become of the indigenous family unit when women are taught our fundamental principles of equality and freedom? We are right to worry about total social upheaval,” “Rapport a/s/ de la Conférence de Brazzaville,” 2). For her part, Germaine Le Goff demystifies



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this masculinist anxiety vis-à-vis the potential for self-expression by women going through the school. In a treatise on the education of women in AOF, she writes: Les hommes, les marabouts en tête, ne voulaient pas que les êtres impurs, diminués, puissent leur parler les yeux dans les yeux. Aussi doctes que sages, ils disaient qu’elles alimentaient le feu de l’enfer. Ils ont failli faire échouer cette oeuvre bonne et indispensable en clamant que “la maison du papier” en mettant le porte-plume aux mains des filles pervertirait leur âme et que toutes sortiraient de l’école ayant le mépris du pilon. (Freland 2004, 128) Men, marabouts leading the way, did not want impure, inferior beings to have the capacity to speak to them as equals. These learned and wise men said women fueled the fires of hell. They tried to sabotage our great work by claiming that “the house of the paper,” by educating girls, was corrupting their souls and that all the girls would leave school with a contempt for the pestle.

What is the place of women in this new order where authority is represented by the newly emerged bourgeoisie, composed of griots, ex-slaves, descendants of slaves, erstwhile nobles, and women? Applied specifically to the impact of women’s education, the concepts of bastardy and blakoroya are associated with the decadence of patriarchy. The emergence and growth of a social order, within or outside the patriarchy, are instigated by women’s education and participation in public life, making the role of women in the new transgressive discourse a seismic one. Activism, or simple critical engagement with the status quo, is one of the surest ways to get noticed and punished. If this is true of everyone, it is particularly true of women. For educated women in the agora, their transgression is threefold: they are women, they are educated, and they use their education to participate in public affairs. Insecure men are threatened by such women for they see in the empowerment of women a path to a “feminization” of the old power structures, which in turn threatens their male privilege. The price a woman is made to pay for such transgression can be steep. We are reminded of Olympe de Gouges, the eighteenth-century writer and human rights activist, a pioneer feminist who lost her head to the guillotine during the early days of the French Revolution’s reign of terror. After her execution, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, prosecutor of Paris, offered the following disdainful reminder to all women: “Rappelez-vous l’impudente Olympe de Gouges, qui, la première, institua des sociétés de femmes et abandonna les soins du ménage pour se mêler de la république, et dont la tête est tombée sous le fer vengeur des lois” (“Remember the impertinent Olympe de Gouges, the first to establish women’s societies and abandon household cares in order to meddle

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in affairs of the republic, and whose head fell under the avenging iron of our laws,” quoted in Lacour, 4–5). FEMME D’AFRIQUE: LA VIE D’AOUA KÉITA RACONTÉE PAR ELLE-MÊME Like Olympe de Gouges over one and a half century before her, Aoua Kéita had a visceral reaction to oppression and other forms of injustice as well as a special radar for the oppressed. In clear disregard of her mother’s lessons on conformity and deference to figures of authority, Kéita would prefer not to silence herself. And if Kéita spends a good portion of her text’s incipit on her mother’s moral teachings, it is to offer them as context and background to 1) her family’s position and 2) her future engagement with both colonial and African patriarchal praxis that target not only women, but also other traditional minorities. If being an educated woman and having a professional career are not “bad” enough, Kéita decides to get into politics. Thanks to her reputation as a fearless and plainspoken person, some men call her “fille prétentieuse jouant à la grande dame” (“a pretentious girl thinking herself a lady,” 41)—a woman who does not know her place in the world. This reaction to Aoua becomes more evident as her political activism grows. When Kéita and her husband’s political engagement begins to ruffle some European feathers, Diawara tells her to slow down: “Tu es trop entière, ma fille, pour faire de la politique en ce moment. Si tu continues de ce train, je me verrai dans l’obligation de te freiner de temps en temps. Ces méthodes et ta franchise brutale peuvent nous faire du mal” (“You are too stubborn, my dear, to be doing politics right now. If you stay on this road, I will have to put brakes on you from time to time. Your actions and plainspokenness could get us into trouble,” 66). But Aoua cannot be silenced. If anything, Aoua’s struggle for the emancipation of women within the larger national and continental struggle for freedom becomes more urgent. During one of her missions to retrieve voter cards for mostly nonliterate women partisans of the US-RDA, a local chief tells Aoua and another woman activist that they are out of place: “Pourquoi êtes-vous si tenaces? Vous n’êtes que des pauvres femmes. . . . Vous feriez mieux de vous reposer tranquillement à l’ombre de vos maisons, au lieu d’être tout le temps dans la rue et de pénétrer dans toutes les maisons pour importuner les gens. . . . Vous vous atelez à un travail d’homme qu’aucune femme au monde n’a jamais fait” (“Why are you so stubborn? You are just poor women. . . . You had better stay in the recesses of your houses, instead of being in the streets all the time and entering people’s houses to bug them. . . . You are getting yourselves involved in a man’s work that no woman in the world has ever done,” 112). Aoua responds that



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women, like men, are children of Mali and have the same rights to join the fight for independence so they can become “libres comme le vent” (“free like the wind,” 113). On the day of the 1959 legislative elections27 approved by the 1958 De Gaulle referendum on the future of African-French relationship, Aoua is stopped from entering a voting area by the local chief accompanied by women who share his dim view of transgressive women like Kéita. The chief tells Aoua: Sors de mon village, femme audacieuse. Il faut que tu sois non seulement audacieuse, mais surtout effrontée pour essayer de te mesurer aux hommes en acceptant une place d’homme. Mais tu n’as rien fait. C’est la faute des fous dirigeants du RDA qui bafouent les hommes de notre pays en faisant de toi leur égale. . . . Koutiala, un pays de vaillants guerriers, de grands chasseurs, de courageux anciens combattants de l’Armée française, avoir une petite femme de rien du tout à sa tête? Non, pas possible. . . . Jamais . . . J’ai trois femmes comme toi qui me grattent le dos tous les soirs à tour de rôle. Retiens ta langue. Si tu continues à me parler, je te ferai bastonner par les femmes. (Kéita 1975, 13) Get out of my village, you impudent woman. It is not enough for you to be disrespectful; you have to take your effrontery to the point of equating yourself with men by usurping a man’s position. Alas, you are not the problem; I blame those stupid leaders of the RDA who, out of disregard for the men of our country, have made you their equal. If you think Koutiala, this land of brave warriors, great hunters, and valiant veterans of the French Army will accept a woman as its head, think again. That will never happen! I have three women like you who take turns scratching my back at night. Watch your mouth! If you insist on talking to me, I will have you flogged by the women here.

These remarks by an inveterate sexist and misogynist is the most vehement expression in Femme d’Afrique of the opposition to women’s education. It also points to the difficult task women and their allies face in the struggle for liberation from the unrepentant claws of patriarchy. Kéita and some of her like-minded colleagues become victims of harassment and retaliation by Europeans and Africans who have different political affiliations (95–96). One way the administration tries to shut her down was by posting her as far away from her home base as possible. In 1950, for example, several years after her transfer from Gao to another region in Mali, she and other members of the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (US-RDA) are sent back there as punishment. Gao, at this time, is considered the “poste disciplinaire (disciplinary outpost)”—a gulag of sorts—where the administration dispatched “tous les enfants turbulents de la grande famille des fonctionnairres du Soudan français” (“all the recalcitrant children of the big family of civil servants in the French Sudan,”

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83). The commandant at Gao tells Aoua: “vous avez jusqu’ici été une sagefemme fort appréciée, tachez de le demeurer et de faire moins de politique” (“You have, until now, been a good and well-liked midwife; you should keep it that way by spending less time in politics,” 95). Her every move and action are surveilled and reported to the authorities. As further punishment for her insubordination,28 Aoua is transferred to Casamance, in southern Senegal, as far away as possible from the colonial seat of power in Dakar (93). She remains in exile there for two years (1951–1953). Nevertheless, all attempts to silence and suppress Aoua Kéita fail. In fact, they only make her resolve stronger. Her exile into far-flung colonial outposts such as Casamance exposes her to more evidence of colonial oppression of her fellow Africans, which ends up making her a Pan-African activist (the “femme d’Afrique” in the title of her autobiography). The president of the Conseil Général du Sénégal sums up Kéita’s character when he tells one of her tormentors, “Aucune brimade, aucune repression ne saurait ébranler sa foi militante” (“No bullying or persecution will break her militant spirit,” 204). “JE SUIS UNE AFRICAINE . . . ” In the last three paragraphs of her autobiography, Frida provides a powerful synopsis of the goal of the school, of the condition of women in many African societies, and of how the new class of Western-educated women see their role in changing mentalities and behaviors. Most importantly, they give us a clear insight into her individual life goals and priorities. These closing paragraphs constitute a de facto manifesto for the young graduate ready to face the world. She tells us how far she has come, from the timid but determined five-yearold girl to the young adult graduate of the AOF’s most prestigious school for girls: “J’ai des idées claires et parfois des décisions nettes. Je suis à présent une grande jeune fille de vingt ans!” (“I have clear ideas and sometimes make definite decisions. I am now a big girl of twenty years old!”). Confident in herself, she will not rush into any decision regarding her professional and personal life. She looks forward to teaching for two main reasons: love and service: “j’exercerai mon métier d’institutrice avec amour; je me dévouerai à mes petites sœurs africaines (I will practice my teaching profession with love, and I will dedicate myself to my younger African sisters).” Nowhere is Frida’s growth and transformation more evident than in her attitude toward marriage and her African heritage vis-à-vis Western civilization. She talks about “mon mariage” and insists on her need and determination to choose her partner. As with her professional career, she is patient and careful. “Mon choix est presque fixé. . . . Mon cœur a parlé, mais je saurai attendre. Je veux éprouver d’abord les sentiments de celui que je voudrais choisir



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pour père de mes enfants (My choice is almost made. . . . My heart has spoken, but I will do well to wait; I must be sure about the feelings of the person I would like to be the father of my children).” The reason for her deliberateness is that she sees “tant de ménages malheureux (so many unhappy couples)” around her. Such marriages, one would imagine, would involve a couple brought together without much choice or reflection on their part and in which the woman is most likely to be the person with less power. But, of course, there are the Kéita-Diawara, Ramatoulaye-Modou, and Aïssatou-Mawdo couples brought together by their own choices. Most certainly, for Frida and her “compagnes normaliennes (fellow normalians),” “le vrai foyer (the true household)” is one in which each member of the couple sacrifices for the other. The fact that she and her fellow sisters can even publicly express their wish to make decisions affecting their private lives attests to the power conferred upon them by their education. A new class of women, distinct from their sisters who have not gone to school and specifically different from the nonliterate woman as homemaker, is born. Even though Frida tells us she was born into an idyllic home, the incident involving her two-year stay with her cruel aunt may have had an effect on her beyond the evident physical and psychological trauma she suffered during those two years. After being absent from the picture, at least according to Frida’s scanty autobiography, her father’s entry into Frida’s life is as the disciplinarian in the family. What the young Frida considers a blessing in her life—namely, her mother’s permissiveness and untethered affection for her daughter—the father sees as a weakness that must be expunged from her. In other words, the mother is spoiling her daughter. Could it be that her mother’s “powerlessness” in the face of the father’s decision to send her away at age eight to her aunt plays a role in her decision to marry only someone who will be an equal partner with her? With respect to her attitude toward her African heritage vis-à-vis France, Frida tells us: “Je ne dédaigne pas les bonnes coutumes de mon pays, mais je veux aussi aider la fillette indigène à devenir la femme pleine de dignité. Je désire que nous, les jeunes filles africaines, soyons, un jour, l’âme d’un vrai foyer comme nos sœurs françaises (I do not despise the good customs of my country. However, I want to help the native girl become a woman of dignity. I want us young African girls to one day be the soul of real households like our French sisters)!” Even as she avoids an indiscriminate rejection of her African way of life, she recognizes the need to change society, and the condition of women specifically, for the better. And she sees herself as an agent of that salubrious change. Frida clearly sees no contradiction in staying African while becoming a woman with agency. It is also remarkable that Frida sees her destiny inextricably tied not only to that of her African sisters (such as Aoua Kéita), but also to French women who, thanks to the education they share, are now her sisters. And as she prepares to exit the school and enter the

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world of adulthood and professional life, she has no illusions about the challenges that await her. However, as a mature, well-rounded human being who happens to be a woman, she is ready to face the vicissitudes of life and deliberate efforts from certain elements of society to sabotage her added value: je ne crains pas de prendre contact avec la vie. J’aime la vie. J’accepte même à l’avance les jours sombres. . . . et je suis même indulgente aux sceptiques, à ceux qui critiquent notre école Normale, notre ‘Maison,’ sans la connaître et qui pensent qu’éternellement, la femme indigène demeurera impersonnelle, sans dignité, la servante résignée qu’un homme peut prendre ou délaisser suivant son caprice. (Lawson 1942, 11) I am not afraid to make contact with life. I love life. I even accept the dark days in advance. . . . I readily forgive skeptics, those who criticize our normal school, our ‘House,’ without knowing it and who think that the native woman will forever remain a nonentity, without dignity, the passive servant that a man can take or abandon according to his whim.

To end her autobiography on this note of defiance to her present and future detractors—those who see the school as the laboratory for women who do not know how to be women, those who would rather see women shrink under and behind the gaze and shadows of men—is a powerful testament to the liberatory capacity of the school she attended. UNE SI LONGUE LETTRE Lamenting the attitude of men toward educated women, Ramatoulaye writes, “premières pionnières de la promotion de la femme africaine, nous étions peu nombreuses. Des hommes nous taxaient d’écervelés. D’autres nous désignaient comme des diablesses. Mais beaucoup voulaient nous posséder” (36, “Being the first pioneers of the promotion of African women, there were very few of us. Men would call us scatterbrained. Others labelled us devils. But many wanted to possess us,” 15). While the school made women like Ramatoulaye exceedingly attractive to men, it also made them less accessible to those who continue to view women as objects and transgressors. This attitude was particularly virulent among educated men, including one or two of the men the author, Mariama Bâ, married and divorced: Nous étions à une période critique de la société africaine. Les frontières dessinées autrefois étaient déplacées. Tout craquait imperceptiblement certes, mais tout craquait. Une poignée de femmes commençait à sortir de l’ombre à la conquête de leur dignité. . . . Comme toute nouveauté notre promotion suscitait



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beaucoup de critiques malveillantes. Elle avait ses détracteurs, ce qui était assez surprenant, surtout dans les rangs des intellectuels. (Ndiaye 2007, 47–48) We were at a critical juncture in African society. The boundaries drawn in the past were being shifted. Everything was coming apart, even if not noticeable at first. A handful of women were beginning to emerge from the shadows in pursuit of their dignity. . . . Like any novelty, our graduating class attracted a lot of malicious criticism. It had its detractors, which was quite surprising, especially among intellectuals.

To be sure, men are not the only ones upset by the audacity of the “évoluées.” As we have seen in the case of Binta Madiallo in Bebey’s novel, women can be among the most vehement critics of the transgression occasioned by the school. We see Binta Madiallo’s equivalent in Tante Nabou, Mawdo’s mother in Une si longue lettre, with the difference that Tante Nabou, like Aoua Kéita’s mother-in-law, directs her ire specifically at another woman. Tante Nabou has the most creative response to the problem of transgression wrought by colonial education. Like the Grande Royale’s proposed use of the colonizer’s education to eventually get back at the colonizer while preserving her aristocratic hegemony, Tante Nabou accepts Western education but bends it to her desire to reclaim her right over her son. In the education of her niece, la petite Nabou, we see the battle of two similar yet competing visions of education and the life it is supposed to guide. Her son’s marriage to Aïssatou becomes the catalyst for Tante Nabou’s mission. A descendant of the early twentieth century King of the Sine-Saloum region, Bour-Sine, Mawdo’s mother lived in the past and refused to accept the present and its difference (55). If the urban Dakar represents the triumph of colonial modernity as well as the transgression and illegitimacy that came with it, Tante Nabou’s ancestral home of Diakhao in the Sine Saloum remains the bastion of her ancestral patriarchal heritage. To execute her conquest of colonial education which has taken her princely son away from her into the hands of the daughter of a blacksmith, she has to return to her source for revitalization (58). Her journey to Diakhao, like Fama’s to Horodougou, is literally a journey backward. During this trip, she acquires her niece and namesake, who becomes her secret weapon, using the unsuspecting girl as the vehicle to perpetuate herself and the traditions she clings on to: “Je vieillis. Je ferai de cette enfant une autre moi-même” (60, “I am growing old. I will make of this child another me,” 29). Acknowledging that times have indeed changed, and to make little Nabou more attractive to her French-educated son, Mawdo’s mother tolerates a compromise in her plan by allowing her niece to attend the French school. But

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in doing so, she does two things to manipulate and dilute the effect of that education on little Nabou. First, she has her namesake choose midwifery as her specialization. Secondly and more importantly, she patiently and obstinately indoctrinates the girl through oral tradition. Ultimately, “l’empreinte de l’école n’avait pas été forte en la petite Nabou, précédée et dominée par la force de caractère de Tante Nabou qui, dans sa rage de vengeance, n’avait rien laissé au hazard dans l’éducation qu’elle avait donnée à sa niece” (90, “School had not left a strong mark on young Nabou, preceded and dominated as it was by the strength of character of Aunty Nabou, who, in her rage for vengeance, had left nothing to chance in the education she gave her niece,” 49). She teaches her how to make delicious sauces, how to iron and use the pestle, while indoctrinating the girl in the belief that “la qualité première de la femme est la docilité” (61, “the first quality in a woman is docility,” 30). Tante Nabou’s insistence, combined with the appeal of the lessons she dispenses to her niece via the oral tradition, does not leave the little Nabou indifferent. In addition to this practical lessons, Tante Nabou constantly reminds her niece of her royal origin. Nabou naturally grows up to become the woman her aunt wants her to be for her son, little Nabou’s cousin. Tradition Dies Hard As we have seen in previous chapters, one of the expected consequences of colonial education was the discreditating and abandonment of the old social structures based on caste. We see this in almost all of the texts examined in this book. Malic’s excoriation of that system is particularly significant. But as we have already seen, especially when it comes to caste differentiation, the old traditions die hard. Even the most Western-educated men like Mawdo cannot resist the siren call of the “féroces lois antiques” (63, “fierce ardour of antiquated laws,” 31). Thus, in succumbing to his own base desires (“la petite Nabou était si tentante,” 63 “Young Nabou was so tempting,” 31) and the mother’s stranglehold on the child-man, he squanders the moral and material capital built over the years with Aïssatou, as well as the investment France’s “civilizing mission” made in him. Aïssatou and her four boys become the price to pay for Mawdo’s reconciliation with his unforgiving and unforgetting mother and the past she is unwilling to bury. After Aïssatou’s departure, Mawdo’s life is turned upside down. Used to living in tranquility and marital bliss, knowing exactly where things were (his socks, for example), Mawdo now finds himself in a house he no longer recognizes and with a woman (la petite Nabou) whom he sees as a mere object for the satisfaction of his base desires and his mother’s selfish wishes. He laments: “je suis déboussolé . . . Ma maison est une banlieue de Diakhao. Impossible de m’y reposer. Tout y est sale. La petite Nabou donne mes denrés



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et vêtements aux visiteurs” (69, “I am completely disoriented. . . . My house is a suburb of Diakhao. I find it impossible to get any rest there. Everything there is dirty. Young Nabou gives my food and my clothes away to visitors,” 34). Yet, Tante Nabou’s victory is a Pyrrhic one. Ultimately, what we see in Une si longue lettre is not only the failure of colonial education to dislodge entrenched traditions, but also the critique of an inward-looking society unwilling to make room for salutary supplements from outside and recognize the autonomy of the individual, especially the woman. Even Mariama Bâ herself laments her own inability to effectively fight the system, kicking instead the proverbial can down the road, hoping that her children’s generation will inherit a less intransigent system they can then dismantle. In an interview given to Amina, when asked if she would allow her daughter to marry someone from a lower caste, Bâ replies that even though she is against caste-sanctioned discrimination, she admits her inability to stand up against her family for fear that they will never forgive her: “Il y a la force du sang, la force des liens familiaux. Je suis obligée de me plier aux exigences du groupe” (“Confronted with the power of blood and family ties, I have no option but to comply with the exigencies of the collective,” 12–14). Every society has experienced, at some point in its history, in one form or another, the situation depicted in the texts we have examined here. Bokar N’Diaye describes this, referring to the West African situation, as the transformation from “l’état statique à l’état dynamique” (“from the state of stagnation to that of dynamism,” 106). At the core of the tensions engendered by shifts in power relations is always the question of which members of any given society should have access to power and privilege at any given time in that society’s history. Moreover, when the shift happens, or threatens to, the “haves” are the ones most likely interested in the reification of social separateness and the accompanying benefits. What colonial education did in Africa, and in other caste-based societies, is destroy or weaken long-established essentialist notions of sameness, difference, and belonging, which seek to permanently make one group superior and others inferior, favoring instead the idea that one can be socialized into a particular caste or class if certain criteria are met. If anything, the texts studied here should serve as cautionary tales. The reconciliation we see at the end of Bebey’s novel offers a possible antidote to the dangers inherent in the will to ossify difference and sameness. NOTES 1. Aimé Césaire captures this reality in Discours sur le colonialisme: “Moi, je parle de sociétés vidées d’elles-mêmes, de cultures piétinées, d’institutions minées, de terres confisquées, de religions assassinées, de magnificences artistiques anéanties,

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d’extraordinaires possibilités supprimées” (19–20, “I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out,” 43). 2. For want of an English term capable of capturing the complex connotation of the term “blakoroya,” I will continue to use the African term here. In his novels, Koné uses the notion of blakoroya (the state of being uncircumcised) as a theoretical crutch and framework for talking about the transgression and illegitimacy of the elite in power. Ahmadou Kourouma’s sister notion of “bâtardise,” which, like Koné’s blakoroya, underscores the general disintegration of society under bourgeois hegemony. 3. A version of this chapter was published as “Of bastards, slaves, dogs and other things: discourses of bourgeois transgression and illegitimacy in two francophone sub-Saharan novels,” Dalhousie French Studies/Revue d’études littéraires du Canada atlantique, 116 (Summer 2020): 99–112. 4. Abdoulaye Wade was angry that the government of Macky Sall was prosecuting his son, Karim, for large-scale graft and embezzlement of state funds. 5. According to an investigative report by the French newspaper Le Monde, Macky Sall is in fact of noble stock—“la famille de Macky Sall n’était pas esclave, mais ‘ceedo’ (guerrière), et avait des esclaves” (Macky Sall’s family was not a slave family, but “ceedo” (warriors); they owned slaves)—even if many anecdotal accounts on the ground in Senegal refute this “official” version of Macky Sall’s genealogy. 6. For example, over the past decade or so, American politics, as well as race and class relations, have been marred by discourses of transgression and illegitimacy. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, members of the Tea Party and some mainstream Republicans used expressions like “take our country back.” The rise of Obama—a member of a so-called inferior race—to the highest level of power is for some a transgression. More recently, Donald Trump, winner of the 2016 presidential election and spearhead of the so-called birther movement, managed to bring these fringe sentiments to the mainstream with his divisive rhetoric crystalized in his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” 7. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was arguably a die-hard royalist, a legitimist by another name. He was no fan of King Louis-Philippe (also known as the Roi-bourgeois for his preference of the bourgeoisie over the nobility), who, in the novelist’s view, was not royal enough. Louis-Philippe’s reign over France, 1830–1848, coincided largely with Balzac’s writing of La Comédie humaine. 8. The two main countries mentioned in Les Soleils des indépendances are la Côte d’Ebène and La République de Nikinai, pseudonyms for Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea-Conakry, respectively. The home of the protagonist, Fama, bestrides the two independent countries. This fact points to the artificiality of boundaries set by the colonizer: what used to be Samory Touré’s empire is now Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, parts of Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, among others. 9. “Horodougou,” in Malinké, means land of nobles. 10. The kidnapping of Sundiata Kéita’s griot, Balla Fasseke, by Soumaoro Kanté was a casus belli for Sundiata’s wars against the Sosso king (Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali).



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11. Article 43 of La Charte de Kurukan Fuga or the Mandé Charter specifically addresses this: “Balla Fassèkè Kouyaté est désigné grand chef des cérémonies et médiateur principal du mandéen. Il est autorisé à plaisanter avec toutes les tribus, en priorité avec la famille royale” (“Balla Fasseke is appointed grand master of ceremonies and chief mediator for Mande. He has permission to joke with all groups, especially with the royal family,” 10). 12. Kourouma’s satirical style and his preponderant use of the technique of internal focalization might give the unsuspecting reader the impression that the author shares his protagonist’s point of view. 13. The “Club de Grands” is an old colonial officers’ mess converted into a sumptuous meeting place for government officials and foreign businessmen. It is actually here that government contracts are awarded, and bribes and commissions discussed and distributed (65). In a way, this club is akin to Kourouma’s “sociétés de sorcières.” 14. We see a similar situation in Hampâté Bâ’s autobiography, Amkoullel, enfant peul. When on the first day of school the young Amkoullel protests that he cannot be made to sit in front of the son of the local traditional ruler, the teacher replies caustically: “Ici, il n’y a ni princes ni sujets. Il faut laisser tout cela chez vous, derrière la rivière” (25, “Here there are neither princes nor subjects. You must leave all that at home, on the other side of the river,” 210). The Rubicon, it seems, has been crossed. 15. In his critically acclaimed L’œuvre de François Rabelais, the Russian ethnocritic Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the image of the grotesque in Rabelais’s works is like a carnival in which transgression of high and low are privileged. He also claims that the image has its source in popular culture. 16. This is a situation the Grande Royale in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë wishes to avoid when she urges her fellow aristocrats to send their own sons to the White man’s school first before sending anyone else there (37). 17. Unlike the French, the British mostly practiced the system of Indirect Rule in their colonies. The policy ensured local chiefs maintain a certain degree of their power of governance over their own people. 18. The primacy of Western education, a vestige of colonization, cannot be underestimated. One cannot be a head of state anywhere on the continent (or occupy a position of low or high civil function) without at least a modicum of literacy in one of the European languages. In fact, as demonstrated so powerfully in Sembène Ousmane’s film Mandabi, one cannot fully be a citizen in one’s own country without the ability to read and write in a European language. 19. For a more in-depth example of the importance of circumcision in West Africa, see Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir and Massa Makan Diabaté’s Comme une piqûre de guêpe. 20. “Blakorodougou” means “town of the uncircumcised.” 21. In fact, the reader never gets to see the real Blakorodougou in Traites. We only get glimpses of the city thanks to Tièfi and Lassinan’s references to it. 22. Binta Madiallo is doubly different from Fama. First, she is financially independent, having inherited her husband’s wealth. Second, her son is an important government minister, and the best friend of the prime minister. Fama has none of these advantages.

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23. Fama is said to have been born “dans l’or, le manger, l’honneur et les femmes! Eduqué pour préférer l’or à l’or, pour choisir le manger parmi d’autres, et coucher sa favorite parmi cent épouses! (in gold, food, honor and women! Raised to prefer gold to gold, to choose among different types of food, and to bed his favorite among a hundred wives!”). Fama’s main concern has always been to retrieve this lost life of luxury. 24. Fama is punished for having failed to divulge to the authorities his dream of a coup d’état (173). 25. Opponents translate his refusal even in the light of Binta’s behavior as the unequivocal sign of the unholy pact between them (the prime minister and the finance minister) to steal the country’s money. 26. It is interesting to note how, even in this bridge symbolism, Bebey, in a typical Bakhtinian fashion, subverts the traditional binary hierarchy of high and low. The low assumes the privileged space, the high becomes the underdog. In this symbolic transgression we see already the real transgression to be performed by the bourgeoisie. 27. Aoua Kéita is a candidate for parliament in this election, and she will go on to be elected as the first woman parliamentarian of a former French African colony. 28. Aoua is punished here for obeying her mother, just as Amkoullel was sent to far-off Haute-Volta for obeying his own mother.

Chapter 5

The Colonial School and the Emergence of New Human Types‌‌‌

Much has been said of the impact of Africa’s encounter with the West, specifically in regards to the tension it created between the individual and their traditional African society and values. We have seen in chapter 4 a specific way colonial education altered the sociocultural landscape in Africa. It is inconceivable to think that the individual would be spared in the tsunami of social change wrought by the school. Indeed, it is a cumulation of individual changes that produced the supra-individual transformations discussed in the previous chapter. The tectonic shift colonization created in African societies played out first at the individual level. The educational engineering the school represented engendered a gallery of new human types easily identifiable in African literature and in real life. These include mimic men, misfits and half-breeds, rebels, marionettes, arrivistes, and those we can call twofaced gods. These are all individuals who have exited their so-called original African culture but have not gained full entrance into the European universe. In this chapter, we shall examine examples of these new individuals in Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Amkoullel, l’enfant peul and L’Étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète africain, Aké Loba’s Les fils de Kouretcha; Bernard Binlin Dadié’s Monsieur Thôgô-gnini; and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë, with the bulk of the chapter dedicated to the arriviste as exemplified in Monsieur Thôgô-gnini. In the opening paragraph of Amkoullel, Amadou Hampâté Bâ highlights the importance of lineage, ancestors, history, and the individual’s connection to these three components of their life: “L’individu est inséparable de sa lignée, qui continue de vivre à travers lui et dont il n’est que le prolongement. C’est pourquoi, lorsqu’on veut honorer quelqu’un, on le salue en lançant plusieurs fois non pas son nom personnel . . . mais le nom de son clan: ‘Bâ! Bâ!’ ou ‘Diallo! Diallo!’ ou ‘Cissé! Cissé!’ car ce n’est pas un individu isolé que l’on salue, mais à travers lui, toute la lignée de ses ancêtres” (17, “an individual cannot 157

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be separate from his lineage, for he is merely an extension of those who continue to live on through him. This is why, when one wishes to honor someone, that person is greeted by calling out his clan name, for instance, ‘Bâ! Bâ!,’ or ‘Diallo! Diallo!,’ or ‘Cissé, Cissé!,’ rather than his personal name . . . , for it is not just one isolated individual who is being greeted but, through him, his entire ancestral line,” 11). By so doing, Hampâté Bâ shows that it is unthinkable of him to tell his life story, a life significantly marked from childhood on by colonial domination, without anchoring it in his family and communal history and relationships. The choice on Hampâté Bâ’s part to open his autobiography thusly is a conscious one, which serves also as commentary on colonization’s will to change the African individual, to remove them as far away from their African self as possible. It is also indicative of the African’s more or less successful resistance to deculturation—or, at the very least, their awareness of their distinctive Africanness. While the novel’s incipit extols and encourages the resilience of African praxis, toward the end of Amkoullel, after spending years in the French school, Hampâté Bâ reminds us of the difficulty of staying anchored in one’s cultural and family heritage in the face of relentless Western efforts at depersonalization of the colonized, an effort headlined by the colonial school and its practices. The goal of colonial education was simply to hollow Africans out and then fill them back up with something else. Given the persistent attack of the school, Hampâté Bâ acknowledes the impossibility to remain intact: “nous vider de nous-mêmes pour nous emplir des manières d’être, d’agir et de penser du colonisateur. . . . On ne peut dire que, dans notre cas, cette politique ait échouée” (387, “Empty us of ourselves and fill us with the colonizer’s way of being, acting, and thinking. . . . In our case, it cannot be said that this policy failed,” 316). The African, no matter how resilient, would be marked in one way or another by the school and other colonial projects, even if some like Hampâté Bâ may have escaped the most insidious effects of the colonialist siren call (as evident in his lifetime work preserving West African cultural heritage), many colonized Africans were not as fortunate or resilient. In making his case for “education collective” (mass schooling and rural education), AOF Governor-General Jules Brévié lambasted the previous educational policy of assimilation, which, in his estimation, focused too much on the individual by trying to make Frenchmen out of a small group of Africans. He characterized this kind of education as misguided since it was causing the disintegration of organic family and ethnic ties in African societies through the creation of what he labeled as “poussière d’individus” (unwholesome individuals xvi). According to him, these misfits in their own land “are the products of an excessively hasty assimilation. They are ‘déracinés’ who have broken away from their milieu and who have been unable to establish



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themselves in ours, and who, suffering from this isolation, in which they do not have any moral support, any consolation, are destined to play these ridiculous or harmful roles” (Brévié, Islamisme contre naturisme, 301).1 Despite the real intention behind it, this assessment of the negative impact of colonial education by Brévié is quite accurate. His concern is that this shift in values will prove harmful for the colonial enterprise since these half-baked Africans could demand more from the colonizer and would be less malleable. MIMIC MEN One of the major effects of colonial education on the elite it created was the numbing of the desire for critical thinking and innovation concurrent with, or subsequent to, the loss of agency. “A une certaine époque, la dépersonnalisation du ‘sujet français’ dûment scolarisé et instruit était telle, en effet, qu’il ne demandait plus qu’une chose: ‘devenir la copie conforme du colonisateur au point d’adopter son costume, sa cuisine, souvent sa religion et parfois même ses tics’” (Amkoullel . . . , 387–88 “There was a time when the depersonalization of the ‘French subject,’ duly educated and instructed, was such that, in fact, he wanted only one thing: to become the exact copy of the colonizer to the point of adopting his clothing, his cuisine, often his religion, and sometimes even his tics!,” 316). Colonial contact induced in many colonized a feeling of inferiority vis-à-vis the White man, and a resultant condition of self-loathing and self-degradation.2 Such a complex was usually demonstrated in the desire on the part of the colonized to be like the colonizer. This tendency is exhibited by both the “évolués” and the masses, and its effects are more evident in the realm of materialism. Ultimately, the degree and quality of imitation are determined by proximity to the colonizer. By virtue of their access or closeness to the White masters and a greater understanding of the colonizers’ world, “évolués” tend to be more prone to copying the ways of the White man than is the general population. Talking about the benefits that could accrue to the colonized through close proximity to the White man, whether in appearance or in reality, Hampâté Bâ notes, “il suffisait, en ce temps-là, de porter un costume ou une coiffure d’importation européenne pour être pris pour un agent de l’administration coloniale ayant le droit de manger, de boire et de se loger à merci chez l’habitant” (Amkoullel . . . , 308 “In those days, it sufficed to be wearing an imported European suit or hat to be taken for an agent of the colonial administration who would then have the right to eat, drink, and sleep at will in people’s homes,” 251). Mimicry, which Homi Bhabha calls an “ironic compromise” (126), is an inevitability in the colonial context. The colonized do not always imitate because they are convinced it is the morally correct thing to do. In fact, some seriously detest

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the attitudes they mimic. Mimicry can be either imitation (in the sense of respect or reverence for the mimicked), imitation with the intent to surpass, or mockery wherein the colonized performs assimilation for the gullible colonizer. The desire to be or to appear like the White man (or their avatars among the “évolués”) is born principally out of the realization that doing so is necessary to ensure their prestige, or simply their survival, in a society that has not only given birth to new forms of violence, but that has also, mainly through the school, produced new forms of social values and appreciation of the individual. What differentiates one “évolué” from another is the degree of mimicry, the intention behind it, and its outcome. Two examples from Amkoullel will suffice to demonstrate the two possibilities of mimicry as performance/mockery and as imitation. During one of his trips back home from school in Djenné, Amkoullel realizes he has only two out of the seven francs needed for the boat ride. He starts wailing. When the boat’s purser, a French man, asks him who he is, where he is going, and why he is unaccompanied, he tells the man he is a student at the regional school. Already impressed by this, the purser asks him what he is learning at school. Cognizant of the French people’s pride in their country, the young boy tells the French man that at school he is taught to read, write, speak, sing, and especially “à aimer la France et à la servir même au prix de ma vie ou de la vie des miens” (321, “to love France and to serve it even if I or the members of my family have to pay a price for it,” 262). To show how much he has inculcated his lessons from the school, Amkoullel joins the man in singing and dancing to “Les trois couleurs” (“The Three Colors”). “Tu es vraiment un bon fils de la France (321, “You truly are indeed a son of France,” 263),” says the man at the end of their performance. As a reward for the African boy’s demonstration of loyalty to “la France éternelle” (321, “Eternal France,” 263), the old warrant officer allows Amkoullel to travel and eat for free. “Merci mon Blanc” (322, “Oh, thank you, my good White Man!,” 263), Amkoullel responds as if to dispel any lingering doubt there might be about his love for France and the French language. The second example involves a native teacher and headmaster at Amadou’s regional school in Djenné, M. Baba Kéita. If little Amkoullel’s mimicry is done as a deliberate performance for an immediate reward, his teacher’s mimicry is an unequivocal rejection of his Africanness. Hampâté Bâ describes him as “le modèle même du grand ‘Blanc-Noir.’ Constamment habillé à l’européenne” (281, “the very model of the great ‘White-Black.’ Always dressed in European clothes,” 230). This description of the sartorial preference of Baba Kéita reminds us of Europeanized Africans encountered quite frequently in African literature of the 1950s–1970s. Camara Laye’s uncle, Mamadou, in L’enfant noir (1995) is a good example. According to Laye, his uncle is a devout Muslim whose observance of the faith was



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without “défaillance” (173). A graduate of the École Normale de Gorée, Uncle Mamadou “ne portait de vêtements européens que pour se rendre à son travail; sitôt rentré, il se déshabillait, passait un boubou qu’il exigeait immaculé et disait ses prières” (“A graduate of the École Normale at Gorée, Uncle Mamdou wore European clothes only at the office. Once home, he removed these clothes, put on his immaculate boubou and performed his prayers,” 173). Unlike Uncle Mamadou, however, Baba Kéita is an example of the thoroughly colonized African who wants nothing to do with his African way of life. Hampâté Bâ reiterates this fact when he writes that Kéita “avait épousé une métisse ‘père blanc-mère noire’ à la peau claire et aux longs cheveux lisses” (281, “had married a mixed ‘White father–Black mother’ woman with light-colored skin and long, straight hair,” 230). By providing such specific details about Kéita’s wife, focusing on the length and texture of the métisse woman’s hair, one is driven to suspect that Kéita married this woman precisely because she is half-White, which is the closest he can legally get to marrying a White woman. To further distance himself from his people, Kéita and his wife “vivaient enfermés chez eux à la manière des toubabs et se nourrissaient des mets européens qu’ils dégustaient assis devant une table, à l’aide de couverts de métal” (281, “lived closed inside their home in the toubab manner, consuming European dishes with metal utensils,” 230). Hampâté Bâ concludes his description of Keita’s mimicry in a rather comical fashion: “M. Baba Kéita poussait le raffinement—pour nous le plus haut comique!—jusqu’à se moucher dans un morceau de toile dans lequel il enfermait soigneusement ses excretions avant de les enfouir, sans doute pour ne pas les perdre, au plus profonde de sa poche” (281–82, “Mr. Baba Keïta carried his refinement—which we found extremely comical—to the point of blowing his nose into a piece of cloth, where he carefully enfolded his excretions before stowing the cloth into the deepest part of his pocket, apparently so as not to lose them,” 230). Ironically, this man who does everything to be a European, to be taken seriously by Europeans, is eventually replaced, despite his manifest academic credentials, with a European who becomes the new school headmaster. Evidently, playing the European as a Black man can only get one so far. It is specifically individuals such as Baba Kéita whom Frantz Fanon targets when he writes “le colonisé rêve toujours à s’installer à la place du colon. Non pas de devenir un colon, mais de se substituer au colon” (Les damnés de la terre, 83, “the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler—not of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler,” 51). If the “évolué” covets the life of the colonizer, the unschooled masses look at the “évolués” as their paragon of success in the new dispensation. Frantz Fanon underscores the ambivalence inherent to mimicry: “Ce monde hostile, pesant, agressif, parce que repoussant de toutes ses aspérités

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la masse colonisée, représente non pas l’enfer duquel on voudrait s’éloigner le plus rapidement possible mais un paradis à portée de main que protègent de terribles molosses” (83, “This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs,” 51–52). Given that during the colonial period the “évolués” were closer to the colonizer than was any other group of natives, it is logical to state that the “paradis à portée de main” to which Fanon alludes was accessible first to that class; hence the characterization of the postindependent African bourgeoisie by some of its critics, Fanon being one of the most vehement, as “l’oiseau noir occupant le nid abandonné par l’oiseau blanc” (“the black bird taking over the nest vacated by the white bird,” “Sembène Ousmane et l’esthétique du roman négro-africain,” 102). MISFITS AND HALF-BREEDS In Burning at Europe’s Borders, Isabella Alexander-Nathani argues that concepts of liminality can be “applied to make sense of individual, political, and cultural upheaval” (213). The colonial school is a liminal space that created a long moment of upheaval for individual and society alike. The education dispensed in that space is like a pilgrimage or the rites de passage undertaken by the colonized student, who becomes perforce a pilgrim. “During a ritual’s liminal stage,” writes Alexander-Nathani, “participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous self and their new self, and liminality can be used to describe the quality of disorientation that occurs in that middle stage” (213). How well the individual navigates or is oriented in this precarious stage of their journey is determined by a multitude of factors, including school authorities, the curriculum, the personality of the student, the familial and societal background of the student, and so on. To be sure, no matter the outcome of the pilgrimage-education, the pilgrim-student comes out at the end with a new identity. Indeed, the pilgrimage itself, from the moment of separation to that of incorporation, is already change. Whatever the case, there is no guarantee that the pilgrim will make it past the liminal stage. As we have discussed in chapter 2, Samba Diallo is a character in limbo. As far as he is concerned, the preliminal has been exited, the post-liminal will never be entered, and the present (the liminal) feels like a jacket that does not fit at all. Samba, a victim of two powerful interruptions in his life (at the Koranic school and at the colonial school) ends up a half-breed, trapped in suspended metamorphosis. Samba becomes impervious to stimuli coming from any of the realities he has inhabited. Rightly so, he compares himself to



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a broken musical instrument that can no longer respond to the musician: “Je suis comme un balafon crevé, comme un instrument de musique mort. J’ai l’impression que plus rien ne me touche” (163, “I am like a broken balafon, like a musical instrument that has gone dead. I have the impression that nothing touches me anymore,” 150). In this liminal space, he is crossing into the cosmopolis desired by his father or the Western-dominated reality preferred by the Grande Royale, with no way of going back to the teacher’s God-land, which he never fully inhabited in the first place. THE MARIONETTE Colonial education was intended as an instrument of assimilation. My use of the term “assimilation” here is inspired by the connotation Dadié attaches to it in Climbié (214), and to the actual practices of the colonizer. Assimilation here does not intend the raising of the native to the level of the European (or the desire thereof); the colonizer, more than anyone else, understood the impossibility of realizing such an objective. Given colonialism’s practice of epistemic and somatic violence, it was a system based on enforced difference. Assimilation was simply part of a reality of exploitation that undergirded efforts to depersonalize the colonized, to transpose them from their presumed state of cultural vacuity into a realm of cultural anonymity under the surveillance of the colonizer. This was part of the fabrication or invention process that gave birth to the African bourgeoisie. Assimilation means conformism to the rules governing the unequal power relationship of colonizer-colonized. It also means the resultant mimicry by the colonized of the colonizer’s behavior. Assimilation as an endpoint signifies complete submission to the whims and caprices of the colonizer. With its guiding policy of training the African for a specific purpose, the colonial school can thus be construed as an instrument of violence. Naturally, much like a factory, the colonial school can only produce human automatons, otherwise known as assimilated elite described by Hampâté Bâ as “un exécuteur inconditionnel des œuvres pénibles du grand chef blanc” (Amkoullel, 254, “the unconditional executor of the unpleasant work commanded by the Great White Chief,” 207) where assimilation means doing the bidding of the master. A typical example of the colonial marionette is Dam’no in Aké Loba’s Les fils de Kouretcha. Very little information is provided in the novel about Dam’no’s life prior to his de-bourgeoisification and descent into oblivion in the postindependent political era. Nonetheless, the reader is able to piece together bits and pieces to make important inferences and evaluations about his past and personality. When the novel opens, Dam’no is presented as a pale shadow of himself, compared to his halcyon days in the colonial period. On the morning of a July

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14 celebration, he is recognizable in the midst of the large crowd only by his strange outfit: Celui qui passait dans les hardes pharamineuses avait été pendant trente ans l’homme le plus en vue, le plus envié de tout le pays. . . . commis expéditionnaire de première classe, le bras droit du Commandant blanc d’alors, avait pu tout s’y permettre. Il n’aurait pas été impossible à Dam’no par exemple de faire bastonner une agglomération entière ou d’en autoriser le siège en vue d’un envoi en masse aux travaux forcés. (Loba 1970, 10–11) That man walking in outrageous rags had been for thirty years the most prominent man and the most envied in the entire land. As a first-class expeditionary clerk and the right-hand man of the then White commandant, he could do anything he wanted. It would not have been impossible for Dam’no, for example, to have an entire town flogged or to authorize its siege in view of rounding up its inhabitants for forced labor.

In addition to having this power over people, Dam’no also succeeds in building an impressive capital and attracts the envy and admiration of everyone. In his business dealings, he has no qualms about exploiting the already dispossessed masses, buying produce from local farmers at five times below the official price (171). But probably his most significant achievement is the building of a school for the boys of his tribe; a rare exploit in the colonial period (11). However, given his complete ignorance of the notions of democracy and accountability, he is convinced that his position of authority gives him the right to do whatever he wants. Angry at the fact that he has been dismissed as chairman of his school board because he refuses to give account of its finances, he wonders, “Avait-il des comptes à rendre de sa gestion d’un bien public né de la source de son intelligence?” (“Did he have to give account of his management of a public good he created alone?” 71). All of Dam’no’s achievements are dubiously won. For example, like his White bosses at the time, he uses the school only to achieve personal goals. Specifically, he plans to use the school as a stepping stone to the chieftaincy of his tribe, a position he believes will allow him to 1) preserve the colonial regime till his death and 2) gain legitimacy in the eyes of the local population that has not forgotten his origin as a slave (Les fils de Kouretcha, 12). THE ARRIVISTE One degree above an assimilated elite such as Dam’no in sycophancy and selfishness is the arriviste. Probably the most frequently encountered



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character in African anti-bourgeois literature, the coming into being of the bourgeois arriviste in sub-Saharan Africa can be traced to the evolution of the economic and political relationships between Africa and Western Europe dating back to the days of the Transatlantic slave trade. By 1815, all the major slave-trading nations of the western hemisphere had passed some kind of law or other prohibiting their subjects and citizens from dealing in slaves. Although for a long time this move did little to stop the trade in slaves from Africa,3 it ushered in an era of what the capitalist nations referred to as “legitimate” commerce (Munro, 42). In the new system, Africans would cease to be mere commodities of European businessmen, becoming partners instead. Bernard Dadié’s play Monsieur Thôgô-gnini effectively depicts this new status quo. His use of hyperbole and Brechtian distancing4 helps create a certain distance between the spectator and what is unfolding on stage. For example, Dadié’s play is set in mid-nineteenth-century Africa, while it is obvious to the reader that he is satirizing postindependence Africa. In an interview given to Bernard Magnier, Dadié reveals that one of his reasons for using the device was to avoid censorship (Hommages et études, 398). The play’s eponymous protagonist is the archetypal arriviste possessing the classic vices and foibles of the new human type on the continent. Dadié concentrates in Thôgô-gnini the farcical social foibles of M. Jourdain in Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme and the burlesque, but equally ruthless, practices of Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu in Ubu roi. I will analyze Dadié’s play in the light of its presentation of money and other trappings of capitalism as the foundation and supporting pillars of the nascent capitalist class in Africa, as well as the very thing on which the strength and progression of the play depend, and above all, as the bastion on which the likes of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini depend for preeminence in a society portrayed to be increasingly deprived of its traditional moral values. For comparative purposes, I shall make brief references to Mhoi-Ceul, another satirical play on arrivisme by Dadié. The opening scene of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini is set on the West African coast around the mid-nineteenth century, with the return of “certains Africains, dont M. Thôgô-gnini, sur le continent” (9).5 We are also told that “un traitant blanc et un acolyte entrent suivis de deux porteurs de cantines” (“enter a White trader and his associate, followed by two porters carrying metal trunks,” 9). After the presentation of gifts and formal exchange of greetings, the White trader reveals the real reason for his visit: “mon roi m’a chargé d’une autre mission, celle d’établir entre nos royaumes, des liens de commerce. Nous avons besoin d’huile de palme. Mon roi serait très heureux de s’en procurer exclusivement chez vous” (“my king has entrusted me with another mission, that of establishing trade links between our kingdoms. We need palm oil. My king would be very happy to get it exclusively from you,”

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15). A few exchanges later, he tells the Africans to plant lots of palm trees and peanuts because Europe is in need of them (18–19). The rapid industrialization of Europe created the need for more raw materials for its growing number of factories. Many of these raw materials could only be cultivated in non-European climates. Thanks to its agricultural potential, West Africa, once known and used mainly for its human “raw material,” became the new supplier of cash crops and other raw materials for European factories.6 However, producing in large scale and in an organized fashion for export required serious human labor. A new form of slavery was introduced in Africa. But this time, it is not the European who is the direct slave master, but Africans themselves. Dadié seems to promote this perspective in Monsieur Thôgô-gnini. His use of the word “traitant”—which connotes, among other things, slave trader, instead of “commercant” or “marchand”—is revealing. He makes at least one more indirect reference to slavery in the use of the word “badine” (21), or walking cane, but which can also mean switch of the type used by slave drivers. The most explicit allusion to slavery is made when N’Zékou, Thôgô-gnini’s nemesis, calls the latter “negrier” (61), which means slaver, slave driver, or slave ship. To satisfy the needs of Europe, as well as their own private desires, self-seeking Africans such as Thôgô-gnini use their people as indentured laborers for the production of cash crops whose prices are set by the European buyer. Thus, the so-called legitimate commerce announced as the replacement and antidote to slavery served only as a smoke screen for continued widespread exploitation. Paradoxically, therefore, the Industrial Revolution, which contributed to the decline in the use of slave labor in Europe, encouraged its reemergence in new and insidious forms on African soil. The introduction of Western capitalist practices in Africa inevitably precipitated the creation of new socioeconomic realities on the continent. Capitalism engendered new forms of human interactions that would transform, in quite radical ways, African societies and peoples. The process of individuation it put in place gradually eroded the practice of community as an organic consortium of more or less likeminded individuals. Instead of thinking first as a member of a group, individuals started thinking increasingly of themselves in antagonism to others. In Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, individualism is presented as a coherent ideology of arrivisme, its main proponent being the eponymous antihero himself. The tenets of this ideology include love only for the self and promotion of the self at the expense of others. Money and power are its ultimate values, the yardstick by which everything else, including the worth of the individual, is measured and evaluated. The arriviste loudly promotes his ideology with the aim of asserting his control over all, and more importantly, using its spread and popularity as justification for his own destructive individualism.



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INDIVIDUALISM AS AN IDEOLOGY OF ARRIVISME Thôgô-gnini’s motto is “chacun pour soi” (everyman for himself). After officially launching the ideology in the second tableau, Thôgô-gnini continues to promote and practice it enthusiastically in the rest of the play. The phrase is spoken only in Tableaux III and IV. These two together constitute the center of the play comprising six tableaux. The first tableau, “Le village” (The Village), depicts very briefly an African society before the arrival of post-slavery European businessmen and their introduction of money into it. The second tableau, “La palmeraie” (The Palm Grove), the shortest in the play, depicts a plantation representative of a society consumed by the new principles of low wage labor. In the third tableau, “Le rêve” (The Dream), the arriviste sets the stage for the flowering of the new ideology by eliminating all those entities that may erect barriers to his ascendance. That the phrase “chacun pour soi” is mentioned for the first time at the end of this liminal tableau is of special significance; it serves as a requiem to the values that once guaranteed social cohesion in the precapitalist society. Tableau IV, appropriately entitled “La rue” (The Street), is basically the theoretical elaboration and popularization of the ideology, the street becoming the place where the ideology is to be tested. Here alone the ideological motto is mentioned seven times, compared to only once in the previous tableau. Not once is the phrase mentioned again in the play.7 In Tableau V, we see Monsieur Thôgô-gnini actually practicing his motto. It becomes clear here that the wealth he has amassed over thirty years (57) is the result of the pauperization of others. For example, when his nemesis, N’zekou, comes to claim a two-year-old debt, Thôgô-gnini feigns forgetfulness and cries foul. When N’zékou shows him the invoice, he snatches and shreds the inculpating evidence. He reveals further that N’zékou is not his first and only victim: “A toi j’ai pris vingt fûts d’huile, à d’autres cinquante, cent, je dis bien cent fûts d’huile qui ne seront jamais payés” (“From you I took twenty barrels of oil, from others fifty, hundred. That is a hundred barrels of oil that will never be paid for,” 58). The last tableau, “Le tribunal” (The Trial), depicts the trial and conviction of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini. Monsieur Thôgô-gnini is not a completely flat character. Indeed, when he enters the scene in Tableau II and notices that his soon-to-be European business partner is pressing his countrymen to work harder and faster in the new plantations, he asks him angrily: “Vous vous croyez en pays conquis?” (“Do you think you are in a conquered territory?” 22), reminding the man that things have changed. However, the moment he realizes money and power could accrue to him personally, Thôgô-gnini ceases to be critical of the intentions of the Europeans. He decides to become practically a slave

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driver and does not stop repeating the words “argent,” “honneurs,” and “vite” (23) after the European. At the end of Tableau III, after the “être étrange” has eliminated all traditional values, including love, the first statement Monsieur Thôgô-gnini utters when he wakes up includes “désormais, c’est chacun pour soi!” (“from now on, it is every man for himself,” 27), thus officially launching the ideology. It is from this point on that Thôgô-gnini becomes the flat, one-dimensional character the playwright will exploit to make his case against capitalist individualism in general and the African bourgeois arriviste in particular. By the time the fourth tableau opens, individualism has become a dominating discourse. The reader has the impression that the “fureur de vivre” (“rage to live,” 34), like gangrene, has spread to other parts of the society, effectively giving the ideology the aura of a dominant discourse,8 with buy-in from others. When N’zekou laments that on account of the new dispensation everything of human value is falling apart around them, his friend, Bouadi, practically accuses him of being opposed to progress: “C’est un mot d’ordre. Chacun pour soi” (“It is the motto: Every man for himself,” 33), he reiterates. His belief that “sans l’argent, l’honneur n’est qu’une maladie [et] le monde cesserait de tourner” (“without money, honor is nothing but a disease and the world will stop turning,” 33) will eventually lead him to put his friend’s freedom in jeopardy by accepting to testify wrongfully against N’zekou in exchange for money. But Bouadi is certainly not the strongest proponent of the ideology. He is merely a conformist who lives according to Thôgô-gnini’s statement of ideological conformism that “dans une vie d’enfer, on se fait diable” (“do in hell as devils do,” 40). Unlike his friend N’zékou who, though in Thôgô-gnini’s “hell,” refuses to acquire the character traits of the devil, Bouadi is presented as a weak individual. He blames his inability to resist the promise of survival that comes with adherence to Thôgô-gnini’s creed. In Dadié’s Mhoi-Ceul, the eponymous character’s very name sums up the ideology of the self (“moi seul,” or I alone). Newly appointed director of a government department, Mhoi-Ceul labels himself as the anointed one with the mission to clean up the chaos and corruption in the civil service (21). In his religious zeal to rectify the malaise he sees around him, and to assure “le rendement, la productivité, la rentabilité” (“performance, productivity, profitability”), he fails to realize that the people he has come to lead have been vegetating in a fundamentally corrupt system for a long time, ignoring their own interests, concerns, and warnings in the process. On his very first day in the office, he forces two of them to retire. When one of them quotes “les textes,”—that is, the statutes governing workplace conduct—Mhoi-Ceul retorts, “Je suis le maître ici et je fais ici ce qui me plaît. J’ai les pleins pouvoirs” (“I am the boss here and I will do as I please. I have unlimited powers,” 22). He takes a series of steps that show that he has not come to sanitize



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the system, but to help putrefy it further by serving only his ego. When his accountant complains that the expenditure on his personal fantasies is more than the department can afford, and that they run the risk of being audited in the future, he replies, “je suis l’orthodoxie financière” (“I am financial orthodoxy,” 30). When a beautiful young woman by the name of Chérie Beauzieux (“sweetheart Beautiful-Eyes”) enters his office in the guise of looking for a job, Mhoi-Ceul has no qualms in hiring her as his “sécrétaire particulièrement particulière” (“personally personal secretary,” 35). He orders Cendiplaume,9 his accountant—who never stops complaining about his boss’s senseless spending of government money—to hire Beauzieux and place her at the top of the salary and benefits pool. He also orders him to find her a furnished six-bedroom apartment, equipped with a telephone and a car (37). For the kind of individualism promoted by the two Dadian arrivistes to flourish in a society that places serious limitations on behavior that endangers community cohesion, the arriviste will have to first destroy, both within himself and in society, those traditional values that serve as checks and balances to all: namely, commitment to others, love, and concern. The extreme manifestation of this attitude is seen in the physical alienation and elimination of people, including family members and friends. Tableau III of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini provides the most interesting and complex representation of arrivistic iconoclasm. It portrays the transformation of Thôgô-gnini as an individual, but also of the society as a whole. In the tableau, a strange creature—obviously Thôgô-gnini’s alter ego—is seen shooting down a woman, a child, and personifications of loyalty, gratitude, old age, respect for age, tradition, love, and drama. These victims of the arriviste’s self-promotion can be placed into four distinct categories. The first category consists of loyalty, gratitude, and love. Each of these suggests a relationship in which the individual interacts with others socially, culturally, and morally. In this relationship, the role of one’s conscience is pivotal. The strongest expression of these sentiments is love. Just before killing off the personification of love, the strange being proclaims: “Toi! . . . Amour de qui? Amour de quoi? Mot creux. Mot vieux, fini! Non, l’argent, la puissance, les honneurs, voilà le véritable amour” (“You! . . . Whose love? Love of what? Hollow word. Outdated word. It’s over! No, money, power, titles; that’s true love,” 26). For him, love is valueless, something you are required to give. In the world of the arriviste, everything is transactional, so giving without getting something material in return is bad for business. The second category of values eliminated comprises old age, respect for age, and tradition. Here, tradition is the overarching value since it requires respect for old age. Tradition is considered by the arriviste to be an obstacle to self-expansion. The “strange being” refers to it as “poids mort, boulet aux pieds des générations. . . . les obstacles sur la route” (“dead weight, ball

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and chain tied to the feet of generations . . . obstacles on the way,” 25). By destroying tradition, the arriviste is potentially destroying the very foundation on which the society rests, replacing it with his own vision of progress. The third category comprises woman and child. By killing the child, Thôgô-gnini is eliminating what he views as the source of potential competition to his hegemony. In response to the child’s statement that he (the child) is the future, Thôgô-gnini says, “L’avenir! C’est moi l’avenir. C’est moi le présent” (“The future is me. I am the present,” 26). Since the woman traditionally represents the reproductive potential of the present and guarantees the future of society, Thôgô-gnini sees in her the moral and emotional conscience of man: “Femme! Non! Vous n’avez plus de place parmi les hommes. Sourire, caresses, pitié. Non, vous n’êtes plus du temps” (“Woman? You no longer have a place among men. Smiles! Caresses! Pity! None of that! You are outdated,” 26). Such qualities as sympathy, love, and care, generally imputed to the woman, are, for Thôgô-gnini, unnecessary in the new age of unbridled individualism. Drama is in the fourth category all by itself. It can be seen as the epitome of all other traditional values that attract the disdain and hatred of the arriviste. Consequently, its elimination explains, more powerfully than anything else, the desire on the part of the arriviste to do away with all the things he considers to be obstacles on his way to personal aggrandizement. Drama generally denotes conflict. Thus, by killing off the personification of drama, the arriviste is symbolically putting an end to opposition, competition, and diversity, in short, to the conflict necessary and inevitable in any society desirous of making real progress. This act further reveals a desire characteristic of the arriviste to simplify and homogenize everything in and around him. This same tendency has been shown to operate in capitalism: “That very tendency within capitalism to embrace everything within a single, homogenizing system which, by leaving nothing out, can pass itself off as natural” (Humphries, 139). The first verbal expression of this homogenizing will in Thôgô-gnini is seen in a statement he makes just before embarking on his extermination spree in Tableau III. He says, “Je suis tout, je ne suis rien, je suis le passé. Je suis l’avenir . . . J’ai toutes les couleurs. Tout en moi est réuni, uni, mêlé. Les autres, c’est moi, et c’est moi les autres. La cité c’est moi, et c’est moi la cité” (“I am everything; I am nothing; I am the past; I am the future. . . . I have all the colors in me. Everything is together in me, united, mixed. The others are me; I am the others. The citadel is me and I am the citadel,” 25). By wanting to assimilate the very space that accommodates both him and the other, Thôgô-gnini intends to eliminate not only real and potential adversaries, but also the scene of competition or confrontation itself. Secondly, in this chiasmic utterance, in which the conjunction “et” serves simply as



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the reconnecting agent between himself and his ego, Monsieur Thôgô-gnini clearly desires to make himself the center of attention. When the play opens, the king is clearly the center of attention (9). But even before this first tableau ends, the king has been completely up-staged by Monsieur Thôgô-gnini. In a bid to eliminate the moral authority wielded by the physically restrained king, Thôgô-gnini plots to dethrone him (61). He will not be satisfied until everything around him has been unified in him. Financially, he has monopolized all available sectors of moneymaking. He soliloquizes: “Que me reste-il à acquérir. J’ai déjà le monopole du riz, du coton et du tabac, le monopole de l’huile et de la banane, le monopole du gingembre, de l’ivoire et du coprah, le monopole du . . . ” (“What is left for me to acquire? I already have monopoly over rice, cotton, tobacco; monopoly over oil and banana; and monopoly of ginger, ivory, copra. I have monopoly over . . .” 53). There is nothing else to monopolize, except, maybe, the one thing whose monopolization may mean his demise: Thôgô-gnini himself! The iconoclasm in Mhoi-Ceul is not as complex as it is in Monsieur Thôgô-gnini. Mhoi-Ceul’s disregard for traditional values is displayed mainly in his attitude toward friendship. He tells Chérie Beauzieux that friends should be chosen based on what benefits one can get from them. For him, as for Thôgô-gnini, all human relationships should be considered in strictly instrumental terms. When his secretary tells him that a childhood friend of his is on the telephone, Mhoi-Ceul refuses to connect with the caller, dismissing him as one of those deadweights bothering successful people like himself. AT THE ROOT OF THE MATTER: MONEY If individualism as an ideology is the tree that has spread its branches in society, money is at once the root that holds the society in place, the foliage that makes it attractive, and, ironically, the poison that will destroy it. It is the foundation on which rests the new arriviste ideology of “chacun pour soi.” At its creation, money possessed an exchange-value like any other commodity used in barter and other trade systems. However, over time, especially with the maturing of capitalist market systems, it assumed a character and personality all its own. In his introduction to the abridged edition of Marx’s Capital, David McLellan writes, Before the capitalist era people had sold commodities for money in order to buy more commodities. In the capitalist era, instead of selling to buy, people had bought to sell dearer: they had bought commodities with their money in order, by means of those commodities, to increase their money. Thus the medium had itself become the message: money was the supreme representative of social

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power in capitalist society and the only social bond in an increasingly divided and fragmented community. (McLellan 2008, xvii)

What is true of money in capitalist society is also true in faux-capitalist societies, that is, in societies without any viable capitalist system, and whose only claim to being capitalist is that they are marginally plugged into the global capitalist system in which they are mainly low-wage workers, suppliers to industrial nations of their own country’s raw materials, and consumers of processed goods from the West. Money’s value and appeal lie in its universal exchangeability, and its quality as a nonperishable commodity. The possibility to accumulate and hoard it for long periods of time is an attractive one. Besides being synonymous with social power and prestige in any given modern society, it has often been held responsible for the disintegration of societal values. Albeit a human invention, money has assumed a subject status, and, like a deity, it now determines the actions of those who worship it and who have mortgaged their agency to it. In a critique of money originating in Western capitalist practices in Africa, Hampâté Bâ cites a saying by the Fula people: “Celui qui s’attache à ces pièces dénude sa propre âme” (Amkoullel, 255, “He who becomes attached to silver coins strips his own soul naked,” 208). For his part, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney writes that “when capitalism came into contact with the still largely communal African societies, it introduced money relations at the expense of kinship ties” (123). As in Pierre Sammy’s Mongou, money is presented in Dadié’s play as the single most important factor responsible for the moral disintegration of African societies. It is mentioned for the first time in the play in Tableau I. Since money is introduced toward the end of this tableau, the spectator of the play is invited to keep this in mind as they engage subsequent tableaux. The European who broaches the subject at the end of Tableau I does so in a rather circuitous manner. To help his presentation, he chooses a religious theme, the world of spirits and spirituality familiar to his audience: “Je sais que vous croyez en Dieu, aux génies, aux revenants, je sais que vous consultez le sort, bref, vous croyez en Dieu, mais Dieu est loin!” (“I know that you believe in God, in spirits, and in ghosts. I know that you consult fortune-tellers. In short, you believe in God. But God is far away!,” 18). When the village crowd quickly reiterates “Oh! Très loin . . . très loin . . . là-haut, très loin . . . loin!” (“True. Very far away . . . very far away . . . up there, very far away . . . far away,” 18), it becomes clear to the European that he has won at least their attention. He seizes upon this breakthrough to take his message to the next level. Questioning the existence of God, he says: “Je n’en sais rien, même mon roi qui est de droit divin, n’en sait rien. Ce qui est certain, c’est que nous sommes sur terre, qu’il faut sur terre vivre en compagnie d’un dieu visible, tangible, et ce dieu le voici” (“I



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am not sure about that. Even my king, who is of divine authority, is not sure about that. What is certain is that we are on earth, and we must live here and now in the company of a visible and tangible god. Here is the god I am talking about,” 18). As he utters these words, he takes out of his pocket wads of banknotes and shows them to the ogling crowd.10 At this moment, God begins to recede, leaving the space left for money to occupy. Henceforth, any mention in the play of the name of God, as in the expression “chacun pour soi, Dieu pour tous,” smacks of cliché and mockery. In the world of capitalistic arrivisme, god, the earth, the visible, the tangible, and the readily accessible easily replace God, heaven, the invisible, the immaterial, the distant. Not only is the immaterial, the invisible, and the distant replaced by their respective opposites; their endowed qualities are also usurped and expropriated by their replacements. It is but natural then that money, having replaced God and the spirits, should assume their traditional role; money should become the master of man. This religious undertone notwithstanding, it is worth noting that the shift is not exactly from one religion to another; it is rather from religion to fetishism. In “La bourgeoisie chez Marx ou la régence de l’histoire,” Nicolas Grimaldi observes that “la bourgeoisie poursuit fantasmatiquement, à travers ce fétichisme de l’argent, l’obsédant désir de quelque omnipotence et de quelque éternité” (128 [emphasis mine]). The arriviste does not pursue money for its own sake. For him, not only is money a god to be worshipped, it is, above all, a mechanism for self-deification. In other words, money, its original function displaced, becomes the passport to omnipotence, omnipresence, and eternity. In Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, there is a serious attempt by Europeans as well as Africans to justify the preeminence of money. They do so not by establishing money’s moral superiority but by underscoring its practicality and materiality. The tone for the justification of money’s practical superiority is set by the lead European. He says to the marveled Africans, “c’est avec l’argent qu’on bâtit un pays, qu’on tient un pays” (“It is with money that we build a country, that we maintain that country,” 19). He adds immediately, “nous les Blancs, nous avons mauvaise réputation, mais notre exemple est toujours suivi” (“We, White people, have a bad reputation, but our example is always followed by others,” 19). In this statement, one could read the unequivocal suggestion that money and good reputation or high moral standards cannot go hand in hand.11 In order to arrive financially, one must be willing to forgo good reputation. Monsieur Thôgô-gnini takes his cue from this statement by his future business partner when, using architectural imagery, he offers his own view of money. His henchman, Fakron, warns him that money is not everything, reminding him that “il y a aussi l’homme” (“there is also the human,” 39). Monsieur Thôgô-gnini’s reply shows how highly he regards money and how little he thinks of humanity: “L’homme, un pannonceau que l’argent hisse très

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haut dans la considération des autres” (“Man is a signpost that money hoists very high above others,” 39). Since, in M. Thôgô-gnini’s world, money now has the power to elevate the human, it follows logically then that the human has less power, indeed less value, than money. This objectification of human is only a harbinger of their commodification. This is a clear reversal of roles. According to Karl Marx, “commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man” (474). It is true that whatever fetishistic relationship there is between humans and their own invention, humans still have ultimate control. However, in the world of arrivisme, humans can and do become commodities without power of resistance to money, even if temporarily. This scenario is exemplified in the last tableau of Dadié’s play depicting the trial of N’zékou, falsely accused by Thôgô-gnini of attempts on the latter’s life and other violent crimes against society. Monsieur Thôgô-gnini has succeeded in buying the legal system, as well as certain individuals outside of it, including the friend of the accused. When the magistrate asks N’zékou’s friend Bouadi if he is in court to testify against him, Bouadi replies “Pourquoi pas! C’est un métier qui rapporte. . . . C’est le temps de bâtir, le temps de vivre . . . de vivre” (“Why not! It is a job that pays. . . . It is time to build . . . time to live,” 109). He then turns to the magistrate and asks him what he would like him to say. This sets the stage for one of the most farcical moments in the play. Bouadi, like a ventriloquist doll, repeats verbatim whatever the magistrate says:

LE PRESIDENT. C’est un bandit. BOUADI. C’est un bandit. LE PRÉSIDENT. C’est un voleur. BOUADI. C’est un voleur. LE PRÉSIDENT. C’est un assassin. BOUADI. C’est un assassin. LE PRÉSIDENT. Je suis un menteur. BOUADI. Je suis un menteur. (Dadié 1970, 110)



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THE MAGISTRATE. He is a gangster. BOUADI. He is a gangster. THE MAGISTRATE. He is a thief. BOUADI. He is a thief. THE MAGISTRATE. He is an assassin. BOUADI. He is an assassin. THE MAGISTRATE. I am a liar. BOUADI. I am a liar.

All said and done, the play makes it evident that Monsieur Thôgô-gnini remains the cheapest commodity, for, before he could buy others with his money, he had already sacrificed his soul to the altar of the money-god he has helped build. While we do not see a similar theoretical elaboration on the theme of money in Mhoi-Ceul, money still occupies a central place in the play. In fact, in Mhoi-Ceul, Dadié adds another layer of complexity to the discourse about money already elaborated in Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, namely, the connection between money and happiness. Mhoi-Ceul believes that money is the index of success and the passport to happiness, arguing that money is the only guarantor of happiness (55). This kind of thinking leads to its logical conclusion: the young director, so as not to be a “crétin” like the majority of his fellow citizens, does what he deems necessary to make lots of money. His determination and motivation to do this become only stronger when Beauzieux informs him that a certain acquaintance of his has just done for his own girlfriend what should put other civil servants to shame: “Il a payé trois villas à son amie, vingt-cinq millions la villa. . . . Ils ont donné, il y a deux jours, une soirée splendide. Toute la ville en parle. Ils projettent d’aller passer l’hiver en Italie, dans le sud-est de la France, sans parler de leurs villas d’ailleurs” (“He has purchased three villas for his girlfriend, each for twentyfive million. . . . They threw a lavish party two days ago. The whole town is talking about it. They plan to spend the winter in Italy, in the southeast of France. Not to mention their villas elsewhere!,” 56). What is more, this man, Bracoulé, has been in his civil service position for barely six years (56). After this piece of information intended by his girlfriend to push him into action, Mhoi-Ceul eagerly seizes the first opportunity that comes his way to make a fortune. He agrees to enter into a dubious business relationship with a certain

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Centroux Crodures (“hard fangs”) (Serry, 160), supposedly from a Western country, who barges into his office one day with a proposal for a large enterprise of which Mhoi-Ceul will be the “Président Directeur Général” (“Chief Executive Officer”) (68–69). Crodures assures the civil servant that he has nothing to fear and that in less than four years he will become the wealthiest man everyone will talk about (69–70). Enticed by the prospect of making a colossal fortune in record time, Mhoi-Ceul uses up his savings to buy shares in a nonexistent company, leading inevitably to his downfall. THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF THE SIGN Nothing distinguishes the arriviste more than the desire for visibility. The arriviste suffers from what Ossip-Lourié calls “l’exhibitionnisme psychopathologique” (“psychopathological exhibitionism,” 4). For the arriviste, money and power are not a means to an end; they are ends in themselves. In his study of the consumption behavior of the capitalist class, The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen theorizes this phenomenon, noting that “in order to gain and to hold the esteem of men, it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence” (36). Imperatively, the arriviste must thus exercise his power and live a life of ostensible leisure. One way this is done is through what Veblen calls “conspicuous consumption” wherein the arriviste buys commodities not because he needs them, but because he intends to use them to impress his importance and value upon the onlooker. This consumption attitude is tied to the arriviste’s yearning for respectability and consideration in the eyes of the public. The arriviste knows that in a society sold on the value of conspicuous wealth, one’s esteem depends not so much on one’s actual wealth as on how much one flaunts such wealth. According to Veblen, the canon of reputability is at hand and seizes upon such innovations as are, according to its standard, fit to survive. Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit. (Veblen 1899, 74)

The rate of consumption is in equal proportion to the desire for conspicuousness; the greater the need to be seen, the greater the desire to consume. Probably the earliest allusion to this desire on the part of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini to stand out is in Tableau II. When this tableau opens, Thôgôgnini is seen dressed Western style, complete with a panama, baggy shorts,



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walking stick, and a fat cigar (21).12 The significance of this change is evident when the spectator recalls that in Tableau I Thôgô-gnini was introduced “en tenue nationale (in national costume),” without further details in the stage directions. Two other scenes demonstrate his “conspicuous consumption.” In Tableau IV, while everyone else is ordering beer at a public bar, Thôgô-gnini comes in with his acolyte, Fakron, and orders gin on three different occasions, loud enough for all present to hear. And later, in Tableau V, as he sits in his bedroom enjoying Chinese tea with a prostitute, Thôgô-gnini responds to the prostitute’s admiration by boasting that he is the only one on the African continent that has the privilege of receiving tea from China. This penchant for exhibitionism could be analyzed within the framework of a politics and economics of the sign. In the world of the arriviste, the sign is most commonly wielded as an economic and/or political instrument. The arriviste uses it mainly to advertise, and subsequently sell, his “image” to the world. As a general principle, the economy of the sign requires that the human become a sign visibly enhanced by money and power. The arriviste uses external objects as signposts for his ideology and for self-inscription. For example, in front of Thôgô-gnini’s office, there is a large, bright red sign that reads “MONSIEUR THÔGÔ-GNINI/AGENT D’AFFAIRES EN TOUT GENRE” (“Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini/Business Agent Specializing in Everything,” 50). Thôgô-gnini’s body also becomes an ideological signpost for the proclamation of his ego, a locus of ostentation, indeed a spectacle. When the play opens, Thôgô-gnini’s physical description is scanty (9). No mention is made of his height, weight, or size. By the second tableau, however, Thôgô-gnini is already displaying the trappings of a stereotypical bourgeois. We are told that “il est habillé en occidental, gros ventre, panama, culotte, badine, gros cigare” (“He is clad Western-style, with a large belly, a Panama hat, shorts, a walking stick, a large cigar,” 21). His body and accoutrements, like the signs for his business, have become the evidence of his newfound opulence. None is more conscious of this fact than Thôgô-gnini himself. He makes reference to the size of his body just in case onlookers fail to notice it. At the bar, he says to the waiter: “Une autre chaise, celle-ci me semble trop petite” (“another chair; this one is too small for me”). Thôgô-gnini reads his body as the sign of his increased value as a newfangled bourgeois. For him, the more physical space one occupies, the more successful one has become. Thôgô-gnini’s body also becomes a space upon which others can inscribe their own desires, namely, the playwright himself, his European business partners, and a group of thieves. First, the playwright dresses his created persona to display the latter’s true nature. In Tableau III, “Le rêve,” we see a being that is described as “habillé de peau de lion, de panthère, de léopard, de hyène, moitié blanc, moitié noir, paré de plumes de paon, de corbeau, d’aigle,

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revolver à la ceinture, et à la main, fusil en bandoulière, botté” (“dressed in lion, panther, leopard, and hyena skin; half white, half black, adorned with peacock, raven, and eagle feathers; a holstered revolver, a gun slung over his shoulder, and wearing boots,” 24). The Strange Being represents Thôgô-gnini’s desire to be everything at once—and failure to be anything at all. It is also the sign of the artificiality, corruption, vanity, violence, lack of self-confidence, and confusion that characterize the new class Dadié satirizes through the protagonist of his play. The second group to dress Thôgô-gnini is his business partners by playing on his vanity and sense of self-importance. His European partner tells him that the suit he has brought him is “le plus beau tissu qui se fait actuellement en Europe; le tissu que portent les hommes en vue. Un tissu exclusif. . . . Et vous ne le trouverez nulle part sur toutes les côtes orientales et occidentales d’Afrique. Ce vêtement fait de vous un homme unique. Un homme qui n’a d’égal que les rois de chez nous” (“the finest fabric currently being manufactured in Europe; the cloth worn by prominent men. An exclusive fabric. . . . And you won’t find it anywhere on all the eastern and western coasts of Africa. This garment makes you a unique man. A man who is equal only to the kings of our country,” 63–64). Thôgô-gnini’s reaction to this flattery reveals at once his vulnerability and his vanity. According to the stage direction, “Thôgô-gnini va et vient, se pavanne, approuve de la tête le discours” (“Thôgô-gnini comes and goes, struts around, nods to the statement,” 64). Probably the most interesting point about this scene is that it shows to what extent Monsieur Thôgô-gnini lacks the intelligence and humility to grasp the irony at play. A little later in the same scene, Monsieur Thôgô-gnini is dressed again in what is the crowning moment of his ridiculousness. Just after his business partners have left, he is seen strutting around in his new outfit when three men abruptly enter his house. While two of them force him to sit in a chair, the third one gags him, ties his hands, whitens his face and hands, puts a necklace around his neck, and earrings in his ears (81). Before making away with a briefcase filled with money, the three thieves attach to Monsieur Thôgôgnini’s chest a sign that reads “CHACUN POUR SOI.” In doing this, not only are they applying his ideological motto against him but they are using his most private space, his body, as the locus for teaching a private—and public—lesson in poetic justice. In Mhoi-Ceul, as the protagonist deploys public relations to advertise and sell himself to the world, he employs the services of a journalist named Legrihault. Like the names of all of Dadié’s dramatis personae in the play, the name Legrihault (“le griot”) has a significance, which Mhoi-Ceul reveals to the unsuspecting reader: “Un journaliste, c’est, si l’on peut dire, le griot moderne, un griot à la mode occidentale, c’est-à-dire nourri, soit d’humanités



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gréco-latines, soit d’humanités américo-slaves” (“A journalist is, as it were, the modern griot, a Western-style griot; that is, fed either on Greco-Latin humanities, or on American-Slavic humanities,” 58). In this rapprochement with the griot, Dadié wishes to highlight 1) journalism as a Western institution that has come to displace and replace an African one, and 2) the complicity of journalists and griots in the pauperization and oppression of the people when they serve as mere praise-singers and justifiers for the powers that be rather than as defenders of truth and human values. Mhoi-Ceul believes that the only way to succeed and move up in the socioeconomic ladder in modern Africa is by promoting a favorable image of oneself. He therefore asks the journalist to help him “asseoir sa réputation dans l’esprit des gens” (“establish his reputation in people’s minds,” 57). His reputation, a misnomer for his ego, becomes a physical sign to be literally implanted into the minds of the public. He demonstrates his desire to be at the summit of visibility in an auditory image that in a way complements the imagery conjured up in the journalist’s name. He says to the journalist, “Dans les pays de tam-tam, il faut jouer plus fort pour se faire entendre et comprendre, et vous seul savez le faire” (“In the land of drums, one must beat louder in order to be heard and appreciated, and only you can do that,” 58). This concern on the part of Mhoi-Ceul for his drums to be heard over and above the drums of others suggests a sociological reality, namely the existence of other arrivistes with whom he is competing to arrive at the top of the social ladder. Legrihault, true to his name, assures him in the most flattering language that he will acquit himself well: “Nous allons vous faire la plus belle des publicités; vous placer sur le piédestal le plus lumineux; faire publier votre portrait dans les plus grands journaux du monde” (“We are going to make you the most beautiful advertisement; place you on the brightest pedestal; have your portrait published in the most well-known newspapers in the world,” 58).13 Legrihault assures his client that his portrait will appear “en gros plan et en première page dans chacun des journaux” (“in close-up and on the front page of each of the newspapers,” 59–60). Finally, it is worthwhile to look at the politics of the sign and self-inscription as a demonstration of the arriviste’s desire to self-perpetuate. In a letter to his uncle about his trip to Egypt, Flaubert wrote the following about a certain bourgeois arriviste: In Alexandria, a certain Thompson, from Sunderland, has inscribed his name on Pompeye’s column in letters six feet high. You can read it from a quarter league away. You can’t even see the column without seeing Thompson’s name, therefore without thinking of Thompson. This cretin has incorporated himself into the monument and perpetuated himself with it. It is even worse than that: he has outdone the column by the splendor of his gigantic inscription. (Terdiman 1985, 44)

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By inscribing himself so conspicuously on Pompeii’s pillar, Thompson aims not merely to share the “immortality” intended for Emperor Diocletian by those who built the statue in his honor, but actually to supplant the emperor as well as the pillar itself. We see a similar desire for self-immortalization in Monsieur Thôgô-gnini. Thôgô-gnini’s ego has grown too large for his own body and his immediate physical surroundings. As a believer in the superiority of the West, Thôgôgnini does not think that Africa is an important enough place for the expansion of his ego. In his estimation, once acknowledged and accepted in Europe, he will have achieved his ultimate goal. He thus asks his European business partners to have a mass said in Europe in memory of his late father (65). It becomes clear soon enough that the requested mass has nothing to do with any true love and respect for his father. Rather, he sees in the mass a means to his universal recognition and immortalization, indeed his apotheosis: “Il faut aussi qu’on sache là-bas, chez vous, que sur les côtes d’Afrique, Monsieur Thôgô-gnini est un homme éminent. Mon nom passant dans votre histoire me fera entrer dans l’éternité . . . l’éternité” (“It should also be known in your country that on the coasts of Africa, Mr. Thôgô-gnini is an eminent man. My name making it into your history will inscribe me into eternity . . . forever,” 67). His European partner responds that he will discuss the request with his king in Europe. Encouraged by this, Thôgô-gnini goes on to make even more outrageous requests. Worried that people might forget him immediately after said mass, Thôgô-gnini asks for something more concrete, more permanent: “Je voudrais autre chose . . . une rue portant mon nom . . . le nom de Monsieur Thôgô-gnini” (“I would like something else . . . a street bearing my name . . . the name of Mr. Thôgô-gnini,” 67). When his partner suggests that his name may easily be engraved into the green marble of a provincial street urinal, replacing that of a famous roman emperor, Thôgô-gnini becomes visibly elated: “Mon nom gravé dans le marbre vert des vespasiennes des provinces. . . . Je vais être l’homme le plus considérable d’Afrique. Pendant mille ans, cent mille ans, mon nom sur le marbre vert des vespasiennes bravera le temps” (“My name engraved in the green marble of the pronvicial urinals. . . . I am going to be the most important man in Africa. For a thousand years, a hundred thousand years, my name on the green marble of urinals will defy time,” 69). When he finally finds out what the word “vespasienne” means, his reaction reveals yet another flaw in his character: “Ah! Edicule pour hommes à besoin pressant . . . Edicule. Enfin, aucune importance, pour entrer dans l’éternité toutes les voies sont bonnes” (“Ah! Edicule for men in urgent need of relief . . . Edicule. Finally, it doesn’t matter, to enter eternity all means are acceptable,” 70). The end, for the arriviste, justifies the means! The European partner indicates that Thôgô-gnini is a banal name to put alongside the names of great men of his country (70). He suggests a nobler



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“Monsieur Thôgô-gnini des AFRIQUES . . . des TROPIQUES (Monsieur Thôgô-gnini of Africa . . . of the Tropics).” Thôgô-gnini misconstrues “tropiques” for “trafics,” so the European uses “trafics” instead and adds “du Benin” to the new, longer name. Thôgô-gnini exclaims gleefully, “Monsieur Thôgô-gnini des Afriques des Trafics du Benin et tout cela sur le marbre vert des vespasiennes des provinces. Vous êtes ma providence” (“Monsieur Thôgô-gnini of Africa, of the Trafficking of Benin and all that on the green marble of provincial urinals! You are a God-sent!,” 71). Once he has started accumulating names and titles, as he does money and other signs of modern bourgeois consumption, he cannot be stopped. Thôgô-gnini tells his European partners that he has another title, ‘la Panthère,’ which the European gladly adds to the ever-growing list of monikers. So our arriviste’s name has grown from Thôgô-gnini to ‘Monsieur Thôgô-gnini de la PANTHÈRE des AFRIQUES des TRAFICS du BENIN’ (Monsieur Thôgô-gnini of the Panther of Africa of the Trafficking of Benin,” 71). THE ARRIVISTE AS HIS OWN WORST ENEMY Arrivisme is not only the untamed desire to rise and rise; it is also the fervent refusal to fall. Obstacles in his way only harden and incense him. He lacks the capacity to differentiate between flattery and genuine praise. For example, when Ya-Gba, the prostitute, says to Thôgô-gnini; “votre réputation n’est plus à faire. Chacun sait qui est Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, où se trouve le bureau de Monsieur Thôgô-gnini . . . sans vous que deviendrait le roi?” (“your reputation is a fait accompli. Everyone knows who Mr. Thôgô-gnini is, where Mr. Thôgô-gnini’s office is . . . without you what would become of the king?,” 51). The latter hears genuine praise. In fact, he hastens to remind Ya-Gba that without him, the entire country is nothing, since everything related to trade in the country happens thanks to him (51). Flattery inflates the arriviste’s ego as much as criticism inflames it. And through the excesses of his actions, he has become the digger of his own grave. In what follows, we shall examine how Dadié, through an indirect and impersonal warning system, highlights the insensitivity of the arriviste, exposes his fundamental stupidity and weakness, and prepares the reader and/or spectator for his eventual downfall. In both plays examined here, Dadié makes extensive use of impersonal pronouns such as “on” and “ses”; the interrogative pronoun “qui” used in rhetorical questions; common nouns like “les riches” and “un homme.” For instance, the prostitute alerts Thôgô-gnini to the value of criticism especially for the rich and powerful: “C’est bon signe pour eux d’être critiqués” (“criticism is good for them,” 52). By favoring this kind of impersonal and indirect discourse in his criticism of the arriviste, Dadié is respecting an African

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practice that privileges the use of impersonal and universal truths to teach lessons instigated by personal behavior to people in particular circumstances. Given that the individual is expected to put into practice the lessons learned within a community of other individuals, it is only fitting that the medium through which such lessons are transmitted to him carry with it the weight of the whole community’s time-honored wisdom. The direct warning comes through casual conversations or confrontational situations. One of the earliest indications of Mhoi-Ceul’s stubbornness and bloated sense of self is his reaction to Cendiplaume’s warning that they might be audited if the director continues with his careless spending habit of government money (33). Mhoi-Ceul, who thinks that his immediate show of firmness on such matters will help enhance his respectability in front of his subordinates, replies with a rhetorical question: “Combien de fois faut-il dire et redire que le seul responsable officiel ici, c’est moi?” (“How many times should I repeat that the only one in charge here is me?,” 33). As for Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, the only clear, unveiled warning to him comes from N’zekou when, at a moment of confrontation with his arch adversary, N’zekou says to him: “Ah Monsieur Thôgô-gnini: nous savons des tas de choses sur vous. Si vous ne dormez que d’un oeil, nous, on ne dort pas du tout” (“Beware, Monsieur Thôgô-gnini! We know a lot of things about you. If you sleep with one eye open, we don’t sleep at all,” 60). Instead of serving as a deterrent to his abuses, N’Zékou’s thinly veiled threat only pushes the arriviste to adopt even more repressive measures against his detractors. Ossip-Lourié notes that arrivisme in its chronic form is incurable: “quand l’arrivisme devient chronique, il n’y a rien à faire, il est impossible de soustraire l’arriviste à sa passion” (“when arrivisme becomes chronic, there is nothing to do about it; it is impossible to extract the arriviste from his obsession,” 13–14). Even if the arriviste’s disease is not communicable to all who come in contact with him, Dadié clearly shows how the arriviste’s actions pose a real threat to the well-being of the community of which he is perforce a member. While it may be impossible to cure the arriviste of his disease, the playwright asserts that the same society whose existence the arriviste’s pathology threatens can always do something to put him in check. One of the most effective controlling devices societies generally use to this end is expulsion. Depending on the degree of the crime committed and the emotions of the victims, expulsion from the society may take various forms, its most extreme form being death. Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, to his surprise, is found guilty in a summary trial, chained and taken away by the people. The fact that the arriviste almost always unwittingly destroys his host, the very society on which the survival of his ego and material cupidity depend, makes him the worst type of parasite. Even though he refuses to offer an explicit alternative to the crass and crony capitalism he satirizes in his plays,



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Dadié succeeds in exposing the arriviste as well as educating his contemporaries of the dangers latent in certain Western importations. The trial of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini could be read as the trial of capitalism itself. However, the African bourgeois arriviste is quite unlike the Western capitalist. Torchbearer of that insidious form of capitalism that seems unique to the African situation, he is too greedy to allow even a modicum of the benefits of his system of exploitation to trickle down to the larger society in order to allow for at least a semblance of well-being among his victims. If, as Marx and Engels assert in The Communist Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie . . . are its own gravediggers” (84), the African bourgeois arriviste is even more so, for his demise comes sooner than that of his more sophisticated counterpart in the West who had a more active role in his creation. THE REBEL At the other end of the spectrum of the assimilated colonized and yes-men like Dam’no, or the completely self-centered arriviste like Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, there is the unassimilated or unassimilable colonized. This is the one who, by his rebellious spirit and sense of justice and identity, refuses to be the White man’s ventriloquist doll. This type is disliked by the colonizer, who sees him as a failure and an obstacle to his project. His posture of self-respect makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to get access to positions of power and privileges. Climbié is an eminent example of this type. Soon after his studies at the École Normale William Ponty in Gorée, Climbié realizes his condition of alienation, becomes disillusioned with the colonial system, and starts asking questions he should not be asking. According to his bosses, he has not been educated so that he could create problems. Climbié is quickly labeled “an agitator” and “anti-French” (140). Having shown he is “unassimilable, indigestible” (140) and refusing to play the role of the “second-class citizen imperfectly trained” (142), he is exposed to the wrath of the French authorities. Obviously, the hope and efforts to weed out potential troublemakers by offering Africans a curriculum that discouraged the teaching of critical thinking skills could not be completely fail-safe. In letting naturally rebellious students like Climbié and Aoua Kéita imbibe colonial education, the system unwittingly created the foundation for its future contestation and unraveling. As Climbié notes, even though Ponty did not directly teach him anti-hegemonic discourse, it still “placed in his hands a tool, an instrument: knowledge of how to make the most for himself.”14 Climbié is summarily arrested and imprisoned for being part of a movement clamoring for better wages and working conditions. By the end of the novel, Climbié, who

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is left without a job, sets out on his own with no fixed destination in mind. His rebellion against the colonizer and his mission are the product of his lucidity, his understanding of how the colonial system works. THE TWO-FACED GOD We will conclude this chapter with a look at the representation of Wangrin in Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s L’Étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète africain in the light of the general observations that have preceded, and in specific relation to two other characters, Climbié and Dam’no. More than any other character of the colonial period in the novel, Wangrin, I propose, represents more fully the successes and failures of the class in general and colonial education in particular. And this thanks to the ambiguity of his character and actions that will be discussed in greater depth in the next chapter. Wangrin, like Climbié, if not more than Climbié, understands the inner workings of the colonial machine. But unlike Climbié who manifests outright animus to colonialism, Wangrin decides to play along in the game of assimilation. He is an adult and a more complex version of the little Amkoullel on the boat. Wangrin fits into the tableau of what Ayi Kwei Armah calls “Westernized successes” (Why Are We so Blest?). It is no surprise that Wangrin, during his initiation, chooses as his tutelary deity, Gongoloma-Sooké, the god of opposites or contradictions. Gongoloma-Sooké is described as “à la fois bon et mauvais, sage et libertin, Gongoloma-Sooké, dieu bizarre, se servait de ses narines pour absorber ses boissons et de son anus pour avaler ses aliments solides. Son membre viril était planté au beau milieu de son front” (22–23, “Both kindly and ill-disposed, chaste and libertine, Gongoloma-Sooke, a weird divinity, used his nostril to absorb drink and his anus to ingest solid food. His penis was planted right in the middle of his forehead,” 8). Wangrin, like his chosen deity, is “le grand confluent des contraires.” What is more shocking about Wangrin is his unwillingness to rectify a philosophy that he himself, more than anyone else, understands with superlative perspicacity. In a moment of characteristic honesty, he describes himself as a “vautour” (123), saying “je suis venu pour voler et m’enrichir” (134, “I have come to make money,” 100). He has no regard for tradition, no religion other than the cult of money. “Wangrin,” Hampâté Bâ comments, “n’était pas un fidèle fervent. Il pratiquait plutôt une sorte d’opportunisme qui lui permettait d’embrasser, sans gêne, la foi de ceux dont il souhaitait l’aide ou le silence” (237, “Wangrin was no faithful devotee. Rather, he practiced a sort of opportunism that enabled him to embrace without scruples the religion of those whose assistance or silence he needed for his own ends,” 140). Using



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marabouts, fetish, and anything at his disposal, he largely succeeds in getting what he wants. A chameleon, a human plasticine, capable of changing to anything the circumstances demand, Wangrin is also a consummate actor even if he is sometimes surprised by his loyalty to France. Nonetheless, Wangrin, unlike Pierre Dam’no, is not a colonizer’s robot. His self-effacement in the presence of his White bosses is a stratagem to win their confidence. Probably the most powerful and complete description of Wangrin’s character is the one offered by Hampâté Bâ himself. Wangrin était filou, certes, . . . son cœur était habité par une intense volonté de gagner de l’argent par tous les moyens afin de satisfaire une convoitise innée, mais il n’était point dépourvu de bonté, de générosité et même de grandeur. . . . son comportement, cynique envers les puissants et les favorisés de la fortune ne manquait cependant d’une certaine élégance. (Bâ 1973, 169) Wangrin was a rogue, true, but his soul did not lack sensitivity. Although his heart was consumed by a desire to make money by any conceivable means at his disposal in order to satisfy his congenital covetousness, there was much goodness, generosity, and even grandeur in his make-up . . . Although his behavior was cynical toward the mighty and the favorites of fortune, it was at no time despoiled of elegance. (Bâ 1999, 115)

Evidently, from the colonial period to the postcolonial dispensation, the school’s reach has been as unstoppable and pervasive as the character and actions of the class it invented. Given our analysis of the gallery of characters forged in the crucible of the colonial school, we can appreciate the monumental impact of the school on the society and the individual. NOTES 1. This translation, as well as “unwholesome individuals,” are from Harry Gamble’s “Peasants of the Empire,” 371. 2. For illuminating perspectives on the phenomena of mimicry and self-denigration by the colonized see Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and Black Skin, White Masks; and Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 3. According to Munro, “The year 1807 marked merely the beginning of the end, for the compulsory transfer of Africans across the Atlantic went on virtually unabated for another forty or fifty years. Between 1807 and 1850, slaves were imported into the Americas at a rate which, although down on the peak period of the 1770s and 1780s, was still approximately equal to the rates for the first half of the eighteenth century, and only in the 1850s and 1860s did the Atlantic slave trade dwindle to insignificance” (43).

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4. The distancing effect, extensively used by Brecht in his dramatic writings, consists, among other uses, of placing an event in a historical period where it clearly does not belong. 5. European nations and abolitionist groups had begun resettling former slaves in Africa even before 1807. For example, following Lord Mansfield’s 1772 ruling outlawing the English slave trade, the British government bought a piece of land from local chiefs in coastal Sierra Leone for the resettlement of freed Africans in 1787. Also, some liberated former enslaved made the trip back to Africa on their own within the context of expanding Africa-Europe trade: “In port cities of the African Atlantic coast such as Freetown, St. Louis, and Lagos, transregionally linked groups of traders—more than a few of them former slave traders or freed slaves—forged important networks with Europeans by adopting standardized bourgeois modes of behaviour, seeking social and economic advancement in the wake of the abolition of slavery through ‘legitimate trade’” (Tödt, 19). Monsieur Thôgô-gnini is one such returnee. 6. Munro writes, “Such items as ivory and gum assumed a new importance in external exchange, but the most rapid growth came in exports of timber, of which the Sierra Leone forest was a major source of supply, and vegetable oils in demand in Europe for the manufacture of soap and candles. Palm oil, extracted from the fruit of the oil palm which grew naturally in the West African forests. . . . The coastal areas of Senegambia, with a savanna-steppe environment, offered an alternative source of vegetable oil in the form of groundnuts” (45). 7. We come across the phrase again in the next tableau; however, this time, it is only as a physical sign placed on Thôgô-gnini’s chest by three robbers. 8. By “dominating discourse,” I mean here the ideology of the ruling class that is not necessarily shared by the dominated classes. Dominant discourse, on the other hand, refers to that discourse that is shared, actively or otherwise, by the ruling as well as the dominated classes. What both discourses have in common is that they originate from the same class, the ruling class. 9. Since “cent” (hundred) and “sans” (without) are homonyms in French, the name could signify “hundred diplomas” or “without a diploma.” 10. When Thôgô-gnini, on seeing the money, exclaims “De l’argent! De l’argent! Donne-le moi,” the European reminds him that, like for Paradise, one has to work hard to earn money. However, as it gradually becomes clear in the play, money is not the same as paradise, for the simple reason that one does not in fact have to work to get it. Monsieur Thôgô-gnini realizes that by getting others to work for him, directly or indirectly, he will make lot more money. Bernard Dadié seems to suggest that in the world of arrivisme in particular, and capitalism in general, work has little or no compensatory value, for those who do not work are shown to be the least likely to be impoverished. Everyone wants to become rich, but not through work. No wonder there is, in Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, a newspaper that, according to its vendor, makes its buyer an instant millionaire (30). 11. Indeed, one of the concrete representations of this fact is seen in Tableau IV. Toward the end of the tableau, a strong wind suddenly starts blowing. Monsieur



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Thôgô-gnini is seen immediately thereafter fighting shamelessly for flying banknotes with beggars and others he normally would consider to be inferior to him (45). 12. The most blatant demonstration of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini’s penchant for Western niceties—“belles choses”—is in Tableau V. We are told that the “blanc ouvre les valises et étale devant Thôgô-gnini de la verroterie, des tissus, des boissons, de la coutellerie, de la dentelle, toutes sortes de friperies qu’il énumère” (63). Thôgô-gnini is particularly elated by the clothes his business partners bring him (63–65). 13. Italics added by author. 14. Ironically, the leaders of anti-colonial and decolonial movements were overwhelmingly products of the colonial school. And Gorée, the location of the school in Dadié’s time as well as the door of no return through which countless Africans were pressed into slavery, became the door of return to Africa (metaphorically speaking) for Dadié and others.

Chapter 6

Reality or Invention? Literary Representation of the Bourgeoisie on Trial

When he asked the young Amadou Hampâté Bâ to write his life’s story, Wangrin, the hero/antihero of L’étrange destin de Wangrin, accompanied that request with another: Mon petit Amkoullel, autrefois, tu savais bien conter. Maintenant que tu sais écrire, tu vas noter ce que je conterai de ma vie. Et lorsque je ne serai plus de ce monde, tu en feras un livre qui non seulement divertira les hommes, mais leur servira d’enseignement. Je te demande expressément de ne pas mentionner mon vrai nom . . . Tu utiliseras l’un de mes noms d’emprunt . . . Wangrin. (Bâ 1991, 8) My little Amkoullel, in days gone by you were a fine storyteller. Now that you have learned to write, you must take down the story of my life and after my death compose it into a book which will not only amuse but also instruct those who read it. I am asking you explicitly not to mention my real name. . . . Rather, you will use one of my borrowed names . . . Wangrin. (Ba 2021, xvii)

Hampâté Bâ finally published Wangrin’s story forty-six years after his promise to do so, and forty-one years after the protagonist’s death. True to his promise to keep certain details anonymous, Hampâté Bâ avoids giving not only Wangrin’s real name, but those of important towns and characters that could easily reveal his identity. According to Hampâté Bâ, the years following the publication of L’étrange destin de Wangrin came with proposals for film adaptations of the novel. The author did not accept any of them. “A mon grand étonnement,” he says, “la plupart d’entre eux présentaient Wangrin comme une vulgaire fripouille sans cœur et sans scrupules, à la limite comme un être dépourvu de toute qualité 189

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humaine” (361, “To my utter astonishment, most of them had turned Wangrin into a vulgar scoundrel who had neither kindness nor scruples, someone with an almost total lack of human dimensions,” 258). Hampâté Bâ’s rejection of this kind of portrayal of Wangrin proposed by film producers should be understood as an effort on his part to shield his hero and friend from a mainstream mode of representation, that is to say, from being depicted as a typical African bourgeois. The emergence and evolution of the bourgeois class in Francophone Black Africa has always been a direct or indirect interest of Francophone African literature. In this literature, we see a second invention of the class, one that follows after its invention in the colonial school. In an effort to come to grips with the new and uncertain identity of this class, a relatively homogenized representation has taken root in the literature. Representations have tended to coalesce into something systematic, a discourse; that is, the repetition of standard tropes in the works of different writers. Such works generally display a pattern of negative representation, especially with regards to their main characters. This chapter focuses more specifically on the question of the conceptualization and representation of the bourgeois and bourgeoisie in Francophone sub-Saharan literature. How do we represent the bourgeois and bourgeoisie engendered by the colonial school? To what extent do individual members of the class represent or distinguish themselves from the class? What is the relationship or tension between literary representation and the “reality” it seeks to portray? L’Étrange destin de Wangrin is the central focus in this chapter for the following reason: in its unselfconscious refusal to conform to the representational “canons” vis-à-vis the class and its individual members, Hampâté Bâ’s biography of Wangrin provides an alternative mode of representation that is more complex. The discussion of Hampâté Ba’s novel is carried out in comparison to four other texts whose representation of the colonial and postcolonial African bourgeois fits into the general pattern of negative portrayal: Bernard Dadié’s Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, Sembène Ousmane’s Xala, Bernard Nanga’s Les chauve-souris, and Amadou Koné’s Les coupeurs de têtes. The goal here is to show how critical evaluation of Francophone sub-Saharan fictional representation of the bourgeoisie not only mirrors the negativity of its object of exegesis, but also reveals the consensus that seem to have been reached by writers vis-à-vis the representation of the class and its individual members. Hampâté Bâ’s portrayal of Wangrin—certainly one of the most comprehensive and complex of the colonial “évolué,” and more specifically of the colonial interpreter in Francophone Africa—has not left readers and critics of African letters indifferent. Gnaoulé Oupoh, for example, sees in the colonial interpreter nothing less than “le portrait type1 du fonctionnaire corrompu,



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cupide et véreux” (“the stereotypical portrait of the corrupt, greedy and crooked civil servant,” 75). To support his claim, Oupoh marshals an example from the inventory of the colonial functionary’s predatory and corrupt practices. He alludes to a particular episode in the novel in which Wangrin is authorized by the commandant to collect supplies toward France’s World War I efforts (58). Wangrin takes advantage of the situation and collaborates with other prominent local figures to build for himself a huge capital out of proceeds meant for the war. Oupoh cites this high-level collaboration as a classic example of class connivance for the exploitation of the masses (75). Oupoh suggests that Hampâté Bâ’s portrayal of Wangrin is a deliberately laudatory one. He argues that in his desire to exonerate Wangrin, the novelist goes out of his way to make the Manichean distinction between “good crook” and “bad crook.” According to the critic, such a distinction has no merit. For him, all scoundrels are entirely bad; Wangrin is a scoundrel; therefore, Wangrin is entirely bad. Oupoh’s criticism of Wangrin stems principally from his identification of Wangrin as a bourgeois and as a member of the ascendant African elite. The tag “bourgeois,” for the critic, is the origin of all sins. Faithfulness to the reality of the African bourgeoisie, Oupoh asserts, suggests that there is only one way to represent Wangrin: the way all African bourgeois elements should be represented—that is, as a completely negative personality. In fact, for Oupoh, there seems to be something almost ontological, even fatalistic, about being an African bourgeois. Thus, Wangrin the bourgeois, in Oupoh’s estimation, is destined for a specific role in life: that of the exploiter in the exploiter-exploited dialectics. Such a view of the African bourgeois is arguably Fanonian. In Damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon asserts that as a result of the type of education they acquired in the colonial school, members of the indigenous African bourgeoisie are naturally incapable of performing a positive role in their respective countries, their historically conditioned function being that of exploiting, and aiding and abetting foreign exploitation of their own people (96).2 Confined, as it were, within this Fanonian perspective, Wangrin cannot escape his “destiny” no matter how hard he (or even the author) may try. His state of being bourgeois automatically negates any good qualities he may have and display. Oupoh writes, Wangrin est un personnage qui a une très forte personnalité. C’est un lutteur forcené, combattif, travailleur infatigable, c’est peut-être là, les traits positifs que l’on peut dégager de son portrait moral. Mais ces énormes qualités mises aux services d’une cupidité et d’un cynisme sans bornes finissent par éclabousser l’œuvre toute entière. (Oupoh 2013, 77)

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Wangrin is a character with a very strong personality. He is a fearless fighter, belligerent, and a tireless worker. These are perhaps positive moral traits. But these enormous qualities deployed out of boundless greed and cynicism negate the man’s positive portrait.

Moreover, Oupoh contends that the novelist is a social critic who should openly and unequivocally censor the waywardness of the characters in his novel. He therefore takes Hampâté Bâ to task for what he considers to be the novelist’s failure to castigate Wangrin (75). Oupoh’s suggestion that the bourgeois should be represented in only one way leads him, inevitably, to the conclusion that Hampâté Bâ’s refusal to denounce Wangrin is tantamount to an apology of corruption and the desire on the part of the author to preserve the status quo of exploitation, irresponsibility, and unaccountability characteristic of the elite in power. For his part, Mohamadou Kane, in his Roman Africain et tradition, describes Wangrin as a total failure. Wangrin, he says, “ne sert que son intérêt personnel. . . . S’il ne soucie pas d’assurer le progrès des choses autour de lui, il ne ménage aucun effort pour tirer le meilleur parti de la tradition qu’il sait au besoin mettre à rude épreuve dans l’intérêt de ses employeurs” (“only serves his own interest. . . . If he has no interest in improving things around him, he spares no effort to make the most of the tradition which he knows how to exploit for the benefit of his employers,” 261). Kane’s criticism of Wangrin is two-pronged. First, he takes the colonial interpreter to task for failing to use his position of privilege and authority to ensure progress around him. Second, he accuses him of using his profound knowledge of African traditions to serve the exploitative interests of his colonial employers. Kane even claims that Wangrin is worse than Aké Loba’s Dam’no, noting that Wangrin is “plus cynique, plus retors” (“more cynical, more devious,” 261). It seems that Kane and Oupoh, in their criticism of Hampâté Bâ and his protagonist, are making a case for a kitschy, one-dimensional mode of representation of the sub-Saharan bourgeois. Kitsch thrives on stock images that elicit stock emotions. These images render kitsch transparent, thereby making it open to what Thomas Kulka, in Kitsch and Art, calls “instant and effortless identifiability” (29). Since “originality and artistic innovation . . . often challenge the accepted representational canons” (Kulka, 31) in any form of art, the artist who produces kitsch adheres strictly to “the accepted representational conventions” (31). “The picture,” Kulka adds, “should be totally explicit and one dimensional; no ambiguities, no hidden meanings. There should be just one interpretation” (37). Likewise, the portrait of the sub-Saharan bourgeois, as Oupoh and Kane seem to suggest, should use the most straightforward and accessible of languages possible to create a portrait of the bourgeois that lacks “aesthetic intensity” (Kulka, 114) and drama.



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OF BIRDS AND ANIMALS PARADING AS HUMANS Bernard Dadié’s Monsieur Thôgô-gnini Dadié’s satirical representation of Thôgô-Gnini as the archetypal African bourgeois arriviste defies conventional discourse. His use of hyperbole, even as this device thrives on the social reality of the bourgeois type, translates into pure invention. Through scenes that effectively portray to the reader the image and ideology of the bourgeois anti-hero, Dadié deftly tracks Thôgô-Gnini’s transformation. For example, in Tableau II, we are shown the rapid bourgeoisification of Thôgô-gnini when we see him in Western attire complete with a cigar, a panama, and a walking stick, a stark difference from his traditional costume in Tableau I. Such is the case in all tableaux except Tableau III. It is Dadié’s desire to capture the complete characteristics of the African Frankenstein in this tableau, one of the two shortest of the play. When the tableau opens, we see the creature described as wearing animal skins, carrying a revolver and a gun, among other things (24).3 This scene appears almost like an epiphany close to the middle of the play. The sudden switch from straightforward description to allegory raises some important questions: Why does Dadié resort to this kind of highly coded discourse? What does it do to his overall effort at representing the bourgeois and bourgeoisie? Does it enhance it, or does it detract from it? Does he intend to capture in this one brief scene what he fears the non-coded text in preceding and following scenes may fall short of doing? Almost all of the animals mentioned in the description of the Strange Being possess attributes conventionally associated with the typical bourgeois arriviste. For example, the lion is associated with aggressiveness and greed, the peacock with pride and vanity, and the eagle is known for its predatory habits. Moreover, the presence of the gun and revolver suggest the violence the bourgeois arriviste, Thôgô-gnini, is willing to use to achieve his goals. Indeed, the words and actions of the Strange Being immediately after this presentation help confirm the above assertion. In the same tableau, he is shown in a fit of extreme iconoclasm literally shooting down the personifications of fidelity, gratefulness, old age, tradition, woman, child, love, and drama, things he considers to be obstacles to personal success. A representation of the African bourgeois is not necessarily the same as a representation of the African bourgeoisie. As a particular case, Thôgô-gnini lacks some of the characteristics of the category into which he has been placed, which is inevitable in representation. As Carole-Anne Tyler notes, “any particular instance of a category necessarily lacks some of the properties of the category as a whole, if only because by definition a category is general rather than particular and at least potentially includes more than just one

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instance” (217). The particular not only lacks some properties of the category, it may also have properties specific to it alone. In fact, it is such individual properties that would eventually make it stand out in the crowd. But in the sense that he is seen to be carrying more than his “fair share” of stereotypical bourgeois traits, as depicted in the Strange Being and in himself throughout the play, one can also argue that Thôgô-gnini equally represents the category. In this way, he becomes a class onto himself, an aggregate of those characteristics that are recognizable not in one, not in two or three, but in almost all the members of his class. That said, when does one know that the list of properties of the category has been exhausted, or are possessed in adequate quantity by the particular case? Furthermore, how do we know where and when individual properties end and properties of the category begin? To even begin to answer these questions, we would have to undertake the challenging, if not impossible, task of dressing an exhaustive inventory of mannerisms and other physical properties of the bourgeois(ie). Dadié uses the technique of montage, which allows him to superimpose one image on top of the other. If we remove the images: the animal skins, the bird feathers, the cigar, the walking stick, the “monsieur” in front of Thôgô-gnini, and also compress the distended belly, what will we be left with to justify the title bourgeois? We will soon realize that Dadié’s bourgeois has been dressed in borrowed robes. The Strange Being (Monsieur Thôgô-gnini’s alter ego) is a nonbeing. In fact, the patchwork quality of the Strange Being is also a powerful commentary on the imperfect nature of the African bourgeoisie, an entity that lacks a specific identity, and which continually seeks one. The significance of this is seen also in the name of Thôgô-gnini, which means in Malinke “name seeker” and “he who will succeed and distinguish himself at all cost” (Jukpor, 121). In his desire to be everything at once, he ends up suffering from an identity crisis, becoming nothing at all, the epitome of non-identity. In a similar vein, Dadié’s desire to transpose into his text a picture of the bourgeois that is at once credible and self-sufficient aims too high. Like its object of representation, Thôgô-gnini, Dadié’s representation itself suffers and falters in its burning desire to be what it cannot be. Bernard Nanga’s Les chauves-souris Metaphors like that of the vulture and those used by Dadié have acquired a substantial amount of universality and conventionality in terms of their negative denotations in anti-bourgeois and anti-colonial African literature.4 The decoding of such metaphors pose little to no difficulty to the reader. Other metaphors are not so readily available to immediate unraveling. Thanks to their esoteric nature, such metaphors reveal what Steen refers to as “the



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poet’s eye for resemblance at its most original” (27). Such is the case with the bourgeois-bat metaphor in Nanga’s novel, Les Chauves-souris. The first thing that strikes the reader about Nanga’s novel is its paratexts, namely the front cover and the note on the back cover. Occupying the foreground of the picture on the front cover is a potbellied man, clad Western style. He is leaning nonchalantly against a Mercedes-Benz car, with a plump cigar in his mouth. The inscription on the Mercedes Benz’s license plate reads “CORRUP.” To the right of center, just behind the car, is a nice concrete house. To the left of center, further in the background, are two thatch huts. In front of the main hut is what appears to be a woman (or what could be a dog) crawling across the picture. For its part, the note on the back cover contains the following observation: “l’égoïsme cynique des élites africaines, jouisseuses et corrumpues (the cynical selfishness of promiscuous and corrupt African elites).” All these are intended to help orient the reader toward an appreciation of a specific aspect of the text, namely the corrupt and cannibalistic character and practices of the bourgeoisie the author seeks to portray through his use of the bat metaphor. This metaphor of the bat, which falls almost in the middle of the novel, at once illuminates the preceding and following sections of the novel and draws its own justification from them. As if to suggest that it takes a foreign eye to see the relationship, Nanga uses a visiting European journalist to draw the resemblance reported by the narrator in the following terms: En voyant tous les chômeurs qui traînaient dans les rues et les quartiers d’Eborzel, il les avait comparés à des insectes attirés par la lumière de la ville, où ils se faisaient gober par les chauves-souris. Et il avait comparé la foule des fonctionnaires inefficaces qui s’écoulaient des buildings administratifs aux chauves-souris. (Nanga 1980, 111) When he saw all the unemployed hanging around the streets and neighborhoods of Eborzel, he compared them to insects attracted by the light of the city, where they were swallowed by bats. And he compared the crowd of inefficient civil servants pouring out of administrative buildings to bats.

Bernard Nanga’s use of the bat metaphor is particularly innovative even within the convention of easy identifiability. By making this kind of comparison between the behavior of the bats and bourgeois state functionaries, Nanga is not trying to exploit any structural resemblance between the source domain (the bats) and the target domain (the bourgeoisie). There is no such literal resemblance between the two. Here, the reader is challenged to go beyond the simple act of retrieving and using already existing knowledge to make sense of the comparison. The kind of metaphor used by Nanga requires what Steen

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calls “active analogizing” (18). Steen describes this type of activity as one in which “the individual produces new knowledge by on-line inferencing” (18). The inventiveness of Nanga’s bat-bourgeois metaphor is useful for another reason. It introduces, probably for the first time in the metaphoric discourse, the dynamics of space in the predator-prey dialectics; it touches on the phenomenon of rural exodus that has interested many an African writer of both the colonial and postcolonial eras. The creation of urban centers in the colonial period—and the accompanying centralization of political power, modern amenities, and general economic development in those towns—leads to the progressive deterioration of living conditions in the countryside. As the den of the bourgeoisie and site of potential emancipation from stifling traditions and poverty, the town is an irresistible, enchanted place toward which gravitate innocent, ignorant, and vulnerable members of the peasantry in the hope of bettering their lives. This phenomenon is known in French as “le mirage de la ville” (“the lure of the city,” Kane, 197). Disenchantment usually follows. Sooner or later, for many of the newcomers, the place once dreamed of as paradise turns out to be more like hell; they become, as it were, clueless insects waiting to be gobbled up by preying bats.5 OF BOURGEOIS IMPOTENCE The adjective “inefficace” (inefficient) is one of the most commonly deployed to describe the African bourgeoisie. Its use is so common that it has become synonymous with the class. The inefficiency of the African bourgeoisie has often been blamed on the political and economic impotence of the class, an impotence originating in their historical sub-standard education. Not surprisingly, such impotence has usually been presented symbolically in the form of sexual impotence. The private impotence that plagues El Hadji Bèye in Ousman Sembène’s Xala and Pita in Amadou Koné’s Les coupeurs de têtes is a powerful symbol of the political and economic inefficacy of the African bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie has been lambasted for its inability to perform productively in society. To appreciate the symbolic significance of the impotence of the two characters, we must first examine its causes and consequences. Ousman Sembène’s Xala and Amadou Koné’s Les coupeurs de tête In Sembène’s work, there are two causes of the impotence: the symbolic and the real. At the symbolic level, El Hadji Bèye’s impotence can be attributed to his identity crisis that is provoked by the types of education he has received.



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We are told that “El Hadji Abdou Kader Bèye était, si l’on peut dire, la synthèse de deux cultures. Formation bourgeoise européenne, éducation féodale africaine” (“El Hadji Abdou Kader Bèye was, so to speak, the synthesis of two cultures: European bourgeois training and African feudal education,” 12). Sembène is quick to tell the reader that “la fusion n’était pas complète” (12). This statement underlines Bèye’s state of imperfection, his inability to harmonize within himself two disparate cultural legacies: his traditional African past and his French colonial education. Bèye’s condition is significantly different from hybridity, which has a ring of complexity and positivity around it. This condition of imperfection renders him incapable of fulfilling his functions as an individual, a man, and as a citizen of his country. Similarly, Pita’s impotence in Koné’s Les coupeurs de têtes is organically linked to his sociopolitical status in his country. His position as brother-in-law to the country’s ruler and head of the “Parti-unique-d’avant-garde” dooms him automatically to a fate of powerlessness. It is particularly telling that Pita’s expertise as a Western-trained medical doctor is completely useless in the face of the impotence that plagues him; indeed, he has to resort to using the services of a marabout (an Islamo-African mystic and healer) for any hopes of a cure. The “xala” in Xala is allegedly caused by a beggar, a man Bèye once dispossessed of his land (182). In fact, the word “xala” in the Wolof language refers specifically to that type of impotence that results from a curse. This detail offered by Sembène indicates perhaps the author’s preference for the real over the symbolic, thereby complicating the relationship between the real and the symbolic. It makes the symbolic reading by the critic appear somewhat artificial, forced upon the text. On the contrary, any symbolic reading of Pita’s impotence, blamed on the excesses of the class he represents, does not require any imposition on the text by the reader. In fact, the author seems to encourage this kind of reading. When the main character, Kassi, learns from Pita’s wife that her husband visits the marabout because he is sexually impotent, his unspoken response reveals no surprise at all: “cette bourgeoisie a trop volé, trop joui, trop baisé. Commence maintenant pour elle le temps de l’impuissance” (“this bourgeoisie has stolen too much, enjoyed too much, fucked too much. Now begins for it the time of impotence,” 186). The bourgeoisie is located by this discourse of impotence in a kind of vicious cycle. By its very imperfect education referred to in Xala, the African bourgeoisie is doomed to commit excesses in its desire to prove it is not imperfect or impotent. Some of the tell-tale signs of this desire include the taking of many wives and/or mistresses, driving in big expensive cars, living in mansions. So, in both Sembène and Koné’s texts, the impotence must be seen at once as cause, result, and punishment for the excesses (corruption, dishonesty, violence, parasitism, exploitation, sexual promiscuity) of what

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Tsenay Serequeberhan labels “the counterfeit bourgeoisie produced by colonialism” (113) in their drive to ensure their speedy bourgeoisification. WANGRIN, ONCE MORE! L’étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète africain is an amalgamation of what Wangrin told Hampâté Bâ over many recording sessions, what Hampâté Bâ remembered of his relationship with Wangrin outside of what the latter recounted to him, and what Wangrin’s griot, Dieli Madi, tells him about Wangrin after Wangrin’s passing, as well as what other people told him, including Wangrin’s rivals, while Wangrin was still alive or after his death. Hampâté Bâ is a writer who transcribes and translates things delivered orally by many different people with varying degrees of separation from the actual facts of Wangrin’s existence. Certainly, things can get lost in transcription and in translation! Not to mention the effect of time on memory. The plea for self-censorship by Wangrin to Hampâté Bâ could be read as an attempt on Wangrin’s part to control the narrative of his life and career, even beyond the grave, while asserting his agency in the face of a colonial system that was bound, by its very nature, to misrepresent the life of a man who may have posed a challenge to its power and legitimacy, and by so doing, inserted weak links within its absolutist, homogenizing colonial super-narrative. The question of censorship (self or otherwise) is ultimately linked to the question of representation. What is represented, how it is represented, by whom, and to what end (among many factors) are questions that deserve investigation. Hampâté Bâ had to engage such queries in the 1986 Afterword to Wangrin: “Depuis la parution de ce livre en 1973, certains malentendus sont apparus ça et là tant sur la personnalité du héros que sur la nature même de l’ouvrage. Je ne sais pourquoi certains (et cela en dépit des précisions apportées dans l’Avertissement) s’interrogent: ce récit est-il une fiction, une réalité, ou un habile mélange des deux?” (359, “Since the publication of this book in 1973, a few misunderstandings have arisen both on the true personality of the hero and the nature of the work. I don’t know why, even in spite of the specific assertions contained in the Foreward, some people ask themselves whether this narrative is fiction, reality, or a clever mixture of both,” 257). In “Finding the Historical Wangrin or the Banality of Virtue,” Ralph A. Austen advances that L’étrange destin de Wangrin “makes use of real historical incidents but misplaces and distorts them, indicating that Hampâté Bâ was inspired as much by literary tropes as by empirical reality” (37). Austen writes, in reference to an earlier work of his (2007) on the same question of the accuracy of Hampâté Bâ’s representation of Wangrin, that “the research for my earlier article was based almost entirely upon printed documents,



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particularly the Journaux offıciels of the two West African colonies where Wangrin served: Haut-Sénégal-Niger (present-day Mali) and Haute Volta (present-day Burkina Faso)” (38). Regarding his revised work, Austen notes that “most of the new materials come from manuscript archives in Côte d’Ivoire, France, and Sénégal. For reasons I have discussed elsewhere, these latter sources are not as rich as one might imagine (e.g., I have not found a personnel fıle for Wangrin), so they have not radically changed the story I told previously” (38). Austen’s reliance here on written sources in his search for the official historical Wangrin leads him in part to question the fidelity of Hampâté Bâ’s representation of Wangrin. This raises the ghosts of debates about historical research and sources (orality versus the written text), which is not our concern here. Even though the written text is preferred in Hampâté Bâ’s project by Wangrin himself, the oral means of transmission is no less important. As Adejunmobi argues, Wangrin, a brilliant graduate of the colonial school quite capable of writing his own story, does not need someone else to do it for him: “Though Wangrin can write, in this account he invokes the resources of orality and after his death, his griot Dieli Madi continues, thereby endowing the narrative with the imprint of orality” (28). Hampâté Bâ does address this specific point about oral traditions as reliable historical sources especially with regards to time and memory. In an effort to set things straight about the fidelity of his narrative nearly two decades after the publication of Wangrin, Hampâté Bâ wrote in Amkoullel, l’enfant peul: Plusieurs amis lecteurs du manuscrit se sont étonnés que la mémoire d’un homme de plus de quatre-vingts ans puisse restituer tant de choses, et surtout avec une telle minutie dans les détails. C’est que la mémoire des gens de ma génération, et plus généralement des peuples de tradition orale qui ne pouvaient pas s’appuyer sur l’écrit, est d’une fidélité et d’une précision presque prodigieuses. (Bâ 1991, 13) A number of friends who have read this manuscript were surprised that the memory of a man over eighty years of age could reproduce so many things in such minute detail. This is explained by the fact that people of my generation and, more generally, people who come from an oral tradition and who did not rely on writing possess memories of a rather inordinate fidelity and accuracy. (Bâ 2021, 7)

Hampâté Bâ hopes to put to rest, once and for all, any doubts there might be about the validity and usefulness of the oral, especially in his particular case even as his act of writing validates the written text. Indeed, Austen himself shows written records can be shifting vis-à-vis the truth when he notes that “Wangrin appears on offıcial colonial records as Samako Niembélé (or

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in various orthographic variants, especially Gnembélé). However, he was known at the time to have another name, Samba Traoré (or Taraoré), which is how he appears in some colonial archives and most records of his life after retirement from administrative service” (38). True to his name, Wangrin, even in the written colonial records, refuses to be trapped in one identity. To be sure, there is some legitimacy in criticism of Wangrin and Hampâté Bâ by Oupoh, Kane, and others. Wangrin, like Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini, Robert Bilanga, Dam’no, El Hadji Bèye, and Pita, has not really gone beyond the situation of oppression to that of complete decolonization, a transition that is a sine qua non of both spiritual and material enfranchisement. One powerful way in which the novel demonstrates Wangrin’s so-called bourgeois mentality and the extent to which he has been assimilated into the colonial mindset is his fetishism of the French language. Wangrin believes that because of his superior knowledge of the colonizer’s language,6 he is best suited for the very powerful post of interpreter to the commandant of Yagouwahi. He expresses this belief to Romo Sibedi, his kind host and current interpreter to the commandant at Yagouwahi, and who he plots to unseat: “Il serait inconvénient qu’un ‘goujat’ se pavanait dans un paradis, y assourdissant tout le monde avec les accents de son ‘forofifon naspa,’7 alors que des hommes lettrés, sur qui doivent descendre bénédiction et miséricorde du ciel et de la France, peinent dans l’enfer de la pauvreté” (105, “It seems improper that a goujat8 should disport himself in paradise, deafening everyone’s ears with his atrocious forofifon naspa, while literate men on whom blessings and bounty ought to be raining down from heaven and from France are suffering tortures of want,” 70). This attachment to the colonizer’s language is one of the hallmarks of the personality of the bourgeoisie that came out of the school.9 Moreover, Wangrin comes across as being opportunistic, cruel, unscrupulous, immoral, and greedy. He conceives of the world and human relations within a simplistic binary framework inhabited by potential victims and potential victimizers. As he plots against Romo, “Wangrin oublia morale et bienséance, justice et reconnaissance. . . . Pour lui, la vie était devenue une lutte cruelle. Il fallait détruire ou périr, jouer des tours ou les subir” (103, “Wangrin forgot all feelings of moral uprightness, decency, justice, and gratitude. . . . For him, life had turned into a cruel struggle. It was either destroy or perish, play tricks on others or be their helpless victim,” 69). He prefers to be the victimizer rather than the victim in a situation where the victimizer/victim dialectic should not apply. The death of Wangrin’s conscience, described by the narrator as a “revolution intérieure” (104, “inner revolution,” 69), signals his entry into the ranks of the typical bourgeois in African literature. Nonetheless, any claim that Wangrin is a totally negative character and a typical bourgeois seen in African literature would be a simplification of



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his representation by Hampâté Bâ. Any reader of Wangrin has to take into account two important facts. First and foremost is the difference between L’étrange destin de Wangrin (a biographical novel) and the other texts we have seen, all fictional works. Unlike such writers as Sembène Ousmane, Ake Loba, Amadou Koné, Bernard Dadié, and Bernard Nanga, who set out specifically to satirize the bourgeoisie, Hampâté Bâ’s intention in writing his novel was different. His goal was to keep a promise to write the “true” story of a man he knew, a man who just happened to be one of the first flamboyant and controversial figures of the African bourgeoisie engendered by the colonial school. Hampâté Bâ’s freedom of representation is thus seriously limited by this fact. The second point to take into account is the difference between a class and the individual member of that class. As a particular case, Wangrin not only lacks some of the characteristics of the category into which he has been placed; he also has properties specific to him alone. A close analysis of Wangrin’s character and actions within the context of colonial discourse in general, and in relation to the characters in the other four texts discussed above, will reveal a supremely round, complex personality. Positive and negative blend in Wangrin so intricately that it is difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. Kouamé refers to him as a phenomenon (71). Unlike El Hadji Bèye in Sembène’s Xala, or Samba Diallo in Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë, for instance, the colonial interpreter is a hybrid who has harmoniously married within him both Western education and the traditions of his people. According to Jean-Pierre Gourdreau, contrairement à ce qui se passa pour d’autres jeunes gens, le séjour à l’école européenne n’a pas été pour Wangrin un déracinement ou une rupture, mais l’occasion de réunir et de fourbir des armes modernes, à la mesure de la nouvelle situation historique créée par le colonialisme. Wangrin ne perçoit nulle antinomie entre son éducation traditionnelle et la formation reçue à l’école des Blancs. (Gourdreau 1980, 162) Contrary to what happened in the case of other young people, attendance at the colonial school was not for Wangrin an occasion for alienation or rupture; it was rather an opportunity to acquire and perfect modern weapons as warranted by the new dispensation engendered by colonialism. Wangrin does not see any contradiction between his traditional education and the training he received at the White man’s school.

In fact, Wangrin’s cultural heritage is of a triple, rather than double, nature. Besides being the product and amateur of Western Christian education and a Bambara deeply rooted in his African traditions, he is also a Muslim, albeit a mostly nominal one.

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Wangrin knows that one of the surest ways to succeed as an individual on the colonial stage is by “performing” complete loyalty to one’s bosses. The consummate actor that he is, he has analyzed the colonial system and come to the conclusion that the best way to maximize his gains is to play the fool, the role of the assimilated. But unlike other actors in the same space, Wangrin takes his roles seriously. He uses his formidable network of informants to collect valuable information on his target audience, mainly his bosses and adversaries. For example, before his meeting with Quinomel, one of his bosses, Wangrin learns that the colonial administrator could be very sentimental about his military service. Though he has never been a soldier himself, upon entering Quinomel’s office, “Wangrin se figea au garde-à-vous tout comme un chevronné de la garde impériale et déclina ses nom, prénom et titre,” which has the magical effect of making the White administrator uncustomarily jovial (111, “Wangrin came stiffly to attention, as if he were an old sweat of the Imperial Guard, and recited his surname, name, and qualifications,” 74). Wangrin performs his role so well that his colonial masters proudly regard him as an exemplum of the success of their mission civilisatrice (33). Wangrin also does everything to avoid conflicts with his bosses, whom he aptly nicknamed “les dieux de la brousse” (“the gods of the bush”). But if by accident or design his interests collide with theirs, the interpreter always pulls himself through thanks to his intelligence, courage, and profound knowledge of the inner workings of the colonial system. In fact, he becomes a nightmare to some of his bosses who begin to consider him a negation of the very purpose of the education given to Africans. In a court case with the Comte de Villermoz, assistant to the commandant at Diagaramba who carelessly signed dubious requisition forms given him by Wangrin, the interpreter uses his knowledge of the laws to implicate the count in a crime the latter obviously did not commit. De Villermoz expresses his disappointment at the way the graduate of the École des Otages has turned out: “Wangrin est une immense fripouille, culottée comme je n’en ai jamais rencontrée. Il est bien dommage qu’un sujet aussi remarquablement intelligent soit on ne peut plus véreux” (218, “Wangrin is the worst possible swindler, and a damned cheeky fellow to boot. It is a real pity that a man of such exceptional intelligence and courage should have such dubious ethics,” 152). Beyond demystifying the colonialist stereotype of the stupid African, Wangrin refuses to be a mere echo chamber, a marionette in the manipulating hands of the colonial ventriloquist. He receives the master’s words, but instead of giving them back to him undigested, he interprets them in such a way that the originator can hardly recognize them. According to Bernard Mouralis, “Wangrin n’est pas seulement un témoin et un acteur. Il pense le rôle d’interprète qui est le sien et se trouve conduit ainsi à définir la place qui revient à l’activité d’interprétation dans l’organisation même de la société” (“Wangrin is not only a witness and



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an participant; he reflects on his job of interpreter, which allows him to determine the role of the activity of interpretation in the organization of society” “La problématique de la liberté,” 37). As interpreter (technically the mouth, eye, and ear of the commandant), Wangrin knows he is an indispensable cog in the formidable wheel of the colonial machine. His position provides him direct access to the instance and execution of colonial power and its attendant privileges. Rather than being simply content with the passively objective petit bourgeois role chosen for him, Wangrin decides, with the unbridled intelligence and assurance of a consciously active subject, to carve out his own space within the dominant and domineering colonial discourse. Something else sets Wangrin in a category apart from other bourgeois elites. Wangrin is no doubt a thief and a rogue; yet, unlike typical African bourgeois rogues represented in much of the literature, Robin Hood-like, he takes from the rich and gives to the dispossessed. Though, like the typical bourgeois, he is unable to elaborate a plan for the global improvement of his people, Wangrin succeeds in using his position in the colonial apparatus to assist other marginalized individuals in the society. According to Kouamé, Wangrin is “un Justicier et un redresseur de torts” (“a defender of the disenfranchised and a righter of wrongs,” 72). The words used by other characters in Hampâté Bâ’s novel to describe Wangrin—kindness, sincerity, generosity, grandeur, courage, honesty—are not the ones to be found in the typical representation of the bourgeoisie. As soon as Wangrin arrives in a new place, he collects information on all those in need, especially women and the elderly. He then proceeds to helping them regularly and anonymously (366). To be sure, Wangrin’s generosity cannot be seen as being entirely altruistic. Much of the loyalty he enjoys from people is a function of his “strategic” generosity. However, unlike characters like Pierre Dam’no who specifically demand acknowledgement for their acts of “kindness” to people (71), Wangrin neither knows personally all the beneficiaries of his kindness, nor does he demand unconditional gratitude or repayment in cash or kind from them. For this reason, Wangrin is able to maintain intact his respect among the general population even in his days of decline. At his funeral, one of Wangrin’s fiercest adversaries in life, Romo Sibedi, paid him this glowing tribute: “Wangrin est mort sans avoir cessé d’être un Étalon humain d’une espèce rare à trouver”10 (357, “Wangrin had remained a man of the highest quality to the very end, a product of an extremely rare breed,” 256). According to Hampâté Bâ, Wangrin is “ni un saint, ni un bandit” who was forced, as it were, by his education to become an “intermédiaire obligé entre le monde blanc et le monde noire” 366 (“neither saint nor bandit . . . a forced intermediary between white and black worlds,” 260). This point is elaborated by Abiola Irele when he notes that the character Wangrin is established in Hampâté Bâ’s narrative:

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as the quintessential marginalized man, burdened with an ambiguity grounded in his existential condition. Wangrin the colonial interpreter, situated in time and place at the meeting point of two disparate languages, is seen to assume the demanding vocation of arbiter between two cultures in conflict, between two antagonistic value systems. The amorality that he displays through most of the story functions as the regulatory principle of his ambition, but it can also be considered a form of response to his stressful situation, an ethos that he assumes as a moral shield, the sign of his resolve to overcome the limitations imposed upon him and, most important, upon his self-conception. (Irele 1999, xii)

And in carrying out his functions as a colonized subject, he refuses, unlike Thôgô-gnini and countless others, to trample deliberately on ordinary and already disenfranchised Africans. OF WRITER INTENTIONALITY AND READER INTERPRETATION Raised in the foregoing is the issue of the open-ended text, as well as ancillary issues regarding writer intentionality and reader response. The notion of the open-ended text is at the very core of literature and places the reader squarely in the creative process. Paul Ricœur posits that “the production of discourse as ‘literature’ signifies very precisely that the relationship of sense to reference is suspended. “Literature” would be that sort of discourse that has no denotation but only connotations” (220). Oupoh’s accusation—for example, that Hampâté Bâ deliberately seeks to present Wangrin in a positive light rather than in a negative one as all bourgeois characters of his ilk should—underscores the question of intentionality. Consequently, Oupoh’s interpretation of the text in a way that is antipodal to the author’s intention highlights that of the response of the reader. Alluding to the multiplicity of significations Hampâté Bâ’s L’étrange destin de Wangrin is likely to yield, Kouamé states the following: “le créateur conçoit l’œuvre d’une certaine manière. Le public auquel il la livre, la recrée également à sa façon. . . . Ce dernier ne fera pas toujours dire à l’œuvre ce que l’auteur aurait aimé qu’on lui fasse dire. La critique la prostituera peutêtre” (“the writer conceives their work in a certain way. The reader takes the work and recreates it in his fashion. . . . The latter does not always interpret the work according to the writer’s wish or intention. The critic perverts the work, so to speak,” 73).11 Kouamé’s observation adds another dimension to the notion of the open-ended text highlighted in Ricœur’s. While Ricœur’s observation underscores the openness of the literary text to multiple interpretations, it does not necessarily make the point that such interpretations could



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be radically different from what the author intends. Kouamé’s statement suggests the possibility that the reader’s interpretation may even seriously violate the author’s intended meaning, as we see in Oupoh’s criticism of Hampâté Bâ’s representation of Wangrin. But what does the open-endedness of literary discourse really mean? Does it mean that readers have total freedom to do with the text as they please? Is the text so open that it can lend itself to “prostitution” by the reader without resistance? Literary discourse does not make itself available to just any kind of reading. This is especially true in the African context where subject matter is usually not subordinated to form, where the work does not stand (only) by its sheer formal force but (also) by its dependence on the substantive external world it has set out to represent. Every literary text is historically, socially, geographically, and culturally rooted. Not to say anything of the authors personal experiences and worldview. Writing, says Sembène, is a form of participation in social action (quoted in Bestman, 8). Hence, no matter how detached they may be from their work, the author always has a motivation and purpose for writing. The context of literary discourse and the intention of its author call upon the reader to take them into account. Besides, writers have a way of reminding readers that the latter should not take unbridled liberty with their work. Usually, intentions of writers and their suggestions to readers of possible readings are revealed in paratexts and extratexts such as letters, prefaces, introductions, postfaces, afterwords, conclusions, and interviews. We have seen, for instance, how Hampâté Bâ uses his “avertissement” and postface to that effect. But by far the most privileged space for the revelation of writer intentionality is the main body of the text. One way in particular in which this is achieved is through the use of metaphor. Metaphors in literary discourse are perforce context-based. “Understanding metaphor in literature,” writes Steen, “is a process which is not only affected by the factors of reader knowledge and text structure, but also by the factor of context” (47). The metaphor and its placement in the text carry the writer’s indelible imprint. Dadié, for example, places his conception of the archetypal bourgeois, the Être étrange (Strange Being), strategically around the middle of his play. This, arguably, is an effort on the playwright’s part to influence the reading and interpretation of his play. In fact, what precedes a prominent metaphor in a text is intended to set it up, and what follows, to buttress it. As we have seen, Bernard Nanga, for his part, uses one of the characters in Les chauves-souris to explain the resemblance between bats and state functionaries instead of simply stating it himself. Many of the writers discussed in this chapter show their preference for metaphor as the ideal vehicle to express their intentions and desires. The advantages associated with this choice cannot be understated. The first big advantage of metaphorization is that it is a process of simplification that

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makes it easier to understand the target domain (the bourgeois) by portraying it in the light of a supposedly more vivid appearance of the source domain (the vulture or the bat, for instance). The primary value of metaphors in representation lies in their capacity to take us from what we are confronted with to something outside of and beyond it. It is the effect produced by the metaphor that, like an epiphany, hits the reader and forces them to go beyond the present into the future and back to the past of the book in order to finish the job begun by the author. This effect enables us to imagine what we already know, but also to access those experiences that are as yet to be fully formed. The second advantage of metaphorization resides in its economy and efficiency. According to Paul Ricœur, the main motivation behind the use of metaphors could be the desire to conceal “the initial embarrassment of a definition and an explanation that can produce nothing but a metaphor of metaphor” (193). Surely, there are other ways to show the voracious and predatory nature of the bourgeoisie than by saying the bourgeois is a bat, or a vulture. One can simply explain that the bourgeois is voracious, aggressive, sadistic, and so on. Metaphors help us avoid the long and cumbersome route to so-called faithful representation. Like any economic system, however, there are always trade-offs to be made when we deploy metaphors. A metaphor inevitably violates the integrity of the truth or the reality it seeks to represent. For example, why do we agree that the lion stands for aggressiveness and greed, the peacock for vanity, or the crow for evil? It is certainly possible to look at these animals differently. For instance, the vulture is a scavenger, but that does not make it bad. Since it feeds on carrion, removing in the process a threat to human well-being, the argument can be made that the vulture is naturally good for society. Therefore, it can be argued that the resemblance that is seen to exist between the bourgeois and the vulture, two otherwise parallel entities, is a constructed and conceited one, which gives birth to a new entity, indeed a new reality, by modifying, perhaps obliterating, at least for a moment, the “prior configuration” (Ricœur, 195) of the bourgeois. This criticism of metaphor as an instrument of reconfiguration is not restricted to the figurative device alone. It can be applied productively to the literary text itself, especially to the novel, which is considered the medium of invention par excellence. This is besides the fact that language itself is a metaphor of some Platonic ideal. One text that lends itself to this kind of reading is L’étrange destin de Wangrin. A second accusation Hampâté Bâ is forced to respond to in the postface to the 1992 edition of Wangrin is that he has distorted the facts of Wangrin’s life story. While generally admitting the historical existence of someone with the pseudonym Wangrin, skeptics insist that the life of Wangrin as portrayed in the book has been somehow “fictionalized” (“romanc[é]”) (Hampâté Bâ, 359) by the author. Hampâté Bâ maintains that none of the characters and



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events mentioned and described in the novel is of his invention or creation. He assures his critics that if the colonial interpreter’s life story appears to be too good to be true, it is exactly because it is very true. The writer argues that he collected his information firsthand either from Wangrin himself or from people who had direct dealings with the colonial interpreter and businessman: Je le répète donc pour ceux qui en douteraient encore: tout ce qui se rapporte à la vie même du héros, depuis le récit de sa naissance (récit reçu de ses parents), en passant par ses rapports avec le monde animiste traditionnel, les prédictions, etc., jusqu’à sa ruine après sa faillite commerciale, m’a été raconté par Wangrin lui-même, dans une langue Bambara souvent poétique, pleine de verve, d’humour et de vigueur, tandis que son fidèle griot Dieli-Madi l’accompagnait doucement en musique. . . . Aucun événement, aucune situation n’a été inventé par moi. (Bâ 1973, 359–60)12 I’ll repeat once more, then, for anyone who might still be in doubt, that I heard everything relating to the life of the hero, from the account of his birth (a story told by his parents), through his relationship with the animist world, the various predictions, and so forth, all the way to his downfall caused by his commercial bankruptcy, from Wangrin himself, in an often poetic Bambara, full of verve, humor, and vigor, to the soft musical accompaniment of his griot Dieli Maadi . . . I have made up no event or circumstances whatsoever. (Bâ 1999, 257)

In the above, Hampâté Bâ defends, among other things, not only the honesty of his sources, but also their and his capacity for remembrance. “The novel [as a genre]” says Michel Butor, “is a particular form of narrative” (48). A narrative—fiction, biography, fictionalized biography, autobiography, semi-autobiography—tells a story. For his part, Raymond Tallis argues that “a narrative is . . . an artifact whose shape and structure, whose internal connectedness, is quite different from that of reality as it is actually experienced. Narration, in short, inevitably distorts reality” (21). Hampâté Bâ’s repeated claims of faithfulness to the facts as he received them do not in any way exonerate him from the fact that he distorts reality, as Ralph Austen rightly argues. So, what is the nature of Hampâté Bâ’s distortion, and how does one square it with his assertion that he invented nothing in his book? The first distortion in Hampâté Bâ’s text is of an onomastic nature. In the novel, he refrains from using the real names of the major characters and places. Out of respect for Wangrin’s desire to remain anonymous, Hampâté Bâ decides to use anagrams for Wangrin and all the major characters in the book. For instance, Moro Sidibe becomes Romo Sibedi, Djibril becomes Brildgi, and Samory becomes Yorsam. Towns are also named anagrammatically: Ouagadougou becomes Goudougaoua, Ouahigouya becomes Yagouwahi, Bobo Dioulasso becomes Dioussola, and so on. But, as Kouamé

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proposes, Hampâté Bâ seems to be engaged in a game of complicity with the informed reader considering the ease with which the real names can be deciphered by those with prior knowledge of these places (Kouamé, 70). The second instance of distortion has to do with memory. How faithful was Wangrin to the facts he narrated? How much did he remember? Also, how much did Wangrin’s own parents, and others Hampâté Bâ interviewed, remember? Moreover, Hampâté Bâ informs us that Wangrin narrated his life story in poetic Bambara to the accompaniment of music by his griot. Those familiar with the work of griots in West Africa know, besides the latter’s preference for highly metaphoric language, how much the griot’s music can influence performance. So, to what extent, one may ask, was Wangrin’s narration of his life affected by the griot’s music, not to mention the liberties a griot might take with the facts? We can never provide absolute or even satisfactory answers to these and many other questions. However, a statement Hampâté Bâ makes as part of his defense against the accusations of embellishment will help shed some light on them. And incidentally, this leads us to the third and most complex instance of distortion in the novel, namely translation, the selection and ordering of facts, and the process of filling in the blanks. Hampâté Bâ states: Chaque fois que je l’ai pu, j’ai conservé les récits tels qu’ils m’avaient été faits, ou les ai suivis de très près. . . . Au moment de l’écriture de l’ouvrage, je dus procéder à un nécessaire travail de montage et de coordination des différents témoignages et introduire partout où c’était nécessaire des textes de liaison, afin de donner à l’ensemble du récit un enchaînement cohérent. Ce fut là, à part le travail de traduction et de mise en forme, bien sûr, l’essentiel de mon apport personnel, ainsi que, par endroits, les descriptions de lieux. (Bâ 1973, 360–61) Whenever I could, I kept the accounts as they were delivered to me, or followed them very closely. . . . At the time of writing the book, I had to perform the necessary work of editing and organizing the various testimonials while inserting transitional elements wherever imperative in order to provide consistency to the whole story. Besides the required work of translation and formatting, this constituted the extent of my personal input in the book, together with the description of settings.

This is an unequivocal admission of direct, personal intervention by the writer. This detail provided by Hampâté Bâ, after his strong disavowal of any in(ter)vention on his part, provides interesting insights into the discourse of representation. There are three issues at play here. First, that of translation from Bambara into French. Much of the information Hampâté Bâ collected during his research, including that from Wangrin himself, was in Bambara. So how much of himself did Hampâté Bâ put into the rendition of the facts



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from that language to French? Second, what Hampâté Bâ refers to as “mise en forme” is a process of refashioning that implies the imposition of a structure, which eventually modifies the shape and form of an original. Moreover, the addition or subtraction of details other than those Hampâté Bâ collected regarding Wangrin’s life point to the writer’s direct interference in the collection, organization, and presentation of the facts. The execution of each of these steps require the direct intervention of the author. In this process, whatever raw historical fact has the potential for disrupting or compromising the shape, order, appearance, and viability of the edifice under construction will be trimmed to fit or even discarded. In this economy of representation, the possibility of trading what is natural or real for what is invented or imagined is quite alive. Finally, Hampâté Bâ himself admits to filling out blank spaces to make for smooth transitions from one section of his narrative to another. In order to make his story more interesting, and perhaps more symbolically and morally useful, Hampâté Bâ introduces in the story elements from the oral tradition repertoire of which he is quite familiar: supernatural episodes, proverbs, aphorisms, and the like. In the final analysis, Hampâté Bâ, like all the authors discussed in this chapter, is guilty of what Kouamé aptly refers to as “le maquillage du réel” (75). This makeover of the bourgeois(ie) ultimately stands in opposition to the flesh-and-blood bourgeois and bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the case can be made that the representations of the individual and the class we have examined here do not necessarily negate reality or the principles of realism in representation. IN DEFENSE OF REPRESENTATION What we refer to as realistic representation does not, and cannot, exactly copy, replicate, mirror, or reproduce reality. In fact, no matter how faithful it is to the original, “something of the real must be absent in a sign for it to function as a sign or representation rather than the referent itself” (Tyler, 217). For a representation to be realistic, it does not have to exhaust or feature all the properties of the original. It is sufficient for it to stand metonymically for the original and to be convincing. This is what Dadié’s Strange Being, for example, attempts to do: stand in for the African bourgeois at that particular time in the history of the class. It may also be unnecessary to replicate reality, precisely because, even if it were possible to do so, of what use would such an exercise be? Who really needs “two identical Tuesdays in the same week?” (Tallis, 195). Furthermore, regardless of a writer’s claims to objectivity in their representation, it is impossible to see nature or reality the same way

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through everyone’s optic. One person’s reality could be another’s illusion. Realism, says Émile Zola in his Roman experimental, does no more than represent “un coin de la nature vu à travers un tempérament” (“a slice of nature seen through a specific disposition,” 32). While it may be possible to replicate biographical structure and chronology (birth, life, death) within the parameters of the literary text, it is impossible to do the same for the specific events that occur in each of those timeframes. In L’étrange destin de Wangrin, for example, Hampâté Bâ faithfully copies the trajectory of Wangrin’s life, tracing it chronologically from his birth to his death. As we have so far shown in our discussion of Bâ’s novel, distortion in the literary text is inevitable for the simple reason that the laws governing the structure of external literal reality differ fundamentally and significantly from those governing a textual narrative. In narratives (literature, photography, film), the creator is called upon to impose some kind of order that does not necessarily exist in nature or reality. But what, really, are facts or reality? “There are no such things as facts, only interpretations,” says Nietzsche (in Tallis, 25). Reality, like facts, is not necessarily entirely natural. It has the influences of the human observer and reporter inscribed all over it. To borrow from Raymond Tallis: The most obvious sense in which reality is a human construct, historically derived rather than naturally given, is that our environment is almost entirely man-made. . . . Even where we appear to have direct contact with, or actively seek out, ‘nature,’ that experience has a social framework: the transhuman weather in the streets has an adjectival or adverbial relation to the urban scene, a ‘natural’ landscape is framed by a window; a country walk is more immediately related to its recreational genre and a variety of pastoral traditions than to undifferentiated matter (the soil) or unmediated physical reality. (Tallis 1988, 44)

Furthermore, the subject confronting any given reality is also constructed. The point of view of the one who observes the so-called facts, their preferences and interests, their conscious and unconscious biases or ideology, their narrative goal or acumen, always leave their mark on their accounts of the facts and reality. One can also add such factors as historical and social circumstances, the observers mental and physical conditions at any given time. One conclusion that can be drawn from the above, says Villanueva, is that the real “is not something ontologically solid and univocal but, rather a construction of both individual and collective consciousness” (31). A similar view is expressed by Tallis with a slightly different twist: “Reality at the level addressed by the novel,” he says, “is undeniably what counts as real; and what counts as real is what is acknowledged by the group to which the individual belongs at a given moment or the group consciousness that is operating



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through him—what ‘they’ count as real; or what is generally accounted real” (46). In other words, a representation does not have to receive the stamp of approval from everyone, or from any group other than the one to which the writer belongs for it to be considered realistic. This truth about group consciousness in relation to reality is revealed when people are confronted with a particular scene in real life or in a textual or cinematographic representation. If, for example, a mixed audience of Africans acquainted with the ways of the bourgeois in Africa and, say, non-Africans who are not similarly privileged are viewing a stage performance of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini, it may be easier for the Africans to appreciate more fully the performance. This situation is less an indictment of the intelligence of the European members of the audience than it is of the demonstration of the specific, localized cultural awareness of the non-Africans. Another important ingredient of realistic narrative is faithfulness to the original. The test of the power of language lies in the answer to the question as to how much the representation performs threatens the ontological integrity of the real object of representation. If the bourgeoisie that comes through symbolic representation is seen to be imperfect, the real is itself a case in imperfection, a type of Frankenstein that has failed to harmonize in itself the characteristics of the real Western bourgeois and traditional African values. One reason Dadié’s portrait of Monsieur Thôgô-gnini can be regarded as faithful to the real is that the so-called real itself can be said to be dressed in borrowed robes. If we apply the process of exfoliation on the real-life bourgeois, we will end up with practically the same results. If linguistic signs and figurative devices make the literary bourgeois what he is, extralinguistic signs (attire, expensive cars, and other bourgeois trappings) and acts make the real-life bourgeois what he is. Without them, he can be like any other man in the street. And quite often in Africa, the process of debourgeoisification happens as fast as that of bourgeoisification. People can become bourgeois overnight, and overnight, they can lose that status as a result of a coup d’etat or by some other means. This is what happens to Wangrin, Robert Bilanga, Thôgô-gnini, and El Hadj Bèye. Moreover, if, walking down the street, looking at or listening to a passerby, we can say “this is Thôgô-gnini” or “that man reminds me of Robert Bilanga or El Hadji Bèye,” then Dadié, Nanga, or Ousmane will have largely achieved his goal. Hampâté Bâ’s problem is of a slightly different mold. To make a statement such as Oupoh’s that Hampâté Bâ’s portrait of Wangrin is less than faithful, one must do so from a position of authority—the kind of authority that is granted by acquaintance with the particular case that is the subject of representation, not the general. Oupoh does not have that kind of authority. He did not know Wangrin personally, and it is unlikely that he ever met any of the people, besides Hampâté Bâ with whom he may have interacted,

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who knew Wangrin personally. All he knows about the colonial interpreter is what Hampâté Bâ has chosen to tell him about Wangrin. Or what, like Ralph A. Austen, he may have learned in the colonial archives about the man. Hence, by applying his knowledge of general bourgeois characteristics to judge Wangrin, he is undercutting the author’s authority, his intention, as well as the memory of the real-life protagonist. Even as we must caution against what Robert Pageard calls “la mythologie du bandit généreux” (“the myth of the generous robber,” 200) and risk ignoring the role of such characters as Wangrin in the underdevelopment of colonial and independent African states, Hampâté Bâ’s novel and protagonist constitute an originality that clearly challenges the accepted canons of representation of the Francophone sub-Saharan bourgeois. The discomfort the character of Wangrin causes critics like Oupoh stems from the fact that the former is complex “art,” not a piece of work confectioned gratuitously from a preexisting inventory of images. As we have already shown, Wangrin is a confluent of opposites (366). He is neither-nor, either-or, and he is also everything at once. While he may display a number of negative traits of the (stereo)typical sub-Saharan bourgeois (such as corruption, immorality, and a fetishistic attachment to the colonizer’s language), he displays, with equal and uncommon intensity and consistency, those positive traits (honesty, generosity, self-effacement) that make it difficult, if not impossible, to put him on the same pedestal as such archetypal bourgeois characters as already discussed in this chapter. NOTES 1. Italics are mine. 2. Probably the most damning nonfictional critique of Africa’s immediate postcolonial bourgeoisie is the one unleashed by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre, specifically in the section entitled “Mésaventures de la conscience nationale” (95–140). 3. See chapter 5 for the full description of the Strange Being. 4. We are reminded of the following verses in David Mandessi Diop’s poem, “Vultures”: “In that time / With civilization’s mouthings / With splashes of holy water on domesticated brows /The vultures built in the shadow of their claws / The bloody monument of the tutelary era (5).” We also see in Sembène Ousmane’s film Xala a rapacious future member of the Chamber of Commerce described as a vulture, and in L’étrange destin de Wangrin when Wangrin refers to himself as a vulture. 5. Another striking example of the town as a shiny trap that attracts, then destroys its unsuspecting victims, is seen in Sembène’s film Xala. In one particularly revealing scene, a peasant is robbed of the entire harvest of his village by Thieli (which incidentally means “vulture” in Wolof), a man who would eventually be appointed to the Senegalese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Other works that address this issue



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are Malick Fall’s La plaie, Eza Boto’s (Mongo Beti) Ville cruelle, Abdoulaye Sadji’s Maïmouna, and Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances. 6. Wangrin is one of the most brilliant products of the colonial school. So brilliant is his scholarly performance (first in his class) that he is made school instructor—a position reserved for the very best students. We are told that his French is “le français tout neuf, couleur vin rouge de Bordeaux” (33), and when he speaks it, “les blancs-blancs eux-mêmes, nés de femmes blanches de France, s’arrêtaient pour écouter” (26, “even the real whites, born of real white French women, hearkened to the sound,” 12). What is more, Wangrin can be genuinely outraged by what he views as the maltreatment of the “belle langue française” (29). 7. An inferior type of French spoken generally by members of the native colonial infantry. 8. According to note 7 of Amkoullel, “Goujat is the name given to people who followed the army and were employed as laborers for any kind of job that might be needed at the time” (264). 9. Frantz Fanon addresses this phenomenon in Black Skin, White Masks. In “The Negro and Language,” the first chapter of the book, Fanon notes, for example, that “historically, it must be understood that the Negro wants to speak French because it is the key that can open doors which were still barred to him fifty years ago” (25). 10. Italics added by author. 11. Italics added by author. 12. Italics added by author.

Conclusion A Literature about Failure

The social engineering that led to the invention of the colonial middle class is akin to that which prompted the creation of colored classes by slave plantation owners in the new world. According to Donald L. Horowitz, Examples of this process of group differentiation may be found in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Some slave systems differentiated “mulattoes” from Africans and bestowed varying degrees of separate status. . . . Everywhere rules were formulated to define the boundaries of the respective groups, to specify the criteria of identification, to categorize marginal cases, and to permit individual exceptions to the rules of group membership. (Horowitz 1973, 509–10)

These color differentiations in the western hemisphere were instigated by a sense of insecurity on the part of Whites who were vastly outnumbered by Blacks in the slave colonies. Loyalty from mulatto classes was bought with “status incentives” (Horowitz, 533), which succeeded in the maintenance of an army of people of color (including free ones) ready to be deployed against uprisings by enslaved people. Colonization, like the triangular slave trade it replaced (or coexisted with in some places), generated the need to control subjugated peoples by any means necessary. Where colorism was used in the slave isles, social class distinctions became the main answer to the security concerns in the colonies.1 This was the classic policy of divide, conquer, and rule. Ironically, the same fear of rebellion that pushed Europeans to educate an elite with minimal prestige made them grant the same elite a limited number of privileges, just enough to keep them hoping for more so they do not themselves revolt. However, this space of supposed privilege was a liminal space, which was oftentimes a no-man’s-land, or an eternal purgatory. As a middle class, the colonial évolué sat literally at the juncture of two different realities, between White and Black. As “‘unfinished products’ of the civilizing mission” (Tödt, 2), members of the indigenous colonial elite were the very personification 215

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of existentialist angst. Some of them were acutely aware of their in-between status as prisoners trapped in stagnation by design. Pioneer of Congolese writing, Paul Lomami-Tshibamba, expressed this anxiety quite eloquently in terms reminiscent of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness: Torn between the morals and attitudes of the natives, who are described as primitive, on the one hand, and Europeanism [l’européanisme] on the other, we do not know where to turn. In light of our native environment and our cultural orientation we believe with complete conviction that only total assimilation to our benefactors can represent our true social fate. Unfortunately, however, witness to, or ourselves victims of, the actions, gestures and attitudes of those to whom we believed we had assimilated ourselves, our aggrieved and embittered souls prompt us to believe that we have gone astray, or rather that we have deliberately been led astray from the path that must inevitably lead men to their social fate. (in Tödt 2021, 49).2

Furthermore, by their exclusion from greater privileges such as decision-making and governance, for as long as the colonizer could manage it, it became clear, somewhat paradoxically, to évolués such as Lomami-Tshibamba that “regardless of all the rhetoric, the emergence of an educated Congolese elite was the last thing the Belgian colonial state wanted” (Tödt, 3). What was true of the Belgian colonial elite was true of évolués like Bernard Dadié in French colonies and elites in all European colonies in Africa and elsewhere. The substandard education dispensed to Africans was one of many calculated efforts on the part of European colonizers to keep a lid on whatever ambition Africans may have harbored about gaining full admission into Europeanness. The surveillance and enforcement of boundaries and borders seen in the educational system were replicated in the question of citizenship and other areas of colonizer-colonized relations. French colonization, and the school in particular, posed serious questions about citizenship and access to the benefits it may confer. Very few Africans, such as those born in the four communes of Senegal (Gorée, Saint-Louis, Rufisque, and Dakar), had access to French citizenship. Whether in the colonial or postcolonial setting, those who—like Ibrahima Dieng in Sembène Ousmane’s film Mandabi—had not been “lucky” enough to attend the colonial school are susceptible to exclusion from whatever benefits the bureaucratic state has to confer. Boundaries also existed in the area of physical contact between Europeans and indigenes. Where the government previously turned a blind eye to, if not encouraged, concubinage and prostitution in the colonies, after World War I (as well as after growing European concerns over miscegenation, the contamination of the White race, and the citizenship question), the administration tightened the



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laws of contact between Whites and non-Whites. As a panacea to that malady of masculine promiscuity, which saw White men running to the “resources locales” (Conquête morale, 64) in the colonies, colonials were encouraged to have their wives and families with them in the colonies (“‘Redefining’ Frenchness,” 71). The “évolués” who “were not supposed to be distinguished by social and political participation or by economic power and civil rights” were “unwilling to be reduced to a bourgeoisie in a culturalist sense” (Tödt, 24). They ultimately proved to be a double-edged sword for the colonizer. Created to serve as a buffer between colonizer and colonized, to unravel African traditional and cultural underpinnings, and to solidify the newly imposed sociopolitical structures and cultural regimes, the “walking lies” (Sartre) became the principal agents for the unravelling of the colonial state. While conceding that “African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa,” Ralph A. Austen, cautions that “if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of nation-building than in the more problematic and continuous role as ‘gate-keepers,’ between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage” (“Colonialism from the Middle,” 22). If, in general, the revolt of the middle class that led to independence exposed the weaknesses and contradictions inherent in the colonial system, the advent of women “évoluées” had an additional effect of exposing the anxieties inherent in the patriarco-colonial ethos. Trained mostly to become good housewives and mothers, the expanded education of a small minority of them posed a significant challenge to male domination underwritten by both European and African patriarchal, masculinist praxis. In ways more complex than the case of educated men, educated women constituted a disrupting third beat in that cacophonous and disorienting encounter between the West and Africa. One of the great advantages of African women going to school was the opportunity the school provided them to tell their own stories, to be their own mouthpiece, as well as to tell the story of their societies from a womanist perspective. The desire to write comes out of a searing need to be seen and heard, to destroy the emptiness of their long silence (d’Almeida). Consequently, the bourgeoisie that graduated from the colonial school, men and women alike, ultimately became heroes and heroines of some form of political emancipation, for it was they who, backed by mass resistance in some cases, compelled the colonizer to make political concessions that led to independence. This class of évolués that came out of the school, as we have already seen, by virtue of its position in the colonial edifice, paradoxically attracts both hatred and admiration from the local populations. Due to its personal and professional weaknesses, resulting generally from its subpar education and

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comportment for the most part, it has been characterized by failure, in regard to itself and to the public that had put its hopes and trust in it. With the exception of a few of its members who, thanks to their personality, have little difficulty asserting their authority (Wangrin, Demba, and Mongou, for example), the bourgeoisie that came out of the school is incapable of establishing itself by virtue of its own personal integrity and respectability. In the absence of any moral authority and personal appeal, violence is often used by certain members of the new elite as a means of eliciting obedience and compliance from local populations. That is why so often there is, in their wake, a widespread climate of terror, insecurity, and uncertainty. In this regard, what is true of this class is also true of the colonial system as a whole. This makes African literature of bourgeois representation, as we have seen from the example of Wangrin, Climbié, Dam’no, and other graduates of the colonial school, generally a literature about failure. Even where the individual is represented as having succeeded, their success is often depicted as a hollow one, precisely because it is built on a dubious foundation and unable to translate into societal progress. Whenever and wherever the individual has gained materially, they have done so at the expense of their moral standing and at tremendous cost to the well-being of their communities. Moreover, elements of the bourgeoisie can end up losing their power and material or monetary riches as fast as they had acquired them; Wangrin, Dam’no, El Hadj Beye, Robert Bilanga, Monsieur Thôgo-gnini, and Mhoi-Ceul are classic examples. It seems that the colonial educational project was, generally speaking, only capable of producing a half-baked bourgeoisie, one that would waste no time to manifest its condition of underdevelopment and incompetence. The bourgeois elites of the colonial as well as the postcolonial periods have come under vehement and incessant criticism for their corrupt and exploitative practices, on the one hand, and their catastrophic failure to redress the dismal situations in their respective countries, on the other. They have been shown to exploit not only for the pleasure of doing so, but especially because it is precisely their historical mission to do so. However, if it was not able to use its education to elaborate and construct a free and developed society, the class per se should not be blamed entirely. The kind of education its members received did not prepare them for a positive role in their home societies. As Mouralis observes, “l’enseignement colonial forme des utilisateurs, non des créateurs” (“Colonial education creates users, not creators,” Littérature et développement, 92). They have remained faithful to an individualistic education that modeled the exploitation of the majority by the few that was characteristic of the colonial system. Wangrin and others have been incapable of formulating and implementing real socioeconomic programs for community or national development precisely because they lack the will, material, intellectual means, knowledge and mastery of the economic potential of their



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respective countries, or critical mass necessary to achieve that goal. The bourgeoisie, even after seven decades of independence, continues to be a mostly comprador bourgeoisie, consuming foreign commodities far more than they are producing value internally. In Discourse/CounterDiscourse, Richard Terdiman describes discourses as “the complexes of signs and practices which organize social existence and social reproduction. In their material persistence, discourses are what give differential substance to membership in a social group or class or formation, which mediate an internal sense of belonging, an outward sense of otherness” (54). Even if the members of the African elite possessed some degree of awareness of appurtenance to a certain class by virtue of their education, proximity to the colonial master, and uniform interest in exploiting the people, this awareness did not necessarily translate into class solidarity or national consciousness. This was in part a result of the fact that the indigenous elite were not trained to be interested in their native communities. As Albert Memmi asks, “how could he be interested in something from which he is so resolutely excluded” (95)? Instead of thinking and working as a group for societal development, their attitude reads more like each one for themselves: Chacun pour soi, as Thôgô-gnini puts it. To expect meaningful political, cultural, and economic liberation by such an elite, with its umbilical cord still attached to the “mère patrie,” seems like a pipe dream. The representations of the sub-Saharan bourgeoisie examined in this book are generally mono-dimensional and negative. Two notable exceptions are seen in the works of Hampâté Bâ and Francis Bebey whose representations of the bourgeois are more nuanced. One of the commonplaces in the homogenous representations is the difference between the bourgeois and the bourgeoisie. While the bourgeois individual is presented as being susceptible to elimination, the bourgeoisie as a class is not. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie, at the end of each of those works, remains intact. Fama’s death in Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances and Binta’s capitulation in Bebey’s Le ministre et le griot is an eloquent statement on the indestructibility of the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The expulsion or death of the bourgeois arriviste in Dadié’s plays Monsieur Thôgô-Gnini and Mhoi-Ceul do not translate into the demise of the class. Furthermore, the playwright’s failure to propose any viable alternatives to the bourgeois arrivisme he so vehemently decries bespeaks that same reality. The peasants’ action against Robert Bilanga in Les chauvessouris is like a pebble dropped in a lake; it does no more than temporarily disturb the serenity of a few centimeters of the lake. Besides, the confrontation remains a strictly family matter. Of all the works studied here, Koné’s Traites is the only one that ends on a promising note concerning the struggle to dislodge the bourgeoisie. Koné’s negative representation of the bourgeoisie concludes with a prediction of a revolution that will displace the class.

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However, this prediction bears resemblance to that made by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon some thirty and twenty years before Koné, respectively. At the end of his Discours sur le colonialisme, Césaire predicts the inevitable “Révolution” that will eradicate what he calls “l’étroite tyrannie d’une bourgeoisie déshumanisée” (“the stifling tyranny of a dehumanized bourgeoisie,” 59). Similarly, Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, specifically in his chapter titled “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” predicts the disappearance of the bourgeoisie of independent states. According to Fanon, the bourgeoisie, which he labels “the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent” (152–53), is unstable because bedeviled by contradictions. He claims that the ThirdWorld bourgeoisie is so mediocre and weak, economically, numerically, and intellectually, that it is not even necessary to wage a war against it—it will simply disappear, “devoured by its own contradictions” (176). However, the youthful enthusiasm—as represented in Mamadou’s son, Lassinan—that led to the promise of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in Traites gives way, in Coupeurs de têtes, to the resignation that usually accompanies the realization of the class’s resilience. By portraying the weakness, and imminent disappearance of counter-hegemonic elements, Koné painfully acknowledges the indestructibility of the bourgeoisie. The void left by one bourgeois is always quickly filled by another. It is this reality philosopher and theologian, Nicholas Berdyaev, captures in the following statement: When the bourgeois has stuck to his place too long, impeding the movement of everyone and everything till his power threatens life with inertia, there appears another type, with a greed for power and for the best life. . . . This parvenu bourgeois is no improvement upon his predecessor; he is even worse. . . . The new bourgeois has a still greater greed for power and might, is still more ruthless toward the weak, is more intoxicated by his greatness, importance and sudden predominance. (Berdyaev 1966, 9)

Berdyaev seems to suggest that getting rid of the bourgeois is like decapitating the mythological Hydra. Of what use then is such an activity when the replacement is worse than the replaced? The history of government change in Africa (through the ballot box, but mostly through the barrel of the gun) is indisputable evidence of Berdyaev’s assessment. How do we explain the pervasiveness and indestructibility of the bourgeois? The bourgeoisie, unlike its individual members, has acquired a certain discursive quality since its invention in the colonial laboratory. This discourse is generally portrayed as being infectious, like a virus that spreads, uninhibited, over the entire body-politic. In its inexhaustibility, the bourgeoisie is the proverbial Shakespearean stage where individuals come to play their parts, and then disappear to make way for others. From the foregoing discussion



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of the various modes of representation of the bourgeoisie, it is possible to compile a list of the components of this discourse. This list will include characteristics similar to those imputed by Césaire to the Western bourgeoisie: “Violence, démésure, gaspillage, mercantilisme, bluff, grégarisme, la bêtise, la vulgarité, le désordre” (“violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder,” 76). The bourgeois that replaces another, according to many of the authors studied, always displays the same characteristics as the previous one, if not worse. The majority of writers examined here are silent on the question of what is responsible for the pervasiveness and resilience of bourgeois discourse and praxis. In fact, the only one who ventures some kind of explanation is Amadou Koné. In both Traites and Les coupeurs de têtes, he places at least partial blame on the victims of the bourgeoisie. In the first text, Lassinan cites the fatalism and resignation of the older generation as reason for the continuity of bourgeois dominance (67). A similar reason is given in Les coupeurs de têtes when Koné implicates the disinherited masses in the perpetration and hegemony of bourgeois rule: “le peuple imbécile, comme dit Pita, fait la force de notre impitoyable bourgeoisie, en admirant son outrecuidance et ses intolérables excès” (“the gullible people, as Pita puts it, strengthen the merciless bourgeoisie by admiring its arrogance and unconscionable excesses,” 117). Instead of uniting against their common enemy, the people make fun of each other’s woes. Writing specifically about the French bourgeoisie in her Histoire de la bourgeoisie en France, Régine Pernoud asserts that the single most important factor responsible for the persistence of the bourgeoisie is its “faculté d’adaptation” (“capacity for adaptation,” 42). It is this chameleonic capacity of the bourgeoisie to change according to the circumstances that seems to have eluded critics such as Césaire and Fanon when they predicted the demise of the class. But if the French bourgeoisie Pernoud is talking about relies on its education, work ethic, and class-consciousness to enable it to adapt, the bourgeoisie whose representations I have analyzed in this book does not. Bourgeoisification in the African context is not always a historical and evolutionary process, where such terms imply a slow process of maturation. In Africa, thanks mainly to the precarious and unstable political and economic conditions instigated at least in part by colonization, bourgeoisification and its antithesis, debourgeoisification, constitute what can be labeled an “express phenomenon.”3 Whereas in modern industrial societies the criteria for entering the class are competence in business and performance of professional roles, in much of Africa, as the literature so often depicts, strategies for entering the bourgeoisie can be as summary as the means used for expulsion from the class. Thus, one would not be totally wrong to state that the bourgeoisie in Africa is more likely to be a passing social condition than a strongly anchored

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class. In this vein, an observation by the main character in Pabé Mongo’s L’homme de la rue is particularly astute. In reference to his own condition, Wamalouk says, “Les hommes de la rue ne constituent pas une race, mais une condition sociale. Dans ce sens, tout homme de la rue peut devenir un homme de bien et vice versa” (“Men of the street do not comprise a race, but a social condition. Accordingly, every man of the street can become a man of means and vice-versa,” 168). What then are the true nature and condition of the African bourgeoisie? The bourgeoisie portrayed in much of African literature is bourgeois not by virtue of its business acumen or moral or organizational strength, but as a result of its access to the instruments of power and the natural and human resources of their countries. Unlike their Western counterparts who matured from their birth in the Middle Ages to the summit of their power and glory in the contemporary age, the national bourgeoisies of African states have not had a long and genuine period of gestation and growth. As any by-product of the colonialist project, it is portrayed as a modern African Frankenstein with no identifiable premodernity. Very much like an afterthought of colonialism’s capitalist brain, its participation in its own creation is often shown as being dismally minimal. Europe did not care to develop a genuine bourgeois class in its former colonies. This class, which was never truly weaned from its creator’s bosom, given continued Western interference in matters of culture, politics, and economics in Africa, it has never had the necessary space and time to grow organically. It is probably this imperfect and amorphous condition of the class that gifts it adaptability to changing times, hence the difficulty in circumscribing and eliminating it. WHICH WAY FORWARD? Perhaps a more realistic and effective approach to resolving the vexing problem of the African bourgeoisie’s legacy of ineffectiveness is not to wait for, or try to precipitate, the collapse or disappearance of the class. If the root of the problem is an education system that even now continues to produce misfits and half-baked citizens, could the solution to the problem—and with it the redemption of the continent—be in education? According to Joseph Ki-Zerbo, “the real solution will seem to lie in re-designing the educational system such that the orientation, in particular the curricula, shall reflect clearly defined objectives related to the needs and interests of the independent states” (35). The value of history lies in our ability to learn good and usable lessons from it. We have seen in every chapter of this book how colonial education—within the larger colonial project—contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa.4 What could we learn from colonial education policies,



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ideology, and practices that can help in building an ethical, talented, and proactive middle class that will then contribute to the construction of developed and sustainable African societies? As imperfect as it was, traditional or precolonial African education sought to ground the child and “citizen” in the knowledge, as well as spiritual, moral, and physical reality of their immediate environment. It taught them the mechanics and metaphysics of living and dying through initiation ceremonies, farming, hunting, healing, worshiping, and so on. With the exception of initiation ceremonies and formal Koranic education, which may take place at fixed times and places, the education of the child was every adult’s responsibility; and because it was preponderantly informal, it took place anywhere, everywhere, and anytime. With the advent of colonialism, education was no longer a means of social integration of the individual within the larger community. In manufacturing a depersonalized intermediary class, colonial education did more than alienate the members of this class from their roots, their physical environment, and their own people; it also significantly compromised the capacity of entire societies to operate in any meaningful way in their native environments. Given modern Africa’s complex identities, the best way forward for the continent and its peoples lies neither in a blind adoption of the ways of its precolonial past nor in the total rejection of its present forged in centuries of colonization and neocolonialism. The solution, it seems, resides in the continent’s ability to take, intentionally, what is good in its precolonial past, combine it with what makes sense in today’s reality in order to produce an education plan that, if successfully implemented, will lead to the unlocking of the continent’s human and natural potential for the development of its peoples, including a middle-class worthy of positive representation in literature and other modes of expression. NOTES 1. We know that in some cases (as in Rwanda), class differentiations between Hutu and Tutsi morphed into racism, which inevitably produced genocides in the Great Lakes region. 2. See Lomami-Tshibamba, “Quelle sera notre place dans le monde de demain?” 3. In Africa, one of the barometers for measuring the fluidity and ephemerality of the bourgeois condition is the frequency of coups d’état. 4. This is a deliberate nod to Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; see especially chapter six, “Colonialism as a System for Underdeveloping Africa.”

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Index

1903 reform, 9, 10, 12, 14, 32, 53n15, 90. See also secularization 1931 Paris conference, 41, 46 1930–1931 reforms, 10, 33, 40 action: human existence and, 29–30; writing and, 205 activism, 99–100, 104–7, 113, 119, 145–46, 148 adaptation, of education for the colonized, 41, 45, 49, 59, 123, 162, 221. See also assimilation administrators, school, 2, 63–64, 81, 100–1, 114. See also principals, teachers administration, colonial, 4, 7, 10–19, 31–36, 40, 43, 54n28, 66–67, 77–87, 93–94, 102–3, 107, 136, 138, 147, 159, 202, 216; postcolonial, 6–7, 138, 195 AEF. See Afrique équatoriale française Africa: ancestral ways of, 43, 131, 139; blacks and, 9, 39, 43, 47, 50, 139, 190; cultures and, 1, 8, 45, 82, 123–24; history of, 38, 45, 82, 125, 129; natural resources and, 10, 25n8, 56, 67, 166; postindependence, 2–3, 8, 106, 112–13, 128, 133, 162, 165, 219; prosperity of, 34, 38–39;

underdevelopment of, 115, 212; West and, 23. See also ancestral ways; knowledge, traditional African culture and African languages: colonial school and, 40, 53n22, 54n23, 65, 87n8–9; autonomy of, 53n17 Africanness, 158 Africans: 123, 157, 211; French education of, 11–12, 15; Frenchspeaking, 20; heritage and, 3, 69, 112, 148–49, 158; training of, 31; resilience of, 97, 123, 139; so-called inferiority of, 38–39, 44. See also Blacks; Whites, boundaries with Blacks Afrique équatoriale française, 3, 7, 10, 12, 24–25n4, 26n19, 34, 36, 48, 54n28, 98 agency, 20, 48, 50–51, 54n26, 74–75, 81, 115, 149, 159, 172 AOF. See Afrique occidentale française Afrique occidentale française, 3, 7–8, 10, 12–17, 24–25, 32–38, 42–43, 52–53, 63, 87, 90, 97–99, 108, 111, 145, 158. See also French West Africa

235

236

Index

agriculture, 10, 13, 15–7, 25n8, 33–35, 39, 59, 80, 129, 166; knowledge of, 41–42. See also farmers Alessandri, Brigitte, 9, 20 alienation, 40, 61, 169, 183, 201, 219, 223; reverse, 87n10 Amkoullel, l’enfant peul (Hampâté Bâ), 1, 6, 22, 53n22, 81–86, 99, 123, 155n14, 157–61, 163, 172, 184, 189, 201 ancestral ways, 61, 133, 151, 158; suppression of, 43, 61, 66, 80, 82, 137, 140, 219. See also Africa, ancestral ways of animism, 82, 123 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 29–30 aristocracy, 69, 70, 72, 127, 131, 136; hegemony and, 71. See also authorities, aristocratic; nobility, old Armah, Ayi Kewi, 186 army, 61, 81, 83, 98, 105, 147, 213; black officers and, 50, 105, 215; white officers and, 105 arriviste, 4, 23, 157, 164–63, 179, 183, 193, 219; desire for visibility and, 176; money and, 173. See also bourgeoisie; elite; évolué assimilation, 1, 65, 113; as colonial policy, 42–46; erasure and, 45; forced, 43; impossibility of, 43; willing, 43, 54n26. See also adaptation; imitation association, as colonial policy, 42, 45, 54n27 Aubineau, Yves, 16 authorities: aristocratic, 127, 136; colonial, 5, 32–33, 44, 47, 67, 83, 94–95, 136, 1387, 144: of new bourgeois elites, 136–37, 140, 192, 215, 218; French, 44, 46, 183; males and, 95, 106; paternal, 31, 102; postcolonial, 4, 140; schools and, 3, 8, 16, 40–42, 53n24, 56, 63, 143, 162, 164; traditional, 132, 136–37, 140; women and, 106, 145–46,

148. See also aristocracy; nobility, old. See also aristocracy; French colonial school autobiography, 3, 64, 94, 98, 101, 106, 108–9, 112, 120, 148–50, 207 autonomy: achievements of, 97; demand for, 17, 43–44, 91; reality of for the colonized, 46, 85, 153; women and, 153 Bâ, Amadou Hampâté, 1–2, 5–6, 18–19, 22–26, 81–86, 99, 123, 157–61, 163, 172, 203–12, 219; on colonization, 53n22; on representation, 201 Bâ, Mariama, 4, 90, 97, 112–14, 119, 150, 153 Balandier, Georges, 125 Balzac, Honoré de, 127–28, 142, 154n7 Bamako, 81–82, 85, 98–102, 104, 107 Bambara, 138, 201, 207–8 Bandiagara, 19, 81, 83 Bandias, 75–77, 79–81 Barthélémy, Pascale, 8, 94, 96, 107, 110 bastard (bâtard), 4, 132, 134, 142 bastardy: attitudes and, 137; illegitimacy and, 127–29, 132–34; modernity and, 124, 130–33, 135, 140–41; social class and, 124, 131, 142, 154n2; women’s education and, 145 Bebey, Francis, 2, 6, 23, 124–25, 128, 131–37, 140, 142, 144, 151, 153, 156n26, 219 Beti, Mongo, 114, 213 Bhabha, Homi, 159 Blacks: American, 74–75; Europeanized, 20, 26n21, 35, 213n6; governance and, 128; learning and, 50; mimicry and, 160–61; policing of, 19; resilience and, 97, 139; skin color and, 178, 215; slave colonies and, 43, 215; so-called inferiority of, 38–39; stigma and, 43, 100; women and, 89, 96–97, 102, 105. See also Africans; Whites, boundaries with Blacks

Index

blakoroya, 6, 125, 137–38, 141, 145, 154n2 Boilat, Pierre David, 12, 25n11, 50, 87n5 Bolibaughm, Jerry B., 11, 25n8 bourgeois: African, 19, 26n24, 79, 124– 25, 130, 134, 137, 162, 190–201, 209, 211–12, 217–22, 223n3; versus Western capitalist, 183, 222. See also arriviste; bourgeoisie; elite; évolué bourgeoisie: African, 6–8, 18, 20–21, 79, 113, 130, 133–36, 144, 162–63, 165, 193, 201, 203, 212n2, 217–22; artificiality of, 24; authenticity and, 122, 143, 153n2; authority and, 137, 144; awareness of, 205, 212; colonial education and, 134; criticism and, 132–33, 162, 170, 177; European, 8, 193, 222; failure and, 218; Francophone African literature and, 190; hegemony and, 124, 128, 132, 135, 142, 151, 154n2, 219, 221; indigenous and, 8, 12, 23, 113; mediocrity and, 127, 220; money and, 138, 173, 181; process of, 79; representation and, 4, 24, 124, 141, 144, 200–1, 204–6, 209, 211–12; satire and, 165, 178, 193, 201; spread of, 20; underdevelopment of, 18, 24; Senegal and, 5; Western and, 51, 220–22. See also arriviste; bourgeois; elite; évolué Brazzaville, 25n4, 107 Brazzaville Conference of 1944, 7, 10–11, 16–17, 26n19, 36, 41, 46, 91, 145 Brévié, Jules, 8, 10, 15, 17, 25 33–34, 36–37, 40, 43–45, 158–59 Cameroon, 2 cannibals, 125–26, 133, 195 capitalism, 51, 165–68, 170–73, 176, 182–83, 186, 222. See also marketplace Carde, Jules, 10, 14–15, 32, 34, 37,

237

Casely-Hayford, Adelaide Smith, 104 caste. See hierarchy, castes and categories, social, 129, 1343–35, 138, 1410–44, 193–94 Catholic conversion. See missions, catholic Central African Republic, 2–3, 25 Césaire, Aimé, 8, 49, 51–52, 153n1, 220–21 certificate, primary school (certificat d’études), 15, 32, 50, 108. See also diploma Christianization, 20, 31; school as instrument of, 43, 90, 201. See also missions, catholic circumcision, 5–6, 42, 137–38, 153n2, 155n20. See also blakoroya citizens, 57, 133, 165, 223; Black French, 16, 216 citizenship, 43, 91, 218; Black French, 16, 218 city, 5, 72 city, versus village, 75, 140 civilization: colonialism and, 42; distinction from culture and, 29; school as instrument of, 43, 49, 64. See also civilizing mission, of France; colonial project, French; conquête morale; conquest, colonial civilizing mission, of France, 17, 20, 38–40, 42, 44–45, 49–51, 56, 62–63, 152, 215; school as instrument of, 43, 51, 52n5. See also civilization; colonial project, French; conquête morale; conquest, colonial cadres, 15; subaltern, 8, 10, 18, 33 class, fabrication of, 2, 81. See also differentiation, of class Climbié (Dadié), 3, 22, 53, 63–68, 80, 86, 109, 114, 163 clothing. See dress, manner of colonialism, 40, 46, 49–52, 122, 128; awareness of, 202; culture and, 1, 122, 223; society and, 18, 124, 129, 135, 215, 222. See also authorities,

238

Index

colonial; civilizing mission of France; conquest, colonial colonial project, French, 1, 7, 9, 34, 43, 46, 51–52, 56, 64, 81, 111–13, 118, 158, 183, 222. See also civilizing mission of France; conquête morale; conquest, colonial colonization, in West Africa: 10, 21–22, 49, 53n22, 67, 81, 113, 124, 129, 157, 215; justification of, 3; trade and, 127; women and, 5, 95 colonized, 50, attitudes of, 36, 161; children and, 31, 42; collaborators and, 7, 165; domination of, 1–2, 18, 22, 50, 118; power and, 81, 163; separation from colonizer, 19, 45, 79, 119, 215–16; so-called inferiority of, 38–39, 122, 152; transformation of, 33, 129, 135, 157, 162. See also Africans colonizers, 50, 163: anxieties of, 36, 91, 143; interests of, 42–43, 46, 67, 69, 79, 222; domination and, 2, 42–43, 67, 124, 215; oppression and, 49, 67–68, 124; power and, 163; so-called superiority of, 38 commerce, school as instrument of, 43, 51–52, 134; slave-trading and, 165–66 Congo, 20, 25, 26n19, 216 Conklin, Alice, 20 conquête morale (moral conquest), 2, 31, 33, 38–40, 52n5. See also civilization; civilizing mission of France; conquest, colonial conquest, colonial, 4, 9, 30, 68, 92, 132; military and, 1, 30, 70, 92. See also civilization; civilizing mission of France; conquête morale conversion, Christian, 19, 31 cooperation, as colonial policy, 42 Côte d’Ivoire, 24, 42, 128, 153n9 cotton, production of, 35, 171 Coulibaly, Sow Assitan, 107

countryside, 142, 198. See also city, versus village Cummings-John, A. Constance, 104 culture, 51, 64, 60, 71; African, 1, 35, 38, 82, 157; citizenship and, 57; civilization and, 29; colonialism and, 124; education and, 29; European, 20, 108, 157; Euro-African, 110; Franco-African, 8, 197; French, 1, 38, 59; language and, 53n22–23, 64, 82–84; teaching of, 51 curriculum, 35, 37, 66, 78, 111, 162, 183; colonial versus metropolitan, 7, 16. See also education Dadié, Bernard Binlin, 3–5, 22–24, 53n22, 63–65, 87n12, 114, 157, 163, 165–68, 172–75, 178–83, 186n11, 187n15, 190, 193–94, 201, 205, 209, 211, 216, 219 Dakar, 12, 15, 17, 21, 66, 92, 99, 102, 105, 107, 111, 125, 148, 151, 216 dara, 57–58, 60–61, 86n4; versus colonial school, 60. See also Koranic education Dard, Jean, 31, 39 Dark Continent, 38 decolonization, process of, 24, 99, 187n15, 200 de Coppet, Marcel, 10, 15 deculturation, 32, 124, 158 de Gaulle referendum, 11, 25, 147 de Gouges, Olympe, 145–46 dehumanization, 18, 30, 220 depersonalization, 66, 81, 90, 114–15, 139, 159, 163, Diallobé, 68, 70–75, 87n13–14, 115 diaspora, 123 differentiation, of class, 18, 152, 223n1; of Whites and Blacks, 35, 215. See also class, fabrication of diplomas, 14, 16, 33, 35, 42; fetish of, 42; power of, 103. See also certificate, primary school

Index

discourse, 219; colonialist, 31, 42, 125, 203 discrimination, 4, 43, 68, 102, 134, 153 divorce, 79, 90, 104, 113–14, 150 domination, 30–31; colonial politics of, 1–2, 6, 22, 46, 49, 113, 124, 158 drama, 170 dress, manner of, 18, 159, 177–78, 193–95, 213; European and, 160, 163, 178; Western style and, 176–77, 187n12 Du Bois, W.E.B., 75 Éboué, Felix, 35–36 École des Otages, 5, 9, 12, 31, 36, 202. See also Faidherbe, Louis education: banking concept and, 51–52; bourgeoisie and, 134–35; colonial project and, 1, 7, 9–10, 36, 46, 50–52, 55–56, 59, 78–79, 83, 124, 158, 218, 222; designed for Europeans versus Africans, 7, 16, 50; empowerment and, 101, 111; failure and, 35, 49, 153, 183–84, 217–18; French language and, 33, 37, 53n22–23, 65, 79, 83–84, 112; goal of, 33; history of, 11–20; masses and, 33–34, 37; philanthropy and, 1, 49, 56, 62; political, 217; poverty and, 196; ruralization of, 17, 36; social engineering and, 7, 21, 31, 49, 65, 79, 157, 215; soft power and, 62, 91; violence and, 31; women and, 8, 17, 94, 98, 103, 107, 119, 146. See also curriculum; French colonial school; secularization; Western education elections, 16, 105–6, 125, 146–47 elite, indigenous, 7–8, 26n24, 37, 89, 132, 135–36. See also bourgeois, bourgeoisie, évolués enseignment adapté. See adaptation environment: classroom and, 61, 97; knowledge of one’s own, 29, 40–41, 65–66, 82, 216, 223; language and, 64, 121

239

equality, 30, 43, 49, 62, 81, 124, 144; Africans’ demands for, 17; gender and, 95–96 Europe, 110, 166: assault on African cultures and, 1, 125; bourgeoisie and, 8; civilization of, 59; clothing and, 161, 178; culture of, 20, 72, 108; modernity and, 115; progress and, 47, 71; women and, 95–96, 110. See also dress, manner of; Europeans, in the colony Europeans, in the colony, 68, 90, 92, 108, 160, 166, 172, 211; access to jobs and, 16; arrival of, boundaries with Africans and, 45, 215–16; children of, 13, 15; privileges of, 102–3, 215–16; values of, 168, 173. See also Europe; settlers, European évolués, 8, 18–20, 26n24, 43, 77–80, 86–87, 103, 119–20, 215; women and, 8, 96–97, 101, 106, 120, 150, 217. See also bourgeois, bourgeoisie, elite Faidherbe, Louis, 9, 12–13, 25n7, 31–33, 36, 62, 120n16. See also École des Otages Faladé, Géraldine, 118 family, 20; African, 8, 45, 95, 109, 119, 125, 144; ancestors and, 80; bonds and, 85, 153; education and, 46; importance of, 48, 61, 94, 99–104, 108–12, 117, 144, 146, 160; nuclear, 95; origin and, 36; pressures and, 5; separation from, 124; Western notions of, 95 Fanon, Frantz, 6, 8, 161–62, 185, 191, 212n2, 220–21 farmers, 16, 34–35, 42, 164, 223 feminism, 104, 106, 118, 145 Femme d’Afrique: La vie d’Aoua Kéita racontée par elle-même (Kéita), 5, 23, 90, 98–107, 119, 125, 146–48

240

Index

fiction, 23, 63, 106, 112, 125, 190, 198, 201, 206–7, 212; auto-fiction, 90, 106 Fleuriau, Joseph, 39 folktales, 27, 57, 99, 106, 130 France, love of, 35, 38, 90, 160. See also civilizing mission of France; loyalty, of colonized to colonizers; mère patrie freedom, 31, 82; expression and, 60; women and, 103, 144, 148 Freire, Paolo, 30–31 French colonial school, 1–2, 7–24, 37, 51, 59–63, 66–67, 82–85; bourgeoisie and, 134–35, 217– 18; as catalyst to transgression, 23; commerce and, 43, 51, 71; hegemony and, 71; history of, 11; morality and, 51. See also authorities; education; schools; Western education French Guinea. See Guinea French language: aesthetics of, 37–38, 112, 213n6; centrality of in colonial education, 35, 37, 41, 79, 81, 84; instruction and, 2, 15, 33, 38, 40–41, 64–65, 83; natives’ ability to speak, 18, 20, 33, 59, 79, 213n6–7; so-called superiority of, 79, 82; social transformation and, 53n22–23, 59, 80, 92; spread of, 15, 32–33, 37, 41, 59, 92; teaching/withholding of, 35, 37–41 French literature, 112; beauty of, 37–38; teaching/withholding of, 37–38 French: interests of, 46; so-called generosity of, 33; so-called superiority of, 38, 82. See also authorities, French; colonial project, French Frenchified Africans, 20, 32, 43, 59 Frenchness, 43 French Sudan. See Mali French West Africa, 8, 10, 20, 45–46, 96, 99, 113, 153, 158, 166. See also Afrique Occidental Française

Fromm, Erich, 31 Fula, 81–82, 120n3, 123–25, 172 Gadjigo, Samba, 2, 20, 28, 46, 66, 70, 87n10, 124 Gamble, Harry, 8, 20 gender, 20, 22, 91, 102, 118 geography, teaching of, 13, 38, 59, 97 Glasman, Monique, 138 Gorée island, 3, 42, 66, 82, 187n15 governance, 216; Black, 128; self-, 105, 154n17 government, 125, 131, 133, 220; new elite class and, 135–37, 216; money and, 169, 182; school and, 31–34, 39, 46–47, 90 griot, 6, 27–28, 57, 62, 124–25, 129–37, 140, 143–45, 178–79, 198–99, 207–8, 219 Grusky, David, 129 Guinea, 24, 25n9, 98, 105, 128 Hardy, Georges, 2, 10, 14, 32, 36–37, 41, 46, 52n5, 59, 63, 66–67, 87n7, 89, 92, 95, 120 Harrow, Keith, 114 headmasters. See principals hegemony: aristocracy and, 71, 135; bourgeoisie and, 125, 128, 132, 135, 142, 151, 153n2, 219, 221; patriarchy and, 119, 170 hierarchy: social, 18–9, 95, 129, 132, 141; castes and, 132, 135, 143; categories and, 129, 135, 143; precolonial, 82, 126, 129, 132; racial, 47 history: importance of, 157, 222; teaching of, 13, 21, 28, 38; transmission of, 27 homogenization, 18, 37, 72, 133, 170, 190, 198, 219 Horowitz, Donald L., 215 housewives, 17, 22–23, 89–92, 96, 101, 111, 119, 149, 217; patriarchy and, 119

Index

human rights, 107, 145, 147 hygiene, 41, 61, 91–93 ignorance, 49, 56, 62, 85, 93, 164, 196; of indigenous cultures, 29 imitation, 43, 47, 159–60. See also assimilation, willing imperialism, European, 42, 45–47, 52, 82 indigenous: bourgeoisie and, 23, 113, 193; elite class of, 32, 35, 37, 137, 215; families of, 144; loyalty of, 32; population of, 15, 42, 93, 145; women and, 90. See also indigénat; natives indigénat, 42–43. See also indigenous; natives individuality, 4, 157, 194; education and, 23, 28–30, 60, 110, 157, 160, 183 indoctrination, cultural, 30, 38, 49, 90, 99, 152. See also conquête morale; conquest, colonial Industrial Revolution, 166 industrial production, 10, 13, 16, 42, 166, 172 interracial, 25n11, 91, 161, 177. See also mulattoes Islam, 43; education and, 4, 28, 49, 57, 60–61, 82, 120n3; identity and, 113, 116, 123, 160; French colonial education and, 6, 83, 85; law and, 14; opposition to, 43, 83, 87; women and, 89–90, 98, 116–19, 120n3 Ivory Coast. See Côte d’Ivoire “Je suis une Africaine . . . j’ai vingt ans” (Lawson), 3, 23, 90–92, 107–12, 120n14, 125, 148–50 Jeusse, Marie-Paule, 132 Joseph-Clozel, François, 10, 14 Kane, Cheikh Hamidou, 4, 68 Kane, Mohamadou, 132, 192

241

Kéita, Aoua, 5, 90, 94, 98–108, 110, 113, 119, 120n6, 146–48, 153, 155n27 Kipling, Rudyard, 42 Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, 222 knowledge, 77, 82, 85, 95, 101, 143, 212, 218–19, 223; acquisition of, 51, 53, 57, 183; generational, 29; prevention of, 37; privilege and, 135–36; traditional African culture and, 6, 11, 23, 112–13, 131, 143, 192, 223. See also Africa, ancestral ways of; ancestral ways Koné, Amadou, 5–6, 23–24, 125, 137– 40, 144, 190, 196–97, 201, 219–21 Koranic education, 4, 28, 74, 82–85, 223; schools and, 57, 63, 70, 162. See also dara Kourouma, Ahmadou, 4, 23, 125–28, 130–33, 137, 142, 144, 155n12, 219 Kulka, Thomas, 192 labor, manual, 15, 33, 38, 41–42, 60, 65, 90; forced, 42–43, 83, 107–8, 164; need for, 166 laborers, production of, 15, 78, 166 Labouret, Henri, 35 language, 53n22–23, 64; of instruction, 11, 39–41, 54n23, 82–84 L’Aventure ambiguë (Kane), 4, 22, 63, 68–75, 86, 115, 124, 203 Lawson, Frida, 3, 23, 90, 107–8, 112– 13, 119, 120n15 laziness, stereotypes of, 32–33 Le Goff, Germaine, 50, 89, 96–98, 111–12, 114, 120n4, 144 Le ministre et le griot (Bebey), 2–3, 6, 23, 124–25, 131–36, 141–44, 219 Les chauves-souris (Nanga), 2–3, 6, 24, 194–96, 205–6, 219 Les coupeurs de têtes (Koné), 6, 196– 97, 220–21 Les fils de Kouretcha (Loba), 4, 24, 157, 163–64

242

Index

Les Soleils des indépendances (Kourouma), 4, 23, 125, 129–33, 136–37, 141, 154n8, 213, 219 Les trois volontés de Malic (Diagne), 63 L’Étrange destin de Wangrin ou les roueries d’un interprète africain (Hampâté Bâ), 5, 24, 25n12, 184–85, 189–92, 198–212, 213n6 literacy, 99, 105–6, 149; of European languages, 65, 154n18 literature, 5, 204–5, 210; African, 2, 52, 61, 141, 157, 160, 165, 190, 221; anti-bourgeois, 160, 162, 165, 194, 200, 203, 218, 222; colonial school and, 2, 6, 11, 22, 52, 61, 68; French, 37, 112; girls school and, 115; ideological space and, 8–9, 55; politics of, 39; power of, 223; representation of school in, 22, 24; students and, 13; withholding of, 37–38 Loba, Aké, 4, 24, 157, 163–64, 201 L’Odyssée de Mongou (Sammy), 2–3, 6, 18, 22, 75–81 Lomami-Tshibamba, Paul, 216 loyalty, of colonized to colonizers, 18, 36, 43, 81, 85, 111, 160, 185. See also France, love of Lumumba, Patrice, 125 Mali, 4, 126 Malinke, 4, 128–32, 138, 144, 154n9, 194 Mandela, Nelson, 53n16 marabout, 60, 143–45 marketplace, 133. See also capitalism marriage, 89–90, 99, 104, 107, 115–119, 148–49 Martin-Cissé, Jeanne, 105 Matip, Mari-Claire, 98, 120n5 Mbaye d’Erneville, Annette, 105 McLellan, David, 171 Memmi, Albert, 69, 219 memory, 198–99, 208, 212

mère patrie, 97, 111, 219. See also France, love of Merlin, Martial, 14 métisse, 99–100, 123, 128, 167 Métropole, 7, 17, 44, 90 Mhoi-Ceul (Dadié), 5, 23–24, 167, 170– 71, 175–76, 178–79, 182, 218–21 midwives, 17, 23, 92–93, 95, 97, 99, 103, 150, 152 mimicry, 58, 159, 161–63, 185n2 mise en valeur, as colonial policy, 15, 42, 76 mission civilisatrice. See civilizing mission of France missions, catholic, 31, 40, 90 modernity, 34, 56, 71, 96, 110, 113, 115, 128, 143; versus tradition, 109, 114 mogoya, 138–39, 144 money, 169, 173–85; bourgeoisie and, 133, 139, 173–78, 181; becoming rich and, 141; capitalism and, 165– 73, 176, 183, 186n10; replacement of barter system and, 80; school and, 23, 56–57; happiness and, 80, 175–76 Mongo, Pabé, 222 Monsieur Thôgô-gnini (Dadié), 4, 23–24, 157, 167–71, 173–83, 187n12, 190, 193–94, 200, 204, 211 motherhood, 89–90; patriarchy and, 119 mothers, 94–95, 108, 110; making of, 17, 23, 92, 217 mulattoes, 215. See also interracial Murray, Donald, 112 Nanga, Bernard, 2, 6, 24, 190, 194–96, 201, 205, 211 nationalism, 91 natives, 7, 13, 18–19, 32–6, 44–45, 50, 164, 216; Frenchification of, 32, 43, 59, 92; economic role of, 16, 34–35. See also indigénat; indigenous N’Diaye, Bokar, 126, 153 Negritude, 87n15

Index

Niane, D. T., 27 Nnoruka, Matiu, 132 nobility, African, 121; Malinke, 4; old, 73, 127, 131–32, 135–37, 140–42, 144. See also aristocracy non-European, 43, 211 nurses, 92–93, 95, 97 oral traditions, 57, 82, 106, 199 Oyono, Ferdinand, 26n23, 137 pacification, military, 42, 61, 70, 91 Palmer, Rose, 104 Paris, 17, 41, 46, 107, 127. See also Métropole paternalism, 30–31, 102, 114 patriarchy, 5, 96, 98, 101, 106, 119, 139, 145–47, 151, 217 Pernoud, Régine, 221 Peuls. See Fula philosophy, 29, 78 policy, colonial education, 3–4, 7–11, 21–22, 46, 78, 224 policies, colonial, 3, 35, 42–44; women and, 118 policymaking, African input and, 30, 47 Ponty, William Merlaud, 10, 32, 37, 42, 52n2, 59 power: access to, 23, 84–85; creative, 51; dynamics of, 63, 65, 81; French, 46, 65, 68; societal progress and, 30; of teachers, 72. See also school, empowerment and precolonial: education and, 27, 49, 223; past and, 223; politics, 48, 81; and social hierarchy, 129, 132, 135 principals, 63–65, 94, 139, 160–61 privilege, 23, 142, 215; access to, 85 progress: Africans and, 16, 55, 118; Europe and, 105; French modernity and, 56, 72, 112; society and, 96–97, 171; women and, 119 propaganda, 3, 7, 38, 59 public sector, 83

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punishment: of a child, 65, 117; bourgeoisie and, 198; school and, 63–64, 67, 82, 85, 87n9; of women, 145, 147–48 race, 21–22, 40, 43–48, 53n18, 59, 76, 91, 102, 110, 154n6, 215–16, 222 racism, 26n24, 29, 45, 223n1; education and, 45; Europeans and, 103–4; Métropole and, 43 Ransome-Kuti, Funmilayo Anikulapo, 104, 106 rayonnement, as colonial policy, 42, 53n22 reading, teaching of, 39 rebellion, 67, 86, 184, 215 recruitment, of students, 35–36, 60, 78–79, 83, 88n20, 94 reforms, 7. See also 1903 reform; 1930– 1931 reforms; secularization regimes, colonial: as exclusionary, 43 resistance, 100; African, to colonial domination, 6, 99, 123, 158, 217; to school, 73, 78, 85, 94–95 Ricœur, Paul, 204 robots, human, 4, 18, 30, 50, 76, 185 Rodney, Walter, 172, 223n4 Roume, Ernest, 10, 12, 32 ruralization of schools, 35–36 sadism, 31 Saint-Louis, Senegal, 7, 11–15, 24–25n4, 89, 94, 105, 216 Sall, Macky, 124–25, 154n4–5 Sammy, Pierre, 2, 6, 18, 22, 75, 80, 174 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 21 Sarrault, Albert, 9 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 217 satire, 5, 154n12, 165, 178, 182, 193, 201 schoolmasters. See teachers schools, 21, 56–61; boarding, 12–13, 32; federal, 33, 94; home or, 124; missionary, 90; precolonial, 28, 49, 82, 223; preparatory, 15, 32;

244

Index

primary, 7, 10, 13, 17, 20, 50; public, 35; rural, 16–17, 34, 40, 45, 160; secondary, 7, 10, 12, 15–17, 20, 50; utilitarian nature of, 35; village, 3 13–14, 32–35, 57–66. See also dara; education; Koranic education; vocational training secularization, 9, 32, 82, 90. See also 1903 reform self-expression, 36, 101, 109, 145, 223 Sembène, Ousmane, 5, 24, 87n5, 155n18, 162, 190, 196–97, 201, 205, 212, 216 Senegal, 12, 15, 25, 40, 43, 50, 89, 91, 95, 105, 107–8, 113, 125, 148, 216; bourgeoisie and, 5; children and, 3, 31, 56; culture and, 11; governor and, 9; Islam and, 116; literature and, 4, 125; schools and, 7, 20, 23, 39, 63. See also Dakar Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 87n15; on education, 28–29, 91; and master race, 43 settlers, European, 15, 161. See also Europeans, in the colony sexism, 146 silence, 101, 116–17, 120n3, 146, 148, 184–85, 217 slavery, 42, 124, 165–66, 186n5, 215 slaves, 85, 124–26, 129–30, 134–37, 140, 145; freed, 131, 186n5, 215; women and, 97 slave trade, 4, 108, 124, 165–66, 215; 186n5 social engineering, 7, 49, 215 social mobility, of Africans, 35 social transformation, 7, 23, 80, 86, 92, 124, 129, 135, 157, 215, 223 social upheaval (perturbation social), colonizers’ avoidance of, 36–37, 144 society, West African, 113, 131; castes and, 23, 127, 129, 134–35, 141– 44, 153; transformation and, 124 Sorbonne, 4, 70, 72

Sous le pouvoir des Blakoros: Traites. See Traites (Koné) speech, value of, 29–30 Stallybrass, Peter, 134–35 stereotypes, of Africans, 22, 31, 42, 202; of African women, 104, 118; of bourgeoisie, 177, 194, 212 students, 35–37, 39, 51, 60, 63, 67, 83, 94, 97–98, 124; as collaborators, 32; as means to an end, 37 storytelling. See folktales subaltern class, 35, 51, 96, 116 tabula rasa (table rase), 29, 45, 66, 99 tam-tam, 97, 136, 181 teachers, 21, 63–64, 69–75, 93; African, 41, 59–60; European, 41, 59; knowledge of, 16, 41; morality of, 41; training of, 8–10, 14, 16, 35, 41–42, 50, 53n24, 60; native, 41, 160; power and, 72; women and, 111–13, 148 Terdiman, Richard, 179, 219 Tödt, Daniel, 20, 26n24, 35, 215–17 trade, in Africa, 4, 31, 128, 134 Traites (Koné), 5–6, 23, 125, 137–41, 144, 219–21 transgression, 134, 151; African ways and, 4, 137; bourgeoisie and, 124–27, 132, 135, 137, 144, 151, 154nn2–3, 155n26; caste and, 23; 151; education and, 102; racial boundaries and, 45; sending a child to school and, 100; women and, 102, 124, 144–45, 147, 150 trauma, 66, 69, 100, 109, 115, 124, 149 trial, 24, 142, 167, 174, 182–83, 189 tribes, 35, 48, 80, 128, 132, 164 uncircumcised. See blakoroya underdevelopment, of Africa, 222 Une si longue lettre (Bâ), 4, 23, 90, 98, 112–19, 125, 150–53

Index

Union Soudainaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, 99, 107, 146–47 United States of America, 42, 54n25, 215 US-RDA. See Union SoudainaiseRassemblement Démocratique Africain village. See city, versus village violence, 30–31, 63–65, 109, 124, 133, 221 vocational training, 10, 13, 15 voting. See elections Wade, Abdoulaye, 125–26, 154n4 Western education, 3–6, 74, 82, 137–40, 203; acceptance of, 151, 153; primacy of, 4, 155n18; women and, 148, 150–51. See also education; French colonial school Western imperial historiography, 38, 217 White man, 39, 42, 58, 83–84, 87n18, 105, 159, 185; language of, 2, 18; natives’ encounter with, 75–81; school and, 6, 61, 83, 101, 108, 138, 201 Whites, 43, 173, 187, 203, 213n6, 216–17; administrators and, 5, 202;

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boundaries with Blacks and, 43, 119, 203; colonizers and, 183; insecurity of, 215; privileges of, 16, 18; values of, 70, 97, 103, 164; women and, 89–91, 98, 114. See also Africans; Blacks White, Allon, 134 White man’s burden, 42 William Ponty. See Ponty, William Merlaud Wolof, 11, 25n10, 39, 87n5, 112, 120n3, 197, 212 women: culture and, 92, 119; colonial enterprise and, 90, 95, 111–12, 118; education and, 89–90, 95, 109, 145, 112, 117, 217; emancipation and, 98, 103, 107, 146; French versus African, 90–91; and politics, 104–7, 113, 146, 156n27. See also freedom, of women; gender; housewives; motherhood; mothers; nurses writing, 28, 82, 99, 106, 112, 199, 201: social action and, 205; teaching of, 13, 28, 37–39 Xala (Sembène), 5, 190, 196–97, 201, 212n5

About the Author

Mohamed Kamara is professor of French and Africana studies and chair of the Romance Languages department at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Mohamed’s teaching and research interests include French and Francophone literatures and cultures, with specific focus on African and eighteenth-century French women writers, French colonialism, child soldiers, and human rights. He has published short stories, a play on the Sierra Leone civil war, and research articles on human rights, the African child soldier, French colonial education, and other areas of African and African diaspora literatures and cultures.

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