Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship 1108489044, 9781108489041

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Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa

Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people – debates historians have termed “the métis problem.” Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Crucially, she centers claims by the métis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amid the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice. In this original history of race-making, belonging, and rights, Jean-Baptiste demonstrates the diverse ways in which métis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally. rachel jean-baptiste is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She has previously published Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (2014) as well as articles in edited books and academic journals. She is Co-President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and serves on the boards of the African Studies Association and the UK editorial collective of Gender and History.

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african identities: past and present general editors Toyin Falola, The University of Texas at Austin Carina Ray, Brandeis University

African Identities: Past and Present offers scholars a unique publishing platform for exploring the multivalent processes through which collective identities have come into being. Books in this series probe the work that African identities have been made to do, the varied investments that historical and contemporary actors have made in them, and the epistemological dilemmas and intellectually fraught politics of writing about such contingent categories of being. The focus on African identities makes clear the series’ commitment to publishing histories of the complex and ongoing processes of identity formation through which Africans have taken on shared senses of being. This series calls upon its authors to unpack the flexible, fluid, contingent, and interactive nature of collective African identities, while also exploring how historical actors have alternatively sought to delimit, expand or otherwise challenge the boundaries of such identities.

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Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa Race, Childhood, and Citizenship Rachel Jean-Baptiste University of California, Davis

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108489041 DOI: 10.1017/9781108773751 © Rachel Jean-Baptiste 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-1-108-48904-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1

2

3 4 5 6

page vi vii viii 1

Multiracial Identities and the Consolidation and Subversion of Racialized French Colonial Rule in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, ca. 1900–1930

25

Wards of the State: Claiming and Mediating Colonial Government Welfare and French Institutional Care of Multiracial Children in the 1930s

63

“I Am French”: Multiraciality and Citizenship in FWA and FEA, ca. 1928–1938

103

“Odd Notions of Race”: Reconfiguring Rights of/to Citizenship and Children, 1939–ca. 1950

147

Humanizing Maternal and Child Welfare in Dakar, 1949–1956: Nicolas Rigonaux and the Union of Eurafricans

195

Multiracial Internationalism: Racial Equality, Human Rights, and Just Eurafrican Futures, 1957–1960

235

Epilogue: Multiracial Pasts, Presents, and Futures

281

References Index

287 297

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Figures

1 Map of colonial French West and Equatorial Africa page 11 2 Organizational chart of French colonial governance in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa 12 3 Logo of the Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa and Togo, ca. 1950s 196 4 Photo 1: Left to right: Nicolas Rigonaux, his mother, an unnamed woman, and an unnamed man (no date). Photo 2: Rigonaux’s presumed biological father, François Rigonaux 201 5 Photo 1: Pauline Diallo Rigonaux at N’Dar Toute (third row, third from right, marked X), no date. Photo 2: Wedding photo of Mr. and Mrs. Rigonaux (no date) 203 6 Photos of delegates to the First International Congress of Métis 243 7 Photo from France visit, summer 1959 260 8 Photo of Nicolas Rigonaux (third from right), Irene Dilloo (fourth from left), and attendees of the Second International Congress of Métis 265

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Tables

1 Statistics on métis children in FEA from the Office of the Governor-General, 1935–1936 page 91 2 Requests for certificates of possession d’état according to the decree of September 5, 1930, received by the Office of the Governor-General of FWA, 1930–1945 113 3 Summary of recognition of French citizenship approved by the Court of Appeals of FWA in favor of métis by application of the September 4, 1930 decree, 1931–1938 117 4 Legal petitions for attainment of French citizenship in FEA from September 15, 1936 to October 20, 1937 142

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Acknowledgments

A global support network of people, resources, and institutions helped me write this book. First, I thank unsung archivists and librarians, many of whom work in abysmal environments with a paucity of resources and remuneration and fight to preserve records and make them accessible. These include the staff of the National Archives of Senegal, particularly its first female director, Fatoumata Cissé Diarra, and Albert Diatta; Institut Fondamental de l’Afrique Noire in Senegal; the National Archives of Gabon; the National Archives of the Republic of Congo; City Archives of Brazzaville, Congo; Archives of Overseas France in Aix-en-Provence; Archives of the Spiritan Fathers in Paris, especially the late Father Viera; Archives of the Evangelical Work for Diaconia and Development in Berlin, Germany; Archives of Sisters of Immaculate Conception in Italy, Senegal, and Gabon, particularly Sister Marie Sidonie; and Archives of the Fathers of Saint Gabriel in Italy, particularly Father Camile Lucat. The following sources provided funding for research and travel to those sites: the Davis Humanities Institute, the Institute for Social Sciences, and the Academic Senate at the University of California, Davis; University of California Consortium for Black Studies in California; and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Kerstin Stubenvoll provided intrepid research assistance in tracking down and translating materials from Germany. I also thank the individuals who granted oral histories. They made themselves, their communities, and forebearers vulnerable by sharing their stories and allowing me access to their family archives. I am especially grateful to Nicole Sarr, Josette Sickout, and Patrick Cellier for their unwavering determination in preserving and disseminating these histories. Various scholars of race and ethnicity; gender and family; African, African American, and African diaspora studies in varied disciplines graciously conversed with me and shared insights about their work, and these interactions challenged me to think more expansively. They included Leora Auslander, Pascale Barthélémy, Jennifer Boittin, Emily Burrill, Barbara Cooper, Corrie Decker, Anne Hugon, Hilary Jones, the late Pier Larson, Christopher Joonhai viii

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Acknowledgments

ix

Lee, Daniel Magaziner, Stephanie Newell, Emanuelle Saada, Lorelle Semley, Christina Firpo, Jean Allman, and colleagues in the Department of History at University of California, Davis. Richard Roberts continued to be an indomitable and generous adviser. I presented (virtually and in person) vignettes of the book in its varied stages at workshops, universities, and conferences, where the conversations with attendees and readers had me going back to the drawing board again and again. I’d like to highlight and thank the following: Conference on Subaltern Political Knowledge(s) at the University of Antwerp organized by Karen Lauwers and Beyen Marnix; African and Gender History Seminar at the University of Reading organized by Heike Schmidt; Slavery, Post-slavery, and Gender Violence in Africa Research Workshop at the University of Birmingham organized by Benedetta Rossi; African Studies Center Lecture Series at University of California, Los Angeles, organized by Steven Nelson; Colloquium on Décolonisation et enjeux postcoloniaux de l’enfance et de la jeunesse organized by Yves Denéchère; Program in African Studies Colloquium at Indiana University organized by Michelle Moyd; and African Studies Workshop at Stanford University organized by Joel Cabrita. I am indebted to a community of thought and writing partners who provided me with critical intellectual and emotional sustenance. I thank Lorena Oropeza and Lisa Materson, who read every single word at every single stage. I also thank Abosede George, Michelle Moyd, Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, Nora Titone, Cecilia Tsu, Kim Warren, and Jennifer Wilks. Michelle Beckett helped me prune, refine, and clarify. Elaina Abbott steered me to write more capaciously. I am forever appreciative of astute critiques and recommendations from two anonymous readers. Carina Ray is a fierce and generous series editor, who prodded me to think and write more bravely. I thank her and Toyin Falola for their advocacy for this series, and Maria March for her championing of this book in a period of immense challenge in publishing. To my blood and chosen family – Ari, Sara, Pria, Noah, Erica, and Cassandra – thank you for your patience and love.

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Introduction

Between the summers of 1932 and 1934, two residents in St. Louis (the capital city of the colony of Senegal in French West Africa during the period of French colonial rule) wrote letters to the colony’s governor imploring the colonial state to assume the care and education of a child named Charles Jondot because he was “métis” – that is, multiracial. Their letters elaborated that Jondot was the child of an African woman from the region and a deceased European man who had worked in the town as a teacher. According to French law, the relationship was not legally a marriage and therefore Jondot was a natural or illegitimate child; his presumed father had not publicly acknowledged filiation, which rendered Jondot’s paternity as “legally unknown.” French colonial law demarcated people residing in French Africa into two racialized legal categories, indigène (native) and citoyen (citizen). In French West and Equatorial Africa, which are the focus of this book, the colonial subject or native – the indigène – was racialized as black and African; by contrast, the citoyen was racialized as white and European. Jondot was indigène, since his mother was indigène and his father “unknown.” Given that he was indigène, the French colonial state bore no obligation to intervene or pay for his education or care, although it may have taken on the responsibility for a child who was a citoyen. However, both letter-writers claimed there was a third category – métis or multiracial – that tied children born of interracial unions to French society and made them rights-bearing individuals vis-à-vis French colonial society and the state. The first supplicant was a Mrs. de la Torre, a French colonial settler and the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children.1 For de la Torre, multiracial children such as Jondot held a liminal status due to their European filiation, even though their fathers played no roles in their lives. Further, they had been “morally abandoned” by French society and the state because they were being raised in their African maternal milieus. However, 1

Archive Nationales du Senegal (hereafter ANS), 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the president of the Executive Board of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the governor-general of Senegal, July 20, 1932, letter 14009.

1

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Introduction

they were entitled to a French lifestyle and educational environments. The charity sought to remove these children from their maternal milieus and raise them in Catholic mission stations in the colony. The second supplicant, Dugay Clédor, was a black African who was an originaire – a person who resided in the towns of St. Louis, Ruffisque, Gorée, or Dakar in Senegal (known as the Four Communes). Originaires held rights of French citizenship rather than the colonial legal status of indigène.2 Clédor argued that the Senegalese colonial state should open, fund, and manage residential schools for métis children such as Jondot who were “visible in the streets of St. Louis.”3 Unlike de la Torre, who viewed multiracial children as special compared to other children born in Africa, Clédor was in favor of state welfare for Jondot as but one part of an educational ecosystem that the colonial state should provide for all indigènes children. If the French colonial state did not even provide for children with French blood in their veins, he argued, he saw little hope that the French could fulfill the colonial promise of bettering the standards of living in Africa or upholding republican principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood in Africa. In 1934, in the town of Libreville (the capital city of the colony of Gabon in French Equatorial Africa during the period of French colonial rule), a selfidentified métis man named Joseph-Gaston Walker-Deemin, who was born from a métis woman and a European man, also wrote a letter to colonial officials. Deemin had founded and was the president of an association called the Amicale of Métis.4 The Amicale decried that the vast majority of the European fathers did not provide for their children, with most having repatriated to Europe after short stays in the colony. Deemin demanded the recognition of and certain rights for people born of interracial relationships between African women and European men. Yet he articulated a broader definition of rights-bearing métis for whom he was advocating than did Clédor or de la Torre in Senegal. The Amicale defined métis who were rights-bearers vis-à-vis the colonial state and society based on their multiraciality as those who were

2

3 4

This status came about through the efforts of Blaise Diagne, a black Senegalese man born in 1872 who studied in France and was elected as the representative of the Four Communes in the Chamber of Deputies in France. Diagne’s advocacy led to the French parliament’s passage of a 1916 law named after him, which conferred the legal status of French citizen to these cities’ African residents, regardless of race or religion. The French perpetually sought to limit the numbers of people who could claim originaires status and limit the exercise of full citizenship rights, limitations against which originaires consistently protested and mobilized. G. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes, 1900–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971). ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Colonial Council, Dugay-Clédor, to Lieutenant Governor Beurnier, June 23, 1934, letter 444. Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the president of the Amicale des Métis to the mayor of Libreville, June 11, 1936, document 4.

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Introduction

3

generationally métis – that is, those who were the children of métis parents, in addition to those who were the children of a European and an African. In Gabon, métis tended to intermarry and viewed themselves as distinct from and superior to other Africans, even though they too held the legal status of indigène. The Amicale demanded that the colonial state provide métis children with free education in state-run residential institutions, segregated from black indigènes children. Their justification was that these children’s European lineage rendered them vulnerable to diseases in African milieus. Additionally, the Amicale argued that métis were French and should be granted legal status as “citoyen” and “European” and be privy to all associated rights and resources. In 1954 in Dakar, Senegal, Nicolas Rigonaux – who referred to himself as “Eurafrican” (Eurafricain) – founded the Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa.5 His mother was from Dahomey and his father was from France; Rigonaux’s father had repatriated there after his birth without recognizing him. Rigonaux accused the French colonial government and black Senegalese alike of racism for not recognizing “Eurafrican” as a distinct identity for people such as he, who were born of a European and an African parent. He demanded that the colonial state pay stipends to mothers so that women like his mother – who were left bereft in raising their children – could afford to send their children to school and provide adequate living conditions. Additionally, he argued that Eurafricans should be granted French legal status. Rigonaux aimed for the organization to bring together Eurafricans (a term he used interchangeably with métis) from both French West Africa and Equatorial Africa. He argued that Eurafricans simultaneously maintained multiple identities – métis, black, African, white, and French, and European – and would contribute to the betterment of all of these societies at local and international levels. From their different locations and positionality in French Africa, Rigonaux, Deemin, Clédor, and de la Torre launched different articulations of multiracial identity and assertions that these identities generated rights related to children and childhood as well as citizens and citizenship in twentieth-century colonial French West Africa and Equatorial Africa. They accused African and French societies of inequities against multiracial peoples, and they envisioned individual and collective actions by and on behalf of multiracial people as the means and ends to create just presents. These claims, which I refer to as multiracial projects, mattered. First, they belied the French assertion that colonial rule was “colorblind”: they challenged the asymmetrical racialized hierarchies of indigène and citoyen that were proxies for race and the 5

ANOM, FM 1 AFF-POL 3406: Letter from President Rigonaux of the Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa to the minister of Overseas France, February 9, 1949, letter 31/U.E.

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Introduction

foundations of French colonial rule.6 Second, these claims complicated the meanings of emerging but seemingly fixed identities – such as “indigène,” “citoyen,” “African,” “French,” and “European.” They demonstrated the capaciousness of how processes of identity formation in Africa called into question the geographically, culturally, and racially bound concepts of identity. Third, these articulations of multiracial identities demonstrated the complexities of racial identity, thought, and practice in African history. Each used the French terms “métis” or “Eurafricain” to convey varied conceptions of what it meant to be multiracial, with shifting factors related to descent, biology, and culture. On the surface, they agreed on who constituted this population, namely, children fathered by European men and born to African women. Yet Deemin, in Gabon, defined métis who could claim rights from the French state based on their multiraciality not only as children fathered by European men and born to African women but also those who were multigenerational métis. I too use this term to delineate people born of two métis parents and their descendants. This distinction is critical, as historical actors throughout the twentieth century argued over what degree of closeness to, or distance from, European parentage would delineate a multiracial identity and the rights that such identities engendered. These four individuals will reappear throughout this book with fuller portraits of their historical trajectories. Multiracial Identities narrates the history of métis or multiracial people of African and European parentage and descent in French Africa – specifically in French Equatorial Africa (FEA) where they numbered about 3,000 people and French West Africa (FWA) that included between 3,500 and 4,000 people – in the period of the expansion, consolidation, and decline of colonial rule. The years covered are from ca. 1895 to 1960.7 This book surveys all of FEA and FWA but focuses on four towns that became consistent centers of métis activism and debate about métis. In FWA, these towns were St. Louis and

6

7

I refer to these varied claims as multiracial projects through borrowing from Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s analysis of race in the United States as a “socially constructed and historically fluid” category of “inequality, of difference/identity and of agency, both individual and collective” manifested in changing “racial projects.” Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2015), x and 3. Variations exist in enumerating the number of métis in FWA, not only because there were contestations in how people articulated and claimed these identities but also because French colonial census taking, record-keeping, and categorizations were disorganized and inconsistent. I obtained the number of 3,500 from Owen White, who cites a 1938 French colonial census – but estimates the number was closer to 4,000. Later chapters of this book return to the question of statistics regarding the number of métis. Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1985–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon University Press), 2–3.

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Introduction

5

Dakar in the colony of Senegal; in FEA, the respective towns and colonies were in Libreville, Gabon and Brazzaville, French Congo. Multiracial Identities traces the roots and routes of multiple articulations of multiracial identities and the contestations that resulted over how such identities made people rights-bearing subjects as children and as citizens, based on the changing dynamics of parentage, life stage, culture, biology, and the law. In analyzing the expressions of multiracial thought and multiracial praxis in French Africa, this book deepens our understanding of how historical actors deployed changing ideas about race to shape the conceptions about and lived experiences of personhood (the demarcation of individual selfhood, rights, and obligations) and peoplehood (the cohering of particular individuals to a shared sense of belonging, rights, and obligations). Analyzing the processes by which historical actors articulated, contested, denied, or invested in the articulation and acknowledgment of multiracial identities also offers a window into conceptions of legitimacy, illegitimacy, inclusion, and exclusion. Emphasizing the language and meaning of how multiracial men and women talked about themselves, this book uses the terms “métis,” “Eurafrican,” and “multiracial” interchangeably. In the communities in which multiracial peoples examined in this book lived, people who identified as métis and locals in these communities generally used the French word “métis” to refer to multiracial people, rather than terms in African languages. As discussed in later chapters, some métis communities in the 1950s began to use the term “Eurafrican.” I use the term “multiracial” rather than “mixed race” or “biracial” – also used by other scholars – because it more aptly captures the multivalent ways in which individuals and collectives chronicled in this book crafted and contested individual and collective identities. Following recent scholarship on multiraciality and the field of global mixed-race studies, I do not use the term “mulato” (mulâtre), which was sometimes used by the French and other Europeans in twentieth- and nineteenth-century archival documents. The reason is the derivation of the term in scientific racism that compared interracial sex to the breeding of animals.8 This book traces the changes over time in terminology and meaning, and the contestations over terms and meanings, in how various constituencies referred to multiracial people. Along the Atlantic coast of West and West-Central Africa, sexual unions between African women and European men had been occurring as early as the 8

A small sampling of studies in mixed-race scholarship includes Alyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Sarah Iverson, Ann Morning, Aliya Saperstein, and Janet Xu, “Regimes beyond the OneDrop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity,” Genealogy 6, 2 (June 2020), 57–80; Erica Chito Childs, The Boundaries of Mixedness: A Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2021); Jasmine Mitchel, “Back to Race, Not beyond Race: Multiraciality and Racial Identity in the United States and Brazil,” Comparative Migration Studies Volume 10, Article 22 (2022).

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late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those unions ranged from sexual violence inflicted upon enslaved women to long-term cohabitation arrangements that lasted for months or years and were legalized as marriage according to local customs (marriage à la mode du pays). They had birthed Eurafrican communities in coastal trade towns.9 As cultural and trade brokers between Africans and Europeans, some black and multiracial women in marriage à la mode du pays in trans-Atlantic trading hubs, such as St. Louis and Gorée in Senegal, referred to as signares, and Libreville in Gabon, amassed influence or wealth.10 Multiracial communities that formed in the precolonial sixteenth through nineteenth centuries along Africa’s coast of the Atlantic Ocean constituted socioeconomic elites.11 Multiracial women and men acted as cultural brokers, spoke European and African languages, and adopted European clothing and material culture. Multiracial people acted as middlemen in the trans-Atlantic and trans-continental exchanges of people and goods, as well as employees and interpreters for European firms. The most well researched of these precolonial multiracial communities has been the métis in Senegal, most of whom resided in the town of St. Louis. There, in the mid-nineteenth century, “métis of the first generation,” in the words of historian Hilary Jones, went on to form “a distinct group identity based on their ability to trace their descent to a signare and a European merchant who lived in the coastal towns of St. Louis or

9

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11

Karl Davis Patterson, The Northern Coast of Gabon to 1975 (Cambridge: Clarendon Press, 1975); George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); David Northrup, “Commerce and Culture” in Africa’s Discovery of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 54–75; Mariana Candido, “Strategies for Social Mobility: Liaisons between Foreign Men and Slave Women in Benguela, c. 1770–1850” in Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne, eds, Sex, Power and Slavery: The Dynamics of Carnal Relations under Enslavement (Athens: Ohio University, 2014), 272–88. For information on increased wealth and status for women in interracial relationships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in French Africa, see: Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa, xvii; Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946,” Journal of Women’s History 22, 2 (2010), 56–82; Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Mariana Candido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 93–4 and 128–9. Patterson, The Northern Coast of Gabon to 1975; Jones, The Métis of Senegal; Henry Hale Bucher, The Mpongwe of the Gabon Estuary: A History to 1860, PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1977. George Brooks comments that in Senegambia, Eurafricans in stratified and patrilineal societies were marginalized and excluded from rights held by others in their age sets, whereas Eurafricans in acephalous and matrilineal societies could reside in and own land and marry without constraints. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa, xxi–xxii. See also Chapter 2: “The Rise of an Atlantic Port, 1710–1850” in Candido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World, 89–143.

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Introduction

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Gorée in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.”12 They maintained this distinction through endogamy, holding the surname of European ascendents, adhering to the Catholic faith, speaking French, and residing in French bourgeois living conditions. However, they also spoke African languages and maintained ties with African societies in the interior. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, when France, Britain, and Portugal consolidated colonial rule in West and Central Africa based on racialized hierarchies of black and white and segregated built environments, colonial discourses came to represent interracial sexuality as illicit.13 Nevertheless, interracial sexual unions between European men and black and multiracial African women continued. Relationships between European women and African men in colonial-era Africa remained rare. Heterosexual interracial relationships resulted in the births of thousands of children; however, most fathers did not acknowledge paternity, provide financial resources, or maintain contact. In what became French West and Equatorial Africa, the children born of these interracial unions differed from earlier generations of multiracial peoples as they struggled to assert their social and legal status in the rigidifying colonial racial boundaries.14 Excluded from legal, cultural, educational, and affective connections to French and European societies, métis born after the consolidation of colonial rule claimed distinct identities based on their multiracial parentage and marginalization and struggled to legitimize their group identities and status as rights holders.

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Jones, The Métis of Senegal, 9–11 and 82–3. These métis communities numbered about 1,200 people in 1830; 1,600 in 1860; and 1,620 in 1920. H. O. Idowu, “Café au Lait: Senegal’s Mulatto Community in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 6 (December 1972), 274. For more on late nineteenth and twentieth century European discourses about interracial sexuality, in Africa and other colonial settings, see Ronal Hyam, Empire and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social Worlds of Batavia: A History of Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Ann Laura Stoler: Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, with a new preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Carina Ray, “Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire” in Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, eds., A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2013). For German and British attitudes towards interracial marriages in Namibia, see Ulrike Lindner, “Contested Concepts of ‘White’/‘Native’ and Mixed Marriages in German South-West Africa and the Cape Colony 1900–1914: A Histoire Croisée,” Journal of Namibian Studies 6 (2009), 57–79. Métis descended from precolonial interracial relationships concentrated their residence within the Four Communes of Senegal, in St. Louis in particular. They saw themselves as a distinct group and were a “self-conscious” and “inward-looking” group. In theory holding French legal status, they intermarried and sometimes were in alignment with originaires of varied racial and ethnic identities in their struggles to exercise full French citizenship rights. Jones, The Métis of Senegal.

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Introduction

Not all people of multiracial descent in FWA and FEA claimed a multiracial identity, nor was there a singular articulation of what multiracial identity meant; rather, there were numerous articulations of multiracial identities. This book does not encompass the self-identified métis descended from precolonial interracial relationships in Senegal, who continued to be concentrated in towns that became the Four Communes, especially St. Louis, after the consolidation of French colonial rule – which accelerated in the late nineteenth century. Métis descended from signares continued to maintain a distinct group identity and did not identify with or join in the struggles of métis born of European fathers and black or multiracial African mothers not descended from a signare.15 Métis in St. Louis descended from precolonial interracial relationships held French colonial legal status as originaires, holding the rights of French citizenship by virtue of being born in these towns. As the French attempted to exert more centralized political control after 1919, métis originaires often expressly aligned with and protested with other originaires – the vast majority of whom were black and Muslim – against French colonial attempts to deny originaires full expression of French citizenship rights.16 However, the multiracial people in Libreville and Brazzaville who articulated multiracial identities, and who are the focus of this book, include those who were fathered by a European man and born to African women (black and métis) as well as multigenerational métis, people descended from métis parents. In FEA, multigenerational métis and children born of interracial relationships alike held the legal status of indigène and joined together to assert collective identities and struggles for rights. The French created the administrative units of FWA and FEA in 1895 and 1910, respectively, to consolidate and streamline colonial rule. These geographic units differentiated African societies across a vast space according to French ideations of ethnolinguistic, cultural, and religious categories. Such mapping tactics were intended to facilitate governance. However, individuals

15

Senegalese historian Ousseynou Faye refers to métis descended from signares as “métis of the first generation” and those descended from colonial-era interracial relationships as “métis of the second generation.” In The Métis of Senegal, Hilary Jones argues: The ability to trace one’s ancestry to a signare and a European merchant or soldier who arrived in the colony in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century distinguishes the métis of Saint Louis and Gorée from people of mixed race who were the products of twentieth-century French West Africa. (182)

16

See also Ousseynou Faye, “Les métis de la seconde génération, les enfants mal-aimés de la colonisation française en Afrique occidentale, 1895–1960,” in Charles Becker, Saliou Mbaye and Ibrahima Thioub (eds.), AOF Réalités et héritages: Sociétés ouest-africaines et ordre colonial, 1895–1960, tome II (Dakar: Direction des Archives Nationales, 1997), 773–94. Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, 196–215; Idowu, “Café au lait,” 284–9; Jones, The Métis of Senegal, 139–55.

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and collectives in FEA and FWA perpetually confounded these colonial concepts through practices and thought, redrawing identities in their local communities and across the colonial geographies. The numbers of multiracial African Europeans in twentieth-century colonial sub-Saharan French Africa – which included FWA, FEA, and Madagascar – were relatively small. Nonetheless, French colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, and jurists in metropolitan France expressed heightened anxiety about their status.17 Elsewhere in the French Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in Indochina, colonial officials and settlers also worried about the existence and status of racially ambiguous peoples. Scholars of French colonial history and Indochina such as Emmanuelle Saada and Ann Stoler have characterized representations of the racial categorization and legal, cultural, and social status of people of mixed European and indigenous parentage as “the métis question” or “the métis problem.” These scholars have published important works that showcase the racialized, sexualized, and gendered asymmetries of colonial rule.18 French anxieties about métis, this body of scholarship argues, reveal the tenuous nature of conceptions of whiteness and the interior frontiers of European identity. However, scholars of European colonial studies have rarely considered the dialectic implications of how the actions and thoughts of multiracial people shaped European thought, practice, and law. Scholars who have focused on the life experiences of métis children and their mothers in Indochina, such as Christina Firpo in her study of French colonial child removal schemes, have shown how these individuals sought to create belonging and family even in the glare of colonial power.19 However, there has been little scholarly investigation regarding twentiethcentury colonial FWA and FEA of how multiracial Africans conceived of their own identities and how the African societies in which they lived considered the question of multiraciality.20 Multiracial Africans and African societies themselves debated the meanings and implications of multiracial identities. In addressing these silences in African history, this book shows that such

17 18

19

20

White, Children of The French Empire; Violaine Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina (Madagascar) aux XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2017). Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule Emmanuelle Saada, Les enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté (Paris: La Découverte, 2007). See also Yves Denéchère, ed. Enjeux postcoloniaux de l’enfance et de la jeunesse: Espace francophone (1945–1980) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2019). Christina Elizabeth Firpo, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016); Denéchère, Yves, ed. Enjeux postcoloniaux de l’enfance et de la jeunesse. An exception is the important book by Jones, The Métis of Senegal. Although more focused on French colonial thought, Children of the French Empire by White briefly touches on how multiracial people saw their own identities.

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articulations shaped the formation not only of African identities and concepts of blackness but also the meanings of whiteness and of French and European identities, as well as the very concepts of belonging and citizenship in Europe and Africa. This book argues that multiraciality was a critical conduit for demarcating and reordering social relations, economic resources, political power, and laws regulating nationality, family, and marriage. It also influenced practices of parenting, fostering, and education in French Africa, both within African communities and in relation to the French colonial state. Lived experiences of and ideas regarding multiraciality in French Africa shaped two important interrelated and constitutive processes of personhood in African, French, and European history, namely childhood and citizenship. Claims to and contestations about multiraciality were also proxies for defining futures, anchoring the past, and demarcating parameters of gender, sexuality, and respectability. Moreover, in analyzing how the French in Africa and metropolitan France sought to define and regulate the articulation of multiracial identities and the rights that such identities may have entailed, this book blurs the boundaries between African and European studies as analytically distinct areas. At first glance, the commonality of the four towns that are the focus of this book – St. Louis and Dakar in Senegal, Libreville in Gabon, and Brazzaville in the French Congo – seems to stem from their status as French colonial capital cities. St. Louis was the capital city of the colony of Senegal from 1872 to 1959 and the capital of FWA from 1895 to 1902. Dakar became the capital city of FWA in 1902 and was the capital of the independent Mali Federation from 1959 to 1960 and of the Republic of Senegal in 1960. Libreville was the capital of the colony of Gabon from 1842 to 1960. Brazzaville became the capital of the colony of French Congo in 1904, of FEA in 1910, and of Free France during the World War II years of Vichy occupation (see map in Figure 1). In the French mind, FWA and FEA were distinct units politically, socially, and culturally in the “mission to civilize” Africa and Africans (see Figure 2). They believed FWA was populated by relatively “advanced” peoples because some precolonial West African societies had centralized states and empires, whereas FEA was inhabited by “backwards” acephalous peoples.21 In Paris, the Ministry of Colonies aimed to oversee the management of the French Empire, with the governors-general of FWA and FEA responsible for

21

For more on French colonial thinking and the division between FEA and FWA, see Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Christopher Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2002).

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Figure 1 Map of colonial French West and Equatorial Africa. Source: Drawn by Cassandra Jean-Baptiste.

the centralized management of consolidated geographic units, which were to generate their own revenues. The governor-general of each region was to be assisted by lieutenant governors, that is, governors of individual colonies, who would oversee a host of French civil servants and military personnel to administer the economic, political, and social affairs at local levels. But the articulation of multiracial identities in these locations where the French colonial state sought to broadcast its power demonstrates the tenuousness of colonial hierarchies and power. Ultimately, the assertions of multiracial identities by various individuals and collectives in French Africa defied the racialized colonial logic of distinction between indigène/African/black and citoyen/ European/white that undergirded colonial rule. Within these “French colonial capitals,” and despite the plans for consolidation, it was African peoples who animated meanings and practices of urban life, built environments, and governance. Inhabitants of these “trans-African cities,” to use Lorelle Semley’s phrase, hailed from various shores of the

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Egypt

Oro Rio

de

12

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Libya

Algeria

Mauritania French Sudan Niger St. Louis Dakar

Chad

Senegal

AngloEgyptian Sudan

Gambia Upper Volta

Portuguese Guinea French Guinea

Dahomey

Nigeria Colony capital Colony capital & federation headquarters

Sierra Leone

Saint Louis (Senegal): Capital 1902–1958 HQ 1895–1902 Dakar (Senegal): Capital after 1958 HQ after 1902

French West Africa

French Equitorial Africa Federation border Colony border

Li b

Cote d'Ivoire

Gold Coast

er ia

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Ubangi Shari Togoland(1)

Cameroon(2)

Spanish Guinea

(1) German colony until World War I. In 1922, split by League of Nations into British and French mandate territories. After 1946, these became United Nations trust territories. In 1956, British Togoland incorporated into Gold Coast and French Togoland gained status as autonomous republic in French Union. In 1960, Togo became independent. (2) German colony until World War I. Split by League of Nations into British and French mandate territories and then United Nations trust territories after 1946, French Cameroon independent in 1960 and British Cameroon in 1961.

! Libreville

Middle Congo

Gabon

Belgian Congo 0

150 300

Brazzaville km

Figure 2 Organizational chart of French colonial governance in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Source: Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.

º

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13

French Caribbean and Atlantic Ocean Africa, and some had also spent time in Europe.22 Merging local cultural forms and their diverse life experiences, they articulated a dual identity as black and French and claimed the political, social, and economic rights denied to them by the French colonial state. However, this book shows that some inhabitants in these towns also articulated an identity as multiracial; they saw themselves as having a triple identity as black and white and French and therefore distinct from others in their local communities. Multiracial people who lived alongside Africans of various identities had been born in or migrated to the four towns in search of opportunities, to attend French schools, to obtain wage labor from the colonial state or European businesses, and to better their present and future. In these four urban spaces, multiracial people articulated changing conceptions of multiracial identities, referring to themselves by shifting terms – “métis” or “Eurafricain” – that served to legitimize their assertions of group identities and as rights holders vis-à-vis French and African societies. By the 1930s, métis associations had sprung up across FWA and FEA. In individual colonies, organizations made persistent claims for the French to provide monetary resources and schools and other institutions for the care and education of métis children. They also demanded that métis adults should hold French legal status, together with the bundle of economic and social rights that such status entailed. Some of these associations buttressed their claims for special recognition and entitlements with the racist sentiment that their lighter skin color made them superior to black Africans. When French missionaries and the colonial state opened “orphanages” at the turn of the twentieth century to educate métis children according to their own interests, métis associations – led by male leaders – claimed to be mediators for black mothers and on behalf of métis children to negotiate their standards of living and education. By 1930 in FWA and by 1936 in FEA, French nationality laws had shifted to allow métis to claim French legal status and shed the status of indigène. By the 1950s, hundreds of métis adults in FEA and FWA had been recognized as possessing the “quality of French citizen” (qualité de citoyen français) under special nationality laws promulgated for métis. In the process, they had transformed the very articulation of French citizenship and what it meant to be Eurafrican at midcentury and throughout the decades to come. After World War II, métis of black and white parentage and descent in French Africa defied the colonial boundaries that distinguished FWA from FEA. They communicated and organized with multiracial people across French Africa. Additionally, some métis in French Africa organized with multiracial people elsewhere in the global French Empire and in Germany. 22

Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 162–3.

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Some expressed a sense of commonness with Afro-Germans, who shared the experience of being marginalized. This new manifestation of multiracial identity expressed the possibility of transnational fictive kinship around people’s common derivation from black and white parentage. By the 1950s, some métis also articulated what I refer to as métis or multiracial internationalism; the term refers to the assertion of multiracial identities as a framework to unite people across the world born of a white and non-white parent in a collective identity and shared struggle. Claims of multiracial peoplehood made by métis offered counter-discourses of belonging to the efforts of emerging African political leaders to delineate an essentialized black identity in multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious African societies, amid increased demands for autonomy or independence in the context of French colonial rule. Multiracial Identities explores one of the most enduring questions of historical inquiry: How do societies calibrate difference, belonging, and power based on changing constructions of race? Claims by métis or on their behalf – some made by individuals and others by collectives such as métis self-help associations – shaped public debates, policies, and practices of legal, cultural, and familial belonging, particularly regarding child welfare and nationality law. Analyzing the comparative history of multiracial identities in French Africa demonstrates that a more global history of the processes of racial identity formation and belonging must consider how these concepts were conceptualized, contested, and lived in Africa. One must understand how ideas about – and lived experiences of – multiracial Africans were in conversation with and shaped identity formation in the global French Empire, in Europe, and elsewhere. In doing so, this book expands our knowledge of race and Africa and race in Africa. It explores the history of the “intimate,” childhood and children, motherhood and fatherhood, parenting, fostering, and family, and citizenship and nationality law. Race and Africa, Race in Africa An important body of scholarship is one that I call race and Africa, in that it collectively explores how Africa has been a touchstone for processes of racialization in global history. One such strand of scholarship traces the origination of race as a category – the source of antiblack racism – in the Western world based on the othering of Africa and Africans. V. Y. Mudimbe’s analysis of how European societies have racialized Africa and Africans since antiquity is key here.23 Scholars of the Americas have explored how antiblack 23

V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

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racism and racial capitalism fed the enslavement of Africans in the fifteenththrough nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade as well as in slaverybased societies and post-emancipation societies.24 Indeed, racism was at the core of European colonialism across the African continent, as has been argued by a number of thinkers and scholars.25 Additionally, scholars of African diaspora literary and historical studies have interpreted the African continent as a critical source of essentialized racial identity formation for people of African descent who were enslaved in the Americas and their descendants. As these scholars have shown, enslaved people and their descendants have articulated conceptions of black identity as rooted partly in shared experiences of slavery and activism against slavery and white supremacy.26 Yet conceptualizations such as the Black Atlantic, black internationalism, and Pan-Africanism have posited Africa as the source of essentialized blackness and tend to obfuscate the history of fluid and contested racial identities in Africa.27 Until the past decade, historical scholarship on race in Africa has been relatively sparse. Such studies examine how Africans have conceptualized, deployed, and contested notions of race and how these notions have changed over time. Several themes have categorized this research. Scholars of South African history have analyzed how European settler colonies institutionalized seemingly naturalized racial and ethnic categories of Africans as “natives,” divided into “tribes,” to demarcate virulent color bars that shored up white minority rule.28 A particular focus of scholarship on race in southern Africa is 24

25

26

27 28

Some of this research to date includes Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992); Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy (eds.), Histories of Racial Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008); F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2021); William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). A small sampling of this literature includes Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jennifer Wilks, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Tiffany Gill and Keisha Blaine (eds.), To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019). Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Mahmood Mamdani: Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); Citizen and Subject:

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Introduction

the analysis of white settlers’ ideology of “Black Peril” – representations of African men inflicting sexual violence on white women – and the nature of settler colonialism and the history of whiteness.29 Beyond the context of settler colonialisms, a second important intervention in the study of race in Africa has been made by scholars such as Jonathan Glassman, Bruce Hall, and Chouki El Hamel, who have disavowed that racialization in Africa – particularly the differentiation of people as either “black” or “Arab” and the existence of anti-Arab or antiblack sentiment in Muslim East and West Africa – was invented solely by Europeans who indoctrinated Arabs and blacks to buy into these articulations.30 Instead, these scholars emphasize intra-African racial dynamics. Glassman demonstrates how “indigenous intellectuals” and African thinkers constructed and contested changing meanings of racial thought in a short-lived outburst of ethnonationalist and racial violence that broke out in 1960s postcolonial Zanzibar, Tanzania.31 Hall’s research on the Sahel region of northern Mali and Niger explores how Africans used “idioms of race to describe intra-African differences” before the arrival of Europeans, dating as far back as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and suggests that the French layered their own notions of race upon these existing political idioms for colonial rule.32 For Hall, concepts like “Arabs and Tuaregs” and “blacks” in the Sahel did not constitute racial identities but rather “racial arguments,” which he defines as “the emergence and changing structures of ideas about racial difference, as well as the ways these ideas were deployed in a variety of contexts over time in the Niger bend to make arguments about particular social and political matters.”33 Another strand of scholarship has examined racial thought and racial identities through colonial and postcolonial African and Indian interactions in the Indian Ocean world, the African continent, and India. In exploring the creation of urban life in colonial Dar Es Salaam as articulated, lived, and contested by Indians and Africans, James Brenan demonstrates the historically fluid meanings of “Swahili” and “African” identities.34 Shobana Shankar’s research on

29

30 31 32 33 34

Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Brett Shadle, The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya (London: Manchester University Press, 2015). Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 8 and 17. Bruce S. Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 16–17. Hall, A History of Race, 22. James Brenan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012).

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the creation of racial knowledge in postcolonial West Africa and India provides an understanding of how non-Western societies defined race and racialization in what she calls the context of a “cultural economy” of goods, music, films, and the creation of academic disciplines, departments, and publications.35 Collectively, this wealth of scholarship has demonstrated the historically contingent and fluid nature of racial thought and racial identity formation in Africa and about Africa. This book builds on such scholarship, which urges attention to how African societies conceived of and enacted racialization and how these processes have shaped intra-African dynamics. Multiracial Identities narrates how the maternal communities in which métis lived engaged the claim to multiracial identities and how these claims launched intra-African contestations regarding how to define people’s belonging and social and legal status. Further building on this body of research, I show how articulations of multiracial identities also fundamentally challenged and reordered the racialized ideas that the French held about African cultures and societies. Beyond discourse or intellectual thought about race, this book also pays attention to racial practice, or race-as-lived, and how quotidian manifestations of race have constituted an important, yet less well studied, dynamic in African history. Another strand of scholars of race in Africa has sought to maintain conversations with global African diaspora studies, but with Africa and Africans centered as active participants in creating varied black identities.36 Multiracial Identities draws from a rich historiography that places Africa as an active participant in the making and remaking of the Black Atlantic as a concept and geographic space. Jemima Pierre’s ethnography on racialization in postcolonial Ghana shows how constructions of “blackness” in racially homogenous twentieth-century postcolonial Ghana underwrote the creation of global black identities, modern globalized racial processes, and “transnational blackness.”37 Pierre’s research reconfigures African diaspora studies, placing people of African descent outside of Africa and people who live in the African continent within “mutually constitutive” processes of the global production of black identities.38 In tracing how Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and other Antillean and African thinkers and political figures physically and

35 36

37 38

Shobana Shankar, An Uneasy Embrace: African, India, and Spectre of Race (London: Hurst, 2020). Lynn Thomas, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Lisa A. Lindsay, Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth Century Odyssey from America to Africa (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Jemima Pierre, Predicaments of Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), xii. Pierre, Predicaments of Blackness, 206.

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ideologically traversed Martinique, Senegal, and France between 1945 to 1960 to create nègritude thought, Gary Wilder further outlines the multivalent constructions of blackness.39 Yet, ultimately, the very term “Black Atlantic” reifies the concept of blackness as the primordial foil through which people in Atlantic Ocean Africa created a sense of shared racial identity and belonging. A commonality between both strands of scholarship of race in Africa has been the idea that Africans have articulated a uniracial expression of racial identity. As much as scholars may argue that individuals and collectives over time and space in African history have articulated changing meanings of terms such as “Swahili,” “Arab,” “Tuareg,” “black,” or “Indian,” scholars have nonetheless reinforced the concept of Africans as claiming a singular racial identity. Multiracial Identities connects these two strands of research on race in Africa, analyzing intra-African debates about the meanings of multiraciality within local and transcontinental contexts as well as how such contestations interacted with and shaped French thought and policies in FEA, FWA, and the metropole. Further, this book traces the ideation of a multiracial Atlantic world that encompasses Africa, the Antilles and elsewhere in the Americas, and Europe. The book also expands the analytic, conceptual, and geographic scale of a small but impactful literature: a third strand about race in Africa, which addresses the history of interracial sexuality (métissage) and multiracial Africans as articulated, debated, and lived by Africans. This strand reveals a fuller history of the complex processes and fluid manifestations of identity formation in African societies. The identities and legal statuses of multiracial people across colonial-era Africa depended on intertwined factors of local conditions and European legal regimes. Violaine Tisseau has expanded the research on multiracial identities and societies in colonial-era French Africa, with a focus on the Imerina ethnolanguage group clustered in towns in the interior highlands of Madagascar, including the colonial capital city Antananarivo. Tisseau has argued that the “métis question” arose for the French and Malagasy of varied identities alike, between the late nineteenth century and 1960.40 In the mid-nineteenth century, as the European presence expanded, interracial sexual relations between French men and women from the Imerina Kingdom – a society that was highly stratified according to people’s status as slave or free, their occupation, whether or not their kin had a tomb, and their origins as Austronesian, Bantu, or Arab – facilitated trade and commerce. After Madagascar became a French colony in 1896, the French constructed difference and legal 39 40

Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina.

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categories in Madagascar according to the racialized binaries of indigènes and citoyen and viewed interracial sexuality and multiracial people as dangers to French prestige.41 Though few interracial unions were marriages according to French civil law in the region, a majority of French fathers recognized their children who went on to hold citoyen or European legal status, with fifty percent of multiracial children remaining unrecognized and therefore categorized as indigènes.42 In towns in the Antananarivo region, Tisseau chronicles how mothers of unrecognized children sought out European schooling in spite of limited offerings by the French colonial state; individual unrecognized métis sought to be acknowledged as French citizens; métis indicated their belonging to French society through wearing European clothing; and métis cast themselves as distinct, claiming membership in Malagasy and French societies. As locations in which many métis were grouped and educated as children, the city – Tisseau argues – facilitated “sociability between métis” and “constituted the privileged site of a sociability between métis, which tended to transform them from a category to a group.”43 Even within the rigid legal racial classifications of native, white, or colored in settler colonial states in southern Africa, scholars have shown that Eurafricans nevertheless crafted a sense of cohesion around varied multiracial identities. Christopher Lee examines the “alter-native subjectivities” of some 10,000 people born between 1911 and 1956 in British Central Africa – Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia – of a “native” mother and a father who was not native. Colonial censuses and missionaries often categorized them as natives and sometimes as “colored,” but multiracial people referred to themselves variously as Anglo-African, Indo-African, Eurafrican, Euro-African, and Cape Afrikaner. The question of why and how the small numbers of multiracial Eurafricans in this region are a critical topic of inquiry in African history is an issue that Lee tackles in his study. Postcolonial scholars of Africa, Lee argues, have identified “the black African subject” as the universal African, an articulation of nativism that comes from colonial binary categories of native and nonnative but also served African nationalist agendas and attempts to unify heterogenous African societies into nation-states. Lee contends: Though small population figures offer a reason for minimizing these communities, scholarship should not be governed by demographic data alone. Their experiences underscore the significance of social margins and border histories, which offer

41 42 43

A 1938 census recorded 5,558 métis, of whom 1,330 were located in the central region of Antananarivo. Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina, 22–44. Fifty percent of 1,330 métis in the central region of Madagascar were not recognized as such. Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina, 181. Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina, 267.

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perspectives that disrupt our current narratives of the past and the frames of analysis we simply employ to understand that past.44

Juliette Milner-Thornton’s “autoethnographic historical account” of her family’s complex articulation of their identity as the descendants of a colonial-era relationship between an African woman and a European man demonstrates how imperial experiences of race and culture continue to impact personhood and peoplehood in contemporary Zambia.45 In Ghana, in contrast, as argued by Carina Ray in her analysis of interracial sexuality in twentieth-century colonial Gold Coast – which briefly touches on the identity and legal status of multiracial Gold Coasters – neither Gold Coasters nor the British had articulated “a métis problem.” Ray argues that “multiracial” as a “category of being had little salience in colonial Ghana for Africans and Europeans alike,” who were focused on interracial relationships and not their progeny.46 Gold Coasters did not call on the British colonial state to provide for the care of multiracial children; neither did the British intervene. African families absorbed multiracial children. Further, British law conferred a common nationality on all people in the Commonwealth, whether in colonies or in Britain: all were British subjects after 1904 and citizens after 1948. That Africans and Europeans in the British Commonwealth held, in theory, the same legal status may be why claims of distinction and organizing by multiracial people did not result in similar fashion to métis in French Africa. Yet, despite the letter of the law, British colonialism still differentiated access to political rights and hierarchies of belonging based on “the color line.” When multiracial Gold Coasters protested against aspects of colonial rule, they did so together with black Gold Coasters to decry their shared experiences of inequity.47 Multiracial people in FWA and FEA chronicled in this book enacted selfnaming practices and, at times, racist views against blacks, as did multiracial people in British Central Africa. They held similarly ambiguous positions in relation to French colonial rule as did the métis in Senegal, at times facilitating colonial governance and at others tying their claims to those of Africans of varied identities who also claimed to be rights-bearers. And they maintained affective ties and a feeling of connectedness to maternal communities, as did multiracial people in Madagascar and the Gold Coast. As in Madagascar, métis 44 45 46 47

Christopher J. Lee, Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 239. Juliette Millner-Thornton, The Long Shadow of the British Empire: The Ongoing Legacies of Race and Class in Zambia (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2012). Carina Ray, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 16. Carina Ray, “Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast,” The American Historical Review 119, 1 (2014), 78–110.

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who congregated in towns and colonial capitals of FEA and FWA to attend French schools or seek wage labor opportunities coalesced with each other in social circles. But in FWA and FEA they also formed associations and launched collective actions to assert their group identities and the rights that such identities entailed. Multiracial Identities is distinct from previously published works on the history of multiraciality in Africa in that it demonstrates the international dimensions of how métis reached out to each other and envisioned a shared sense of identity with multiracial people elsewhere in the French Empire, Europe, and Africa. Sources, Methods, and Organization of the Book Multiracial Identities draws on various and diverse source materials, methodologies, and transnational research. Following the paths of historical actors entailed conducting archival and field research in Africa – in Senegal, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo; and in Europe – France, Italy, and Germany. Archival research yielded thousands of documents, such as citizenship case files, administrative and financial records of schools and orphanages, police records, publications of métis self-help organizations and their correspondence with colonial administrators, documents by missionaries, and the files of private charities. Archival research has also unearthed the correspondence that men and women in FWA and FEA sent to people in positions of power in the colonial state and Christian churches. These precious documents reveal narratives of love, pain, separation, and attachment, providing insights into the emotional history so often missing from research in African studies. In analyzing texts produced by African historical actors, I have heeded Derek Peterson’s and Stephanie Newell’s highlighting of writing and print cultures of African societies as underutilized yet rich sources of African history.48 Archival research alone was not sufficient. Multiracial Identities poses questions about intimacies, family history, and trauma, questions that historical actors and states often sought to erase or hide from the public record. I pursued fieldwork alongside archival research, gathering private family papers and photographs from the descendants of my historical actors and the few who

48

Derek R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004); Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading, Oxford Postcolonial Studies Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Newell, Ghanaian Popular Fiction: “Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life” (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); Newell, “Newsprint Worlds and Reading Publics in Colonial Contexts” in “Colonial Public Spheres and the Worlds of Print,” special issue, Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 44, 2 (2020), 435–45.

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Introduction

were still alive and had lived in the period of French colonial rule. I traveled to wherever I was able to track down these descendants and I recorded thirty oral histories in Gabon, Senegal, the United States, France, and Italy. I have analyzed both the oral and the text sources with a critical eye for the biases, viewpoints, and limitations of all source materials. The arc of this book traces the geographic and ideological circuits of métis in the African continent, elsewhere in the French Empire, and in Europe, between the 1930s and 1960, as they formulated changing ideas about racial identity tied to claims to and opportunities for child welfare resources and French citizenship. Chapter 1 chronicles métissage from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1930s and outlines the varied circumstances in which women gave birth to multiracial children in the early decades of the twentieth century, as well as the possibilities and constraints these circumstances played in childrearing, naming practices, and educational strategies. I establish the foundational significance with which women and children and ideas about motherhood and family intersected with ideas about race and legal status, themes which would intersect and be contested for decades to come. Chapter 2 traces the experiences of children who passed through the doors of state, private, and missionary institutions and into the households of maternal kin in Libreville, St. Louis, and elsewhere in FEA and FWA, starting in the 1930s. The chapter examines the intersectionality of racial thought and concepts about children, childhood, and welfare. In the 1930s, a minimalist colonial welfare state emerged both FWA and FEA. Colonial administrators pooled limited amounts of money and people into state-run and missionary-run schools, residences, and social and health services exclusively for métis children – who in policies were called “wards of the state.” It was not just the actions and thoughts of colonizers that led to this welfare state. It was also through the insistence of African mothers, kin, and other African individuals who were not métis, as well as métis self-help societies, that these children became entitled to certain rights and resources.49 Here, I apply Abosede George’s argument, as seen in her study of children and childhood in colonial-era Lagos, for scholars to “historicize changes in the ideology of childhood over time” in African history and pay more attention to ideas about “childhood itself as a historical or theoretical question” and “social category and a life stage.” By doing so, she argues,

49

In French Africa, it was often African caretakers – and not the French or Belgians, as occurred in child removal schemes in Indochina, Belgian Congo, and Rwanda – who enrolled multiracial children in special French state or mission schools for métis as an investment in children’s futures and capacity for social mobility. Firpo, The Uprooted; Assumani Budagwa, Noirs, blancs, métis: La Belgique et la ségrégation des métis du Congo belge et du Ruanda-Urundi (1908–1960) (self-pub., 2014).

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we can more fully analyze how “societies view notions of progress, development, modernity, and futurity.”50 Chapter 3 also focuses on FWA and FEA in the 1930s. It centers the question of citizenship, specifically examining how métis sought out, obtained, or were denied French legal status in response to decrees promulgated by the French specifically for métis. The chapter analyzes how the hundreds of men, women, and children who petitioned for citizenship invested in the colonial courts and colonial law to acknowledge their feelings of selfhood and belonging to French society. Implementing this change in French nationality law resulted in further contestations between petitioners, witnesses in their local communities who were to corroborate their claims, and colonial officials regarding the slipperiness of how biology, culture, language, and descent shaped racial identity and citizenship. Chapter 4 spotlights Brazzaville, the capital of Free France for much of World War II, from 1939 to 1950. This town was a site of entrenched debates around the recalibration of race and multiraciality, power, and the rights of French citizenship – which would impact all of French Africa after the end of the war. In Brazzaville, the black governor-general of FEA, Félix Eboué (who was a French citizen from Guyana) sought to end what he saw as colorist entitlements for métis and to enact child welfare and the conferral of citizenship in ways that would more universally assure the development of African societies and buttress French colonial rule. His visions collided with those of activist métis associations, which forwarded varied visions of their relationships to black Africans and white supremacy and the particular legal status and social entitlements the associations sought. The chapter traces how these contestations in Brazzaville reverberated across FEA, FWA, elsewhere in the French empire, and in Europe where varied military and civilian factions claimed to be the legitimate government of the fractured French nation. Post–World War II was a watershed period in which the French were forced to respond to expanded claims, differentiated by race, across French Africa for equality and autonomy. A new French constitution of 1946, drafted with African participation, declared all who were indigènes in French Africa to now be citoyens. Black political thinkers and delegates elected to newly formed legislative assemblies questioned the conferral of entitlements specifically for métis. The chapter traces how various racebased discourses shaped rights-based discourses in how historical actors sought to define the meaning of citizenship, colonial reform, and autonomy during these years of increased anticolonial agitation. Chapters 5 and 6 are a dyad. Chapter 5 focuses on Dakar in the early 1950s and analyzes how Nicolas Rigonaux and the Union of Eurafricans of French 50

Abosede George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), 13–15.

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Introduction

West Africa shifted the policies of the colonial welfare state, diverting colonial state expenditures on behalf of multiracial children from European state and missionary institutions to direct payments made to mothers and the Union itself. The chapter narrates Rigonaux’s founding of a charity and foyer that housed métis boys. Additionally, it discusses how métis across the colonial units of FEA and FWA began to claim a collective identity and mobilize together, and Rigonaux corresponded with the leaders of métis associations in individual colonies to form the Union of Eurafricans of Black Africa. The Union also began to publish a French-language newsletter, seeking to create pathways for métis in French Africa to directly control money, services, and communications with each other and multiracial people elsewhere in the world. Chapter 6 crisscrosses between Dakar, Brazzaville, Paris, and Neu-Asel in Germany, from 1959 to 1963. The chapter explores the emergence of a concept I call “multiracial internationalism” in the twilight years of colonial rule and at the dawn of independent Africa. In these years, the name of the Union of Eurafricans of Black Africa changed to the International Union of Métis. The name change is illustrative of the organization’s efforts to cultivate a shared identity as “multiracial” not only across colonial boundaries in French Africa but also reaching beyond Africa and the French-speaking world. The organization held two congresses, one in Brazzaville and the other in NeuAsel, in which attendees forwarded the concept of multiracial people as a global family and the rights of multiracial people as universal human rights that transcended rapidly changing ideas of colony, nation, and citizenship. Contributing to recent scholarship that seeks to complexitize the meaning and processes of decolonization, this chapter explores alternative African futures, crafted in multiracial thought and praxes in ways that both contested and reified the racialized logics and binaries that had characterized the colonial period.51

51

For analyses that disrupt interpretations of decolonization in Africa as inevitably leading to nation-states see Jean Marie Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison, Wisconsin, 1993); Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Lee, Unreasonable Histories; Wilder, Freedom Time.

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Multiracial Identities and the Consolidation and Subversion of Racialized French Colonial Rule in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, ca. 1900–1930

In 1933, sixteen-year-old Léon Poujade caught the attention of colonial government officials in Brazzaville in French Equatorial Africa (FEA). They were suspicious of Léon, whom they referred to as “a métis child,” and his apparent legal status as European in French colonial legal documents and his right to bear the French surname “Poujade.”1 His biological mother, Ducara Brounga, had followed French colonial channels to register his birth when he was a newborn. She brought him before French colonial administrators for them to acknowledge his belonging to French society. She gave him names – Léon Stanislas Théodore – that represented and preserved his ties to his biological father, identified in the 1917 declaration of birth document as a French man named Juste Poujade, a deputy administrator in the French colonial service. Colonial officials in FEA and FWA reacted with alarm toward indigènes (natives) bearing European names and tried to limit the writing down of these names on colonial documents, as the processes of naming and inscribing conferred the recognition of paternity by an individual father and the state.2 French colonial administrators feared the fraudulent conferral of European legal status. The document identifies Brounga as a “native mother, about 16 years old, no profession, and resident of the village of Fort de Possel” in the colony of Ubangi-Shari in FEA.3 The notes convey that Poujade was absent from the proceedings and was “not able to provide a declaration” that he was the father. However, the colonial administrator in charge of the proceedings passed the declaration of birth on to his superior. A few days later, a higher-ranking colonial administrator issued a second French legal document, which conferred on Léon the legal status of “European” based on the first document. The administrator issued a birth

1 2 3

Letter from the governor of colonies of Ubangi-Shari to the governor-general of FEA, March 16, 1933, letter 175/AC, GG 411, Archive Nationale du Congo (hereafter ANC). ANS O-685 (31), Letter from the LG du Haut Sénégal et Niger à M le GG de l’AOF, Letter # 726, November 20, 1907. Declaration of birth issued in Fort de Possel, certified copy by registrar A. de Kermadec, June 26, 1917, GG 411, ANC, GG 411.

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Racialized French Colonial Rule in FWA and FEA

certificate listing Brounga as the mother and Poujade as the father.4 The birth certificate included standard language that the document could “serve and assert what is right.” Further, the birth certificate conveyed paternity and legal recognition of Léon as the biological child of Poujade and gave Léon French legal status by default. Further cementing Léon’s French legal status, the administrator recorded Léon’s birth in the État Civil, the registry of births and marriages of French and other European nationals residing in the colony. African and European conceptions of Léon’s racial and legal status as he moved through various life stages in FEA highlight the unstable boundaries of black versus white and native (indigène) versus European – cracks that destabilized attempts to consolidate colonial rule in French Africa. At the time of Léon’s birth and for much of his life, French administrators concurred with his mother about his filiation and legal belonging to the French community in FEA.5 But by 1933, colonial officials had judged Léon’s claims to European rights and privileges to be dangerous and false.6 Colonial personnel crossed out his putative father’s name from the legal records issued at birth, thereby revoking Léon’s European legal status and any social, economic, and political rights it entailed.7 When reviewing the 1917 birth documents in 1933, the director of Political Affairs concluded that the administrators who issued them had overstepped their authority, because French family law required Poujade’s consent to declare paternity or a legal judgment that forced him to do so.8 According to a 1912 French law, the mother of a child born out of wedlock could file a paternity suit if the biological father refused to acknowledge

4 5

6

7 8

Birth certificate issued in Fort de Possel, certified copy by registrar A. de Kermadec, June 28, 1917, GG 411, ANC. Léon went on to live in an American missionary’s home in an unidentified location for a few years and attended a French public school for Africans in the colonial capital of Bangui. By 1933, he was living with his mother in Brazzaville. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, colonial society in French Indochina also worried about cases of “fictitious, fraudulent, and fabricated Europeans.” These cases were facilitated by unemployed European men who falsely recognized native children as their biological children, in collusion with – and in exchange for economic resources from – indigenous women. Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusions in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 3 (July 1992), 514–51. Letter from the governor of colonies of Ubangi-Shari to the governor-general of FEA, March 16, 1933, letter 175/AC, GG 411, ANC. According to French law, if the child’s mother of foreign nationality and French father were legally married, the child born during that marriage acquired the father’s nationality. A child born out of wedlock to a foreign mother and a French man retained the nationality of the mother. The child could obtain French nationality only if the father voluntarily acknowledged paternity or was forced to do so by a judge. Rachel Fuchs, “Seduction, Paternity, and the Law in Fin de Siècle France,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 944–89.

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paternity.9 Upon a judge’s ruling, a man could be compelled to “recognize the child,” which would confer legal recognition of paternity and the father’s nationality and could potentially confer child support and inheritance rights. Yet this law was not extended to French Africa, and people who had “colonial subject” status – such as Léon’s mother – could not file such petitions. The governor-general sent a letter to the governors of FEA colonies directing them to be stricter about curtailing other people from falsely claiming European status. The governor-general sought to limit colonial officials, as they sometimes aided and abetted these claims, reminding his governors of a 1928 circular directing colonial personnel to halt the practice of “natives who add European names.” He reminded them to not add any European surnames to any stateissued documents, unless they had verified that the European person had legally recognized or adopted the indigène person in question.10 But Léon’s case was not the first or last time that individuals in French Africa claimed a multiracial identity and used that identity to assert their social, cultural, or legal status as “French” or “European” and claim the rights that this status entailed.11 This chapter surveys the contested meanings and experiences of multiraciality in FWA and FEA, with particular attention to Senegal, Gabon, and French Congo. The focus is on childhood and citizenship from the late nineteenth century to the interwar years circa 1930, years marked by the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule.12 How people conceived of, 9

10

11

12

Proponents of the law argued that illegitimate children were inherently “morally endangered.” Without financial support from their biological fathers, illegitimate children raised by single mothers faced precarious living conditions that led to infant mortality, abandonment, infanticide, or abortion, all factors that accelerated the rate of depopulation in France. Rachel Fuchs, “Find Fathers, Save the Children,” in Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 109–60. Circular from the governor-general of the FEA to the heads of circumscriptions, October 5, 1933, letter 181 A/S, GG 411, ANC. Colonial officials in FWA issued similar cautions and directives as early as 1907, evinced in a letter from the governor of Senegal to the governorgeneral. He noted that French employees of the Department of Education in Senegal listed métis students attending state schools with the family names of European men who had passed through or were living in the colony. He cautioned that recording these names in colonial documents implied that the colonial state confirmed the presumption of paternity. He urged the governor to request that members of the education department stop this practice of codifying “the European family name to which the legally unrecognized métis had no rights.” Letter from the lieutenant governor of Upper Senegal and Niger to the governor-general of FWA, November 20, 1907, O-685 (31), ANS. Colonial officials in FWA noted similar slippage in French colonial administrators’ recording of French surnames in state documents and warned the administrators that the practice was illadvised. Letter from the lieutenant governor of Upper Senegal and Niger to the governorgeneral of FWA, November 20, 1907, O-685 (31), ANS. O-685 (31), Letter from the LG du Haut Senegal et Niger a M le GG de l’FOA, Letter # 726, November 20, 1907. Many scholars have analyzed the proliferation of racist French ideas justifying colonial rule as a “civilizing mission,” whereby Africans would assimilate to the supposedly superior French culture, ways of being, and mentalities, which would uplift backward (that is, black and or native) African people. Focusing on FWA, Alice Conklin argues that while racism was the

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Racialized French Colonial Rule in FWA and FEA

talked about, wrote about, and lived race in French Africa were iterative and constantly changing in ways that subverted the racialized binaries and the very foundations of power of colonial rule. African mothers, maternal kin, community members, and métis people episodically sought to transcend such colonial categories, even as the French calibrated laws, policies, and processes to controvert such attempts. Local conditions shaped meanings and practices, and these dynamics unfolded differently across FWA and FEA. Two tropes – métis as child and métis as French citizen – were crucial for how métis and their maternal communities and French society grappled with what it meant to be multiracial. French colonial personnel, missionaries, settlers, and jurists as well as government officials in metropolitan France debated the meaning of the term “métis" and the social and legal status of métis people and what resources toward their upbringing and education should be provided by the French state and the Catholic Church. Yet, racial thought and practice in these decades were continually recalibrated by African agency. “Métis” is a French word, and people who used the term for themselves or children across French Africa used it to assert their belonging to and rights within French society, in spite of a colonial state that sought to assert their difference. This chapter chronicles these instances of individual and collective claim-making, fleeting and episodic in the decades of the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule. These processes of claim-making were gendered and varied according to one’s life stage. Across FEA, some African mothers or maternal kin who raised métis children maintained a vestige of their child’s European filiation through naming practices and by sending their children to missionary boarding or day schools, which conferred distinction and prestige within African communities. In the 1920s, some métis men across FWA seized upon changing policies of the French military to seek recognition as French citizens and serve in the metropolitan French army corps, despite a lack of recognition by their fathers. In claiming to be French, métis individuals and their kin articulated porous conceptions of race, culture, and legal status, even as the French endeavored to centralize their colonial rule around rigid boundaries of race and culture, black and white, citizen (citoyen) and native (indigène).

bedrock of the civilizing mission, for colonial administrators it coexisted “unproblematically” with republican ideals. With the idea that the French would better the lot of colonized societies, French society rationalized the contradiction between the republican ideal of universal democracy and the coercion of colonial rule. “However misguided, self-deluding, or underfunded,” Conklin continues, changing articulations of the civilizing mission are a key prism for understanding colonial thought and practice. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 8–9.

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Multiraciality and French Colonial Thought, Practice, and Policies: Shifting Alliances of Church and State in FWA and FEA Questions about multiraciality and childhood and legal status became fulcrums around which various French constituencies built and worried about the racialized hierarchies of indigène and citoyen that undergirded colonial rule in Africa at the dawn of the twentieth century. In 1895, the French consolidated eight colonies into the political unit of French Occidental Africa (hereafter referred to as French West Africa), each with a capital city where its governor was located. The headquarters of FWA, where the governor-general presided over all of FWA, was in Senegal, first in the town of St. Louis on the northern Atlantic coast and after 1902 in Dakar on the southern Atlantic coast. In Equatorial Africa at the turn of the century, the French imperial presence consisted of a weak colonial state structure in what would become French Congo and Gabon. It was divided into geographic units, controlled by private concession companies that brutally exploited African societies to produce raw goods for agricultural and industrial outputs. These companies gave the colonial state a percentage of their earnings. The atrocities of concession companies became public in France and Europe, and by 1910, the French had attempted to centralize and rationalize colonial rule by grouping four colonies as FEA. From the beginning, the tracking of métis and their mothers and African caretakers was central to how successive governors-general of FEA and FWA, individual colonies’ governors, other civil servants, military personnel, private French citizens, and missionaries attempted to define and carry out different conceptions of the French mission in Africa. Colonial state personnel and missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constructed a notion of multiracial children raised in Africa as morally and physically “endangered” due to the abandonment by French fathers and supposed unhealthy milieus of African mothers. What to do about multiracial children generated many debates. As Owen White argues, the lives of multiracial children in FWA were characterized by a paradox in relation to colonial state and society, a “peculiar mixture of abandonment and intervention” and ambivalence.13 White’s analogy characterizes FEA too, specifically in the degree to which most European fathers had little involvement in the lives of their children and the Catholic Church sought to direct the children’s upbringing and education. “Abandonment” – as used by French government employees, missionaries, jurists, and other historical actors – referred to the actions of European fathers, most of whom stayed in the colonies for finite periods ranging from a few

13

White, Children of the French Empire, 50.

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months to a few years. Some provided financial resources for their children while they were in the colony or at the time of their departure, but the vast majority neither legally recognized, maintained contact with, or provided any financial resources for their children while in Africa or after their departure. At the turn of the century, and as French colonial expansion increased in West and Equatorial Africa, French African Catholic missionaries and many metropolitan and colonial government officials as well as private French citizens perpetually decried the manner in which European fathers did not provide for their métis children. They urged intervention by French society into the lives of métis children, with the goal of rescuing French prestige. Catholic missionaries and colonial personnel categorized métis as a distinct category of children. One premise of French obligation was that métis children living in French Africa faced a particular set of risks: their European bloodlines threatened their physical survival, mental state, and morality. A second premise was that their European blood endowed them with intelligence and the potential to assimilate into French culture, and there was thus a possibility of their contributing to the success of colonial endeavors and the civilizing mission, whether through the religious focus of missionaries or the objectives of economic productivity among government employees.14 The argument that métis were deserving of and in need of upbringing and education within French milieus in Africa was reflective of racist views that their partial European descent made them superior to other children in Africa. Elsewhere in the French Empire, such as Indochina, the argument that multiracial children were vulnerable resulted in large-scale child removal schemes that took them from their mothers’ homes and placed them into French institutions.15 While such expansive efforts did not develop in French Africa, the church and state nonetheless reached into the lives of métis children to varying degrees, following at times contradictory and inchoate visions for how métis children touched by the interventions would contribute as adults to differing visions of the French civilizing mission.16 As early as the mid-nineteenth century, missionaries singled out multiracial children as particularly vulnerable and entitled to receive French Christian instruction so they could grow to become models of Christian belief and lifestyle in Africa. By the turn of the nineteenth century, missionaries had opened and were operating residential orphanage-schools in major Atlantic Ocean trading hubs, which housed métis children in high proportions and

14 15 16

White, Children of the French Empire, 33–60. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Saada, Les enfants de la colonie; Firpo, The Uprooted. For more on French state, missionary, and charity interventions in maintaining residential schools for métis children in Madagascar, see Tisseau, Etre métis en Imerina.

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alongside other children born in Africa whom missionaries viewed as vulnerable.17 By the early twentieth century, colonial policies had evolved such that small numbers of métis children spent some years of their childhood alongside other African children in residential and nonresidential French Catholic mission-station schools scattered across FEA and FWA. Missionaries condemned interracial relationships because nearly all occurred outside of Christian marriage. They equally disparaged European men who did nothing to provide for their children and saw European “abandonment” of métis children as a moral stain. Missionaries thus often referred to the residential institutions as “orphanages” – although the children’s mothers were still alive. In many cases, the children were sent with the idea that access to French education would improve their lives. Like many colonial officials, missionaries espoused a view of multiracial children as more intelligent than other African children and deserving of European education because of their paternal lines. However, they sought to educate métis children alongside other African children to become models of Christian personhood. Beyond multiracial children, the orphanages housed and educated African children of various origins who were orphaned or “vulnerable” as defined by missionaries, including the children of slaves, children who were formerly slaves, or prepubescent girls whose families had betrothed and accepted bridewealth payments for them. Most mission-station schools were located near centers of economic production and trade, including Maradi in Niger, Brazzaville in Congo, St. Louis in Senegal, Libreville in Gabon, and Porto Novo in Dahomey – locations that had attracted many European men and fostered interracial sexual-domestic relations. Some African mothers or kin, and in some cases European biological fathers, paid fees to missions for the children’s room and board, but missionaries often bore most of the costs. Orphanage-schools ran on a meager budget, funded primarily by private donations from Europe, with food raised by the farming and other labor of children who resided in those institutions, additional revenue earned by the handicrafts of girls and young women, and small amounts of government money.18 Residences consisted of spartan dormitory living quarters. The primary goal of mission-run schools, most of which were elementary schools that provided only a few years of education, was to

17

18

At the turn of the nineteenth century, métis girls or boys were taken in at mission stations in Ségou; Dinguira; Kita in French Soudan; and Moussou in the Ivory Coast. Pascale Barthélemy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918–1957) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), 85. ANOM, 1AffPol 667: Letter from Monsignor Augouard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of colonies, December 5, 1919; Letter from Monsignor Augouard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of colonies, January 5, 1920.

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propagate Christianity and produce African clergy, schoolteachers (to teach other Africans), and catechists. Girls’ education consisted of rudimentary French language and domestic arts, and boys were taught a combination of trade skills, French reading and writing, and mathematics, although instruction was sometimes given in indigenous languages.19 In Senegal, Catholic orphanages established along the Atlantic coast and key rivers in the late nineteenth century were to become mainstays of education for multiracial children. Nuns of two Catholic orders, the Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny and the Sisters of Notre Dame of Immaculate Conception of Castre (Sœurs Bleues), and male missionaries of the Spiritan fathers boarded métis girls and boys along with other African children in gender-segregated schools at a handful of mission stations throughout Senegal, near Dakar, St. Louis, and on Gorée Island. The largest orphanage-school in Senegal for métis boys was run by the Spiritan fathers in N’Gazobil, which housed about twenty boys and provided a day school for those who lived in the region. Until 1914, the mission allowed male students to remain beyond elementary school to become apprentices in trades such as tailors, shoemakers, ironworkers, and carpenters.20 The mission that consistently took in high numbers of métisses girls was the N’Dar Toute orphanage-workshop, opened in 1855 by nuns of the St. Joseph de Cluny in St. Louis. It focused on housing poor and abandoned African girls of various origins, ranging in age from babies to 18–19 years, as well as European girls during the early decades of its operation.21 Girls at N’Dar Toute were often grouped into two categories: girls found in a “miserable state,” with physical ailments such as blindness, limping, or paralysis; and girls whose parents had died or had abandoned them. The mission also took in “poor” girls – African, French, or other European nationalities – whose parents or kin could not provide for their basic material needs.22 Catholic missionaries represented métisses girls as vulnerable to a life of prostitution with European men and especially endeavored to retain the girls until marriage. In

19 20

21 22

David Gardinier, “Schooling in the States of Equatorial Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 8, 3 (1974). ANS, O-685: Director of political affairs, general government of the FWA, to the inspector of education of FWA, March 7, 1923, note 4; Letter from the adjunct inspector of education of FWA to the governor-general of FWA, March 12, 1923, letter 95; Letter from the administrator in chief in the district of Thies to the governor-general of Senegal in St. Louis, February 19, 1938, letter 45, 13 G 93 (280), ANS. He refers to his letter #60 of January 7, 1937, in response to the enquete de métis, in which he went into further detail about this institution. Barthélemy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale, 85. White, Children of the French Empire, 41–2. Letter from the head of primary education services of Senegal in St. Louis, November 17, 1938, 13G93 (280), ANS. Letter from the head of primary education services in St. Louis, November 17, 1938, 13G93 (280), ANS.

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1856, there were thirty-five residents.23 By the 1920s, N’Dar Toute took in as many as 100 girls at a time, about sixty of whom were métisses. Like many other Catholic educational institutions for children in Africa, it survived mainly through private donations, with only small amounts from the colonial government. The nuns provided a primary school education, which according to the historian Pascale Barthélémy was “without intellectual ambition.”24 The girls in the nuns’ care were primed with a European model of ideal womanhood that emphasized domestic arts such as sewing, housecleaning, and only rudimentary written and spoken French. The mission depended on the girls’ manual labor to generate money for its operation and survival. The girls washed, ironed, and mended clothes that townspeople brought to the mission.25 However, the assessment of missionary education as deficient in training students to meet colonial economic needs coupled with increased anticlerical sentiment in the French government led colonial officials to argue for the state to assume direct intervention in the upbringing and education of multiracial children. Beginning in 1903 in FWA, the colonial state began to directly intervene – with limited funding and scale – in the rearing and education of métis children. A combination of factors contributed to this change, including laws passed in metropolitan France that secularized the provision of educational services, pragmatic objectives of métis children becoming useful auxiliaries for colonial rule, and visions of a moral and humanitarian mission. In addition to indirect intervention in the lives of métis children through subsidizing missionary efforts, colonial officials sought to direct the efforts to provide métis children with exposure to French education and culture in order to cultivate loyal intermediaries and produce laborers with skills useful to colonial business endeavors. Many colonial officials expressed concern about métis children – that they would become resentful opponents and dangerous rebels regarding colonial rule, in light of abandonment by their fathers. These officials argued that the French government had some obligation toward and interconnectedness with métis and that for the colonial state to intervene in their upbringing and education would promote colonial rule. The reasons forwarded by colonial personnel were both pragmatic – for example, to buttress the economic and political success of colonial endeavors by creating a pool of Africans who

23

24 25

White, Children of the French Empire, 41; Genevieve Lecuir-Nemo, “Femmes et vocation missionnaire, permanence des congrégations féminines au Sénégal de 1819 à 1960: adaptation ou mutations? Impact et insertion” (PhD diss., Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1996), 209–13. Barthélemy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale, 38. White, Children of the French Empire, 41–2.

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would work as accountants or clerks for French businesses – and moral: some argued that colonial society was obligated (to various degrees) to rear and educate the children fathered by French men in order to save French prestige.26 Métis children with proper exposure to French culture could become adults who adhered to French cultural and social mores and would be exemplars for colonized societies. These interventions mainly consisted of opening state-run institutions, socalled orphanages that housed métis children. A 1903 decision by FWA General Governor Ernest Roume directed that the colonial capital of each colony open a state-run orphanage.27 Unlike residential missionary stations, in which métis children lived in dormitories alongside other African children, these state-run orphanages housed only métis children. They were often managed by a French civil servant who lived on-site. By the 1920s, the colonies of Ivory Coast, Dahomey, French Soudan, Guinea, and Niger had each established similar state-run orphanages for boys or girls, or for both boys and girls in separate dormitories.28 A small number of colonial officials argued the need for the state to additionally subsidize and provide capital to African mothers for their children’s material needs and school fees. But French missionaries and colonial personnel alike maligned the capacity and morality of African mothers to raise métis children and advocated for the institutionalization of multiracial children as the best means to direct their care and futures.29 In some individual colonies, such as Dahomey, colonial officials reported that they paid allowances to the African kin with whom métis children lived to pay the fees to send them to French schools and provide adequate food and shelter.30 26

27

28

29 30

Letter from the administrator in chief in the district of Thies to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis, February 19, 1938, letter 459, 13 g 93 (280), ANS. He refers to his letter #60 of January 7, 1937, in response to the enquete de métis, in which he went into further detail about this institution. ANS, O-715 (31), Enseignement, Enfants des Métis de l’FOA, Assistance et education, Letter from LG of Cotre d’Ivoire Angoulvant to be attached to the Law of September 10, 1914, #519 Authorizing the creation of an orphelinat de métis, September 14, 1910. ANS, O-715 (31): Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Upper Senegal and Niger, to the governor-general of FEA, November 11, 1910, letter 91; Letter from the lieutenant governor of the Ivory Coast Angoulvant to be attached to the law of September 10, 1914 (authorization of the creation of an orphanage for métis children), September 14, 1910; ANS, 10 D 1 (24); Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, February 19, 1935, letter 145; Annexe à l’arrete # 537 Reorganisant les Orphelinats de métis et métisses du Soudan Francais, August 11, 1932; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, Letter # 145, February 19, 1935. Letter from the governor of Chad, Commander Dugarre, to the governor-general of FEA, December 5, 1919, 5D44, ANOM. The number of children on behalf of whom the colonial state of Dahomey doled out these grants was small, about twenty métis children according to a 1923 report. ANS, O-68: Director of political affairs, general government of the FWA to the inspector of education of FWA, March

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The orphanages, colonial civil servants projected, would provide sustained exposure to French cultural mores and language and cultivate loyal intermediaries for colonial rule – while the children were simultaneously imbedded in African societies. Thus, métis children housed in state-run homes attended local colonial state–run schools with other African children, befitting their status as indigènes, and supposedly providing a better quality education than mission schools.31 The 1910 regulations of the state-run orphanage in Bingerville, Ivory Coast, may be representative of the guidelines that were to regulate other such institutions in other colonies.32 The state would pay for all the expenses of children it housed and it could accommodate up to eight children. The listed criteria for admission were that the mother was poor or the father did not provide any monetary assistance. The colony’s governor had the final word in deciding who could be admitted, based on the suggestions of administrators and attestations by health officials that the child did not have any contagious disease. Students were to be given European clothing: khaki shorts, pants, and a beret for boys and cotton dresses for girls.33 In some regions, officials may have pressured mothers to entrust their children to homes, while other caretakers may have relinquished children with the understanding that this was an optimal choice for their well-being.34 While some staff of state-run orphanages and colonial officials argued for the complete separation of multiracial children from African milieus, many mothers refused, and multiracial children often spent school holidays with maternal kin. In spite of the lip service paid by colonial officials of state-run orphanages regarding the access to French culture, the orphanages were vehicles to reinforce that métis were of native legal status. Material conditions were barely better than in institutions managed by missionaries. The children’s activities were constantly surveilled by French personnel. When not in school, the children completed manual labor such as cleaning the premises or growing food in gardens. Girls raised money for the institution’s coffers through tasks

31

32

33

34

7, 1923, note 49; Letter from the adjunct inspector of education to the governor-general of FWA, March 12, 1923, letter 95. ANS, O 715 (31): Letter from the lieutenant governor of the Ivory Coast, Angoulvant, to be attached to the law of September 10, 1914 (authorization of the creation of an orphanage for métis children), September 14, 1910; Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Haut Senegal and Niger, to the governor-general of FEA, letter 912, November 11, 1910; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, February 19, 1935, letter 145, 10 D 1 (24), ANS. ANS, O-715 (31): Enseignement, Enfants des Métis de l’FOA, Assistance et education, Letter from L of Cotre d’Ivoire Angoulvant to be attached to the Law of September 10, 1914, #519 Authorizing the creation of an orphelinat de métis, September 14, 1910. ANS, O-715 (31), Enseignement, Enfants des Métis de l’FOA, Assistance et education, Letter from LG of Cotre d’Ivoire Angoulvant to be attached to the Law of September 10, 1914, #519 Authorizing the creation of an orphelinat de métis, September 14, 1910. White, Children of the French Empire, 51–9.

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such as tailoring or laundry.35 Meals followed the nutritional regimen of local foods, such as manioc, rice, and plantains, with daily rations of meat or fish and local fruits and vegetables. State-run orphanages were exiguous and underfunded operations, some with scant French language materials, despite government representations of them as sites of French acculturation. Boys in orphanages located in colonial capitals had the option to attend urban primary schools in which European instructors taught a metropolitan curriculum. However, the primary, post-primary, and teacher-training levels of education emphasized the basic skills and practical training necessary for wage labor employment in European enterprises.36 When first opened, state-run orphanages for girls – such as those in Kayes and Ségou French Soudan in 1904 – were largely focused on training girls in sewing and other domestic skills, with the few state-run primary schools for girls in FWA also emphasizing the domestic arts and learning of the French language.37 The Catholic Church and the colonial state in FEA and FWA continued to be aligned in the provision of education to métis children, despite growing anticlerical sentiment and the passage of the 1905 law in metropolitan France prohibiting the state from recognizing or funding any religion. The Mutualité Coloniale – an organization founded in 1905 and based in Paris that included French colonial settlers, current and former colonial officials, and some métis from Indochina – organized congresses in locations around the French Empire in Africa and Asia, with the goal of “the systemic organization of colonial social work,” including services for métis children.38 In the context of the 1923 congress held in Tunis, the organization wrote to colonial officials in FWA asking about the provisions that the colonial state provided in this region. The inspector general of Education for FWA responded that the colonial state provided generously for métis children. When the governorgeneral asked for information about the numbers and state of “abandoned métis” children in the region, the inspector general replied that there were no “abandoned” métis in the region. First, he elaborated, African societies valued and absorbed all children whom women birthed, including those born of European men. This response was significant. It acknowledged the critical welfare ecosystems that mothers and maternal communities provided, and it highlighted that the representation of such abandonment within French colonial thought prioritized the lack of European paternal engagement at the cost of 35

36 37 38

ANS, O-715 (31), Enseignement, Enfants des Métis de l’FOA, Assistance et education, Letter from LG of Cote d’Ivoire Angoulvant to be attached to the Law of September 10, 1914, #519 Authorizing the creation of an orphelinat de métis, September 14, 1910. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 78–81. White, Children of the French Empire, 50–1. Bathélémy, Africaines et diplomées, 35–6. Congrès de la mutualité coloniale et des pays de protectorat, Constantine, 1911. Compte-rendu Général Publié Sous La Direction De M. L. Gamard. Amiens: Imp. Yvert and Tellier, 1912, 7.

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diminishing the value and depth of African childrearing. For multiracial children whose mothers or kin could not provide for them, “the French state intervenes,” he insisted.39 He elaborated that nearly all colonies had single-sex boarding houses run by the state for métis children, and those colonies that lacked such institutions sent their métis children to neighboring colonies. Further, some colonies made direct welfare payments to African mothers raising métis children for the payment of their school fees. The French state, he conveyed, was a generous one that attended to the well-being of children born of but not cared for by their French fathers. However, his own report reveals the fiction of this portrait of the paternal colonial state and society. Only 300 métis children, approximately – about half of the recorded 600 métis children in FWA at the time according to colonial census estimates – even resided in or attended a French state-run or missionary institution or had payments made on their behalf. Most métis children who did reside in or were educated at a French school did so in institutions managed by missionaries, not the state. Although colonial governments in FWA stopped funding missionary schools after French law prohibited the use of government money to fund religion, missionaries continued to maintain school-orphanages in many colonies and continued to be providers of educational and care services to multiracial children.40 Senegal was an outlier and remained distinct in its policies and funding for métis children compared to elsewhere in FWA. By the 1920s, other colonies had state-run institutions for métis children; in Senegal, missionaries were the providers of educational and other social services, not the state.41 Employees in the office of the governor of Senegal headquartered in St. Louis conveyed that the colony was too poor to fund institutions for métis children born in Senegal and asked that the FWA headquarters in Dakar do so.42 However, this distinction may have developed partly due to the preference of local colonial

39

40 41

42

ANS, O-658: Head of political affairs, general government of FWA to the inspector of education of FWA, March 7, 1923, note 49; letter from the adjunct inspector of education of FWA to the governor-general of FWA, March 12, 1923, letter 95; Barthélemy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale, 85. White, Children of the French Empire, 54–5. Madagascar was similar to Senegal in that these colonial states were reluctant to provide direct services to métis children; they provided only limited intervention, paying subsidies to private secular and Catholic organizations to offset their costs. An organization called the Society for the Assistance and Protection of Métis children operated by French settlers opened a secular school for métis girls and boys in the town of Antananarivo in 1902. Additionally, Catholic missionaries maintained an orphanage for boys and another for girls. Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina, 115–41. ANS, O-658: Head of political affairs, general government of FWA to the inspector of education of FWA, March 7, 1923, note 49; Letter from the adjunct inspector of education of FWA to the governor-general of FWA, March 12, 1923, letter 95.

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officials in Senegal to delegate the provision of such services to the Catholic Church and private entities rather than take on the management and delivery themselves. Even as the governor’s office endeavored to expand the reach of the colonial state into directing the lives and futures of multiracial children, it turned to partnering with a private French organization, the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children. The organization was founded in 1924 in St. Louis by a group of French women who were the wives of colonial civil servants and French businessmen; its presiding officer also acted as director of the Red Cross chapter of Senegal. Using similar language to that of other French people who advocated for the care of multiracial children, the founding charter mandated that French society was duty bound to provide for the moral and material upkeep of métis children, whom they categorized as “abandoned” because of the dereliction of duty by their fathers.43 The organization had fifty members at the time of founding, women and men from metropolitan France who resided in Senegal and the neighboring colony of Mauritania as well as colonial officials. These members were to donate money into a monthly pool to subsidize the instruction, food, clothing, and housing of métis children at Catholic institutions until they reached the age of eighteen years. Some colonial officials donated money and worked with the organization, which is an indication of local colonial officials’ continued support of Catholic institutions in spite of metropolitan government directives.44 In FEA, colonial governors and the Ministry of Colonies welcomed the services that missionaries provided and often subsidized the upbringing and education of multiracial children.45 One example was a Catholic missionary effort in the French Congo in 1921 amid World War I. Philipe Augouard, serving as the archbishop of Congo since 1890, called for the construction of a new dormitory at an existing Catholic orphanage-school for boys in Brazzaville. The mission housed eighty “orphans,” of whom twenty were

43

44

45

The society solicited donors, ranging from those who could fund a complete scholarship (estimated to cost 10,000 francs) to adherents who gave forty francs each year. Letter from Madame de la Torre to the governor-general of FWA, September 19, 1924, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. Minutes from meeting held October 1, 1924 and minutes from meeting held December 2, 1924, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. In a 1924 letter to the governor-general of FWA, the governor of Senegal indicated that the heads of trading houses and FWA banks in Dakar and St. Louis had pledged to donate generous sums to the charity. He attached an example of a blank form that founding members would fill out to declare their donation. Letter from the governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, November 23, 1924, document 5005/APA, 23 G 23 (24), ANS. Even after the separation of church and state according to the 1905 law, the government general of FEA continued to pay fewer subsidies to mission schools to continue operating, obliging them to teach whatever constituted the state-sanctioned curriculum for that region. David Gardinier, “Schooling in the States of Equatorial Africa,” 518.

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multiracial.46 Augouard wrote a letter to the Ministry of Colonies in 1921 asking if the government could fund the mission’s efforts to attend to the “suffering children” in the Congo, specifically the little mulattos who are growing in number in Brazzaville and whose fathers abandon them with little remorse. Their lot is worse than that of black children and it is a disgusting sight to see these half-white people walk about often naked and with little comforts. These children are not responsible for the faults of their parents, and we have to come to their aid.47

With the characterization of multiracial children as “half-white people,” Augouard endeavored to emphasize their intrinsic belonging to French society and hence the obligation of the French to provide welfare services appropriate for the children’s classification as “white.” He asked the Ministry to fund the construction of an annex to separate métis boys from other African boys and to increase the number of métis children in the mission’s care.48 The minister and the governor of FEA approved this proposal and granted funds toward the effort.49 A new dormitory was open by June 1928. The budgets and receipts for material costs, labor, and supplies indicate that the annex had an additional fifty beds as well as an infirmary, pharmacy, classrooms, and plumbing for flush toilets, facilities that did not exist in the dormitory for “native” children. Throughout FWA and FEA, Catholic mission orphanage-schools continued to house African children of diverse racial ancestries, but missionaries continued to underscore that métis children had the greatest need for and entitlement to schools and welfare services. It was not just the colonial state, society, and Catholic Church that determined the nature and depth of multiracial children’s engagement with European cultures and institutions. In addition, the parenting practices of African mothers, maternal kin, and African societies toward multiracial children stoked anxieties, debates, and schemes around the dual poles of colonial 46 47 48 49

Letter from Monsignor Augouard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of the interior, Paris, April 25, 1921, 1AffPol 667, ANOM. Letter from Monsignor Augouard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of the interior, Paris, September 6, 1919, 1AffPol 66, ANOM. Letter from Monsignor Guichard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of colonies, April 10, 1926, 1AffPol 667, ANOM. ANOM, 1AffPol 667: Letter from the minister of labor, hygiene, assistance, and social welfare to the minister of colonies, February 25, 1927, letter 00872 P/M; Letter from the minister of labor, hygiene, assistance, and social welfare to the minister of colonies, July 26, 1927, letter 16.93; Letter from the minister of labor, hygiene, assistance, and social welfare to the minister of colonies, January 3, 1928, letter 00444 P/M; Letter from Monsignor Guichard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of labor, hygiene, assistance, and social welfare, June 1, 1928; Letter from Monsignor Guichard, archbishop of Upper Congo, to the minister of colonies, June 1, 1928.

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“abandonment and intervention.” These practices subverted the racialized hierarchies that were foundational to colonial governmentality. There is little surviving historical record of caretaking practices for multiracial children in FWA during these decades. Yet multiracial voices, imaginaries, and agency appear in the interstices of colonial documents in FEA and demonstrate the caretaking strategies that called into question colonial racial blueprints and binaries. Anchors of Belonging in French Society: Motherhood and Fostering of Multiracial Children in FEA Childrearing, by mothers and other caregivers, is not often characterized in historical analysis as an avenue for making claims to the colonial state and society or for political action. Yet the manner in which some mothers, kin, other individuals, and communities in FEA named and educated multiracial children and ensured welfare support for them had the consequence of anchoring the children’s belonging within French and European society. A combination of factors contributed to this context. The first was a sexual economy in which particular ethno-language groups facilitated interracial relationships and transformed bridewealth paid by European men into generational wealth in goods and property. Second, some mothers chose French names for their children to distinguish them socially and culturally within their African communities, despite the lack of legal recognition by the European fathers. The third factor was the purposefulness with which mothers and maternal kin accessed French educational services for their boys and girls. Finally, European men in some colonies – more so in FEA than FWA – provided some economic contributions for their children. Such actions were an investment in the children’s futures, to maintain before African and European communities that they were métis and French. In FWA, the government-general and individual colonial governors displaced the missionary provision of services to métis children and directly managed and funded such initiatives in the early decades of the twentieth century. Colonial states in FEA did not coordinate similar centralized efforts. French government officials viewed FEA as much less economically productive and conceptualized the mainly stateless FEA populations as less “evolved” and assimilable to French culture than in FWA. The French colonial state invested next to nothing in educational and social services to Africans, much less any spending on the education and rearing of métis children.50 Some

50

Gardinier, “Schooling in the States of Equatorial Africa,” 518–19.

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caregivers placed their children in residential French missionary schools to deepen their cultural competence in European mores and Catholic faith. Nevertheless, colonial personnel generated much documentation that displayed anxiety regarding the “métis problem” and countless solutions to resolve it. The censuses and reports that French personnel, missionaries, researchers, and private citizens generated in FEA provide glimpses into the lives of African children and a window into the changing conceptions and practices of childrearing, family life, and gender roles.51 In March 1918, the interim lieutenant governor of Gabon wrote a letter to French civil and military personnel who were responsible for the management of administrative units from the coast to the hinterlands. The letter stated, “I was particularly struck by the number of métis in the capital city who only continue to be in greater and greater number and I thought that this presents us with an important question that needs immediate investigation.” In spite of the lack of money in the colony’s coffers amid World War I, Lieutenant Governor Thomann sought for the colonial state to “effectively organize the protection of métis children” and argued that such children were “worthy of our solicitude.”52 He wanted his administration to open a state-operated orphanage for métis children, such as those in Ivory Coast, where he had previously been posted. He asked subordinate colonial officers to undertake a census of métis who lived in their regions and to categorize the results according to two groups. The first group was adult men and women, defined as those who were fifteen years or older; their names and ages were recorded. The second category included children younger than fifteen, with their names, ages, and names of their mothers recorded. He requested additional and specific information: the children were to be categorized according to the “degree of abandonment that causes them suffering” and listed “by order of urgency of those who are in the greatest need.” He asked that the children be grouped according to the following categories: completely abandoned, living in the care of a family

51

52

In 1913, the Anthropological Society of Paris sent a 34-question survey on the topic of “ethnic mixing in FEA” to the governor-general of FEA, asking about the ethnic and national origins of African women and European men in interracial unions: whether they resulted in children and the age, skin color, weight, health, education, and moral and character traits of such children. The governor-general distributed it to governors of individual colonies to submit their responses. Most of the responses have not survived in the archives. ANOM, 5D44: Response to the Survey of Ethnic Mixing in FEA from the circumscription of Pool in the French Congo, September 1, 1913; Response to the Survey of Ethnic Mixing in FEA from the circumscription of Bakongo in the French Congo, June 24, 1913; Response to the Survey of Ethnic Mixing in FEA, September 1, 1913; Response to the Survey of Ethnic Mixing in FEA from the circumscription of Likoula in the French Congo, November 2, 1913. Letter from the lieutenant governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, April 30, 1918, letter 31/A, 5D44, ANOM.

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with few resources, living in the care of a family with sufficient resources, and living with a family that received resources from the European father. The governor-general of FEA, Martial Merlin (a career veteran of the colonial service who had previously served as the governor-general of FWA) extended the survey to all colonies in the FEA. Merlin asked the individual governors to report the answers to the same questions for the regions they governed.53 The responses revealed a tally of between 304 and 325 métis children in FEA – fewer than the approximately 600 children in FWA. The responses further documented the local conditions of mothers and natal kin, their ethnicities, and their wealth (or lack thereof ) left behind by European fathers. Contrary to the governor of Gabon’s representation of métis children as living in destitution, the report for Gabon revealed that majority of mothers of métis children and their kin seemed to hold elite socioeconomic status and provided for the needs of their children, even though few received financial assistance from European fathers. The report for Libreville – where the largest concentration of métis in FEA resided – did not include any children who resided in the city’s two mission stations, as the missionaries did not reply to the governor’s missive to provide an accounting of their métis residents.54 The document listed ninety-one métis children, but the actual numbers were likely higher given the missing information from missionaries. According to the categories set by the lieutenant governor, none of the children in Gabon fell into the category of completely abandoned by their biological mothers or maternal kin. Forty-eight children (52.75%) lived with families with sufficient resources, thirty-one children (about 33%) lived with families deemed to lack sufficient resources, and twelve children (about 13%) lived with families that received resources from the European father. The survey listed the names of the mothers, all of whom were of the Mpongwé or other Myèné ethnolanguage groups – who also tended to comprise the vast majority of women engaged in interracial sexual relationships in Gabon and the neighboring Congo.55 Myèné ethno-language communities converged along the coast and had grown in wealth since the mid- to late nineteenth century through operating as middlemen in trade exchanges between Europeans and Africans. Interracial sexual relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries solidified the wealth among Myèné societies – both the wealth of 53 54 55

Letter from Governor-General Merlin to the lieutenant governors of Ubangi-Shari, Chad, and Congo, April 20, 1918, letter 157, 5D44, ANOM. Memo from the mayor of Libreville, March 8, 1918, letter 77/A, 5D44, ANOM. For more on African women and interracial relationships in Gabon, see Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “‘A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man’: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946,” Journal of Women’s History 22, 2 (2010), 56–82.

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women and that of their fathers or uncles – which facilitated the capacity of economically well-resourced mothers to cultivate the social reproduction of children born from such unions. My analysis of the social, political, and economic import of motherhood follows the arguments of scholars such as Chikwenye Ogunyemi, whom Lorelle Semley cites as conceptualizing the term “public motherhood.” Semley invokes this term to urge scholars to examine the “historical and cultural settings that define motherhood” in West Africa as changing and flexible.56 Historian Rhiannon Stephen’s argument for an analysis of “the roles motherhood has played in social organization, economic activity and political power” in African history provides an entry point to trace how the seemingly intimate practices of mothering impacted social and economic changes as colonial rule expanded.57 Scholars of African history have gendered African employees in colonial state bureaucracies, such as interpreters, clerks, and secretaries “who rendered crucial services to Europeans” in managing the “collection and distribution of information, labor, and funds” – thus influencing colonial rule – as “almost without exception male.”58 Through interracial relationships, women similarly “acquired skills, knowledge, and situated authority with which they furthered their own strategy of accumulation,” even though they were not employees of the colonial state and therefore not official delegates.59 Some mothers of multiracial children in the early twentieth century parlayed their French language and cultural skills into wealth and political influence to buttress their lives and their children’s futures in the evolving landscape of colonial rule. In oral interviews I conducted in 2001 with Victorine Smith, a métisse Mpongwé woman born in 1923 whose mother was also a métisse and one of the few people of her generation still alive, Victorine described how mothers of multiracial children in the early twentieth century were able to amass and transfer generational wealth.60 She dated her lineage to that of nineteenthcentury Myèné kings and several generations of métis people, stating that her grandmother had been married to a French man according to local customs.61 Within Mpongwé communities, sending métisses and black girls to the St. Pierre mission school as either day or boarding students had become de rigueur since the founding of the mission in the late nineteenth century. 56 57 58

59 60 61

Lorelle Semley, Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 11. Rhiannon Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2–4. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts, eds. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 4–5. Lawrance, Osborn, and Roberts, Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, 5. “Victorine Smith” is the pseudonym she asked me to use in publications. Oral interview (hereafter OI) with Victorine Smith, Libreville, Gabon, December 10, 2001.

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Although this residential school was open to children of any ethnicity, Libreville residents whom I interviewed remembered it as “the internat des métis,” precisely because most of the children it housed were métis and/or Mpongwé. By contrast, Libreville’s other mission-station, Sainte Marie, housed and educated mainly Fang girls.62 When I asked Smith about her mother’s life trajectory, she recounted how métis communities in Libreville had historically valued French education for girls just as they did for boys and stated that mission schools played an important role in women’s advancement. Even a limited French education furnished women with a level of literacy that allowed them to exercise some agency against the paternalism of Mpongwé society and the racism of French colonial society. Smith proudly proclaimed that her mother and grandmother were literate in French. These were language skills that few African men or women possessed, which enabled métisses Mpongwé women “to be in charge here in Libreville. When we needed something from the governor, it was the women who were at the front.”63 Such women making demands on the colonial state was both acknowledged and maligned by the colonial officials. Colonial documents summarize an interwar protest in which Myèné women claimed their status as primary caretakers of young children, many of them métis children, to argue against the colonial state’s rationing of food during World War I.64 Smith’s mother was “salaried”; she was employed as a clerk at the colonial Bank of Africa instead of working in subsistence farming – as was common for women of varied ethnicities in the Libreville region. Métisses Mpongwé women were among the first Africans to own cement houses, a type of structure in which mainly European inhabitants of Libreville lived.65 Smith and other Mpongwé men and women whom I interviewed relayed that interracial relationships in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations were advantageous for women, because when European men repatriated, the women often retained their European partners’ houses and other material goods.66 Thus, the houses in which many métis children in Libreville grew up were of the same condition as the houses in which French and other Europeans in the town lived, and the mothers and maternal kin mirrored the living standards and conditions among

62 63 64 65 66

OIs in Libreville with Louise Délicat Tati, December 9, 2002; Moise Meyo M’Obiang, March 1, 2002. OI with Victorine Smith, Libreville, Gabon, December 9, 2001. Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “Une Ville Libre? Marriage, Divorce, and Sexuality in Colonial Libreville, Gabon, 1849–1960” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2005), 66–7. Jean-Baptiste, “Une Ville Libre?”; Guy Lasserre, Libreville: La ville et sa région (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1985), 245. OIs in Libreville with Victorine Smith, December 11, 2001; Benoit Messani Nyangenyona, March 2, 2002; Joseph Lasseny Ntchoréré, April 16, 2002.

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Europeans who also lived in the town.67 Interracial unions resulted in new households and household formations, led by Mpongwé women and mothers, which altered the very fabric of social stratification in African societies and manifested in political protest against colonial directives. In Libreville, mothers and maternal kin took advantage of access to French education to further their lineage and their children’s socioeconomic status. Many mothers and natal kin sent métis boys and girls to French and American day and residential schools, run by Catholic and Protestant missionaries, in mission stations in the Libreville region and elsewhere in Gabon.68 The girls’ school included residence at the mission. Boys attended as day or boarding students and had the option of completing secondary school. The result was a generation of métis women and men who were literate in French and culturally competent in French mores.69 By 1907, the colonial state had opened a nonresidential school for African boys that offered instruction in French language, literature, and mathematics for the purpose of cultivating graduates who could work as writers and clerks for French businesses and government offices and become teachers in schools for African students. A high concentration of métis boys attended this school, which translated into métis men having the language skills to work as wage laborers for French private businesses, brokers for trade between inland African communities and the French, and civil servant positions in the expanding post-World War I colonial state.70 Mothers of métis children in Libreville (as throughout FEA and FWA) also sought to retain vestiges of their children’s European parentage, even if the father had departed from the colony or had no role in the child’s life, through the names that they gave to their children. Of the children listed in the Libreville survey, all but seven had European first names; many also had a European last name, ostensibly that of the biological father, in spite of French efforts to prevent conferring legitimacy to and through such naming practices.71 As in Gabon, mothers in French Congo preferred to name their

67 68

69

70 71

OI with Joseph Lasseny Ntchoréré, Libreville, Gabon, April 16, 2002. Catholic clergy who ran schools for boys recorded in 1909 that a significant concentration of their 300 students were métis; some were residential students placed there by their fathers before they left the colony. Community newspaper in the Journal de la Mission de Saint Marie 1895–1907, 4J2.7 (a, b) and 4J2.8 (a, b), Archives General de la Congregation du Saint Esprit (hereafter AGCSE). Community newspaper in the Journal de la Mission de St Pierre, issues dated February 25, 1908–1929, September 1913, and August 1, 1909, 4J2.8 (a, b), AGCSE. Letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor general of FEA, January 1, 1935, no document #, AFE/ GGAEF/5D44, ANOM. Community newspaper in the Journal de la Mission de St Pierre, issues dated February 25, 1908–1929, September 1913, and August 1, 1909, 4J2.8 (a, b), AGCSE. Memo from the mayor of Libreville, March 8, 1918, letter 77/A, 5D44, ANOM.

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children with European first names – such as Marie, Marcelle, and Cécile for girls and Marc or Philippe for boys – and identified with the family name of the presumed biological father. The lieutenant governor of Congo indicated that his regional administrators reported there were thirty-five métis children in the colony: thirteen boys and twenty-two girls, some of whom were siblings. The children ranged from one to thirteen years old.72 The Congo report included an assessment of mothers’ economic and marital statuses. The reported findings about the children again belied colonial representations of precarity. Five women were recorded as having married an African man, and the marital status of the other women was not noted. Of the thirty-five children, thirty-two lived with their mothers, mostly in rural regions across the colony, while only eleven lived in the capital city of Brazzaville. Regarding three children who lived in the Batéké region near the border with Gabon, the governor of Congo noted that they “seemed to be well-cared for.” An unspecified number were reportedly raised in what the lieutenant governor described as “adequate” conditions. Of the ten mothers who lived in Brazzaville, two took advantage of the educational opportunities, and their ten- and thirteen-year-old sons attended the state-run elementary school that was open to any African child. Chad and Ubangi-Shari were distinct from the other colonies in FEA in many regards, including the rearing, living, and educational conditions of métis children. The establishment of colonial rule in this region was a classic example of the messiness with which European colonial mapping haphazardly attempted to place colonial boundaries around a heterogenous demographic and political landscape – in this case slave-raiding Muslim sultanates and largely animist communities that they often raided. Armed resistance to French colonial rule among different African communities in the region continued through the 1920s, and French military personnel – not civilians – were at the helm of underfunded and poorly manned efforts to establish colonial rule, which was tenuous at best.73 The French colonel acting as the governor of Chad detailed that there were 103 métis children in the colony, over half of whom lived in the region of the colonial capital of Fort Lamy, which had the highest concentration of European men in the region. The métis children were described as ranging from babies to adolescents and not “indigent.”74 Indeed, most métis children in Chad did not live in economically precarious situations. The vast majority of 72 73 74

Letter from the governor of Congo to the governor-general of FEA, September 3, 1918, letter 4/2, 5D44, ANOM. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, Emerging States of French Equatorial Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 3–20. Letter from the governor of Chad, Commander Dugarre, to the governor-general of FEA, December 5, 1919, letter 82/G, 5D44, ANOM.

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mothers of métis children had received some form of wealth from their children’s French fathers before they departed from the colony. The governor of Chad disparaged the French categorization of the children as “abandoned,” opining that they were morally abandoned by absent French fathers but their mothers tended to them with “care” thanks to a “nest-egg” left by the European fathers in the form of heads of cattle, the primary form of wealth.75 Additionally, his administration paid five francs per month to mothers whose children lived with them. In exchange, the administration mandated that the children attend day classes in the French school for boys in Fort Lamy, attended by both indigènes and métis children. Mothers sent their sons to French school but did not follow the same mandate for their daughters, as they did not want them to travel the distance from their rural homes to the town, where the only school for girls was located. The governor’s administration also paid for the tuition, housing, and food for eleven métis boys who resided at the state-run school in the city. The mothers of these children were poor or had no desire to raise their children and had sent them to the school. The administration funded these mothers and children not because the governor saw métis as inherently distinct from other Africans but because métis could be used to form an elite, namely the interpreters, accountants, and commercial agents of French colonial interests that FEA needed to become economically productive. The governor of Ubangi-Shari noted that his administration was already providing financial payments to an unspecified number of mothers of métis children from the colony’s budget in order incentivize the mothers to send their children to French schools.76 He further specified that he made these payments to address the lack of a “skilled workforce” of accountants, clerks, and agents at French trading posts, which the colony needed to become economically productive. There were between ninety and ninety-six métis children in Ubangi-Shari.77 About fifteen children had fathers who continued to live in the colony and contributed some financial measures for their care, but the remainder of children were raised in the “unenlightened care of their mothers,” who survived on the occasional generosity of French administrative district heads. While some boys went to French schools, most of the girls, the governor noted, “vegetated in the native milieu without receiving any intellectual or moral education” and drew their subsistence from temporary unions with European men. This representation of mothers as “unenlightened” and of 75 76 77

Letter from the governor of Chad, Commander Dugarre, to the governor-general of FEA, December 5, 1919, letter 82/G, 5D44, ANOM. Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari-Chad to the governor-general of FEA, May 15, 1919, letter 172, 5D44, ANOM. Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari-Chad to the governor-general of FEA, May 15, 1919, letter 172, 5D44, ANOM.

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métisses girls as destined for prostitution with European men forwarded notions of African women as morally and sexually abhorrent – a common representation among colonial observers, which métis men would counter and seek to dismantle in the decades to come. The governor outlined a precarious landscape for the stability of French colonial rule in the colony due to African men in Ubangi-Shari shedding light on the French failure to provide for multiracial children. Similarly, in early twentieth-century Ghana, African men decried in newspapers and in letters to colonial officials “the immoral behavior and paternal failings of white men” in the British colonial service, who fathered multiracial children and did not provide any economic resources for them.78 Also in UbangiShari, Sultan Hetman – a descendant of the last independent kingdom of the region before French colonial conquest – had gathered onto his property and cared for about twenty children fathered by French civil servants, traders, or soldiers.79 He paid for the boys in his care to attend classes at a French Catholic mission school. The governor implied that Sultan Hetman’s actions only highlighted French shortcomings and short-sightedness, and he lamented the education that métis children received in the colony as not adequately “French.” Missionary schools were staffed mainly by African teachers who had “rudimentary” French language reading and speaking skills and thus could not “fully help métis children arrive at their full capacity.” The governor was likely referring to the idea that métis children, equipped with French language and cultural mores, could potentially grow up to contribute as productive laborers and facilitate colonial extractive economies. Ultimately, this round of statistical reporting, analysis, and recommendations by various colonial governors would not result in FEA-wide colonial state policies and practices regarding multiracial children, as had occurred in FWA.80 Colonial officials in FEA worried that any outreach toward multiracial people could in fact destabilize the racial hierarchies that were the foundations of colonial rule.

78 79 80

Ray, Crossing the Color Line, 15–16. Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari-Chad to the governor-general of FEA, May 15, 1919, letter 172, 5D44, ANOM. Handwritten notes made by FEA Governor-General Merlin on the 1918 letter from the lieutenant governor of Gabon, Thomman – which sparked the FEA-wide query – provide clues why no action was initiated at this time. Merlin scribbled that “this delicate question which impacts the future” could not be addressed given the current economic state of FEA. Further deliberations were needed to decide on a “charitable effort” that would be durable and effective for this population that was “deserving of interest.” Letter from the lieutenant governor of Gabon to the administrators of civil and military circumscriptions, March 13, 1918, letter 2/A, 5D44, ANOM.

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Disentangling Education of Children from French Legal Status While advocating for the education and care of multiracial children in French institutions in FEA and FWA, most colonial officials, missionaries, and other French individuals and institutions were consistent in their views of métis as “indigènes.” They did not intend for métis to access French education and culture only to upend racialized colonial legal statuses and the binaries of indigène and citoyen. As has been argued by scholars of European colonial studies such as Emmanuelle Saada, Ann Stoler, Durba Ghosh, and Jean Gelman Taylor, colonial states and secular and religious child welfare organizations fretted over the fate, identity, and status of multiracial and racially ambiguous children in various late nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This concern arose precisely because multiracial people represented the “perceived threat” that racial identity, and thus also legal status, might be fluid.81 In colonies such as French Indochina, colonial officials sought to maintain the boundaries of European legal status as synonymous with whiteness and sought to curtail “false” claims by “native” children for European status.82 Colonial officials, jurists, and metropolitan French government employees across the French Empire prevaricated that while European filiation may have made multiracial people more receptive to French culture, it did not make them automatically European in their mindsets, ways of life, and legal status. Emanuelle Saada has aptly described French attitudes towards métis in colonies that were established after the nineteenth century as a continuum “in between subjection and citizenship.”83 Saada’s focus is mainly on Indochina, but argues that this attitude extends to Africa as well. In the first two decades of colonial rule in French Africa, some colonial administrators, settlers, and French jurists argued that all métis in French Africa and elsewhere in the French Empire should be granted French legal status, whether or not they had been educated or raised in European milieus or recognized by their French

81

82 83

Saada argues that métis embodied the “perceived threat” of a blurring of the lines between citoyen and indigene, colonizer and colonized, French and native. Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race Filliation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 43–4. See also Ann Stoler, “A Sentimental Education: Children of the Imperial Divide,” in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 112–39; Durba Gosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” 514–31. Saada, Empire’s Children, “An Imperial Question,” 13–41.

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fathers.84 However, this was a minority opinion. French colonial law in early twentieth-century Africa held that those categorized as indigènes could obtain the legal status of French citizen through a very narrow and nearly unattainable set of requirements that demonstrated that they were culturally French.85 The 1912 decree specified the conditions under which people who held indigène legal status in FWA could obtain the qualité de français. The decree indicated that a change in legal status was possible for self-nominated “natives who would have moved closer to us by their education, who would have adopted our mores” or who were nominated by a department of colonial government.86 Proof of “having moved closer” to the French included a checklist of criteria: speaking and writing French; stable economic standing and character references of good conduct; and demonstrated devotion to French interests or holding employment, with great merit, by the French colonial state or a private enterprise for ten years. Birth from a French parent – much less a parent who had not legally recognized their child – was not sufficient grounds to obtain French citizenship, since métis were raised in and remained within African milieus. Many colonial officials and some private French citizens residing in French Africa cautioned that the provision of educational and material resources for métis children held potential danger. The acknowledgment of métis as a distinct and special category placed these children between black and white and between colonial subject and French citizen. Some argued that because the French nation and society would never fully regard métis people as French, métis children would become restive adults who rebelled against colonial rule.87 However, others cautioned that not allowing some measure of access to French culture and material resources that were present in Africa risked missing an opportunity for the French to cultivate useful allies and helpmates in the French colonial endeavor. Even as colonial states in FWA edged toward distinguishing métis children as a particular category of colonial subjects entitled to French educational and welfare services, they sought to reinforce that these children were colonial

84 85

86

87

Lecture given by Mr. Henri Sambug Dareste, “The Legal Condition of Métis in the French Colonies,” 1933, FEA/GGFEA/5D44, ANOM. White, Children of the French Empire, 136–7. Decree setting the conditions of accession for the indigenous peoples of French West Africa for French citizenship, Journal officiel de la république Française [Official Gazette of France], June 1, 1912, 4818–9. Décret fixant les conditions d’accession des indigènes de l’Afrique occidentale française a la qualité de citoyen français [decree setting the conditions of accession for the indigenous peoples of French West Africa for French citizenship], Journal officiel de la république Française [Official Gazette of France], June 1, 1912, 4818–9. Letter from the governor of Chad, Commander Dugarre, to the governor-general of FEA, December 5, 1919, 5D44, ANOM.

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subjects – even as they wove their way through French institutions. In a 1907 letter to the governor-general of FWA, the lieutenant governor of Senegal complained that colonial documents listed students attending French schools with the surnames of European men who had passed through or were living in the colony. He decried that education department personnel listed them without having investigated if the Europeans in question had consented to the use of their family names. These “irregularities” were often codified and given the legitimacy of government approval when the names were inscribed on an acte de notorieté, a colonial state–issued document that served as a retroactive birth certificate. This document of the Civil State (État Civil) gave the semblance of paternal and state legal recognition for the family name of a particular European. The lieutenant governor worried that such state documents would confirm the presumption of paternity, against the authorization and will of the person whose name was being used. He wanted members of the education department to stop this practice of codifying “the European family name to which the métis non reconnu had no rights.”88 Ultimately, colonial frameworks in French Africa, such as directives restricting the use of European surnames, guidelines for state-run orphanages, and the curriculum of mission-station schools were gatekeeping mechanisms to keep métis in their place of usefulness to French colonial control and curtail their thoughts and efforts to claim European status.89 Yet as adults, some métis would go on to mobilize the material, cultural, and educational immersions in French ways of being – accessed over the course of their childhood – into claims that they were not colonial subjects but citizens. Their European education, names, and standards of living resulted in consequences perhaps unanticipated by their mothers and certainly unintended by the colonial state and society. By the 1920s, some métis men across FWA went on to subvert the racialized colonial hierarchy of black colonial subject versus white citizen by claiming a multiracial identity. Further, they claimed that such an identity opened the door to their entitlement to participate in an institution uniquely reserved for male citizens, the French army, and that their service justified their legal status as citizens. Métis Men and Military Service: Gatekeeping French Citizenship in FWA In November 1928, Jean Traoré Moreau, a teacher conscripted by the colonial state of French Soudan to serve as a soldier in the native army corps 88 89

ANS O-685 (31), Letter from the LG du Haut Sénégal et Niger à M le GG de l’AOF, Letter # 726, November 20, 1907. Letter from the lieutenant governor of Upper Senegal and Niger to the governor-general of FWA, November 11, 1910, letter 912, O-715 (31), ANS.

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(corps indigènes) questioned his status as “indigène.” From his station in the town of Diré, he sent a handwritten letter to the commander of his cercle (district) relaying his “intention to request French naturalization.”90 Traoré Moreau identified himself as métis. He then staked his claim to French citizenship, citing a document titled “Ministry Circular Concerning the Incorporation of Unrecognized Métis Who Fulfill Certain Conditions into the French Army.” It had been issued earlier that year by the Ministry of Colonies in Paris with the accord of the minister of war and sent to the governor-general of FWA in Dakar.91 In his letter, Traoré Moreau not only referred to but also articulated his concise understanding of the circular: métis men who were no older than eighteen could elect to serve in the French military corps with French soldiers stationed in Africa, not the “native corps,” and doing this service would result in them being granted French citizenship. He conceded, however, that he was older than the age limit as detailed in the circular: “I have nonetheless decided to fulfill all the conditions that you will demand of me in regard to military service.”92 Traoré Moreau considered himself to be French and sought for his military commanders and the French state to confirm his sense of identity and legal status. At the bottom of the letter, the cercle administrator penciled in that he was forwarding “Jean Traoré’s” request, omitting the use of the last name “Moreau.” Hence, while Traoré Moreau claimed the family name of his presumed biological father, colonial administrators continued to refer to him only by his African surname. French personnel refused to acknowledge the identity of his presumed French father in the public records, but they did concede that he was presumed to have had a French or European white father and referred to him as “métis.” Traoré Moreau’s claims are indicative of the ways in which dozens of métis adults, all men, who had not been legally recognized by their fathers nonetheless pursued the pathway to French citizenship. They claimed that being métis made them entitled to French citizenship as well as the rights of citizenship, including serving in regiments open only to French citizens. Traoré Moreau’s story is the most well-documented; his case study, while not representative of all métis men, illustrates the dynamic maneuvers of multiracial men to claim French citizenship and the entitlement to certain rights. 90 91

92

Letter from Jean Traoré Moreau, schoolteacher working in Diré, to the commanding administrator in the district of Goudan, July 27, 1928, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. Memo from General Peltier, director of military services, writing on behalf of the minister of colonies in Paris to the governor-general of the FWA in Dakar, January 5, 1928, document 71/ IL, G 22 (24), ANS. Attached: Ruling enacted in FWA regarding the law of March 31, 1928 on army recruitment. ANS, G 22 (24): Letter from Jean Traoré Moreau, schoolteacher working in Diré, to the commanding administrator le Cercle de Goudan, July 27, 1928.

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Such aspirations can also be seen in the case of Louis Vital, another métis man who appealed to the tenets of the 1928 circular. In December 1928, the governor of French Soudan wrote to the governor-general informing him of a request by Vital, a 24-year-old shipping clerk in the town of Koulouba, to enlist in the French army and – as the governor wrote in his short letter – “desiring subsequently the rights of French citizen.”93 The accompanying dossier included a birth certificate and certificate of education, nearly the same documents as in Traoré Moreau’s case.94 Dated 1928, his retroactive birth certificate identified Vital as born in 1904 in a village named Goumban. In the deposition to establish the facts of his birth, a Bambara man identified as Lamine Koné testified as to Vital’s parentage, which the document recorded. He was born to a Bambara mother named Nieléba Traoré, who was present at the proceedings, and “a white [man]. His name was Louis.” However, handwritten notes by the secretary of the court at the bottom of the document invalidated the revelation of paternity, identifying Vital as born of “an unknown father.” Vital attended French schools, specifically the state-run secular orphanage for métis the town of Kayes, from 1916 to 1919. He attended the primary school in Bamako from 1919 to 1926.95 Although Traoré Moreau, Vital, and other petitioners had likely never set foot on European soil, they espoused a deep feeling that they were French. They were not the only Africans or people of African descent in the French Empire to make such claims. As argued by Semley, various people of African descent in the centuries-long history of the French Empire, from the Antilles to West Africa, claimed to be French – not only through physically traversing oceans and residing in metropolitan France, but also through “transcending identities.”96 African historical actors called into question the racialized framework of colonial legal status – that black identity conferred native legal status and white identity French citizenship – by claiming that one could be both black and French. In other words, individuals with black racial identity could also have French legal status even if not born in or residing in metropolitan France. The men who petitioned for French citizenship based on the 1928 circular asserted a third identity, beyond the black and white racialized binary: they

93 94

95 96

Letter from the lieutenant governor of French Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, December 12, 1928, document 705, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Declaration of intent to pursue French naturalization, signed by the witness, Vital, and an unknown signatory signing on behalf of the mayor, December 5, 1928; Retroactive birth certificate issued April 13, 1928, which arrived May 19, 1928 at the office of the governor of Mali, document 1298. School certificate issued in Bamako, March 29, 1928, document 256/SE, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. Semley, To Be Free and French, 190.

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identified as métis and French. The articulation of multiracial identity claimed by Traoré Moreau and other métis men was distinct from how other people of African descent transcended the French colonial racial hierarchies and created new identities. In response to these claims, some colonial personnel articulated that being multiracial conferred a greater capacity to arrive at la qualité de français than others born in Africa. At other times, colonial personnel reified the idea that the black/white binary was fixed and they thus reinforced rigid racialized boundaries of legal status. The context for the 1928 circular – which Traoré Moreau and other métis men in West Africa tried to use throughout the 1930s as an access point into French citizenship – came about because of events more than decade earlier. After World War I and into the 1930s, the French public and government in metropolitan and overseas France were anxious – and were still reeling in the devastating impact of over a million civilian and soldier deaths.97 The birth rate continued to decline, public health was precarious, and the economy was faltering. Military officers remained in war mode and were desperate to recruit soldiers and increase the size of the French army. Starting in 1905, the government imposed a mandatory military service period of two to three years for all men of French nationality who were aged nineteen or older, whether they resided in metropolitan France or elsewhere in the French Empire.98 French authorities maintained this mandatory service even after the war ended. Military service and French nationality for men became intertwined: it was the duty of every French male citizen to serve in the army, and only men who held French citizenship could serve in the French army. Each year, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old men presented themselves before local military authorities, who would take a census and publish the names of men to be enlisted.99 Men of French nationality residing in the colonies were to also fulfill conscription requirements, enlisting in French military corps in these locations or the closest colonies with such troops.100 A change in French law in 1923 allowed noncitizens residing in metropolitan France to be conscripted into the French military corps. This change established a legal precedent for the Ministry of Colonies to extend similar measures in 1928 to métis men.101 As there were continued feelings of 97

98 99 100 101

Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing French Race: Immigration, Intimacy and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Duke University Press, 2009), 21–9; Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Richard Fogarty, “Race and Sex, Fear and Loathing in France during the Great War,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 34, 1 (2008), 50–72. Loi sur le recrutement de l’armée [Law on Army Recruitment], Journal officiel de la République française [Official Gazette of France], April 5, 1923, 3410–22. Loi sur le recrutement de l’armée [Law on Army Recruitment], 3410–22. Loi sur le recrutement de l’armée [Law on Army Recruitment], 3410–22. Article 12 of the law regarding army recruitment, issued April 1, 1923, 23 G 22 (24), ANS.

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vulnerability of the French nation in the 1920s, civilian and military leaders sought to increase the size of the French army. Article 12 of the modified army recruitment law of 1923 targeted a particular population of eighteen-year-old men without French nationality: those “without family” who had been taken in and raised by a French family or had attended a French school for at least eight years and had the intention of claiming French nationality when they could legally do so at twenty-one years of age.102 The law was likely intended to apply to young men who had been born elsewhere in Europe. Service in the French military would be a conduit to citizenship and would signify the pending confirmation of citizenship. Non-French European men could fulfill the duty of male French citizens to complete military service even before they were titular citizens. However, the French also depended on and benefited from the forced service of African men from North and West Africa in segregated military corps separate from white French men. How the French constructed the framework of military service for men in French Africa reflected the racialized hierarchies and unequal conditions of indigènes versus citizens, factors that métis and other African men sought to overturn. While many French or European men serving in the French military corps were deployed to Africa, the French depended heavily on African soldiers from various ethno-language groups to establish and maintain French colonial rule in North, West, and Equatorial Africa. Neither the armed skirmishes of conquest that had established French colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nor victory against Germany in the European front lines of World War I would have been possible without the service of hundreds of thousands of men from throughout West Africa. They had been forced to serve in segregated military regiments, known as tirailleurs Sénégalais or troupes noires, the colonial army or native corps, led by French military officers.103 While some African men volunteered for these forces, such as slaves, former slaves of African slaveholders, and others of low status, the French also conscripted soldiers against their will in campaigns to fulfill quotas to extract forced labor.104 Conditions were dire: tirailleurs Sénégalais faced heavy casualties, injuries, infectious diseases, and racist treatment; they received little compensation and endured longer service compared to soldiers in metropolitan troops.105

102 103

104 105

Loi sur le recrutement de l’armée [Law on Army Recruitment], 3412. Gregory Mann explored veteran West African soldiers’ articulations of the sacrifices they made for France and argued that the French state insufficiently recognized their contributions and did not properly compensate and recognize them, resulting in a “blood debt” that the French nation and society had yet to repay. Gregory Mann, Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 2–4. Mann, Native Sons, 15. Mann, Native Sons, 17–18; Sarah Zimmerman, “Citizenship, Military Service, and Managing Exceptionalism: Originaires in World War I,” in Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers

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Recruitment drives by the French aided by African chiefs sparked revolts in African communities in regions across West Africa. Traoré Moreau hoped that declaring his sentiments of being French and his desire to complete military service were sufficient for him to obtain French citizenship. However, the 1928 circular for métis men offered a more restrained path to citizenship compared with that offered to European recruits. According to the 1923 law, military service was a sufficient criterion for eighteen-year-old European nationals to then legally claim French citizenship. However, legally unrecognized métis of native status, according to the 1928 circular, were to “apply for French naturalization.”106 The words apply and naturalization implied that the métis petitioners underwent a transformation from a state of being that was not French to one that was French. In other words, métis men had to prove that they were “French” for the French state to grant them French legal status. The document further defined naturalization as “admissions to the rights of French citizens”; such recognition was a privilege granted by the state only to métis who were exceptionally deserving. These distinct paths were based on French ideas about racial difference. Traoré Moreau’s letter and the paper trail that his request generated convey his connection to a network of on-the-ground French military officers and colonial civil servants who supported his claim to be French, to serve in the French army corps, and for the government to confer citizenship. The 1928 circular attached models of the documents that local administrators and recruits were required to complete for métis men to be incorporated into the French army corps and lay the groundwork for the naturalization petition process after the completion of military service and their twenty-first birthdays. Multiple French military officers and civilian personnel confirmed Traoré Moreau’s legitimacy to claim citizenship and provided the supporting documents required to prove his Frenchness. The commander of the administrative region in which Traoré Moreau lived collected his letter and the other documents in a dossier, which he sent to the governor of French Soudan requesting approval for Traoré Moreau to enlist in

106

and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict, ed. Andrew Tait and Richard S. Fogarty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 241. One copy of the declaration was to remain in the archives of the colony and the other was sent to the Department of Political Affairs at the office of the minister of colonies in Paris. If the recruit’s petition for naturalization was subsequently refused even while he served in the French army, he could demand to be liberated from the army. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Circular regarding the incorporation of métis into the French corps, issued by General Peltier on behalf of the minister of colonies to the governor-general of the FWA in Dakar, document 119/BCM, January 5, 1928; Ruling enacted in FWA regarding the law of March 31, 1928 on army recruitment, 1965.

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the French army and follow-up for his naturalization request.107 The first document was a “Declaration of Intention to Solicit French Naturalization,” formalized with Traoré Moreau’s name, signature, and the date. The next two documents were to confirm the recruit’s sufficient integration into French culture – or “Frenchness” – which first meant confirmation of métis status in addition to the criteria for having received a French education. The birth certificate attached to Traoré Moreau’s dossier confirmed the biographical information that he had already detailed in his letter. He was born on December 23, 1899, in the city of Kayes in French Soudan. The certificate identified him as the son of a woman named Penda Traoré. However, the birth certificate listed his father as “unknown,” a euphemism for a French or other European national, thus erasing the public naming of his biological father as having the surname “Moreau.”108 Another document was a certificate of schooling, signed by Mr. Pin, director of the Primary and Apprentice School of Bamako and an employee of the Department of Education. He detailed that Traoré Moreau had resided at French schools in the cities of Kayes, Bamako, and Gorée, locations in which either a state-run dormitory for métis children existed or a mission-station took in métis children.109 Once the necessary documents for métis recruits had been gathered, the 1928 circular detailed that they were to be sent to the Ministry of Colonies. However, the archival trail ends, and what became of Traoré Moreau’s claim is unclear. Local colonial administrators and military were sympathetic to métis men in their colonies, probably because these young men’s potential service was essential to their on-the-ground efforts to maintain political and social control. In June 1928, the governor of Niger conveyed to the governor-general that he had received “the declaration of intention to solicit French naturalization for their registration” on the enlistment list, from two métis men whose names were not identified and who were twenty-one years old. He had forwarded their names months prior and now asked that the governor-general make an exception and place them on the list even though they were too old.110 In November 1928, the governor of Dahomey wrote to the governor-general of FWA that he was forwarding eight declarations of the intention to solicit French naturalization from unnamed métis men who requested that they be

107 108 109 110

Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, November 29, 1928, document 697, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. Affidavit signed by Commander of the district of Keyes, July 17, 1924, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. School certificate issued in Bamako, director of the Primary and Apprentice School of Bamako and an employee of the Department of Education, September 20, 1928, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Niger, to the governor-general of the FWA, June 1, 1928, document 1027, 23 G 22 (24), ANS.

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placed on the conscription list of 1928. Between December 1928 and July 1929, the governors of Guinea and Senegal forwarded three more requests to solicit French naturalization from Emile Souma dit Ceres, Pierre Sall dit Fennel, and Georges Souvoyelah.111 Between November 1928 and July 1929, four more requests came in from the governors of French Soudan, Guinea, and Senegal, naming four specific métis men who also requested to be enlisted in the French army, with the understanding that this would allow them to later apply for French citizenship.112 In the many debates about the status of métis in French Africa over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century, some French jurists and commentators warned that the métis could become a restive group and might rebel against colonial rule if the French did not grant them some economic and social recognition as a distinct group. Few had anticipated that such anticolonial agitation would take the form of a steady trickle of demands by métis men to be granted French legal status and exercise rights and duties as French citizens to serve in the French army corps – declarations of their loyalty to the French nation and belonging to French culture. It is likely that petitioners such as Traoré Moreau had attended French Catholic or colonial state–run schools, institutions that the French had hoped would cultivate métis men to be loyal intermediaries to the colonial enterprise. However, these young men directed the cultural competence they had acquired (however thin) in French culture, language, and literacy and their relationships with French military and civilian colonial personnel toward making claims for French citizenship and the rights it entailed. The 1928 circular was but a narrow opening to French citizenship, yet it offered great hope for the métis men who pursued it. French colonial personnel put up barriers to obtaining French citizenship, even as métis men attempted to bypass those barriers, reading and citing the text of the 1928 circular to support their claims. There was a substantial divide between locally based colonial personnel (who had the most direct contact

111

112

Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Dahomey, to the governorgeneral of the FWA, November 22, 1928, document 534 BM, 23 G 22 (24), ANS; Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of French Guinea, to the governor-general of the FWA, December 13, 1938, document 739 B, 23 G 22 (24), ANS; Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Senegal, to the governor-general of the FWA, July 30, 1929, document 1019 BM, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Dahomey, to the governor-general of the FWA, November 22, 1928, document 534 BM; Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of French Guinea, November 29, 1928, document 697; Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of French Guinea to the governor-general of the FWA, December 13, 1938, document 739 B; Letter from the governor of colonies, the lieutenant governor of Senegal, to the governor-general of the FWA, July 30, 1929, document 1019 BM.

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with soldiers in the colonies) and French government personnel in the government-general in Dakar and in the Ministry of Colonies (who authored the circular). The latter noted that the possibility of extending naturalization to unrecognized métis should be assessed carefully. They had not meant to open the floodgates of French citizenship for legally unrecognized métis men in West Africa. In a letter dated January 11, 1929, the Ministry of Colonies urged the entire military and civilian government leadership in FWA – namely the governor-general, the lead general of the French army, colonial governors, and the administrator of the Circumscription of Dakar – to apply the law in limited numbers.113 Bloodlines to a French father were but a point of entry, not a guarantee of French citizenship for métis men. The completion of military service in a French army troop by a legally unrecognized métis person did not “open up the right to citizenship” but merely added another qualification to the profile of Africans who may obtain French citizenship: “It is advisable to avoid disillusion with the effects diametrically opposed to the aim pursued, that no ambiguity remains on this particular point.”114 Métis men who forwarded their claims to local officials, and the local officials themselves, understood that men who identified themselves as métis could enlist in the French army and could apply for and would obtain French citizenship, with a near guarantee that they would be successful. But this was not the case. The claims to French citizenship by the métis men challenged and revealed the fragility of French efforts to delineate “whiteness” as equivalent to “citizenship.” Confusion about the law continued among colonial personnel in FWA and prompted the governor-general’s office to draft a document called “Application of the Provisions” regarding the 1928 circular, which listed numerous questions and answers.115 Consider one of the questions: “Does the term unrecognized métis encompass only children of Europeans and natives?” The response: the circular was meant to apply only to “the child who could claim either via his undesignated mother or father, to be of French origin or of foreign origin of the white race” and it was up to local authorities to “assess if the claimant is or is not a direct descendent of white race.” The gendered reference to the French parent as either a man or woman contradicted the rarity of French women engaging in interracial sexual relationships in early colonial-era French Africa. The French parents of multiracial Africans were nearly always male.

113 114 115

Letter from the director of military services Peltier writing on behalf of the Ministry of Colonies to the governor-general of the FWA, January 11, 1929, letter 41 I/I, 23 G 22 (24). Letter from director of military services Peltier writing on behalf of the Ministry of Colonies to the governor-general of the FWA, January 11, 1929, letter 41 I/I, 23 G 22 (24). Telegram regarding the application of the provisions on January 6, 1928, 23 G 22 (24), ANS.

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As to the question of whether those beyond the age range of eighteen to twenty-one years qualified under this decree, the response was no. According to this list of frequently asked questions and the corresponding answers, few of the dozens of métis men who had petitioned their local administrators to be incorporated in the French army corps with a view to eventually obtaining French citizenship even qualified to serve in the French army. Not only had many of them passed the age limit to enlist; some also failed the assessment of “being descended of the white race” because one parent might have been métis themselves. There were intentions among high-ranking colonial personnel of FWA governance to limit the capacity for Africans to obtain the status of French citizen. In spite by efforts of the Ministry of Colonies to restrain the maneuverability of métis men to claim French citizenship, métis men continued to claim the right to serve in the French army – with the understanding that it was something they were entitled to, a path that would lead to them obtaining French citizenship. In a March 1930 letter, fueled by the continued flow of métis men’s requests, the governor-general of FWA pushed back: Despite potential métis conscripts claiming that they were French, they were still colonial subjects according to French law and thus had no more claim to French citizenship than other colonial subjects. The governor-general maintained that the 1928 circular did not present “a new way of attainting the status of French citizen, but rather was a qualifier” for already existing processes for Africans to attain this status.116 He referred to the 1912 Decree Regulating the Conditions for Natives of French West Africa to Attain the Quality of French Citizen – the term in the French language for French citizenship – which, combined with the 1928 military circular, set out the stipulations for the naturalization of métis conscripts. Métis conscripts’ French bloodlines made them more deserving of opportunities that would allow them to fulfill the requirements to obtain French citizenship, such as one to three years of military service in the French metropolitan army corps, which would count toward the requirement of employment in a French entity. However, legally unrecognized métis were so-called indigènes and would have to follow the naturalization processes outlined in French colonial law just like other Africans of such colonial status. Even if they were successful in enlisting and completing a number of years of military service, such labor would serve as nothing more than the ability to

116

In February 1930, Colonel Foisy, head of the French Army troop of FWA, wrote to the governor-general that an entire native military unit had asked questions concerning “naturalization and the attainment of the quality of French citizenship for legally unrecognized métis.” Letter from the governor-general of the FWA to the superior commanding general of French West Africa, March 8, 1930, letter 1501, 23 G 22 (24), ANS.

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check off one of the numerous qualifications that an African of native status had to exhibit in order to obtain French citizenship.117 Métis, by virtue of having attended French missionary and secular schools in higher concentrations than other Africans, ostensibly could more easily meet some of the criteria for citizenship, such as French language skills, which in turn paved the way to meeting the criteria of wage labor in French milieus. The benchmarks in the 1912 decree – and that métis would have to meet them – were not negotiable. To add to an already ambiguous, contradictory, and ever-shifting legal landscape, colonial officials in FWA disagreed as to the interpretation of the 1928 circular. The dossiers of métis men, the governor-general continued, would be examined with “very special benevolence,” and given “the fact of their origin and education received for at least eight years in a French family or school, we can allow that legally unrecognized métis whose requests are strongly supported with evidence, will exhibit sufficient proof of their attachment to French interests.”118 Here, the governor-general contradicted the admonishment of the previous governor-general, who had stated that French and European bloodlines did not confer preferential access to French citizenship for métis compared to others who held indigène colonial status. With the right of entry to French military units afforded by the 1928 circular, conferred by their multiracial identity, métis had a head start compared to others of indigène legal status in the quest to obtain French citizenship. But there are no indications that any métis men at all succeed in obtaining French citizenship based on the 1928 decree.119 Obtaining French citizenship was nearly impossible for anyone categorized as holding native legal status in FWA. Few who petitioned according to the 1912 law were successful, whether métis or of any other identity.120 In spite of the promises of the so-called civilizing mission of the French Empire and the 1928 circular, it was nearly impossible for African men – much less women – to obtain French citizenship.

117 118 119

120

Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the superior commanding general of French West Africa, March 8, 1930, letter 1501, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the superior commanding general of FWA, March 8, 1930, letter 1501, 23 G 22 (24), ANS. The same 1928 decree applied in Madagascar. Unlike in FWA, some métis men acquired French citizenship after serving in the French Army – a total of fourteen métis soldiers between 1929 and 1931. This group represented about forty-one percent of the thirty-four métis who obtained French citizenship in that period, with the remainder gaining their status based on laws promulgated for people of indigène status. Tisseau, Etre métis en Imerina, 158–9. From 1914–1922, ninety-four people with the legal status of native (indigène) gained French citizenship. White, Children of the French Empire, 128.

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Conclusion Childhood and citizenship were two foundational and intersecting processes of identity formation in the early decades of colonial rule. African mothers and caretakers of multiracial children, multiracial people themselves, and French colonial government and missionary actors made and unmade ties of belonging, culture, access to socioeconomic resources, legal status, and power based on these concepts. Mothers’ decisions to give their children European names sometimes facilitated European legal status, whether such outcomes were intended or not. Education in French schools and soldiering –two mechanisms that French colonial state and society mobilized to ensure the assimilation of métis to French conceptualizations of their place and status – were instead recalibrated by métis to bargain for their visions of selfhood. Métis men from throughout FWA who had attended French secular and missionary schools during their childhoods felt and expressed that they were French, and they marshaled a network of French sponsors, such as their former teachers or military commanders, to corroborate and provide evidence of their Frenchness. While African voices, imaginaries, and agency appear hard to find and scattered in colonial archives, the parenting, mothering, and fostering strategies of African communities regarding multiracial children become visible when such documents are read across the grain. With these childrearing maneuvers, mothers, maternal kin, and other African caretakers forged vestiges of connections to French culture and society. Such ties, by the seemingly thin thread of a name or some years spent in a French school, provided a framework for multiracial and multicultural identify formation, which some mothers of métis children – or métis themselves – assembled into claims that they were French citizens. The processes of métis defining themselves as distinct, and in the decades to come finding a sense of affiliation with each other – identity formation – and then packaging these identities into public claims sparked contestations and negotiation by various historical actors. The next chapter analyzes these debates and their unintended consequences as they intensified over questions about children and childhood in the 1930s.

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Wards of the State Claiming and Mediating Colonial Government Welfare and French Institutional Care of Multiracial Children in the 1930s

In July 1932, a French woman identifying herself as Mrs. de la Torre, President of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children located in St. Louis, wrote to the lieutenant governor of Senegal. She requested that the “two young métis children Paul Diallo and Charles Jondot, the son of a deceased teacher, be entrusted to the charity,”1 and opined that the two boys were “morally abandoned” and needed care. She emphasized Jondot’s filiation from a French man. Both boys had previously lived in the dormitory of a state-run school that had closed for the summer. She considered their temporary residence at a nearby hotel-restaurant run by a French man, possibly a site of prostitution, to be unacceptable. She proposed that the colonial state entrust the children to the charity, which would place the boys “with the fathers at the Catholic mission,” who would ensure that their “moral education” continued and they would be “sheltered from the dangers of the street.” The boys would return to school in the fall but continue to reside at the mission. She requested 1,500 francs per year from the government to cover the costs. For de la Torre, all métis children were “morally abandoned”; she envisioned partnerships between the colonial state, the Catholic Church, and her charity of private citizens to care for them. Governor Beurnier wrote to the governor-general in Dakar, asking him to fund Jondot’s school fees. He conveyed that it was the state’s responsibility to ensure the boys’ well-being but pleaded that the colony’s limited budget had resulted in insufficient resources. A representative of the governor-general replied that “It was up to Senegal to pay for the expenses of métis as do other colonies.”2 The governor of Senegal conceded, but only for the cases of Jondot and Diallo. The colonial state paid for their lodging in the dormitory that summer, but he declined to 1

2

Archive Nationale du Senegal (hereafter ANS), 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the president of the Executive Board of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the governor-general of Senegal, July 20, 1932, letter 14009; ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Project for an outreach program for Métis children in Senegal, attached to a letter from the director (signature illegible) to the governor-general of AOF, September 19, 1924. Telegram, Office of Finance and Accounting, Fournier writing on behalf of the governor-general to the governor of Senegal, November 7, 1932, document 2512, 10 D 1 (24), ANS.

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entrust them to the charity to avoid the colonial state taking on the burden of paying for the children’s care indefinitely.3 Beginning in 1933, the colonial government of Senegal assumed greater management and funding of Jondot’s living arrangements, but with reluctance and at a limited amount, maintaining that his mother retained custody.4 Jondot was a “ward of the administration” that year.5 This meant that the Senegalese colonial government would pay for the costs of his food, lodging, and education at French institutions. Government documents identified two additional métis boys from St. Louis as wards – Diallo and Léon Traoré – with the charity as the facilitator of services and accommodations.6 The colony of Senegal began to regularize the policies and funding of the wards program, technically open to any children born in Senegal but targeting métis children in practice. Jondot’s mother, the state, private French citizens, and Catholic missionaries together facilitated Jondot’s educational, religious, and material upbringing.7 Yet Jondot’s long-term status as a ward of the state came about due to the interventions of another historical actor. In the spring of 1934, Amadou Dugay-Clédor, a non-métis originaire and former mayor of St. Louis (1919–25), sent several letters to the lieutenant governor of Senegal about Jondot.8 Dugay-Clédor’s letter called out the social and moral shortcomings of the French government in Senegal in regard to the upbringing and education of “abandoned métis children.” Like de la Torre, he argued that this was a designation that applied to all children whose European fathers did not provide for them. These circumstances, he continued, reflected the failure of the French government to provide cultural, social, and economic resources to aid the

3

4 5

6

7 8

Telegram, Chesse, administrator of Ziguinchor to the governor of St. Louis, May 23, 1932, telegram 141; Handwritten note regarding wards of the state, July 29, 1932; decision signed by Beurnier allocating money for the upkeep of two students at the Lycée Faidherbe, August 18, 1932, decision 1930/AG, ANS, 10 D 1 (24). ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the principal of Lycée Faidherbe to the governor of Senegal, January 13, 1933, letter 781. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the secretary general writing on behalf of Lieutenant Governor Felix Martine to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, November 24, 1932, letter 228/AG; note for the chief financial officer, October 30, 1933, letter 504/AG; Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, January 4, 1933, letter 1; Letter from Secretary General Martine to the headmaster of the Lycée Faidherbe, January 12, 1933, letter 12/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, February 10, 1933, letter 365/AG; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, January 17, 1935, letter 164/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Governor Beurnier to the headmaster of Lycée Faidherbe, January 18, 1933, letter 289 C. Amadou Dugay-Clédor, La bataille du Guîlé: De Faidherebe à Coppolani ou Les Gandiols Gandiols au service de la France (Saint-Louis: Printing Press of the Government of Senegal, 1931).

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advancement of “native populations.”9 Dugay-Clédor and de la Torre corresponded with each other, and both employed the same language of abonnement; they may even have interacted with each other in person as they both lived in St. Louis. Dugay-Clédor envisioned a colonial state that not only invested in métis children but managed their care, education, and future as part of the landscape of providing access to education for all African children. It was essential for the colonial state to provide for the protection and education of métis children to realize the promise of the French civilizing mission in French Africa – which he believed in and facilitated. Seeking to shame the colonial administrators in Senegal, Dugay-Clédor pointed out that neighboring French Soudan operated two state-run orphanages in the colonial capital of Bamako, one for boys and one for girls, where métis children lived. The children attended primary or vocational schools along with other African children. He touted Bamako’s endeavors as a model of education and care of children worth emulating. He mentioned Jondot, stating that he and other métis children were wandering the streets of St. Louis, subject to the possibility of “bad things happening to them” unless the administration intervened.10 A few months later, the colony of Senegal transported and paid for Jondot and three other métis boys to live and be educated in the orphanage and school in Bamako, which Dugay-Clédor had praised in his correspondence.11 Jondot remained a ward of the state until he was nineteen years old, living at the Bamako orphanage for many years and subsequently returning to Senegal and living at various schools there. Jondot’s case is exceptional. Few métis children have featured as frequently in French colonial archival documents, from a young age to adulthood and written about by many different African and French historical actors. But his case is illustrative of a change that began in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon: these colonial states became colonial welfare states, with special consideration and increased oversight and funding given to the education and rearing of métis children. Jondot’s story encapsulates how this expansion was driven not only by the colonial state but also by African caretakers and stakeholders, as

9 10 11

ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Colonial Council, Dugay-Clédor, to Lieutenant Governor Beurnier, June 23, 1934, letter 444. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Colonial Council, Dugay-Clédor, to Lieutenant Governor Beurnier, April 1, 1934, letter 255. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Governor Beurnier to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, July 7, 1934; Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the president of the Colonial Council, September 22, 1934, letter 1425; Letter from Secretary General Remy acting on behalf of the governor of Senegal to the administrator of Senegal, April 21, 1942, letter 712 APA/4; Letter from the secretary general to the head of education services, letter 629. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision paying subventions to the government of Soudan for the care of four wards of the administration of Senegal, May 9, 1935, document 1131.

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well as other French constituents (e.g., private citizens, missionaries, and sometimes fathers) who mediated rights to and of métis children. This chapter focuses on the life histories and experiences of métis children who were the subjects of colonial government funding and management regarding their education and rearing, as wards, in the 1930s in Senegal and Gabon. Due to new wards policies, the number of multiracial children who lived in and attended French institutions increased in Senegal and Gabon compared to prior decades. The question of the education and daily life of métis wards and those on whose behalf the colonial state made payments became a battleground, through which fictive and blood kin, métis activists, emerging African political leaders, French colonial administrators, and Catholic missionaries debated the meanings of race, culture, and child welfare. In Senegal, African stakeholders such as Dugay-Clédor – along with mothers and natal kin – mediated métis children’s access to French education and their living conditions and the colonial welfare payments for services to establish sound futures for the children. While stakeholders in Senegal justified métis children’s entitlement to French education and welfare payments as based on their parentage from French and European men, they often couched these arguments in terms of the colonial state’s obligation to provide access to education for all children born in Africa and deemed that métis children would reside with black children and be educated in the same institutions. In Gabon, by contrast, the Amicale of Métis – an association of adult métis founded in Libreville in the 1930s – lobbied for separate and unequal access to French material conditions for métis children, so that they could attend the school reserved for European children and reside in a foyer (boarding home) where black children would not be allowed. These arguments reflected the view that métis were superior to black Africans and that they should occupy an elevated social and cultural standing and become rights-bearing actors vis-à-vis both French and African societies. In both Gabon and Senegal, contestations around welfare and métis children coalesced on the promise of – and racialized limits regarding – the French republican rhetoric of universal rights and equality. The welfare and education of métis children in FWA and FEA reveal the unevenness of colonial governmentality and the changing ways in which Africans articulated their relationship to the French colonial state and French society, as well as how this relationship impacted hierarchies of power within African societies. The Colonial Welfare State in French Africa in the 1930s Historians of France identify the 1920s and 1930s, with the crises of World War I and the Global Depression, as decades of significant social reformist legislation by politicians and government employees among various political

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parties in Paris and in the provinces. The state empowered itself to play an active role “in pursuit of the common good, or national interest.”12 New legislation and increased government spending resulted in expanded services and protections in the medical, social, educational, and health arenas, particularly for workers, women, and children. The concept of government evolved into one in which the state played a key role in protecting and promoting the social and economic well-being of its citizens and those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life. In addition to paying organizations to provide services, the state also made direct payments to individuals. Welfare states expanded similarly elsewhere in Europe, such as the United Kingdom, and the German state had enacted social welfare as early as the late nineteenth century. The idea of the state as duty-bound to maintain the welfare and well-being of citizens did not automatically extend to colonial states and subjects. It was not until the 1940s – spurred by labor strikes among African male wage laborers in cities such as Lagos, Dar es Salaam, and Dakar – that British and French colonial states across sub-Saharan Africa were forced to expand their ideas about development beyond colonial exploitation to social welfare. These states were mainly focused on the welfare of their male workers.13 However, historian Abosede George argues that the rise of the “developmentalist colonial state,” purporting to attend to the well-being of colonial subjects, occurred at the intersection of “new social, cultural, and intimate spheres of African lives that were pulled into the orbit of governmental interest,” specifically regarding children and childhood.14 George reaches this conclusion through analyzing the British colonial laws, social work, and institutions that targeted girl hawkers in Lagos, Nigeria, in the 1940s to “save” them from the perils of Yoruba practices and ideologies regarding child labor. The policies of the developmental colonial state sparked debates among Lagos residents, including Christian elites, Yoruba parents, colonial officials, and welfare civil servants, over how to define “childhood” and the question of juvenile welfare and who would make the relevant decisions. Borrowing from George’s analysis of how the British colonial state assumed direct relationships with children as a legitimate trajectory of colonial rule, I categorize the colonial states in Gabon and Senegal – which sought to 12 13

14

Timothy B. Smith, “Building Mini-Welfare States, 1920–1940,” in Creating the Welfare State in France, 1880–1940 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 91–124. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); F. Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Abosede George, “Within Salvation: Girl Hawkers and the Colonial State in Development Era Lagos,” Journal of Social History 44, 3 (Spring 2011), 837–59.

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regulate the rearing and education of multiracial children – as nascent colonial welfare states. I characterize them as welfare states rather than developmentalist states because they were built on models of social welfare for children in metropolitan France. These French welfare interventions began in the 1930s, a decade before the period that George and other scholars of African history have identified as when a shift occurred toward emphasizing the social welfare of colonial subjects, at the intersection of family, children, and labor.15 These interventions happened in FWA and FEA a decade earlier than elsewhere in Africa due to the demands of métis themselves, their mothers, and other historical actors in maternal and colonial communities. The idea of “welfare” connotes a certain degree of intimacy with the subject that is its focus, rather than the idea of “development” – which implies that a “backward” subject will receive enlightenment from an external party. In Senegal and Gabon, colonial officials continued to refuse to acknowledge the filiation of multiracial children from specific French and European men and therefore full belonging to French society. However, colonial officials began to acknowledge the “collective filiation” of métis children from European men and distinguished multiracial children from other children who were colonial subjects.16 In the 1930s, métis children became “deserving” of expanded access to – and state funding for – education in French institutions. Catholic missionaries had been making such arguments for decades and mediated the expanded reach of these colonial states’ interventions as both an opportunity and a peril. This chapter demonstrates that the emergence of the welfare state and its expanded reach were not initiated by colonial society alone but also arose through the claims of so-called colonial subjects that they were entitled to certain services. A diverse array of historical actors in Senegal and Gabon articulated their own conceptions of the “abandonment” of métis children as a platform to cultivate patron–client or parent–child relationships with the French colonial state and claim welfare assistance. In Senegal and Gabon, respectively, colonial welfare for métis children came about due to the advocacy of some black originaires and the formation and persistent lobbying by a collective organization of métis. In both locations, black and métis men used their proximity to the colonial state as well as their literacy in French and knowledge of colonial governance to advocate for what they perceived to be

15

16

Lorelle Semley chronicles how the government interest in the “the politics of the family” and social welfare that arose in metropolitan France in the 1930s did not expand to West Africa until after World War II. Semley, Mother Is Gold, 122–6. Saada used the term “collective filiation” in relation to the French nationality law promulgated in the 1930s specifically for métis in various colonial settings across the French Empire. Saada, Empire’s Children, 5. The topic is discussed further in Chapter 3 of this book.

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the social entitlements of métis children. Gender, economic, and political dynamics in each colony resulted in different yet analogous contestations over how to define social welfare policies, which multiracial children would be beneficiaries, and who would make such decisions. Colonial Welfare for Multiracial Children in Senegal How Jondot became a ward of the state illustrates the evolution of policies and processes through which a nascent colonial welfare state came into existence in Senegal in the 1930s, as shaped by multiple African and French constituents. Could Jondot be made a ward of the nation (Pupille de la Nation)? – the colonial officials wondered, as they received letters from Dugay-Clédor and de la Torre. The ward policy began in metropolitan France as a means to address the care of children whose fathers or mothers had perished in World War I. These children became “adopted by the state,” and through the adults or institutions responsible for them, they were recipients of government welfare money to pay for their material needs and education. While the state assumed financial responsibility, any living relatives or guardians retained legal custody. A note by an unidentified employee in the Senegalese governor’s office qualified that in Senegal there was no “specific statute defining the status of métis as wards.”17 In FWA, legislation dating back to 1923 existed for colonial governments to intervene with financial assistance for “native minors living in deficient material conditions” and make them “wards of the administration.” The employee noted further that “a few” individual administrators had interpreted this 1923 provision as applicable specifically for métis children. Without specifying the number of children, he elaborated that these few administrators paid an annual sum to the mothers or kin with whom the children lived. A second practice came about “with the accord of the mother,” he continued. A few métisses “girls whose mothers gave consent” and who were older than eleven were entrusted to the N’Dar Toute Catholic mission in St. Louis, with administrators paying small grants to defray the mission’s costs. The governor decided to try a new tactic, paying a small amount of money for the two boys’ temporary housing, only for that summer, to reside in the lycée’s dormitory. The governor did not take up de la Torre’s offer for the charity to assume legal responsibility for Jondot. His mother would remain his legal guardian. French colonial personnel in Senegal perpetually sought to limit the full liability of the French state and society for the welfare of métis

17

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Handwritten note regarding wards of the administration of Senegal, July 29, 1932.

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children and maintained that mothers or other African remained the legal guardians, even if the state remitted payments on the children’s behalf.18 The Senegalese colonial state was more than willing to limit its financial liability and allow for private French citizens to assume the cost of care for Jondot. In 1933, the headmaster of the Lycée Faidherbe wrote to the lieutenant governor requesting to become “the correspondent” – that is, legal guardian – of Jondot.19 He mentioned Jondot’s mother, with whom he was in contact, and advocated for what she desired regarding her son. The headmaster asked that the governor honor her wish that Jondot attend a Catholic school and pay for his formal schooling and material needs.20 While the government denied the headmaster’s request to be authorized as the boy’s legal guardian, it approved of his offer to use his own money to house, feed, and clothe Jondot and pay for his education. Jondot lived at the headmaster’s home, with his lodging and food paid for by the headmaster, from January to May 1933. In the end, colonial officials decided that Jondot’s deficient material conditions and publicly well-known filiation from a deceased French man warranted intervention. De la Torre again requested that the government authorize the charity to coordinate Jondot’s schooling and residence at a Catholic mission and for the government to pay the bulk of the costs.21 Governor Beurnier agreed to entrust Jondot and Diallo to the care of the charity, which would manage their residential placement and schooling. The state would pay 1,400 francs per year to facilitate the boys’ transport to and education and housing within a Catholic residential school in Senegal – the request first made by de la Torre in 1932.22 De la Torre received a letter in 1933 indicating that Jondot

18 19 20

21 22

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision signed by Beurnier allocating money for the upkeep of two students at the Lycée Faidherbe, August 18, 1932, decision 1930/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Debonne to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, July 7, 1933. In internal correspondence with other government personnel, Lieutenant Governor Beurnier indicated his predilection to accept this offer of payment, which he felt “offered all the necessary guarantees, [and] had the accord of the mother” and was testament to the headmaster’s generous nature. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter signed by Beurnier addressed to M. Louveau, attached to a letter from the headmaster of Lycée Faidherbe to the governor of Senegal, January 13, 1933, letter 781. ANS, Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, May 18, 1933, letter 137. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, December 13, 1932, letter 113; Letter from the secretary general to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, January 3, 1933, letter 12/AG; Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, January 4, 1933, letter 1; Letter from Beurnier to the administrator of Dakar, January 12, 1933, letter 190/AG; Letter from Secretary General Martine to the headmaster of Lycée Faidherbe, January 12, 1933, letter 12/AG.

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was now a “Ward of the Administration.”23 Jondot was to live and attend school at the largest Catholic-run orphanage-school for boys in Senegal, in N’Gazobil. It housed twenty-eight métis boys and twenty-four “native orphans” (i.e., black orphans) in 1933, and by 1938 there were sixty métis boys.24 A French military officer observed three categories of boys there: those who had been orphaned by the death of both parents, those whose parents were too poor to provide for their basic needs, and those who were “morally abandoned” – meaning métis children.25 Jondot did not attend and reside at N’Gazobil Catholic mission school from 1933 to 1935 but instead attended another state-run school in St. Louis, called L’École Blanchot.26 The sons of African chiefs and métis and black originaires also attended this state-run school, along with some white French students who were sometimes in segregated classes. Its graduates would come to constitute members of the elite African community and were employed as interpreters and clerks or held other forms of wage-labor employment through private and government French entities.27 For the years of 1933–5, the colonial government listed three métis boys – Jondot, Diallo, and Léon Traoré – as wards of the administration, with the charity listed as their caretaker and the promise of government payments to subsidize the costs.28 The boys lived in the homes of French women who were members of the charity. However, the government did not pay the promised money on a regular basis, and the charity took on many of the costs of tuition, food, and lodging. The lack of consistent payment indicated how the Senegalese government would be a colonial

23

24

25 26

27 28

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the secretary general on behalf of Lieutenant Governor Felix Martine to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, November 24, 1932, letter 228/AG; note for the chief financial officer, October 30, 1933, letter 504/AG; Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, January 4 1933, letter 1; Letter from Secretary General Martine to the headmaster of the Lycée Faidherbe, January 12, 1933, letter 12/AG. ANS, 13 G 93: Letter from the inspector of education of Senegal to the governor of Senegal, October 2, 1933, letter 965/E; Letter from the administrator in chief of the district of Thiès to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis, February 19, 1938, letter 459. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the administrator in chief of the district of Thiès to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis, February 19, 1938. Records do not indicate why Jondot did not board at a Catholic school despite the wishes of his mother and the charity. It may have been because of continued anticlerical sentiments amongst colonial officials. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the governor of Senegal, May 10, 1933, letter 137/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision regarding the allocation of funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, February 10, 1933, letter 365/AG; telegram from the administrator of Senegal, district of lower Senegal, December 8, 1934, document 6762; Decision regarding the allocation of funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, January 17, 1935, letter 164/AG.

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welfare state on the cheap, perpetually defaulting on its promised fiduciary contributions for métis children. Jondot’s subsequent and long-term placement – and payments made regularly by the Senegalese colonial state – later served as a model for the operationalization of wards policies and were the result of intervention by Dugay-Clédor, who was a participant in colonial governance and positioned himself as an equal with the governor. As an originaire, Dugay-Clédor was part of the heterogenous African French-speaking community in St. Louis. He published several histories of Senegal in French, served as the elected mayor of the town from 1919 to 1925, and presided over the Colonial Council (a body of European and African elected delegates who advised the colonial administration) when he wrote the letter on Jondot’s behalf.29 Dugay-Clédor was also an ally and supporter of Blaise Diagne, the first black African elected to serve in the metropolitan France Chamber of Deputies on behalf of Senegal.30 Diagne was the author of a 1916 law that recognized originaires as French citizens. Like Diagne, Dugay-Clédor was loyal to the French colonial endeavor but also wanted Africans of diverse origins – beyond métis – to acquire political and socioeconomic rights as full-fledged members of French society and for the French to fully actualize the promise of developing African societies. Dugay-Clédor felt his various identities and French cultural competence entitled him to play a leadership role in the development of a French colonial welfare state for the benefit of children in Senegal. He asked that Governor Beurnier grant access to education for “the sons of those who, alongside the sons of Europe, conquered territory for France in the French Soudan.” These were the descendants of men from different Muslim states in the region who had served in colonial troops in the late nineteenth and early twenties centuries and facilitated French colonial conquests.31 He entreated that the French honor the partnership and loyalty that societies in Senegal had given to them through

29 30

31

Jones, Métis of Senegal, 178–80. Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics, 97–8. Céline Labrune-Badiane and Etienne Smith, Les hussards noirs de la colonie – instituteurs africains et petites patries en AOF, 1913–1960 (Paris: Karthala, 2018), 373–5. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Colonial Council, Dugay-Clédor, to Lieutenant Governor Beurnier, April 1, 1934. Dugay-Clédor was the author of several books, including La Bataille de Guilé; De Faidherbe à Coppolani: les gandiols-gandiols au service de la France; and La bataille de Guilé suivi de De Faidherbe. The website of Senegal Métis (http://www.senegalmétis.com), maintained by twenty-first century descendants of signares, was accessed by this author between January and June 2022, but at the time of going to print it had been taken down. It claimed that Dugay-Clédor was the son of a spahi, soldiers of primarily Arab or Berber origin who served in colonial French troops and ushered in the conquest of West African states.

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providing “native children an education” and by “taking in, raising, and educating young métis.” His 1934 report on French Soudan showed him to be more fully versed in the humane operation of colonialism than the sitting colonial government of Senegal. Dugay-Clédor cited the following statistics for two state-run orphanages for métis children, one for boys and one for girls, in neighboring French Soudan: the orphanages had graduated ninety-one girls, who worked in wage labor in professions such as nursing, midwifery, tailoring, and assistant teaching; and ninety-four boys who held professional roles such as secondary school teachers, medical assistants, veterinarians, and clerks in various government and private enterprises.32 He inquired as to when the administration in Senegal would assume financial responsibility to provide métis children with educational opportunities to achieve sustainable socioeconomic standing. Dugay-Clédor championed the work of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children under its new president, Madame Rocca. Dugay-Clédor and the charity were aligned in their desire for colonial state financial assistance for métis to be operationalized for a larger number of métis children. The organizing committee of the charity requested that the colony of Senegal build its own orphanage for métis boys, a stance that aligned with what Dugay-Clédor had proposed to the governor. Dugay-Clédor facilitated the Colonial Council’s 1934 vote to support the petition by the charity that the colonial government of Senegal build an “official” (i.e., state-run) orphelinat for métis boys in the colony.33 The charity’s executive committee noted that private donations were sufficient to provide assistance for only a few métis children, whereas “about one hundred disinherited children in Senegal and Mauritania need to be taken in and given aid.”34 The organization stressed that building an orphanage for métis boys was a the duty of the government rather than a charity that had limited resources. The governor lamented the lack of money to build an orphanage but affirmed the commitment to increase the amount of money that the colonial 32 33

34

ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Colonial Council, Dugay-Clédor, to Lieutenant Governor Beurnier, April 1, 1934. The charity gave a petition to Dugay-Clédor that its executive committee had written to request the construction of an orphanage. He transmitted the document to Lieutenant Governor Beurnier. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, dated June 23, 1934, attached to a letter containing an extract from the minutes of the general meeting, June 10, 1934; Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, January 25, 1935; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Senegal to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, February 7, 1935, letter 457/AG; Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the president of the Colonial Council, September 22, 1934, letter 1425. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, dated June 23, 1934, attached to a letter containing an extract from the minutes of the general meeting, June 10, 1934.

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government would dedicate for the material and educational care of métis children. Governor Beurnier of Senegal responded in a letter to the council that he was aware of the “regrettable lacuna” in Senegal vis-à-vis French Soudan, which responded to the “humanitarian and social question of arranging the upbringing, education, and of setting a good foundation for their future of young abandoned métis.”35 The precarious financial state of the charity and its bankruptcy in 1935 sparked a crisis regarding where to place the children who had been under its care, namely, Jondot and three other métis boys. Colonial administrators, executive committee members of the charity, and Dugay-Clédor agreed that the Bamako orphanage was the best place to send the three boys.36 While the governor lamented and apologized in a letter to the charity for the government’s lack of money to take on the “worthwhile cause” of all métis children amid the Global Depression, he stated that his administration would pay for the three boys to attend Bamako.37 He articulated the future goal of expanding Senegal’s capacity to provide social services for métis children and the operationalization of the wards programs and policies.38 Nevertheless, a host of private French citizens – including missionaries and fathers – continued to work with and contest the state’s control over métis children. The case of Jondot illustrates another aspect of the wards policies in Senegal: while the colonial state would fund and oversee the conditions of lodging and education of métis children, it would not provide direct services. It would seek surrogates, such as missionaries or other colonies, to provide services.39 As colonial personnel in Senegal pondered sending “abandoned 35 36 37 38

39

ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the president of the Colonial Council, September 22, 1934, letter 1425. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, March 7, 1935. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Governor Beurnier in St. Louis to the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, July 7, 1934. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the president of the Charity for Abandoned Métis Children to the lieutenant general of Senegal, stamped as arriving January 28, written January 25, 1935, letter 1739; Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the lieutenant governor of Soudan, February 7, 1935, letter 61/AG. Many projects to build a state-run orphanage in Senegal were started and halted. Between 1932 and 1937, Albert Charton, the inspector general of education for FWA, circulated a plan for the government-general and colonies in FWA to expand state intervention in the lives of métis children. He proposed that the office of the governor-general centralize the care of métis children in state-managed regional orphanages located in principal towns in Soudan, Ivory Coast, and Senegal. Métis children from various colonies would reside and be educated in the residential schools from infancy until they reached a level of education sufficient to allow them to earn a living (or be married off, in the case of girls). The project did not come to fruition due to a lack of funding. Moreover, the governors of various colonies doubted whether mothers would send their children to live far away in distant colonies. Between 1937 and 1942, subsequent governors and other colonial employees in Senegal continued to advocate for different versions of Chatron’s plan. This included a proposed orphanage in St. Louis and

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métis” to the orphanage in Bamako, they focused on the milieu and educational opportunities it offered in the hope of producing boys who would be culturally French and suitably trained to obtain wage-labor employment in French enterprises. In response to inquiries about the conditions of life at the Bamako orphanage, the governor of French Soudan wrote that living at the orphanage entailed living according to “discipline” and rules.40 Admitted children were to live there year-round, even during summer vacations, and could leave only to spend time with their families – with the governor’s approval after an investigation into the “suitability” of the family. The boys housed at the orphanage would attend primary school at the local regional school of Bamako, where they would attend classes with children of diverse African origins. They could potentially obtain a certificate of primary school studies, the highest degree open to Africans in the colony. The colony of Senegal paid the fees, tuition, and room and board rate of 1,200 francs per year as well as the travel costs to get the boys to Bamako or back and forth between Bamako and Senegal. A French nurse traveled with them as a chaperone on the train between the two colonies for their initial journey in 1935.41 These deliberations about the welfare of Jondot and other multiracial children in St. Louis percolated during a period in which government officials in metropolitan France also debated the scale and scope of social benefits. They differentiated between the rights to social safety for citoyens and the extension of limited maternal and childhood social policies toward sujets or indigènes, based on the racialized perspective of colonialism serving to “civilize” Africa.42 The welfare state in metropolitan France expanded even more after 1936 with the election of the socialist Popular Front movement candidates to

40 41 42

one in Dakar. All plans were abandoned, with colonial officials citing the lack of sufficient funds. ANS, 13 G93 (280): Report sent to the governor of Senegal concerning the protection of unhappy or difficult children by G. Chaigneau, head of primary education in Senegal, December 5, 1939, letter 1848/E;ANS, O-685 (31): Note from Inspector General of Education Charton to the cabinet director, June 17, 1932, letter 1091E; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Dahomey, Governor Bourgine, to the governor-general of FOA, March 19, 1935, letter 404/ APA; ANS, O-715 (31): Instruction on Métis children of AOF from Assistance and Education, Paris; ANS, 2H1(1): Note with a summary of responses received about the “question regarding métis” from the general government of FOA; List of métis in Soudan, 1947ANS, 2H(17)26: Minutes from the general government high commissioner of FOA, sent to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis, June 8, 1942, letter 281 AP/I; Letter from the general director of administrative, social, and political affairs to the governor-general, high commissioner of FOA, November 16, 1942, letter 3470 AP/2. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the lieutenant governor of Soudan, February 7, 1935, letter 61/AG. ANS, 61 AG: Letter from Lieutenant Governor Beurnier to the lieutenant governor of Soudan, February 7, 1935. For an analysis of French colonial ideas from 1895 to 1930, which Alice Conklin refers to as “a certain ‘civilizing’ logic – a twisted logic, perhaps,” see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 246–56.

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the legislative Chamber of Deputies and the role of prime minister, who wanted to expand welfare aid.43 Over the course of the 1930s, the office of the Ministry of Colonies in Paris sent inquiries to colonies in Africa about how colonial state personnel were attending to the care of métis children. These were sometimes linked to the provision of maternal and child health for Africans; at other times, the inquiries emphasized a particular French obligation to métis children.44 The ministry directed individual colonial states to provide and fund social services for colonial children, distinguishing métis children as a group apart. However, it provided no funding for any efforts; colonies were to pay for all projects themselves. In response, departments and units in the colonial government of Senegal outlined their initiatives regarding women and children, with métis children always singled out as particular cases. In 1933, a report from the Department of Health of Senegal to the Ministry of Colonies stated that the protection of children was foundational to the colony’s long-term sustainability; its wards policies were a principal vehicle for this protection. The Senegalese colonial state began to inject more money to fulfill the 1923 wards legislation, outlining the payment of welfare aid on behalf of “native minors” who lived in poverty. Lieutenant Governor Beurnier, who was governor until 1936, and subsequent lieutenant governors asked local administrators each year to forward the names of potential candidates, charging them with finding and funding African children in need, with an emphasis on métis children. The presiding Local Committee for Wards of the Nation who oversaw the program shared this emphasis.45 Over the course of the 1930s in Senegal, hundreds of métis children traversed through the programs and policies for wards of the administration,

43

44

45

Paul V. Dutton, “Parliament Acts,” in Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97–136; Dutton, “Challenges from City and Countryside,” in Origins of the French Welfare State, 137–83. Circular from the minister of colonies to the governor-general, November 7, 1934, letter 29-4/S, FEA/GGFEA/5D44, Centre d’Archive d’Outre Mer (hereafter ANOM); ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the lieutenant general, administrator in chief of the colonies, and district administrator of Dakar, December 19, 1934; Note from Inspector General of Education Laborde to the director of political affairs, November 4, 1938, O-685, ANS; ANS, 2 H 1 (1): Confidential letter from the lieutenant governor of Dahomey to the governor-general of FWA, January 5, 1937, letter 3/APA; ANS, 2 H 1 (1): Note containing a summary of the questions received regarding the “question des métis”; ANS, 2 H 17 (26): Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the director of the Economic Agency of FWA, February 25, 1939, letter 43 AP/I. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Health Services to the governor-general of FWA, October 19, 1933, letter 2149/AG; Letter from the inspector of education of Senegal to the governor of Senegal, October 2, 1933, letter 965.

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also referred to in colonial documents as “Wards of the Nation,” “Wards of the Colony,” or “Wards of the State.” A condition of financial assistance was the mandate that the child must go to a French school, whether religious or secular, with welfare payments intended to cover the school fees.46 A few wards, two or three per year, lived in African households and attended day schools. The colonial government was reluctant to remit direct payments to African mothers or other female African guardians of funded children. For the few wards who lived in African households, the records indicate that the colonial government made welfare aid payments to African male guardians with whom the children lived, sometimes a blood relative – such as the grandfather or uncle – and at other times a chief or similarly elder man who took in the child.47 Most funded wards were children who resided at dormitories or mission-station schools. The state paid a negotiated rate to these institutions, which was to reimburse and cover the costs of food, lodging, instruction, and health care.48 46 47

48

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the General Administration, signed by Babin, October 30, 1933, letter 504/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the head administrator of the territory of the Casamance to the governor of Senegal, October 6, 1933, letter 491/F; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of the territory of Casamance, December 16, 1933, document 743; telegram from the head administrator of the territory of Casamance to the governor of Senegal, December 20, 1933, document 7772/AG; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the superior administrator of the territory of Casamance, September 29, 1933, document 533; Handwritten note that the letter was transmitted to and read by the lieutenant governor, October 6, 1933; Death certificate of Matar Sall, August 6, 1931; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of the territory of Casamance, April 10, 1933, document 250/F; Handwritten note on the telegram that a copy had been sent to the office of the lieutenant governor in April 1933 and viewed by the head of the Office of Finances, September 8, 1933; Letter from the Office of Finance to the head of the First Office, September 9, 1933, letter 1634/F2; Letter from the First Office to the head administrator of the territory of Casamance, September 12, 1933, letter 4668; Decision modifying decision 365/AG (February 10, 1933) concerning funds allocated to the orphans Paul and Cécille Sall, October 23, 1933, document 2307; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of the territory of Casamance, December 16, 1933, document 743; Telegram from the administrator of the territory of Casamance to the lieutenant governor, September 23, 1933, document 475/F; Letter from the head administrator of the territory of Casamance to the governor of Senegal, October 6, 1933, letter 491/F. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal in 1936, January 20, 1936, document 283/AG; Letter form the adjunct administrator of St. Louis to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, December 3, 1936; Letter from the Congregation of St. Joseph de Cluny to the governor, February 26, 1936; Decision modifying decision 275/AG (January 29, 1936), April 6, 1936; Note for the lieutenant governor from the secretary general for current affairs, October 22, 1936, letter 5894/AG; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal in 1937, January 18, 1937, document 100/AG; Decree allocating funds to the government of Soudan for the maintenance of four students of the administration of Senegal, January 28, 1938, document 283/AG; Decree allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration in 1938, January 28, 1938, document 284; Decree allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration in 1938, February 23, 1938, document 536/AG; Decree allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration in 1938, February 23, 1938, document 537/

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On annual lists of wards, notations sometimes indicated which children were métis and which were children of other origins with the status of colonial subject. It is likely that children listed with European names were métis, given the common practice of assigning European names to multiracial children. Based on this assumption, it may have been that at least nineteen of the twentyfour children listed as wards in 1932 were métis.49 However, some métis children had African family names. Thus, it is possible that all the wards in a given year were métis. Between 1932 and 1939, the colony of Senegal added an additional three to six children to the list of wards each year.50 About six to eight wards each year were boys; some lived at the orphanage in Bamako and others at the Catholic mission of N’Gazobil.51 In FWA, Senegal consistently ranked last in terms of colonial state funding for the care and education of métis children. Among all colonies in FWA, Senegal had the lowest rate of métis children receiving state funding and/or living in French institutions.52 A 1937 colonial survey identified 1,238 métis under the age of twenty in FWA. While statistics varied from colony to colony, about a third boarded in secular or Catholic French institutions; namely, school-orphanages for métis children.

49

50

51

52

AG; Decree allocating funds to the government of Soudan for the maintenance of students of the administration, January 28, 1938, document 283/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision regarding the allocation of funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, February 10, 1933, letter 365/AG; Letter from the secretary general acting on behalf of the lieutenant governor-general to the administrator of Matam, December 5, 1933, letter 6070; Telegram from the administrator of Matam to the Governor, December 14, 1933, document 1864. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal in 1936, January 20, 1936, document 283/AG; Letter form the adjunct administrator of St. Louis to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, December 3, 1936; Letter from the Congregation of St. Joseph de Cluny to the governor, February 26, 1936; Decision modifying decision 275/AG (January 29, 1936), April 6, 1936; Note for the lieutenant governor from the secretary general for current affairs, October 22, 1936, letter 5894/AG; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal in 1937, January 18, 1937, document 100/AG; Decree allocating funds to the government of Soudan for the maintenance of four students of the administration of Senegal, January 28, 1938, document 283/AG; Decree allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration in 1938, January 28, 1938, document 284; Decree allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration in 1938, February 23, 1938, document 536/AG; Decree allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration in 1938, February 23, 1938, document 537/ AG; Decree allocating funds to the government of Soudan for the maintenance of students of the administration, January 28, 1938, document 283/AG. ANS, 10 D1(24): Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration. Stamped: the inspector of finance, director of financial regulations, signed by the adjunct director of finance, Letter 365/AG, February 10, 1933; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration. Stamped: the inspector of finance, director of financial regulations, signed by the adjunct director of finance, Letter 164/AG, January 17, 1935. Letter from the governor of Senegal to the general-governor of FWA, August 11, 1938, letter 1791, O-715, ANS; ANS 2 H 1 (1): Note containing a summary of the questions received regarding the “question of métis.”

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Out of about 300–400 métis children identified in the census as living in Senegal over the course of the decade, between twenty-two and forty-five children – a mere ten to fifteen percent – received some form of financing for their school fees and material needs in French institutions through the wards policies.53 The largest group of children to receive designation and funding as wards were girls who lived in Catholic missions. About twelve to sixteen girls boarded at the Catholic mission of N’Dar Toute in St. Louis every year, and two to four girls per year boarded in the towns of Ruffisque, Kaolack, or Dakar. These were important trading towns. Kaolack was the center of the peanut trade near the border with British-controlled Gambia and Ruffisque, twenty kilometers south of Dakar, one of the four communes, and a key port.54 Government subsidies ended when childhood ended. The colonial officials defined this point as eighteen years of age for both boys and girls or at a girl’s marriage (if younger than eighteen).55 In theory, children designated as wards were to be surveilled and receive regular visits by local administrators to assess their well-being. Regional administrators or governor appointees, such as police or military officers, were to visit the homes and institutions of wards to assess the “physical and moral state living conditions” of the children.56 In reality, regional administrators often failed to monitor children for years at a time.57 The colonial welfare state in Senegal was a reluctant and cheap one, providing only a small budget for the education and welfare of métis children. The wards program was perpetually underfunded and overbudgeted, and the number of potential candidates exceeded its capacities. Between 1932 and 1940, the annual budget remained unchanging at 20,000 francs and was

53 54 55

56

57

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, February 10, 1933, letter 365/AG. Diouf, L’histoire du Sénégal, 25 ANS 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the commander of the district of Kédougou to the governor of Senegal, December 6, 1934, letter 897; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Matam to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, October 26, 1936, letter 22790/AG; Letter from the administrator of the district of Matam to the governor of Senegal, November 23, 1936, letter 1291/AG; Letter from Health Services to the governor-general of FWA, October 19, 1933, letter 2149/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Secretary General Félix Martine on behalf of the lieutenant governor to the superior administrator in Ziguinchor, December 20, 1932, letter 6521; Letter from Acting Governor Félix Martine during the lieutenant governor’s absence to the administrator of Senegal, December 21, 1932, letter 6521; Telegram from de la Rocca in Ziguinchor to the governor of St. Louis, January 5, 1933, document 50. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of the territory of Cassamance, April 10, 1933, document 250/F; Letter from the Office of Finance to the head of the First Office, September 9, 1933, letter 1634/F2.

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always in deficit.58 Funding for the wards provisions emanated from Senegal’s local budget, with occasional additional funding of unspecified amounts from the metropole for “temporary aid” when administrators in Senegal pleaded that their local budget could not cover the number of deserving cases of children in need.59 In 1938, the Ministry of Colonies in Paris pressured colonial governors in French West Africa to increase funding for educational and health services for métis children to the extent done in Indochina, which the ministry touted as a model.60 The governor of Senegal responded that his administration provided educational opportunities for all indigènes; primary schools existed throughout the colony as well as two high schools and a special school to instruct child and adolescent criminals in elementary education and vocational training. He stated that “the question of métis is currently the object of a careful study.” Yet the wards program and polices continued to be the mainstay of colonial interventions in the lives of métis children.61 Follow the Money: African Mothers, French Catholic Women, and Disbursement of Welfare Aid for Métisses Girls Although the colonial state allotted the funds and ultimately decided which children would enter or leave the status of “ward,” these determinations were tempered by negotiations with the Catholic nuns who managed the residences and the African mothers and other maternal kin who asserted their own visions of the disbursement of welfare funds. While colonial personnel often expressed broadly anticlerical views, they viewed métisses girls as vulnerable to lives of prostitution and in need of Catholic education. Government officials felt that education for métisses girls at N’Dar Toute and other missions would help them to enter into respectable marriages with African men and build sufficient

58

59 60 61

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the general administration, signed by Babin, October 30, 1933, letter 504/AG; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, February 10, 1933, letter 365/AG; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, January 12, 1934, document 106/AG; Letter from Governor Beurnier to the administrator of Matam, November 20, 1934, letters 5967–9, 5990; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Matam to the governor of Senegal, March 22, 1935, letter 243; Extract from the death certificate of Famata Mallal, March 3, 1935; Letter from the commander of the district of Kédougou to the governor of Senegal, December 6, 1935, letter 897; Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of wards of the administration of Senegal, January 17, 1935, letter 164/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Budget from the secretary general of the Department of Finances, First Office, General Administration, September 29, 1939, letter 316/AG. ANS, O-715 (31): Letter from the director of administrative and political affairs to the governorgeneral of FWA, December 29, 1938, letter 3421. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Lieutenant Governor of Senegal Parsot to the governorgeneral of FWA, January 5, 1939, letter 23/AG.

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skills to find wage labor in respectable professions such as midwifery and tailoring.62 The office of the governor of Senegal paid to the missions about 1,200 francs per year for each girl, in monthly installments, with N’Dar Toute housing more métis girls than other missions. In some years, the mayor of St. Louis gave the N’Dar Toute mission about seventy francs per child that it housed to help offset the costs. The colonial government of Mauritania sent some métisses girls from the colony to N’Dar Toute and paid 100 francs per month for about eleven girls each year.63 Another report by the police commissioner of St. Louis cited sources of funding that included 5,000 francs year from the colonial government of Mauritania, 14,000 francs per year from the government of Senegal, and 8,000 francs per year from the office of the mayor of St. Louis. Over the course of the 1930s, the mission housed about fifty to sixty girls of various origins.64 The building was divided into a dormitory, a classroom, and a dining hall.65 Nuns sought to harbor docile girls without special needs, who could follow the basic primary school education and learn handicrafts. The mission continued to depend on girls’ manual labor to generate money for the operation and survival of the mission. The girls washed, ironed, and mended clothes for the townspeople.66 At the end of each year, the police commissioner of St. Louis visited N’Dar Toute to ascertain the health and well-being of the girls and to assess the renewal of individual subsidies for the next year. The reports consisted of a few sentences confirming that the girls were in good health and were receiving sound care, specifying that they were “decently dressed and appear to be happy.”67 In some years, detailed one-line summaries were given for individual cases, such as which girls had left the mission because they reached the maximum age or had moved on to employment or apprenticeships, or

62 63 64 65 66 67

ANS, 2 H 17 (26): Letter from Albert Charton to the governor-general of FWA, December 17, 1936, letter 2130/E. ANS, O-715 (31): Letter from the governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, August 11, 1938, letter 1791. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the police commissioner to the administrator of the district of Lower Senegal, January 28, 1938, letter 204. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the police commissioner of St. Louis to the administrator in chief of the district of Lower Senegal, November 21, 1941, letter 185. ANS, O-715 (31): Letter from the governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, August 11, 1938, letter 1791. Telegram-Lettre from the Administrator of Bas Sénégal to the lieutenant governor of Sénégal, Letter 8373/931, December 30, 1932; Letter from le Commissaire de Police de Saint Louis à Monsieur l’Administrateur du Bas-Sénégal, letter 2425/AS, December 14, 1935; ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from le Commissaire de Police de Saint Louis à Monsieur l’Administrateur du BasSénégal, letter 2819/AS, November 28, 1936.

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otherwise left to go live with their mothers or other African kin, or because the nuns expelled them for unruly behavior.68 Each year, the mother superior of N’Dar Toute suggested candidates from the girls already housed at the mission to receive funding as wards, providing whatever biographical information was known for the lieutenant governor to assess. Before a girl could be designated as a ward, the nuns had to wait for the governmental process of conducting a police investigation into her parentage; the government officials did not share the findings with the mother superior. Colonial officials sought to identify the mother, the national origin of the father, and their present locations; they also ascertained the finances of the parents (if identified) and other maternal African kin. When investigating who might have been the father, colonial officials sought to ascertain that he was French or European as defined in their understanding. Catholic missionaries used the word “métis” to refer to children who had fathers from Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt, but colonial officials argued that men of these origins were not European and therefore their children were not métis and were denied such status or funding for their residence in missions as wards.69 Additionally, colonial officials rejected the sisters’ requests for ward subsidies for girls whose fathers or mothers were themselves métis, further narrowing the eligibility for funding and definition of “abandoned métis” to exclude St. Louis métis families descended from precolonial interracial relationships who had

68

69

Reasons given for expelling girls included behaviors that nuns described as “temperamental.” For example, in 1933 the Mother Superior requested removal of Eliza Dieng from the lists of wards. She said Dieng had bouts of hysteria that were disruptive to the other girls. She was returned to her mother. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Telegram from the administrator of the district of Lower Senegal to the governor of Senegal, December 16, 1933, letter 5229/AG; Letter from the secretary general writing on behalf of the governor to the administrator of the district of Lower Senegal, December 5, 1933, letter 6065; ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the police commissioner of St. Louis to the administrator in chief of the district of Lower Senegal, November 21, 1941, letter 185; Letter from the police commissioner of St. Louis to the administrator of the district of Lower Senegal, December 14, 1935, letter 2425/AS. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): La Superieure de l’Orphelinat N’Dar Toute à M. le Lieutenant-Gouverneur, No document number, July 21, 1937; Ville de Saint-Louis, Commissariat de Police fair pour retour à M. le Procureur de la Répluqlique à Saint Louis, Administrateur Commandant le Cercle du Bas-Sénégal, letter 164, July 30, 1937; Le Chef de Subdivision M’Bour, August 14, 1937; Chef de Poste Fatick, no document number, September 15, 1937; La Supéerieur de l’Orphelinat de N’Dar Toute à M. le Gouverneur du Sénégal, S/C M. l’Administrateur du Bas Sénégal, no document number, arrival document 3816, February 15, 1939; Ville de Saint-Louis, Commissariat de Police fair pour retour; Letter from Officer Louis Marchad, commander at the Gendarmerie of Fatick, to the commanding administrator of the subdivision of Sine, September 20, 1937, letter 2621; Telegram from Gendarme Louis Marchad, Commondant le poste de Gendarmerie de Fatick à M. le Procureur de la Répluqlique à Saint Louis, Administrateur Commandant le Cercle du Bas-Sénégal, letter 164, July 30, 1937; Le Chef de Subdivision M’Bour, August 14, 1937; La subdivision du Sine, letter 2621, September 20, 1937; Letter from the superior of the N’Dar Toute orphanage to the governor of Senegal, February 15, 1939, arrival document 3816.

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fallen on hard economic times.70 The benchmark of indigence was firmly held for becoming a ward. The girls’ black mothers or African kin were required to be in a state of extreme poverty compared to other Africans.71 Being a ward of the administration was not an entitlement of being métis; rather, having a European biological father opened the possibility to be considered for wardship. It was more important that a métis child had neither African nor European kin to provide for their basic maintenance. The standard for entry was one of tragedy befalling African maternal kin – whom colonial officials viewed as the “natural” caretakers of the children – such as serious illness, death, disability, or mental incapacity. Marie Ba was a five-year-old métisse girl when she was admitted to N’Dar Toute in 1937 as a ward of the administration. Her story provides some clues into the heart-wrenching circumstances that led some mothers to be separated from their young children.72 An administrator of the Siné-Saloum region wrote to the governor in September 1937 that the subdivision’s administrator “had to” take in the girl and her mother due to the “miserable state in which they were found.” The subdivision head wrote that over the course of traveling throughout the region, he happened upon Marie’s mother, Fatoumata Ba, married to an African man named Ibrahim Sidbé, who worked as a farmer. He noted their housing was a “miserable hut... with lamentable hygiene conditions”; the girl had bronchitis, and they lacked sufficient means to raise the girl. He took the girl and her mother to a residence near his regional headquarters.73 It is unclear whether he asked Ba if she wanted to leave her husband’s residence. 70

71 72 73

After 1920, multiracial descendants from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century signares and European men, who constituted a distinct “self-identified métis population” in St. Louis and other coastal locales of Dakar, were diminished in their socioeconomic and political standing. Jones, The Métis of Senegal, 82–3. For cases of métis children of originaire parentage who were denied ward subsidies by colonial officials, see ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the office of the governor-general of FWA to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, March 12, 1934, letter 734/E; Letter from the office of the governor-general of FOA, Delegate Secretary General Boisson to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, letter 734/E, March 12, 1934, received April 4, 1934; Letter from the head administrator charged with current affairs on behalf of the governor to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, May 28, 1935, letter 415/AG; Letter from the absent governor, written by the head administrator charged with current affairs, Bellieu, to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, letter 415/AG, May 28, 1935; ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the administrator in chief of the district of Thiès to the governor of Senegal, December 5, 1942, letter 3512. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Gouvernement de Sénégal, Note au sujet des pupilles de l’administration. Handwritten document with no document number, illegible signature, July 29, 1932. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision allocating funds for the maintenance of students of the administration, October 11, 1937, documents 286/AG and 2879/AG. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the deputy administrator of the colonies to the chief administrator of the district of Lower Siné-Saloum, August 12, 1937, letter 2259; Letter from the deputy administrator of the colonies to the chief administrator of the district of Lower Siné-Saloum, September 13, 1937, letter 2623.

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Marie’s designation as ward illustrates how, in certain cases in which fathers had recognized and/or provided some financial care before their death or repatriation, children were expeditiously declared to be wards even if their African kin had indicated the desire to raise them. Regional colonial administrators observed that Marie had been “abandoned” by her French father, a man they identified as M. Pilley, a former employee of the Society of Tropical Farming, who had repatriated to France eighteen months prior. It was Fatoumata’s father, interviewed by regional administrators, who indicated that until three months prior, M. Pilley had sent him sixty francs per month for Marie’s care. He requested that his granddaughter be sent to live with him and that he would care for her. Regional administrators denied the request, claiming that “it would be preferable to ask the Governor to admit young Marie in a métis orphanage.”74 The governor’s office gave special dispensations and added the child as a ward even though the budget of the program was already overdrawn for that year. Marie became a resident at N’Dar Toute and a subsidized ward, based on a colonial administrator’s judgment that the living conditions her maternal grandfather offered were unsuitable – and possibly without the consent of her mother. Such was also the case for Madeleine Priera, who was designated as a ward at the end of 1932 in the mission at Rufisque. In August 1932, a mail carrier plane crashed in Senegal. Joseph Priera, a man of unspecified European nationality who was employed as a deckhand by a European business, was on board and perished. The governor-general of FWA was aware that Priera had a métisse daughter and directed the lieutenant governor of Senegal to investigate the status of this girl to see whether she merited “an exceptional grant.” She was housed and attended school at the mission of sisters in Rufisque.75 What made her worthy in his eyes and the eyes of other colonial personnel who researched her case? The copy of Madeleine’s birth certificate recorded that she had been born in Rufisque in 1918, of an African woman named Hélène Lo and the deceased Priera, who had legally recognized her two months after her birth. Priera had been paying the monthly fee for her to live in and receive an education at the mission station since 1927. After his death, the nuns allowed her to remain there, free of cost, feeding and housing her. According to rumors, Lo “lost her mind” when she heard the news of Priera’s death and was now residing in the Tilène Médina neighborhood of Dakar with

74 75

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Telegram sent from the administrator of Tambacounda to the administrator of the district of Koalack, August 19, 1937, letter 422. ANS 10D 1 (24), Letter from Beurnier to the Délégue of Ruffisuqe, letter 629, September 8, 1932; Letter from Brevié to the lieutenant governor of Sénégal, letter 79, August 27, 1932.

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a relative. The administrator at Rufisque emphasized that Madeleine had no brothers or sisters or anyone else who could come to her aid.76 By the end of the month, the lieutenant governor’s office had issued a decree allowing a payment of forty francs per month to the sisters of the convent of Rufisque “who were responsible for the maintenance of this orphan.”77 By the end of 1932, the governor’s office had asked the local administrator to report on the child’s health and well-being and give his recommendation as to whether she should become a ward of the administration; he said yes based on the recommendations of the nuns. That her father had legally recognized her was probably the main factor that lead colonial officials to declare her a ward. Though Priera may have held a foreign European nationality that was not French, and therefore Madelaine did not hold the legal status of qualité de Français, colonial officials may have been biased to maintain her education at the mission to maintain her Catholic and pseudo-European upbringing. She remained on the list of wards until 1939, at which point she may have married. A report indicated that her mother had passed away in 1936, and thus she was “entirely an orphan.”78 Years after the start of the wards program, African caregivers solicited the colonial state for welfare payments, not for girls to reside in French institutions but for them to live in their homes and for the state to subsidize their upbringing and education. For the African women who made these requests, colonial officials approved direct payments to the women if they were “respectable” and lived according to French norms. In 1936, two African women caregivers began to receive welfare payments for girls who had previously resided at N’Dar Toute. In the latter half of 1936, the mother superior informed the mayor of St. Louis that two girls had left the mission and requested that their new guardians continue to receive the payments on behalf of the girls.79 Francoise Maroleau, who had been at the mission for five years, now lived under the guardianship of and in the home of Mrs. Demonguere, a typist for the department of post and telecommunications in St. Louis. Similarly, a girl named Josephine Assice had returned to live with her mother in Thiès.

76 77 78

79

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the Délégation Ruffisque to the governor of Sénégal, letter 746/ Ruffisque, September 13, 1932. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Projet de decision alloaunt une secours à la jeune Madeleine Priera, 2267/ AG, October 6, 1932. ANS 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the Délégation Ruffisque to the lieutenant governor of Sénégal, letter 10, 1933. January 10, 1933; Letter from l’Administrateur Carriere Commandant le Cerlce de Thiès to the governor-general of Sénégal, letter 3603, December 23, 1935; L’Administrateur en Chef des Colonies Jaffre, Commandant le Cercle du Bas-Sénégal, à Gouverneur Sénegal, Secretariat General, Premier Bureau, Document 5134/AG, October 31, 1939. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Handwritten letter: Congregation of St. Joseph de Cluny to Monsieur le Gouverneur, February 26, 1936.

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Demonguere wrote directly to the lieutenant governor with her request in November 1936. She noted that she was Maroleau’s godmother and that she and the mother superior had reached an agreement about transferring guardianship to her, but that she needed the monthly payments from the government to fully care for the girl.80 Her plan was to send Francoise to a secondary school in Dakar run by the sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny. An investigation into her life history by the police commissioner revealed that she was fifty-two years old, had been born in St. Louis, was divorced, had two grown children, and had never been convicted of a crime. The governor approved the request, and Maroleau continued to be a ward of the administration. Demonguere received the welfare payment until 1939. Demonguere assumed direct communication with colonial officials regarding the annual renewal of the payments. One year, she wrote that the 100 francs per month was insufficient, and the colonial government doubled the allowance.81 Both these girls and their guardians remained on the lists of wards for disbursement of money until 1939. In FEA, as in FWA, expanded but limited provision of colonial welfare state aid and the placement of métis children in French institutions was not always determined by state or missionary imperatives but was done at the behest of, and in contestation with, African adults. The colonial government did not expand the resources for métis children through its own benevolence but because of pressure by the Amicale des Métis. The leadership of the Amicale maintained a sustained campaign of lobbying and shaming the colonial administration into providing social, educational, and health services to métis children, thereby ushering in a colonial welfare state. Multiracial Children and Colonial Welfare in Gabon: The Association of Métis in Libreville In Gabon, the questions of the rights of métis children and the rights of adults regarding those children were mediated by the Amicale des Métis. This vocal

80

81

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Mrs. H. G. Demonguere to the lieutenant governor of Senegal, October 20, 1936; Intelligence report sent to the administrator of the district of Lower Senegal, November 3, 1936, transmission 4632; Information Bulletin, police commissioner to the administrator of Lower Senegal, Document 4352, November 3, 1936. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the secretary general of the First Office to Mrs. H. G. Demonguere, November 6, 1936, letter 2518/AG; ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the commander of Lower Senegal to the governor of Senegal, October 31, 1939, document 5134/ AG; Letter from the police commissioner to the administrator in chief of the district of Lower Senegal, November 28, 1940, letter 1806; Letter from the secretary general of the First Office to Mr. Amar Sérigne, mechanic for the local memorial society, January 8, 1940, letter 86/AG; Letter from the secretary general of the First Office to Mrs. H. G. Demonguere, January 8, 1940, letter 82/AG; Letter from the police commissioner of St. Louis to the administrator in chief of the district of Lower Senegal, November 28, 1940, letter 1806.

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group of self-identifying métis had emerged in Libreville in 1934, and its president, Joseph-Gaston Walker-Deemin, claimed to speak for all métis people. As the president of the Amicale, Deemin acted as the principal broker regarding how the colonial state and missionaries interacted with multiracial children. Deemin had been born in Libreville in 1896 of a British father who did not recognize him; his mother was from Gabon, from the Mpongwé ethnolanguage group, from which nearly all women in interracial relationships hailed.82 As in Senegal, multiracial people in Libreville self-identified as a distinct group; spoke French as well as African languages, in this case Mpongwé; attended mission schools; decorated their homes and dressed in French fashion; and referred to themselves as métis.83 In comparison to ethnolanguage groups such as the Fang, who migrated to coastal Gabon in increased numbers in the interwar years, métis people thought of themselves as superior because of their European lineage, cultural mores, French language skills, and economic endeavors in trading, property ownership, and wage labor as civil servants or in French businesses.84 Deemin was part of the Mpongwé métis elite. He earned a certificate of primary school studies in a Catholic missionary school and worked for years as a clerk in the post and telephone service.85 He was one of the few people not of European legal status who had a permit to cut wood for export in Gabon’s booming industry of okoumé timber; he gained wealth as a lumberman – in an industry dominated by French businessmen, which soared in the 1920s.86 From his position of wealth and influence within both Mpongwé and European circles, Deemin denounced European fathers for not providing for their children and stated that this trend had not existed in the nineteenth century; he referred to métis children as “abandoned orphans” and demanded that the colonial state and society provide a French education and milieu for

82

83 84 85 86

Florence Bernault, Démocraties ambiguë en Afrique Centrale Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon: 1940–1965 (Paris: Karthala, 1996), 62; David Gardinier and Douglas Yates, Historical Dictionary of Gabon, 4th ed. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 222–. Letter from the chief medical doctor of the sanitary department of the Estuary region and Libreville Hospital, Captain Soulage, to the inspector general of health and medical services of FEAFEA, March 1, 1939, FEA/GGFEA/5D44, ANOM. Jean-Baptiste, “A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man”. Gardinier and Yates, Historical Dictionary of Gabon, 222–3. Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës, 62. Only 100 Africans, most of whom had attended missionary schools, were able to navigate the bureaucratic process – which entailed literacy in French – of purchasing and obtaining permits from the colonial state. Deemin was one of the wealthiest, holding a permit to cut wood in a 2,500-ha area in the Estuary region. Jeremy Rich, “Forging Permits and Failing Hopes: African Participation in the Gabonese Timber Industry, ca. 1920–1940,” African Economic History 33 (2005), 149–73, 156–7; Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale, 62.

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them to live in, which would befit their French filiation. The Amicale defined all people who had a European descendant in their lineage, no matter how many generations removed, as métis. Deemin began communication via correspondence with colonial officials in Gabon and elsewhere in FEA, conveying the actions, goals, and demands of the Amicale in relation to the French colonial state and society. Initially, there were two branches of the Amicale, one in Port-Gentil and the other in Libreville, towns with a concentration of Myènè multiracial people. The Port-Gentil section closed in 1936 due to insufficient member-generated revenues. Deemin sent copies of the minutes of meetings to the mayor of Libreville, detailing the names of attendees and the topics discussed.87 About ten women and eleven men attended the annual meetings in Libreville during the 1930s, with up to eighty-one paying members.88 The 1934 statutes of the association summarized the organization’s three main goals: solidifying the bonds of friendship among métis; advocating for their interests; and “to morally and materially aid needy métis children found to be in destitution, following a survey.”89 Rather than relying on colonial enumeration of métis, the Amicale planned to identify and tally their own numbers. That is, the association sought to define the meaning and statistical account of who was métis and the demarcation of which children were in need and deserved welfare aid. In Gabon, people who were métis, French, and non-métis African alike defined “métis” as a person who had a parent or ascendant of European legal status or a multiracial person several generations removed. Unlike in Senegal, where métis differentiated themselves by their descent from precolonial or colonial-era interracial relationships and colonial legal status as originaire or indigène, in Gabon, most multigenerational métis and those with a European parent alike held the status of indigène and formed a sense of commonality. This was significant in that the French sought to provide limited services for the direct descendants of French men, and not necessarily an expanded demographic of métis. Amicale members were most concerned about multiracial children whose fathers had not recognized them, while also advocating for multigenerational métis children. The Amicale and its members consistently argued that providing for the material and moral care of métis children entailed providing these children with living

87 88

89

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the president of the Amicale des Métis to the mayor of Libreville, June 11, 1936, document 4. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the president of the Amicale des Métis to the mayor of Libreville, June 11, 1936, document 4; Minutes from the general assembly of the association Amicale des Métis, May 3, 1936. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Statutes of the Amicale des Métis, attached to a letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, May 8, 1934, document 334.

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conditions, access to health care, and education that mirrored what was received by children in metropolitan France and children holding French legal status in the colonies. In making the case for the colonial state to fund and administer welfare assistance for métis children, Deemin began correspondence and developed a working relationship with all levels of colonial governance in FEA – sitting governors-general of FEA, lieutenant governors of Gabon, and the mayor of Libreville – as well as private French citizens and the colonial ministry in Paris. In 1935, Deemin first wrote to Governor-General Renard of FEA.90 In the wake of Renard’s death a few months later, Deemin addressed his next letter to the Ministry of Colonies in Paris.91 The Amicale had conducted its own census of métis and relayed that the number of métis in Gabon was increasing. These numbers provided justification for the “necessity” of an orphanage for métis children in Gabon, “a necessity for which the urgency only increased each day.” Deemin requested that the colony – meaning the French government – should pay for and ensure the housing, feeding, and education of métis children in French-managed institutions. Citing statistics obtained by the Amicale, Deemin argued that the growing number of métis children in Libreville justified the attention and money of the colonial state. He noted that almost twenty-five percent of the African children in Libreville were métis; among the city’s approximately 1,200 African children, 267 were métis. Given this high proportion of children “abandoned by European men to the care of native mothers,” he appealed to what he viewed as the natural French sentiment of humanity. He ended with a personal appeal to Minster of Colonies Louis Rollin, emphasizing that “your well-known concern in regard to childhood in general and young métis in particular [suggests] that there will be no delay in arriving at a solution in their favor.”92 Deemin’s letter provoked the minister of colonies to ask Governor-General Maréchessou of FEA to give his opinion on Deemin’s request and what follow-up his administration could provide, a pointed reply to justify whether and how the FEA government was attending to the question of the care of French men’s forgotten offspring.93 The governor-general replied that the métis children’s well-being was of “primary prominent social importance that 90 91 92 93

ANOM, FF 1 AFFPOL 666: Letter from J. Deemin, president of the Amicale des Métis Libreville to the governor-general of FEA, February 5, 1935, letter 5. ANOM, FF 1 AFFPOL 666: Letter from J. Deemin, president of the Amicale des Métis Libreville to the minister of colonies in Paris, May 8, 1935, letter 14. ANOM, FF 1 AFFPOL 666: Letter from J. Deemin, president of the Amicale des Métis Libreville to the minister of colonies in Paris, May 8, 1935, letter 14. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister colonies, July 3, 1935, letter 1041.

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of of of of

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justified the financial assistance of the administration.” He conceded the children had received insufficient attention due to limited government resources. He pledged that 1936 would see a substantial increase in government funding for missions. The administration and private organizations would work together to “take in, care for and morally and intellectually educate young métis.” Colonial administrators in FEA faced pressure from the Ministry of Colonies to indicate some budgetary spending on the welfare of métis children. But local personnel stressed that their revenues (or lack thereof ) did not permit the state provision of social services. It was Deemin’s advocacy and direct communication with the Ministry of Colonies in Paris that prodded colonial officials to consider how they would fund and expand access to education and other services for métis children, questions colonial officials had raised decades earlier. The minister conveyed that the government-general of FEA would increase the funding to missions so they could take in additional métis children in the region.94 In 1935, Governor-General Maréchessou ordered lieutenant governors of individual colonies to conduct a census of métis children. This census was no doubt prompted by the tally for Gabon that Deemin and the Amicale had presented. The governor-general sought to enumerate the multiracial children who attended or resided at Catholic or state-run French schools for free or reduced tuition fees, subsidized by the colonial state. Table 1 reproduces the data exactly as reported to the Ministry of Colonies by the governorgeneral of FEA. The governor-general sought to record not only the numbers of métis under the age of sixteen but also the numbers “Gathered and Educated,” meaning that they either lived in or attended some type of French educational institution. For Libreville, the colonial census recorded seventy-one more métis children than the Amicale survey results. The estimated total population of métis children across FEA – under sixteen years old – was 792. This was about 500 children fewer than the number of métis under the age of twenty years enumerated in colonial censuses in FWA. According to this census, about 333 of the known métis children (roughly 43% of the total 792) in FEA either attended or were housed at French secular or religious educational institutions. Brazzaville and Libreville had the highest concentrations. With the exception of Muslim societies in Chad and Ubangi-Chari, métisses girls in FEA attended school in greater or equal number to métis boys. This was a continuation of a pattern that had begun in the late nineteenth century,

94

ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 1637: Letter from the minister of colonies, Louis Rollin, to the president of the Association Amicale des Métis, September 12, 1935, letter LG 288.

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Table 1 Statistics on métis children in FEA from the Office of the GovernorGeneral, 1935–193695 Gathered and educated Colony

Métis younger than 16 years

Gabon 1. Libreville (including Estuary Region) 2. Ogouée-Maritime 3. Ngounié-Nyanga

500 (336 in Libreville) 4 –

Congo 1. Brazzaville 2. Pointe-Noire Ubangi-Chari and Chad 1. Bangui 2. Bangassou 3. Fort Archambault, Fort Lamy, Achébé-Fada 4. Massenya

288

Total

792

Educational system

Boys

Girls

63

56

28

91

16

23

32

7

35

60 7

95 7

1 7 5

1 9

2 16 5

40**

10**

167

166

Boarding

Day

50** 235

98

** Funding from the governor-general of FEA subsidized the mission for the costs of caring for these children.

when various orders of Catholic missionaries – including nuns – had established mission-station school-orphanages for girls in Gabon and the Congo.96 The high numbers of métisses girls in some parts of FEA in the early twentieth century who attended school was in stark contrast to the norm of education across twentieth-century colonial Africa, in which few girls attended European-managed schools.97 Notes in the margins indicate that nearly seventy percent of schools attended by métis children in FEA, whether as day students or boarding students, were Catholic, with a few Protestant schools. 95

96 97

ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 666: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, July 3, 1935, letter 1041; ANOM 5 D 44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, October 25, 1936, letter 1488; ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, June 3, 1935, letter 1041; Letter from the superior of the Saint Pierre Mission to the mayor of Libreville, January 22, 1935, no document number. Phyllis Martin, Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters of Troubled Times (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2009); Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights, 54. Tabitha Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya: 1900–1950 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2005); Pascale Barthélemy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918–1957) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010).

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Their costs were partially subsidized by individual colonial budgets. State schools accounted for only thirty percent of the schooling of multiracial children, mostly in the colonies of Ubangi-Shari and Chad.98 Among the sixteen children attending Catholic schools in Bangui, an unspecified number had their fees paid for by the Sultan Hetmen, a precolonial ruling family. The census results conveyed the failure of France to attend to métis children. In a letter to the Ministry of Colonies, Governor-General Maréchessou expressed regret that the budget of FEA was insufficient to fully fund all métis children and stated that “much still needed to be done,” particularly in Libreville, which had the highest number of métis, and in Brazzaville, the FEA headquarters. The administration and private works – namely, the Catholic Church – he urged, needed to unify to “take in young métis, to care for them and to mold them intellectually and morally.” The Ministry of Colonies in Paris responded in support of Maréchessou’s wish to expand the funding and reach of the French colonial state and culture in the lives and minds of métis children and enquired about his envisioned projects and budget for future initiatives.99 At first, the governor-general’s office envisioned increasing its subsidies to Catholic missions for the care of individual métis children, such that they would be housed and attend schools along with other children who were “colonial subjects.” Deemin initially viewed the Catholic Church as the most suitable entity to provide educational and childrearing services, while the state would control the purse. He advocated for Catholic missions to house and educate poor métis children, whom he defined as those whose fathers provided no resources for their upbringing. In 1935, the office of the governor-general of FEA gave two grants totaling 19,000 francs to the Catholic Mission of Libreville and the parish of St. Pierre in Libreville. These funds were to be used by the missions to take in – house, feed, and educate – métis children at no cost to the children’s families at the mission-station schools, which also educated and housed children of various other origins. The funds, which totaled 100,000 francs one year and 150,000 the next year, were intended to “completely entrust to missions the care and education of métis children.”100 98

99 100

In the Congo, the colonial state remitted 2,000 francs per year per child for an unspecified number of girls at the Catholic mission in Brazzaville. The Sultan Hetma of Rafain continued to house and pay for the school fees of an unspecified number of métis children. Chad had a dormitory for métis children annexed to the Urban School in Fort Lamy. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 666: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, July 3, 1935, letter 1041; ANOM 5 D 44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, October 25, 1936, letter 1488. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the minister of colonies, Marius Moutel, to the governor-general of FEA, December 4, 1936, letter 135. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, October 25, 1936, letter 1488.

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After 1936, the policies of the governor-general changed to focus on the creation of state-run and segregated residences open only to métis children, including those who were multigenerational métis or had a European father, in select cities in FEA. Unlike so-called orphanages managed by missionaries or state-run schools, these newly created institutions were not accessible to black children. This change was due to pressure that the Amicale placed on the colonial government as much as it reflected the changing vision of new leadership in the government-general.101 It was the Amicale that had written to the governor-general of FEA and the Ministry of Colonies in Paris, requesting that the government provide financial assistance so that the mission stations could take in more métis children.102 While the mission did take on an increased number of children – twenty-six – Deemin complained in a 1936 letter to the mayor of Libreville that the missionaries’ care had not resulted in the improvement of “the lot” of the children under their watch. Material living conditions at the missions and the quality of education were not “French” enough. Deemin insisted that métis children were entitled to French living conditions and criticized the missions for failing to provide such environments. The Amicale called on the colonial government to end the practice of subsidizing missionary care for métis children and to manage its own institutions.103 Colonial administrators also clashed with individual missionary organizations about the education and material conditions of métis children.104 In 1936, the Director of Education for FEA in Brazzaville wrote a report criticizing the quality of pedagogy at the St. Pierre mission in Libreville. The government of FEA had given a total of 38,000 francs to the mission in previous years so that métis children in attendance did not have to pay tuition.105 Under the care of missionaries, the director elaborated, the children were underfed and lodged in unhygienic conditions. Correspondence between missionary personnel and the Education Office grew rancorous. The missionaries lambasted the administration for false accusations, and the disagreement escalated to the point of the administration ending its payments to the mission. The mission, citing their 101 102 103

104

105

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Telegram from the Department of Political Affairs and General Administration to the head of finance, June 23, 1937, document 325. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 66: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, July 3, 1935, letter 1041. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Progress report for the Amicale des Métis for 1935, sent to the mayor of Libreville, June 15, 1936, document 4067. Oral interview (OI) with Father Camile Lucat, Fathers of Saint Gabriel, June 2008 in Rome, Italy. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: “Report on Métis,” written by Mr. Saint-Blancat, administrator in training at the office of the mayor of Libreville, contained in a letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, August 15, 1938, document 1957. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: “Report on Métis,” written by Mr. Saint-Blancat, August 15, 1938, document 1957.

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reduced funding, expelled some children and turned away new requests to take in more tuition-free children.106 Following the cut in funding and reduced numbers of métis children taken in, Deemin escalated the criticisms of the mission in his communications with Governor-General Reste.107 Deemin stated that the missions treated métis children exactly like other children they housed; they were fed the same daily ration of manioc and smoked sardines and lived in comparably poor conditions of hygiene – to the extent that some children had contracted tuberculosis. French administrators and members of the Amicale concurred that food, hygiene, and clothing for métis children should be better than for other African children.108 Deemin further positioned the struggle for the provision of services to métis children as a campaign for the recognition of fundamental human rights, breaking with his prior political protest alongside elite black African male urbanites against the inequities of colonial rule toward all who were categorized as indigènes, whether black or métis. His activities entailed connecting with an organization called the League of Human Rights and the Citizen. It was originally founded in 1898 in Paris to defend Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish soldier wrongfully accused of treason due to antisemitism. Members viewed themselves as defending emerging ideas about universal human rights. The chapter in Libreville included black, multiracial, and white members, people who held both European and colonial subject status. Historian Jeremy Rich has analyzed the active involvement of elite black and métis men of varied ethno-language groups from Gabon – educated in mission schools, French-speaking, and holding elite status due to their professions as intellectuals, clerks, and skilled laborers – in the League in the interwar years.109 Viewing themselves as embodiments of the French republican ideals of liberty, they sought an outlet to address the discrimination they faced from colonial society and to gain economic and political rights. But Deemin’s assertion that métis were entitled to specific rights, Rich concludes, “fractured the common front of men of color that had previously united” the League.110 The League wrote to the governor-general of FEA denouncing missionary care for métis children. The League also wrote to the governor-general of FEA on behalf of the Amicale, recounting how the tension between the Amicale and

106 107 108 109 110

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: “Report on Métis,” written by Mr. Saint-Blancat, August 15, 1938, document 1957. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the acting lieutenant governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, February 21, 1941, letter 159. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, October 25, 1936, letter 1488. Jeremy Rich, “Gabonese Men for French Decency: The Rise and Fall of the Gabonese Ligue des Droit de l’Homme,” French Colonial History 13 (2012), 30–2. Rich, “Gabonese Men for French Decency,” 42.

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Catholic missionaries centered on the 19,000 francs the government had given to the Amicale for the care of métis children. The organization delegated the money to be spent by the mission on its behalf since it was lacking in personnel or bank accounts. However, the Catholic missionaries refused to respond to Deemin’s requests for an accounting of how the money had been spent.111 The letter ended with a new request for the Amicale to receive a separate direct grant to build a new residential school for métis. The League justified this request by stating that the government of France was supposed to be secular; hence, deserving organizations such as the Amicale should have priority over Catholic missions.112 The Amicale campaigned to colonial officials for living quarters and schooling for métis children in European-quality milieus, segregated from other African children. Deemin’s vision was for a new campus that included dormitories and classrooms for métis children only.113 On May 3, 1936, ten women and eleven men, all members of the Amicale, met at a Libreville restaurant called Dancing Weill to review the activities of the previous year and priorities for the next year. According to the minutes that were sent to the mayor of Libreville, Deemin ended the meeting with a speech that announced the association’s most important goal: “The outcome of the creation of a métis orphanage, which has become a necessity.” Those in attendance, the document specified, greeted the declaration with thunderous applause.114 Governor-General Reste of FEA proved to be more amenable than his predecessor to corresponding with Deemin and performing the actions that the Amicale requested, which aligned with his ideas about the role of the colonial state in the lives of métis children.115 In response to the minutes of the Amicale’s meetings and the letter from the League, Reste concurred in a letter to Deemin that he was in “complete agreement” with the Amicale and that “métis are deserving of our attention.”116 Reste personally met with the leadership of the Amicale when he visited Libreville in August 1936. Emboldened by this visit, Deemin reflected in a follow-up letter to Reste: 111 112 113 114

115

116

ANC GG359, Letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, January 8, 1937, letter 3/C. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the League of Human Rights and the Citizen to the governor-general of FEA, May 26, 1936. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: “Report on Métis,” written by Mr. Saint-Blancat, August 15, 1938, document 1957. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Minutes from the general assembly of the Association Amicale des Métis from May 3, 1936, in a letter from Andre Guillaume Olimbo, secretary of the association, sent to the governor-general of Gabon, June 11, 1936, letter 4. Reste was a “center-left politician” who served under the emerging Popular Front Government and thus had a relatively reformist mindset regarding colonial governance. Rich, “Gabonese Men for French Decency,” 23–53, 42. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the president of the Amicale des Métis, July 31, 1936.

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“We trust and we are persuaded that as long as you are in office, the fate of métis children is in good hands.” He mentioned the residential institutions for métis attributed to Governor-General Reste that had opened during his prior postings in Dahomey and Ivory Coast.117 By December 1936, Reste submitted a proposal and architectural plan to build three state-run boarding homes for métis children in Libreville, Brazzaville, and Bangui, the principal towns in FEA. He asked the Ministry of Colonies in Paris to assist in paying for these institutions, given the poverty of the colonial government in FEA. The three projects would house 300 métis children in total, at an annual cost of 240,000 francs.118 He noted: “The problem of providing for the material needs and education of abandoned métis was a sorrowful question for which we have waited too long to find a solution.” At the time, Catholic missions throughout FEA received subventions totaling 190,000 francs from the colonial administration. This sum provided for the care of 181 métis children, but Reste calculated the diversion of the funds to state-run orphanages, which would result in increased services to an estimated 300 children. What made the state-run boarding homes in FEA distinct from Catholic missions in FEA and FWA, and other state-run “orphanages” elsewhere in FWA, was that most of their residents attended the so-called Urban Schools, which taught the curriculum of metropolitan France and not the curriculum designed for “indigènes.” State-run boarding homes exclusively for métis children were opened in Libreville in 1937 and in Bangui in 1939. Conflicting records indicate that another home was built in Fort Lamy in either 1935 or 1938.119 Architectural plans for the two-story buildings detailed classrooms, a kitchen, common space, separate dormitories and cafeterias for boys and girls, and indoor plumbing that could sustain showers and toilets – that is, living conditions for students that would conform with European standards.120 The various métis state-run boarding homes were centrally managed by the Department of Education for FEA, based in Brazzaville, as well as

117 118

119

120

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the president of the Amicale des Métis Deemin to the governor-general of FEA, August 9, 1936. The cost of construction was expected to be between 650,000 and 700,000 francs in total. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the Ministry of Colonies, October 25, 1936, letter 1488; ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/670: Letter from the Ministry of Colonies to the governor-general of FEA, December 4, 1936, letter 139. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 670: Report to the standing committee of the board of directors for the General Inspection for Public Works in FEA, August 21, 1937, case 28; Note from the political affairs department to the Ministry of Colonies, March 12, 1937, letter 40/18; ANOM, FEA/ GGFEA/5D44: Note from the Department of Finance to the director of the political affairs department regarding regulation concerning the Métis, April 28, 1948, letter 2478/Df-5. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL 670: Note from the director of the Department of Political Affairs to the Ministry of Colonies, March 12, 1937.

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local committees in each colony. The institution in Libreville accepted both boys and girls in separate dormitories, while those in other cities accepted only boys. Even as these state-run institutions emerged, Catholic mission stations continued to be spaces that housed and educated métis children. Colonial state funding of missions sometimes continued and sometimes stopped, as local colonial personnel and the government-general remained dependent on the church to provide services to children. Additionally, African communities had already established relationships with Catholic missionaries. Many multiracial girls and boys from Gabon continued to attend and/or live at Catholic mission schools in Libreville or Brazzaville, where they could obtain the certificate of native primary school studies.121 Métisses women who either attended the Catholic St. Pierre School or resided in the dormitory for métis in the 1930s and 1940s remembered their education there as providing valuable skills to earn a living as adult, for professional roles such as seamstresses or secretaries for timber enterprises. Métis men with certificates of primary studies went on to careers as accountants and teachers, and some pursued secondary education in Brazzaville.122 Thus, métis boys and girls traversed variously through secular, state-run, and Catholic educational spaces. Little archival information remains about children’s experiences in these institutions, but oral histories and the scant archival materials portray adult perceptions of the impact that the Urban School had on the life trajectories of métis children after they left the institutions. Boarding Home–School for Métis Children The project of the boarding home and school for métis children in Libreville operated at the intersection between cooperation and conflict among métis adults and French civil servants. It cultivated a milieu that mirrored French material and educational conditions and segregated the children from African communities. It was called a boarding home and not an orphanage, a clear indication of how this institution was a departure from the orphanages for métis children in Bamako or Catholic missions, such as N’Dar Toute, which received métis children as wards of the state and educated them alongside 121

122

OI in Libreville: Anonymous Female Informant 1, February 2, 2002; Luc Marc Ivanga, January 14, 2022; Benoit Messani Nyangenyona, March 5, 2002. Exact numbers are difficult to determine. Archival documents housed in France regarding the school run by the Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny are not accessible; documents of the Saine Marie mission remaining in Libreville are not organized; and records in Rome of the boys’ school Ecole Monfort, run by the Saint Gabriel Fathers, are scanty. OI, Libreville: Marie France (pseudonym), October 9, 2002; Helène (pseudonym), November 12, 2002; Rosalie Antchandie, Libreville, Gabon, November 1, 2002.

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other African children. The boys and girls housed at the new boarding home attended the Urban School in Libreville.123 This was a state-run school, reserved for the white children of metropolitan French or European citizens residing in the colony. The Urban School followed a metropolitan primary school curriculum in French reading, writing, and mathematics, not the basic curriculum taught in missionary and state-run schools reserved for colonial subject children. Those who were schooled here received an education that could lead to relatively well paid employment opportunities in French enterprises and colonial civil service.124 While they had French teachers, some of the classes for métis children were segregated from those for children of European legal status.125 When the boarding home opened in August 1938, it housed sixty-one of the 327 métis children identified in the Estuary region under the age of sixteen, representing just under twenty percent of the population of métis children.126 The 1937 decree establishing its creation outlined the regulations that were to direct its financial and day-to-day regulations.127 The Committee for the Patronage of the Residence for Métis in Libreville – which consisted of colonial civil servants, private French citizens, and the president and another delegate of the Amicale – managed the day-to-day operations and finances.128 Governor-General Reste appointed a European director to manage the day-today affairs and maintain the medical and academic records of admitted children and keep track of their comings and goings; the director also maintained the inventory and financial records. Children aged between four and seventeen years, identified by the committee, administrators, or the Amicale and approved of by the governor of Gabon, were to be admitted, either for free or for reduced fees, as “wards of the colony.” Métis children who did not qualify for funding could attend if the family paid for their room and board out of pocket. According to the regulations, children admitted to the residence had rights: to be housed, fed, and clothed, and to receive medical care from French practitioners. Students were to be given doses of quinine as a prophylaxis for or treatment of malaria, which distinguished these métis children as a separate category of African children who were more deserving of European123 124 125 126 127 128

Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale. Gardinier and Yates, Historical Dictionary of Gabon, 312; Jean André Eyeghe, Colonisation et modernization du Gabon: 1886–1960 (Anatole: Connaissances et Savoirs, 2017), 55. OI, Josette Moussirou Sickout, Libreville, June 17 2002. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: “Report on Métis,” written by Mr. Saint-Blancat, August 15, 1938, document 1957. Decree issued by the office of the governor-general of FEA, October 21, 1937, decree 3.274, GG174, Archives Nationale du Congo (hereafter ANC). ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Decision from the governor-general of FEA, January 19, 1938, decision 40.

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administered health care. The regulations did not state that mothers or kin who entrusted children to the residence relinquished their rights. The regulations did note that the children lived at the residence full-time, with the exception of school breaks, which they could spend with their families if the governor approved this – after determining that the family was of good “morality and had sufficient financial resources.”129 Upon completing their studies, children who had lived in the boarding house were to receive cash payments and additional assistance to bolster their socioeconomic situation. The committee could designate certain graduates to receive an additional grant of fifty francs per year as well as assistance in finding employment. The founding charter outlined that the committee was to pay particular attention to the “placement of young men and women” once they left the institution.130 The director of education for Libreville opined in a 1939 report that métis students had more successful results than “indigène students,” not acknowledging the unequal schooling conditions of métis and black students at French schools.131 In 1939, a métis boy and girl were the highest-ranking African students who had completed the examinations for the certificat d’études indigènes in the colony. Furthermore, among the eight métis men who had graduated with the certificate since 1935, one was completing military service, three were students at the École Édouard Renard (a secondary school for boys in Brazzaville, which was one of the few high schools in FEA), two were employed by private trading companies, and another two were interns (one at the telephone service and the other as an electrician at a trading company). According to the director of education, the social status of métis in Libreville was categorized as “evolved natives” (des indigènes évolués) and métis engaged in a deliberate effort to raise themselves above the standard living levels among “natives.”132 The intimation was that métis students may have been more intelligent than other children, which belies how the French-run schools for black children taught only a rudimentary curriculum, with few books and other educational materials, and enforced harsh punitive conditions and the duty of manual labor on the school grounds. Additionally, the assessment that métis inherently enjoyed more successful career trajectories in

129 130 131 132

ANC, GG174: Internat de Métis de Libreville, Decree 3.274, October 21, 1937, Gouvernement du Gouverneur General. ANC, GG174: Internat de Métis de Libreville, Decree 3.274, October 21, 1937, Gouvernement du Gouverneur General. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the director of the Urban School in Libreville to the director of education of FEA, February 8, 1939. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the director of the Urban School in Libreville to the director of education of FEA, February 8, 1939.

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European wage-labor jobs did not consider how the French opened up these avenues for métis and excluded black Africans. I spoke with Joseph Ntchoréré Lasseny, who lived in the residence for five years until he obtained his primary school certificate. While he stated that he could not recall childhood memories of his time there, he credited the years he spent there with his ascent into a working career at a bank.133 Victorine Smith, whom I interviewed in 2001, was the only surviving person of the first cohort of boarding house residents. Her oral history is illustrative, if not representative, of how individuals who lived at the boarding house remembered their experience and how it impacted their life trajectories. I met with Smith once a week over the course of several months in the living room of the house that she owned in Libreville.134 She emphasized her self-identity as métis, elaborating that being métis meant being “half French, half Gabonese.” Following in her grandmother’s and mother’s footsteps, Smith began her education at a mission school and was transferred to the new boarding home for métis children and the Urban School when they opened. Life at the boarding house afforded her access to French material resources and objects. She remembered the institution with fondness: I left the Catholic school to attend the boarding school for métis. I was one of the oldest students there at the time. The white people had constructed this boarding school for métis because métis had complained, saying that the French men had abandoned their children and that their mothers didn’t have the means [to take care of them]. There was one boarding house for girls and one for boys. We were well cared for at the boarding school. We got enough to eat, a doctor came to see us each week, we were given clothes, nightgowns, everything. We were well cared for. We were even given handkerchiefs, four per person, towels, and even toilet paper, dresses, and sanitary pads.135

Smith thus viewed the founding of the boarding school as the outcome of claims made by métis for children’s rights to a French education and French living conditions. She also recalled comfortable living conditions: food, clothing, and luxury items such as toilet paper. When she left, “They gave me a bit of pocket money so that I could make sure I had enough to eat. I got a job very quickly, with no difficulties, as a teacher at the public school in Libreville.”136 Hence, even after she graduated, a stipend subsidized her material needs. The metropolitan French education that she had received allowed her to become a teacher in the French colonial education service, becoming “the first woman administrator in the Urban School.” She also embraced small-scale farming of plantains and manioc, the primary economic 133 134 135 136

OI with Joseph Lasseny Ntchoréré, Libreville, Gabon, April 16, 2002. This is not her real name but the pseudonym that she asked me to use in publications. OI with Victorine Smith, Libreville, Gabon, December 11, 2001. OI with Victorine Smith, Libreville, Gabon, December 11, 2001.

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activity of women of other varied ethno-language groups in the Libreville region, as sound and supplemental means to ensure her economic security. She learned from other Mpongwé women, who maintained small gardens to have a steady food supply in periods of famine in the Estuary region, and she tended a plot of land during school vacations. She became one of the few women in Libreville who bought a car; she stated that the income she earned from the sale of produce from her plot had allowed her to amass enough money for such a purchase.137 The status of ward of the colony – with the associated segregated education, material living conditions, and post-educational financial support – helped these métis children to attain an elite socioeconomic status in adulthood in Libreville. However, Smith’s case also shows that even people who spent years at the institution maintained a hybrid identity and daily activities: French, African, and multiracial. Conclusion: A Child Ward Grows Up By 1942, Charles Jondot had returned to Senegal as a secondary school student at the École Blanchot, one of the few secondary schools open to Africans in francophone Africa. He was on a scholarship from the budget of the Department of Education of the colonial government of Senegal. Two of the three boys from Senegal who arrived with him in Bamako eventually completed their primary school education there; one went on to complete secondary school studies. The third boy was expelled and mobilized in the colonial army.138 Jondot took an examination to pursue teacher training at the École Normal Fréderic Assomption in Dakar. Perhaps eighteen years old in 1943, he took pen to paper to define what being a ward of the state meant to him, requesting that the government continue to pay for his education and provide supplemental funds. He indicated that the government of Senegal had paid to him directly a monthly sum of fifty francs for a few months in 1941, and he requested that this “favor” be renewed for 1942. The school director demurred that Jondot was but “an average student.” Nonetheless, he recommended the government approve the request because Jondot was “a métis orphan,” and the grant would allow him to have a bit of pocket money that would help him 137 138

OI with Victorine Smith, Libreville, Gabon, December 11, 2001. Léon Traoré was expelled from the orphanage in 1944 for “indiscipline and poor intellect” and was mobilized in the colonial army. That same year, Paul Diallo obtained his certificate of elementary school studies and was admitted to pursue further education at the high school in Bamako. In 1947, Rémy Binta obtained his elementary school studies certificate at the local school annexed to the orphanage. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Telegram from Secretary General Remy to the governor of Senegal, December 4, 1942, document 801 APA/I; Execution of the prescriptions from a telegram sent by the secretary of the colony, implemented by A. Le Poittevin, director of the Terrason school and the Métis Home, December 12, 1942, document 32/N.

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survive during the school vacation. Jondot’s monthly direct payments were continued.139 Jondot disappeared from written records for a number of years. His name reappeared in 1950 in the minutes of two meetings of the Association of Eurafricans of Soudan in Bamako. At the time, the association had no relationship with and was separate from the Amicale of Métis in FEA, but the two groups had similar goals. The association focused on mutual aid and advocacy for métis, with branches throughout FWA. Jondot held the position of secretary general, and as such, his signature appeared on the minutes of meetings.140 The association maintained several goals: to plan social events to solidify ties among métis and to advocate to the colonial government for the upbringing and education of métis children. Its third goal was to advocate for the general interests of métis, particularly for them to gain French legal status. Decades prior, in FEA, Deemin and the Amicale had advocated for métis children to have access to French education and material living conditions, with the intention that their immersion in French language, mores, and values would pave the way for métis to obtain French legal status. At its founding in 1934, the Amicale of Métis in Libreville and elsewhere in FEA had declared additional goals – beyond attending to the needs of “abandoned” métis children – advocating for the rights to and of French citizenship for métis.141 The imbrication of the upbringing and education of métis children in French institutions and the possibility of métis adults actualizing French citizenship came up again and again as contested matters for French and African historical actors. It is these contested questions over the right to French citizenship for métis – contestations often intricately tied to debates about children – to which the next chapter turns.

139

140 141

Belying the director’s characterization of Jondot as an “orphan,” a police report identifies a woman with the family name Konaté as his mother; she was still alive and lived in a nearby village. Jondot also had an older brother named Paul Jondot, twenty-five years old and working as a mechanic for a French business. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Jondot Charles, eighth grade student at the Blanchot School, to the governor of Senegal, January 6, 1942, letter 5; Note from the acting director of primary education of Senegal to the head of the First Office, December 9, 1942, document 11137/EP; Order granting an allowance to a métis orphan, May 12, 1942, document 1488/APA1; Report from the police commissioner of St. Louis to the administrator in chief of the district of Lower Senegal, April 30, 1942, document 975; Note re: letter 1948 A. G., August 8, 1940. Minutes from January 7 and 11, 1950, “Union Internationale des Métis,” L’Eurafricain: Bulletin d’Information des Eurafricains, 7, 18–20. Statutes of the Amicale des Métis, attached to a letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, May 8, 1934, document 334, FEA/GGFEA/5D44, ANOM.

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“I Am French” Multiraciality and Citizenship in FWA and FEA, ca. 1928–1938

In 1931, Paul Konaté dit Dechambenoit obtained French legal status. Born in Guinea, Dechambenoit was among fourteen métis men from across FWA who appeared on the French colonial attorney general’s list of “legally unrecognized métis” for whom the quality of being French had nonetheless been recognized by the colonial Court of Appeals of FWA.1 Dechambenoit’s story provides a window into a new and contested pathway toward French citizenship that was promulgated by the French government specifically for “legally unrecognized métis.”2 Dechambenoit’s quest for citizenship began in 1930 when he wrote to the French commander of the tiralleurs Sénégalais – the French military corps for men who held the status of colonial subject and in which he had served in Guinea – requesting his “accession to the quality of citizenship” based on a 1928 circular.3 Issued by the Ministry of Colonies in Paris, the circular identified métis men as suitable recruits for the French metropolitan army corps stationed in Overseas France. Only men who were French citizens could serve in the metropolitan army corps; hence, the circular intimated that métis men could hold the status of French citizen. In his correspondence, Dechambenoit referred to his family name with the prefix “dit” (“known as”), claiming the family name of a presumed biological European father.4 1

2

3

4

ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the attorney-general of the Court of Appeals of FWA to the director of political and administrative affairs, summary of accession of legally unrecognized métis pronounced by the Court of Appeals, March 30, 1936, letter 569 P.G., document 329. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ivory Coast to the governor-general of FWA, September 22, 1930, letter 1428 B.P; Letter from Division General Benoit, commanding officer of group troops of FWA to the lieutenant governor of French Guinea c/o governor-general of FWA, November 8, 1930, letter I 12133 R; Letter from the governor of French Guinea to the governor-general of FWA, May 12, 1931, letter 675 A. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Note from Paul dit Dechambenoit, unrecognized métis, auxiliary doctor, exintern at the Teaching Hospital in Dakar, laureate of the Medical and Surgical Society, and exsoldier normal first class 1097 of C. H. R. of the seventh R. T. S., to the commanding colonel of the seventh R. T. S. c/o doctor colonel, head of Health Services in French Guinea, typed up in telegram 575 from the doctor colonel, October 24, 1930. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Telegram from the brigade colonel of group troops of FWA to General de Di Vition, commanding officer of group troops of FWA, October 30, 1930, document A/7299/Y.

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Several French colonial civilian and military personnel supported Dechambenoit’s request, as indicated by the documents included with his letter. They detailed educational training he had completed with distinction at French schools, his current employment as a physician assistant for a troop of tiralleurs Sénégalais, and his former service as a first-class reservist with a troop of tiralleurs Sénégalais in Guinea and as a soldier for a regiment of tiralleurs Sénégalais in Dakar. An employee in the office of the governorgeneral of FWA assessed the request and noted that Dechambenoit’s claim would be judged according to a 1912 decree, which specified the conditions for those who held native status to acquire French citizenship.5 One of the requirements was that candidates must complete ten years of employment for a French entity. Dechambenoit and regional colonial officials viewed the labor he had completed for African and French military units and his education in French colonial schools as evidence of his qualifications for citizenship.6 However, his request was denied based on a technicality: the years that Dechambenoit had spent as a student in medical school in Dakar would not count toward this employment because this period had occurred before he reached the age of majority. The governor of Guinea requested that the office of the governor-general bring to Dechambenoit’s attention a decree promulgated on September 5, 1930, which established “a special procedure for métis born of legally unknown parents” to gain French citizenship and to place his request anew based on this new pathway.7 The decree outlined that people with a “legally unknown parent of presumably French origin or of foreign origin of European extraction could petition for the recognition of the quality of French citizen.” These bodies of law codified métis as a special category of colonial subjects: people born of a parent of presumed European origin who was gendered male and legally unknown. While the other parent was not mentioned in the decree, the intimation was that the other parent was female, of “other” origin, and a colonial subject. A first step in this new legal process of naturalization was for the petitioner to prove – and obtain a certificate of – their “possession of status,” that is, their own “Frenchness.” This could be evinced in their French or European family name, their education, and their upbringing. In 1931, Dechambenoit sent a letter indicating that he sought such a certificate.8 This was how he and fourteen other métis men approached obtaining citizenship. 5 6 7 8

ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Note for the governor-general from the director of political affairs. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the lieutenant governor of the Colony of Ivory Coast to the governor-general of FWA, April 20, 1929, letter 493. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the lieutenant governor of French Guinea to the Department of Political and Administrative Affairs, November 17, 1930, letter 2181 AP/I. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the governor of Ivory Coast to the governor-general of FWA, March 29, 1931, document 500 AP/I.

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Between 1930 and 1936, new French nationality decrees across FWA and FEA recognized the claims that métis people had been making for decades: they were French and entitled to French legal status. The new legal pathways reflected a profound shift from prior decades, in which there were almost no avenues to French legal status for métis who held colonial subject status. This new pathway and articulation of French citizenship and demarcation of the parameters of belonging were inextricably tied to conceptions of race and multiraciality and the ways in which multiracial identities were mapped onto French legal status. French metropolitan and colonial officials and jurists conceived of these decrees as mechanisms that would grant French legal status to multiracial people who were “sufficiently” assimilated into French culture. For colonial administrative and judicial personnel, the degree to which a métis petitioner had sufficiently assimilated to French culture was predicated not just on being the child of a European but also through a childhood that had exposed the person to French culture, by means outlined in the decree and other factors that would change over time. This chapter argues that the claims of métis themselves contributed to why and how the French promulgated acts that specifically allowed métis in FEA and FWA to petition for and obtain French citizenship. These decrees codified multiracial people as a specific category of person in French colonial thought and society. They did so within the context of how multiracial people themselves claimed multiracial identities. Conceptions of how race, filiation, and culture determined one’s legal status were changed through the legal processes of implementing these decrees, and such processes were sparked by the claims that petitioners made regarding colonial law. Changes were thus engendered by the investment that petitioners made in seeking confirmation of their assertion of Frenchness. The burden of proof for petitioners hinged on the question of paternity and their relationship to French society, but maternal kin, mothers, and African communities also played essential roles in the legal processes and unfolding of these laws. The implementation of the decree opened debates about the definition of race and racial identity and changed the idea of Frenchness in ways that crisscrossed the geographic categories of colony and metropole. Individual petitioners and métis associations forwarded various confident narratives that they were French, articulated in ways that were unanticipated by colonial administrators. The articulation of métis identities to buttress claims to French citizenship were consequential for hierarchies of racial and legal status within African societies, as they both contested and created hierarchies of social and legal status and privilege based on changing views of race. This chapter broadly surveys FEA and FWA and highlights specific studies in Senegal, Gabon, and the Congo. These locales became epicenters of contestation over the meaning of métis and claims to the rights of métis over the next few decades.

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Race and Citizenship in French Metropolitan and Colonial Thought and Law, ca. 1928–1930 Between 1928 and 1930, the French promulgated new nationality laws in the French Empire, specifically in Southeast Asia and Africa, which allowed the illegitimate children of French men and colonized women to obtain French citizenship. These laws first took hold in Indochina in a 1928 decree, reflecting French conceptions of assimilation and identification with French culture on the part of métis in Indochina, except for the formality of legal status. To obtain French legal status, petitioners were required to prove their own Frenchness and their filiation from a legally unknown person of “French origin and race” (d’origine et de race françaises).9 French definitions of the word “race” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries delineated race as an individual’s or group’s class status or geographic origin. However, as argued by Elisa Camiscioli, the concept of “the French race” in interwar French public discourse, scientific writing, and government policies changed increasingly to mean “biocultural sameness” – meaning whiteness and the performance of being French through quotidian actions and appearances.10 This new understanding came about in the context of French anxiety about the decreasing population of people born in France and the increased influx of “foreigners,” such as people from Italy, Syria, Lebanon, Spain, and Slavic-speaking areas. The question of how to sustain and grow the French nation through immigration was resolved through concepts of “whiteness as a necessary precondition for citizenship in Republican France”; in other words, only people of European origin who were deemed to be sufficiently white could truly assimilate to French culture and obtain French legal status.11 Similarly, in the French Empire, metropolitan and colonial government officials applied a biocultural articulation of race in assessing the legal status of multiracial people. As argued by Emanuelle Saada in her study of the 1928 decree in Indochina, this legislation reflected a turn toward French law defining race as “both as a biological reality and a range of social qualities and cultural competencies that manifested in behavior.”12 The decree codified the racialization of French nationality and the assertion of state control over the question of paternity, given that the presumed French parent in colonial

9 10 11 12

Saada, Les enfants de la colonie, 13. Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing French Race: Immigration, Intimacy and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Duke University Press, 2009). Saada, Les enfants de la colonie, 76. Saada, Empire’s Children, 203.

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settings was male.13 To define a métis petitioner as the child of someone of “French origin and race” in the legal arena, Saada argues, included many factors, including skin color, language, lifestyle, education, and race (as defined in this paragraph). Evidence that could validate a petitioner’s claim included factors such as name, a French upbringing, culture, and education, and their societal situation. Between 1927 and 1930, political and legal constituencies in metropolitan France (jurists, professors of law, legislative members of the Superior Council of Colonial Legislation, the Council of State, the Ministry of Colonies) and colonial civil servants in French sub-Saharan Africa (governors-general, lieutenant governors, and attorney generals) debated whether and how to extend the 1928 Indochina decree to métis in sub-Saharan Africa.14 The large volume of responses and debates this question generated highlights the significance of the issue for French nationality law – as contested by French legal scholars, law makers, and colonial personnel – as well as the lack of consensus. Some argued that granting citizenship to multiracial Eurafricans who held legal status as colonial subjects was essential for the security of French colonial rule in Africa and was in keeping with the humanitarian and civilizing missions of colonial rule.15 Others expressed concerns about extending the law to Africa, questioning whether multiracial people born in Africa could be truly “French” in their ways of thinking, living, and being. Some legislative representatives expressed concern about granting citizenship to métis individuals in Africa with filiation as the only qualifier. One representative underscored the need to 13 14

15

Saada, Empire’s Children, 203. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the minister of colonies, March 15, 1927, letter APA/75; Letter from the minister of colonies to the governor-general of FWA, March 23, 1927, letter APA/67; Centre d’Archive d’Outre Mer (hereafter COAM), 2ECOL/18/68: Report presented by Mr. Arthur Girault, dean of the faculty of law in Poitiers and member of the Superior Council of the Colonies, meeting of January 25, 1928; ANOM, FMAPOL/1637: Letter from the minister of colonies to the governors-general and governors of the colonies and the commissioner of the French Republic in Togo and Cameroon, February 15, 1927, document 627; Letter from the governor of FWA to the minister of colonies, January 18, 1928, letter 49; ANS, 17 G 59: Report on the legal conditions of French subjects in the colonies and the prerogatives that result from the quality of the subject, presented by Mr. Tesseron, honorary director at the Ministry of Colonies, circa 1926; ANOM, 2ECOL/18/68: Report presented to the legislative council of the Superior Council of Colonies by Mr. Arthur Girault, meeting of September 1, 1926; ANOM, FMAPOL/1637: Article entitled “Les problèmes coloniaux” [the colonial problems] in Le Petit Parisien, October 6, 1930, stamped October 13, 1930, document 2799. ANS, 17 G 59: Report on the legal conditions of French subjects in the colonies and the prerogatives that result from the quality of the subject, presented by Mr. Tesseron, honorary director at the Ministry of Colonies, circa 1926; ANOM, 2ECOL/18/68: Report presented to the legislative council of the Superior Council of Colonies by Mr. Arthur Girault, meeting of September 1, 1926; ANOM, FMAPOL/1637: Article titled “Les problèmes coloniaux” [the colonial problems] in Le Petit Parisien, 6 October, 1930, stamped October 13, 1930, document 2799.

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grant citizenship to métis with the right type of “mindset.” It was not in French interests to “promote naturalization en masse” in Africa but instead to welcome “a small number of subjects who had shown themselves to be assimilated to French ways of life and thinking.”16 Another assembly member insisted that successful candidates should be limited to those who had been gathered in and raised by French-run child protection societies, entities that could be trusted to have provided the necessary education in French ways of life.17 Colonial civil servants in FEA approved of the decree, arguing that France would gain from cultivating young citizens who were acclimated to African ways and would facilitate the love of France and French customs.18 However, FEA received little investment in human capital compared to FWA and was seen as a backwater region meant for economic exploitation.19 Hence, despite the favorable recommendations, the law was not immediately promulgated in FEA. In FWA, most lieutenant governors and colonial personnel were in favor of the decree, qualifying that the decree provided French citizenship only to specific métis who were “the right people” and who could prove their competency in French culture.20 Colonial officials envisioned the prototypical métis who could be a French citizen as gendered male, with little consideration that métis women might also seek such legal status.21 This gendered myopia belied the history of métisses in locales such as St. Louis (Senegal) and Libreville (Gabon) having previously hosted public protests and claiming for themselves – and sometimes on behalf of all black and métis men and women – the rights of French citizens.22 The colonial omission of métisses as candidates for accession to French legal status 16

17

18 19 20

21

22

ANS, 17 G 59: Report on the legal conditions of French subjects in the colonies and the prerogatives that result from the quality of the subject, presented by Mr. Tesseron, honorary director at the Ministry of Colonies, circa 1926. ANS, 17 G 59: Report presented by Mr. Bernard Lavergne, professor in the faculty of law at Lille and member of the Superior Council of the Colonies, regarding the elevation of the indigenous peoples of the colonies to French citizenship, March 30, 1927. ANOM FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, April 6, 1927, letter 486. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, The Emerging States of Equatorial Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 20. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from lieutenant governor of Dahomey to the governor of FWA, May 2, 1927, letter 240; Letter from the governor of FWA to the minister of colonies, January 18, 1928, letter 49. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ivory Coast to the governor-general of FWA, March 7, 1927, letter AP/284; Letter from the governor of FWA to the minister of colonies, January 18, 1928, letter 49. For more on métisses and political protests for French citizenship rights, see Semley, Free and French; Jean-Baptiste, “A Black Girl”; Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights, 64–7. For an analysis of how seven black women from throughout the French empire defined and lived out their status as French citizens, see Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

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Race and Citizenship in French Thought and Law, 1928–1930

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was in keeping with French representations of women in Africa as mothers, wives, daughters, prostitutes, slaves, and agricultural laborers, but rarely as rights claimants and bearers before la cité.23 Members of the Court of Appeals of Dakar approved the decree, with the recommendation that the exact same decree be passed for FWA as in Indochina.24 Ultimately, changes to the decree that was formulated for FWA further rigidified ideas about French legal status as corresponding to whiteness. With the momentum strong and favoring some type of legislation among colonial governors (despite certain reservations), the governor-general of FWA argued for changes to the Indochina decree in its application to FWA. These changes would allow for a maximum number of multiracial people to obtain French citizenship. He proposed that the unknown parent could be “of French origin or foreign origin of European extraction,” which would open citizenship to the children of other European nationalities.25 Governor-General Cadre argued that the law should not be limited to those born of French progenitors for two reasons: “‘Les indigènes’ [the natives] themselves do not distinguish between those who were of different white races,” and it would be nearly impossible to find the nationality of the “true” father. The European culture most prevalent in French Africa, he continued, was French; therefore, children of any European filiation could assimilate to French culture. The governor-general explicitly equated being European with whiteness, defined as physical characteristics and shared ancestry from countries that constituted “Europe.” What mattered, he continued, was that the petitioner’s father was “white.” He underlined this sentence in his letter: the unknown parent must be “of the white race of European origin in order to not include Syrians, Lebanese, Turkish, and Arabs.” The exclusion of children of men from these groups mirrored the exclusions made by the French colonial states in their child welfare services. Both citizenship and child welfare services (and the former flowed from the latter) that were extended by the colonial state were racialized according to a rigid concept of whiteness – which could be measured and verified.

23

24

25

For an argument of how the French colonial state diminished African women’s capacity for political influence in Guinea, West Africa by delegating women to the household and decoupling the household from political power and the state, see Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011). For an analysis of how black women throughout the French empire in Africa, the Caribbean, and metropolitan France invoked their citizenship rights, in spite of how French society overlooked black women as political actors, see Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Extract from deliberations of the Court of Appeals of FWA regarding the elevation of métis children born from parents not legally recognized to the status of French citizen, May 21, 1927. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the governor of FWA to the minister of colonies, January 18, 1928, letter 49, 23 G. See also Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation.

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Cadre proposed another modification that was subsequently incorporated into the final decree promulgated for FWA in September of 1930. This was an additional bureaucratic hurdle that would limit the numbers of people in FWA who could obtain French citizenship. Not only did they have to prove filiation from a white person, but they also had to prove their own possession d’état (possession of status) – that is, their own Frenchness. The concept of possession of status was fundamental to French civil law, defined as “a personal quality, like filiation or nationality, to which legal consequences were attached.”26 In the case of the September 1930 decree for métis in FWA to be acknowledged as a French citizen, a petitioner had to prove they were “French” not just through filiation but also in how they acted, appeared, and thought.27 The decree thus defined the criteria that could corroborate Frenchness as the intrinsic and extrinsic factors of education, way of life, and social reputation.28 Elsewhere in Africa, in Madagascar, a 1931 decree also allowed métis a new pathway to accede to French citizenship.29 As in FWA, métis in Madagascar eligible for these terms could be the child of a European man of any nationality, whereas in Indochina the parent had to be French. Petitioners in Madagascar and Indochina had to prove only their filiation from a French or European man, not also their own Frenchness, whereas petitioners in FWA had this extra burden. Yet, whether in Indochina, Madagascar, or FWA, a petitioner’s skin color and other physical characteristics were assessed to establish their whiteness – factors not mentioned in the actual decree. This assessment played a role in colonial administrative and legal representatives’ implementation of the decree and decisions regarding cases. Applying for French citizenship by métis in FWA was a process that involved administrative and judiciary colonial personnel. It was a two-step process of proving both the petitioner’s French acculturation and their parentage from a European “white” person. The first step entailed obtaining the certificate of possession of status, issued by the lieutenant governor of the colony in which the petitioner had been born. Lieutenant governors were required to inform the governor-general in Dakar of such inquiries. Local officials were to launch an investigation in the claimant’s history to assess their possession of status and decide whether to issue a certificate; they

26 27

28 29

Saada, Empire’s Children, 186. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Minutes from meeting of May 16, 1929 with draft decree attached; Report from Mr. Arthur Girault examining the status of métis of FWA born of parents legally unrecognized by the State, June 9, 1928; ANOM, 2ECOL/18/68: Report from Mr. Arthur Girault, decree on the legal condition of métis born from parents not legally recognized in FWA, June 1928. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Decree concerning the children born from parents legally unrecognized by the state, ca. 1912. Tisseau, Etre métis en Imerina, 170–4.

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forwarded their decision to the governor-general, who had the ultimate authority to uphold or reverse the decision. No matter which colony had issued the certificate, the Court of Appeals of FWA, headquartered in Dakar, could rule on the final judgment of “recognition of citizenship.” The decree outlined that the court was to verify parentage from a European person based on “any means necessary,” with the exact definition of the processes and criteria not defined.30 While the law in Indochina referred to children as the petitioners, the law promulgated for FWA was skewed toward adult petitioners, with special provisions made for children. Decrees specifically for métis sparked even more contestation around ideas of race, filiation, and culture in determining the shifting ideas of identity and legal status. Step One of Petitioning for French Citizenship in FWA: Proving Frenchness Archival documents from the office of the attorney general of FWA provide evidence and narratives of 207 people across FWA who requested the certificate of possession of status between 1930 and 1944. It is challenging to discern the motivations and life histories of most applicants and why individual governors issued or denied the certificate for individual applicants. Many of the dossiers only include a note from the lieutenant governor or other colonial personnel that an applicant had made a claim; the eventual outcome is not detailed. Others include a second letter indicating whether or not the governor issued the certificate. Some of the cases in which a certificate was issued provide certain biographical information about the applicant, including their name, sometimes their place of birth, their age, the names of schools they attended, their profession, and their mother’s name. It is likely that more than these 207 people applied for and received the certificate of possession d’état. Discrepancies abound between the numbers reported in the attorney general’s office and the archives of individual colonies.31 30 31

ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Decree concerning the children born from parents legally unrecognized by the state, ca. 1912. For example, according to the extant documents in the archives of the office of the governor of Senegal, between 1931 and 1938 eight people from Senegal received the certificate of status. Yet the attorney general’s records indicate that during those years, fifteen people from Senegal received French citizenship based on the 1930 decree. Only two people appear on both lists. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the governor of colonies to the governor-general of FWA, March 19, 1931, letter 393 AI; Letter from the governor of colonies and lieutenant governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, January 31, 1936, letter 162 AI; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, January 28, 1935, letter 171 AI; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, January 9, 1936, letter 172 AI; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, November 27, 1936, letter 2175 AG; Letter from the administrator in chief of the colonies to the governor-general of FWA, December 16, 1936, letter 2907 AG.

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Table 2 provides a numerical summary of the number of requests and success rates for the 207 petitioners across FWA. They are listed in descending order according to the number of requests, by colony (see page 113). Of the 207 requests for the certificate between 1930 and 1944, about fortyfour percent, overall, were successful across FWA. For some colonies, such as French Guinea and French Soudan, about fifty percent of applicants were successful. In Ivory Coast Niger, only about a third of applicants were successful. Applicants who pursued this first legal step were predominantly men. Of the 207 requests, just seventeen came from women, six of whom (representing thirty-five percent of the women) received their certificates.32 What the certificate looked like varied from colony to colony. Most stated the name, date, and place of birth of the person and conferred that the person was born of a legally unknown parent, presumed to be of French or foreign European origin. In some colonies, the certificate stated the name of the mother. Colonial employees omitted any mention of specific men in any legal documents – such as birth certificates and, ultimately, the certificate of possession of status – and listed the presumed European biological parent as “legally unknown.”33 The required documentation to operationalize the 1930 law set a high bar for petitioners, who had to document their varied life stages of birth, schooling, and employment in documents issued by French government employees and private French citizens.34 Addenda to the decree outlined that applicants (or the adult guardians of minors) requesting the certificate for the possession of status were to include the following: a birth certificate or retroactive declaration of birth; criminal records; evidence of places of residence; report cards; and verification of employment, income, marital status, and children. Colonial officials interviewed witnesses to vouch for the social standing and lifestyle of applicants. Owen White argues that “the contradictory nature of the decree of September 1930 caused a certain amount of confusion among those responsible for its application,” as well as “inconsistent application” of the decree and “vagaries” in interpretating who qualified for the certificate of possession 32

33

34

ANS, 3 M 51 (184): Letter from the justice of the peace in the district of Ziguinchor and the Court of Appeals of FWA to the attorney general of Dakar, April 15, 1936, letter 295; Letter from the administrator in chief of the colonies Eboué and the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, May 23, 1935, letter 1012; Letter from Mr. Jean Nègre, a teacher in Ségou, to the attorney general of the Court of Appeals in Dakar, received March 6, 1936, written January 17, 1936, document 180 PG; Letter from Mr. Jean Nègre, a teacher in Ségou, to the attorney general of the Court of Appeals in Dakar, received March 6, 1936, written 29 February, 1936, document 881 PG. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the attorney general to the director of political affairs, August 24, 1939, letter 3.056 PG; Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the governor of Senegal, September 6, 1939, letter 647 AP/I. ANS 23 G 22 (24): Determining ruling concerning the certificate of status, one of the terms of the decree of September 5, 1930, which set out the legal conditions for métis born from parents not legally recognized by the state, November 14, 1930.

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Table 2 Requests for certificates of possession d’état according to the decree of September 5, 1930, received by the Office of the Governor-General of FWA, 1930–1945* Colony

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

Requested

Issued

Ivory Coast French Guinea French Soudan Dahomey Senegal Niger TOTALS

1 0 1 5 0 1 8

2 3 4 2 2 0 13

2 2 1 0 1 0 6

1 1 0 0 0 1 3

0 4 3 1 0 1 9

2 10 5 2 2 2 23

4 1 3 5 1 1 15

12 1 12 6 1 3 35

4 4 3 1 1 0 13

10 2 1 1 2 0 16

12 7 1 8 2 2 32

2 0 1 0 0 1 4

2 0 0 0 0 1 3

0 5 7 4 4 2 22

0 4 0 1 0 0 5

54 44 42 36 16 15 207

19 23 23 14 7 5 91

* ANS 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the attorney general at the court of appeals in FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, March 10, 1934, letter 569 PG; Letter from the attorney general at the court of appeals in FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, April 5, 1935, letter 896 PG; Letter from the attorney general at the court of appeals in FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, March 6, 1936, letter 569 PG; ANS, 3 M 52 (184): General correspondence from the attorney general regarding the legal status of the métis, 1938.

113

114

Multiracial Citizenship in FWA and FEA, 1928–1938

d’état.35 Colonial administrators reviewing requests judged them based on factors not mentioned in the law, including “irreproachable morals and seamless social skills.”36 Consequently, in correspondence about individual cases over the course of the 1930s, colonial personnel in individual colonies denied individual claimants’ requests for questionable reasons. Examples were that they had sent “insolent letters” to one of their teachers, had been convicted of minor civil crimes such as theft or fraud, or lived in conditions that were steeped “native culture.”37 In spite of the governor-general and attorney general’s admonishment that a candidate’s morality was to play no role in the assessment for the certificate of status, governors routinely granted the certificate based on the conduct and merit of the petitioner or denied a request due to unfavorable “mentality, social habits, and employment.”38 What constituted a person’s demonstration of French or European status was a moving target, not just because of the ideas of colonial personnel but also because petitioners themselves offered an expanded view of what constituted their Frenchness. Such was the case for a man named Joseph Assane Aly, who resided in St. Louis and petitioned the governor of Senegal in 1930 to be recognized as a French citizen. Aly’s letter in December 1930 stated that he had been born in Dangana, Senegal, in 1910, the son of Assane Aly (who was “a Lebanese”) and Mintou Fall (“Mauresque”).39 The governor referred to Aly

35 36 37

38

39

White, Children of the French Empire, 143–7. White, Children of the French Empire, 143–5. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from Governor-General Brevie, governor-general of FWA, to the lieutenant governor of Soudan, October 27, 1932, letter 911 AP/I; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, October 18, 1932, letter 3594; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, November 4, 1932, letter A. 1770; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, April 15, 1932, letter A. 605; Letter from Governor-General Brevie to the lieutenant governor of Soudan, June, 1932, letter 595; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governorgeneral of FWA, September 8, 1934, letter A. 188; Letter from Governor-General Brevie, governor-general of FWA, to the lieutenant governor of Soudan, February 6, 1935, letter 91 AP/ I; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, April 15, 1932, letter A. 605; Letter from the attorney general of the Court of Appeals of FEA to the governor-general of FWA, November 15, 1935, letter 2304 A.P.; Letter from Governor-General Boisson, governor-general of FWA, to the lieutenant governor of French Guinea, June 3, 1935, letter 401 AP1; Letter from the lieutenant governor of French Guinea to the governor-general of FWA, August 26, 1935, letter 1635 API; Letter from the attorney general of the Court of Appeals of FWA to the general director of administrative and political affairs, May 23, 1940, letter 1690 PG. See, for example, ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the governor of Senegal to the governorgeneral of FWA (letter marked confidential, referring the issuance of a certificate of status for Djouldé Martin), April 6, 1939, letter 129 AG; Letter from the governor of Dahomey to the governor-general of FWA (letter marked confidential, referring the issuance of a certificate of status for Denis dit Leqcuet), March 10, 1939, letter 351/APA 7. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from Mr. Joseph Assane Aly to the lieutenant governor of Senegal in St. Louis, December 16, 1939.

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as “métis,” but qualified that he was métis born of a Lebanese father – who had not legally recognized him – and a native mother.40 A few weeks later, the attorney general replied to the governor-general, identifying Aly as the son of a Syrian man, remarking that Syria was an Asian country, not a European one. Therefore, Aly did not qualify to obtain French citizenship based on the September 1930 decree. In the face of all existing legislation, “he can only possess the status of his mother.”41 Another colonial official emphasized that if the petitioner’s parent was a person of “foreign origins, it had to be of European origin, which excluded the métis whose foreign ascendant originated from outside of Europe; this case being one of someone who is descended from a Lebanese.”42 In FWA, individuals who called themselves métis and applied for French citizenship under this legislation were frequently denied consideration by administrative and court officials if the father was from Lebanon, Syria, or Egypt, even if the petitioners considered their fathers to be European.43 Extant letters from petitioners requesting the certificate of possession of status were all handwritten and all followed the same formula. Conveying awareness of the language of French legal petitions, many letters began with detailed summaries of the decree, as if to proactively counteract any lack of knowledge by colonial officials.44 Paul Bacquery, born in French Soudan but working in Kankan, Guinea, sent a letter addressed to the mayor of Kankan in October 1933. His letter cited the 1930 law and noted that it appeared in the Journal

40 41

42 43

44

ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the lieutenant governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, January 23, 1931, letter 16q/BP. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the chief legal officer of FWA to the governor-general of FWA, February 13, 1931, letter 163 AJ; Letter from the chief legal officer of FWA to the governor of Senegal, February 24, 1931, letter 208 AP/I. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Note attributed to Attorney General Lanes, November 20, 1939, letter 4.052 P.G. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the attorney general, head of the judiciary department, to the director of political affairs, January 15, 1940, letter 130 PG; Letter from the governor general of FWA to the governor of Soudan, March 2, 1940, letter 155 AP/I; Letter from the governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, January 2, 1940, letter 10 APA/2; Letter from the director of political affairs to the attorney general of FWA, November 11, 1939, letter 3805 AP/ I; ANS, O-715 (31): Letter from the governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA regarding an investigation into the métis, August 11, 1938, letter 1791; ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the attorney general to the director of political affairs, January 15, 1946, letter 130 PG; Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the governor of French Guinea, March 6, 1944, letter 76/APPI. ANS, M 50 (184): Letter from Adolphe Cros to the lieutenant governor of French Guinea in Conakry, c/o the commanding administrator of the district of Siguiri, February 9, 1933; Letter from Mrs. Rossi nee Odette Ouattre, visiting nurse in Segou, to the attorney general of the Court of Appeals in Dakar, received March 27, 1936, written March 19, 1936, document 1199 PG; Letter from Alphonse Thiécourra, third-year medical student at the Jules Carde School of Medicine in Dakar, to the chief registrar at the Court of Appeals in FWA, c/o the director of the Jules Carde School of Medicine; Possession of status file for Daniel Farah, correspondence between colonial personnel between November 1939 and January 1940.

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Officiel on 22 November 1930, on page 1945; the letter continued, “I have the honor of soliciting from your benevolence my possession of status with the intention of French naturalization.”45 Léon Vallée, who identified himself as a head of a logging camp, born in and residing in Ivory Coast, made a request of the mayor of Grand Bassam: “I have the honor to solicit the favor of being naturalized a French citizen” according to the dispositions in the 1930 law “concerning the naturalization of métis born of legally unknown parents.” He mentioned that he was attaching unspecified documents in support of his request.46 Successful petitioners exhibited patience, persistence, and savviness in navigating French bureaucracy, as the process often took two to three years to complete and was influenced by the assistance or hindrance of a host of African and French individuals and institutions. Colonial administrators sometimes had difficulty in establishing the colony and date of birth of petitioners, much less a retroactive birth certificate and the other documents that the decree required.47 But it was the second step of the two-step process of obtaining French legal status that demonstrated the deep investment that petitioners placed in colonial law – and how the French continually shifted the boundaries for who could obtain French legal status. Step Two of Petitioning for Citizenship: Proving Filiation in Colonial Court Between 1930 and 1938 – the only years for which there are consistent records from the Court of Appeals and the office of the attorney general of FWA – 45

46 47

ANS, 3 M 50 VERS 184: Letter from Paul Bacquery, auxiliary veterinarian, to the commanding administrator of the district of Kankan, received October 25, 1933, written October 14, 1933, document 2150. ANS, 3 M 50 VERS 184: Letter from Léon Vallée, forestry site manager, to the commanding administrator of the canton of Grand Bassam, received on October 23, 1934, document 3998. See, for example, the case of André Kan, born in Ivory Coast and a student of agriculture in Tunisia between 1935 and 1937. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the Ministry of Colonies to the governor-general of FWA, September 13, 1937, letter 89; Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the minister of colonies, September 13, 1937, letter 270 AP/I; Letter from the director of administrative and political affairs to the attorney general of FWA, August 10, 1937, letter 1808 AP/I. See also the case of Paul Niamba, dit Dorquelle, born in Ivory Coast. ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the attorney general of FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, February 28, 1936, letter 725 PG. Finally, see the case of Jean Mensah, born in Ivory Coast and residing in Paris. ANS, 2 3G 23 (17): Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the governor of Ivory Coast, January 12, 1937, document 13/AP. In the 1942 cases of Jean Sterlin and Charles Steinmetz, who were assessed to have been born in Ivory Coast but left to live in Gold Coast when they were “very young” and returned in 1921 and 1931 respectively, the certificate was denied on the grounds that their way of life could not be accurately assessed as the individuals had spent so much time “outside of French territory.” ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, August 25, 1942, letter 260 AP/I; Letter from the governor of Ivory Coast to the governor-general of FWA, November 6, 1942, letter 670 AP/2.

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Table 3 Summary of recognition of French citizenship approved by the Court of Appeals of FWA in favor of métis by application of the September 4, 1930 decree, 1931–193848 Colony French Soudan French Guinea Cote d’Ivoire Dahomey Senegal Niger Haute Volta Total

1931

1932

1933

1934

7 1 4 0 3 0 0

7 8 2 4 2 0 0

4 2 4 6 0 0 0

5 4 7 3 1 1 0

15

23

16

21

1935

1936

1937

1938

Total

1 0 0 0 2 0 1

6 8 3 1 4 0 2

3 4 5 7 0 2 0

3 2 3 3 3 1 0

36 29 28 24 15 4 3

4

24

21

15

139

139 people ostensibly attained the recognition of French citizenship based on the 1930 decree. This office compiled dossiers of individuals who had received citizenship, which included investigative reports and documents regarding their life histories. The office sent copies of the dossiers to the Ministry of Colonies in Paris so that they could note the status change. Most of the supporting documents for individual cases have not survived or may have been removed from the archives. They include birth certificates; records of marriage, employment, and school; character witness references; police reports and criminal records; and any correspondence that petitioners or their advocates wrote to colonial officials. Most records list only the names, dates of birth, and colonies of birth and residence. However, the available records are illuminating (see Table 3). The colonies with the highest numbers of successful applicants were Soudan, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Dahomey; these colonies had the most robust offerings of state-financed schools and orphanages for métis children in French Africa. State-funded orphanages operated in the cities of Bamako, Kankan, and Bingerville, which provided some familiarity with French language and culture, which in turn resulted in applicants acquiring the cultural and social competencies and relationships to meet the metrics for receiving final court judgment of citizenship. Despite the often less-than-stellar material conditions and educational opportunities, access to even a modicum 48

ANS, 23 G 23 (17): Letter from the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, March 10, 1934, letter 569 PG; Letter from the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, April 5, 1935, letter 896 PG; Letter from the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA to the director of administrative and political affairs, March 6, 1936, letter 569 PG; ANS, 3 M 52 (184): General correspondence from the attorney general regarding the status of the Métis, 1938.

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of French education, material conditions, and contact with French citizens facilitated the documentation and networks of people needed for an affirmative judgment by court officials. Dahomey was next highest ranked in terms of the number of successful applicants, which might have been due to the comparatively many French and European fathers who reportedly contributed some money toward their children’s upkeep and tuition to attend missionary Catholic schools.49 Dahomey was often cited by colonial officials as a location in which a number of French fathers paid for their children’s school fees. Niger and Haute Volta had some missionary schools, operated by French Catholic and American missionaries, but the relatively thin French presence and high numbers of Muslim adherents meant that the population of métis was lower than in other colonies. So were the opportunities to acquire the accoutrements of French culture and upbringing. Only nine of the 139 successful applicants were female (about seven percent); hence, the recognition of French citizenship for métis was skewed toward males.50 Métis women in FWA attended French schools in greater numbers than other African women and they may thus have achieved the French cultural competence necessary for French legal status as outlined in the 1930 decree. Yet, the quality of instruction in secular or missionary-run schools for girls was lower than that in schools for boys. Moreover, métis women may have applied for French legal status in smaller numbers than métis men. This may have been because métis women did not perceive French legal status as beneficial, given that they may have married métis or other African men according to customary rather than French civil law – a practice that would have nullified their candidacy. Nearly all successful applicants of either gender were twenty-one years of age or older, the age at which one was a legal adult according to French law of the period. Only six were minors – four girls and two boys. These cases warrant further analysis for the insights that they offer about the ways in which mothers and other male and female African kin asserted themselves as rights-bearing individuals in determining the legal status of these children. They did so even as colonial courts and administrative employees and private French citizens sought to direct who could or could not be “French,” and in what ways.

49

50

In his critique of a draft version of the decree, the governor of Dahomey pushed back against the notion that métis children had been abandoned by their French fathers. He argued that some fathers legally recognized them and others gave assistance to their children “with circumspection,” meaning without making it public knowledge. Such métis, he continued, were wellplaced in the milieu indigène. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the lieutenant governor to the governor-general of FWA, May 2, 1927, letter AP/ 240; Letter from the governor of FWA to the minister of colonies, January 18, 1928, letter 49. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter to the minister of colonies from the attorney general of FWA, July 19, 1938, letter 2635 PG.

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Children and Citizenship: Parental Rights and Colonial Law in FWA Legal cases involving children often involved maternal kin working with or in conflict with colonial courts and administrative officials to determine not only the question of children’s paternity and legal status but also who had parental rights. According to the September 1930 decree, if the petitioning party was a minor, then “a public officer, the person who had taken in the child, or a child protection society certified by the administration” could petition the court of appeals on behalf of the child. The decree displaced African kin and delineated individuals with French legal status and French institutions as having rights to petition colonial officials and courts on the question of a multiracial minor’s French legal status. Furthermore, colonial officials were to assign to minors who received the recognition of French citizenship “a French legal guardian” – a person with French legal status, of either sex, or a certified child protection society or member of such a society. A métis child legally recognized as a French citizen would ostensibly remain in the care and responsibility of people who were also French until they reach the age of majority. The legal procedure and aftermath of obtaining French citizenship for a métis child appeared to be a collective process facilitated by men, mainly maternal kin. In only two of the six cases of métis children who gained French citizenship based on the September 5, 1930 decree did a French or European man initiate the legal petition and pay the fees for French legal status. In these instances, the European man who initiated the process was likely the biological father who exercised this alternative route to parental rights. These men’s children came to possess French legal status – but the father did not have to legally recognize the child.51 In both cases in which European men filed the petitions, they were also named the legal guardians. While the names and locations of mothers were cited in colonial documents, and their testimony about interracial sexual relations were elicited to verify that a biological father was French or European, colonial administrators otherwise validated male African kin as people who could petition on a child’s behalf. In four of the six successful cases, men with African names (first and last) – perhaps the

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I speculate that the adult who filed the petition for a boy from Dahomey named Paul Louis Léon dit Fourn to receive French citizenship was his father, as a French man sharing the same last name, identified as Pierre Fourn – who worked as an agent for a trading company – paid the court fees. The governor of Dahomey asked the attorney general that Fourn be assigned as the boy’s French guardian, and Fourn is named as guardian on the decree recognizing Paul as a French citizen. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Pierre Fourn to the clerk of the Court of Appeals, May 4, 1937; Letter from the governor of Dahomey to the public prosecutor, head of the Court of Appeals of FWA, July 22, 1937, letter 2349/PG; Requisition of the Court of Appeals of FWA, Attorney General, June 16, 1937.

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applicants’ uncles, older brothers, grandfathers, or other guardians – petitioned the court for the child’s French citizenship. In three of these four cases, the men were also designated as the legal guardians after the judgment. In only one case was the name of an African woman written as the guardian of the child.52 Nevertheless, events in two cases of children who received French citizenship – Cécile Blandine Sall (born in Senegal) and Germaine Diallo (born in the Ivory Coast) – demonstrate how mothers, grandmothers, and other female kin sought to maintain their relationships with children and navigated the interactions with colonial states and courts and individual Europeans to maintain their parental rights. They did so even as their children traversed the legal process and eventually gained French citizenship. These two cases are illustrative if not representative of other cases involving children. The many years of administrative and legal procedures and deliberations in these cases provide a window into the contestations of African and French parties and how legal processes and outcomes deviated from the decree, and thus how these processes challenged the power of the colonial state. Cécile Blandine Sall was a former ward of the state in Senegal when the court of appeals deliberated over her naturalization process between 1935 and 1936. She was one of the few wards who did not live in a residential French school or other institution but in an African household. The colonial state paid a monthly stipend to an African guardian for her care. Beginning in 1932, the office of the governor of Senegal remitted monthly payments of 547.50 francs per month to a male notable – a title given by colonial officials to elite Africans who worked with or cooperated with the state. In this case, the notable was Matar Sall, who lived in the village of Sédhiou in the Casamance region of Senegal. The state paid Matar for the care of Cécile and her brother Paul. Both children were listed with the family name “Sall” and were siblings identified as métis in government correspondence. Cécile Blandine Sall had been born in 1915 in Sédhiou. In 1933, the administrator of the district sent a telegram requesting that the subsidy on the children’s behalf be paid instead to Madiguè Boup, the widow of Matar, who had actually died in 1931.53 The head of the Casamance was chastised for failing to closely monitor the children, as local administrators had 52

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ANS, 3 M 51 (184): Letter from the attorney general to the justice of the peace of Ziguinchor, February 9, 1935, letter 349 PG; Letter to the commander of the district of Sédhiou from the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA, February 27, 1935, letter 115; ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Letter from the administrator of colonies, Lebessou, to the governor of Senegal c/o the senior administrator in Casamance, Zuiguinchor, December 15, 1934, letter 2072; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, January 28, 1935, letter 172 AI. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of Casamance, with a handwritten note attached indicating that a copy had been sent to the office of the lieutenant governor in April 1933 and was viewed by the head of the

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been reporting for years that the children were being well cared for by Matar. The deputy administrator’s April 1933 telegram insisted that they were indeed well cared for but revealed that it was Madiguè who had been managing them and ensuring that they went to school. It was African women who managed the day-to-day care and French acculturation of the few métis child wards on whose behalf the colonial state made direct welfare payments to African caregivers, despite the colonial state’s preference for attributing such responsibilities and making direct payments to African male guardians. Following their awareness of the death of Matar Sall, local administrators investigated and reported as to the suitability of his widow to be the official recipient of the funds. In the report, the administrator of Sédhiou not only declared her to be a suitable guardian but also defended his own lack of knowledge about the death of the chief. It had, in fact, been Madiguè who had visited the office over the years to receive the money that arrived in her husband’s name. He further specified that Matar Sall, when alive, was a man of rather advanced age who was paralyzed. His guardianship of the children had been “nominal,” and Madiguè and her daughters provided daily care for the “orphans” for several years.54 The lieutenant governor’s office named her as the legal guardian of the two children and as the recipient of the allocation on their behalf to provide for their needs.55 By 1934, colonial administrators had determined that the two children no longer met the criteria of being wards of the administration, and Cécile and Paul both disappeared from the rolls. In September 1933, Paul Sall had passed away after a bout of dysentery, and the head of the Casamance region blamed his relatives, noting that they called a European doctor to attend to the boy only when his illness became acute.56 Cécile was employed as an assistant teacher at a school for girls in her hometown; the regional administrator took this to mean Cécile had achieved adulthood, in that she earned wages sufficient to

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Office of Finances on September 8, 1933, written 10 April, 1933, letter 250/F; Letter from the Office of Finance to the head of the First Office, September 9, 1933, letter 1634/F2. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the superior administrator of Casamance, with a handwritten note indicating that the letter was transmitted to and read by the lieutenant governor on October 6, 1933, written September 29, 1933, document 533; Certificate of death of Matar Sall, issued in the territory of Casamance in the district of Sédhiou, backdated August 6, 1931. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decision modifying decision 365 AG of February 10, 1933 concerning the mandate allocating a grant to the orphans Paul and Cécille Sall from the department of finances, October 23, 1933, document 2307; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of Casamance, December 16, 1933, document 743. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Telegram from the administrator of Casamance to the lieutenant governor, September 23, 1933, document 475/F; Letter from the head administrator of the territory of Casamance to the governor of Senegal, October 6, 1933, letter 491/F.

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provide for herself.57 Ostensibly, the French intention of the wards programs had succeeded: Cécile’s education and upbringing, managed by Madiguè, had been sufficiently French – such that she was now employed by a French school. But was Cécile French enough to be possess French legal status? Two years later, Cécile Sall again appeared in colonial documentation because of a petition on her behalf to attain French legal status, filed by her mother.58 The court dossier indicates that she had been issued the certificate of status in 1935, but her case was not heard by the Court of Appeals of FWA until 1936 because “the interested parties” (her maternal kin) had not paid the 150-franc fee. This was a cause for delay in many similar cases. Cécile was twenty years old when she was issued her certificate of status and twenty-one years old when citizenship was issued, yet she was labeled a minor by the court. Perhaps this was because the legal proceedings began before she was married or before she reached the age of majority. Despite the letter of the September 1930 decree that outlined that métis minors who obtained French legal status were to be appointed a French legal guardian, the court documents validated Cécile’s biological mother as her legal guardian. In April 1936, the head of the Court of Appeals of FWA wrote that the court had issued a decree recognizing Cécile as having “the quality” of French citizen.59 The court-issued decree conferred French legal status to successful métis petitioners such as Cécile, which retroactively established that she was “born” French. Once the Ministry of Colonies received the judgment from the Court of Appeals in Dakar, it was to instruct French authorities in the petitioner’s colony of birth to add the person to the registry of births in the l’État Civil (civil registry) maintained in that colony for “Europeans and the assimilated.” This step was akin to issuing a retroactive birth certificate. Two African male witnesses, an Abd-El Kader Sarr, who was a clerk for a colonial office, and Diallo Mamadou, the secretary of the Chef de Canton of Boudié, signed the document on behalf of Mme Sall (Cécile’s mother), likely because she was illiterate.60

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ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the head administrator of the territory of Casamance to the governor of Senegal, October 6, 1933, letter 491/F; Telegram from the administrator of the district of Sédhiou to the head administrator of Casamance, December 16, 1933, document 743; Telegram from the head administrator of the territory of Casamance to the governor of Senegal, December 20, 1933, document 7772/AG. ANS, 3 M 51(184): Letter from the attorney general to the justice of the peace in Ziguinchor, February 9, 1935, letter 349 PG; Letter to the commander of the district of Sédhiou from the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA, February 27, 1935, letter 115. ANS, 3 M 50 VERS 184: Letter from Attorney General Laues to the minister of colonies, April 20, 1936, letter 1204 PG. ANS, 3 M 51 (184): Receipt for Sokhotine Sall with illegible signatures by the witnesses and by the commanding administrator of the district of Sédhiou.

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The second case study of a child who obtained French citizenship is that of Germaine Diallo, who was born in Ivory Coast in 1925. This case reveals the ways in which mothers sought to maintain parental rights. The colonial court intervened to render a final judgment not only regarding Germaine’s legal status but also the question of rights over children. It is the story of an African woman from the Ivory Coast; her métis daughter, who went on to attain French citizenship and live in the Congo and France; a French man and his wife, who claimed parental rights over the girl; and French colonial civil and court personnel, who adjudicated competing custody claims regarding the girl.61 The central struggle unfolded over the course of an epistolary exchange and legal battle between the mother, Adama Diallo – a resident in Abidjan, Ivory Coast – and Pierre Dauriat, a French military officer in command of a colonial infantry troop of African soldiers. Dauriat was stationed first in Ivory Coast and later in Congo. Each adult claimed parental rights over Germaine. Their letters and telegrams – archived in the records of Germaine’s citizenship dossier adjudicated by the Court of Appeals of FWA between 1937 and 1939 – are marked by intense expressions of intimacy, bitterness, love, and loss by both parties. Focusing on establishing the consanguinity of children and fathers and their respective racial and cultural identities, the September 1930 decree implied a gendered and asymmetrical relationship of power that elided mothers’ rights and relationships to their children. The letters and telegrams between Adama and Pierre are preserved in Germaine’s legal dossier because Adama retained them and transferred copies to the colonial officials when seeking to prove her rights, love, and emotional attachment to her daughter. In February 1938, Adama wrote to the French colonial attorney general of the Ivory Coast requesting official assistance in facilitating the return of her daughter.62 She protested that Pierre, who resided at the time in Brazzaville, Congo, had “detained illegally and against my will my daughter Germaine Diallo.” The letter continued: I do not understand and have never understood the goal that M. Dauriat is pursuing. For two months, he has tried with all his relations to intimidate me into abandoning my daughter brought up at the price of ten years of sacrifices. The copies of acts and correspondence included with this letter will prove to you the whole extent of our accord. This why I take recourse with your highest justice so that my daughter is given back to me as soon as possible.63

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“‘The Right To My Daughter’: African Women, French Men, and Custody of Métis Children in Twentieth Century French Colonial Africa” in The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, edited by Dagmar Herzog and Chelsea Schields. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2021. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Adama Diallo with Samba Diallo, resident of Treichville, to the attorney general of the Republic in Grand-Bassam, stamped February 5, 1938, written February 4, 1938, letter 3399/AN. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Adama Diallo, February 4, 1938.

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The letter relayed that she had written to Pierre repeatedly since March 1937 regarding the return of her daughter. She claimed that Pierre at last responded and promised to return her daughter in August 1937. Adama had not written these letters herself. In one letter to the officials, she conceded that they were written by someone else, perhaps a professional African letterwriter, “who was willing to write my thoughts,” but insisted that the content of all the correspondence was her own.64 Adama refused to disappear from Germaine’s life and selected the instruments of pen, paper, and telegrams along with a letter-writer’s ability to convey her thoughts and claims through these channels of communication. The telegram and letters leave a trail of “written agency” that threatened Pierre’s assertion of rights to retain custody of Germaine and the determination of her legal status.65 Adama elaborated that she had “entrusted” her daughter to Pierre, but the process was fraudulent. She forwarded to colonial officials a copy of a legal document recording the supposed accord granting Pierre’s guardianship of Germaine. This agreement was recorded in a report authored by a regional colonial employee in Ivory Coast in July 1934.66 The report summarized that Adama had declared under oath “that they consented entirely to confide [entrust] the métisse daughter of Adama Diallo, named Marguerite Germaine born in 1925 in Bobo-Dioulasso of an unknown father” to Pierre, and that “it remains agreed that Mr. Dauriat takes on as his cost and entire responsibility the care and education of the young Germaine until she reaches the age of majority.”67 It was Adama’s husband, Tiémoko Diara, who spoke on her behalf, with the document conferring to him the legal right to speak for Adama and confer guardianship of her daughter to Pierre. The document also referred to Germaine as “métisse,” intimating that this racialized identity was crucial to the question of the transfer of guardianship. How were the parties – Adama, her husband, and Pierre – connected? Pierre and Adama may have had a sexual relationship during Pierre’s time in Ivory Coast, and he was Germaine’s biological father. Pierre perhaps wanted to raise his daughter, and perhaps his French wife agreed to this arrangement on the 64

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Public letter-writers for hire worked for fees paid by African clients and this was a profession regulated by the colonial state in British and French West Africa. Clients often engaged their services to write letters or petitions supplicating hearings and judgments by colonial courts. Benjamin Lawrance, “Petitioners, ‘Bush Lawyers’ and Letter Writers: Court Access in BritishOccupied Lomé, 1914–1920” in Osborn, Lawrance, Roberts, eds. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks, 94–115. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Adama Diallo, living at the residence of Pierre Beraud in Railway, Abidjan, January 16, 1937. I borrow the concept of “written agency” from Christopher Lee, who formulates it in his analysis of how multiracial children in Southern Africa made claims on British colonial state and society. Lee, Unreasonable Histories. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the governor-general of FWA, June 23, 1938, letter 397c A/P. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Summary of minutes from the cercle of Lagunes in Ivory Coast, July 19, 1934.

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condition that he not sully his reputation and white manhood by legally claiming biological fatherhood. Adama might have reluctantly – yet willingly – entrusted the care of her daughter to Pierre, seeking the best material circumstances for her child. Alternatively, Adama might have been coerced or convinced by Pierre or Tiémoko (or both), potentially through the promise of financial compensation for relinquishing her guardianship. Perhaps Adama did not fully comprehend that she was ceding her parental rights, or perhaps such a legal hearing never took place. Indeed, Adama later accused Pierre of fraudulently using his connections with colonial administrators to draw up the legal proceedings. However, it is also possible that Adama may have entered into the agreement willingly, and the parties may have privately agreed that she would occasionally see Germaine. After the presumed 1934 accord between the parties, Pierre departed with Germaine, then nine or ten years old, to France. Adama, Tiémoko, and Pierre remained in contact about Germaine. Telegrams and other correspondence initially suggest collaboration, mutual respect, and agreement about Germaine’s living situation – and even cordiality and warmth. In letters that he addressed to Tiémoko from Paris, Pierre wrote about Germaine’s adaptation to French culture, describing her as a “little European” and noting that his family in France had come to “adore” her.68 Pierre alluded to future travel to Ivory Coast with Germaine, at which time Tiémoko and Adama would be able to see her. However, when Pierre and Germaine made a brief stopover in Ivory Coast during 1936, en route by ship from France to Brazzaville, Adama was unaware of their arrival and missed seeing her child. She and Tiémoko were by now divorced, and Pierre had communicated only with Tiémoko about the journey.69 By October 1936, in a series of telegrams and letters between Adama, Tiémoko, and Pierre, the tenor of these discussions had significantly changed. By then Germaine, Pierre, and Pierre’s French wife were living in Brazzaville, Congo. Germaine was ten or twelve years old and had been away from Africa and her mother (Adama) for two years. Adama asked Tiémoko to send a cable to Pierre, notifying him of her plans to travel to Brazzaville to see her daughter. Pierre’s response to Tiémoko was a terse “No” and that he “categorically refuses to receive Adama.”70 In responses addressed to Tiémoko, Pierre insisted that Adama’s presence would be “harmful to Germaine,” because “I am doing my duty for Germaine to give her a European upbringing and 68 69

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ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from M. P. Dauriat at the Ministry of War and the office of the secretary general to “my dear Tiémoko,” October 10, 1935. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Adama Diallo, living at the residence off Samba Dialoo, Treivchville, Abidjan, to “my dear Mr. Dauriaut,” Certified Mail Letter # 203 A.R., November 30, 1946, delivered to the addressee on December 11, 1946. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Cable 496 W 9, October 29, 1936.

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education that will allow her to become naturalized as French as soon as she is 16 years old.”71 By making this statement, Pierre announced that he would approach the colonial court to have the child declared of French legal status. After this exchange, Adama further shifted from expressing the right to visit her daughter in Brazzaville to repeatedly demanding that Pierre return Germaine to her. Her response to Dauriat cited French law, the concept of human rights, and moral and ethical behavior as frameworks that buttressed her claims to have full parental rights.72 She also emphasized her love for her daughter and entreated that Pierre’s own affection for Germaine would compel him to empathize with her desires. Yet Pierre’s reply dismissed Adama’s assertion of her parental rights based on her status as Germaine’s mother; he instead proposed his French wife as a more suitable mother for Germaine. He alluded to the project of making Germaine “a little European” as one that he and Adama had originally agreed on and insisted this was still the best path for Germaine. Pierre also included a typewritten letter that he said was written by Germaine, which stated, “I say hello to you and wish you happy new year. Right now, I will be very happy if you leave my mother and father alone. I am doing well in their home and I wish to stay with them.”73 Yet Adama continued to contend – in yet another letter to Pierre – that “I want the pure and simple return of my daughter. The so-called educational contract that was drawn up due to your relations with highly ranked people in Bingerville does not bind me.”74 She threatened to file a complaint with colonial administrators in Ivory Coast and eventually did so. Meanwhile, Pierre petitioned Brazzaville’s colonial administrators to have Germaine declared a French citizen. The colonial officials in FEA wondered why Pierre, a French man who claimed no biological ties to Germaine, now asserted that the African birth mother had conferred guardianship and that he even had the legal right to file such a claim.75 Before they would allow Pierre’s case to proceed, colonial officials sought to determine whether Pierre had rights over Germaine according to French law. Referring to the September 1930 decree for métis in FWA and French citizenship, the attorney general relayed in an April 1938 letter that “the person qualified to institute the legal 71

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ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Dauriat, commander of the transition of troops of FEA, to “my dear Tiémoko,” October 10, 1936, 3M52(184), ANS. Letter from Dauriat, commander of the transition of troops of FEA, to “my dear Tiémoko,” December 12,1936. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Mr. Dauriat to Adama Diallo, December 11, 1936, certified mail letter 085; Letter from Dauriat to Adama, Certified mail Letter # 085, December 11, 1936. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Germaine Diallo to Adama Diallo, December 12, 1936. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Adama Diallo, living at the residence of Pierre Beraud in Railway, Abidjan, January 16, 1937. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from Adama Diallo, living in the residence of Samba Diallo in Treichville, to the attorney general of the Republic in Grand-Bassam, stamped February 5, 1938, written February 4, 1938, letter 3399/AN.

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proceedings” would have to file the request.76 Further, Germaine had been born in Ivory Coast, which meant that colonial officials in FWA were to determine her case. In June 1938, the governor-general of FEA sent a confidential letter to the governor-general of FWA informing him of Dauriat’s petition in FEA and transferring the matter to FWA.77 At first, colonial administrators in FWA maintained that they could not proceed with the citizenship question without Adama’s consent; she was the biological mother and therefore was “the person qualified.”78 Yet, colonial court officials legitimized Pierre as Germaine’s legal guardian and allowed him to file a petition for the child to be declared a French citizen. The court utilized the 1934 document conferring responsibility for Germaine to Pierre – the one Adama claimed had been brokered fraudulently by Pierre’s friends in the colonial administration to strip her of her rights. The court cited the emotional attachment of “Mr. and Mrs. Dauriat” to Germaine to justify its transfer of legal guardianship to the couple. Germaine had “always lived with Mr. and Mrs. Dauriat, who brought her with them to France, gave her a European education, treating her like their own child and showing her deep affection, that she gives back to them completely,” the court’s ruling elaborated. The 1930 September decree mentioned no such factors as emotional attachment in determining who had the right to file a court petition. In July 1938, court documents of the Court of Appeals of FWA declared that Germaine Marguerite dite Dauriat was recognized as a French citizen, following the issuance of her certificate of possession of status a few months prior.79 The certificate listed her father as legally unknown – yet conferred guardianship to Pierre. The use of the surname Dauriat rather than Diallo further indicates that Pierre might have been the biological father. The document that declared Germaine a French citizen permanently nullified Adama’s legal rights over her daughter, and “Diallo” was removed from Germaine’s name in the colonial documents. The final judgment issued by the court acknowledged “the opposition of her mother Adama Diallo” but justified the abrogation of her parental rights owing to her “morals and lifestyle.” The document further stated that “It is in the well-understood interest of the minor 76

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ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from the head of the Justice Department, Court of Appeals of FEA, to the attorney general, March 25, 1938, letter 992 P.G.; Letter from the attorney general of the Court of the First Instance of Brazzaville to the chief police commissioner, April 12, 1938, letter 457; Note from the chief police commissioner in the French Congo to the attorney general of the Republic, April 13, 1938, letter 316 D.68. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the governor-general of FWA, June 23, 1938, letter 397c A/P. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from the attorney general of Ivory Coast, court of the first instance, Grand-Bassam, to the attorney general of FWA, Letter #397 H P.G., December 15, 1937. ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from the attorney general of FWA to the attorney general, head of judiciary service of the Court of Appeals of FEA, Letter #9923, March 25, 1938.

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métisse girl to remain confided in the care of the Dauriat spouses who will assure her an education and living conditions that her mother would certainly be unable to provide for her.” Officers of the court conceded that they were denying Adama her parental rights but maintained that the nullification was in the best interest of Germaine, concluding that she “belonged” to French society and the Dauriat household and family.80 Legal adults who went on to gain French citizenship ostensibly initiated the petitions themselves. Yet the twists and turns that they navigated in the legal process raised equally thorny questions about race, rights, and belonging and how their childhoods impacted the legitimacy of their requests as adults. Adults and Citizenship: Frenchness, Filiation, and Naming in FWA The dossiers of the 123 adult métis – two women and 121 men – who obtained the designation of “French citizen” in FWA between 1930 and 1938 demonstrate the fraught legal landscape these people traversed. To be successful, applicants had to mobilize wealth and people and demonstrate their biological and social filiation. The successful applicants had access to money, African kin, or witnesses who would attest to their European parentage and upbringing; they also knew individual French or European sponsors who would sign off on the numerous documents that legitimized their assimilation into European culture and conduct. Obtaining French acknowledgment of their claims was difficult, and the ways in which court and civil colonial employees assessed the petitioners’ advocacy for the recognition of their French selfhood was never straightforward. A critical component was that supplicants had to pay the 150-franc court fee for the processing their petition. Many petitioners launched their claims with a formulaic letter to the court, to which they attached their certificate of status, and cited the decree on which they staked their requests. Some individuals did more than just formulaically cite the law. They wrote narratives that elaborated their devotion to, love for, and loyalty to France, proclaiming and providing evidence that they were French.81 For example, Fréderic Carl dit

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ANS, 3 M 52 (184): Letter from the attorney general of FWA to the Ministry of Colonies, Office of Archives, September 27, 1938, letter 3443 P.G. ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Letter from Camara Jean, teacher at the regional school of Conakry, to the chief clerk at the Court of Appeals in Dakar, received March 8, 1935, written 23 February, 1935, document 729 PG; Letter from Camara Jean, teacher at the regional school of Conakry, to the chief clerk at the Court of Appeals in Dakar, May 15, 1935; Letter from Camara Jean, teacher at the regional school of Conakry, to the chief clerk at the Court of Appeals in Dakar, May 29, 1936; Letter from Camara Jean, teacher at the regional school of Conakry, to the chief clerk at the Court of Appeals in Dakar, June 30, 1936; Letter from Faber Martin Johan to the

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Brenner of Dahomey addressed a letter to the attorney general in Dakar in 1937 with his copy of certificate of status: I have experienced the benefits of French civilization since my childhood, thanks to which I have a little education and a situation that allows me to live in conditions better than those in which I would live in case I had not had one or other. With all my heart I am French and my greatest desire is to get the right to bear the title.

He ended the letter with the pledge: “I promise you the Attorney General always be a faithful and son to France.”82 For Brenner, he was French in all ways except the official recognition by the state. He saw himself as French through and through, beyond the notion – on the part of colonial officials – that métis citizens had potential as useful facilitators of imperialism. In addition, métis from throughout FWA who petitioned the court of appeals emphasized their education, service, and life histories in French institutions and enterprises as demonstrative of being and acting French and deserving French legal status. Successful petitioners consisted mainly of men who had attended French missionary schools or lived in state-run or missionary orphanages. They had obtained primary school certificates, and some even pursued secondary training; they worked as nurses, veterinary assistants, and teachers for the colonial state. Circumstances such as these were exemplified by Jean Courama in a letter addressed to the governor of Senegal. Courama identified himself as a student at the medical school in Dakar and opened his letter requesting the “enjoyment of rights of French citizen,” citing the 1930 law. He then summarized his biography in chronological terms: he was born in Ivory Coast in 1909 of a man of French origin named Terasson de Fangères (who had not legally recognized him) and a woman named Madoussou Carammal; he was raised in the orphanage in Bingerville, where he received a French upbringing and education at local schools. From 1925 to 1931, he lived in Gorée and Dakar while attending postsecondary schools. He closed the letter by stating that he had attained the age of majority and that he had been “raised and supported by the administration.”83 This comment underscored that he met important qualifiers: he had received a French education and upbringing, facilitated by the French colonial state. Courama read the law and understood

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chief clerk of the Court of Appeals in Dakar, December 20, 1933; Letter from Jacques Antonie Rossi, treasury accountant of FWA in Bamako, to the president of the Court of Appeals in Dakar, January 29, 1938, document 390; ANS, 3 M 51(184): Letter from Honoré Dominique Lefevre, auxiliary writer in service at the district of Porto-Novo, to the chief clerk of the Court of Appeals in Dakar, April 30, 1937. ANS 3 M 51 (184): Letter from Fréderic Carl dit Brenner, railway conductor and station master in Togo, to the attorney general at the Court of Appeals, arrived April 19, 1937, written 3 April, 1937, document 1094/PG. ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Jean Courama, medical student at the school of medicine in Dakar, to the governor of Senegal, April 9, 1931, document 1347.

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it, or was coached in how to address the letter, thus asserting his legal status as an entitlement to be conferred. Those who were successful in obtaining French citizenship were usually fluent in the French language, one of the factors that colonial administrators underlined as a key criterion. Many used their fluency to write repeatedly to the court of appeals when they perceived that their cases were taking a long time to resolve.84 Between 1934 and 1935, Courama worked as a physician’s assistant, serving in several colonies throughout FWA. He wrote letters and telegrams to the Court of Appeals in Dakar and to local court officers, claiming that due to his numerous “job transfers and incorrect understanding of the varied institutions [he had attended] made by the commissioners charged with his investigation,” he had yet to receive a response to his petition. He wrote at least three times to the office of the court’s clerk to find out his status.85 Courama received his certificate of possession of status in 1932; he lodged a request before the court to receive the recognition of French citizenship in 1934, and the court of appeals granted him the recognition of French citizenship in 1936.86 Despite the letter of the decree – which indicated European parentage as the deciding factor for recognition of French citizenship – colonial officials continued to inquire into petitioners’ moral and social behavior during their 84

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86

Such was the case for a man from French Soudan who identified himself in handwritten letters as Jean Nègre, a teacher at a school in Ségou, but whom colonial documents also identified with the surname of dit Diakité. Between 1934 and 1936 he wrote six times to the lieutenant governor of French Soudan and the attorney general of the Court of Appeals, lamenting “what was to be done to remedy this delay,” referring to the delay in the court declaring him a citizen. ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Letter from Mr. Jean Nègre, a teacher in Ségou, received November 15, 1934 by the commander of the district of Mopti and transmitted to the governor of Soudan, written October 31, 1934, document 1169; Letter from Mr. Jean Nègre, a teacher in Ségou, to the chief clerk at the Court of Appeals of FWA, received June 6, 1935, written May 1935, document 2080 PG; Letter from the administrator in chief of the colonies of Eboué and lieutenant governor of Soudan to the governor-general of FWA, May 23, 1935, letter 1012; Letter from Mr. Jean Nègre, a teacher in Ségou, to the attorney general of the Republic at the Court of Appeals in Dakar, received March 6, 1936, written January 17, 1936, document 180 PG; Letter from Mr. Jean Nègre, a teacher in Ségou, to the attorney general of the Republic at the Court of Appeals in Dakar, received March 6, 1936, written 29 February, 1936, document 881 PG. ANS, 350 M (184): Letter from Jean Courama, writing from his position as auxiliary doctor at Abidjan, to the attorney general of FWA, received November 3, 1932, written 28 October, 1932, document 3339 PG; Letter from Jean Courama, writing from his position as auxiliary doctor at Bonaké, to the attorney general at the Court of Grand Bassam, January 24, 1934; Letter from Jean Courama, writing from his position as auxiliary doctor at Tiassalé, to the chief clerk in Dakar, February 15, 1935; Telegram from Jean Courama to the prosecutor, seen by and transmitted to the administrator in chief in the district of Bingerville, August 27, 1935, stamped as document 716. ANS, 350 M (184): Indictment written by Attorney General Baptiste at the prosecutor’s office in Dakar, October 21, 1935; Letter from the attorney general to the minister of colonies, January 30, 1936, letter 898 PG.

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deliberations. In assessing the case of Martin Johan Camara dit Faber from Guinea, whom the court recognized as a citizen in 1936, the judge in Guinea wrote the attorney general in Dakar that the “information collected on morality [is] good and this métis made an excellent impression on me when he appeared before me in my office. I therefore give a favorable recommendation for the consideration of his request.”87 The judge had asked local colonial civil servants to query his former employers, the missionaries where he attended school, and African notables about his character, and all of them had reported that he was a serious employee with satisfactory conduct. A métis notable in the town of Dominghia stated that Camara dit Faber had been “raised by his relatives according to European habits and we all consider him as an intelligent and reserved European, of perfect politeness.”88 His character and reputation influenced officials to rule favorably in this case. Colonial officials also depended on and queried African interlocutors in the locales where petitioners had been born about the existence of relationships between the named biological mothers and presumed European fathers. In January 1937, for example, the Court of Appeals of FWA decreed Jean Louis Lirman dit Drame (born in Guinea but residing in Dakar) to be a French citizen.89 The court used a summary of eyewitness oral testimony from an African man named Amara Morlaye to corroborate Drame’s European parentage. The commander of the cercle in which Morlaye lived forwarded to the court the following statement attributed to Morlaye: I knew Jean Louis Darame [sic] dit Lirman [in the town of] Gaoual from 1928–1931. He was with his mother, the woman named Darame, and was at the Mamou orphanage. His mother always paid for his care. [He] was viewed as a responsible young man. In this region no one doubted that he was born of a European father since his complexion is fair and he was born following cohabitation between the mother and M. Lirman, European and assistant head of civil services.90

For Morlaye, Darame’s skin color and the timing of his birth after the cohabitation were evidence of filiation by a European man. He elaborated on the mother’s caretaking skills and her having sent and paid for her son to attend a

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ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Letter from the prosecutor of the Republic, the Court of First Instance of Conakry, to the attorney general at the Court of Appeals in FWA, September 25, 1933, letter 285/PG; Minutes from the district of Conakry signed by the commander of the district, Henri Montigny, February 27, 1932. ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Minutes from the district of Boffa, commander of the district of Boffa, April 13, 1932; Minutes from the district of Kankan, commander of the district of Kankan, May 8, 1932. ANS, 3 M 51 (184): Indictment from acting Attorney General Baptiste, January 7, 1937. ANS, 3 M 51 (184): Minutes from the district of Siguiri, French Guinea, completed by Emile Astruc, administrator first class, December 19, 1936; Letter from administrator first class Emile Astruc to the attorney general of French Guinea, December 23, 1936, letter 751/AS.

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missionary-run orphanage for boys. He provided the father’s name, with specific details of the father’s employment in the colonial government, and elaborated that mother and father lived in the same household for a period, after which Darame was born. Officers of the colonial court assessed these markers of complexion, eyewitness accounts of cohabitation, and the timing of birth as proof of filiation. For court officials, eyewitness testimony by African and European individuals that a certain French or European man (with the nationality defined) had a relationship with a certain African woman was sufficient to establish a petitioner’s birth from a person of European or French origin.91 Despite the court’s attempt to control the narrative about how to determine filiation and what surname to assign in French colonial legal documents, métis petitioners fought for the right to legally bear the surname of the man whom they considered to be their father. In French Guinea, Martin Johan Camara dit Faber insisted that he be allowed to bear the surname of the European man who raised him rather than the European man who was his biological father. In letters, he referred to himself as Faber Martin Johan. French authorities tried to establish a specific German man named Martin Johan – who had lived with the boy’s mother around the time of this birth – as his biological father. His mother had apparently had a relationship with Johan and given birth to her son, but the father left the colony shortly thereafter. She went on to live for years with another German man, with whom she raised her son and had three other children. Faber viewed this second man, Faber Heireich, as his father; he lived with him for much of his childhood and never even met his birth father. Having established that his biological father was a “white European,” whether it was one man or another did not matter to court officials, as the applicant had met the court’s criteria of establishing filiation.92 But it mattered to Faber. In the end, the decree declaring French legal status recorded the name of the petitioner as Martin Johan Camara dit Faber, retaining the names of both the biological father and the stepfather. Even after achieving French legal status, which conferred the right to bear a European family name, métis still had to struggle with local colonial personnel for the right to be acknowledged with these names in official documents. In 91

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ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Letter from the Court of First Instance of Conakry to the prosecutor of the Republic, September 25, 1933, document 286 PG; Letter from Attorney General Laues, head of the Court of Appeals of FWA, to the Ministry of Colonies, February 10, 1936, document 413/ PG; Letter from Faber Martin Johan to the chief clerk at the Court of Appeals, December 20, 1933; Letter from the prosecutor of the Republic to the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA, September 25, 1933, letter 285/PG Minutes from the district of Lagunes in Ivory Coast, stamped and signed by the commander of the subdivision of Tiassalé, November 17, 1934. ANS, 3 M 50 (184): Letter from the prosecutor of the Republic to the attorney general at the Court of Appeals of FWA, September 25, 1933, letter 285/PG.

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1936, a physician’s assistant in Guinea, known to colonial officials as Jean Tounkara, wrote to the colony’s governor and requested his family name to be written in French legal documents as “Tounkara Jean dit Bouchez.”93 The governor of Guinea refused his request, citing a 1924 law in FWA that banned any “indigène” from using a European family name on any act or document of the French État Civil. The attorney general explained that the law had been passed to prevent any indigène residing in the metropole from duping French authorities into thinking that they were a French citizen and to prevent harm to Europeans whose names may have been “illegally adopted.” In this case, the attorney general and governor-general – and officials who followed them – agreed that the use of “dit” before a European surname in French colonial documents was appropriate, because the family name of the petitioner was a piece of evidence in a métis petitioner’s claim for citizenship. Years after the passage of the September 1930 decree, newly recognized French citizens in FWA began to wage struggles with colonial officials to define and actualize what citizenship meant and the rights it conferred. Yet in FEA, it was only in 1936 that the promulgation of a similar citizenship decree for métis was issued. The Promulgation of Métis Citizenship Law in FEA, 1931–1936 In August 1931, a letter from a man identifying himself as Charles Hilaire Momi (dit Bobichon), who worked as an accountant in the colonial service in Ubangi-Chari, arrived at the desk of the governor-general of FEA.94 The letter began as follows: “being a métis of European roots, born to a woman named 93

94

ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Letter from the governor-general of FWA to the governor of French Guinea, October 15, 1935, letter 746 AP/I; Letter from the governor general of FWA to the lieutenant governors of the colonies and the district administrator of Dakar, November 18, 1935, letter 485 AP/I; Letter from the attorney general to the director of administrative and political affairs, September 10, 1935, letter 1648 AJ. The letter was originally addressed to the colony’s lieutenant governor, who forwarded Momi’s letter to the governor-general with a cover letter stamped “Confidential.” ANOM, FEA/ GGFEA/5D44: Letter from Momi Charles Hilaire (dit Bobichon), expeditionary accountant in service to the cabinet, to the governor of colonies and the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari, August 10, 1931; Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari to the governor-general of FEA, August 31, 1931, letter 237/AC. His biological father may have been Henri Bobichon, a French man who accompanied Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in the late nineteenth century in the first instances of European travel through interior regions of the Congo and Gabon. Bobichon became a colonial administrator, first stationed in Bangui in the late nineteenth century and later in Gabon. He also authored several works about French colonialism in FEA and was elected to the Academy of Colonial Sciences, a society of explorers, colonial administrators and other government and military personnel claiming to be a learned society on questions of colonialism and colonies. See https://academieoutremer.fr/academiciens/?aId= 293 and for his archives https://recherche-anom.culture.gouv.fr/archives/fonds/FRANOM_ 11043.

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Momi and of a legally unknown father of French origins, I have the honor of very respectfully soliciting your attention to be recognized as a French citizen.” In support of his claim for citizenship, he cited the September 1930 decree from the Official Journal of Senegal, the same law through which dozens of métis people in FWA had gained citizenship that year. French metropolitan and colonial government officials had intended for the decree to apply only to métis colonial subjects in FWA. Momi’s letter conceptualized métis as a category of person, whether in FWA or FEA, who shared a common genealogy and collective identity of European and African parentage, which endowed them with a common set of rights to French citizenship. Momi requested that the decree be applied in FEA and to him.95 Adhering to the requirements of the September 1930 decree, Momi attached documents to prove his possession d’état: a retroactive birth certificate signed by the mayor of Bangui; a certificate attesting to his employment as a writer, interpreter, and accountant over several years in various colonial administrative offices; a certificate of good morals and conduct, signed by the police commissioner of Bangui; and a certificate of native studies – the completion of primary school, which was the highest level of education available to Africans in the colony. These documents indicate tacit support by the regional colonial officials and civil servants for Momi’s request. The governor-general of FEA scribbled on Momi’s letter: The question of métis is an important question but treated differently in each colony. In FEA we have carefully avoided creating an official class, [which would be] contrary to French law that does not know differences in color. There is no métis. There are children who have been legally recognized [by their biological fathers] and those who have not been recognized, children with European legal status and those of indigène status.

The governor-general perceived himself as upholding the principle of French law, such that the concept of race and physical traits of skin color were not factors that differentiated a person’s legal status. Nevertheless, the governorgeneral was highly conscious of race and not at all color-blind. He expressed that his fundamental concern in applying the FWA law to FEA was that skin color varied greatly in Ubangi-Chari’s indigènes population, as some were of Arab or Fulani origin. Anyone whose “hue was less than ebony,” the governorgeneral worried, could fraudulently apply for and gain French citizenship. Denying Momi’s request, he maintained that the only process through which an indigène could change legal status from colonial subject to French citizen

95

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from Momi Charles Hilaire (dit Bobichon), expeditionary accountant in service to the cabinet, to the governor of colonies and the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari, August 10, 1931.

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was through a French man’s legal recognition of paternity or through existing naturalization laws and processes for people of colonial subject status. The lieutenant governor and head of the civil affairs office, Delmas, urged the governor-general that it was worth considering the applicability of the FWA decree for FEA and for Momi. Delmas argued that many of the hundreds of métis young people in the colony had made “a meritorious effort to acquire a level of education that assimilates them to us and that some among them are capable of rising to the occasion and meeting the social standards required of the status of French citizen to which they aspire.”96 Delmas insisted that colonial court personnel could establish that the petitioner’s unknown parent was French or European based on the physical traits of the petitioner, “which could easily be seen by the naked eye,” yet another intimation that race was biological. While Momi and the colonial officials used various terms such as “parentage” or “origin,” all parties involved in this epistolary circle were talking about race – a slippery category that encompassed physical traits, behaviors, and cultural attributes. Momi talked about his racial identity by way of African and European parentage, education, social status, and meritorious achievements and procured documentation from varied local colonial officials as evidence of these factors. The governor-general talked about skin color. Delmas defined “race” as determined by a combination of social and cultural factors and biology. Five years later, a colonial decree in FEA similar to the September 1930 decree in FWA did indeed acknowledge métis as a distinct category of people, who were entitled to the legal status of French citizen.97 Momi filed a petition for the recognition of French citizenship before the French court in Bangui on March 22, 1937, based on the September 1936 decree to determine the legal status of métis born in FEA. On July 7, 1937, the highest court of FEA in Brazzaville rendered the final judgment, approving Momi to receive “the recognition [of] the quality of French citizen.”98 96

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ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the lieutenant governor of Ubangi-Shari to the governor-general of FEA, August 31, 1931, letter 237/AC; Note regarding the conditions in FEA of métis children born to French fathers and indigenous mothers, March 3, 1931. Like the 1930 decree for FWA, the September 1936 decree establishing the status of métis born in FEA of legally unknown parents outlined that any individual born in FEA for whom one parent was legally unknown, but of presumably French or European origin, could petition for the recognition of the quality of French citizen. The presumption that the legally unknown parent was of French or European origin could be corroborated based on factors such as the petitioner’s family name and their French education, culture, upbringing, and situation in society. Décret du 15 Septembre 1936 fixant le statut des métis nés en FEA de parent demeurés légalement inconnus [Decree of September 15, 1936 guaranteeing the status of métis born in FEA from parents remaining legally unrecognized], Journal Officiel de la République française [Official Gazette of France], September 19, 1936, 1032. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the attorney general to the governor-general of FEA, October 20, 1937, letter 1.766/PG.

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Seeds for the conditions that led to the change in Momi’s legal status in 1937 had begun to germinate in FEA and metropolitan France years before. The socialist Popular Front coalition government was rising to power in France in 1935; the coalition emphasized social reforms in France and promised to “make the colonial system more humane” by expanding unspecified political and labor rights “without distinction of race.”99 In 1935, the acting governorgeneral of FEA, Maréchessou, raised the question of legislating French citizenship for métis in FEA in response to a letter written to him in 1935 by the Ministry of Colonies about projects to protect maternal and infant health in the region. Maréchessou noted that the “status” of métis children who were neither recognized nor provided for by their European fathers was a “problem” that necessitated government action.100 But the problem was on two fronts. First, métis children needed access to education in French ways and in professional skills to earn a living and to rise in social status. Second, there was “a juridical problem” that was a “a significant lacunae” in FEA compared to other colonies.101 However, colonial officials viewed the question of whether métis should hold French legal status as a thornier proposition. The governor-general sought to limit entrance into the French cité to only those who were “truly French,” a state of being that he thought could be established through assessing skin color and the person’s way of life and thinking. This vision fused biology and culture in shaping people’s legal status. He cautioned that it was not his intention to transform a multitude of children born to the colonies of unknown parents but whose native status is however clearly attested by their physical appearance into French citizens. However, we cannot refuse some of these children whose appearance even proves that they are from a European the ability to juridically recognize their origin.102

He collapsed the idea of holding French legal status as inseparable from looking “white”; people who “looked black” could not be French. However, because métis people bore some white physical traits, they had the intrinsic capacity to acculturate to French ways and acquire French legal status. Over the course of 1935, the governor-general, the lieutenant governors, and legal personnel of individual FEA colonies and jurists in France yet again 99

100 101 102

For more on the mission and organization of the commission, see Ghislaine Lydon, “The Unraveling of a Neglected Source: A Report on Women in Francophone West Africa in the 1930s [La re-découverte d’une source négligée: un rapport sur la condition des femmes en AOF dans les années 1930],” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 37, 147 (1997), 555–84. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies in response to letter 29-4/S, January 24, 1935, letter 149, docs. 26–9, 32–48. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies in response to letter 29-4/S, January 24, 1935, letter 149. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies in response to letter 29-4/S, January 24, 1935, letter 149.

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discussed extending the application of citizenship laws specifically for métis.103 The first drafts of the article specified the same two-step process. To obtain citizenship, an applicant had to prove their possession of status, to be assessed and conferred by administrative personnel, and their filiation to a person of French or European origin, to be assessed by colonial court personnel.104 But the final decree issued for FEA in September 1936 was not a verbatim replica from FWA; the administrative investigation and legitimization of the petitioner’s possession of status was omitted.105 The only requirement for the recognition of citizenship for métis in FEA was for an officer of the court to investigate and provide proof of the presumption of French or European parentage. It was the same legislation applicable to Indochina, but with the difference that the petitioner’s legally unknown parent could be of either French or European origin. According to the letter of the September 1936 decree, the pathway for métis to gain French citizenship in FEA was more generous than anywhere else in French Africa. In FEA, petitioners needed to prove “white” parentage of any European nationality. Gaining citizenship would be based purely on filiation, and filiation could be “proven” by cultural and social factors such as education, name, and social status – factors duplicated from similar decrees elsewhere in the French Empire. While the decree did not identify skin color as “proof” of European filiation, in their debates over the decree, colonial officials intimated that this was a factor to be assessed by officers of the court. Additionally, the highest colonial court in each colony could adjudicate and rule upon petitions; it was obligated only to inform – and not to involve – non-judiciary colonial personnel or the court of appeals for all of FEA in these proceedings.106 Joseph-François Reste, the new governor-general of FEA after 1936, was a career colonial civil servant and former minister of colonies. He exhibited sustained interest in the colonial state promulgating a law to allow métis in FEA to grain French citizenship. When he announced the new law to lieutenant governors in 1937, Governor-General Reste opined that the one-step legal process for

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ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Report of a presentation given at the state council regarding a decree on the legal status of métis born from parents not legally recognized by the state, January 1936; Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, July 3, 1941, letter 1041; Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, October 20, 1935, letter 859. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies in response to letter 29-4/S, January 24, 1935, letter 149. ANS, 23 G 22 (24): Decree from September 15, 1936 regarding the legal status of métis born in FEA to parents not legally recognized by the state in the Journal officiel de la République française, issue 220, September 19, 1936, document 54; ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Report to the president of the French Republic entitled “Projet de Décret” [Decree Project], ca. 1936. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/2125, Letter from the Ministry of Colonies to the Provisionary Government of The French Republic, letter JM/RB 49.

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assessing citizenship petitions best fitted the local conditions. He emphasized that the number of métis was smaller in FEA than elsewhere in the French Empire, since it was a “colony of exploitation” with few French institutions and French people on the ground. The French nation would be well served, he argued, by granting citizenship to people of any European parentage as this would increase the number of loyal populations in the region.107 Beyond this colonial rationale, why the French promulgated a lower bar for the recognition of French legal status in FEA may have been a concession to the activism of the Amicale and métis in Gabon, who had claimed the rights of French citizens for decades and forwarded a more capacious definition of who was métis in the first place. The acting lieutenant governor of Gabon at the time of the law’s passage, Louis Bonvin, criticized this law as opening the doors of French citizenship too easily to people who did not have sufficient affinity with French culture and ways of thinking.108 However, the question of who was “the right type” of métis to become a French citizen would be contested, not only by French government personnel but also by a host of métis individuals and organizations. Birthright or Merit? Contesting Citizenship in Courts of Opinion and in Colonial Courts in Libreville and Brazzaville The reaction to the 1936 decree was swift among members of the métis selfhelp organization, the Amicale des Métis (see Chapter 2). Joseph-Gaston Deemin, the president of the association, had a close but contentious working relationship with Governor-General Reste and the mayor of Libreville. Deemin immediately asserted himself as a crucial actor in the question of the implementation of the 1936 decree. The governor of Gabon had sent Deemin a letter in June 1935 to inform him that a draft of a decree that would extend the quality of French citizenship to métis in FEA had arrived on his desk and was being considered by the French government in FEA and France.109 On December 6, Deemin wrote to the governor thanking him; however, on December 7, 1936, Deemin wrote again, indicating that he was less than enamored of the implementation of the new law. He warned the lieutenant governor to guard against the “mass granting of 107

108 109

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, February 4, 1937; Letter from the Ministry of the State, interim, for the Ministry of Colonies, to the governor-general of FEA, April 13, 1937, letter 22; Letter from the governorgeneral of FEA to the delegate governor of Gabon, Bonvin, June 26, 1937, letter 42/3. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the delegate governor of Gabon, Bonvin, June 26, 1937, letter 42/3. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Minutes of the association of the general assembly for May 3, 1936, included in a letter from André Guillaume Olimbo, secretary of the association, the governor of Gabon c/o Mayor Assier of Pompignan, June 11, 1936, letter 4. ANC, GG 359, Letter from Deemin to the governor of Gabon c/o the head of the Estuary Department, December 6, 1936.

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French nationality to métis who were not deserving.”110 Only those who demonstrated merit, either due to their economic wealth or sound morals, should become citizens.111 Deemin viewed the role of president of the Amicale as legitimization for him to act as a gatekeeper, along with colonial personnel, to play an active role in weeding out claims to French legal status by individual métis. Deemin suggested the immediate formation of a six-person commission of colonial officials, French settlers, and himself to review all requests before they went before the court. The commission would advise the judges if individual petitions should be denied or affirmed. Deemin’s letter revealed the fault lines of class and social status that existed among métis in Libreville: people who had achieved personal wealth viewed themselves as the elite compared to those who were perhaps of lower socioeconomic status and had not pursued formal French education. The mayor of Libreville noted that such a commission would “prevent the entrance of undesirables, of which there are a few among métis as there are among other inhabitants in FEA, into the French family.”112 The acting governor of Gabon, Bonvin, criticized the authorities who had passed the 1936 decree, which he said surpassed even the desires of métis beneficiaries in FEA.113 Bonvin implied that few métis in FEA were sufficiently French to merit being designated as citizens. The debate over citizenship as an entitlement that was a métis person’s right versus a privilege selectively conferred by French colonial personnel or other métis would continue to be a point of contention among multiracial people, French colonial officials, and settlers, as well as African societies in FEA, for decades to come.114 Governor-General Reste’s reply to Deemin was deeply personal: I will not hide how much I found your letter to be painfully surprising, no matter the sentiments that drove you. Such a generous and humane and human act of the French

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112 113

114

ANC, GG 359, Letter from Deemin to the governor-general of Gabon c/o the head of the Estuary Department, December 7, 1936; ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, February 4, 1937, letter 199; Letter from the minister of colonies, April 13, 1937, letter 22. Historian David Gardinier and political scientist Douglas Yates suggest that Deemin may have been a descendant of British trader R. B. N. Walker, who was in Gabon from the late nineteenth century. Walker reportedly recognized his children and provided some financial support. I was not able to find any documentation about Deemin’s legal status or any informants for oral interviews who could attest to his legal status. Gardinier and Yates, Historical Dictionary of Gabon, 212–13. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from Deemin to the governor-general of Gabon c/o the head of the Estuary Department, December 7, 1936. ANC, GG539, Letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, Letter # 2083, December 9, 1936. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the delegate governor of Gabon, Bonvin, June 26, 1937, letter 42/3. ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/1637: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the minister of colonies, February 4, 1937, letter 199; Letter from the minister of colonies, April 13, 1937, letter 22.

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government does not lend itself to any criticism. The métis of Gabon, whom I know, are not inferior to those of Dahomey and Ivory Coast, whom I also know well.115

He conceded to Deemin that “some bad characters” existed among métis in FEA, but even for these undesirables, “we should offer the means for them to raise themselves.” Furthermore, the attorney general’s distinction that the citizenship law “recognized” rather than “imparted” French citizenship positioned citizenship as a birthright of métis, in contrast to Deemin’s interpretation that citizenship was earned through amassing wealth or demonstrating upstanding moral qualities. Yet other métis individuals in FEA sought to accelerate and simplify the implementation of the law. Momi dit Bobichon, referring to himself as Charles Momi, wrote a letter to the governor-general in Brazzaville in December 1936, complaining that the Bangui court’s processing of citizenship petitions was too slow.116 Like Deemin, Momi first thanked the governor for the passage of 1936 métis citizenship law and “all that you have done for us and for all that you will still do.” He complained that several métis had placed requests, but the court of Bangui had thus far maintained “a prolonged silence,” and applicants were wondering what had become of their requests. Reste responded to Momi that the decree would be enforced; court officials had experienced some difficulties in interpreting and implementing the law, but the cases in their docket should advance shortly.117 Some French colonial administrators and some métis alike continued to measure the moral qualities, personal wealth, and French cultural competency of individual petitioners in an effort to limit the numbers of people who gained entrance into the registry of French citizenry.118 Rather than resolve “the métis question,” the 1936 citizenship law thus fomented further contestation over whether citizenship should be based on filiation, privilege, and shifting ideas about race and cultural competency – whether it was a legal status to be conferred on the basis of jus sanguinis or earned through establishing affinity

115 116 117

118

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the Cabinet of Political Affairs and GovernorGeneral Reste to Deemin, February 4, 1937, letter 291. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the president of the Association Amicale of Métis of Ubangi-Shari to the governor-general of FEA, December 9, 1936, letter 52. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Circular to the prosecutors of the Republic in Brazzaville, Libreville, and Bangui applying the decree of September 15, 1936 regarding the legal status of métis in FEA, February 13, 1937, letter 203/PG; Note from the prosecutor’s office to the attorney general of FEA, February 20, 1937; Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the head of the department of Niari, March 12, 1937, letter 557. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Circular to the prosecutors of the Republic in Brazzaville, Libreville, and Bangui applying the decree of September 15, 1936 regarding the legal status of métis in FEA, February 13, 1937, letter 203/PG; Note from the prosecutor’s office to the attorney general of FEA, February 20, 1937; Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the head of the department of Niari, March 12, 1937, letter 557.

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to evolving conceptions of Frenchness and French culture. The differences of opinion continued in court deliberations and legal processes that followed petitioners’ claims. A 1937 report by the attorney general FEA responding to the governorgeneral’s inquiry about the status of the implementation of the law provides a precious glimpse into how métis people responded to the 1936 decree in the first year after it was issued, who the applicants were, and how the recognition of French citizenship was obtained.119 This report lists the names, locations of birth and residence, and the current status of the applications. The decree had outlined that the highest court of FEA, the Court of Appeals of FEA in Brazzaville, was to render final judgment of French legal status, yet it was the colonial courts in each colony that deliberated upon and issued a decision about the requests. Surviving archival records from the colonial courts throughout FEA and of the highest court in Brazzaville are thin, and 1937 is the only year for which such records have survived. Table 4 enumerates, by colony, the number of petitions filed, the completed investigations, the number of petitions recommended for the recognition of French legal status, and judgments issued declaring French legal status (See page 142). According to the report, 177 adult métis across FEA requested French legal status between 1936 and 1937. Ninety-three people, about fifty-two percent of the petitioners, were successful and attained French legal status. While the number of métis in FEA was smaller than in FWA, it appears that métis who petitioned for French legal status in FEA attained this status at higher rates than those in FWA. This may have had to do with several factors, including the more complex two-step process in FWA. What becomes apparent is that many of the initial petitions never reached the later stages of an investigation. For nearly all the colonies, a petitioner’s case was almost guaranteed to receive a court ruling for French legal status if the investigation had been successfully concluded. For cases with uncompleted investigations, there were several possible reasons: the required documents and witnesses never materialized or applicants dropped out of the process. This issue was particularly acute in locations such as Brazzaville, Congo; PortGentil, Gabon, and the colonies of Ubangi-Chari, in which only forty-five percent – or less – of the initial requests resulted in completed investigations. Métis children in Catholic and colonial state-run residential schools may have acceded to French citizenship in groups and faced fewer hurdles than adults petitioners. Legal proceedings for these children could have been initiated by colonial officials and missionaries acting in the capacity of socalled “child protection societies,” who bypassed the involvement and consent 119

For more on challenges and limitations of source materials for the history of French Equatorial Africa, see Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights, 17–18.

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Table 4 Legal petitions for attainment of French citizenship in FEA from September 15, 1936 to October 20, 1937120 Colony and Court

First Degree Court of Libreville (Gabon) Justice of the Peace in Port-Gentil (Gabon) First Degree Court of Brazzaville (Congo) Justice of the Peace in Pointe-Noire (Congo) Justice of the Peace in Fort Lamy (Chad) First Degree Court of Bangui (OubanguiChari) Total

Number of Requests

Completed Number of Requisitions Investigations (Recommendations to Recognize Citizenship)

Legal Judgments Recognizing Citizenship

61

61

61

61

8

1

1

3

74

34

20

12

4

4

4

4

6

3

3

3

24

10

10

10

177

113

99

93

of mothers. This point is suggested in the autobiography of Andrée Bloiun, born in Ubangi-Shari and the daughter of Josephine Wouassimba from the Belgian Congo and Joseph Gerbillat from France (who did not recognize her). Bloiun resided in a mission station in Brazzaville when the September 15, 1936 decree came into effect.121 She had lived there since she was two years 120

121

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from the attorney general and director of judicial affairs for FEA to the governor-general of FEA, October 20, 1947, letter 756/PG; Investigation #4 of Mr. Saint-Blancart, student administrator at the mayor’s office of Libreville, sent to the governor-general of FEA from the governor of Gabon, February 15, 1938. Bloiun granted an interview to Jean McKellar but later sued to block its publication on the grounds that the account used a psychological lens to frame her life, relationships, and consciousness – rather than her political activism. Scholars and writers have disagreed on and debated whether the publication reflects Blouin’s direct words or how McKellar heavily edited them. André Blouin in collaboration with Jean McKellar, My Country Africa: Autobiography of the Black Passionaria (New York, Praeger Publishers, 1983), 4–5. For more on the disagreement regarding the publication, see Karen Bouwer, Chapter 3 “Andrée Blouin: A Sister among Brothers in Struggle” in Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 71–99.

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old, when Joseph had removed her from her mother’s village. Josephine maintained a relationship with and visited Bloiun at the mission on two occasions, berating the nuns on one such visit for their malnourishment and physical abuse of her daughter; however, ultimately she had little control over her child’s person or legal status.122 In 1937, nuns informed the sixteen-year old Blouin and the other twenty-one métisses girls there that they were to receive French citizenship and needed to choose a name for themselves to appear on legal documents, on the condition that it could not be the name of their father. On the day that citizenship was to be acknowledged, the girls were taken to the city hall, where they appeared before a room of colonial personnel, including the mayor and police commissioner alongside a judge.123 Determined to maintain the name of her father, whom she had met and with whom her mother was sometimes in contact, Blouin claimed his surname when called upon to declare her name, dropping the “t” from how it was spelled in compliance with the restriction. As relayed in the account, on September 11, 1937, judgment #20 of an unspecified court declared Andrée Madeleine Gerbilla to be a French citizen. The abysmal state of surviving records of colonial-era Congolese and Gabonese court records does not allow for the investigation of whether this en-masse adjudication of French citizenship for métis children residing in French institutions was an aberration or commonplace. The decrees allowing for métis to accede to French citizenship opened an attainable avenue for African girls and women to obtain French citizenship, a legal status that few females in colonial-era Africa held. For Madagascar, Violaine Tisseau found that thirty-eight percent of métis who obtained French citizenship from 1931 to 1957 via the 1931 French citizenship decree promulgated there specifically for métis were women.124 Emmanuelle Saada has characterized the “métis question” in French discourse as a problem of French men and métis sons; similarly, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch chronicled that colonial administrators in FWA framed citizenship laws as “applying only to natives of the masculine sex.” Owen White has argued regarding FWA that métis women “seem to have been far less likely [than men] to make use of the decree of September 1930.”125 These statements appear to be appropriate for FWA, as only nine of the 139 métis who obtained French citizenship according to the September 6, 1930 decree between 1931 and 1938 were 122 123 124 125

Blouin in collaboration with McKellar, My Country Africa, 27–42. Blouin in collaboration with McKellar, My Country Africa, 53–5. The total number of métis who obtained French citizenship in these years was 1,454. Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina, 177–8. Saada, Empire’s Children, 3; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Nationalité et citoyenneté en Afrique Occidentale Français,” Journal of African History 42, 2 (2001), 292; White, Children of the French Empire, 46–50.

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women. However, among the 177 métis who submitted petitions for the recognition of French citizenship in FEA between 1936 and 1937, forty-six (about twenty-six percent of applicants) were women. Of the sixty-four métis who became French citizens in Gabon specifically in 1937, twenty-eight (about forty-three percent) were women.126 The higher numbers in FEA, particularly Gabon, compared to FWA may have been related to the legacy of métis women in Libreville having high levels of French education and literacy as well as political activism, dating to the early decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, colonial officials and métis associations alike continued to debate the question of French citizenship status and rights for métis in the years immediately after the law’s promulgation as a quandary of delineating métis men’s legal, political, and economic status. In this regard, male colonial officials and the male leadership of métis associations maintained a patriarchal framing of citizenship. Impact of French Citizenship Laws for Métis in FWA and FEA The 1930 and 1936 métis citizenship laws represented significant new pathways for people born in Africa, métis men and women, to attain the legal title of “French citizen.” This attainment changed the processes of French nationality law and what it meant to be “French.” In theory, people born in subSaharan African who held colonial subject status could petition to become French citizens through naturalization laws that opened French citizenship beyond the legal frameworks of jus soli (birth on French soil) or jus sanguinis (bloodlines), which that regulated the hexagon and territories in the French Caribbean. However, naturalization laws for Africans were restrictive and the criteria were constantly changing.127 An American observer noted in 1945 that “only thirty-six blacks” in FEA were French citizens. In FWA between 1937 and 1943, forty-three out of 233 applicants – presumably “black” – who applied for French citizenship obtained the status.128 Yet between 1930 and 1944, a total of 372 métis in FWA had obtained recognition of 126 127

128

For more on a métisse woman named Flavie N’Guia who obtained citizenship according to the 1936 law in Libreville, see Jean-Baptiste, “A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man.” Criteria for Africans to be eligible for French citizenship changed vastly between 1914 and 1946. Some of the criteria included having won a Legion of Honor for military service, commendable military service in World War I, marrying a French woman, fluency in the French language, and French cultural competency (see Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Nationalité et citoyenneté en Afrique Occidentale Français”). The processes of naturalization in Algeria, a settler colony, differed from that in sub-Saharan French Africa; cases from Algeria were adjudicated by the Ministry of Justice, while cases in sub-Saharan Africa were facilitated by the Ministry of Colonies. Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 216–25. These statistics are cited in Cooper, Africa in the World, 28–9, 38–9.

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French citizenship based on the September 1930 decree.129 For FEA, political scientist Robert Yates and historian David Gardinier note that a total of 400 métis in Gabon alone obtained French citizenship based on the September 1936 decree.130 Given that French colonial censuses estimated the population of métis in Gabon as 1,200 people in 1935, this figure means that about onethird of métis became French citizens under this special legislation. The 1930 and 1936 decrees opened further debate, not only about the conferral of French legal status and to whom and how it should be conferred but also the rights and privileges for métis that came with citizenship. Métis people in FEA and FWA who obtained French citizenship based on the 1930 and 1936 decrees expected that obtaining citizenship would bring increased access to French education, well-paying jobs, and material conditions that mirrored those of European people who lived in their regions, so that they could rise above the living standards of African communities around them.131 The 1937 report by the Guernut Commission – a six-month inquiry in which French political leaders purported to take an extensive survey of social conditions and “the needs of legitimate aspirations populations living in the colonies” – involved a questionnaire called the “Survey of Métis,” which was sent to administrators in each colony. This report also provides some insights.132 Regarding Senegal, French writers of the report concluded that there was no correlation between a métis person’s citizenship and their socioeconomic status; in other words, gaining French citizenship under the 1930 decree did not result in a person’s increased income or material living conditions. The change in legal status did confer some advantages that were not “negligible: the right to attend French language schools to obtain diplomas in French standards, the right to serve their military service in the metropolitan troops, and finally the right to become civil servants of the European cadres levels.”133 Yet, though these were the rights of citizenship, French colonial society and the state did not allow métis to exercise them fully.134

129 130 131 132 133 134

ANOM, FM 1 AFFPOL/2125: Note regarding “the problem of the métis” from the minister of colonies, December 12, 1945. See also White, Children of the French Empire, 146. David Gardiner, Historical Dictionary of Gabon, 2nd ed (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 222–3. Commission Guernut: Report addressed to the official enquiry in the overseas territories, 3–4, 1937, ANOM, FM Guernut 81. For more on the mission and organization of the commission, see Lydon, “Unraveling of a Neglected Source,” 555–84. ANOM, FM Guernut 81: Commission Guernut: Report addressed to the official enquiry in the overseas territories, 4, 1937. ANS, O-715 (31): Letter from the governor of Senegal to the governor-general of FWA, August 11, 1938.

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In Gabon, métis who became citizens under the 1936 decree ran into the limits of their particular status as French citizen, finding that racialized inequities in economic and social rights existed between them and colonial settlers of French metropolitan legal status. Métis citizens faced barriers in purchasing land or obtaining permits to participate in the colony’s lumber industry and received less pay for civil service jobs than did French colonial settlers who hailed from metropolitan France. Colonial officials in Gabon who responded to the Guernut Survey acknowledged that being listed as having French legal status on the colony’s registry of the État Civil did little to change the quotidian lives of métis: “These new citizens enjoy only a title [of citizen] and in practice this new quality brought to them only disadvantages.”135 They now paid the higher tax rate charged to Europeans rather than the lower rate for those of indigène status. Yet, those employed as civil servants still held the status of cadre indigène instead of the status of European that would earn them higher salaries and benefits. Further, the report conveyed, “They all claim that there is no difference being a French citizen of color and a [colonial] subject.”136 The 1930 and 1936 decrees initiated new contestations about the status of métis not only in relation to French colonial society and state but also within African communities. Métis sought to attain both the title of French legal status and its accompanying rights, access to economic and work opportunities, and high-quality French education. Métis citizens maintained that the French state and society had duties and obligations toward them. They complained that they had received the title of citizen but not the benefits that came with it; in addition, female and male citizens held distinct entitlements. On the other hand, French colonial employees stated that having been granted the title of “citizen,” métis had duties and obligations to uphold the interests of the French colonial state. Métis in FEA and FWA responded to the limits of their citizenship with increased activism around the attendant rights of this status. These contestations increased during and in the aftermath of World War II. The winds of social, political, and economic change prompted a cacophony of claims by various constituencies in Africa and African-descended constituencies in the French Antilles about the imbrication of race, children and childhood, and legal status.

135 136

ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from Mr. Saint-Blancat, “Métis problem: investigation on Métis,” August 15, 1938, letter 1957. ANOM, FEA/GGFEA/5D44: Letter from Mr. Saint-Blancat, “Métis problem: investigation on Métis,” August 15, 1938, letter 1957.

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4

“Odd Notions of Race” Reconfiguring Rights of/to Citizenship and Children, 1939–ca. 1950

Between December 1943 and January 1944, a letter from the president of the Mutuality of Métis of French Soudan in FWA, Pierre Caba, circulated among the highest levels of Free France governance who were scattered in Algiers and London, including Charles de Gaulle.1 The Mutuality was a self-help organization, with the aims of gathering together people born of French or European fathers and African mothers and seeking remedies for “the problem of métis.” Caba defined the problem as how the métis was “neither black nor white, neither European nor African” and that this state of not fully belonging to either group rendered métis in an untenable social and legal status. Knowing that the “highest people in charge of the French Empire” were about to meet in Brazzaville, Congo, in FEA, the Mutuality decided it was time to publicize an accompanying article – “The Point of View of Métis” – with the intention that it would attract the attention of the French government officials in attendance. In the article, the Mutuality claimed specific rights for métis. The article critiqued that even when a métis person had gained legal recognition of the qualité de français, they didn’t fully “enjoy” the benefits of this status because in reality only two categories existed, “black or white.” A métis person who was declared a French citizen in fact experienced life as a black person, as an indigène. Examples included that métis children who lived in “orphanages” still went to schools with and received the same level of education as indigènes; métis civil servants received the same salaries and possibilities for promotion as indigènes. However, the article continued, all métis – whether they had French nationality or not – had the desire for “a superior social status” and should be integrated into the French community, implying that the French 1

Centre d’Archive d’Outre Mer (hereafter ANOM), FM 1affpol 3406/6: “The Point of View of Métis,” Letter from the Mutuality of Métis of French Sudan to René Pleven, Commissioner of Colonies, Algiers, December 13, 1943; letter arrival 8188/AP; Dispatch slip from the cabinet of General de Gaulle, Algiers, to the commissioner of colonies, Fromentin School, January 18, 1944, letter 1356/CAB/G; Letter from the commissioner of colonies to the chief of staff of the Office of Charles de Gaulle, January 28, 1944, letter 4764; Letter from the commissioner of colonies, Political Affairs Division, to the chief of staff of the Office of Charles de Gaulle, les Glycines, Algiers, February 7, 1944, letter 4890.

147

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should categorize the métis as “white” in the racialized legal and social categories of French colonial rule. The article insisted that the French actualize the “deep aspirations” of the métis: “For the métis of European stock, recognized legally as such must be integrated purely and simply in the French community” and “with all the advantages that such a designation should entail” for them.2 Caba acknowledged that there could be political consequences and protest from evolved natives (indigènes évolués) if the French government adopted the proposed solution. However, “There will be no need to justify this position. It is natural and the natives will understand, especially given that that this takes away nothing from their own rights.”3 He invited “the highest powers of the administration” to promulgate laws that would “definitively settle these problems.”4 In calling out how métis citizens – in similar fashion to Africans who were not citizens – could not access French social and economic resources, Caba’s letter and the accompanying article called out antiblack racism and challenged the white supremacy that was the foundation of colonial rule. Yet, in requesting that all métis be fully integrated into the category of whiteness and availed of all of its attendant rights, the Mutuality’s aspirations reified rather than decoupled citizenship from whiteness and indicated an investment in the maintenance of white supremacy. The statements parsed out claims to citizenship rights by black elites as legitimate, yet distinct from the entitlement to citizenship status and rights held by métis by virtue of the whiteness they embodied but which colonial society had still to recognize fully. The wartime acting commissioner of French colonies, Henri Laurentie, sent a letter in response: “The painful importance of the question of métis” had not escaped him, and that it was part of the agenda to be addressed at the conference in Brazzaville, where “our colonial doctrine” was to be defined.5 Caba’s letter and the French response illustrate one of the many racial and multiracial visions, some forwarded by métis and others about métis, of various historical actors during and in the aftermath of World War II. Such visions sparked contestations that recast the relationship between race and citizenship, and the rights of citizenship, in French Africa. This chapter explores the ways in which conceptions about race and multiraciality, as articulated by and about métis, were central to (re)defining the meaning and practice of French citizenship and social welfare of childhood in French Africa during and in the aftermath of World War II, from 1939 to 1950. 2 3 4 5

ANOM, FM 1affpol 3406/6: “The Point of View of the Métis,” 4. ANOM, FM 1affpol 3406/6: “The Point of View of the Métis,” 4. ANOM, FM 1affpol 3406/6: “The Point of View of the Métis,” 3–4. ANOM, FM 1affpol 3406/6: Letter from the commissioner of colonies, Henri Laurentie, to the president of the Mutuality of Métis of French Sudan c/o the governor-general of FWA, December 28, 1943, letter 4279.

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These were years of increased scale and plurality regarding how several constituencies in FEA and FWA coalesced to forward various racial identities, from which they called attention to the racism of French colonial rule and crafted liberatory aspirations. Occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, and with its infrastructure, economy, and morale devasted, France was a nation divided and in crisis. These factors carried over into the French Empire, as FWA was governed by the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime from 1940 to 1943, and FEA became the center of Free France. This chapter focuses primarily on Brazzaville, the capital city of Free France for much of World War II and the center of contestations regarding the vexing and shifting “métis question.” It chronicles how what was debated, decided, and rejected there reverberated elsewhere in FEA and FWA. For the French – even as Vichy, Free France, and post-Nazi occupation factions competed with each other about who were the legitimate government leaders – “the métis question” was critical in the efforts to maintain the French Empire in years of precarity. Félix Eboué, a black man from the French Caribbean colony of Guyana, and therefore a French citizen of metropolitan status, was the governor-general of FEA from 1940 to 1944. He advocated for changes that he thought would facilitate the social and economic development of French Africa and in turn stabilize the French rule. For him, factors such as the 1930 and 1936 decrees reserved for métis to accede to French citizenship and claims by métis in FEA that they were superior to black Africans were what he called “odd notions of race.”6 He viewed the decrees and colonial state subsidies for the education of métis children as untenable policies that created differentiation between blacks and métis, whom he saw equally as indigènes. Some French colonial officials agreed with Eboué’s critiques, yet others in Vichy and Free French Africa alike advocated for maintaining or expanding the legal and social entitlements for métis. Yet, even after FWA and FEA were united under Free France rule, Eboué’s critiques continued to reverberate, sparking shifts in the wards of the state and child welfare policies for métis children to encompass black and métis children. Métis constituencies in FEA and FWA forwarded a range of multiracial identities and varied claims to legal status and quotidian rights, which sparked contestations with and within the post-1946 French government and with French-educated black Africans. In wartime and post-wartime Brazzaville, under the auspices of a newly activist Amicale of Métis, the first generation of métis who had obtained French legal status based on the 1936 French 6

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Note regarding the ordinance project creating the Charity Protecting Métis of the Empire, General Directorate of Administrative and Political Affairs, April 11, 1941.

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citizenship decree lobbied the local colonial personnel to actualize their aspirations for how their particular citizenship status should impact the daily lives of métis men, women, and children. The Amicale leadership accused the French of racism in denying them the same social rights as white French metropolitan citizens, and they launched campaigns for access to French education for métis children as well as food rations and economic opportunities. Unlike the Mutuality of Métis in French Soudan, who articulated that métis were “white,” the Amicale in Brazzaville maintained that a plural identity of métis as black and white rendered them intermediaries who would bridge African and European societies. These demands intersected with the increased mobilization of various collectives of several ethno-language groups in French Africa, who came together around a shared identity as black (noire). They called attention to antiblack racism of French colonialism, and of métis. Seizing the moment during the war and after 1945 in which colonialism was increasingly scrutinized internationally, a diverse array of collectives and individuals in French Africa demanded an end to harsh aspects of colonial rule and opportunities to better direct the present and future lives of black Africans toward prosperity. The French had to make concessions. New laws and a new French constitution of 1946, drafted with Africans having a seat at the table in their creation, declared all people formerly categorized as indigènes as now exercising the rights of citoyens and that colonies were now territories in the French Union. In this new political unit, which ostensibly replaced the French Empire, Africans would be able to exercise some direction over political and economic affairs in a new framework of equality with France. Yet, in putting these tenets into quotidian practice, conversations and contestations about how racism and colorism shaped citizenship and the welfare of children abounded from Brazzaville to Libreville and St. Louis. In these towns, newly elected black delegates to legislative assemblies emphasized the sacrifices and efforts they had made to liberate and sustain France and demanded equality in social and legal rights. In the process, they marshaled newly established legislative oversight of territorial budgets to reconsider the funding of educational opportunities for métis children that had excluded black children. In assembly debates, elected delegates argued that such measures as advocated for by métis and maintained by white colonial officials were racist and that equal investment in black and métis children fulfilled the French promise of equality for all in the French Union. Others argued that French government funding for the education of children fathered by – yet neglected by – French men was a critical moral component of France’s investment in more prosperous African futures. To the extent that delegates viewed the legal status of métis and child welfare subsidies for métis children as aligned with or antithetical to the new landscape of universal and nonracist opportunities for

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advancement in the French Union, delegates voted to either maintain or defund schools and scholarships that were exclusively for métis children. FWA: Race and Multiracialism in the Vichy Years, 1940–1943 France was a nation divided and warring within itself for much of the 1940s, as was the colonial administration of the French Empire; and as such, métis in FWA faced different contexts and possibilities than in FEA. After Germany invaded it in the summer of 1940, the Third Republic dissolved when its Prime Minister Phillipe Pétain signed an armistice with the Nazis and ushered in the collaborationist Vichy regime, which controlled metropolitan France and much of the French Empire. The Vichy rule in FWA endured until December 1942, whereas colonial officials in FEA revolted that summer and decided to remain loyal to Allied forces.7 Shifting concepts of race – specifically racism – were at the core of Vichy ideologies and strategies for governance, both in the metropole and in the areas of the French Empire under its control. The National Revolution, the ideology of Pétain’s rule, included the new government slogan “Work, Family, and Homeland,” which would ostensibly allow France to thrive while under occupation and retain its former glory. The tenets included the promotion of conservative Catholic values, anti-Semitism, pronatalism, and the rejection of Republicanism and parliamentarism.8 New legislation targeting people of the so-called “Jewish race” ushered in what historians of France have argued was the explicit “racialization of French nationality law” as more than 100,000 people in Algeria and metropolitan France were stripped of their French citizenship.9 Historians have argued that Vichy-era administrators under the mandate of Pétain’s National Revolution ideology were more racist than prior French colonial regimes and ushered in a “new, harsher brand of colonialism” in the regions of West Africa, Indochina, Madagascar, and French Caribbean under their control.10 Unlike prior colonial regimes, which had forwarded the 7 8 9

10

Pierre Ramognino, “L’Afrique de l’Ouest sous Pierre Boisson,” in L’Empire colonial sous Vichy, eds. Jacques Cantier and Éric Jennings (Paris : Odile Jacob, 2004), 75–89. Éric Jennings, “La politique colonial de Vichy,” in Cantier and Jennings, L’Empire colonial sous Vichy, 24–6. Weil, How To Be French, 103–13. Yerri Urban, “Race et nationalité dans le droit colonial français (1865–1955),” PhD diss., Université de Bourgogne, 2009, 495–518. For a comprehensive analysis of denaturalization and Jewish people in Vichy-era France, see Claire Zalc, Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). See, for example, Catherine Akpo-Vaché, L’OAF et la Seconde Guerre mondiale: la vie politique, septembre 1939–octobre 1945 (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1996); Ruth Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xv; Ousmane Ahmed Mbaye, “Les associations patriotiques en FWA durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (juin 1940–octobre 1945),” PhD diss., École nationale des

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rhetoric of Africans’ potential assimilation to French culture and the notion that a small number could become putative French citizens, Vichy metropolitan and colonial government officials drew a sharp line. Ruth Ginio argues that for the Vichy government, Africans who held titular French citizenship status were not “truly” French, since they were black and race trumped any expressions of cultural affinity and formal legal status. However, the encounter between African populations and Vichy colonial rule was “complex and sometimes ambivalent.”11 Ginio’s framework of complexity and ambivalence is an apposite lens through which to analyze how Vichy-era colonial officials viewed and interacted with métis. Vichy-era administrators’ conceptualizations of and policies toward métis in French Africa, particularly métis children, paint a nuanced and troubling portrait of French articulations of race, racism, and sexualized racism. Vichy administrators conceptualized métis as special – yet sought to direct their loyalty and utility toward the regime through shaping their moral consciousness toward Catholic mores. In a 1941 letter, High Commissioner Boisson opined: “This métis problem, one of the most serious that exists in the consciousness of colonizing nations, had not yet received, at least in FWA, a satisfying solution” in the area of “education and of formation of the character” of métis children.12 When the education of métis children was not attended to, “young métis girls too often slip into prostitution, more or less disguised.” Boisson wanted colonial governors to increase funding and elevate the work that missionaries were undertaking across FWA with métis children, particularly girls.13 The education of métisses girls in domestic arts and proper womanhood under the tutelage of nuns, to create proper wives for African men, became the central policy and funding focus of “the métis question” for Vichy-era administrators. The office of the governor-general in Dakar was to subsidize the budgets of individual colonies and deemed Catholic missionaries to be the most natural and suitable deliverers of intellectual and moral education and care for métis children. Boisson requested the disbursement of funds that he thought were held in an account of the French Bank of Africa, an amount of

11 12

13

chartes (2005); Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 2–3. Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked, xiv–xv. Archive Nationale du Senegal (hereafter ANS), 18 G (221): Letter from the governor-general, High Commissioner of FWA, to the secretary of states in the colonies, Directorate of Economic Affairs, Vichy, June 9, 1941, document 4.193 FI/A. ANS, 2 H (17) 26: Letter to the governor-general, High Commissioner of FWA, from the lieutenant governor of Senegal, December 20, 1941, letter 3805 APA/1.

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2.4 million francs, to his budget for the construction in Dakar of an orphanage school for métis girls and a boarding house for unmarried métis young women who worked in the town.14 Conscious of the economic difficulties amid the war, he added that with funding from the Bank of Africa, his policies would not be a financial burden to the metropole. Because of the chaos caused by the war, French officials couldn’t determine what offices controlled the funds and the full amount of funds promised never arrived, despite letters and telegrams sent to France.15 In preferring that the care of métis children be conferred to Catholic missionaries, Vichy-era colonial officials realigned FWA-wide polices to follow those forwarded in Senegal, once an outlier for its lack of state-managed “orphanages.” In Senegal, Vichy-era administrators maintained the wards of the administration policies, and the number of wards fluctuated between twenty-four and thirty children per year. These numbers were about the same as in the 1930s and were still a very small percentage of all métis children.16 While government officials in Senegal preferred Catholic residential education, for reasons not stated, the administrators increased the number of children designated as wards who lived with African individuals and on whose behalf the authorities transmitted monthly welfare payments. A third of wards during these years lived in African households.17 The caregivers who received welfare payments were men and women, mothers, mothers’ kin, and nonblood relatives whom 14

15

16

17

ANS, 18 G (221): Directorate of Finances, Note regarding construction at the orphanage run by the Sisters of Immaculate Conception, no date, document 1329 S/G; Telegram from Commanding Officer Platon of FWA, April 16, 1942; Letter from the high commissioner of FWA, Directorate of Finances, to the secretary of state in the colonies, Vichy, June 9, 1941, document 4.193 FI/A; Telegram signed by Platon, September 18, 1941, document 2.750. ANS, 18 G (221): Note from the Directorate of Political Affairs to the inspector general of education, January 5, 1941, letter 32 AP/I; Letter from the governor-general, High Commissioner of FWA, to the Directorate of Economic Affairs, Vichy, June 9, 1941, document 4.193 FI/A; Letter from the Directorate of Finances, P. Boisson, to the secretary of state in the colonies, October 9, 1941, letter 8167 FI/A; Letter from the Directorate of Finances to the secretary of state in the colonies, Directorate of Economic Affairs, Vichy, January 19, 1942, letter 906 FI/A; Telegram from Colonies–Vichy to Haussaire–Dakar, April 15, 1942, document 1329; Minutes from the Office of the High Commissioner of FWA, Directorate of Finances, to the governor of Senegal, June 8, 1942, letter 281 AP/I; Letter from the general director of political, administrative, and social affairs to the governor-general, High Commissioner of FWA, November 16, 1942, letter 3470 AP/2. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the mother superior of the orphanage to the secretary general, June 23, 1941; Decision granting a subvention to the orphanage of N’Dar Toute, Office of Finances, July 14, 1941, decision 1972; Telegram from the cercle of Lower Senegal to the governor of Senegal, General Secretariat, December 23, 1941, document 6571; Note for the head of the Office of Finances from the governor, December 29, 1941, document 7.463 APA/I; Letter from the mother superior, director of the N’Dar Toute orphanage, to the governor-general of Senegal, arrived June 19, 1942, letter 13971/APA. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the General Secretariat to Mr. Arona Ba, retired police sergeant c/o the administrator in chief of Lower Senegal, January 18, 1939, letter 81/AG; Letter from the Police Commission in St. Louis to the administrator in chief of Lower Senegal, August

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colonial officials assessed as sufficiently accommodating of French cultural ways of living, who would send métis children to school and raise them to be loyal subjects. Yet, it was in FEA that the most significant debates about race and multifractality took place, debates that would meaningfully shift multiracial thought and practice in French Africa for decades to come. FEA: Félix Eboué and New Native Social Policy, 1940–1943 As metropolitan France fell to the Nazis, in the summer of 1940, Charles de Gaulle denounced as illegitimate the government in metropolitan France that had signed the armistice, put out a call for the French to continue to fight, and claimed leadership of Free France. With metropolitan France and nearly all of the French Empire under Vichy control, this was a shallow leadership of tenuous legitimacy. The situation changed when French Equatorial Africa allied with de Gaulle and his forces in a show of support initiated by Félix Eboué, the governor of Chad. De Gaulle rewarded this loyalty by appointing Eboué as the new governor-general of FEA. Upon arriving in Brazzaville, Eboué formed the Council for the Defense of the Empire, which aimed to wrest control of other colonies in French Africa from Vichy. Brazzaville in French Congo was the capital of both FEA and Free France from 1940 to 1943. Thus, as Eric Jennings argues, “the heart of Free France was not in London, as standard accounts would have us believe, but rather in Free French Africa,” in the “colonies without Motherlands.”18 Eboué’s leadership resulted in reconsideration of racial thought and practice in Free France and Free French Africa. Eboué was a black French citizen from the French Antilles, a descendant of slaves, and a critical figure without whom Free France forces would not have consolidated. Eboué laid bare the colorism in the supposedly color-blind French governance and society by shining a spotlight on how colonial policies conceived of métis as more “French” than others born in Africa due to their skin color.19 For Eboué, métis were indigènes by virtue of their birth in Africa and because they were raised by mothers and maternal kin in Africa. He argued that maternal communities were the natural homes for métis and were their place of social and legal belonging. He

18 19

23, 1939, letter 1625; Letter from administrator in chief of the colonies, Jaffre, commander of the cercle of Lower Senegal, to the governor of Senegal, October 31, 1939, document 5134/AG. Eric Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2–3. For more on Eboué, see Brian Weinstein, Eboué (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Josette Rivallain and Helene D’Amelia-Topor, eds. Eboué, Soixante Ans Après: Colloque (Paris: Publication de la SFHOM, 2004); Albert M’Paka, Gouverneur Général de L’Afrique Équatoriale Française, Premier Résistant de l’Empire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); Arlette Capdepuy, Felix Éboué: De Cayenne au Panthéon (1884–1944) (Paris: Karthala, 2015).

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advocated for equality of opportunity in which black or métis Africans who proved their French cultural competence, devotion, and utility to France could earn the legal status of “French citizen.” His views sparked contestations within the fledgling Free France movement, and adherents from London to Brazzaville debated the question of the status of métis in FEA as key to defining the viability of a Free French nation and empire built on the very promises of Republicanism that the Vichy regime abjured. Debates over the legal status and social rights of métis in FEA were of heightened importance in colonial governance, as Free France leaders – in Brazzaville, Algiers, and London – struggled to maintain and define French sovereignty and who was genuinely French within the dislocations caused by World War II. In the period of Eboué’s governorship, métis individuals continued to petition for French citizenship according to the 1936 legislation. Between 1939 and 1942, the war effort disrupted the already inconsistent and under-resourced colonial court system in FEA, which probably had a negative effect on the number of people who petitioned for French citizenship based on the September 1936 decree. In response to two petitions that FEA lieutenant governors sent to him, Eboué noted that no matters pertaining to indigènes and French naturalization had been processed since the war broke out.20 At the local level in individual colonies, colonial courts rendered affirmative judgments in three cases.21 To bolster the claim of Free France as the legitimate government of France and the French Empire, de Gaulle sought to expand the numbers of loyal adherents and conceived of expanded entitlements for métis as a means to achieve this. De Gaulle’s initiative, the Project of Ordinance Creating the National Charity Protecting Métis of the Empire, marked the first time the highest levels of French metropolitan government outside of the Ministry of 20

21

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Telegram from the head of the annex, artillery in Libreville and telegram from the governor-general of FEA to the commanding general of French African Forces (referring to the case of Louis César Charlemagne), December 16, 1942, document 1180/APAG; Letter from 10 November, 1939 (refers to the case of Etienne Makama Gerard), letter 2218 A/P. This included two métis men and a sixteen-year-old boy by courts in Port-Gentil (1939), Bangui (1940), Libreville (1943.) Patrick Celier, private family archives, Saint-Malo, France, Minutes of the Court of First Instance of Libreville regarding the judgment on the request for determination on the status of Métis, October 9, 1943. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Telegram from the director of the Department of Political Affairs and General Administration to the director of personnel, April 22, 1941, # 221; Telegram from the governor of Ubangi-Chari to the governorgeneral of FEA, April 8, 1941, # 408/CP. A handful of from métis in varied FEA locations inquired about obtaining French citizenship: ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from R. Durand, secretary-accountant, Department of Agriculture in Cameroun, to the mayor of Port-Gentil, February 1, 1944; Letter from R. Durand, secretary-accountant, Department of Agriculture in Cameroun, to the governor-general of FEA, February 1, 1945, document 393; Letter from Madame G. Durand, B.P. 143, avenue de Poincaré, Douala, to the governor-general of FEA, received on May 18, 1945, written May 14, 1945, document 568.

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Colonies showed such a direct interest in métis people since the passage of the 1930 and 1936 citizenship decrees. The initial correspondence from the office of the high commissioner of the Free French in Algiers to Governor-General Eboué conveyed that de Gaulle’s attention was particularly taken with “the problem of métis” and he had decided to provide an immediate solution to “an agonizing question.” De Gaulle wished to create a public office for “the protection, education, and tracking the existence of métis in our colonies.”22 The sentiments in this letter were strikingly similar to those of High Commissioner Boisson in Vichy-controlled West Africa: métis were a distinct category of people who should receive attention and money for their wellbeing from the French state, questions about their place and status were important, and the current administration was seeking to put in place measures to address these issues. The letter requested lieutenant governors to study and comment on the proposed project without delay, as de Gaulle wished to sign the ordinance during his next visit to Brazzaville. This project was to exemplify how Free France was a place of opportunity, in contrast to the racist ideologies of the Vichy regime. However, it led administrators to debate, yet again, how to define “métis,” raising questions that the 1936 métis citizenship law was supposed to address. A preliminary version of the project began with a clause that defined “métis” as an individual born in a Free French Africa colony of parents – one of whom was of European status and the other of native status and not a French citizen – and their descendants.23 Colonial administrators were to undertake a census to identify métis in Free French Africa and to organize an état civil des métis, a registry of births, marriages, and other life events of métis. The project proposed providing “moral and financial assistance” to métis. Such assistance would include educational scholarships, wage-labor employment opportunities, facilitation of the purchase and exploitation of land by métis, granting bridewealth loans to facilitate marriage, and establishing or taking over the management or funding of private institutions attending to the education and vocational training of métis. The idea was that the French state would play a role in the entire life course of a métis person, from birth through adulthood, and through several generations of descendants. An initial version proposed that each colony reserve 720 francs per year per “abandoned métis child” and manage the

22

23

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the high commissioner of Free French Africa to the governor-general of FEA and the governor of French Cameroun, April 8, 1941, letter 214; Ordinance project establishing the Charity Protecting Métis of Free French Africa, General Chief de Gaulle; Letter from the high commissioner of Free French Africa to the governorgeneral of FEA and the governor of French Cameroun, April 23, 1941, letter 257. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Ordinance project establishing the Charity Protecting Métis of Free French Africa, General Chief de Gaulle.

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donations of fathers, who would remain anonymous.24 These were the very entitlements that métis associations in Brazzaville and Libreville had been lobbying for since the 1930s. Led by Eboué, the project encountered a pushback as it circulated through different administrative offices in colonial governance of FEA. Eboué and some members of his legal and political team argued that the administration needed to avoid reifying the idea that “métis” was a category separate from blacks. Métis, they insisted, were indigènes who would normally live in the milieu indigène. Eboué wrote back to de Gaulle’s office with strong misgivings and suggested amendments to the proposal. In a May 1941 letter, Eboué opined that de Gaulle’s proposal was in contradiction with the 1936 métis citizenship law, which outlined a legal process for those who were the direct progeny of French citizens. He urged against defining métis as those who were several generations removed from a French descendant. He asserted that it was not necessary for de Gaulle’s ordinance to even define the term “métis,” warning that doing so would give definition to “a category of person, which may have a legal effect that modifies laws already passed on matters of the civil state and nationality.”25 The French had already unwittingly codified the concept of métis as a distinct category; métis thought of themselves as a distinct “caste” and sought to maintain what Eboué warned were “odd notions about race.” The odd notions were the concept – which he intimated the French themselves had reified – that the lightness of their skin color conveyed superiority. However: “People in the French Empire are to be divided between those who are French citizens and those who are not. Métis are both people who are French citizens and those who are not French citizens. Those who are French citizens are to be treated on equal footing with other black French citizens.” Eboué viewed the 1936 decree as racializing people in French Africa as black or métis. The consequence was the creation of a hierarchy in which métis (regardless of citizenship status) viewed themselves as superior to black people. This included black people who were French citizens, whether those

24

25

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Note regarding the ordinance project creating the Charity Protecting Métis of the Empire, General Directorate of Administrative and Political Affairs, April 11, 1941. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Note from the Directorate of Education, director of education, April 22, 1941, document 374/IE; Letter from the attorney general to the governor-general of FEA, 5 May, 1941, letter 1145; Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the high commissioner of Free French Africa, May 13, 1941, letter 316; Note from the office of the director of education to the director of political affairs, April 22, 1941, letter 255; Note from the office of the General Directorate of Administrative and Political Affairs to the director of finance, April 29, 1941; Letter from the office of the attorney general to the governor-general of FEA, May 1, 1941, letter 51/SJ; Note from the Directorate of Finances, May 6, 1941, document 1263.

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such as himself who held French metropolitan citizenship or black Africans who had attained French legal status. Furthermore, not all Free French colonial civil servants in FEA viewed the expansion of entitlements for métis favorably. Acting Lieutenant Governor Colonel Parant of Gabon sought to temper de Gaulle’s efforts toward métis. In a 1941 letter to Eboué, Parant warned of the need to limit any such reforms “without recourse to demagoguery,” meaning the ways in which métis in Gabon had made claims for the same social and economic rights as white French citizens. In his view, many métis who had been declared as having the qualité de français based on the September 1936 decree were not authentically “French,” as they had spent their entire lifetimes in Africa and in African maternal communities. Furthermore, he argued, the law had created “an exaggerated demarcation” in the attainability of French nationality for those born on African soil.26 A métis individual who could not speak French could more easily obtain French citizenship than even the most educated black African évolué, which fomented feelings of jealousy and rancor, he continued. Filiation to a white person and skin color alone, he intimated, were the criteria that courts used in their rulings and were not sufficient. Eboué proposed a “counter project” to de Gaulle’s that would provide state funding for the education of métis children in existing state-run and private schools, without “separating métis from the milieu indigène.”27 With this counter project, the French state would hold some moral responsibility for the care and education of the biological children of French men, but métis children still belonged to – and should identify with – the African communities of their mothers. Ultimately, de Gaulle’s initiative was not implemented and Eboué implemented revised guidelines for colonial state–sponsored services and the funding of services for métis children. While Eboué disapproved of educational opportunities afforded only to métis children, he also disapproved of European fathers who did not provide resources for the care of children they had fathered. In 1941, his office approved the government subventions from the Department of Education for the care and residence of ten métis children in missionary-run boarding schools in French Congo.28 Moreover, he supported the use of government funds to cover some of the costs of missionary societies that provided housing and education to individual cases of métis children he deemed particularly dire. In June 1942, the governor of Chad received a letter requesting annual financial 26 27 28

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from Colonel Parant, acting lieutenant governor of Gabon, to the governor-general of FEA, February 21, 1941, letter 159. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the director of general administrative and political affairs to the attorney general, April 21, 1941, letter 244 C/Y. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the Department of Political Affairs and General Administration to the director of education, Brazzaville, January 9, 1941, document 11.

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assistance for the three “non-recognized métis children” of a French man who had died, leaving the children in a “miserable” state. The father had been providing some financial assistance for them, although he had not publicly acknowledged paternity.29 The administrator asked the governor-general’s budget to continue to pay the fees for the children to remain at the mission stations, and Eboué approved the request.30 Colonial state subsidies to Catholic missions and boarding homes in FEA that housed and educated métis children, which the state had been subsidizing since 1930s, continued – but with certain limitations. In July 1943, Eboué issued a measure that tightened the 1937 law that facilitated the disbursement of state funds to private works “that took in abandoned métis.”31 Eboué maintained privileges for métis children on whose behalf such subventions were paid – including mosquito nets around their beds or dormitory windows, dosages of quinine, and regular school attendance – privileges that other African children with whom they lived might not have been able to access. Eboué’s reforms gave the governor-general, upon the requests of lieutenant governors or the inspector of education, the authority to decide whether to issue payments of subventions for the food, furnishing, clothing, and medical care of métis children younger than sixteen years who had been admitted for free or at a reduced cost. Eboué scaled back the funding of school fees for métis children in Brazzaville and removed the funding of a dormitory for métis boys run by Catholic missionaries, which eventually closed for lack of funding. Like other colonial officials, he viewed the needs of métisses girls as acute and maintained the funding for a boarding house for métisses girls in a mission-school run by the sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny.32 In Gabon, members of the Amicale and some colonial personnel rejected Eboué’s idea that métis children were like all other African children and strove to maintain the boarding school for métis children. Joseph Deemin, still the president of the Amicale des Métis in Libreville – and therefore a member of the committee for the boarding school for métis children – rejected the view that African milieus were the best environments for métis children. As the managing committee of the school reviewed its needs in January 1942, amid 29

30 31

32

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the administrator of colonies F. Casmatta to head of the territory of Chad, June 9, 1942, letter 46/CF; Letter from the governor of colonies to the governor-general of FEA, June 9, 1942, letter 45/CF. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Note from the general government of FEA, Directorate of Finances, July 29, 1942. Archive Nationale du Congo (hereafter ANC), GG174: Law determining the remittance and monitoring of the use of subventions to accord to private institutions that take in abandoned métis children, law no. 637/IGE, signed by Eboué, governor-general of FEA, July 29, 1943. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Confidential letter from the high commissioner of the Republic, the governor-general of FEA, Cornut-Gentille, to the minister of Overseas France, letter dated February 1949.

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Eboué’s questioning of segregated milieus for métis children, Deemin maintained that placement in the boarding school was essential to the well-being and physical survival of métis children. He argued that the mortality rate for métis children living in African households was high and claimed that only one child living in the boarding school had died since its opening.33 He further insisted that abandoned to the indigenous milieu of Libreville, the métis cannot develop in a normal way. The métis child is physically more fragile than the black child and cannot be abandoned to the milieu indigène, which is not evolved enough and in which he could not receive the care – in terms of food and hygiene – that he needs in younger years.

The presiding committee for the boarding school for métis children in Libreville, which included French government personnel and another representative from Gabon’s Amicale of Métis, requested more money and supplies from the Department of Education for FEA, headquartered in Brazzaville. The department was funding the school. The request included additional dosages of quinine for students and a bigger infirmary, improvements to modernize the plumbing, and the construction of a new boys’ dormitory.34 The director of the school relayed that it had reached its maximum capacity of thirty-one boys and fifty-two girls, with an additional seven boys and one girl as day students, and there was a waiting list. The report described the necessity for métis children to live according to French material conditions and with continued separate and unequal treatment for métis children versus black children. There would be a time in which métis children could remain with their maternal kin and other African children, but until then, “we need to continue this important effort, while waiting for a more evolved indigène society that can absorb the métis to develop.” Unlike his predecessor, the new governor of Gabon in 1942 expressed that métis children were, by birth, more “French” than other African children.35 He approved of the measures proposed by the committee and, acknowledging the unlikely outcome that more funding would be given, said that his department of public works would proceed with the repairs to the extent that the colony’s

33 34

35

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes from the presiding committee for the boarding school for métis children, ordinary session held in Libreville, January 14, 1942. The committee requested that the colonial health department in Brazzaville transfer additional dosages of quinine to the boarding school as well as the following: money for the installation of flush toilets, showers, and sinks, which were part of the original architectural plan; mosquito nets for the boys’ beds; an expanded infirmary; and construction of a new dormitory for boys. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes from the presiding committee for the boarding school for métis children, ordinary session held in Libreville, January 14, 1942. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the governor-general of FEA to the high commissioner of Free French Africa, May 20, 1942, letter 389/APAG.

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budget would allow.36 He sent two copies of the report, one to Eboué and the other to the high commissioner of Free French Africa in Algiers.37 The governor did this perhaps because of Eboué’s public critiques of entitlements for métis; he thus sought the tacit approval of “white” Free French figures in case Eboué disapproved. Yet Eboué was not content to recalibrate what he saw as racist policies regarding métis children’s access to education. He sought to reconfigure the very racialized binary of citoyen versus indigène that formed the foundation of French colonial rule. Ultimately, Eboué sought to elaborate a new guiding philosophy for French colonial rule and African–French interactions at the social, political, and cultural levels, which he proposed would buttress the integrity of the French Empire in precarious times. At first issued as a series of circulars to FEA governors between January and May 1941, Eboué’s New Native Social Policy was published by Free France in London; it was written based on the gathering of fifty French religious and administrative people in Brazzaville. The document, Eboué hoped, would become the new foundation of French colonial governance. New Native Social Policy argued that French colonial rule and economic policies had damaged African societies by eroding political institutions and customs that were best suited to guide African social and economic development. The new outlook was to establish an African population that was healthy, stable, and peaceful and had a certain material, intellectual, and moral development, to create “excellent citizens of their own regions based on African customs.”38 New Native Social Policy was a recognition and valorization of what he saw as “authentic” African cultures that had not been influenced by French colonial rule and French culture. Eboué argued that the métis citizenship decree created a group that was separate from “native society, while at the same time they are unable to accede to European society. This creates a pernicious rivalry between métis and blacks, without métis having gained much by way of benefit.”39 The title of “citizen,” he continued, which métis specifically could acquire, was ineffectual because it did little to alleviate the central problem: métis stood apart in African societies. For Eboué, only with métis’ full belonging in African societies – not just in French society or in-between French and African societies – could African and Africa–France futures be assured. 36

37 38 39

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes from the presiding committee for the boarding school for métis children, ordinary session, January 14, 1942, in a letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, April 21, 1942, letter 316. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes from the presiding committee for the boarding school for métis children. Eboué, La nouvelle politique indigène, 25. Eboué, La nouvelle politique indigène, 16.

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Native Social Policy argued that métis – and other people alienated from African societies through their personal development of having been educated in French schools – could become useful leaders of African societies and efficient partners to the French. He proposed a new status to be accorded to deserving indigène: the status of “notable évolué” (evolved notable).40 Legal status other than indigène was not a birthright due to the lightness of one’s skin or ancestry from Europeans, Eboué countered, but a status to be earned by merit. People with such titles were to receive it by their demonstration of loyalty to French colonial governance or accomplishments in economic status.41 Such a status was to be earned, and he contended that this reframing would promote the mise en valeur (development) of French citizenship for Africans as an active rather than passive status or title. It would be a single political status, open to anyone – black or métis – who had obtained a “certain situation” in society.42 Those who were appointed the status would become “real citizens of the colony, to the extent that they would participate in the administration of their towns under our direction.” The bundle of obligations and duties this status contained would expand the numbers of Africans who could fruitfully serve African–French futures and a more enlightened unfolding of the French Empire. De Gaulle ostensibly agreed that Native Social Policy could be the new guide to French colonial rule in Africa. He signed legislation in July 1942 that approved the recognition of the new status of “evolved notable.” The legislation established that certain African urban areas with a critical mass of notable évolués could become semi-autonomous towns, with elected Africans governing unspecified matters.43 However, governors of colonies in FEA did not support Eboué’s philosophies; few agreed to the idea of expanded political rights and status for Africans. Few adhered to the outlined policies, and many resisted appointing Africans to an evolved native status. De Gaulle proved to be half-hearted about applying the tenets of Native Social Policy as the war continued.44 Reforming Welfare Aid for Children and Maternal Households in Reunited French Africa, 1943–1944 By the summer of 1943, FWA came under the control of the Free French Forces, together with FEA and most of the global French Empire. Some of 40 41 42 43 44

Eboué, La nouvelle politique indigène, 27. Eboué, La nouvelle politique indigène, 27. Eboué, La nouvelle politique indigène, 14. Arlette Capdepuy, “Félix Eboué, 1884–1944: mythes et réalités coloniales,” PhD diss., Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III (2013), 334–6. Capdepuy, “Félix Eboué,” 336–7.

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Eboué’s thoughts about the belonging of métis in African societies came to influence thinking and suggestions for reforms regarding the colonial policies toward métis. It was not only Eboué but also other colonial officials who questioned the continuation of state-managed and funded services for métis children in environments segregated from black children. The inspector of the Department of Education for FEA in a 1943 report strongly urged the reconsideration of maintaining segregated boarding homes for métis children: It’s a mistake of serious political repercussions, of wanting to make métis a particular class. On the contrary, it is necessary for the milieu indigène to absorb them, it is in this and by the same process as black children, that [métis] should pursue their social and cultural development. The goal to work toward should be the suppression, at a later date of all métis boarding schools.45

Eboué did not follow this route, and the boarding school for métis children in Libreville remained and so did the subsidies for particular Catholic missionschools. Yet, in the glare of multidirectional critiques about the lack of French provision for education and social opportunities for Africans, it became impolitic to focus only on social services for métis children. Behind closed doors, however, some colonial officials wondered how to expand or even maintain access to education and other services for métis children. In Senegal, where colonial officials noted an increased number of children born of wartime interracial relationships, the reconsideration of racialized childhood social welfare became central. Reformed policies regarding wards of the state came to encompass métis and black children, even as the French sought ways to funnel a limited pool of money for the education of métis children. Although Free France forces purged Vichy-era colonial officials from office and installed new colonial governors, Vichy discourses about the moral decline of France and the need to invest in family continued to influence colonial officials’ perception of “the métis question” and its solutions. In Senegal, post-Vichy governors retooled the wards program to target a broader pool of vulnerable children in Africa who would be eligible for state funding. In 1943, the governor’s office stopped using the term “wards” and emphasized that it wished to aid “child orphans originaires from the colony of Senegal” with grants to subsidize their basic necessities and education.46 The governor perpetuated a racialized demarcation in specifying that eligible children were 45

46

ANC, GG174: Letter from the general inspector of education of FEA to the governor-general of FEA regarding the report presented before the Permanent Commission of the Administrative Council, July 24, 1943, letter 12/IGE. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from the administrator of the cercle of Matam to the governor of Senegal, December 23, 1942, document 2164; Letter from the administrator of the cercle of Diourbel to the governor of Senegal, January 15, 1943, document 202; Letter from the administrator of the cercle of Kolda to the governor of Senegal, no document number, January 15, 1943; Letter from the administrator of the cercle of Podor to the governor of Senegal, December 19,

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either to be “originaires orphans” or “morally abandoned orphans” – euphemisms demarcating “black” from “métis” children. The number of orphans on whose behalf the colonial state made payments increased from twenty-five children in 1942, under the older wards program, to thirty children in 1943 and 1944, and forty children in 1945. The yearly budget increased from 60,700 to 114,300 francs.47 While children residing in mission stations continued to represent the greatest number of recipients of government payments, the colonial state also increased the numbers of payments made directly to mothers or African caretakers whose children lived with them. This increase occurred throughout the colony of Senegal and in regions that had seen the increased presence of French men as a consequence of the ongoing war. This shift may have been due to the Eboué emphasis on keeping métis children in the milieu indigène or because many mothers or maternal kin refused to send their children to missions. Administrators of one particular town, Ziguinchor, recorded an increase in the numbers of métis children born in the region since 1939; they relayed to the office of the governor of Senegal that they needed government aid.48 Located at the mouth of the Casamance River, which linked the Atlantic Ocean with Jola-speaking peoples and their interior networks of trade, Ziguinchor was an important trading port. Between 1942 and 1945, administrators of Ziguinchor identified between four and eight children each year as métis who were living with their mothers and deserving of aid, based on metrics established by the governor: the national origins of the proposed candidate’s father, the child’s health, and the mother’s moral standing.49 To qualify for direct payments, mothers had to be in exceptional states of poverty relative to their communities and be unable to work in income-generating

47 48 49

1942, document 3990; Letter from the administrator of the cercle of Thiès to the governor of Senegal, January 2, 1943, document 15. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from the commanding administrator of the cercle of Kédougou to the governor of Senegal, December 22, 1944, document 889/APA; Letter from Administrator Louga to the governor of Senegal, December 20, 1944, document 4494/APA; Letter from the commanding administrator of the cercle of Matam to the governor of Senegal, December 18, 1944, document 7123/APA; Letter from Administrator Gouriou, commander of the cercle of Diorbel, to the governor of Senegal, December 2, 1944, document 4456/APA; Letter from the commanding administrator of the cercle of Tanbacouanda to the governor of Senegal, December 12, 1944, document 690/APA. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Decree allocating subventions for the care of young orphans from the colony of Senegal, Office of Finances, March 7, 1945, document 693 APA/I. ANS, 13 G 93 (280): Letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Sajous, commander of the cercle of Ziguinchor, to the governor of Senegal, December 24, 1942, letter 1435/F. ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Circular from the General Secretariat to the commanders of the cercles, November 29, 1943, document 216 APA/I; Letter from the General Secretariat, Remy acting for the absent governor, to all cercles, November 19, 1943, document 307; Proposition for the orphans originating from Senegal to T. L., December 7, 1943, document 307 APA/I; Letter from the head administrator of the colonies, Claude Michel, commander of the cercle, territory of Casamance, to the governor of Senegal, August 24, 1944, document 1056.

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activities. The colony of Senegal paid grants to mothers or guardians on behalf of seven métis children aged between eleven and fifteen years in Ziguinchor between 1944 and 1945.50 Yet questions about race, legal status, and access to social opportunities – and how these issues impacted the very premise of French colonial rule in Africa – continued. As other colonies of the French Empire along with FWA and FEA came to be under the control of Free France by the end of 1943, the possibility of France maintaining colonial control over French Africa was not assured. Pressures included demands by Africans for reforms to colonial rule, or outright decolonization by some, and implications by the Atlantic Charter and the United States that these colonies could be placed under international trusteeship. De Gaulle and the French Committee of National Liberation (FCNL), the provisional government of Free France, acknowledged that French Africa, and the labor, materials, and military contributions of Africans, were foundational to the legitimacy of Free France.51 Its leaders recognized that they had to reform colonial rule to be able to maintain governance over the region. De Gaulle, FCNL officials, and colonial governors gathered in Brazzaville in January 1944 to deliberate what adjustments were necessary to preserve the French Empire, even as they continued to battle for the end of Nazi occupation of metropolitan France. Contrary to promises made by French colonial administrators to the President of Mutuality of Métis of Soudan, the Brazzaville Conference did not address the question of the legal status of métis. Promises from the Brazzaville Conference included an ill-defined resolve to give colonial populations equal rights and increased economic prosperity. The resolutions included giving some authority in political affairs to Africans through colony-based legislative assemblies, in which Africans and French citizens residing in colonies would vote in members; expanded health and education; the end of the indigénat penal code, in which colonial officials could subject violence on Africans with near impunity; opening more civil servant positions for Africans in the colonial administration; and the presence of Africans on the Constituent Assembly, which would be formed after the war, to determine the constitution for a new republic.52 Some colonial officials in FWA continued to maintain that métis were particularly able to assimilate to French culture, which necessitated special pathways to French legal status as outlined in the

50

51 52

ANS, 10 D 1 (24): Letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Sajous, commander of the cercle of Ziguinchor, to the governor of Senegal, March 7, 1944, document 354/F; Decision allocating a school grant, General Secretariat, First Office, April 1, 1944, document 718 APA/I. Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 55–82. Eric Jennings, La France libre fut Africaine (Paris : Perrin, 2014), 258.

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1930 and 1936 decrees.53 Others agreed that the key to the sustainability of the French colonial endeavor would be increased attention to the development of évolués, black Africans educated in French schools and exhibiting a deep understanding and practice of French culture, and to end the consideration of métis as a special group. Eboué left Brazzaville exhausted and in poor health, and he died in March 1944. The governor-general of FEA, André Bayardelle, arrived in Brazzaville a few months later, when Allied forces and French armies – populated by significant numbers of troops from the colonies – liberated metropolitan France from Nazi control. While World War II continued, and in its aftermath, a diverse array of individuals and collectives in French African societies made claims to increased access to social and economic resources, autonomy in governance, and the elimination of coercive policies of colonial rule. Some expressed nationalist sentiments and wanted the end of colonial rule. Others affirmed the continuation of French–African political affiliation, claiming they were both French and African, and sought to conceptualize futures in which Africans could more fully actualize their social, economic, and political well-being. Contestations about which Africans had what rights often occurred around fault lines of who was sufficiently “French” – based on skin color, genealogy, and inherent or acquired competency in French culture. These differing views about race and color intersected with claims by individual métis for specific rights. They also sparked debates about the colonial legal categories of “French” and “indigène” and about the racialized foundations upon which French colonial rule was based in the first place. These debates foreshadowed the ways in which conceptions of race would shape broader notions of citizenship and rights after the war, and Brazzaville again became a center of these contestations. Protests and Petitions: Struggles for Social Rights of Métis in Brazzaville, 1944–1946 FEA continued to be at the center of contestations and recalibrations of multiracial thought and practice in French Africa as World War II continued. The city was racially segregated, with the plateau restricted to white people, Europeans, and French citizens of metropolitan status. By contrast, PotoPoto – a low-lying and insalubrious landscape that lay along a river across from Léopoldville, Belgian Congo, and which was regularly traversed by African residents on both sides – was reserved for indigènes and métis, whether French citizens or not.54 Daily urban life and the questions around 53 54

White, Children of the French Empire, 91. For more on the history of Brazzaville regarding leisure and social life, see Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (New York: Cambridge University Pres, 1995);

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mobility and transport, how to earn and spend money, restriction from or access to space, and schooling – as well as sentiments of respectability – became the frontline of efforts by métis women and men to challenge the racialized limitations of French citizenship. Black Brazzavilleois also invoked these aspects of daily urban life to demarcate whether and how métis belonged in Poto-Poto communities. Written accounts by and about individual métis who lived in 1940s Brazzaville convey the tenuous acceptance by and belonging to the black communities in which they lived. These accounts relay experiences of colorism in which black Brazzaville residents called attention to métis’ lighter skin color as not just a marker of difference but a marker of insult. Henri Lopes, a writer – and the future 1970s prime minister in independent Congo – was a generational métis who attended primary school in the town. Andrée Blouin was the daughter of a woman from Ubangi-Shari and a French man who lived in Brazzaville; she was in her late teens, after having resided a Catholic mission station-school for fourteen years. These two individuals recount stories of being referred to as “café-au-lait” by black residents of the town, experiencing it as injurious. In a book of vignettes about his life history and intellectual thought, Lopes recounts that he had a disagreement one day with a classmate. With a “hateful look” on his face, Lopes describes, the boy shouted at him “café-au-lait” – as a slur.55 Writing of this incident in his elderly years, Lopes intimates that these words hurt because his grandmother and his métis aunts (tantines) of extended kin conceived of themselves just as fully black as they were white, and the words negated his blackness. Blouin’s account, narrated to an American writer, conveys how “boys,” the servants of white men, would solicit her when she was walking in the streets at the behest of their employers, who regarded her as a sexual object. When she would refuse to engage, the boy would call her words that she says hurt: café-au-lait, badly bleached, or white of Africa.56 As Blouin elaborates, these terms called attention to her white parentage, which neither her father nor European society had publicly acknowledged, thus serving to put her in her place and degrade her self-esteem. These names implied that she was no better than black Africans in terms of status, specifically the boy she had rebuffed. Yet métis in Brazzaville did indeed claim and fight for social and cultural entitlements in daily urban life that was otherwise reserved for whites.

55 56

Danielle Porter Sanchez, “Bar-Dancing, Palm Wine, and Letters: Alcohol Consumption and Colonial Anxieties in Free French Brazzaville, 1940–1943,” Journal of African Military History3, 2, December 2019, 123–4. Lopes, Henri, Ma grand-mère bantoue et mes ancêtres les Gaulois (Paris: 2003), 60. Blouin in collaboration with McKellar, My Country Africa, 86–7.

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Andrée Blouin’s account also demonstrates how struggles to consume French foodstuff and enjoy cultural venues restricted to Europeans in the plateau could be subversive to racial hierarchies of French imperial rule. Blouin had acceded to French citizenship status by virtue of the September 15, 1936 decree specifically for métis and she pushed back against what she refers to as “second-class citizenship.” At the Catholic orphanage for métis girls in which she lived for fourteen years, she became literate in French and learned sewing. She parlayed these skills in working as a seamstress for European clients in the plateau and traversed her residence in Poto-Poto to provide this service.57 Yet, when she crossed into the plateau for reasons of her own leisure and consumption, she found that European businesspeople denied her entrance to a movie theater, responded to her in the African languages of Lingala or Kikongo when she addressed them in French, or refused to sell her butter when she asked to purchase it.58 She felt demeaned by the way in which Europeans treated her, as “It was a way of saying that although we had French citizenship we had no real right to use French.” However, she repeatedly presented herself at the movie theater in spite of the rebuffs and insults by the owners, until they let her in. She also insistently asked for butter as a deliberate provocation. In an interview she elaborated that “In spite of the cost of personal humiliation to us, we had to make our presence felt. We had to make whites admit that we could no longer be ignored.” She further detailed that when a shop owner finally relented and brought out the butter, she would respond that she had changed her mind and leave, and that “For us, that was a victory. We had refused intimidation.” By the time the Amicale of Métis in Brazzaville became an active organization years later, Blouin no longer lived there. Nonetheless, in the same vein, the organization focused on the daily snubs that métis encountered from European settlers and colonial personnel when they tried to exercise the same rights as Europeans. The Amicale broadcast the quotidian instances in which individual métis were denied the capacity to exercise the “real rights” of citizenship and crafted a campaign of protest against these shared experiences of the denial of their personhood. The Amicale of Métis in Brazzaville emerged as an organization that actively and vocally stoked these contestations. In 1944, the organization declared two mandates: to advocate for the interests of métis and to aid needy métis children, regardless of whether they held French legal status.59 Minutes of a 1944 association meeting estimated 57 58 59

Blouin in collaboration with McKellar, My Country Africa, 84–5. Blouin in collaboration with McKellar, My Country Africa, 112–13. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Formations and goals for the Amicale Association of FEA, headquarters in Libreville, Brazzaville section, in a letter from the president of the Association of Métis of FEA to the governor of French Congo, received August 3, 1944, written 31 July, 1944, document 151.

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that there were 3,000 métis throughout FEA; a 1946 colonial census claimed the number of métis to be between 2,500 and 3,000, without detailing why there was this wide range of numbers. About 555 of these métis lived in the French Congo, mainly in Brazzaville and Poto-Poto.60 In Brazzaville (Congo) and Libreville (Gabon), these two branches of the Amicale relayed that about 225 (a little less than eight percent) of the métis in FEA were active members of the organizations, specifying that Brazzaville members included thirtyseven men, thirty-three women, and seventy-three children. About fifty people attended monthly meetings. Additionally, fifteen men from France – including the governor of Gabon, the head of police of FEA, and the chief of staff of the governor-general – were listed as honorary members in 1945; they contributed anything from 100 to 500 francs toward the association’s operational budget. Not enough métis members were able to pay their association dues of fortyfive francs per year, and the Amicale operated on a shoestring budget.61 The activism of the Amicale in Brazzaville during and after World War II was due to the leadership of its president, Antoine-Marie Van Den Reysen, who maintained relationships with the governor-general of FEA and the governor of Congo. Other métis officers included Jean Periere, Jaime Marques Gouveia, and Antoine Henriques, men educated at missionary schools, residents of Brazzaville, and people who worked in colonial government departments or French businesses.62 In spite of the small membership and budget, the Amicale in Brazzaville maintained that it advocated for the entire métis population of the Congo and across FEA, as the city was at the height of its importance in Free France. The organization was a thorn in the side of colonial administrators as it maintained a campaign of letters and petitions with demands. Over the course of 1944 and 1945, the Amicale lobbied the offices of the government-general, the governor, and the mayor of Brazzaville, insisting that the French state was obligated to educate and provide material resources for métis children in the Congo and facilitate their exposure to French culture; the state was also obligated to provide professional training and jobs in colonial 60

61

62

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Audience of October 24, 1944, Association of Métis of FEA, October 24, 1944; Letter from the director of Political Affairs, Merlo, to Physician General Robert, director of the public health department, re: distribution of quinine to métis, May 10, 1946; Telegram from the governor of Chad to the governor-general of FEA, August 16, 1949, letter 563; Report from the Directorate of Political Affairs on the number of métis living in the territories and departments of Gabon and Middle Congo, May 10, 1946, document 568/API. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes of the November 27, 1946 meeting of the Amicale Association of Métis, Brazzaville section, letter from the Association of Métis to the director of political affairs for the General Government, November 21, 1946, letter 4/46. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes of the 23 January, 1945 meeting of the Amicale Association of Métis, Brazzaville section, letter from the president of the Association of Métis, Van Den Reysen, to the governor-general of FEA, January 23, 1945, letter 9/AM-SB.

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administration and French businesses to métis adults. In November and December 1944, Van Den Reysen complained that there were significant shortfalls in the government’s policies toward métis in the Congo and that the increasing number of métis children there required urgent attention.63 He requested the government-general open a state-managed boarding school for métis children in Brazzaville. He also requested that métis adults who had obtained certificates from teacher training schools should manage the school through the creation of a new position, namely the director of métis boarding schools. This person would be appointed to manage the operations of these institutions for all the colonies in FEA. Educated adult métis, he intimated, were the natural choice to educate a new generation of métis children. In January 1945, in a letter addressed to the governor-general, the Amicale asked that it be designated as a child protection agency, a certification that until then only missionary societies had secured from the colonial government.64 This would mean that the Amicale would earn the right to submit court petitions on children’s behalf to receive French citizenship according to the 1936 decree. The Amicale sought this designation to facilitate an increased number of métis children to receive French citizenship. Further, the Amicale argued that the social rights of unwed mothers in metropolitan France to receive financial assistance from the fathers of their children should be extended to apply to mothers of métis children in the Congo on behalf of “miserable children left by fathers, who lived in pitiable conditions in the native neighborhoods.” The Amicale requested that the colonial state transfer money to the organization, and its officers would then determine which mothers to fund. The Amicale sought to become a true mutual aid society, with the autonomy and funds to assist its constituents, arguing that its people had intimate knowledge and experience of the struggles of métis. In addition to rights on behalf of children, the primary focus of Van Den Reysen and other officers of the Amicale was lobbying for the rights of métis who held the legal status of French citizen. Beyond advocating for the attainment of French legal status based on the September 1936 decree, they sought to define what being a citizen meant in people’s daily lives. Métis in Brazzaville protested against what they found to be “incommensurate citizen–state relationships [which] produced a spectrum of rights endowed to different individuals.”65 They sought just one standard of rights, that which 63

64 65

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Audience of 24 October, 1944, Association of Métis of FEA, October 24, 1944; Letter from the acting president of the Amicale of Métis of FEA, Brazzaville section, to the governor-general of FEA, December 22, 1944, Letter 89 AM/SB. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the Board of the Amicale of Métis to the governorgeneral of FEA, February 23, 1945, letter 9/AM-SB. Kara Moskowitz, Seeing Like a Citizen: Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980 (Athens: New African Histories, 2019), 10.

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was accorded to white citizens, to be equally applicable to them; in making these claims, they reinforced the link between citizenship and whiteness rather than decoupling the two concepts. Borrowing from Nimisha Barton’s study of the mass migration of European foreign-born men and women to France under the Third Republic, and how they articulated their expectations of French citizenship, I argue that métis in Brazzaville articulated claims to “social citizenship.”66 Barton urges a turn from defining citizenship only as economic or political rights or the formal attainment of citizenship status to focus on how ordinary people made their claims for social rights – such as pensions, family allowances, and housing. Similarly, métis with French legal status in Brazzaville claimed that citizenship entailed rights to food, compensation, medical services, and treatment that were equal to those exercised by white French citizens who also lived in the Congo. They began a years-long campaign to actualize their vision of what French citizenship conferred to métis: the same social rights as white French metropolitan citizens enjoyed. Van Den Reysen and other leaders of the Brazzaville Amicale thus claimed that métis were “citizens of color” who deserved equal treatment with white French citizens. Over the course of 1944 and 1945, leaders of the Brazzaville Amicale wrote letters and petitions to colonial officials in the Congo arguing that the French state had socially and economically abandoned métis citizens, thereby rendering their legal status as French citizen null and void and demanding that the French colonial state grant them the rights and resources reserved for citizens. Not only configuring the status of métis vis-à-vis white French society, métis in Brazzaville sought to secure and demonstrate their status in relation to the African communities in which they lived, particularly in the context of emerging ideas of new forms of French citizenship. One of the founding members, identified by the last name of Kringer, gave a speech during a meeting in Brazzaville in January 1945 that conveyed the central themes around which the association would campaign: the role of métis as harmoniously coworking with blacks and whites in the French Empire, a glue that would bind the societies and facilitate their mutual prosperity. Métis had rights to make claims of the colonial state, Kringer elaborated, as they were children born because of colonial rule. A métis person, he continued, was “a child of the state.”67 He asserted that their claims to rights from the state were often “misunderstood by individuals that often pit us with blacks in the game of competition. Such incidents are regrettable, especially when we must 66 67

Nimisha Barton, Reproducing Citizens: Gender, Immigration and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945 (New York, Cornell University Press, 2020), 6–7. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Speech delivered at the annual general assembly of January 7, 1945 by M. Kringer, founding member and former secretary of the Amicale of Métis of FEA.

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always recognize that black is not a stranger, let alone an opponent, but that he is our kinsman.” The role of métis as an intermediary between black and white societies did not mean that métis claimed to be superior to “the black person.” On the contrary: “I would be the enemy of the black person who opposed the rights of métis as I have defined them; I would be the enemy of the métis who claimed superiority over the black person.” He concluded that “the métis person took one hand of his white father and black mother and would direct them towards prosperity. Let us all be unified and stand together.” In spite of Kringer’s insistence that métis did not claim to be superior to blacks, the Amicale of Brazzaville continued to press for the segregated upbringing and education of métis children in state-run institutions. Rather than seeking to dismantle the colonial hierarchy of white supremacy, the Amicale protested that métis occupied a lower rung – which was equivalent to that of blacks – and sought to occupy the same rung as that of Europeans in Brazzaville, with the same privileges. Beyond advocating for the education of métis children, the Amicale spotlighted the quotidian slights that métis in Brazzaville faced, such as restrictions on certain types of foodstuffs imported from France. Between 1944 to 1945, the Amicale sent seven letters and held two meetings with colonial personnel, protesting that métis had not received ration cards for butter.68 These demands for butter were not trivial, as indicated by Andrée Blouin’s individual rebellion in seeking out this product; they illustrate the aspirations of daily life that métis envisioned for themselves. In October 1945, the conflict came to a head in an incident that the Amicale summarized in a letter to the police commissioner: a member was not allowed the rations of butter that “originaires from Europe” received.69 When asked by the governor-general’s office to respond to these protests, a colonial civil servant claimed that the rationing laws specified that butter was to be distributed only to “Europeans which would not include originaires of FEA.” For colonial officials, métis who had received citizenship in FEA based on the September 1936 decree did not hold the same status or have the same access to economic and social rights as residents in FEA who were born in Europe.

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ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letters from the Amicale cited that the association had sent seven letters addressed to the head of the mayor’s office between October 1944 and February 1945 and held two meetings; Letter from Van Den Reysen to the director of political affairs, office of the governor-general, December 4, 1945, letter 105 AM-SB; Letter from Van Den Reysen to the mayor of Brazzaville Lisette, no document number, December 5, 1945. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the Amicale of Métis of FEA to the police commissioner of Brazzaville, October 26, 1945; Note regarding the Association of Métis from the director of political affairs, October 31, 1945.

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Officials claimed it was normal for the European population of Brazzaville to receive priority rations for items they saw as necessities.70 With the denial of the ration cards, the Amicale’s members threatened to mount a public protest in front the governor-general’s palace, a public affair that would surely embarrass the French government.71 The head of the judiciary service noted there should be no difference in the rationing of food between the “originaires of Europe and métis” and urged Brazzaville personnel to follow suit. For leaders of the Amicale, the question of access to butter, an essential item of quotidian French gastronomy, was a marker of their full legitimacy as members of French society in Brazzaville, but also of their manhood. Representatives of the colonial administration met with Van Den Reysen and other members of the Amicale to try to reach a solution. The delegates argued that they had always demonstrated loyalty to France: “We are ready to accept all of our duties, but we also demand all of our rights. Either we are French citizens, or we aren’t.”72 One representative of the Amicale, a métis African named Melezé who was married to a black woman from the French Antilles (who thus had French metropolitan citizenship status by virtue of having been born there) relayed that the French authorities had presented his wife with a ration card for butter but denied him a card. She refused altogether to take her card, expressing that the denial to her husband was discriminatory. The summary of the meeting by personnel from the governor-general’s office noted that Mr. Melezé was “upset and thinks that occurrences of this sort are able to compromise his marital authority.” The Amicale of Métis of Brazzaville also insisted on the obligation of the colonial state to assist male métis citizens to achieve social adulthood and economic advancement through increased remuneration in civil service employment and professional promotion, as well as jobs for former soldiers. The Amicale explicitly called attention to the military service of métis men who had served in the French army during World War II and to the civilians who lived in Brazzaville who had endured material deprivation. Members claimed that France had asked them to sacrifice their labor, money, and lives in World War II, but these sacrifices had not translated into tangible improvement in the material conditions of people’s lives. Van Den Reysen emphasized that métis citizens held rights to equal treatment in terms of employment titles, promotions, and compensation; however, “racism and injustice greeted them”

70 71 72

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Return from the deputy director of trade and food supply, October 27, 1945, document 3.669/EC. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Note regarding information on the Association of Métis from the head of the judiciary services to the director of political affairs and security, November 9, 1945. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Note regarding information on the Association of Métis, November 9, 1945.

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instead.73 Another aspect of the racism that métis experienced had to do with their mobility in the city. A December 1945 letter from Van Den Reysen and a formal complaint with the police commissioner protested the difficulties that métis French citizens encountered in receiving transportation services from the main taxi company owned by a white French man named Masse.74 The white drivers refused métis men service when they tried to hire them.75 As had other métis individuals and associations, the Amicale claimed that the snubs and inequalities that métis faced was an affront to their birthright of French legal status and its accoutrements, by the “right of blood,” due to French or European paternity. To this blood-based biomarker that delineated the rights of métis, the Amicale added the concept of “a debt in blood.” I borrow this phrase from Greg Mann, who coined this expression to characterize the rights such as pensions and disability pay that black tirailleurs Sénégalais in FWA – veterans of French colonial army corps who fought in battles of colonial occupation and two world wars – claimed after 1945 that the French state owed but denied them.76 Similarly, métis veterans in Brazzaville – who had served in the French army corps if they were French citizens and in colonial infantries if they were not – pointed out that they had spilled their blood and put their lives at risk on the battlefields, but France had yet to compensate them fully in the form of social and economic rights that white French soldiers of metropolitan status received. In articulating these rights, demobilized métis soldiers in Brazzaville argued for particular rights due to them because of their French parentage and sacrifice – that France owed them a double debt in blood. They did not throw in their lot with and organize with black veterans to articulate a common set of grievances and entitlements but insisted upon the separate and particular rights of métis veterans.77

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ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes no. 8 from the annual general assembly of January 13, 1946 of the Amicale of Métis of FEA, Brazzaville section, January 13, 1946; Letter from the president of the Amicale of Métis of FEA of Brazzaville to Mr. Moutet, president of the Ministry of Overseas France, July 2, 1946; Letter from the minister of Overseas France to the governor of FEA, September 20, 1946, letter 3203. CAOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44, Association l’Amicale des Métis de l’AEF, Section Brazzaville, Compte Rendu à M. le Commissaire de Police, Signed by President Van Den Reysen and VicePresident Dickson, Brazzaville, December 8, 1945. CAOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44, Letter from the Association de l’Amicale de métis de l’AEF Momo to the Procureur General, Chef du Service Judiciaire de l’AEF, Letter #106, December 11, 1945. Mann, Native Sons, 117–33. While Africans in FEA were recruited for and conscripted to French colonial infantries, they did not mobilize in ways similar to tirailleurs Sénégalais to claim economic and social benefits for their service. Eric Jennings surveyed colonial documents that concluded that the French conscripted and recruited about 17,000 African men from FEA between 1940 and 1943; another 10,000 were already serving in the French colonial infantry before this increase. However, he argues that these numbers were probably higher. Jennings, Free French Africa, 140–2.

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Van Den Reysen accused local colonial officials of reducing them to second-class citizens as métis citizens had done all that was asked of them by the French government, which was derelict in fulling its end of the social contract with métis. In a 1946 letter to the governor-general, he wrote: Recognized as French, we now know that without distinction of color, nor origin, we have the same duties and the same rights; we have displayed equality of duties which we earned in servicing our fatherland of France, but equality of rights is yet to be achieved and this state is contrary to French conceptions. We would like to know if the constituency of the Fourth Republic was to create a second class of French citizens since we don’t understand how it is that administrative services of the colony haven’t endeavored to solve the problem of adult métis. We find ourselves left behind, and a quick decision will help us and our pure and simple assimilation to metropolitan Frenchmen will erase the difficulties that we are currently facing.78

Van Den Reysen demonstrated his deep historical and cultural competence in the founding tenets of Republican France, the post-war effort to reconstitute the Republic, and called out local colonial officials for not governing according to its principles. In asking that métis be granted the same rights French citizens of metropolitan status, he echoed the request of the president of the Mutuality of Métis of French Soudan. Yet the Amicale and Van den Reysen spotlighted how whiteness was not the only fault line of equality of citizenship rights, as citizens of French metropolitan status in Brazzaville who were white or black such as Eboué or the wife of the Amicale member, held privileges that métis could not. Not asking that French society categorize métis as “white,” Van Den Reysen beseeched that the France of their fathers no longer deny métis full citizenship based on their birthplace of Africa and parentage by an African mother. French colonial officials, however, sought to keep the gate closed to métis citizens in terms of accessing the full array of social and economic rights of French citizenship. Even as Governor-General Bayardelle and other Free France officials publicly endorsed working with the Amicale of Métis, internal government correspondence between 1944 and 1945 after the Brazzaville Conference reveals that French colonial civil servants continued to think the qualité de Français was too easy for métis to obtain. Bayardelle wrote that métis were “a class of misunderstood and embittered people launching a superiority complex vis-à-vis blacks and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis whites” and that recognizing them as a class apart other Africans could have “a veritable strain on the social and political future of our colonies.”79 He 78 79

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the president of the Amicale of Métis, July 2, 1946. ANS, 23 G22 (24): Letter from the director of political affairs to the attorney general, May 21, 1944, letter 852; Letter from the director of political affairs to the attorney general, July 11, 1944, letter 967/AP.

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argued that the acquisition of French citizenship was to be conferred if a métis person had fulfilled conditions of European education, culture, and morality. This comment intimated that colonial courts had too easily conferred French legal status based on the September 1936 decree. Bayardelle supported the efforts of colonial officials in FEA to amend the 1936 citizenship decree to make it more difficult for métis to gain French citizenship “not only on jus sanguinis but depending especially on the education and social conditions in which they were raised.”80 This line of thinking was more aligned with Eboué’s ideas than de Gaulle’s, converging on the belief that it was dangerous to perpetuate the idea of métis as a group apart from African society. The new commissioner of colonies and governor-general argued that a métis born of a black parent and a white parent was not superior to a person with two black parents.81 While many leaders of the Amicale argued the same things, they simultaneously claimed privileges exclusively for métis and not for all Africans. Yet in arguing that métis and blacks were the same culturally, socially, and ultimately in legal status, colonial officials sought to curtail access that métis had to French schools and rations, as well as French citizenship. René Pleven, a high-ranking Gaullist who presided over the Brazzaville Conference, noted in a 1944 letter to Bayardelle that it was “better to make a métis child a rather well-adapted indigène than a maladapted European.”82 After World War II came to an end, leaders and members of métis associations in FEA persisted in advocating for the moral obligation of the colonial state to provide for the care and education of métis children in conditions related more closely to those of children in metropolitan France. They continued to argue that métis were French citizens different than other people born in Africa. They steadfastly made these claims in spite of abounding winds of change, even as a diverse array of African individuals and collectives also expanded demands that they be accorded the parity of legal status and social, 80

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ANOM, FM1AfPol/2125: Letter from Governor-General Bavardelle to the commissioner of colonies, containing the project of modifications to the September 15, 1936 decree establishing the status of métis in AEF, July 21, 1944, letter 354; Letter from the minister of justice to the minister of colonies, February 14, 1946, letter 45/bl 153; Letter from the attorney general of FEA to the minister of colonies, report on the legal status of métis in FEA, July 11, 1944, document 354; Letter from the minister of colonies to the vice-president of the State Council, October 1945, letter 13196. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from Commissioner of Colonies Laurentie to GovernorGeneral Bayardelle of FEA, May 15, 1944, letter 6474; Letter from Commissioner of Colonies Laurentie to Governor-General Bayardelle of FEA, May 5, 1944, letter 470; Letter from Commissioner of Colonies Laurentie to Governor-General Bayardelle of FEA, July 21, 1944, letter 354. ANS, 23 G22 (24): Letter from the commissioner of colonies to Mr. Seignon, delegate at the Advisory Council, May 4, 1944, letter 6473 ML/CM; Letter from the Judiciary Service of FEA to the governor-general of FEA, July 12, 1944, letter 161/SJ.

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and political, rights as French citizens. A new generation of black African men – who had pursued French education in Africa or metropolitan France and some of whom had served in colonial infantries – increasingly demanded rights for “blacks” or “Africans” and claimed to be speaking on behalf of these communities. Forced to make concessions, the French dismantled some of the black/indigène and white/citoyen frameworks that had defined French colonial rule. Racial Difference, Racism, and New French Citizenship Status in Africa, 1946 As argued by historian Frederick Cooper, World War II created cataclysmic conditions for change in French Africa, given that “France’s honor was saved by its empire.”83 FEA saved the day for de Gaulle by rallying to his side, which gave him legitimacy in governing a region in the French Empire and made Brazzaville the de facto capital of Free France. Hundreds of thousands of men from the African continent were forcibly conscripted into the army and fought battles on frontlines in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Historians estimate that sixty percent of French infantry divisions consisted of soldiers from North and West Africa; approximately one-third to one-half of all Free French soldiers, or about 27,000, between 1940 and 1943 were from FEA or Cameroun.84 Soldiers from Africa significantly contributed to key military campaigns and the eventual defeat of Nazis in occupied France in 1944. The shadow of the Nazi occupation, the shaky legitimacy of de Gaulle to transition from soldier to the leader of the interim provisional government of the French Republic, and the devastation of the French economy and infrastructure left France vulnerable. African individuals and collectives made demands for increased access to social and economic resources, autonomy in governance, and to reduce the coercive policies of colonial rule. While some expressed nationalist sentiments and the end of colonial rule, many political activists in French Africa – who had attended French schools, served in militaries, or mobilized labor unions – sought the reform of colonial rule to facilitate for African societies to actualize social, economic, and political rights.85 Once the war ended, African and French deputies from each colony met in Paris in the newly formed National Constituent Assembly to debate the creation of a new French republican government and constitution.

83 84

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Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 6–9. Eric Jennings, Free French Africa, 140–3; Jon H. Morrow Jr., “Black Africans in World War II: The Soldiers’ Stories,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 632 (2010), 12–25. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 12–13.

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With the promulgation of the Lamine Guèye law in May 1946, on paper, Africans who held the legal status of colonial subjects, or native, were declared to have the status of citizen. As argued by Yerri Urba this law ushered in “the disappearance of the native as a category” in French nationality law.86 The law elaborated that “ressortissant” (a person born outside of but dependent on the laws of metropolitan France) of the French Union had “the quality of citizen (qualité de citoyen) in the same manner as nationals of metropolitan France or overseas territories. Particular laws will establish the conditions in which they will exercise their rights of citizens.”87 It left undefined the very meaning and rights of this citizenship status. The new French Constitution of October 1946 established a new geopolitical framework to replace the French Empire: the French Union. It consisted of metropolitan France and colonies in the Caribbean that came to be called overseas départements. The nomenclature of regions in Africa changed from “colonies” to “overseas territories.” This renaming from colony to territory implied that they had some political autonomy and direction over their affairs. In a sleight of hand, residents in metropolitan France and the départements were French citizens (citoyens français) but those in territories were citizens of the French Union (citoyens de l’Union Française).88 Cooper conceptualizes the citizenship conferred on Africans as “imperial citizenship” because it was not based on blood or birth in a nation-state, the roots through which many modern nations define citizenship, but was rather based on a person being a subject in an empire. Imperial citizenship was ostensibly a “universalistic, egalitarian conception of citizenship; the new status conferred the right to vote, form political parties, and have equal rights to education and civil service employment.”89 There was a distinction in the French citizenship status of Africans that allowed Africans to maintain their “personal status” – that is, adhere to customary or Muslim laws rather than the French civil code to regulate matters such as marriage and inheritance.90 This allowance was a change from prior naturalization laws, which maintained that people with native status had to adhere to the French civil code upon becoming citizens. On paper, the racialized legal categories of black indigène and white citizen no longer operated. Yet, as in previous times, Africans ran into the “color line” of the racialized hierarchy of colonial rule and confronted how they, as imperial citizens, did 86 87 88

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Urba, Race et nationalité dans le droit colonial français, 538–42. “Law no. 46-940 of 7 May 1946 Proclaiming All Nationals of Overseas Territories Citizens,” Journal Officiel de la République française [Official Gazette of France], May 8, 1946, 3888. Emily Marker, “Obscuring Race: Franco-African Conversations about Colonial Reform and Racism after World War II and the Making of Colorblind France, 1945–1950,” French Politics, Culture & Society 33, 3 (Winter 2015), 6. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 6–10. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 5–7.

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not receive “equality of treatment” compared with metropolitan citizens.91 Beyond French Africa, dynamics were similar in anglophone West, East, and southern Africa, where the letter of the law of the Commonwealth gave subjects in British colonies the same rights as those in the metropole, but in practice fell short.92 Individuals and collectives across French Africa decried the continued racism and racial inequality in political, economic, and social realms of French governance. Individuals such as leaders of new political party leaders, deputies to the Constituent Assembly, and trade unionists mobilized collectives and disputed that social citizenship – which meant “equality of life chances in the workplace, in schools, in civil service positions” – had not been fully actualized. They demanded that the French state grant Africans the social rights of citizenship; they wanted equal rights in spite of differences in personal status.93 As argued by Emily Marker in her analysis of the transcripts of the Overseas Territories Commission of the Constituent Assembly, the French responded to African deputies’ calls to end “systemic racial inequality” by “developing new code words and rhetorical strategies that deflected accusations of systemic racism and ultimately displaced the issue of race altogether.”94 However, the French could not displace the issue of race, not only because black Africans decried the emptiness of the title of citizen, but because multiracial people did so too, in ways which also perpetuated the racial inequality of black Africans. Even as African and French political actors alike increasingly implied that terms such as “black,” “blacks,” or “Africans” applied to all who were born in FWA and FEA, some métis rebuffed these identities and insisted on interstitial identities. They insisted upon their Frenchness and Africanness, and their blackness and whiteness, as being equally intrinsic. The persistence of multiracial identities in the post–World War II period, in which many liberation ideologies in Africa coalesced around the idea of blackness as a unifying concept, illustrates the plurality and complexity of how people contested and forged ideas about belonging. Funding and Defunding of Métis Children in Schools in Territorial Assemblies in Brazzaville and Libreville, 1946–1950 Métis organizations that had been active in the war years in Brazzaville and Libreville infused the question of social rights in the French Union with

91 92 93 94

Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 5–7. For more on how Africans protested against racism and failed colonial promises of legal equality, see Ray, “Decrying White Peril,” 78–110. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 124–5. Marker, “Obscuring Race,” 2.

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multiracial thought and practice. They emphasized that the legitimacy of métis as French citizens came not from the new constitution but from their genealogy of French or European descent. Further, unlike métis in Africa, who acceded to the qualité de citoyen under the new constitution but retained their personal status for their civil affairs to be adjudicated under Muslim or customary laws, métis who had received citizenship based on the 1930 and 1936 decrees were to adhere to the French civil code. They claimed equality and sameness: métis were French by blood and birth, the same as people in metropolitan France, and they were entitled to exercise equal social and legal rights but for the lack of recognition by their fathers. It was in these two FEA colonial capital cities that métis concentrated and launched such advocacy campaigns. They continued to argue for access to educational opportunities, health services, and employment conditions exclusively for métis adults and children as confirmation of their status as full French citizens. The Amicale in Brazzaville made claims for rights to employment and access to economic resources, not just for male métis but also for women. It asked for educational scholarships for métisses citizens to learn trades that would lead to employment roles in the wage-labor private and public sectors, such as home education teachers or typists.95 Opportunities for women to practice a profession and earn wages would facilitate their marriage to métis men, who often lacked enough money to support an entire household. These claims suggest a need to rethink the conceptual meaning and significance of citizenship – not only as an affirmation of belonging to a nation-state and the rights that entailed, but also in providing a launching pad to claim the identity and rights of a particular group. Engin F. Isin and Patricia Wood argue that citizenship can also be conceptualized as “the practices through which individuals and groups formulate and claim new rights or struggle to expand or maintain existing rights” and as “an articulating principle for the recognition of group rights.”96 Not only the needs of adults but also the parameters through which métis children – regardless of their legal status – could access material, social, and educational opportunities of French society remained issues at the forefront of post-1946 debates. Responding to the Amicale’s persistent calls for government funding for the education and upbringing of métis children, General Bayardelle agreed that the colonial state had some moral obligation to provide for métis children, French citizens or not; however, alternative policies were

95

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ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from Henri Seignon, deputy to the National Assembly for Gabon and Moyen Congo to the minister of Overseas France, July 13, 1946, no document number; Letter from the minister of Overseas France to the governor-general of FEA; Minutes from the assembly of the Amicale of Métis, Brazzaville section, May 15, 1949. Engin Isin and Patricia Wood, Citizenship and Identity (London: Sage, 1999), 4.

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needed that would differ from those of Eboué, de Gaulle, or the demands of the Amicale. In March 1946, his office created the Committee for the Patronage of Métis Children of FEA, an amended version of de Gaulle’s 1941 initiative for métis in FEA. Without defining the meaning of the term “métis,” the decree outlined that materially or morally abandoned métis would be placed under “the tutelage of the governor-general, to ensure that métis would receive an education to permit them to arrive at a decent social standing, to contribute to their care, and to ensure their morality.”97 This decree marked a transformation in FEA colonial policies – that is, for the government-general to centrally manage the education and social rights of métis in the entire region to facilitate their inculcation in French cultural mores in order to cultivate productive and useful métis citizens. This FEA-wide committee would communicate with local committees in Libreville, Bangui, and Fort-Lamy, which would manage and monitor the running of boarding schools. The new policy reified the concept of métis as a differentiated category of people deserving of French government social services. The committee was to make recommendations on how to grant scholarships to individual métis pursuing studies in high schools or even universities in France and decide about the distribution of money set aside for special cases of “particularly needy métis children.” For métis children who were not yet of an age to attend school and lived with their families, the committee was charged with ensuring that they were “suitably dressed and fed.”98 As part of this new initiative, the Amicale’s wish for a state-run boarding home for métis boys came to fruition in April 1946, when the colony of Congo – rather than the government-general – opened a state-run boarding house for métis boys in the city of Boko. Its residents attended the regional state-run school open to any African children.99 The boarding home was to be managed by the Department of Education of Congo and directed by a French civil servant with teacher training who resided at the home. Similar to the boarding school for métis children in Libreville, a committee consisting of the

97

98 99

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Decree relating to the creation of a committee for the patronage of métis children of FEA, from the General Directorate of Education and Public Heath, signed by Governor-General Bayardelle, March 26, 1946, letter 706/IGE. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Decree relating to the creation of a committee for the patronage of métis children of FEA, March 26, 1946, letter 706/IGE. ANC, GG174: Letter from the head of the Department of Education of Middle Congo to the inspector general of education, February 12, 1946, letter 221; Permanent Commission on the Board of Directors, meeting of August 22, 1946, presentation of decree projects, decree 706 of March 26, 1946 regarding the creation of a committee for the patronage of métis children of FEA and including decree 975 of April 17, 1946 regarding the creation of the boarding school for métis in Boko, affair 7; Letter from the head of the Department of Education of Middle Congo to the governor of colonies acting on behalf of the governor of Middle Congo, July 5, 1946, letter 713.

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president and one member of the Amicale, the director of the regional school of Boko, and other colonial officials was formed to direct the home’s operations; this committee also inspected the premises for “moral and material standards.”100 As many as thirty métis boys between five and fourteen years old could reside at the boarding house. District heads or representatives of the Amicale could propose candidates and the colonial social service department would investigate the children to draw up a list of admitted students. According to the decree that announced the founding of the boarding house, the director of the home was to maintain strict supervision of the pupils. The boarding house also employed African “auxiliary personnel” such as a cook, assistant cook, laundress, and handyman. The children had rights to be lodged, fed, and clothed and to have access to a French doctor for medical care and doses of quinine. As was the case for the boarding school in Libreville, the children who resided at the institution in Boko were to continue to receive monthly financial assistance after they graduated, based on their degree of poverty. Once admitted, parents and families released control of the boys to the institution. Kin and mothers who did not meet French administrators’ and Amicale representatives’ criteria for providing “French” culture and material conditions lost all rights to host their children during the school vacations. On paper, the boarding house in Boko was a family home (foyer familial), a space of comfort and nurturing, a laboratory-school of French upbringing and socialization for young men with presumed French bloodlines.101 As argued by historian Sam Kaplan regarding schools in twentieth-century Turkey, “schools and the curricula within are intended to mold subjectivities, to elicit a particular constellation of desires, attitudes, and hope around key social issues.”102 The boarding house was to be a site of discipline, French language acquisition, and medical care, and it enabled the boys to be segregated from their maternal families, daily life in the Congo, and the milieu indigène.103 Although they attended classes and played with other African boys by day, there was only one language in which the métis children were to speak while at the boarding house: French. Life was also to entail the children’s manual labor: 100 101

102 103

ANC, GG174: Decree completing decree 975 of April 17, 1946 regarding the creation of the boarding school for métis in Boko, July 24, 1946, document 2191/API. ANOM, 1 AffPol/2125: Decree regarding the creation of the boarding school for métis in Boko, April 17, 1946, document 975/I. C. E., attached to a confidential letter from the high commissioner of the Republic FEA, Cornut-Gentille, to minister of Overseas France, Directorate of Political Affairs, letter dated February 1949, no document number. Sam Kaplan, The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Culture in Post1980 Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), xvii. ANOM, 1 AffPol/2125: Rules of procedure for the boarding school of métis in Boko, AEF, Middle-Congo, September 25, 1946, document 1052, attached to a confidential letter from the governor-general of FEA, Cornut-Gentille, to the minister of Overseas France, Directorate of Political Affairs, letter dated February 1949.

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each was assigned a task to maintain the cleanliness of the residence and assigned land to spend his “leisure time” growing the produce of his choice. The harvest would supplement their meals or be sold for profit to benefit the home’s general budget. Relatives could visit their children on Saturdays and Sundays but could only come into the courtyard; they could not enter the interior spaces.104 Fifteen boys resided there in 1946 and the number increased to forty in 1947. Given the derelict conditions that education inspectors found when visiting state-run and some missionary homes for métis children elsewhere in French Africa, it was likely that the conditions outlined in the regulations were not the reality.105 Nevertheless, it is likely that the boys who lived in the home and attended the local school were able to parlay their education into wage labor in colonial service and French businesses. However, new African deputies of the Representative Council of the Congo sought to end particular entitlements for métis in the name of creating a field of equality of rights for all Africans. The newly created territorial assemblies in FWA and FEA (called Representative Councils in FEA) were to fulfill the French promise of post–World War II reforms to allow Africans greater control over governance and development. These new legislative bodies consisted of African delegates as well as French colonial settlers, who were voted into office by two separate electorates: an African college and European college of French settlers. The first elections in FEA territories were held in 1945 and 1946, and African delegates were voted in by a small electorate of Africans – whom the French categorized as so-called évolués.106 The role of assemblies was largely advisory, and the lieutenant governor and various French colonial officials and departments continued to make the most important decisions. However, the assemblies did have voting power over matters pertaining to infrastructure (such as roads and public works projects), taxes, and the use of government funds on social issues (such as educational scholarships, payments on behalf of children, and public health expenditures). Most African delegates were men who had attended French missionary schools, came from urban areas, had been employed as accountants or clerks in French businesses, or served in the indigenous ranks (cadre indigène) of colonial civil service.107 Many held the title of “notables évolué” and some had obtained French citizenship according to naturalization laws before the 1946 constitution. They saw themselves as the vanguard for establishing reforms to colonial rule and prosperity for African societies in the various regions and

104 105 106 107

ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Rules of procedure for the boarding school of métis in Boko, September 25, 1946, document 1052. Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale, 125. Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale, 95. Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale, 104–5.

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ethnicities they represented. For some, achieving these goals meant expanding access to French education for African children of groups they represented, which meant halting the funding to schools, boarding houses, and educational scholarships that were exclusively for métis children. In Brazzaville, debates about whether or not métis children were entitled to special educational and financial assistance from the colonial state escalated after 1947, amid broader transformations in the political mobilization of African societies. Even as French colonial administrators in FEA debated whether these separate institutions for métis children were warranted – but continued to fund them in the meantime – African legislators, newly endowed with the power to determine the budgets of their local territories, protested against state funding for métis boarding schools. They viewed these schools as racist and untenable in the newly constituted French Union, in which people of all hues in the metropole and elsewhere in the French Empire were to have equal social, economic, and political opportunities.108 In September 1948, the council voted to defund the state boarding home for métis boys in Boko and a Catholic boarding school for métisses girls at the Catholic Mission Augouard, effectively ending the segregated education and lodging of métis children funded by the colonial state. In a letter to the high commissioner of FEA, the governor of Congo qualified that the debate to remove the funding was about overcoming budget shortfalls, not “a racial problem.” However, minutes of the debate indicate that the question of race was central to the deliberations.109 A French assemblyman protested that a yes vote on the measure would result in “putting children to live out in the street” and urged delegates to vote no. Yet French opinion was not uniform. Assembly member Reverend Father Charles Lecomte made the accusation that it was métis themselves who were guilty of fomenting racial discrimination, since they refused to admit black children to the schools. Black delegates who voted in favor of the measure protested that such institutions were racist. Albert Lounda, presiding head of the council, noted that before métis children began to live in such boarding schools, they lived well with their maternal families, so the best solution was for them to return to their milieu d’origine. Another delegate, Stéphane Tchitchellé, protested that French government officials should no longer display “a special interest in 108

109

The council passed a resolution that either the governor of Congo stop funding the Boko boarding house if it remained exclusively for métis boys, or that admission be open to “all children of black race.” This resolution was a recommendation for French colonial officials to act on, which they did not. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: First ordinary session of the Representative Council of Middle Congo for 1947, March 17, 1947, vow 33. ANOM, 1Affpol/2125: Meeting of September 10, 1948 of the Representative Council of Middle Congo, attached to a confidential letter from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FEA, letter dated February 1949.

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métis” and said it was time to end the effort “to make métis a superior race.”110 Ten delegates voted yes, ten voted no, and ten – who had French surnames and may have deliberately been absent from the vote in protest of the entire debate – did not vote. The head of the assembly had voted yes, and procedural rules meant that the measure was passed, and funding was removed from the colony’s budget. In November 1948, the assembly again debated “the métis question,” specifically whether métis were Europeans or belonged to what one delegate referred to as the “indigenous” constituencies they represented.111 Delegates debated how to expand access to free education for black children, whom they argued were as needy and vulnerable as métis children and would benefit from the education and material conditions of residential schools, and whether this should be at the expense of further reducing métis children’s access to and funding for education. In explanation of why the assemblymen had voted in the ways that they did, Lounda sent a letter to the governor of the Congo, citing words attributed to Eboué: “There are also African orphans; why not give them the same access as métis to educational institutions.” Delegates maintained that métis belonged to the various societies they were elected to serve, and Delegate Jean Molonga indicated that he wished to see “métis and blacks sitting on the same benches, in the same schools.” The final vote concerned two more proposals, one pitched by the European Father Le Comte and another by African delegate Stéphane Tchitchellé.112 Father Le Comte proposed that the council reverse its prior decision to remove territorial funding of scholarships for métis children in schools. He stressed that he understood the worry of black delegates – that is, the Congo “should not establish a separate category of citizens” in maintaining entitlements for métis. Nevertheless, he implored, residential and day schools that had admitted primarily métis children since their foundation decades earlier had already begun to accept children without “distinction of skin color.” He cited the enrollment statistics of two schools for girls in Brazzaville. One was the Augouard primary school, run by the sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny, which had thirty-six black boarding students and sixty-four métisses students, whereas in 1942 there was only one black student. The other was that the Javouhey school, which offered education through secondary school and had 110 111

112

ANOM, 1Affpol/2125: Meeting of September 10, 1948 of the Representative Council of Middle Congo. ANOM, 1Affpol/2125: Meeting of November 17, 1948 of the Representative Council of Middle Congo, copy certified by the director of the second office of political affairs, attached to a confidential letter from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FEA, letter dated February 1949. ANOM, 1Affpol/2125: Meeting of November 17, 1948 of the Representative Council of Middle Congo.

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111 white children as well as sixty-four métisses and thirty-six black girls. What Le Comte elided was that white, métisses, and black girls were housed in separate dormitories at the schools.113 Further, the enrollment statistics he cited indicated that métis students were disproportionally represented, although they were relatively few in the total numbers of children born in the Congo. Tchitchellé proposed a resolution for the territory to fund educational scholarships for any orphan in the Congo to attend local schools instead of being sent to Boko.114 His intention was that métis children would remain living in their maternal milieus. He argued that if the administration saw métis children as Europeans, they were to “completely go live among Europeans,” but if they were Africans, they were to remain in African milieus. Therefore, he proposed that all African children simply attend the schools closest to their place of residence.115 In 1947, aware of the controversies and resolve of delegates in the Congo, the lieutenant governor of Gabon decided that admission and enrollment to the state-run boarding house for métis children in Libreville would be opened to black children. The governor made this decision in spite of the protests of the Amicable of Métis in Gabon to maintain métis-only admission. Henceforth, black and métis children would live together in the same dormitories and attend the French Urban School, the school that taught a metropolitan French curriculum and also served white European children.116 At the time of the decision, the dormitories for métis children housed forty-seven boys and fifty-nine girls.117 It is probable that African delegates in the Territorial Assembly of Gabon would have made similar proposals as those in the Congo; however, such debate and voting might have gone in any number of directions. Joseph Deemin had run for and was an elected assemblyman. Because he was listed on the civil registry of Gabon as European rather than indigène, he ran for the assembly as a European and was one of the twelve Europeans elected.118 In addition to being the president of the Amicale and 113

114

115 116

117

118

Françoise Blum, “Les Enfants métis de Monseigneur Augouard à Brazzaville,” in Enjeux postcoloniaux de l’enfance et de la jeunesse: Espace francophone (1945–1980), ed. Yves Denéchère (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2019), 81. ANOM, 1 Affpol/2125: Meeting of November 17, 1948 of the Representative Council of Middle Congo, attached to a confidential letter from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FEA, letter dated February 1949. ANOM, 1Affpol/2125: Meeting of November 17, 1948 of the Representative Council of Middle Congo. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the governor of Gabon to the high commissioner of FEA, September 19, 1947, letter 1270; Letter from the high commissioner of FEA to the minister of Overseas France, October 14, 1947, no document number. There were also eleven métis boys and fourteen métis girls housed in Catholic school-missions for whom the colonial state subsidized the fees. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Letter from the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA, June 26, 1948, #6663/AG. Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale, 127–8.

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now a delegate to the Territorial Assembly, Deemin also held powerful positions and alliances with French settlers; he was the treasurer of the association of forestry businessmen – which controlled Gabon’s lucrative lumber trade – and of the Chamber of Commerce of Libreville.119 As such, he would have been in a strategic position to defend métis people’s interests and entitlements, yet the formal sanctioning of these interests by the colonial state came to an end. Antoinette Mikidou Olivera, whom I interviewed in Libreville in 2002, recounted that she was the first black child to live in what she still referred to as “the boarding home for métis” in the aftermath of the vote.120 She was already attending the Urban School as a day student when her father, a civil servant for the French military, worked with the assemblyman from their region to nominate her to lodge at the school. She credited her residential education at the boarding school and her secondary school diploma as having paved her entrance into the French colonial School for Midwifery in Dakar, Senegal. It was one of the few postsecondary vocational training centers for African women, and its graduates were some of the few African women who secured employment as wage laborers in the colonial civil service. In spite of the changing winds, the Amicale and Deemin continued to advocate for rights for métis beyond access to free education, based on the argument that the particular relationship of parentage they held with French men – which black Africans lacked – rendered them morally entitled. They sought increased compensation for métis who worked as civil servants and access for métis to enter lucrative industries dominated by French settlers. Deemin demanded that the colonial state create an intermediary tier between European civil servants of the highest grade and African civil servants of the lowest grade. The category was to be called “local intermediary” and reserved for métis civil servants, which would be “in keeping” with their legal status as French, given that they had received legal acknowledgment of their qualité de citoyen according to the law specifically for métis.121 The Amicale and Deemin also asked for métis to receive paid vacation days and permits to fell and export wood. Métis men sought to enter into and profit from the timber industry, Gabon’s primary economic activity, which was dominated by French men and white men of various nationalities. These concessions would allow for “the development of the country in which we are called to live for the rest of our days.” Colonial officials did not grant any of these demands but did fund

119 120 121

Bernault, Démocraties ambiguës en Afrique centrale, 62. OI, Antoinette Mikidou Olivera, Libreville, December 9, 2002. ANOM, AEF/GGAEF/5D44: Minutes from the extraordinary general assembly held at the home of Mr. Deemin, October 2, 1948.

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the construction of a Cercle des Métis (Club for Métis), in which the Amicable held social events and other gatherings.122 By 1949, in direct response to and pushed by the actions of the African delegates in the Congo, the new high commissioner of FEA, Cornut-Gentil, and colonial officials in the French Congo conceded that separate institutions for métis were indeed impolitic and no longer tenable. Nevertheless, the high commissioner insisted that métis were a special category and wanted to find a way for the colonial government to fund their education and care. His solution was to reorganize the tertiary school system in the Congo into a system of primary school residential institutions, of which Boko would be the first in the pilot program.123 It would be open to “métis orphans” – which he defined as all illegitimate children of European men. Additionally, Boko would be open to black orphans, defined as children whose mothers and fathers had died, “if any existed.” The minister of Overseas France approved this proposal, insisting that “maintaining the boarding schools for métis children seems to be a grave political error” and the new proposal to open admission to orphans of any origin or to children whose parents lived too far away from schools was an appropriate response to current needs.124 Unlike in FEA, black political figures in FWA who were newly endowed with political influence in colonial legislative bodies initially indicated their support of educational programs specifically for métis children as integral to their campaigns to wrest equality of opportunities and rights for French citizens in Africa. So-Called Abandoned Children: Recalibrating Welfare Aid for Children in St. Louis and Dakar, 1948 In 1948, in St. Louis (Senegal), African delegates elected to the newly constituted Territorial Assembly and the General Council demanded that the colonial state expand its funding for the upbringing and education of métis children, given that French fathers did not provide for them. The assemblymen conceived of access to education and monetary resources for the well-being of métis children in the context of broad demands for the equality of rights and policies and funding for the development of African societies in the French 122

123 124

Photography collection, photo 135, Archives Nationales de Gabon (hereafter ANG); Telegram from the chief administrator of the Estuary Department to the governor of Gabon, July 13, 1937, document F/530, July 13, 1937, ANC. ANOM, 1 Affpol/2125: Confidential letter from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FEA, letter dated February 1949. ANOM, 1 Affpol/2125: Letter from the minister of Overseas France to the director of political affairs, inspector general of education and youth, March 21, 1949, letter 2101; Note for the inspector general of education and youth from the Directorate of Political Affairs, March 14, 1949, letter 2258; Note for the inspector general of education and youth from the Directorate of Political Affairs, March 28, 1949, letter 2708.

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Union. Echoing what Dugay Clédor had requested in the 1930s, the council approved a two-part resolution advocating that the French colonial state fund the education and care of métis children. The wording of the first resolution was that “the French state intervene in the payment of the money necessary for the care and education of so-called abandoned children.” The second was that the law permitting the search for paternity that was active in metropolitan France be extended to FWA.125 The act did not explicitly use the term “métis” in referring to the children of which it spoke; however, by using the term “so-called” in reference to such children, the assemblymen issued a scathing critique to French and European men who knowingly refused to acknowledge their children or provide money or attention toward their care. In forwarding information about the vote to the high commissioner, the lieutenant governor of Senegal noted that the legislators were referring to the increased number of métis children born due to the “significant” presence of European soldiers and those of the Vichy-era Foreign Legion in Senegal during World War II.126 While black politicians in Senegal lobbied the French government to pay for the education and material care of métis children, they did not argue that métis children were distinct from or superior to other children born in Africa. Rather, their vote was a critique of the failure of the French to fulfill promises to invest in African human resources, to acknowledge their social rights, and expand access to education. The delegates’ critiques of European men and the colonial state’s lack of care and education for multiracial children mirror the critiques launched by black male African writers and commentators in colonial-era newspapers in the British Gold Coast.127 Thus, establishing educational opportunities and the exercise of legal rights for métis children was interwoven in the expansion of access to education for all Africans. Subsequently, French colonial administrators in Senegal and elsewhere in FWA were careful to publicly couch entitlements for métis children in those terms. The office of the high commissioner based in Dakar and colonial officials of Senegal stationed in varied regions maintained public assertions of equality and access to education and health care for all African ressortissants of the French Union. Yet, in their correspondence, colonial administrators continued

125

126 127

ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Wishes presented by General Counsel Diatta, adopted by the general council during the meeting of May 15, 1948, the president of the general council, vicepresident of the general council acting as president, and signed by Adama Lo, certified true copy, the secretary general of the general council, April 15, 1948. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from the governor of Senegal, chevalier in the Foreign Legion, to the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, June 30, 1948. Ray, “Decrying White Peril,” 78–110.

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to express a preference for the state to channel money toward the education and material conditions of métis children in particular. The French were not color-blind and continued to see métis children as more assimilable to French culture – and therefore potentially more useful citizens – than other children in Africa. In 1948, the high commissioner of FWA, René Victor Marie Barthes, outlined potential policy initiatives to increase material and educational aid to métis children in the new political reality in which Africans of all origins claimed equal rights and decried French racism. He noted that French “public opinion” expressed pity for métis children who had been abandoned by their fathers and left to the care of their mothers with few resources, which necessitated that métis children were the object of “special treatment” compared with other African children.128 However, he conceded that government entities could no longer “exercise the same liberty” in according métis children monetary aid and free education in public institutions funded by government, without extending the same access to other African children who were in similar conditions of being “abandoned or deprived of family support.” Thus, the solution to continue to provide for métis children was to locate, take in, and educate African children of any origins whose mothers and fathers had died, or children who were otherwise destitute and without the support of their mothers or fathers. This public assistance initiative provided monetary and educational support across FWA for a more capacious concept of “abandoned children,” while targeting multiracial children. The high commissioner’s office began an initiative for Dakar to become a hub of educational opportunities and primary and secondary schooling for girls from Senegal and elsewhere in FWA. Between 1946 and 1951, the high commissioner funded several missionary orders throughout Senegal, but particularly in Dakar, for the building of residential boarding school-orphanages for girls. This emphasis on Catholic missions as the best providers of education was a continuation of Vichy-era philosophies and an unfulfilled project to fund the building of residences for métisses girls in mission-schools in Dakar and its outskirts.129 Although each school took in black African girls, the missionschools emphasized their work with métisses girls, housing and educating girls

128

129

ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, commander of the Foreign Legion Barques, Chief of Staff P. I., General Directorate of APAS, Social Services, July 9, 1948, letter 478 AP/4T. ANS, 18 G 221 (160): Letter for the governor-general of FWA from the General Directorate of Finances, November 16, 1944, letter 1346/F-TP; Note for the governor-general from the General Directorate of Finances, November 29, 1944; Note for the governor-general from the director of financial control of FWA, R. Lemoire, January 9, 1945, document 9; General Government of FWA, an account of expenses, control of expenditures, budgetary funds recuperated from the BFA Public Works Department, execution of work at the Immaculate Conception Orphanage, January 9, 1945, document 4493.

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as young as two years old until the age of marriage, as they were the key population that elicited French colonial government interest and funding.130 With the office of the high commissioner increasing the budget for the education of children in FWA, the office of the governor of Senegal also increased its budget for welfare aid to Catholic institutions; in addition, it expanded its earlier wards program to incorporate not just métis children but African children of any ethnic or racial origins. The number of children on whose behalf the office paid subsidies for education and material needs increased significantly from pre–World War II and wartime numbers. After 1949, the number of children on whose behalf the colonial government of Senegal made welfare and educational payments increased to between eighty and a hundred children per year, racialized into categories of “métis” and “black.”131 As argued by Emily Marker, post–World War II French metropolitan and colonial government officials administrators perpetuated the idea of colorblindness while also perpetuating the “unequal distribution of power and resources among historically racialized groups” in ways that “entailed the creation of new code words that eschewed racial language – reliance on Européen instead of ‘white’ or on ‘autochtone’ instead of ‘black.’”132 The office of the lieutenant governor solicited his administrators each quarter to forward the names of any “métis or autochthonous children originaires of Senegal” likely to benefit from a subsidy, signaling that métis remained a special category and that the funds were intended for them. The office of the governor of Senegal stipulated that any children who received a subsidy were required to attend school, whether state-run or missionary. Most of the funded wards attended missionary schools and many continued to live with their kin, in addition to others who were resident at missionary stations. 130

131 132

ANS, 18 G 221 (160): Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny to Mrs. Cournaire, General Government of FWA, received March 5, 1945; Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny to the governor-general of FWA, received March 20, 1945; Directorate of Finances, subvention for the métis orphanage, March 9, 1945, document 813; Letter from Mrs. Belaigues, mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny, to the high commissioner of FWA, August 8, 1949; Directorate of Finances, subvention to the métis orphanage, November 12, 1949, document 5715 FI/A; Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny to the high commissioner of FWA, June 20, 1950; Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny to the high commissioner of FWA, June 28, 1950; Directorate of Finances, subvention for the métis orphanage, August 4, 1951, document 4692 FI/A; Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny to the high commissioner of FWA, December 3, 1951; Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of St. Joseph de Cluny, Sister Francoise De LaSalle, to the high commissioner of FWA, April 22, 1952; Directorate of Finances, subvention for the métis orphanage, May 2, 1952, document 3677 FI/A; Directorate of Finances, subvention for the métis orphanage, August 12, 1953, document 5988 FI/A. Circular to all cercles from the General Secretariat, First Office, Camille Bailly, December 27, 1949, letter 273 APA/I, 13 G 94 (180), ANS. Marker, “Obscuring Race,” 6.

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The number of children living with African individuals in Senegal who received welfare payments increased in comparison to prior decades, which reflects the shift in colonial thinking toward maintaining métis children in African homes and not just in French institutions. The number of children whose educational fees were paid for by the colonial government expanded beyond St. Louis or N’Gazobil, which had mission stations with a large concentration of métis children. In 1949, twenty-five boys and seven girls, who lived with individuals listed with African surnames (who may or may not have been their mothers or natal kin) received subsidies of 8,400 francs per year; these children lived in towns across Senegal, including Kédougou, Thìes, Dioloulou, Bignona, Sédhiou, and the circles of Ziguinchor, Tambacounda, and Louga.133 In 1950, thirteen additional children from Tambacounda alone received subsidies of 6,000 francs per year.134 In St. Louis, the office of the lieutenant governor issued a separate decree regarding “young orphans who were materially and morally abandoned,” this wording being a form of code to distinguish between black and métis children. Five girls and four boys with European last names lived with women who may have been their biological mothers, and these women received payments of 16,800 francs per year.135 In spite of the increased budget for the wards program, there were always more children in need than there was funding. As in years prior, the colonial welfare state continued to be a cheap one in spite of the rhetoric that promised money and resources for métis children. Conclusion Contestations over multiracial identities were critical to the formal dismantling of the racialized frontier of “indigène” versus “citoyen” and the reimagination of citizenship, social welfare, and the education of children. The contours of anti-imperial struggle from World War II continued in the reverberations of the war’s aftermath through the 1940s. Félix Eboué – black, Antillean, French, 133

134

135

ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Decision allocating subventions for the care of young orphans originating from the territory of Senegal for 1949, May 3, 1949, document 2172 APA/I; Decision allocating subventions for the care of young orphans originating from the territory of Senegal on the propositions of the mayor of St. Louis, General Secretariat, Department of Finances, March 16, 1949, document 1136 APA/I. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Decision allocating subventions for the care of young orphans originating from the territory of Senegal for 1950, September 14, 1950, document 5137 APA/I; Decision allocating subventions for the care of young orphans originating from the territory of Senegal for 1950, July 22, 1950, document 4262 APA/I; Letter from the mother superior of the Orphanage of N’Dar Toute to the governor of Senegal, February 14, 1950. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Decision allocating subventions for the care of young orphans originating from the territory of Senegal for 1950, May 6, 1949, document 2174 APA/I; Letter from the Reverend Mother St. Albert, director of the Orphanage of Kaolack, to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis c/o the administrator of Kaolack, February 28, 1950, 450 F/AG.

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and a lynchpin of Free France, sought to shore up the French nation and empire through reforming colonial governance in Africa. He launched a critical volley that fueled these contestations by critiquing policies that were to solve “the métis question” as evidence of France’s antiblack racism and a danger to the maintenance of French colonial rule and the economic and social development of the region. He also refuted the claims by métis themselves that their parentage and multiraciality made them different from others categorized as indigènes in French colonial classifications and the same as the white citoyens of their fathers’ milieus. Eboué refuted the very premise that being the child or descendant of a European made métis “French,” as African cultures and maternal milieus were resilient. For him, the facility with which a métis could obtain French citizenship meant that people who were not authentically French could become French citizens because of the hue of their skin, and black Africans who may have authentically assimilated into French culture could not become French because of the hue of their skin. In this regard, Eboué sought to decouple race from French citizenship. His line of argument also belied the idea that the commonality of black identity cohered Antilleans and Africans in shared struggles against antiblack racism and differentiated French citizenship status and rights. Métis and blacks were indigènes, who equally had to prove their Frenchness to obtain French citizenship status, whereas black Antillais were French at birth because of their geographical location. Eboué’s critiques solicited detractions, affirmations, and rebuff from individuals with French metropolitan citizenship vying for power in Free France and in post-Nazi occupation efforts to reconstitute the French nation and empire. Nonetheless, his thoughts prompted reconsideration of the relationships between race, citizenship, and investment in the education and wellbeing of children in French Africa, as the French sought to reestablish dominance in a shifting and unstable world order. Even as colonial officials invoked various moral and political grounds for the French state to provide monetary resources for métis based on the children’s abandonment by French fathers, they doubled down on offering limited educational resources to a finite number of children and protecting individual French men from any personal liability. Yet, métis individuals and collectives increased the scale of public declarations of varied racial identities, from which they made claims regarding the duties and obligations of French society and state toward them due to a dual blood debt: their French and European bloodlines and their contributions to the war effort. Whether métis constituencies claimed whiteness or being both black and white, they all maintained that the blood debts rendered them not indigène and therefore they were fully entitled to the social rights restricted to European French society. In letters, petitions, and individual daily actions, they called out the quotidian slights they faced from white French citizens in the course of their daily lives in the towns in which they lived. Their demands

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caused cracks in the French imperial coupling of full French citizenship rights in Africa with unambiguous whiteness. As a result, métis in FEA cities were able to access some social welfare measures – quinine, food rations, and residences and schools for children – formerly open only to white French citizens. Métis clamored for their incorporation into French society while a post-war generation of French-educated black-identifying Africans clamored for the racial, social, and political reconfiguration of imperial rule. They demanded for Africans to wield political rights to direct their present and future lives in equality and cooperation with France. Métis constituencies maintained their rights and advocacy as distinct from and not counter to those increasingly and vocally mounted by differentiated groups of black-identifying African soldiers, wage laborers, thinkers, writers, and other activists from Paris to Dakar to Brazzaville. After the 1946 formal dismantling of the racialized indigène/ citoyen demarcation that was the bedrock of French colonial rule, black African delegates to territorial assemblies in St. Louis and Brazzaville questioned arguments by and about métis as racially different from blacks and racially the same as whites as antithetical to emerging visions of Africa’s political and socio-economic futures. In debates and votes to affirm or defund the education and care of métis children, black delegates intimated that métis could neither claim racial difference nor entitlements due to racial difference as doing so would deny what were otherwise universal rights of citizenship and childhood. Additionally, delegates took the French to task for insufficient investment in the education and well-being of children born to African mothers. By 1950, it appeared that de facto and de jure colonial racial hierarchies that delineated métis as distinct and inherent members of “the French race” – or as relatively capable of assimilating to this “race” under the right conditions – began to crumble. Yet as increased constituencies of Africans clamored for social rights and greater autonomy over governance and their futures in the 1950s, certain métis actors continued to insist on a distinct personhood that made them different from “black Africans” and therefore entitled to different, special, better treatment. Some French private citizens and civil servants also subscribed to this idea. Nevertheless, métis and French people clashed over who would control the purse and scope of entitlements for métis, even as French and African historical actors alike debated the shifting winds of African autonomy and governance in the 1950s. The next chapter turns to Dakar, which emerged as the center of a new round of debates about multiraciality and competing visions of “the métis question” amid continued social, political, and economic change, with increasing rhetoric for more egalitarian reconfigurations of Africa–France.

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Humanizing Maternal and Child Welfare in Dakar, 1949–1956 Nicolas Rigonaux and the Union of Eurafricans

In February 1949, Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa (“the union”), addressed a letter to the minister of Overseas France in Paris, which landed at the desk of the high commissioner of French West Africa in Dakar.1 The letterhead features the union’s logo, a pencil drawing of three people with distinctly different skin colors and wardrobes: a French man, identifiable because he sports the iconic khaki shorts and pith helmet of a colonial employee; an African woman, identifiable by the head scarf and off-the-shoulder dress common among stylish urban women in Dakar; and a naked child of the woman and man, of unidentified gender, positioned as though looking at and walking toward the reader (see Figure 3). The skin color of the woman was penciled in ink, while the skin color of the child and man were not – that is, their skin was the color of the white paper. The child of the African woman and French man, walking toward an unknown future, was the focus of Rigonaux’s letter. Rigonaux wrote to the minister to inform him “of some matters of importance about which you may not be aware” regarding “the métis or Eurafrican.” He argued that the métis or Eurafrican child was both a social and legal “bastard” and as such was the most disadvantaged child in Overseas France. The French government had the duty to mitigate this social and legal illegitimacy caused by the “failed father.” He promised that he would soon outline steps and solutions for addressing the problematic childhood of Eurafricans. He had once been that child. Born in Dahomey in 1915 of an African woman named Adeline Alouga and a French man with the surname of Rigonaux, who had not legally recognized him, Nicolas Rigonaux had attended and resided in a Catholic mission school in that colony for some of

1

Letter from President Rigonaux of the Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa to the minister of Overseas France, February 9, 1949, letter 31/U.E., FM 1 AFF-POL 3406, Centre d’Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM).

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Figure 3 Logo of the Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa and Togo, ca. 1950s.

his childhood. He had applied for and obtained French citizenship in 1937 according to the September 1930 decree for métis.2 Colonial court documents listed his name as Nicolas dit Rigonaux, but he referred to himself simply as “Rigonaux,” never with “dit.”3 How Rigonaux named himself is significant: he decried the refusal of the French government and society to formally recognize his filiation from the man that he, his mother, and maternal kin knew was his biological father. Rigonaux used his French education and literacy, knowledge of colonial administrative government functioning, and accounting acumen to argue for expanded government provisions for métis, in actions and terms that were both different from and similar to those of other métis organizations in FWA and FEA. He used the term “Eurafrican” as well as “métis” to refer to multiracial people, which emphasized the claim of

2

3

Archives National du Sénegal (hereafter ANS), 3 M 51(184). Letter from the lieutenant governor of Dahomey to the governor-general of FWA, April 1, 1937, letter 411 APA, document 1, documents 20–32. OI with Nicole Sarr, daughter of Nicolas Rigonaux, Paris, 2014.

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belonging to both European and African societies and cultures and embodied this multifaceted identity as a glue that facilitated an equitable African French future. His meaning of Eurafrican as implying a form of personhood that represented symmetry differed from that of European thinkers, who conceptualized Eurafrica as a geopolitical unit. As conceptualized by European scholars and political figures in the twentieth century, “Eurafrica” meant “an asymmetrical relationship, the essentialized role of colonialism and the economic exploitation of the African continent to serve European integration and futures.”4 In a three-page document that he personally delivered to the high commissioner of FWA a few months after the first letter, Rigonaux – writing on the behalf of the Committee of the Union for FWA and FEA – asserted that the union and the French government should work together to “remedy the problem of The Childhood of the Abandoned Eurafrican.” He outlined actions and policies to undertake to find solutions.5 He noted that “the métis child is the most destitute of [children] in the territories of Overseas France,” repeating the language and doléances (grievances) that métis individuals and organizations had been stating for decades. Rigonaux envisioned a French paternalist colonial welfare state that would mitigate the social and legal disadvantages engendered by the failures of European biological fathers. He asserted that it was métis adults (such as himself ) and the organizations they founded who were best suited to direct the day-to-day care, childrearing, and education of métis children. He acknowledged that the colonial administration had opened some orphanages in “black Africa to take in abandoned Eurafricans,” but he wanted the state to intervene differently in order to save these endangered children. Rather than placing children in French residential institutions, saving Eurafrican children would mean supporting the households of African mothers and their métis children. Rigonaux humanized multiracial children and their mothers by emphasizing their individual stories of suffering.6 First, Rigonaux insisted that the state make direct payments to African mothers or kin raising métis children so that they could afford housing, food, and their children’s school fees. That is, the French should give money to the

4 5 6

Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2014). ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FOA to the high commissioner of FWA, August 1, 1949, letter 229 U/E. For more on Rigonaux and the union’s efforts to rehabilitate representations of black mothers of multiracial children, see Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “Miss Eurafrica: Men, Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945–1960,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, 3, 568–93.

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union to disburse and ensure the provision of services. He prioritized how the state should use the money: creating a center of refuge for pregnant women to receive medical services and proper nutrition, monitoring the nutrition of children who lived with their mothers, and providing a stipend to the neediest of mothers. Second, Rigonaux argued that all métis should receive “assimilation to the category of Metropolitan status” to fully possess the rights of French citizens and the same access to resources. Invoking yet again the “debt in blood” argument of how Africa had saved France during World War II, he contended: “They [métis] don’t understand why, after their assimilation in the army, their civil status changes after their return to civilian life.”7 Métis men had served as soldiers in French metropolitan army corps during World War II but were treated as second-class citizens upon their return to Africa and were denied the social rights enjoyed by metropolitan French citizens. He was critical of the fact that neither the titular French citizenship that all Africans now possessed under the Fourth Republic nor the French citizenship that métis could apply for under the September 1930 decree sufficiently acknowledged the full legal status and rights that métis were entitled to because their biological fathers were French. Third, Rigonaux claimed that métis across French Africa shared a collective identity, one that crossed the colonial boundaries of FEA and FWA. He argued that members of métis associations in FWA and FEA were “walking hand in hand, exasperated by the lamentable state, asking for immediate resolution to the problem they face.” Rigonaux ended by demanding from the French government the immediate resolution of problems related to métis in all of French Africa. With this reference to all métis as sharing a collective identity, belonging, and needs, Rigonaux invoked the idea of Eurafricans as constituting a family, a group of people whose bonds of kinship cohered them to African and European societies, from which they could claim the obligations that each society owed them. Rigonaux’s 1949 letters marked the beginning of decades of engagement across French Africa with multiracial people, mothers of multiracial children, black political thinkers and activists, and French government employees in metropolitan France and Africa. He also created new relationships and exchanges with métis elsewhere in the French Empire and with African Americans. Rigonaux envisioned the colonial state partnering with him and 7

The concept of “debt in blood” refers to tiralleurs Sénégalais who fought in world wars on the side of France, as articulated in Mann, Native Sons, 1–3. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Note for the inspector general of colonies, director general of finances, c/o secretary general of the Ministry of the Interior of FWA, July 30, 1949, letter 2906 INT/AP/2; Attached: reminder, Nicolas Rigonaux for the Committee of the Union of FWA and FEA, June 25, 1949, no document number.

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other métis to facilitate the social reproduction of the family life of mothers and their children and the social reproduction of métis, as well as their integration into French cultural mores, material living conditions, and full legal status. This chapter analyzes Rigonaux’s articulation and facilitation of social, economic, and political multiracial projects – primarily in Dakar but also elsewhere in FWA and FEA – and the infrastructure of people, monetary resources, and print and radio platforms that his efforts cohered across French Africa. I argue that racialized and gendered ideas and praxes of childhood, parenting, fostering, and family were important features in articulating what belonging, autonomy, and citizenship meant in 1950s French Africa and that these issues destabilized French colonial power. Rigonaux portrayed himself as a father figure, guiding the well-being of métis and facilitating the French colonial state to enact its promise of equality. He succeeded in carrying out many of his initiatives with money from the colonial state. He maintained several platforms in addition to the presidency of the union, which expanded after 1951 and was called the Union of Eurafricans of Black Africa or the Union of Eurafricans of FWA, FEA, and Togo, and which brought together various associations of métis across French Africa. He facilitated for the offices of the governor-general and the governor of Senegal to allocate direct welfare payments to mothers in Dakar and to provide money to the union to facilitate its activities and disbursements. Beginning in 1949, Rigonaux published a quarterly magazine called L’Eurafricain (The Eurafrican), which featured articles, faits divers (news in brief ), birth and death announcements, correspondence, minutes, photos of métis associations in individual colonies, and illustrations. In 1952, Rigonaux founded the organization French Charity for Children, to which the colonial offices also transferred money for services, including the opening of a foyer (home) for boys in Dakar. Contributors to the publication from French Africa, elsewhere in the French Empire, and around the world wrote articles, and the publication promoted the work of the charity and the union. The magazine also advocated for métis and bonds of solidarity among métis across the French colonial world and worked to keep the public in Africa and Europe aware of “the Eurafrican problem.”8 Trans-African Routes and Roots: Rigonaux’s Biography Lorelle Semley coined the term “trans-African” to refer to the “physical and social mobility of people of African descent both within and beyond the 8

Toniduag, “Talking About the Métis Problem,” The Eurafrican: Information and Connection Newsletter of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA, FEA, and Togo; Issue 15, 13–14.

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African continent” in order to “ascend socially.” I use this term to trace the roots and routes in Africa that shaped Rigonaux.9 Yet Rigonaux’s transAfrican roots and routes also facilitated a trans-European mobility in which he ultimately claimed equal belonging to both Europe and Africa. Born in Dahomey, he was the poster child of the “abandoned métis” children whose plight he lamented; he did not have contact with his biological father, nor did this father provide any material support for his upbringing. Rigonaux grew up within a framework of French education in the colonial capital of Porto-Novo. Dahomey was second only to Senegal in terms of the number of students – black, métis, and other racial identities – attending French schools.10 Rigonaux went on to pursue secondary school education in the best schools available to Africans. While métis children who lived in Catholic or state-run orphanages attended schools with black children, colonial society expressed strong opinions about separating métis children from African kin and culture. Directors of orphanages sought to limit African mothers’ visiting rights.11 Nevertheless, Rigonaux’s mother, Adeline Alouga, maintained a relationship with her son, fostering exchanges with his maternal kin and community (see Figure 4). In an interview I conducted in 2014 in Paris with Nicole Rigonaux Sarr, one of Rigonaux’s biological children, she credited Rigonaux’s mother and the advocacy she waged on his behalf as having profoundly influenced his life trajectory.12 Sarr recounted how Alouga fought for her son to gain French citizenship and for him to bear the name of the French man who was his biological father. Her grandmother went to the colonial court in Porto-Novo with witnesses to corroborate her relationship with – and the identity of – the father of her child as having been Rigonaux, a soldier from Corsica, who returned there shortly after the child’s birth (see Figure 4). Nicolas Rigonaux’s articulation of the innate rights of métis was rooted in the African milieus in which he spent his childhood. These milieus provided the emotional and ideological spark for his own sense of self as métis, African, and French – and informed the expansive scale at which he went on to claim rights for all métis across French Africa. His thoughts may have been influenced by the activist milieu in which he grew up in the town of Porto-Novo (in Dahomey) in the 1920s and 1930s. Semley notes that men and women of African descent who lived there during those decades had originated from and traveled to various shores of the Atlantic French Empire. They launched strikes, journalistic writings, and court petitions in which they argued for their 9 10 11

12

Semley, To Be Free and French, 162–3. White, Children of the French Empire, 75–6. A 1905 report by the inspector of education for French West Africa claimed that 1,600 children in Dahomey and 350 in Ivory Coast had attended schools maintained by the SMA. White, Children of The French Empire, 48–9, 55. OI with Nicole Sarr, Paris, May 2014.

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Figure 4 Photo 1: Left to right: Nicolas Rigonaux, his mother, an unnamed woman, and an unnamed man (no date). Photo 2: Rigonaux’s presumed biological father, François Rigonaux.13 Source: Nicole Sarr, daughter of Nicolas and Pauline Rigonaux, personal collection.

identity and belonging as both “French” and “black” and the rights, freedoms, and shared humanity they clamored for the colonial state to acknowledge.14 The collectives of African male laborers, market women and traders, Muslim communities, and descendants of precolonial royalty did not view their protests as anticolonial. Rather, they sought the end of French racism toward Africans – manifested in the denial of French citizenship as well as low wages, lack of access to education, and forced labor conditions – in order for French colonialism to fulfill its promise of universal rights for all in the French Empire. In the 1920s, African journalists in Porto-Novo wrote several articles that were published in newspapers, critiquing abusive colonial policies as antithetical to French republican ideals. The writers portrayed themselves as loyal Frenchmen who sought to help France live up to its republican ideals, using “colonial rhetoric, specific statutes, and even official speeches and publications

13

14

French government personnel in the colonies and Metropolitan France tried to avoid naming presumed biological fathers in documents. However, a 1964 French Embassy in Dakar document marked “Secret/Confidential” identified Rigonaux’s biological father as “the deceased François.” Archives Nationales de France (ANF) 19970062/11 Dossier 800362 International Union of Métis, Information Note, French Embassy in Dakar Senegal, Document Number 1743/SCTIP/SL. Semley, To Be Free and French, 184–6.

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to argue their positions.”15 Rigonaux would go on to utilize similar rhetorical strategies and espouse the simultaneous critique of and love for France in his articulation of métis identity and belonging. Yet, he claimed a different identity for himself – as métis, African, and French. He employed this legal status to simultaneously avow loyalty to France while criticizing the failure of French colonial policies to live up to republican ideals of rights and freedom that were “supposed to transcend race, nation, and religion.”16 Rigonaux had a lifelong partner, his wife, whom Sarr also credits as the bedrock of her father’s ideas and actions. Referred to as “Mrs. Rigonaux” in archival documents and L’Eurafricain, Pauline née Diallo was born in French Soudan of an unknown father and an unknown woman. She had lived at the N’Dar Toute orphanage in St. Louis, Senegal, since she was a baby.17 The future Mr. and Mrs. Rigonaux met in St. Louis, where he was stationed to complete his obligatory year of service in the French army. They married according to French civil law and moved to Dakar, where he went on to work as a civil servant accountant.18 Both spouses were Catholic and had no kin in Senegal. They had five biological children and created a new family unit. Over the course of the 1950s, they embarked on what they viewed as their calling: fighting for the rights of métis to grow up in dignified living conditions so they could contribute to the moral, economic, social, and political equilibrium of African and French societies (Figure 5). Rigonaux envisioned that the union would be an umbrella organization to unite métis not only in Senegal but across FWA, FEA, and wherever multiracial people lived throughout the French Empire. Founded originally in Dakar in 1944 as the Philanthropic Association of French Mulattos, under Rigonaux’s leadership the Senegal-based organization extended its reach.19 Its areas of focus were the care and education of métis children, the cultivation of a sense of solidarity among métis, and the citizenship status and rights of métis. Rigonaux and other association officers from the headquarters in Dakar 15

16 17 18

19

One such prominent writer and activist born in Porto-Novo was Kojo Tovalou Houénou, born into the family of royals from the kingdom of Dahomey. He spent his teens and twenties in France before returning to Porto-Novo in 1920 and going back to France in 1923. He penned letters and articles in locations throughout the French Empire and France, based on Porto-Novo residents’ sustained and varying calls for full French citizenship in law and practice for Africans, as a right and a fulfillment of French rhetoric, not revolt. Semley, To Be Free and French, 226–7. Semley, To Be Free and French, 186 and 226–. OI with Nicole Sarr, Paris, 2014. ANS 3M51(184), letter from the procurer general to the Ministry of Colonies, letter 2211 PG, July 7, 1937; Extrait de l’Arret de la Cour d’appel de l’AOF à Dakar reconnaissant la qualite de citoyen francais au métis Nicolas dit Rigonaux, Borderau Letter 219 PG, April 23, 1937 The Eurafrican, edition entitled “Loyalty to the Metropole,” no edition number, ca. 1950: Minutes of the October 29, 1949 meeting of the Dahomey Section of the Union of Eurafricans, 5–7; Minutes of the November 19, 1949 meeting of the Bamako French Soudan of the Union of Eurafricans, 5–7.

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Figure 5 Photo 1: Pauline Diallo Rigonaux at N’Dar Toute (third row, third from right, marked X), no date. Photo 2: Wedding photo of Mr. and Mrs. Rigonaux (no date).20 Source: Nicole Sarr, daughter of Nicolas and Pauline Rigonaux, personal collection.

traveled across FWA to attend the meetings of other branches located in colonial capital cities, facilitating the election of branch officers, solidifying cohesion, management, and purpose, and recruiting new members.21

20 21

OI with Nicole Sarr, private family photos, Paris, 2014. The Eurafrican, edition entitled “Loyalty to the Metropole,” no edition number, ca. 1950: Minutes of the October 29, 1949 meeting of the Dahomey Section of the Union of Eurafricans,

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The expansion of the association took place during a decade in which new and shifting African constituencies clamored for social and political rights in the French Union. In the aftermath of World War II and the 1946 French Constitution, Africans across French Africa continued to demand equal access to economic and social resources from the French colonial state. Across French Africa in the 1950s, Frederick Cooper argues, Africans mobilized in “claiming citizenship,” demanding that political citizenship of the French Union be transformed into a social citizenship and “equality of treatment” in economic resources, access to education, and standards of living.22 African political actors created new forms of collective identities and sought increased African autonomy within the French Union. They forwarded conceptions of what “Eurafrica” could be in ways that differed from French and other European perceptions, through popular mobilization, organizing political parties, labor union activism, and legislative debates. They were active in cities and rural areas.23 Métis people’s claims for equality of treatment in the shifting French Union were predicated on discourses based on blood and kinship – discourses rooted in and routed through the investment in mothers and children. Studying these claims and discourses expands one’s understanding of Africans “claiming citizenship.” “Worthy of Interest”: African Mothers, Urban Conditions, and Colonial Welfare Payments in Dakar Over the course of the 1950s, the number of children on whose behalf the colonial government of Senegal made welfare and educational payments increased to between 100 and 300 children per year – a sharp increase from the forty-two children who were funded in 1948.24 In any given year, twentyfive to forty percent of these recipients were categorized in colonial documents as “métis,” and the rest were “native.” Métis children were awarded government aid at a disproportionate rate compared to the much larger numbers of African children of other origins. By 1953, the colonial government made payments for the subsistence or educational tuition of about 376 métis children (about twenty-five percent of the métis population) in Senegal. This figure encompassed children who lived in Catholic institutions and those who lived with their mothers, maternal kin, or African adults who were their legal

22 23 24

5–7; Minutes of the November 19, 1949 meeting of the Bamako French Soudan of the Union of Eurafricans, 8–10. Cooper, Citizenship Between Empire and Nation,184–5. Cooper, Citizenship Between Empire and Nation, 165–7. Circular sent to all the cercles from Secretary General Camille Bailly of the First Office, December 27, 1949, letter 273 APA/I, 13 G 94(180), ANS.

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guardians.25 About forty-seven percent of children on whose behalf the colonial government of Senegal made payments lived in African homes, not in French institutions, and many lived in Dakar. This shift was in no small part due to the actions of Nicolas Rigonaux, who viewed African mothers of métis children as “worthy of interest” and forwarded the names and locations of women and children in Dakar.26 In 1950, Rigonaux listed the names of twenty-six métis children in the Dakar region, ranging from two to sixteen years old and living with their mothers; he requested that the government of Senegal remit welfare payments. Half of the women on this list went on to receive monthly government payments.27 This represented a change from prior decades in which colonial administrators were reluctant to extend payments to African mothers in favor of funding missionaries. In Dakar, over the course of the 1950s, the mothers and a few male kin of ten to twenty métis boys and girls received monthly welfare payments for the children’s quotidian needs and school fees. Additionally, the number of educational scholarships funded by the colonial state for métisses girls to

25

26 27

ANS, 13 G 94(180): Decision granting subventions for the care of young métis and indigenous orphans of the territory of Senegal for 1952, from the Department of Finance, April 18, 1952, document 2260 APA/I; Decision granting subventions for the care of young métis and indigenous orphans of the territory of Senegal for 1953, from the Department of Finance, May 28, 1953, document 1830/1550; Letter from the mayor of the commune of St. Louis to the governor of Senegal, a nominal list of orphans living in the commune who may be granted a subvention, March 2, 1953, letter 178 SG; Letter from the mother superior of N’Dar Tout to the governor of Senegal c/o the head of the political office, March 9, 1953; see also: August 8, 1952, document 5254 APA/I; July 19, 1952, document 4725 APA/I; March 13, 1952, document 1440 APA/I. ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from Mother Superior Marie Vianney of Immaculate Conception in Ruffisque to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis c/o the deputy administrator of Ruffisque, received November 14, 1951, November 23, 1951, document 22306 AG; Letter from the mother superior of Immaculate Conception in Ruffisque to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis c/o the deputy administrator of Ruffisque, received January 9, 1952 and forwarded to the secretary general of the office of the governor of Senegal, January 17, 1952, document 965 AG; Letter from the mother superior of the N’Dar-Toute orphanage to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis, arrived January 12, 1952, document 271; Confidential telegram from the secretary of the district of Kaolack to the governor of Senegal, September 29, 1952, document 1118/CK; Letter from the mother superior of the orphanage of Immaculate Conception in Kaolack to the governor of Senegal in St. Louis, November 21, 1952; Letter from Reverend Father Bertrand, superior of the Catholic Mission of Kaolack, to the governor of Senegal c/o the commanding administrator in chief of the district of Kaolack, September 15, 1952; Letter from the reverend father of the Catholic Mission of Ruffisque to the deputy administrator of Ruffisque, June 6, 1952, arrival 1396. The Eurafrican, Issue 14, 4. ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, November 23, 1949, letter 616 U.E.; Letter from the head of the political office to the secretary general; Note from the Department of the Interior, Office of Political Affairs, to the delegate of the governor of Senegal to Dakar, October 24, 1950, document 3803 APA/I.

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attend residential Catholic schools increased. This expansion of direct payments to African caregivers and Catholic missions in Dakar came about through the intersecting interests of colonial officials in improving the education of girls to meet the needs of the colonial economy and Rigonaux advocating fiercely for specific children and their mothers.28 St. Louis was the capital city of Senegal, but Dakar grew in population, size, and importance after World War II. It increasingly drew African and non-African migrants who sought opportunities to earn money. Its population rose from just under 80,000 residents in 1936 to more than 160,000 people by 1944.29 French colonial officials, settlers, and urban planners sought to maintain a segregated city according to colonial categories, with Europeans concentrated in an area known as the plateau, Africans in the medina, and people who were “inbetween” – such as Lebanese and Cape Verdeans – living in intermediary neighborhoods. Rachel Petrocelli argues that these “ideological boundaries about race that colonizers aimed to achieve in Dakar were, as in many African cities, more ambiguous than the state acknowledged,” and people of diverse backgrounds “delineated different lines and connections between each other from those that authorities would draw.”30 Some of these connections across colonial racial categories during and after World War II were sexual relationships between European and African women. Such relationships resulted in the children who became the focus of Rigonaux’s life work. Beginning in 1950, Rigonaux established relationships with colonial offices and civil servants – at the municipal, colony, and federal levels in the cities of Dakar and St. Louis, with the delegate of the governor of Senegal in Dakar, the mayor of Dakar, the minister of the interior of FWA, and the high commissioner of FWA – that eventually resulted in individual cases of African mothers in Dakar gaining welfare payments to care for their métis children. He also lobbied the colonial state to pay subsidies to the mission stations to underwrite the costs of food, lodging, and school fees. Through correspondence and in-person meetings with colonial officials, Rigonaux advocated and convinced different branches of the French colonial government to give financial assistance on behalf of “young métis children abandoned by their departed fathers who are left behind no known address.”31

28

29 30 31

For more on the expanded scale of black and multiracial girls’ educational opportunities in post–World War II West Africa, see Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées, Chapter VII “Pionnières,” 81–90. Rachel Petrocelli, “City Dwellers and the State: Making Modern Urbanism in Colonial Dakar, 1914–1994,” PhD diss., Stanford University (2011), 188. Petrocelli, “City Dwellers and the State,” 194–5. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the Ministry of the Interior of the governor-general of FWA, November 7, 1950, no document number.

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African mothers of métis children came to receive the welfare payments in increased numbers due to the new representation of African mothers of multiracial children forwarded by Rigonaux and by some of these women themselves: the poor, suffering, deserving, and dignified mother. According to historian Nimisha Barton, anxieties about depopulation that had existed for decades – since World War I – meant that a welfare state in metropolitan France “happily equipped struggling widows, mothers, and heads of large families with requisite legal tools and financial assistance they needed to survive.”32 Yet such safety nets were not extended to French Africa or to colonial subjects. European colonial officials and Catholic and Protestant missionaries represented African mothers’ childbearing and childrearing practices across the continent as leading to infertility, underdevelopment, and infant mortality. Colonial states and societies attempted to medicalize and rationalize reproductive health and child nutrition practices to fit with Western logic.33 Missionaries and colonial officials in French Africa also expressed particular suspicion and hostility toward colonized mothers of multiracial children, often categorizing them as prostitutes and bad mothers, denying their respectability and basic human dignity.34 As argued by Christopher Lee, multiracial people and associations in British Central Africa employed specific tactics to counteract colonial discourses of the disreputability of African women who engaged in interracial relationships; multiracial adults established for themselves “a form of social dignity and honor to be used against frequent counterclaims of illicit origins.”35 Rigonaux sought to establish the social dignity and honor of multiracial children through an emphasis on African mothers. This differentiated him from some other métis associations in French Africa, which often argued that métis children faced better futures when raised in French colonial state-run or French missionary institutions. Rigonaux made it his mission to advocate for women living in the Dakar region and raising métis children, based on the idea that the status of mother

32 33

34 35

Barton, Reproductive Citizens, 7. For analyses of African women’s reproductive health and ideas and practices of maternity in twentieth-century colonial Francophone Africa and other European empires, see studies such as Barbara Cooper, Countless Blessings: A History of Childbirth and Reproduction in the Sahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); Martine Spensky, ed. Le contrôle du corps des femmes dans les Empires coloniaux (Paris: Karthala, 2015); Amy Kaler, Running after Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe (London: Heinemann, 2004); Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Circular from Secretary General Chauvet and the delegation to the governors of the colonies for the high commissioner, July 30, 1949, letter 548 INT/AP2b. Lee, Unreasonable Histories, 170.

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and the accompanying task of nurturing children into adulthood conferred dignity and value. Rhiannon Stephens argues that motherhood in the long durée of African history is a “social institution with an ideology,” a central aspect of human practice, but one through which individuals and societies have articulated a “social system of meaning.”36 Rigonaux triumphed against colonial officials’ “systems of meaning” – in which African women who had engaged in interracial relationships and given birth to métis children were seen as women of ill repute – by instead painting an image of devoted mothers who courageously struggled against circumstances to provide for their children. Rigonaux’s tactic to elicit the government to respond favorably to his proposed mother-headed households was to emphasize that the catalyst of the children’s plight was their “abandonment by their departed fathers who are left behind no known address.”37 He emphasized that mothers would use the money to provide for basic necessities and school fees. Hence, Rigonaux’s portrait invoked a suffering and destitute mother who struggled to provide a decent living because of the callous action by a European man who had left her and her child bereft. He further characterized the urban environment of Dakar, with its high cost of living and lack of decent lodging, as a particularly harsh and dangerous environment for métis children. The fault lay not with mothers but with biological fathers, the colonial state, and the conditions of urban life that were beyond their control. The case of a woman residing in Dakar named M’Bayène Diop, mother of two “abandoned métis children,” as described by Rigonaux in a 1950 letter, is indicative of his advocacy.38 It was outside factors, not the character and behavior of the mother, that endangered the children’s welfare. Homeless and surviving on the charity of neighbors, the mother “protected and raised the children to the best of her abilities,” he wrote. Rigonaux described her circumstances as “a typical case that merited your attention.” Colonial officials had police officers in Dakar conduct investigations into the lives of the women that Rigonaux forwarded to confirm the occurrence of a relationship with a man categorized as “European” and thus establish paternity and unearth any criminal records. M’Bayène Diop lived at the bottom of the stairs of a private residence in Dakar with her daughter Odette Passy, whose biological father was presumed to be a deceased soldier named Colonel Passy, who used to live

36 37

38

Stephens, A History of African Motherhood, 6–12. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the Ministry of the Interior of the general government of FWA, November 7, 1950, letter 709/ U.E. Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo in Dakar to the general director of the interior of the general government of FWA, October 13, 1950, letter 645 U.E., 13 G 94(180), ANS.

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in Dakar. Also living with M’Bayène Diop was her son, Edouard Robert, whose father, Roland Robert, was another soldier who had also left Dakar.39 By November 1950, the delegate of the governor of Senegal issued a decision that she would receive an annual payment of 12,00 francs for each child.40 While Rigonaux acted as an intermediary and wrote to colonial officials to lobby for specific families of women and children to receive government aid, some women wrote directly to the office of the delegate of the lieutenant governor of Senegal in Dakar, requesting that the administration provide financial assistance in raising their children.41 For example, in March 1950, Pauline Bérguerisse wrote that she was soliciting financial assistance from the administration for the care of her two daughters, who had been abandoned by their father. She attached the girls’ birth certificates, which indicated that they had been born in 1948 and 1950.42 The emotion and emphasis of her household’s pathos in Bérguerisse’s letters mirrors the literary techniques and tropes that Rigonaux often deployed in his letters to colonial administrators advocating for individual children and mothers. She may have known Rigonaux, and they may have collaborated on her letter. She described herself as a “sad mother” who could not work to provide for her children because one daughter had been born prematurely and required in-home care. Bérguerisse and her children lived in the home of her father, who did not have enough resources to care for all of them. A month later, a delegate recommended that she be granted financial assistance, and the payments began. Rigonaux also advocated for children whose mothers did not meet the colonial metrics of moral virtue. In 1950, he sought assistance for Anna Diouf and her children, regardless of the police commissioner’s assessment of her less-than-stellar reputation, evinced by three different French men 39

40

41

42

ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from the delegate for the governor of Senegal in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, Office of Finances, November 13, 1950, letter 21460/AG; Decision completing the decision of April 20, 1950, allocating subventions for the care of young indigenous and métis orphans from the Territory of Senegal for 1950, Secretary General Camille Bailly, First Office, November 22, 1950, no document number. ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from the delegate for the governor of Senegal in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, Office of Finances, November 13, 1950, letter 21460/AG; Decision completing the decision of April 20, 1950, allocating subventions for the care of young indigenous and métis orphans from the Territory of Senegal for 1950, Secretary General Camille Bailly, First Office, November 22, 1950, no document number. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from Secretary General Magendie, First Office, to the academic inspector in St. Louis, January 10, 1951, letter 23. Other cases of women writing letters include Henriette Burel; Letter from Antoinette Huchard to the delegate of the governor of Senegal, received June 20, 1950 and forwarded to the secretary general, First Office, office of the lieutenant governor of Senegal, June 26, 1950, document 12162/AG. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from the delegate of the governor of Senegal in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, April 13, 1950, letter 66272 F/E; Letter from the chief of security to the delegate of the governor of Senegal, March 27, 1950, letter 4577/SU; Letter from Ms. Pauline Béguerisse to the delegate of the governor of Senegal, March 1, 1950, no document number.

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having fathered her five children through what the commissioner labeled “prostitution.” The police commissioner said she was a “well-known person in all of the police commissioner offices of Dakar, for her morality as well as her conduct.”43 Diouf was convicted in 1949 for maintaining a brothel and for solicitation and was condemned to a suspended sentence of twenty days in prison and payment of a fine of 3,000 francs. She was part “of a gang of women hanging out in cafés like stray dogs with the goal of linking up with [French] soldiers.” Rigonaux met with the delegate of the governor of Dakar and emphasized that the children lived in a state of poverty and urged the delegate to not focus on the mother’s conduct. The delegate issued a positive recommendation for financial assistance “in spite of the bad conduct of the mother Anna Diouf.”44 The governor’s office approved and disbursed welfare payments to her and another woman for whom Rigonaux had advocated. Rigonaux was persistent in his requests on behalf of mothers and children. When he had not heard back from government officials within a few weeks, he wrote again, asking for the status of the list that he had forwarded. Acting Governor Camille Bailly replied to Rigonaux that his administration was considering each of the cases seriously and would investigate them with “kindness,” with the intention of making a single decision about which cases to fund.45 By 1951, the tone between Rigonaux and Bailly in their letters was one of a cordial and friendly relationship. That year, Rigonaux requested that thirty-eight additional mothers receive funding.46 The delegate of Senegal’s governor in Dakar, tasked with following up and investigating the mothers and life circumstances of the children, favorably recommended that twenty-five of the candidates be approved and the rest be denied. The grounds for denial included children who were sixteen or older and were declared to be of age to a find a job and support themselves, did not attend school or were too old to begin to do so, or their mothers worked and earned enough money to adequately support them.47 43 44 45

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47

ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from Security Services, principal inspector C. P. J. in charge of the fifth district, to the delegate of the governor of Senegal, March 11, 1953, letter 1095/M. Letter from the delegate of the governor of Senegal in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, December 7, 1950, letter 23025/AG, 13 G 94(180), ANS. ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from the acting lieutenant governor of Senegal to the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo, April 20, 1951, letter 816 APA/I; Letter from the governor of Senegal to the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo, September 25, 1951, letter 2180 APA/I. ANS, 13G94(180): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, Président de l’Union des Eurafricains de l’AOF et du Togo à Dakar, Letter # 512/U.E., February 27, 1951; Letter from the office of the governor of Senegal to the delégué du gouverneur Senegal in Dakar. Attached document: Etat Nominatif des enfants abandonnés susceptibles de bénéficier d’un secours ou d’une bourse scolaire, letter #1831, April 7 1951. ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from the delegate of the governor of Senegal in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, May 12, 1951, letter 9320/AG; Letter from the chief of police and security

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Rather than continue the disbursement of funds to African caregivers and the determination of who should be funded, colonial officials began to delegate these duties to Rigonaux. By 1952, the governor of Senegal began to transfer funds to Rigonaux to directly disburse funds to mothers and children as he determined were best suited to receive welfare payments. Between 1949 and 1951, the high commissioner transferred 50,000 francs each year in the name of Nicolas Rigonaux to the Union of Eurafricans, entrusting him to directly fund the cases of mothers and children in Dakar.48 To manage this endeavor, Rigonaux established a new entity, the French Charity for Children, which operated as an arm of the union. In 1952, the charity managed the distribution of funding on behalf of thirty-three boys and girls.49 This arrangement gave Rigonaux increased standing among métis members of various union branches and reduced the burden of the colonial state in having to assess and administer the cases themselves. It also continued the tradition of the colonial state delegating the administration of social services to private organizations and charities. However, the new arrangement differed significantly in that it was not a Catholic or French organization at the helm but an African-administered and secular organization. That Rigonaux received money both from the office of the high commissioner and the governor of Senegal based in St. Louis was a demonstration of his reach and influence across various levels of colonial administrators. In addition to creating safety nets for mothers and children, Rigonaux aimed to create a system of economic, social, and emotional support for métis people at different life stages. He sought to make his vision of “the family of métis” a reality that would also cohere adult métis in Senegal, across FWA and FEA, and elsewhere in the French Empire.

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of the Territory of Senegal in Dakar to the delegate of the governor of Senegal, April 26, 1951, letter 7508 SU; Letter from the chief of police and security of the Territory of Senegal in Dakar to the delegate of the governor of Senegal, March 29, 1951, letter 5554 SU. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Decree from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, General Directorate of Finances, for the absent governor-general, the secretary general in charge of current affairs Chambon, August 19, 1949, document 4324 FBI/I; Nicolas Rigonaux to the secretary general of the governor-general of FWA, April 4, 1950, document 260 U/E; Decree from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, General Directorate of Finances, for the absent governor-general, the secretary general in charge of current affairs Chambon, May 5, 1950, document 2579 FBI/I; Decree from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, General Directorate of Finances, for the absent governor-general, secretary general in charge of current affairs Chambon, February 1, 1951, document 1351 FBI/I. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): List of abandoned children sent to the Centre of Eurafricans, rue de Dardanelle, no date, no document number; List of children and orphans rescued by the Association of Eurafricans, stamped as received by the office of the delegate of Senegal in Dakar, no date, no document number. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Nicolas Rigonaux to the High Commission of FWA regarding aid given to needy mothers and their children over the course of 1950, January 26, 1951, document 22/UI.

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The Union’s Expanded Mobilization: The Eurafrican Rigonaux sought to reframe how métis across French Africa viewed their very identity and belonging – as people who embodied both European and African cultures, were tied to both African and European societies, and constituted a particular kinship group or family across Africa and the greater French Union. To forward this goal, Rigonaux cultivated a “Big Man” persona among métis throughout French Africa. With funding from various colonial offices, he became a patron to multiracial individuals, able to transform the union into a functional mutual aid society through which he could disburse funds and peddle influence. He cast a broad, global net and built a coalition of allies of diverse racial identities within Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States. Further, the periodical The Eurafrican became the principal organ for him and individuals and collectives in his network to cultivate a sense of cohesion and connection among multiracial people and to advocate for the rights that métis claimed. This approach often elicited the ire of colonial officials, who viewed his efforts as going beyond the limited window of social welfare to mothers and children in Senegal that they had approved. Rigonaux carefully accounted for the money he spent each year in the hope of securing future and increased funding for what he viewed as dire needs of métis people at differing life stages, not only in Dakar but elsewhere in FWA. In 1950 and 1951, Rigonaux and the treasurer of the union wrote letters to the secretary general of the high commissioner of FWA detailing how the organization had spent the 50,000 francs and requesting the renewal of the subvention for the next year. They emphasized that the organization had quickly exhausted the funding, that it was not sufficient to meet their objectives, and that the organization required an increase in funding – that is, a “substantial subvention” for the union to address the needs of the most destitute.50 In one such letter, which accounted for the 1949 spending of colonial government funds, Rigonaux described how the union had used the money: 6,526 francs to subsidize the costs of métis associations and orphanages that housed children in Haute-Volta, Dahomey, and Soudan; 3,700 francs to assist with the funeral costs of adult members; 280 francs for office furniture; 2,316 francs for medical costs of a métis child with leprosy; 5,410 francs for toys to give to children as Christmas presents; and 7,585 francs for disbursements to “needy 50

ANS, 17 G 207(160): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the secretary general of the general government of FWA, April 14, 1950, letter 229 U/E; Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the secretary general of the general government of FWA, January 16, 1951, letter 22 U/E; Letter from the General Directorate of the Interior M. A. Thomas, Directorate of Political Affairs, July 28, 1951, letter 2318 AG/AP.2; Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the high commissioner of FWA, October 20, 1951, letter 2024 AG/AP.2.

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families” in Senegal. The largest payment, 22,621 francs, went toward printing costs for The Eurafrican.51 The director of finance for the high commissioner was displeased with how the organization spent the money, categorizing the costs that went toward the publication as noncompliance and insisting that the union only disburse educational scholarships to poor métis students, and only in Senegal. In a more detailed audit report for 1950, the union listed the names of twenty-five children on whose behalf the organization gave an average of 1,000 francs per child to their mothers, totaling 37,000 francs. Other expenses included 4,090 francs for toys to give to children as Christmas presents; 15,310 francs for printing; and 3,600 francs paid to a Paul Bignon, “a member of the Union.”52 Rigonaux countered that the organization used most of funds allocated to the union to disburse “grants in aid to needy mothers and their children.” For the accounting of how the union spent the entire 50,000 francs subvention for 1951, the report by Rigonaux and treasurer Georges listed the cases of “aid given to destitute mothers and abandoned children,” citing amounts ranging from 1,000 francs to 3,000 francs and the names of thirty-one children who were the beneficiaries, and a grant of 5,000 francs for three métis children confined to a leprosy colony in Bamako.53 The director of finance wrote an internal memo, expressing concern about “the excessive” amounts that the union spent on printing costs, considering that it was an organization “that was not very important.”54 However, Rigonaux viewed the publication as the central organ for cultivating a system of connection for métis, calling attention to the plight of métis children, strengthening ties of solidarity between métis adults, and generating donations from the French and African public. The issues were published quarterly or sometimes yearly. The magazine advertised the activities of various métis

51 52 53

54

Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the secretary general of the general government of FWA, April 14, 1950, letter 229 U/E, 17 G 207(160), ANS. Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the secretary general of the general government of FWA, January 16, 1951, letter 22 U/E, 17 G 207(160), ANS. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Supporting document for the use of subventions granted by the general government of FWA in 1951, July 10, 1952; Supporting document for the use of subventions granted by the general government of FWA in 1951, July 30, 1952; Documentary proof of the use of subventions granted by decision 1360 FBI/I of March 9, 1951, read and approved by Nicolas Rigonaux and Treasurer R. Georges, attached to a letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the high commissioner of FWA, March 5, 1953, letter 305 UE; Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the high commissioner of FWA, September 6, 1951, letter 1964 AG/AP; Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the high commissioner of FWA, October 20, 1951, letter 2024 AG/AP.2. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Note for General Director Ehrhard from the Directorate of Finances, February 28, 1951, document 929; Note for the general director of finances from General Director of the Interior M. A. Thomas, March 1, 1951, document 652.

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organizations in FWA and FEA, correspondence between Rigonaux and French colonial personnel, letters he received from métis as far as Indochina, and correspondence with various black Africans. His aims were similar to those of multiracial Anglo-African writers in British Central Africa, who published a newspaper in Rhodesia between 1945 and 1950, called the Rhodesian Tribune. It was published by the Euro-African Patriotic Society, an organization consisting of members who claimed European and African parentage; the members claimed that such parentage meant they had a distinct identity, neither “colored” nor “half-caste” nor “Non-European” – as categorized by British colonial society in law and legal status.55 They self-identified as “Eurafrican” and used the paper to foster regional solidarity and self-help among the “Eurafrican race” in Rhodesia, Nyasaland, and South Africa. Rigonaux, the union, and The Eurafrican had nuanced relationships with the French colonial government, simultaneously critiquing its failures in racial equity while also vowing to make the French Union an entity that would foster the economic, social, and political wealth for all who lived in it. Yet, in contrast to the authors of the Rhodesian Tribune, Rigonaux and most of those who published pieces in The Eurafrican did not advocate for the separation of métis from African societies. Instead, they wanted recognition from French society and the state, as well as African societies, affirming that they were both black and white – or more aptly black, white, and métis – or simply “Eurafrican.” Rigonaux and many other Eurafrican contributors claimed multiracial people constituted a distinct identity that was not black or white but both black and white, and that French filiation entitled them to social welfare and rights afforded to white French citizens – and to French legal status. But few who wrote for or were featured in The Eurafrican, and certainly not Rigonaux, claimed that métis were superior to black Africans or should be raised and educated in milieus segregated from black Africans. However, one of Rigonaux’s allies in French Indochina did believe in the removal of multiracial children from their mothers and their segregated upbringing. William Bazé was a métis man from Indochina who was a wealthy plantation owner. He was also the head of a civilian-led society, which was nonetheless abetted by the French government, a so-called métis child “protection” society. The society systematically convinced, coerced, or forced indigenous mothers of Eurasian children in colonial-era Southeast Asia to 55

The newspaper served a dual purpose of cultivating solidarity and advocacy. Examples of solidarity among Eurafricans included stories that highlighted cultural events and parties for members. Examples of advocacy included letters and correspondence from British colonial officials supporting the association and its members as upstanding, campaigns for equal pay and social services for returnee Eurafrican soldiers that were the same as for white British soldiers, scholarships for Eurafrican children, and the right to name European fathers in birth certificates. Lee, Unreasonable Histories, 178–84.

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confer the children to French institutions.56 In 1950, as colonial troops fought communist Việt Minh forces that sought to wrest Indochina from French colonial rule amid the First Indochina War, Bazé founded the Federation of Charities for French Children in Indochina (FOEFI) along with other métis and French settlers. They used arguments about the moral and physical vulnerabilities of multiracial children in indigenous milieus to justify removal as an effort to rescue multiracial children from indoctrination in nationalist communist ideologies. For those who managed FOEFI, all métis children were French regardless of their formal legal status. Following the declaration of South Vietnam as independent nation, FOEFI leadership claimed it was a humanitarian act that saved the children from lives of poverty and “unenlightenment” to separate the children from their mothers and place them in institutions in Indochina or France.57 Bazé also advocated that Eurasians should obtain privileges such as metropolitan French salaries and the right to French civil servant employment in Vietnam, even as an indigenous government formed. Rigonaux viewed Bazé’s work with Eurasian children and more broadbased advocacy for the legal and social rights of métis as aligned with his quest to diminish racism and allow the French principles of liberty and equality to be fulfilled.58 However, unlike Bazé, Rigonaux did not subscribe to the idea that all mothers were unsuitable and did not recommend the forced removal of children. Also, unlike Bazé, Rigonaux built a racially and geographically diverse coalition of supporters and allies. Beginning in 1949, Rigonaux reprinted many letters that Bazé wrote and articles that Bazé and others in French Indochina wrote for newspapers in France and Indochina.59 A 1951 edition of The Eurafrican featured a letter in which Bazé talked about how his “Eurafrican brothers” and Eurasians were doing the same work regarding the care and education of métis children.60 As the Indochina war intensified and French defeat loomed, Bazé moved to Paris and demanded that all Eurasian children be declared French citizens.

56 57 58

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Firpo, The Uprooted, 1–17. Firpo, Uprooted, 116–7 and 142–8. See also the website of the association FOFEI, accessed on September 25, 2021, http://foefi.net/. The Eurafrican, “Extract from a Speech by William Bazé Published in The French Union, No. 922,” and “Speech by Mr. Mutini of a Group of Eurasians,” Issue 7, 19–25; “Indispensable Solidarity,” Issue 14, 2–4; “William Bazé Advisor to the National Assembly,” Issue 15, 37–8; “Proposition Requesting of the High Commissioner of the French Union for The Study of a Juridical Statute in Favor of Eurasians, Annex to the November 6, 1952 Debated of The Assembly of the French Union,” Issue 16, 20–2. The Eurafrican, Reprint of “Proposition to the High Commissioner of the French Union for The Study of Juridical Statute for Eurasians,” Annex to the November 6, 1952 assembly of the French Union, presented by William Bazé, Issue 16, 20–2. The Eurafrican, Reprint of “Letters between Rigonaux and Bazé, October 27, 1951,” Issue 12, 7–17.

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Reflecting a greater expansion of geographic scale, the pages of The Eurafrican began to feature the writings of – and about – a veritable global Who’s Who of people who viewed themselves as engaging in advocacy for racial equality. They were interested in black, multiracial, and indigenous people in Africa, Indochina, metropolitan France, and the United States. The people who wrote to Rigonaux or for The Eurafrican viewed their work as aligned with and complementary to his. Rigonaux fought for a specific change to French law: for Eurafricans to be able to petition for the legal search and recognition of their French biological father’s paternity, which would open the possibility for receiving financial support from their fathers. This change could only be voted on by lawmakers in metropolitan France, and Rigonaux reached beyond colonial officials in FWA and sought the direct buy-in of French metropolitan lawmakers. This entailed relationship-building with African French multiracial individuals in metropolitan France. An example is evidenced in a reprint of a 1950 letter to Rigonaux from Jane Vialle, a métis woman born to a French Congolese mother and French father, raised in France, and an elected senator to the French parliament Conseil de La République representing Ubangi-Chari.61 Her politics and activism traversed overseas and metropolitan France, and she advocated on behalf of children and women in Africa and for citizens of the French Union to have the same political and social rights as citizens of metropolitan France. She was well-regarded in France, having been imprisoned by the Vichy regime. She was also esteemed by African politicians negotiating with the French for expanded power in the new colonial order. Yet, as Lorelle Semley notes, Vialle felt that as a métis person she held multiple identities, and rather than being stuck between them, she “could encompass borders rather than only cross or connect them” and could inhabit “multiple physical and cultural spaces at once.”62 Vialle’s self-identity as métis – which meant black and white and French – became a foundation for her interactions and advocacy regarding issues that also mattered to Rigonaux. In her January 1950 letter to Rigonaux, Vialle indicated that she had initiated and would be presenting to her fellow elected officers in metropolitan France the draft of a law to facilitate “the full protection of children that too many white men still leave to the care

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Vialle grew up with her father in Ubangi-Chari and she went with him to France when she was eight years old. In France, she finished her secondary education and was married and then divorced. Vialle may have had metropolitan French legal status, or she may have had French legal status based on the 1936 law for métis in FEA. Lorelle Semley conveys that her father reputedly recognized her in 1912. Lorelle Semley, “Women Citizens of the French Union Unite! Jane Vialle’s Post-War Crusade,” in Anne R. Epstein and Rachel G. Fuchs (eds.), Gender and Citizenship in Historical and Transnational Perspective: Agency, Space, and Borders (London: Palgrave, 2017), 186–210. Semley, “Women Citizens,” 188.

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of a black mother without any financial support.” She reassured him that there were “parliamentarians and metropolitan French who are only asking how to help you.”63 She was referring to article 340 of the French civil code, which allowed for the exercise of a 1912 French law allowing paternity suits on behalf of illegitimate children born in colonies only at the discretion of local government officials. Since 1912, colonial officials had denied people in French colonies who held the status of colonial subject the right to file such suits.64 For Rigonaux, this was an example of inequality that the French government perpetuated in which Eurafrican citizens did not hold equal rights to citizens in the metropole. The right to file a legal claim for establishing paternity was essential to achieve the goal of full citizenship and would allow the state “to extract a greater number [of Eurafricans] from misery and mediocrity.”65 At the end of the year, metropolitan France representatives along with African and French members of a committee of the Assembly of the French Union voted yes on a proposition to extend this right.66 Rigonaux was notified that a law had been promulgated in December 1949 that allowed “all illegitimate children the possibility to bring to court a petition for the research of investigation for paternity.”67 Yet, even as he announced this to readers of The Eurafrican in an article entitled “We Are Advancing,” he worried that the wording of the law made it seem as if allowing métis the right to sue for paternity was a favor and not a right. He was also concerned that the long, slow, and obdurate court proceedings would never result in positive outcomes for petitioners to receive the financial support that was essential to their development. He sought Vialle’s assistance in spotlighting that while there were laws on the books that promised equality of rights, French racist thinking and practice meant that such equality was often not the reality. Vialle advocated for multiracial people in Africa in the context of decrying French racism against black and multiracial people across Africa. In 1951, The Eurafrican reprinted excerpts from an article published in the Tribune of the 63 64

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The Eurafrican, “Letter from Jane Vialle, Senator to Nicolas Rigonaux January 18, 1950,” Issue 7, 10. The Council of the Republic, the upper house of the French Parliament, had voted in 1947 that the government would extend the provisions of article 340 in the overseas territories, yet Rigonaux thought this had not been promulgated. The Eurafrican, inaugural issue entitled “Loyalty to the Metropole, ‘Judicial Standing of the Métis,’” Issue 7, 11–17 and “Letter from Luc Durand-Reville to Nicolas Rigonaux, January 6, 1950 and Letter from Djim Momar Guye, Delegate of the French Union, January 18, 1950,” 11–13. The Eurafrican, “We Are Advancing,” Issue 7, 1–2. The Eurafrican, “Proposition Requesting the Government to Render the November 26, 1912 Law Authorizing the Investigation of Paternity and Maternity in Territories Other Than Indochina Under the Jurisdiction of Overseas France, December 15, 1949,” Issue 7, 5–6. The Eurafrican, “Letter from Chauvet Secretary General on Behalf of the High Commissioner to Nicolas Rigonaux January 6, 1950,” no issue number, 3–4.

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French Union in which Vialle had decried that occurrences in overseas territories were the antithesis of France’s ideals of liberty and equality. She elaborated on two incidents. First, the Amicale of Métis in Brazzaville tried to reserve space in a large hotel for a celebration only to have their booking canceled because “the presence of men of color in this hotel shocked certain individuals from the Metropole and the owner did not want to lose his important clients.” Second, both métis and black soldiers in FWA and FEA were denied the same rights as metropolitan soldiers who had served in Indochina: four months leave at the end of two years of service and paid transportation to their country of origin. Such realities went against the principles of equality of citizens as proclaimed by the Constitution of the Fourth Republic.68 Rigonaux also reached out to métis originaires, people born in the four communes of Senegal from precolonial interracial relationships, who were French citizens by default of their birthplace; he obtained their buy-in. There were many multiracial identities and métis communities in Senegal. By the beginning of the twentieth century, métis descended from precolonial relationships of female signares and European men were a small and elite group of people who often intermarried. They claimed no affinity with métis born of colonial-era interracial relationships.69 Rigonaux sought to unify people who articulated Eurafrican identities into a single group sharing a common identity and common interests. There is no evidence that he was successful in convincing métis descended from signares to join the union. However, Germain Crespin, a métis originaire, lawyer, and colonial civil servant serving in the Court of Appeals of FWA agreed to Rigonaux’s request to serve as honorary president of the union and publicly advocate for the organization through attending fundraising events and generating print and radio press.70 For Rigonaux, fighting for the rights of métis was essentially a crusade against racism however it revealed itself, and he cited stories of African American civil rights efforts as aligned with his actions and vision. In 1953, the eminent African American historian and Howard University professor, the civil rights activist and Pan-Africanist, Rayford Logan, met with Rigonaux during a visit to Dakar as part of a State Department trip to several countries in FWA. Logan spoke French; he had served in an all-black army troop in France during World War I, followed by a year of study, and had participated alongside contemporaries such as W. E. B. Dubois in the organization of the

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The Eurafrican, Jane Vialle, Senator of Oubangui-Chari, “Racial Discrimination in FWA: Offences Against the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” Issue 12, 13–14. Jones, Métis of Senegal, 182–3. The Eurafrican, “Our Annual Ball,” Issue 12, 4–7. For more on Germain Crespin and Crespin family genealogy, see Semley, To Be Free and French, 235–9; Jones, Métis of Senegal, 190–1.

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second Pan-African Congress that took place in Paris in 1921.71 An article in The Eurafrican quoted Logan as praising Rigonaux’s devotion to children.72 In the same article, Rigonaux highlighted his own accomplishments – such as his campaign for the law to allow illegitimate children of African women and French men to seek the legal recognition of paternity – as antiracism work that mirrored the activism of other African and African American political actors. It was the common work of dismantling racism. Rigonaux also couched his work as aligning with that of black Africans fighting for racial equality within the French Union.73 He recognized the political power held by black African men who were elected to the territorial assembly. He corresponded with Mamadou Dia, a black African elected as delegate to Senegal’s assembly and requested Dia’s support for the law that would allow unrecognized children of French men in Africa to sue for the legal recognition of paternity. Rigonaux printed Dia’s response in a 1950 issue of L’Eurafricain, a forum to place pressure on French officials: Dia had received the proposed law from the minister of Overseas France and would assess the matter without delay.74 Over the course of the 1950s, Rigonaux cultivated relationships with the Amicale de Métis in FEA, corresponding with its officers in Libreville and elsewhere in the region; the Amicale had been active for decades prior to his organization. In 1951, the Amicale branch representing Brazzaville, FortLamy, and Chad also joined as a dues-paying branch of the union but retained its independence to focus on FEA and to define and implement its own initiatives.75 By 1954, Joseph Deemin, still the titular president of the Amicale of Métis of FEA, had been elected as the president of the Territorial Assembly of Gabon. Deemin came to Dakar to meet with the high commissioner that year in his capacity as an elected political actor in the new French 71

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“Obituary,” New York Times, November 6, 1982, 15; Kenneth R. Janken, “Rayford Logan: The Golden Years – Howard University,” Negro History Bulletin: Washington 61, 3–4 (1998), 38–55. Logan had an interest in the history of Haiti and wrote a dissertation and several publications on Haiti-US relations. He was also a member of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet” and under this mandate undertook a fact-finding trip to Haiti to examine the effects of the U.S.. military occupation. Rayford Logan, “Education in Haiti,” Journal of Negro History, Association for the Study of African American Life and History 15, 4 (October 1930), 401–60; Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941). The Eurafrican, “Our Guests: Professor Logan,” Issue 17, 17–18. The Eurafrican, “End of Military Campaign Leave,” Issue 10, 19–33 and 39–40. Rigonaux wrote to various French politicians in metropolitan France regarding this issue, including René Pleven, supporter of the Free French Forces, who had presided over the Brazzaville Conference, as well as Luc Durand-Reville, the senator of Gabon. His letter made its way to Francois Mitterand, the future prime minister of France. Rigonaux reprinted a reply from Pleven, who pledged that the issue would be investigated by the Ministry of Defense. The Eurafrican, Issue 10, 34. The Eurafrican, “Fusion of Sections,” Issue 10, 48.

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Africa electoral systems. He also met with Rigonaux.76 Rigonaux similarly corresponded with the French-speaking Association of Mulattos in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo.77 Métis organizations in FEA looked to Rigonaux for direction, particularly regarding how to increase their revenues.78 Rigonaux had proven success in raising money for the charity and publishing The Eurafrican, and he had the eyes and ears of a host of international figures. Rigonaux continued to toggle between his work with métis adults and children. He sought to use the money granted by colonial officials for a host of issues that he saw as mission-critical to support métis individuals and to build a sound present and future. As much as he maintained support for métis children to stay in the homes of their African mothers, he also saw instances in which children were better off placed in French institutions. In 1952, Rigonaux inquired of the director of the Department of Interior if it would be possible for the administration to create a “social service” department so personnel could periodically visit the homes of mothers of métis children to assess the children’s material and moral state.79 While he did not see African mothers or African kin as inherently unsuited to raise métis children, he argued that native milieus were often poverty-stricken and could breed “bad instincts.” He began to argue that it was métis adults such as himself – with their cultural competence in navigating European and African worldviews and their inherent emotional bonds to métis children – who were the best caretakers and most competent managers to direct the financial and quotidian care of métis children in institutions.80 Further, he insisted it was of interest for the French government to create such an institution managed by métis, as such places could “decently raise children in all meanings of the word who will be made

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The Eurafrican, “At Home with the Eurafricans.” Issue 18, 44. The Eurafrican, “Letter from The Association of Mulattos of Leopoldville May 12, 1954,” Issue 18, 36. It may have been Rigonaux’s guidance that led the Amicale in Brazzaville and its president Paul Betty to organize a “big dance night” benefit with a live orchestra, called the Festival of Métis Children, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary in 1955. Rigonaux had organized similar benefits for the French Charity for Children. The Amicale invited all the “official local personalities” for a night of dancing and food, and the proceeds were to go to “exclusively métis children of Brazzaville” in the form of gifts. Letter from Paul Betty, president of the Amicale of Métis of Brazzaville, to the inspector general of education, January 18, 1955, IGE 139 (1), Archive Nationale du Congo (hereafter ANC). Attached to the letter are posters advertising the event scheduled for January 29, 1955. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from the General Directorate of the Interior, Directorate of Political Affairs, July 28, 1951, letter 2318 AG/AP.2; ANS, 13 G 94(180): Letter from the delegate of the governor in Dakar to the governor of Senegal, April 8, 1952, letter 6452 AG1; Letter from Ms. de Boisferon, social worker, Social Services, to the head of the political office of Senegal, March 18, 1952, no document number. The Eurafrican, “An Example to Follow,” Issue 11, 44.

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into dignified and loyal French citizens.”81 Ultimately, Rigonaux was able to convince French colonial personnel to accept this vision. He opened a home for métis children under the auspices of a new entity he founded and named: the French Charity for Children. Father Rigonaux: A Home for Métis Boys in Dakar In 1952, Rigonaux’s dream of opening a home for métis children (foyer des métis) in Dakar, specifically for boys, came true as he was able to mobilize his networks and allies among various branches of colonial government in Senegal and elsewhere in French Africa to fund the home. Funding began years prior, from a defunct budget line for “French self-help charitable works for liberation [from Nazi control] and now called ‘National Aid.’” In October 1951, the office of the high commissioner of FWA doubled the union’s subvention to 100,000 francs.82 Additionally, Rigonaux wrote to the governors of neighboring Soudan and Haute-Volta, requesting that their governments subsidize the funding and operation of the foyer on the grounds that the union had previously granted financial assistance to métis from their colonies and based on the assumption that these colonies would send boys to live in his foyer.83 The two colonial governments granted an unspecified amount of money. With these and his own funds – a sign of his personal commitment – Rigonaux rented a villa in Dakar in January 1952, and the first cohort of boys moved in. In an article in The Eurafrican, he announced that the opening presented “the mission to which I have assigned myself: to save Eurafrican childhood.”84 Rigonaux thus positioned himself as the savior and father of métis children. Above all, he wished for the foyer to be a safe home with essential hygiene standards. In addition, he wanted the foyer to include a health 81 82

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ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Cited in letter from the general director of the interior, Directorate of Political Affairs, July 28, 1951, letter 2318 AG/AP.2. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from the director of the cabinet, general government of FWA, to the general director of finances c/o the governor secretary general, October 5, 1951, letter 558 DIR/CAB; Decision granting a subvention, from the General Directorate of Finances, October 3, 1951, document 5971. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA to the governor of Soudan, September 20, 1952, letter 040/UE; Letter from the governor of Soudan to the high commissioner of FWA, general director of finances, October 20, 1952, letter 2023 FOD; Letter from General Director of Finances Le Moyne to the governor of Soudan, November 4, 1952, letter 5555 FBI/I. The Eurafrican, Issue 14, 4. The director of finance in the high commissioner’s office supported Rigonaux’s solicitation of the Government of French Soudan, writing a follow-up letter that vouched that the union was a “charitable work that was particularly worthy of interest” and that it was up to the governor to determine the amount his colony could give, according to his budget.

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clinic for basic health needs and a library that would provide to abandoned children “a taste for life and confidence that they lack.” Rigonaux used L’Eurafricain to publicize the foyer’s opening and its operation, to solicit additional funds for its maintenance, and to convey his idealized representation of the children’s experience of life there. Between 1952 and 1953, Rigonaux was able to get additional funding from various colonial government sources to furnish the home with what he saw as essential objects of French domesticity and to employ a staff of métis and black people to help manage the home.85 By 1953, funding for the foyer amounted to a total of 1.3 million francs. The foyer’s expenses included construction materials for repairs and renovation, including plumbing and electricity and general maintenance; personnel; office furniture; monthly rent of 20,000 francs; the payment of school fees; food and clothing; kitchen materials such as plates, tables, and utensils; medication; and an assortment of unanticipated expenses.86 Rigonaux’s home in Dakar was distinct from other residences and institutions that served métis children in French Africa: it was the only one opened and managed by a multiracial person instead of colonial personnel or missionaries. Rigonaux’s mandate was to cultivate a distinct métis Franco-Senegalese manhood that would serve as intermediary between French and African societies, a manifestation of how French governance in Africa could live up to the promise of equality. He deliberately named it a “home” and not an “orphanage”; his was not a sterile institution but a loving and nurturing milieu, in which he and his wife and other personnel provided an environment of family life, education, and immersion in French culture and living standards. Teachers, both Eurafrican and black, provided primary and elementary school classes and tutoring for children, while the older boys likely attended a school in town.87 In 1953, the foyer housed fifteen boys ranging from five to fourteen years old, whom Rigonaux referred to as “mulatto boys for whom no one gave a care”; he had argued that they would find in the home “the solicitude of the 85

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Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA to the high commissioner, general government of FWA, with an attachment about the justification of the use of a subvention granted by decision 5.971/FBI/I of October 30, 1951, April 26, 1952, letter 1012/U.E., 17 G 207(160), ANS. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Note for the general director of finances from the general government of FWA, Directorate of the Cabinet, Adjunct-Chief of the Civil Cabinet M. David, January 2, 1952, document 9 CAB/CAC; Document from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, General Directorate of Finances, January 21, 1952; Document regarding the use of subventions granted to the Union of Eurafricans of FWA by the government of Senegal and Upper Volta for the establishment of abandoned children; ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA, AEF, and Togo to the governor of Senegal, August 1, 1953, letter 31000/U.E. The Eurafrican, “Report on The Foyer Written by the Surveillant Michel N’Daw, July-August 1954,” Issue 17, 13–15.

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large family of métis.” A 1953 edition of L’Eurafricain was the only public instance of Rigonaux using the term “mulatto” rather than “métis” or “Eurafrican” to describe the children in the foyer’s care. He focused specifically on boys because many services were already in place to assist métisses girls, but “in the case of [métis] boys, too often they are ignored.”88 Any boys who arrived in the foyer did so with the consent of their African kin or guardians – who ostensibly retained legal parental authority over the children.89 The foyer was the fulfillment of Rigonaux’s dream not only to cultivate “a large family of métis” but also to demonstrate how métis people could lead African and French societies in working to remedy the stains of French racism and inequity. Abosede George argues that British social welfare administrators who managed hostels in Lagos for African working-class girl hawkers viewed their efforts to save African children as “salvationist.” George argues that British social welfare employees saw these girls as “Rousseaunian children who had been distorted by the civilization they had been born into, yet who might be corrected and redeemed for modern childhood if they were placed in beautiful environments and addressed by patient, nurturing, [European] maternal figures.”90 Rigonaux crafted a similar representation of métis children. Their negation by fathers, the poverty of their mothers, and the lack of integration into French culture and access to education had distorted the childhoods of métis people, which created cycles of trauma that prevented them from reaching their fullest potential. The foyer was a place that could make abandoned métis boys “into men who would be useful to society and equipped with a good profession.”91 Yet in his salvationist narrative, it was Rigonaux who was the savior rather than Europeans. He hoped that a European-style home, with European accoutrements and health services, would mitigate the childhood trauma. Modern facilities, custom-made clothing, shoes, and food imported from France were essential to create an ecosystem of love, health, education, and well-being within the foyer. At its opening date, the foyer was divided into a classroom, a dormitory room, and a game room. The game room held a medicine cabinet in which there were remedies for ailments ranging from “colds to skinned knees.” Christmas was a celebration, which Rigonaux

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The Eurafrican, Issue 15, 4. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): Letter from Commander Spraeur of the district of Tambacounda to the governor of Senegal, July 25, 1953, letter 2293 B.M.; Letter to the commander of the district of Tambacounda from the secretary general in charge of expediting routine business for the governor, July 31, 1953, letter 1180/APA.I. George, Making Modern Girls, 198. The Eurafrican, Issue 18, 14.

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organized with gusto each year for the boys at the home as well as métisses girls who resided at Catholic missions or elsewhere in the city. The celebration included a lavish feast, a Christmas tree, and the distribution of imported European toys. In 1953, the Christmas celebration cost about 6,000 francs, a large sum for a single day.92 In a 1953 issue of The Eurafrican, Rigonaux recounted how he and his wife visited the foyer every evening from seven to nine o’clock to oversee the home’s operation and interact with the boys. A few years later, the Rigonaux couple moved in to live at the foyer.93 The children ate three meals a day, and the content and quality of the food was essential. It mainly consisted of food imported from Europe – a reflection of Rigonaux’s notion of a proper diet for raising healthy children – and included servings of vegetables and meat. The European diet that he thought best suited for the boys can be seen in the meticulous quarterly accounting reports. Daily purchases included 1 kg of meat; vegetables such as carrots, green beans, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, celery, cucumbers, and cabbage; and fresh or smoked fish. There were also weekly or biweekly purchases of vermicelli noodles or other pasta, fish bones for soup, couscous, butter, sugar, coffee, and oranges (as needed to replenish stock), as well as charcoal for the stove.94 Special treats included cookies and bananas. Additional expenditures included flowers and imported alcohol from France, such as beer, wine, and cognac, ostensibly for special occasions for adult visitors. Personnel included a typist, a guard, and a cook. Further expenses included excursions for the boys around the Dakar region. The boys received shoes and clothing, including two sets of uniforms, pajamas, and briefs; soap; books and supplies for school; and access to a barber.95 Rigonaux represented the foyer as a loving home in which the children were scrupulously cared for. After school, the boys returned to the foyer, where a monitor – a métis man named Joseph Diakité – lived full-time and was responsible for the day-to-day operations. On Sundays, Rigonaux gave lessons 92 93 94

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ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Day of December 31, 1952, “Market and Christmas Tree at the Foyer,” no date, no document number. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA and Togo to the governor of Senegal, December 26, 1952, letter 6004 U.E. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Report certifying that Mr. Rigonaux paid for the subsidized expenses, amounting to the sum of 139,430 francs, minus 15,000 francs taken from the union’s account by cheque, signed by Rigonaux and accompanied by four illegible signatures, March 7, 1953, document B.AO 6,431,25. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, Union of Eurafricans of FWA, to the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, attached to a document regarding the use of subventions granted to the Union of Eurafricans by decision 753 FBI/I of January 31, 1953 of the general government of FWA and by the committee for the use of funds of FISSE in FWA on March 12, 1953, signed by Nicolas Rigonaux, May 23, 1953. The Eurafrican, Issue 15, 4.

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in Christian morality.96 Rigonaux insisted that the boys complete some manual labor so that they would not develop too much of an elitist personality or look down upon their “black brethren.” Several times a week, the boys cleaned, made the beds, tended the gardens, completed small repairs on the buildings, and assisted the cook in preparing meals. The house rules required that “once admitted to the foyer the child should consider himself a member of a big family. He will sustain this family, through his devotion, his labor, his complete submission, and discipline.”97 Yet the boys were also to remain tied to African cultures and milieus through periodic visits from their kin. There were strict rules that relatives could visit the boys in the foyer only with the written permission of Rigonaux. A few years after its opening, the home also came to house some black boys. In 1953, Rigonaux indicated that they housed ten “abandoned” boys, of whom eight were métis and two “African,” perhaps meaning black African.98 In 1954, when the number of boys increased to fourteen, another newsletter indicated that one boy was “of pure African blood.”99 In a 1954 interview on Radio Dakar, Rigonaux explained that at first he had conceived of the foyer as a hostel just for métis boys, but he soon realized the precarious situation of many black children and expanded admission to the foyer. The French Charity for Children, he insisted, was not racist and decidedly against segregation: it welcomed boys of any racial or religious origin.100 Between 1952 and 1959, the annual enrollment ranged from ten to thirty boys aged between four and eighteen. The charity also continued to disburse direct welfare payments to mothers, funding approximately seven mothers for the care of their twenty-five métis children.101 Because the grants from the colonial state were never sufficient for the projects he wished to undertake, Rigonaux tried to raise more money, but he proved to be highly inept at fundraising and even at balancing the books. He had great aspirations for the number of children he could provide for and the material conditions they would live in under the umbrella of the charity, as 96 97

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The Eurafrican, Issue 18, 48–9. The Eurafrican: “Some Aspects of Our Lives,” Issue (ca. 1953), 10–11; “Dardenelles Street: A Little Home under Red Tiles,” Issue 16, 23; Issue 19, 23–6. In this regard, the philosophy mirrored the Koranic schools that Rudolph “Butch” Ware chronicles in his publication on Muslim education in colonial Senegal. Rudolph Ware, The Walking Qurʼan: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Letter from the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA to the high commissioner, governor-general of FWA, December 26, 1952, letter 6003/U.E., 17 G 207(160), ANS. The Eurafrican, Pierre Malo, “Those Who Are Rejected by the World,” Issue 16, 7–8. The Eurafrican, Issue 18, 7–8. ANS, 13 G 94 (180): List of children and orphans rescued by charitable persons in Dakar, stamped as received by the Office of the Delegation of Senegal in Dakar, no date, no document number.

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well as the work of the union in providing financial assistance to métis adults. Colonial officials perpetually underfunded his aspirations. The constant scrutiny of colonial officials about how Rigonaux spent money and managed the home plagued him throughout his career. He perpetually pleaded with the high commissioner for more money, insisting that rent and the costs of renovating the foyer were “a fortune” that left the charity and union with very little money. He concluded a 1952 accounting report by emphasizing the union’s main goals: to “provide relief to abandoned children, elevate the level of life for the individual, in order to make him an adult, a man with dignity.” He closed the letter with the hope that the governor would see to it to grant “more substantial aid than in the past,” yet colonial officials did not grant the request.102 Rigonaux was perpetually in fundraising mode to build a bigger foyer and house more children. He solicited donations from French settler residents in Dakar to fund the orphanage, and some donated anonymously, while organizations such as the Red Cross donated goods or money. Well-to-do multiracial people such as Deemin donated unspecified sums of money.103 But Rigonaux proved to be far better at spending money than he was at generating revenue. Starting in 1949, the union held several galas, fundraising evenings of food, dancing, and entertainment at French-owned venues in Dakar, such as the Lido restaurant, Cinéma VOG, and the Professional School. Attendees included high-ranking colonial officials such as the high commissioner and governor of Senegal; the consul of the United States; French settlers; the president of the Association of People from the Antilles; and black Africans such as Papa Guye Fall, president of the Association of Prisoners of War.104 In 1952, one gala raised about 86,000 francs, but about 142,000 francs were spent on expenses such as food, alcohol, entertainment, and tips for waiters as well as transporting, feeding, and lodging métisses girls from the N’Dar Toute Catholic mission in St. Louis, who performed “traditional dances” for the audience.105 Rigonaux represented himself as a doting parent who wanted the boys in his care to have the best, which for him meant French food and European-style uniforms and living conditions with running water and electricity. By contrast, French colonial government personnel wanted the home to operate on the 102

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Letter from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, director of the cabinet, to the president of the Union of Eurafricans of FWA, October 3, 1952, letter 1648 CAB/TECH, 17 G 207(160), ANS. The Eurafrican, “Our Benefactors Actions,” Issue 18, 12. The Eurafrican, “Arrival of Francois Périer,” Issue 14, 5–9; “Our Annual Ball,” Issue 16, 51; “Our Annual Ball in 1951,” Issue 18, 4. ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Financial results from the gala held by the Union of Eurafricans on June 7, 1952, at Lido, no date, no document number. The Eurafrican, Issue 12, 5–7.

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cheap, without what they viewed as excesses and unnecessary luxuries for the boys. For the 1953 funding cycle, Rigonaux requested nearly double the grant money to cover the costs of the foyer and other operating expenses of the union.106 The office of the high commissioner balked at this amount. They calibrated their calculations of the daily amounts that they thought Rigonaux should spend on the boys in his home, based on amounts they granted to the African guardians of delinquent black African children to ensure that the children did not commit any further crimes. This sum was about 100 francs per day. Colonial administrators agreed to give Rigonaux only a modestly elevated sum for the children under his care.107 Implicit in the negotiations between Rigonaux and French colonial personnel were the following questions: How much were children worth when differentiated by racial categories? What quantities and types of food were sufficient for subsistence and health? What materials were essential and necessary for the children’s care and what were “luxurious”? Colonial administrators publicly commended Rigonaux for his accomplishments and frequently went on visiting tours of the foyer. Rigonaux publicized the visits by French dignitaries in The Eurafrican. He cultivated and maintained the trust of colonial personnel; for them, the charity and home were evidence of the humanitarian accomplishments of French governance in Africa and how the more humane colonial rule cultivated Africans’ well-being and thriving. Rigonaux was seen as an honest and charitable man who often used his own money to fund expenditures; any misallocations of funds or overspending were inadvertent. Thus, for 1953, the colonial state gave Rigonaux the amount he had requested. The high commissioner’s office allocated 300,000 francs from the commissioner’s general budget and another 350,000 francs from Investment Funds for Economic and Social Development (FIDES).108 This was a French government entity founded in the aftermath of the 1946 Brazzaville Conference to curtail increased protest by Africans against colonial policies through providing cash grants for the development of

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ANS, 17 G 207 (160): Letter from the general director of finances to the director of the cabinet of the governor-general of FWA, June 23, 1953, letter 251 FBI/I. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Note from the general director of finances to the director of the cabinet of the governor-general of FWA, May 29, 1953, letter 2887 FBI/I; Note from the director of the cabinet of the general government of FWA for the general director of finances, June 14, 1953, document 606 CAB/AS. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Decision according a subvention, the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, January 31, 1953, decision 753 FBI/I; Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, Union of Eurafricans of FWA, to the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, attached to a document regarding the use of subventions granted to the Union of Eurafricans by decision 753 FBI/I of January 31, 1953 of the general government of FWA and by the committee for the use of funds of FISSE in FWA on March 12, 1953, signed by Nicolas Rigonaux, May 23, 1953, no document number.

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“human capital,” social welfare services, and infrastructure.109 Rather than the prior notion of the colonies and colonial subjects generating their own revenue and mise en valeur (development), the National Constituent Assembly of African and European deputies who established the guidelines of FIDES envisioned that cash transferred from the metropole would plant the seeds of economic growth in the territories.110 The French government purported humanitarian goals and the well-being of Africans, but in reality – through the public works projects and health and education services funded by FIDES – the French sought to “control and discipline their subjects at a time when the very legitimacy of colonialism was in question.”111 Rigonaux and multiracial individuals who joined his organization did not question the legitimacy of French colonialism but critiqued its continued failure to live up to the promise of bettering the lives of people in Africa, particularly given that métis were the direct descendants of French men. If the French state did not provide sufficient resources for métis to arrive at their full human potential, how could it live up to its promises for all people in French Africa and elsewhere in France overseas? The disbursement of some French development grants emboldened Rigonaux to seek increased funding that would truly provide the material, educational, and health infrastructure for multiracial people to thrive. Financial resources from the state should not just be temporary; they were the entitlement of multiracial people (who had been disinherited by their fathers) to benefit over the entire course of their lives from the French social welfare state, as befitting their status as French people.112 But ultimately Rigonaux came up against the hypocrisy and limitations of French developmentalist rhetoric. French colonial personnel in Senegal did not actually agree with Rigonaux that métis children were fully French and deserving of large sums to provide material resources for their home and education. Colonial officials advised Rigonaux to envision “a reorganization of your home that permits its functioning based on a reasonable base.” It was implied that he was too extravagant in the types of food and other materials he purchased for the children. The high commissioner stated that going forward, funding was to be utilized strictly for the children’s and foyer’s expenses.113 The implication was that the activities of advocating for métis people’s social 109 110 111 112 113

Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, The Idea of Development in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 147–2. Cooper, Citizenship Between Empire and Nation, 68. Monica M. van Beusekom and Dorothy L. Hodgson, “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period,” Journal of African History 41, 1 (2000), 29–33. The Eurafrican, “Interview of Nicolas Rigonaux with Radio-Dakar on August 12, 1954,” Issue 18, 7–9. ANS, 17 G 207(160): Letter from the high commissioner of FWA, director of the cabinet of the governor-general of FWA to the president of the Union of Eurafricans, October 7, 1953, letter 1976 GAB/AS; Note for the general director of finances, October 10, 1953, document 1991

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and legal rights were a political strand, which needed be separated from what the administration viewed as the charitable and morally upright act of caring for children. Yet Rigonaux’s mission of the betterment of the lives of métis children led him to run afoul of various black African constituencies in Dakar, who either decried his views and actions as racist or as an infringement upon the capacity of other constituencies in French Africa to similarly access equality in social and economic resources. Conflict with Black African Deputies and Senators In 1954, Rigonaux tried to take hold of a piece of land on the outskirts of Dakar, not content with the run-down state of the rental building that housed the boys’ home. He wanted to build a bigger and more structurally sound foyer. The colonial government, which owned the land, granted the union permission to rent the parcel for the low sum of 500 francs per month. However, it was the duty of the territorial assembly, composed of elected black African legislators, to approve of the land grant, and the main body voted to refuse this arrangement. Rigonaux reprinted the minutes of the April 1954 territorial assembly debate in an issue of The Eurafrican. In the summary report, delegates praised as noble the work of the Union of Eurafricans to “aid needy Eurafrican children of both sexes to guide and advise them in how to conduct themselves well in life.”114 However, one delegate criticized the union for its seeming focus on “one category of those who were poor” while ignoring “other categories of citizens.” This quote referred to the 1946 Lamine Guèye Law and new Constitution of the Fourth Republic, which declared that all people formerly holding colonial legal status as indigènes now held French citizenship status. The delegate argued that the union’s services, opportunities, and monetary resources benefited only métis, while there were other needy children in Senegal who received nothing.115 A delegate named Ousmane Alioune Sylla said he voted against the allocation of the land because “the problem of Eurafricans does not exist in Senegal,” intimating that multiracial people were neither special nor more entitled than any other people born in the region and that efforts such as the foyer reflected inequality. Another delegate noted that the foyer entailed the segregation of black and métis children; what was needed instead was the creation of philanthropic initiatives that helped “all

114 115

CAB/AS; Decision according a subvention from the General Directorate of Finances, October 28, 1953, document 7993 FBI/I. The Eurafrican, “Commission of Social Affairs, Affair # 11, Territorial Assembly of Senegal,” Issue 18 (April 16, 1954), 17–19. The Eurafrican, “Commission of Social Affairs, Topic #11,” 17–19.

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of the categories of those who are in the Territory.” This debate by the Territorial Assembly in Senegal was radically different in tone than the one it held in 1948, where members had chastised the French colonial state for not doing enough to provide resources for multiracial children. The delegates argued that there were poor children in Senegal of many identities; services were needed to address the requirements of all children, not just multiracial children. Rigonaux lambasted the decision as inhumane toward children who had already suffered trauma and stated that the assemblymen had erred in their assumptions and accusations that the foyer and the union were segregationist. The home, he argued, was not segregationist; if assembly members would just visit the foyer, they would find it housed “side by side, children who were métis as well as children that were purely African. And without doubt, you would understand that you had gone down a wrong path.”116 He emphasized that the foyer was also open to “black children,” and while the union had originally opened the foyer for unfortunate métis children not recognized by their fathers, “we extended this benefit to African children who were of the same case, because we determined that there is no cause to dissociate Eurafrican and African children.” With this focus on the common cases of disinheritance by fathers, Rigonaux emphasized that the lack of paternal support was what made multiracial children vulnerable and in need of special resources. Ultimately, it was the Permanent Council of FWA – entirely composed of French metropolitan settlers and no Africans – that approved the land grant (at minimal cost) for a fifty-year renewable time period.117 With this vote, the council implicitly acknowledged that it was the paternal failings of French men that undergirded their responsibilities toward métis. The foyer continued to operate primarily due to French colonial government subsidies. The amounts increased further, reaching between 1.625 and 1.85 million francs over the course of 1956.118 Rigonaux insisted that his home accepted children of any

116

117 118

The Eurafrican, “Letter to Mr. Dia Cissé Loum, Councillier of the Territorial Assembly of Senegal in St. Louis from Nicolas Rigonaux,” Issue 18, 18–26; “Letter to Mr. Ousmane Alioune Sylla, Counsellor of the Territorial Assembly of Senegal in St. Louis from Nicolas Rigonaux,” Issue 18 (August 28, 1954), 27; “Letter to Mr. Mr. Guillarbet, First Vice-President of the Territorial Assembly of Senegal in St. Louis from Nicolas Rigonaux,” Issue 18, 28; “Letter from Maitre Crespin, Retired Lawyer to the President of the Territorial Assembly of Senegal,” Issue 18 (November 12, 1954), 6–7. The Eurafrican, Issue 18; “Deliberation #82/CP 55,” Official Journal no. 2772, June 18, 1955, 8. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Decision from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, commander of the Legion of Honor, General Directorate of Finances, March 8, 1956, document 1991 BI/I; Note from the cabinet of the high commissioner signed by Bourges to the general director of finances, February 27, 1956, document 3063; Decision from the high

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origins, but the budget line was categorized as funding the charity that “took in métis children.” In 1955, Rigonaux separated what he viewed as charitable action, namely, the home for boys, from the union itself. Going forward, the Charity for French Children and the union were separate entities, operated with separate budgets and separate managing boards. Rigonaux nevertheless remained the president of each board.119 The charity would focus on the needs of children in the home and the union would advocate for the economic, social, and legal status rights of all métis, both adults and children. Rigonaux still viewed himself as a benevolent paternal figure, sacrificing his personal gain for the good of all métis. However, some maternal kin of the children in his home chafed at what they saw as his dictatorial style, as demonstrated in a controversy that he publicized in a 1955 issue of The Eurafrican. In an article entitled “Warning to the Relatives of the Children in the Foyer,” he criticized the “nefarious rumors” among some of the children’s kin.120 He complained that relatives of some children had claimed the children were neglected at the home and that he and his wife profited from the money given by the colonial government and donors. However, accountants scrupulously documented each expense, and they sent these reports to the “administration,” which verified the expenses. Rigonaux further elaborated that government funding was perpetually insufficient and that he spent some of his own money to provide for the children. He also wrote about the three meals per day, including dessert, that the children received; the clothing; the clean dormitories and beds; and the medical attention that he provided for “the smallest booboo.” Children who had been “sick” on entering the foyer, he insisted, “were quickly made well and are currently in excellent health.” He highlighted the labor that Mrs. Rigonaux provided for the home, noting that she mended torn clothing and supervised the preparation of meals. He ended the diatribe with a declaration: “I am not a dictator; I only have the best intentions for the children who are entrusted to me. If people

119

120

commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, commander of the Legion of Honor, General Directorate of Finances, July 4, 1956, document 5618 BI/I; Note from the cabinet of the high commissioner signed by Bourges to the general director of finances, June 20, 1956, document 9695; Decision from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, commander of the Legion of Honor, General Directorate of Finances, August 7, 1956, document 6561 BI/I; Note from the cabinet of the high commissioner signed by Bourges to the general director of finances, July 21, 1956, document 11318; Decision from the high commissioner of the Republic, governor-general of FWA, commander of the Legion of Honor, General Directorate of Finances, September 4, 1956, document 7396 BI/I. ANS, 17 G (207): Letter from the Union of Eurafricans of FWA to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, arrived June 22, 1957 and attached to minutes from the extraordinary General Meeting held April 15, 1955, June 21, 1957; Proposed amendment of the statutes of the Union of Eurafricans, signed by Rigonaux and the secretary general, February 15, 1950. The Eurafrican, “Advertisement to the Relatives of Students in the Foyer,” Issue 20, 22–4.

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continue to create trouble, it will be for the benefit of those who would have wanted the death of this work.” Rigonaux attached a statement called a “Retraction” to the article, which was supposed to be signed by whomever had launched the critiques. The document called on detractors to confess that they had lied and instead thank Rigonaux for having accepted their children into the home and for taking such good care of them.121 The signatories were also to declare that from then on, “I will no longer meddle in the interior affairs of the home, even those which concern my own children. Mr. Rigonaux is the only master of this place.” Rigonaux’s issuance of new rules for the foyer demonstrated the complete control of the children in his home that he hoped to exercise and his paternalistic view that he was better equipped than their mothers – or any other kin or guardians – to raise the boys. Alluding to “inflammatory” behaviors, he noted that children who resided in the foyer were not to be served alcoholic beverages on visitation days when they stayed with their maternal kin. The new rules stressed that “all mothers wishing to confide [entrust] their child” had to declare in writing that they agreed to grant the foyer full latitude to act in the best interests of the child. They had to indicate that they would adhere to the rules, which included limitations on the visits by family members to the foyer and children’s visits to their mothers or kin outside the foyer. Additionally, signatories agreed never to withdraw the children during the school year. Breaking these rules, the contract specified, could result in the child’s expulsion and their kin would be obligated to reimburse the home for any expenses incurred. In a shift from the view that all métis children and mothers were worthy of charity, Rigonaux now delineated patriarchal views about what constituted moral and sexual uprightness of the mothers in order for their children to be admitted to the home. The insinuations of his neglect and embezzlement as leveled by relatives of the children in his care had precipitated this change. His public statement intimated that it may have been mothers of what he considered to be ill repute who started the rumors; in addition, the conduct and homes of these same women were harmful for their children. He now sought out particular candidates who could become the morally upright and accomplished men he hoped to cultivate. To determine a boy’s suitability, the mother’s moral conduct would be considered for any child’s admission – a new criterion. The foyer would investigate prospective mothers, and admission could be refused in cases in which the “shameful life carried out by the mother was common knowledge.”122 A new rule also outlined that mothers who 121 122

The Eurafrican, “Retraction,” Issue 20, 25. The Eurafrican, “To the Parents of Students in The Home of The French Charity for Children, Rue Dardanelles in Dakar,” Issue 20, 26.

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received any welfare payments from the French colonial government, or had sources of income, had to declare it. The charity would assess this information to determine how much money the mother herself would have to contribute to the foyer to subsidize the costs of the child’s care. No longer was the home free of charge; if a mother had the financial resources, she was to pay some of the costs for her child to reside there. Following the colonial government’s directive that the funds allocated to the charity were to be used for the home only, in Rigonaux’s accounting report for 1956 he outlined that the bulk of funds went toward direct expenses for the children.123 Yet, as much as he concentrated on his work with children and the charity, Rigonaux continued to advocate for the union to also receive government funding and for its membership across FEA and FWA to actively champion what he saw as essential social, political, and economic rights of not only métis children but also adults. Beyond Dakar: The Global Family of Métis At the end of 1956, Rigonaux wrote to the new high commissioner of FWA, Gaston Cusin, requesting that the previous year’s grant of 1.85 million francs to the charity be increased to 2 million francs. He cited the increased cost of living and that the foyer now housed a larger cohort of twenty-four boys.124 The Department of Social Services vetted the request and gave it a “favorable recommendation.”125 However, by March 1957, no money had been transferred to Rigonaux for the foyer. It was not clear that the high commissioner had even approved the funding. Signing on Rigonaux’s behalf, the secretary general of the union wrote again to the high commissioner, indicating that the matter was urgent: Rigonaux would leave for what he referred to as the International Congress of Métis in eight days, and he wished to leave a situation that was “clear and healthy” for those who would manage the foyer in his absence.126 However, the focus of the letter was not the foyer but the union. Since 1955 the 123

124 125 126

ANS 18 G 208 (160): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, attached to the grant status for the care of young orphans rescued by the Charity for French Children during the period of the second semester by decision 5.618 FBI/I of July 4, 1956, signed by Rigonaux and four members of the Administrative Council of UNION (signatures illegible), December 12, 1956, no document number. Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the governor, secretary general of the general government of Dakar, January 31, 1957, 18 G 208(160), ANS. Note from Social Services to the general government of FWA, illegible signatures, no date, no document number, February 15, 1957, 18 G 208(160), ANS. Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, stamped as received March 22, 1957, March 19, 1957, no document number, 18 G 280(160), ANS.

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union – which had previously been generously funded by the colonial government of Senegal and the office of the governor-general of FWA – had received no subventions from the government of Senegal or the high commissioner’s office, despite its yearly request for money. The secretary general stressed that the association’s goals were well known and that it remained apolitical and hostile to any forms of racism, working to facilitate unity between Africans and Europeans. He further emphasized that its members were low-ranking civil servants and modest wage-earners in the private sector; the organization did not have sufficient resources of its own to pay for and fulfill its mission. The congress was an event in Brazzaville that would bring together representatives of métis associations from across Francophone Africa and elsewhere in the French Empire. This event signaled the transcontinental and international trajectories toward which Rigonaux aligned his advocacy for Eurafricans. Colonial officials viewed such trajectories as evidence of the politicization and anticolonialism of multiracial peoples’ claims, which they viewed as increasingly at odds with the survival of the French Union. Rigonaux viewed such claim-making as the foundation of African French futures. He saw himself as a trusted partner to the French colonial and metropolitan government as well as a partner to African societies – which would help shepherd the creation of a “Eurafrica” in which the values of liberty, equality, and brotherhood were authentically applied to all people. Africa and France were intimately intertwined, Rigonaux believed. He sought the French presence in Africa to show the continent’s best version, through ensuring the welfare of métis so they could actualize their full potential as a bridge between African and French futures.

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Multiracial Internationalism Racial Equality, Human Rights, and Just Eurafrican Futures, 1957–1960

On April 24, 1957, Nicolas Rigonaux delivered the opening address of the International Congress of Métis in Brazzaville, French Congo, to an audience that included officers of métis organizations from across FWA, FEA, Belgian Congo, and Vietnam. A handful of high-ranking French colonial officials of FEA were also in attendance, including the interim high commissioner.1 The location of the congress in Brazzaville held tremendous symbolic importance in the history of Africa–France relations: not only had it served as the de facto capital city of Free France during much of World War II, but its leaders had convened the 1944 African Conference – without any Africans or colonized people present – to direct the changing course of Africa–France futures. Rigonaux’s opening remarks underscored that Eurafricans (that is, métis) were a distinct constituency that belonged equally to both African and European societies; they needed to be recognized and acknowledged as such in both Africa and France to determine a new and racially just world order. Métis were born from “two races who work shoulder to shoulder in Africa,” and they had their perspectives to add to the “global upheavals.”2 The global upheavals to which Rigonaux alluded included the crumbling of French colonial rule in Indochina, the demands of colonized people for reform in colonial rule or the outright end of colonial rule, and mobilization by African Americans in the United States against racial discrimination. In French Africa, various groups and individuals – including political activists, labor union leaders, and intellectuals – demanded increased autonomy to govern and equality in rights and access to economic and social resources, while affirming and retaining their political, economic, social, and cultural ties with France.3 1 2 3

The Eurafrican, “Summary of the Reunion of the Reconciliation of the Association of Métis in Brazzaville, 20 April 1957,” Issue 24, 9–11. The Eurafrican, “Summary of the Reunion of the Reconciliation of the Association of Métis in Brazzaville,” 9–11. A common foundation of emerging “Third World” activism in Africa, Asia, and Arab regions in the 1950s, as articulated in many conferences and gatherings – such as the 1955 African-Asian Bandung Conference – were the pillars of anticolonialism and antiracism. Activists challenged the notion that “human rights could be respected under a colonial regime” and argued for self-

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Recognizing expanded African self-governance, Rigonaux implored: “It is important that public powers, elected assemblies, do not forget about our existence and also do not at all sacrifice our interests. Our role, which is essential in African as well European communities, demands from us sound patriotism, conscientiousness, loyalty, and steadiness.” In emphasizing the “patriotism” and “loyalty” of multiracial Africans toward the emerging black African governing bodies, Rigonaux insisted that métis did not view themselves as superior but sought to dismantle old models of colonial rule built on the foundation of antiblack racism. He aimed his words at black African intellectuals, heads of newly forming political parties in French Africa, elected deputies to the French National Assembly, and representatives to the territorial assemblies – who controlled the budgets and negotiated new policies and laws with French politicians. One such person was the poet and politician Léopold Senghor, one of Senegal’s two deputies to the assembly and the founder of Bloc Populaire, a political party that dominated the territorial assembly after substantial wins in the March 1957 elections held in Dakar. Senghor and Aimé Césaire, a writer and politician from Martinique, had met in Paris decades earlier and were the originators of the concept of nègritude (blackness) as a basis of antiracist mobilization for black people across the francophone world.4 Artists, intellectuals, and political activists who were proponents of nègritude heralded black African civilization and culture, particularly art forms and literary expression, as equal and complementary to French and European civilizations.5 Senghor talked about how black people had experienced métissage, a civilizational and cultural mixture with Europe; he argued that “Africans and Europe are jointly responsible for the common future they are fated to share.”6 Nègritude thinkers proposed that the elevation of both European and black cultures would provide a foundation of equality and interdependence in which both societies could work toward mutual flourishing. As argued by Gary Wilder, Césaire and Senghor advocated for a “non-nationalist decolonization” and “self-determination without

4 5

6

determination. Yet, unlike some Arab, Asian, and anglophone African activists, many in francophone Africa did not seek outright self-determination as the only path to realizing Africans’ full human rights; they argued instead for reformed colonialism. Many francophone influencers who sought to define “freedom” and “rights” for black Africans debated how to remain in some form of political alliance with France, weighing options such as departmentalization, federalism, and confederalism; these influencers disavowed that African societies would become nation-states. Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 49–50; Cooper, Citizenship between Empire, 11–12. Wilder, Freedom Time, 21. Advocates of nègritude posited that “equality in equivalence” afforded people of African descent the same political and social rights as people in metropolitan France. Semley, To Be Free and French, 261–3. Wilder, Freedom Time, 55–9.

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sovereignty,” seeking to form a decentralized democratic federation that would include former colonies as freely associated member states, ultimately emancipation from colonialism in ways that questioned “the very categories ‘Africa,’ ‘France,’ and ‘Europe.’”7 Rigonaux agreed that Africa–Europe futures were conjoined, but he contested nègritude as the singular identity and culture that fused people born in Africa in a collective identity and struggle for equality. Nègritude left métis vulnerable to racism from black Africans in addition to the racism they faced from the French. He implored in his 1957 speech: Whatever we do, whatever we say, we are and must remain Africans and Europeans. It would be nonsense for us to singularize ourselves and to turn our backs, either to Europeans, or to blacks. It is also important, in my opinion, that we loyally promote the successes of new institutions that the French Parliament is forging. We will work for France, for our territories, and in the interests of our descendants.8

At the end of his speech, later published in Eurafrican, Rigonaux also announced a new name for the former Union of Eurafricans of French West and Equatorial Africa, Cameroon, and Togo, namely the International Union of Métis (IUM). The new name reflected the organization’s expanded vision to represent multiracial people around the world. The IUM’s twin pillars of mobilization and collective action – childhood and citizenship – were in line with what métis organizations in Africa had supported for decades. However, the meanings and claims that Rigonaux and his allies ascribed to these concepts changed between 1957 and 1960, during which time Rigonaux and his international network forwarded a vision and future of multiracial internationalism. I borrow from the concept of black internationalism, as used by scholars of African American and African diaspora studies, to analyze the global consciousness with which black activists forged solidarity and struggled against white supremacy, racism, slavery, and colonialism.9 At the core of black internationalism, as argued by Robin Kelley, is the ideal of “universal emancipation, unbounded by national imperial continental, or oceanic boundaries – or even racial ones.”10 7 8 9

10

Wilder, Freedom Time, 1–5. The Eurafrican, Issue 24, 9–12. Michael O. West et al., eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), xi. Research in black internationalism often disregards the critical role of black women in creating the concept: “Black internationalism” or “internationalism noir ” was coined by Martinican writer Jeanne Nardal in a 1928 essay published in a magazine cofounded by her and her sister Paulette, as discussed in Keisha Blain and Tiffany Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 2–3. Scholars of peoples of African descent have inherently incorporated a global, diasporic, and transnational framework in their analyses, given the roots of involuntary trans-Atlantic slavery and the proactive routes of engagement with the Americas, Africa, and Europe of black activists in their struggles for black liberation. This global vision is what scholars often term “black

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Rigonaux’s network of multiracial internationalists viewed themselves as struggling against racism and racial oppression, whether perpetuated by “blacks,” “whites,” or “others.” Delegates planted seeds for a new line of thinking: their shared identity of being born of white and “other” parents constituted a distinct form of transnational kinship, which would create a bridge toward international peace and the realization of universal human rights. Multiracial people were members of a global family based on their shared aspects of multiracial lineage, bicultural competency, and experiences of discrimination. These ideas are emblematic of what Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as “uses of race as a basis for moral solidarity” through the “assimilation of ‘race feeling’ to ‘family feeling.’”11 Multiracial internationalism projected that multiracial people were kin, who embodied a transnational citizenship that entailed their civic, social, and humanitarian action for the prosperity and security of African and other subjugated societies. The multiracial subject was to be the vanguard in guiding African societies toward a new relationship with France – which could heal the racial trauma of colonialism, further the development of African societies, and foster a mutually reinforcing and interdependent future. Rigonaux’s allies had varying regional, linguistic, national, and racial identities and they did not always agree regarding whether – or how – their local concerns aligned with his global views. However, they converged regarding the idea that membership of two racial groups meant that multiracial people were well positioned to lead their societies into a utopian tomorrow that was not bound to geopolitical boundaries. The concept of multiracial internationalism was a boundary-crossing racial identity based on collective genealogical descent that encompassed Europe, Africa, Asia, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. This vision of a collective multiracial identity was simultaneously African and European – and beyond. It provided an international foundation from which to articulate the universality of human rights as well as the specific rights of multiracial people. This chapter argues that multiracial internationalism coexisted alongside ideologies of black internationalism, nègritude, and Pan-Africanism that circulated in the twilight years of colonial rule in French Africa. Indeed, multiracial internationalism is indicative of the multivalent ways in which people of African descent shaped their identities, belonging, and political and legal configurations.

11

internationalism.” Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86, 3 (1999), 1045–77. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17.

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First International Congress of Métis: The Origins of Multiracial Internationalism, 1957 Organizing the first International Congress of Métis encompassed what Lorelle Semley refers to as a “trans-African moment,” a historical through line since the eighteenth-century expansion of the French Empire into Africa – in which Africans tapped into “multiple local, oceanic, and ideological networks” to articulate claims that they could be a race other than white and could also be French. Trans-African claims did not call for the end of colonial rule but rather the capacious application of French republican ideals to encompass the humanity of black peoples. Yet, in Semley’s narrative, people of color always claimed the racial identity of “black” as a springboard for political thought and collective actions for liberation in colonial contexts.12 The congress also encompassed some tenets of pan-Africanist thought, defined by Hakim Adi as “ideologies and movements that have at the centre the notion of the unity and advancement of Africa and its diaspora.” As the 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana included North African Arab states, pan-Africanism came to signify the unity of black and Arab societies for social, economic, cultural, and political emancipation.13 The ideology emphasized interconnectedness and shared common history as well as the fight of people of African descent against “the anti-African racism” that fueled global white supremacy – which had manifested in trans-Atlantic slave trade and had continued in colonialism and neocolonialism. But Rigonaux and his allies did not claim the black identities in Semley’s conceptualization of transAfricanism. Nor did they utter calls for the end of colonial rule or prioritize the shared commonality as people of African descent, themes that are central to Adi’s conceptualization of Pan-Africanism. Métis or multiracial internationalists entreated both African and French societies to recognize racial categories other than black or white, and their triple identity as métis, African, and French; they also advocated for the continued necessity of African– French interwovenness. Rigonaux and the IUM adherents developed a theory of métis or multiracial internationalism in which it was argued that a solidarity of people existed across Africa and the world, who shared the following common experiences: birth from a white parent and a parent of a racial identity that had experienced racism; the lack of involvement of their fathers in their lives, which resulted in childhood poverty and lack of access to education and basic resources; and racism experienced from both maternal and paternal societies. The solidarity

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Semley, To Be Free and French, 185. Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2–4.

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and actions of multiracial people resulted in the recognition of their human dignity, racial equality, and human rights. Benjamin Talton explains that although some scholars equate black internationalism and Pan-Africanism, they are different: “I try to remain mindful that the term ‘Black internationalist,’ like ‘nationalist,’ one of its precursors, centers the nation-state and that its intellectual and ideological ambitions run counter to terms such as ‘Pan-Africanist’ and ‘African diasporic,’ which point to cultural and political connections and movements that discount the primacy of the state.”14 While the concept of multiracial internationalism affirmed the collective identity of multiracial peoples in spite of their nationality, it did not seek to dismantle national boundaries or states. Adherents of the IUM affirmed the legitimacy of African and European states and government officials and attempted to mobilize them to acknowledge the existence and rights of métis people. Rigonaux maintained that government acknowledgment of multiraciality as a distinct identity – one that endowed multiracial people with particular legal and social rights – would demonstrate that the French had overcome the antiblack racism that informed colonial rule. It would also demonstrate how African societies defined liberation based on a shared language and understanding of universal human rights and antiracist thought and actions. Bruce Hall argues, “Race works instead as an argument about the world, as a moral ordering divide, even at times as a way of conjuring up a utopian vision.”15 The first International Congress of Métis was the launchpad from which métis sought to articulate how the acknowledgment of their personhood provided a moral ground to guide African societies toward a new relationship with France. This would be a mutually reinforcing and equitable future that could heal the racial trauma of colonialism and further the development of African societies. Rigonaux had to convince people who identified as métis in French Africa that their individual and regional needs would be addressed if they agreed to form a union with each other and under his centralized leadership. In the pages of L’Eurafricain, he took on a dual tone of reporting a narrative of the congress’s success and expressing his worries; he pleaded with métis readers to unify and make his dream of their collective global family through the IUM a reality.16 Rigonaux publicized that he used his own limited wealth (at great sacrifice) to pay for the publication and pleaded with readers to send donations to keep it afloat. His summary article stated that métis would no longer feel

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Monique Bedasse et al., “American Historical Review Conversation: Black Internationalism,” American Historical Review 125, 5 (December 2020), 1709. Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9. The Eurafrican, Issue 24, 2.

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isolated because “they will see a link between themselves that will make them feel solidarity with one another, and that will give to those who are the most destitute the feeling of belonging to the same family, ready to provide aid to each other in times of distress.” Not all members of métis organizations felt an instant sense of solidarity with each other across French Africa. Rigonaux sought to change this with a publicity campaign that was carried out in person, in print, and on the radio. In the weeks before he arrived in Brazzaville, Rigonaux met face-to-face with members of métis organizations across French Africa. He flew to Conakry, Guinea; Sassandra, Ivory Coast; Cotonou, Dahomey; Lomé, Togo; and Niamey, Niger. He gave interviews to newspapers and radio stations based in Paris, Dakar, and Brazzaville as well as in Belgian Congo.17 Rigonaux claimed leadership based on his networking abilities in francophone Africa and beyond. He highlighted his abilities to create alliances across the African continent beyond French-controlled areas, continue relationships with Eurasians in Indochina and France (which he had already cultivated for years), correspond with government officials in European metropoles (such as Brussels and Paris), and receive the recognition and cooperation of the French government. According to Rigonaux’s vision, creating the IUM meant that métis associations in individual territories would cease to exist. They would become sections of the union, which had formal headquarters in Paris; Rigonaux would be president of the union, assuming the centralized lead. Each section would collect dues and manage its budget but pay a yearly minimum amount to Dakar, where Rigonaux and a committee of representatives would manage the overall goals and funding of the union. But President Antoine Van Den Reysen of the Amicale des Métis of Brazzaville lodged a complaint with the colonial court in Brazzaville, noting that Paul Betty, president of the neighboring Amicale des Métis of Ubangi-Chari, had unilaterally dissolved the Amicale of Métis of FEA and declared it to now be a part of the IUM – without obtaining the members’ consent.18 Rigonaux was able to make peace between the men based on a power-sharing agreement. Van Den Reysen withdrew the claim, and he and Betty agreed to consolidate their associations into one section, a Brazzaville section of the IUM. Rigonaux asked attendees to tell their members that “Your association – the Amicale des Métis – as [it] had existed until this time, no longer has a reason to exist,” and that “personal interests must be erased for the general good.” Rigonaux sought to convey that the collective gathering broke down barriers of language, distance, and citizenship status between métis. Most of the 17 18

The Eurafrican, Issue 24, 3. The Eurafrican, “Minutes from the Meeting of the Association of Métis in Brazzaville, April 20, 1957,” Issue 24, 9–11.

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attendees of the congress were “Big Men” wearing Western-style suits and ties, presidents and other officers of métis associations from West and Equatorial Africa. Of the twenty-nine delegates, all but four were men (see Figure 6). They came from French Congo, Ubangi-Chari, Gabon, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Togo, and Cameroun. Rigonaux served as the representative for the rest of FWA. A delegate from Vietnam represented the Association of Eurasians. Two people also came from elsewhere in Africa: one from Angola and one from the Belgian Congo. At some point during the two days, delegates traveled across the Congo River to Leopoldville, Belgian Congo and visited the headquarters of the Association of Mulattoes of Leopoldville. This was a journey beyond the boundaries of French territories and therefore “justifies for all the attribute of ‘INTERNATIONAL’ adopted by the Congress for the name of the Union of métis.”19 Rigonaux and other attendees who gave speeches outlined two primary audiences and broad end goals for the congress. First, they noted the French government held a moral duty to provide money and institutions for the care and education of métis children, even in light of increased African political autonomy.20 Delegates called out and sought to dismantle what they saw as the racism of French colonial rule, as evident in the French state providing insufficient resources to métis children. The failure of French fathers to provide for métis offspring left a lasting imprint of poverty and human indignity. Further, it was the duty of the French to atone for this oversight within the context of their claiming to be creating new relationships of authentic equality for Africans. The delegates thus simultaneously solicited the French government for money and autonomy, requesting the government give money directly to the associations, which would manage the day-to-day operations of children’s foyers.21 Second, attendees pressed African political actors to acknowledge métis as a distinct constituency. Attendees affirmed their affinity with the African societies of their mothers, yet also continued to claim that métis were inherently French through blood. There was a dual tension: métis were different from other Africans but were still Africans. A primary concern was the justification of métis as a distinct identity and group, underscored by how other Africans regarded “métis” as distinct. For example, the two delegates from Cote d’Ivoire explained that people in their maternal villages referred to them as “métis” and “a son of a white man.”22 Their own maternal kin and 19 20 21 22

The Eurafrican, Issue 24, 6; emphasis in original. The Eurafrican, “Message from the International Congress of Métis to President Eisenhower, Brazzaville, April 24, 1957,” 13. The Eurafrican, “Annex 8,” 25. The Eurafrican, “Annex 6, Report Presented to Congress by the Delegation of the Mutuality of Eurafricans of the Ivory Coast,” Issue 24, 19.

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Figure 6 Photos of delegates to the First International Congress of Métis.23 Source: The Eurafrican, Issue 24.

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The Eurafrican, Issue 24.

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Figure 6 (cont.)

communities viewed their filiation from a white man as rendering them different. Further, they continued, people in their maternal villages often regarded them with hostility because of the bad conditions of the colonial rule with which the French had governed, and by transferring their anger toward

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the French onto métis instead. Delegates also supported the concept of management by Africans over their own governance and the control of economic resources. Delegates also argued for increased resources for all vulnerable children born in Africa. In a shift from prior decades, in which métis associations had wanted the French to build orphanages and boarding schools exclusively for métis children, these delegates advocated that such institutions would benefit and should admit needy African children of any race. Jean Valin of Cameroun stated that the French-government funded Cité Enfantine was open to black and métis orphans. Delegates called for renewed funding for any orphanages that African legislatures had defunded and argued in favor of what the Amicale des Métis had been striving for over decades: building a new foyer in Brazzaville, open to “abandoned children of any origin or race” and run by the association.24 The care of métis children contributed to the political survival and solidification of the French Union; one delegate claimed the primary aim of institutions was teaching children “to get to know and love the French Union.”25 Delegates presented themselves as loyal to the French Union and claimed the IUM contributed to the edification of the “real French Union, the only guarantor for a better Africa.”26 Delegates traversed delicate and conflictual trajectories: their identities and statuses as people living in Africa, autonomy versus continued relationships with the French government, and debates of what constituted antiracism and the protection of their own privileges. The IUM’s statutes summarized multiple pillars in unifying métis in Africa and around the world – along with Africans and Europeans – for what they argued was humanitarian rather than political action. The primary goals were to cultivate a collective identity of métis in Africa and defend their social and moral interests; to coordinate the actions of IUM branches in their advocacy for abandoned children, regardless of origin; and to use their interstitial role to establish cooperation between “the European race” and “the African race.”27 With the projected future in which African and French societies would acknowledge métis as a distinct category of people who would peacefully bridge France to its former colonies, Rigonaux assumed the role of statesman or broker to achieve that vision. Following the congress, Rigonaux mobilized 600 members of the IUM and his cultivated allies of various racial identities from around the world to achieve the goals of “making our work prosper, to

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The Eurafrican, “Annex 6, Report Presented by the Brazzaville Section of the Union of Eurafricans of Black French Africa,” Issue 24, 23. The Eurafrican, “Annex 8,” 25–6. The Eurafrican, “Annex 6,” 21. The Eurafrican, “Annex 5, Statutes,” 24, 27.

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work on behalf of abandoned children and to make ourselves esteemed by the Europeans and the Africans.”28 Fundraising and Mobilization for Multiracial Internationalism in Europe, 1957–1958 After the congress, between 1957 and 1959, Rigonaux took on several roles: a spokesperson for métis in French Africa; a fundraiser and lobbyist before European and African government officials and political activists, and other influential people around the world, for multiracial people’s interests; and a scold to métis in Africa, persuading them to have active civic lives in their respective regions. He wanted their civic lives to fulfill the aspirations and communities of belonging that were envisioned at the congress. He played these roles while traveling to Cameroon and to France and Germany. He also expressed these roles on paper, by writing letters to various government officials across Europe and Africa and publishing L’Eurafricain. He managed the publication’s content, which included articles and letters authored by him, correspondence between him and a rotating cast of government officials, the minutes of the meetings of IUM branches in Africa, and reproductions of articles and other texts first published in Europe, Africa, or Southeast Asia. Rigonaux emphasized to readers of L’Eurafricain and member sections of the IUM that the future of the organization depended upon healthy coffers, which necessitated donations from métis themselves.29 But Rigonaux was appealing to a financially strapped organization and individual members.30 The IUM was, in fact, insolvent both at its founding and throughout 1962, the year in which documentation about the organization disappears from the archives. Payments of subscription fees for the publication and donations were scarce. Rigonaux insisted that the changing cast of French governing institutions in Africa, as well as government institutions in metropolitan France, owed the IUM money to achieve its mission to ensure the education and social mobility of métis.31 The IUM advocated for the French government to provide for permanent welfare for métis children and adults, with the organization as the recipient and distributer of funds.32 28 29 30 31 32

The Eurafrican, “Closing Speech of the International Congress of Métis,” 9. The Eurafrican, “Call to the Eurafricans of Cameroon and Report of the General Assembly of the Union of Eurafricans of Cameroon, August 1958,” Issue 26, 16–17. The Eurafrican, “Circular Addressed to all Members of the International Union of Métis,” Issue 24, 42–3. The Eurafrican, Issue 24, 6. ANS, 17 G (207): Letter from the Union of Eurafricans of FWA to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, attached to a work plan of the Union of Eurafricans for 1957, June 21, 1957; Letter from the Union of Eurafricans of FWA to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, June 11, 1957.

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Rigonaux attempted to demonstrate that he was internationally recognized by publishing letters to and from various African and European public figures. The IUM leadership in Dakar requested the Ministry of Overseas France to approve the headquarters of the IUM as Paris rather than Dakar, which the ministry approved.33 However, the colonial government denied requests for funding, telling Rigonaux that the budget for African organizations had already been depleted.34 Rigonaux reproduced and published a copy of this letter in a 1957 publication of Eurafrican to shame the French into funding the IUM.35 Nevertheless, in the fall of 1957, Rigonaux did manage to cultivate a new alliance in what would eventually become West Germany. The alliance was with a white German woman named Irene Dilloo, who operated the Albert Schweitzer home just outside of Frankfurt. The home housed children of African American soldiers and German women. In August and September 1957, Rigonaux visited the home, which Dilloo managed, and the children who lived there.36 33

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In correspondence marked “confidential,” the minister of the interior wrote to colonial officials in FWA requesting further information to assess this request. This included intelligence on the association and its officers. Further information was also asked about René Déroux – the senator of Dahomey in the French Senate – who Rigonaux also identified as the Paris representative for the IUM and whose office in the fifteenth arrondissment was to serve as headquarters. When questioned about the request, Déroux replied that the organization had made the request with the sole intention of keeping the French government informed about the creation of the IUM and it was unlikely that it would be active in France. National Archives of France (hereafter NAF), 19850250/11: Note for the director of regulation, Department of Foreigners and Passports in the Office of Nationality and Foreign Affairs, subject line: A/S request for authorization to operate presented by the International Union of Métis, slip n 440 of July 20, 1957 and July 30, 1957, S.307, SN.RG.ETR.5941; Note for the director of regulation, sixth section, Department of Foreigners and Passports in the Office of Nationality and Foreign Affairs, Reg./Nat. n 440, July 20, 1957; Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the IUM to the minister of public health and population, November 9, 1961, stamped arrived on November 13, 1961, 19780557/18, NAF. ANS, 17 G (207): Letter from the delegate of the territorial commander of Senegal in Dakar to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, July 8, 1957, letter 581/AG; Letter from the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA to the president of the Union of Eurafricans, November 13, 1957, letter 12.233 PR/JC. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): “Lettre du Haut-Commissariat de l’FWA au Président de l’Union des Eurafricains,” L’Eurafricain, Issue 25, 51; Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, founded by the Union of Eurafricans, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, December 19, 1957. The first time that Dilloo mentions Rigonaux in surviving records of her correspondence is in a 1957 letter she wrote to the World Council of Churches, which provided her with funding: “The work we began in the small framework of the Federal Republic to rescue, preserve, and educate abandoned and rejected mixed-race children, which carries within itself the thought, the soul of racial bridging and the unification of nations, is now also becoming a visible sign through President of the International Union of Métis, Mr. N. Rigonaux from Dakar and Paris, affiliated to this comprehensive world union of mixed race of all colors; it would represent a ‘new children’s family.’” EDWE Archives, letter from Dr. Albert Schweitzer Kinderheim e.V.,

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With this encounter, Rigonaux actualized the IUM’s claim to represent multiracial people from around the world, through the incorporation of “Mischlingskinder.” This was a derogatory term that the German public used to refer to children of “mixed origin,” specifically children born of African American soldiers and German women. The children were among the hundreds of thousands of “war babies” fathered by the tens of thousands of occupation soldiers of various nationalities and racial identities from Allied troops and German women.37 In an interview with a French publication, Rigonaux included what he called the “suffering-pain” of these multiracial offspring as integral to his global mission of bettering the lives and futures of abandoned children.38 War babies and the women who bore them faced scorn and stigma, both because the children were illegitimate and because they had been fathered by “the enemy.” The German public particularly vilified relationships between German women and African American men and marked the resultant children as different from other war babies due to the race of their fathers.39 The relatively few children born of German women and African American men – about 4,700 children – received a great amount of attention and were a source of anxiety for the German government and social service providers.40 These children represented about twelve percent of the children born of American soldiers and a little over one percent of the children fathered by occupation soldiers of all nationalities. Multiracial black children, like all war babies, were titular

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Neu-Asel/Korbach [barred: Wermelskirchen, Friedrichstr. 64, Bankverein Westdeutschland 9507, Postscheckkonto 21552], to the Oekumenischer Rat der Kirchen (World Council of Churches), Central Office, Geneva, October 22, 1957, HGST 3949. After its defeat in World War II, Germany was occupied by diverse Allied forces from Britain, France, Russia, and the United States between 1945 and 1955. Occupation soldiers and German women engaged in sexual relations in consensual, nonconsensual, coerced, and remunerated contexts. Soldiers remained for mere months at a time and few acknowledged paternity, provided financial resources, or took their children with them. The public referred to the estimated 400,000 children of German women and occupied soldiers as Besatzungskinder (“children of the occupation” or “war babies”). Barbara Stelzl-Marx and Silke Satjukow, eds., Besatzungskinder: Die Nachkommen alliierter Soldaten in Österreich und Deutschland (Vienna: Böhlau, 2015), 11–14. “Tu es mon papa, je le savais dit le petit garçon de couleur . . . quand il fut certain que le blanc ne le renait pas,” L’Eurafricain 24, 45–6. The article was identified as having appeared in IciParis, 630, July 31–August 6, 1957. Maria Hohn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German–American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Yara-Colette Lemke Muñiz de Faria, Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung. Afrodeutsche Besatzungskinder in Nachkriegsdeutschland (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002), 20; Zwiespältige Heimat, “Auslandsverschickung afrodeutscher ‘Besatzungskinder’ zu Beginn der 1950er Jahre” in Judenfeindschaft als Paradigma: Studien zur Vorurteilsforschung, eds. Wolfgang Benz and Angelika Königseder (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002), 238–45.

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German citizens and, like all other illegitimate children of any origin born in West Germany, they were automatically wards of the state. Yet black multiracial German children faced heightened discrimination. They were the subject of numerous debates by government, religious, and secular youth and social service providers as to their status in German society and how to care for them. Yara-Colette Lemke Muñiz de Faria notes the racist views of the German public toward these children: government and social service representatives viewed multiracial children as particularly at risk of growing up to be deviant, given their essentialized racial difference that rendered them foreign and “not German.” The government provided money for their care and education in the framework of services for illegitimate children, delivered by secular and religious social service representatives. Some argued that they should be removed or raised away from German society, for their own good, due to racial discrimination; others believed that black multiracial children should be raised by “their own kind” or in segregated milieus in Germany.41 However, most German mothers kept their multiracial children. Hundreds were adopted by African American families in the United States through a program called the Brown Baby plan.42 About 640 of the 4,700 children were raised in orphanages with other abandoned or orphaned children.43 Dilloo’s orphanage was the only one that housed black multiracial children exclusively. Irene Dilloo was the mother of nine children and wife of a Protestant minister. In 1950, she had proposed to Bavarian local government and Protestant organizations to open a home that could house up to 200 AfroGerman children. Like Rigonaux, Dilloo felt that multiracial children were in “moral danger” of becoming unproductive people due to German racism and abandonment and neglect. She viewed herself as the housemother who would provide maternal care, which was essential but missing in the children’s lives.44 She would train the children in the segregated setting of the home in basic education, foreign languages, and vocational skills, and provide the selfconfidence they would need to become productive adults. Representatives of churches, public youth welfare services, and benevolence societies objected to building a special home just for black war babies, arguing that segregation 41 42 43 44

Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, “Germany’s Brown Babies Must Be Helped! Will You? U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-Germanic Children, 1950–1955,” Callaloo 26 (2003), 342–62. Jet Magazine, July 24, 1953, 12. Yara-Colette Lemke Muñiz de Faria, Between Care and Exclusion (Berlin: Metropol, 2003), 1–9. In 1952, Dilloo outlined the pedagogical concept of the home and the reference to Albert Schweitzer. Archive of the Evangelical Work for Diakonia and Development (hereafter EDWE), HGST 3949, Statutes of the Albert Schweitzer-Kinderheim E.V, Protokoll Nr. 1 über die Gründungsversammlung des Vereins Dr. Albert Schweitzer-Kinderheim e.V. am 18. Oktober 1952 zu Wermelskirchen im Saale des Hotels “Zur Eich.” Newspaper clipping from a German newspaper identifying Dilloo as “Mother of Mischlingskinder” in EDWE, HGST 1161, “Mother of the Mixed-Race Children: Mrs. Irene Dilloo Speaks,” no author, no date.

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would further accentuate the children’s difference and hinder their ability to be productive and integrated adults. Nevertheless, Dilloo opened the Albert Schweitzer Children’s Home Association (ASK) in October 1952 with funding from a small pool of private donations and government subsidies.45 At its opening, ASK consisted of a rented house in the town of Burgholz-Elberfeld, and the home housed between sixteen and twenty children, aged between two and eleven years.46 By 1956, Dilloo had secured a new rental location on the grounds of a former summer camp in the town of New-Asel outside of Frankfurt; by now, she had about thirty children in her care. Dilloo advocated for segregating the children within German society and expanding their contact with black people from outside Germany; in this regard, she needed Rigonaux. She viewed the children in her home meeting other black people as key to building their confidence and self-worth. Dilloo hoped to help the children build futures in “black” societies, such as in Africa.47 As much as she denounced German society as racist, her own view that black countries were the best place for German multiracial children was itself racist. Rigonaux saw in Dilloo a kindred spirit, someone like him who held parental love for multiracial children and the desire to care for and nurture them so that they could achieve self-realization and become productive citizens. Dilloo sought out press and publicity about the home and regularly gave interviews to German publications; she allowed journalists to visit and take photographs of her and the children. Rigonaux’s visit was a godsend for her because it helped to legitimize her work. Rigonaux also reprinted (in French) articles published in three German newspapers about his visit to ASK.48 He 45

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Copy from the order of the State Youth Welfare Office Hessen under number 52 1-04-13-02 K / 1057 H / 58, April 2, 1958, addressed to the board of directors of the ASK children’s home in Asel. Board meeting on August 25, 1957, in Asel. EWDE, HGST 3949; Lemke Muñiz de Faria, Between Care and Exclusion, 142–4. Dilloo had corresponded with the famous German doctor and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, who operated a hospital and provided medical services to Africans in Gabon, about her desire to care for needy children. She named the home as a tribute to him and probably because she thought the name would attract funders. Letter, Irene Dilloo to Professor Albert Schweitzer, May 12,1952, EDWE HGST 1193. Since founding ASK, she was often unable to pay the rent and she and the children moved multiple times in Germany. At some point, she and the children even moved to Denmark, after government inspectors described the living conditions and in-house educational training as inadequate. Lemke Muñiz de Faria, Between Caring and Exclusion, 121–2. For example, in 1956 a German newspaper reported a visit by the wife of the Minister of Labour of the Republic of Liberia, Mrs. Juah Buchanan, to the ASK home and with the Dilloos during a state visit. The story reported that she promised to adopt one of the children the next time she visited Germany and that all the children “wanted to go south [to Liberia] with her right away” where she would attend to “integration and further advancement.” Hessian News, No. 260, Saturday, November 3, 1956, Eder-Bote “Wife of the Liberian Labor Minister visited Aseler Heim. Asel” Article originally titled “A Grand Foyer of Children: 28 Little Fuzzy Heads,” translation reproduced by Rigonaux in The Eurafrican as “Report of President Rigonaux’s Visit to the Foyer of the Albert Schweitzer League,” Issue 25, 22–3. The same article was also published in the Kasslerr Post, September 14, 1957, and in Der Mitage of Düsseldorf on October 19, 1957, and in Der Tage Spiegel of Berlin on October 12, 1957.

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summarized how he had accompanied the Dilloos on a visit to the federal minister of the Republic in their region and the office of the Ministry of the Interior. He gave an interview with a German radio station and another two for a French radio station about him and the Dilloos.49 German officials were no doubt irked by the press that Rigonaux cultivated. In praising ASK in the media and advocating for government support and funding, Rigonaux implied that the German government was racist – an implication that German government officials were keen to refute through direct correspondence and conversation with Rigonaux. In a 1958 edition of Eurafrican, Rigonaux published a letter he had received from Dr. Reuthe, the minister of finance for the Republic of Germany, who wrote to him in French.50 Reuthe’s letter exuded a painstaking solicitousness to underline that the German government was not racist or prejudiced against “children of the occupation” who were “children of color.” Reuthe emphasized that in “regards to educational assistance and other care measures, [these children] are treated as other than German children” and did not face discrimination. Rigonaux viewed himself as an authority of the well-being of multiracial children. He offered to readers his own statistics on the number of children born of black fathers and German women as being far greater than the 5,000 cited by Reuthe. His high estimate of 150,000 was one way of establishing his authority and highlighting the significance of the international population of multiracial people of whom he claimed to be an important leader.51 He endorsed Dilloo’s work and requested that the German government legitimize her as director of the home, remove the presence of intrusive social workers, provide the home with land and building as a permanent location, and pay financial subsidies for its survival.52 In letters she sent to Rigonaux after his visit, translated and published in French in Eurafrican, Dilloo gushed about Rigonaux: “The conferences that you have envisioned for your young métis and their co-education in contact with whites are very necessary and will be met with great success.”53 Rigonaux proposed to Dilloo that the children who resided at ASK travel to Senegal and visit the children in his care, noting that the German children could learn an African language if they visited Senegal. Late that year, Rigonaux designated ASK as an affiliated branch of the IUM, which provided 49 50 51

52 53

The Eurafrican, “Report of President Rigonaux’s Visit to the Foyer of the Albert Schweitzer League,” 22–3. The Eurafrican, “Correspondence between the President of UIM and Doctor Reuthe, Minister of Finances of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, October 31, 1957,” Issue 25, 47–9. The Eurafrican, “Letter from N. Rigonaux, Président de l’Union Internationale des Métis et de l’OEUVRE Française de l’Enfance to M. le Rédacteur en Chef du Figaro, Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, Paris, 8ième, October 12, 1959,” Issue 25, 27. The Eurafrican, “Réponse de M. Rigonaux au Docteur Reuthe, January 2, 1958,” Issue 25, 49. The Eurafrican, “Extraits de Lettres De Mme Dilloo au Président Rigonaux, 15 et 17 Octobre, 1957,” Issue 25, 45–6.

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the legitimization that he was the leader of a global movement for multiracial people. In return, Dilloo received external recognition that her acts were moral, loving, and in the best interest of métis children and that she cultivated racial harmony in the world – and was thus deserving of government recognition and money. Rigonaux gave talks in Paris in public venues, where he struggled to convince the French public to be empathetic toward the plight of métis. One such venue, the Faubourg Club, invited artistic, political, and intellectual figures from France and beyond to give speeches on a diverse array of topics, followed by debates with the audience.54 Rigonaux decried racism against métis people by black Africans and talked about how African nationalism often manifested as “black racism.”55 One audience member claimed that black Africans disdained métis but that this prejudice was the result of “métis thinking that he is European and conduct[ing] himself as such toward blacks”; he added that the métis should “not forget that he is African before anything else and, because of this should support blacks.” For this French audience member, “métis” or “multiracial” were not valid identities: people were black or white, and métis were black. Rigonaux responded that the métis was black and white, African and French, and they served as “the link between the two races, without sacrificing themselves in adopting equivocal positions.”56 He denied that métis could be racist, insisting that “in their very essence” they cannot be anything other than antiracist.57 In a speech Rigonaux gave via a Parisian radio station, he elaborated on how racism was breeding animosity, which could be assuaged with the construction of a building for the IUM in Africa; this would become a space in which blacks and whites could meet, talk, and better understand each other. Rigonaux was frustrated by the refusal of the French government to extend funding for the care and welfare of métis children. But with a renewed conviction in this cause and his capacity to cultivate a global community and unity of multiracial people after his trip to Germany, he returned to Dakar in the fall of 1957 with renewed energy regarding his foyer for boys. Multiracial Internationalism in Dakar: Morally Abandoned Boys Become Adult Men Citizens Rigonaux successfully grouped together a diverse cast of Africans in Senegal, namely politicians, Muslim clerics, and métis from St. Louis, along with 54 55 56 57

For more about the Faubourg Club, see Claire Lemercier, “Le Club du faubourg, Tribune libre de Paris, 1918–1939,” master’s thesis, Institut d’Études Politique de Paris (1995). The Eurafrican, “Conference of Mr. Rigonaux on 26 October 1957 at the Villiers Cinema for the Faubourg Club,” Issue 25, 33. The Eurafrican, “Pre-Dinner Reception at the Faubourg Club, October 17, 1957,” Issue 25, 30. The Eurafrican, “Fighting Mixed Marriages to Preserve the Great Black Race,” Issue 24, 38.

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French colonial government offices and private citizens, to support and fund the construction of a new building for his foyer on the outskirts of Dakar. It was situated on the route de Oakam. This development allowed him to take in an increased number of boys. It also allowed him to actualize his vision of how French and African societies investing in the care and education of multiracial children would foster the development of African societies; facilitate the French promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity to become a reality; and seal Africa–France solidarity during changing historical circumstances. Rigonaux fashioned himself as a surrogate father, humanitarian, and peacemaker. He achieved many of the goals outlined at the first International Congress: defend the social and moral interests of métis; act in favor of the care of abandoned children, without distinction of origin; and enable métis to provide bridges of collaboration between Africans and Europeans. Rigonaux forged a new network of African and French supporters through softening the previous message that the IUM would advocate only for métis. One key change was admission to the foyer, which was open not only to métis boys but to an expanded category of “morally abandoned boys” in Senegal – of any origins. This was no doubt in acknowledgment of sweeping demands by black Africans for equality and social well-being, access to education, higher wages, and allocations for all Africans.58 By 1958, Rigonaux had removed a line in the foyer’s letterhead that stated the home had been founded by the Union of Eurafricans.59 This was likely because the French government in Senegal and the metropole disapproved of the existence of the IUM and what they interpreted as political and inexpedient claims.60 Initial support for the construction of the foyer came from French government sources, as a result of the relationships Rigonaux had already cultivated with French colonial employees. The money for the construction of a brandnew building came from the Funds for Economic and Social Development (FIDES), an organization and funding mechanism housed in metropolitan France. FIDES had been created in 1946 in the wake of increased post– World War II demands by Africans for economic and social resources and

58

59

60

For more on mobilization in French Africa for social and political rights and accusations of French racism in the period of the French Union, see Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 279–324; Marker, “Obscuring Race.” ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, founded by the Union of Eurafricans, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, December 19, 1957, document 1/IGAA PM/JC. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Letter from the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA to Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, January 2, 1958; Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, attached to an equipment investment project for the foyer for 1958 and budget revisions for the same year, January 25, 1958.

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the initiative of African legislators who sat on the postwar Constituent Assembly to pass the measure.61 FIDES funds paid a total of 30 million francs for the foyer project, an amount that was sufficient for the construction of a building with modern plumbing and electricity.62 In February 1958, Rigonaux moved into the new foyer along with his wife and their biological children. Running the foyer became his life’s work.63 Every issue of L’Eurafricain during 1958 and 1959 included news and photographs about the boys, representing them as industrious boys who would grow into productive men for the future of African and French political, economic, and cultural partnerships. The foyer took in “materially or morally abandoned” children – code for métis and black – from six to fourteen years old to provide an education and professional training commensurate with their abilities. All children at the foyer attended school, with either professional training and apprenticeship or further secondary education to be continued after consultation by Rigonaux and educators.64 Rigonaux referred to the home as “a model of family life” in which the children divided their time between their studies, manual work, and games.65 This model of family life, as documented in articles, included their education and learning, fun times in celebrating Christmas, and their diligence in maintaining a clean physical space within the foyer. They were depicted as happy, respectful, and eager to be educated. Some issues also featured letters that the boys wrote themselves, talking about their daily lives and thanking the benefactors who had donated money. In a 1958 publication, a letter signed by the “children of the French Charity for Children” thanked private donors who had contributed “such numerous toys” for their Christmas celebration. Jean Dunand, who wrote a thank you letter to donors on behalf of all the boys, promised to “work hard in school, which would bring satisfaction

61

62

63

64 65

This shift came about because of the initiative of the African deputies elected to the post–World War II Constituent Assembly to form the Fourth Republic; their initiative held that reform must include true capacity for the economic development of African regions. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 68; Decker and McMahon, The Idea of Development in Africa, 137–41. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, arrived September 29, 1958, written September 21, 1958; The Eurafrican, Issue 26, 9–10. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, attached to an equipment investment project for the foyer for 1958 and budgetary revisions for 1958, letter dated January 25, 1958, arrived I.G.AA 328; Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, founded by the Union of Eurafricans, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, February 13, 1958, arrived IAA 430. The Eurafrican, “Excerpt of the Rules of Procedure of the Charity for French Children,” Issue 27, 57. The Eurafrican, “Life at the Foyer as Described by Three Students,” Issue 27, 58–61.

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to those who promote the French Charity, as well as everyone who work for its success.”66 The continued solvency of the French Charity for Children and the foyer became uncertain when the Fourth Republic and the French Union dissolved in 1958. Rigonaux had to shift toward cultivating alliances with black African political activists, intellectuals, and other figures of social and political influence in order for the foyer to survive. The catalysts were several and global. Colonialism in Retreat: New African Alliances in the French Community Over the course of the 1950s, political activists in French Africa continued to chafe against the racial discrimination, lack of autonomy, and unequal rights and access to economic resources in the supposedly retooled French Union. They formed new political parties and demanding more equal power-sharing.67 In Algeria, one of France’s longest-held overseas territories – with about one million French settlers – the violent guerrilla struggle for independence between a coalition of militants known as the National Front for Liberation (FLN) and the French army that began in 1954 caused a crisis within the French Republic. Discontentment about the ongoing war resulted in the instability of the French government, which reached its peak in May 1958 when French soldiers in Algeria attempted a coup d’état. This instability ushered in the return of Charles de Gaulle as the head of state and the drafting of a new constitution for France and its overseas territories. The new constitution walked the line between supporting French settler colonists in Algeria who wanted the colony to remain part of France, while conceding that France needed to enact further colonial social, political, and economic reforms for Algerian “Muslims” to avert the loss of this crucial region of Overseas France.68 Realizing the political expediency of having its remaining colonies elect to stay aligned with France, De Gaulle extended the vote on the new constitution to the entire French Empire. On September 28, 1958, a referendum was held throughout the French Union based on ostensibly “universal” suffrage in FWA and FEA. A small number of literate and elite people in cities participated, and newly formed political parties directed voters. Voters were to choose between two 66

67 68

The Eurafrican, “Letter from the Children of the Charity for French Children, 2 rue des Dardanelles in Dakar, to Mr. Richard Béranger and Mrs. Josette Volny, as seen by the Monitor Moise, aka For the Children of the Jen Dunand Foyer, 17 February 1958,” Bulletin 25, 58. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 25. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 73–81.

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options: (i) immediate independence; or (ii) joining the French Community, a geopolitical configuration that would supposedly give African states “local autonomy” and self-determination while maintaining links with France. All of the territories voted to become a state in the French Community, except French Guinea, which voted for the option of independence and sovereignty.69 The Fourth Republic and the French Union were dissolved. Under the new constitution that established the Fifth Republic, the French Union was replaced by the French Community. The French Community comprised the French Republic and African autonomous states, also referred to as “republics,” which replaced their prior designation as “territories.” In the new configuration, people in Africa were citizens of the French Community, but what rights this citizenship entailed was ambiguous, evolving, and contested among French and African political constituencies. African states were to regulate their own borders and generate their own constitutions, and they could create bilateral partnerships. Each state would manage its own justice system, higher education, external and public transport, and telecommunications and was to be self-governing through elected councils and legislatures. This emerging and fluid African–French alliance, however, was fraught with debates and contestations among African political activists and party leaders and between French and African negotiators about the degree of autonomy African regions should have, their access to economic resources, power-sharing with France, and the timing and meaning of independence.70 Some African political party leaders wanted complete autonomy from France and to be members of the French Community as independent nation-states. The French were reluctant to completely give up the hierarchies of political, cultural, and economic control over African futures. Francophone African leaders sought to cultivate relationships that maintained social, political, and economic ties to France, but they also sought autonomy and self-rule and the freedom to create alliances with other African states to shore up otherwise weak economies and fledgling social and political infrastructures. After the May 1959 vote, political leaders across FWA and FEA debated and disagreed over the extent to which they wanted to maintain ties with France and the exact makeup of political and economic 69

70

As argued by Elizabeth Schmidt, various constituencies in Guinea disagreed on the nature and form of relationships with France. “Grassroots militants,” whom she defines as youth, students, women, and trade unionists, decried how the African Democratic Assembly (RDA) and elders accepted the French conditions in the new constitution, which would render “overseas territories as perpetual minors in the French Empire.” These militants pushed for the no vote. The RDA was a political party that became the largest in French Africa in the 1940s and 1950s through bringing together several political parties across FWA and FEA. Elizabeth Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1948 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 143–4 and Chapter 5, “The Renaissance of the Left.” Wilder, Freedom Time, 218–22.

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configurations.71 In April 1959, Mali and Senegal agreed to form the Mali Federation, a single federal government with equal power-sharing that would be politically independent from France and enact sovereignty over the countries’ newly drawn borders, while remaining a part of the French Community. The government of Senegal moved the capital from St. Louis to Dakar without telling the French government until the decision was already made; it would not be seeking French permission to make decisions.72 Rigonaux worried about the impact of increased African self-governance on the funding and survival of the foyer. In August 1958, in response to his request for more money to expand the premises, the departing high commissioner wrote to Rigonaux that the charity would receive nearly two million francs for its normal functioning, but no additional funding after that year.73 French government officials insisted that he find financing from African sources, directing him to seek funding from the Mali Federation.74 This news was undoubtedly a blow to Rigonaux. Nevertheless, Rigonaux gained the support of a diverse group of African benefactors by creating new coalitions with African political leaders and Muslim clerics. The public representation of the charity and home shifted from attending to the particular needs of multiracial children to the universal needs of children of varied races who were bereft of supportive family networks. According to the High Commission records, “the government of Senegal” gave the charity 24,000 francs per year per child in 1959.75 In an issue of L’Eurafricain the same year, Rigonaux noted that he had obtained an unnamed amount of money for funding the foyer from what he referred to as “the 71 72 73

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For an extensive analysis of these debates and possibilities, see Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 326–71. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 327. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, August 29, 1958, arrived at IGAA/ 1130; Letter from the inspector general of administrative affairs to the cabinet of the high commissioner, September 21, 1958, document 1087; Grant document, financial audit from FWA, August 15, 1958, document 6977/IGAA; Grant document, financial audit from FWA, December 23, 1958, document 10529/IGAA. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Rules of procedure for the Charity for French Children, October 21, 1958, document 1257; Letter from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the Charity for French Children, to the high commissioner of the Republic in FWA, February 13, 1959; Letter from the general high commissioner to the inspector general of administrative affairs, January 23, 1959, document 15/S5/3; Grant status for the subvention of the care of young orphans rescued by the Charity for French Children during 1958 by decision 733/IGAA for a total of 1,900,000 francs, signed by Rigonaux, December 10, 1958; Grant status for the subvention of the care of young orphans rescued by the Charity for French Children during 1958 by decision 733/IGAA for a total of 1,900,000 francs, signed by Rigonaux and member of the administrative council, January 2, 1959; Letter from the general high commissioner to the inspector general of administrative affairs, January 23, 1959, document 15/S5/3. ANS, 18 G 208 (160): Letter from the general high commissioner to the inspector general of administrative affairs, January 23, 1959, document 15/S5/3.

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government of Mali.” He appointed El-Hadj Seydou Nourou Tall, a leader of the influential Tijaniya Muslim order – which had adherents in Senegal, Mali, and elsewhere in West Africa – as the honorary president of the charity. He also appointed other people with Muslim names to the board.76 Tall gave an interview to the newspaper Paris-Dakar praising the charity and the difference it made in the lives of children and called on African legislators and officials to vote in the budget lines necessary to continue the survival of the home.77 He emphasized that the charity took in abandoned or orphaned children or those entrusted to it “without racial, color, or religious discrimination.” It took in boys of the neediest cases, who represented only a small fraction of the children in need. He stressed that the charity’s work curtailed a rise in juvenile delinquency, which was at risk of increasing in cities such as Dakar where the population was growing quickly. Tall detailed specific expenses for the thirty children at the foyer, which Rigonaux managed as an unpaid volunteer. They would have to throw out the children in the home’s care if government funding did not come through. Tall invited readers who wanted to donate to telephone Rigonaux or the treasurer; the article included their phone numbers. These alliances allowed Rigonaux to claim that his charity work was antiracist to the core and that it produced young men who represented a form of citizenship not grounded in legal status or the nation-state but in modeling the fruits of multiracial brotherhood.78 He acknowledged that the majority of boys the foyer housed were métis, but stressed in media campaigns to newspapers in Dakar and Paris and in the pages of Eurafrican that the foyer was open to orphaned and abandoned children of all origins; there were no restrictions related to “race, color, or religion,” and the children who lived there included “pure Europeans” and “pure Africans.”79 Yet, even as he claimed his work was antiracist, Rigonaux’s views of race, culture, and power were filled with complexities and contradictions. Rigonaux professed anxiety that métis in a Senegal controlled by African political leaders would face discrimination. He cited both personal incidents 76

77 78 79

The Eurafrican, “Here Is the Office of the Charity for French Children. Excerpt from the ParisDakar Journal, 30 August 1959,” Issue 27, 56. For more on the Tijaniya order in Senegalese and African history, see Mamadou Karfa Sane, “Islam et Société au Sénégal, approche sociologique d’une confrérie: le cas de la confrérie Tidjane.” PhD diss., Universite de Nantes, 2004; David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud, eds. La Tijâniyya: une confrérie musulmane à la conquête de l’Afrique (Paris, Karthala, 2005). The Eurafrican, “El-Hadj Seydou Nourou Tall, Honorable President of the Charity for French Children, Tells Us. . .” Issue 27, 54–6. The Eurafrican, “El-Hadj Seydou Nourou Tall,” 54–6. The Eurafrican, “Letter from N. Rigonaux, President of the International Union of Métis and of the Charity for French Children to the Editor in Chief of Figaro, 8th Roundabout of the Champs-Élysées,” Issue 26, 47–8; The Eurafrican, “El-Hadj Seydou Nourou Tall,” 54–6.

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and incidents elsewhere in FWA of what he called “black racism.”80 To Rigonaux and other writers in Eurafrican, the defunding and closure of orphanages for métis children also constituted black racism. In 1959, he expressed outrage at the news that the newly independent government in Dahomey was set to abolish orphanages designated exclusively for métis; lawmakers were to transfer wards to the homes of their maternal families and provide financial assistance for rearing children in need, whether they were métis or black. Rigonaux was scornful that a state as young and poor as Dahomey with “so many urgent problems to attend to” had enough money to finance the home-based care of métis children. He further decried how this new legislation represented the “racism of certain Africans” and a “black colonialism” that he feared even more than white colonialism, even as Africans demanded “democracy and liberty for themselves.”81 In a letter published in Eurafrican entitled “A Call to Eurafricans of Cameroun,” Jean Valin, the vice president of the IUM – and born in Cameroon – echoed Rigonaux’s sentiments about black racism. He called for a world that could “shelter métis civilization” in the light of “ferocious local antagonism between brothers and neighbors, color prejudice and social class” in Cameroon.82 Rigonaux and other officers of the IUM were blind to how black African legislators and politicians viewed the IUM’s desire to maintain privileges for métis – privileges other Africans were not privy to – as a fundamentally racist stance. As new governance structures, funding streams, and regional political– economic alliances emerged in Senegal and across French Africa, and with the erosion of some French colonial institutions, policies, and personnel, Rigonaux and the IUM looked beyond the French Community to forge partnerships in support of the rights of multiracial people. He continued to envision that métis would form global alliances with other multiracial people and individuals and organizations professing to fight against racism. Second International Congress of Métis in Germany: Multiracial Internationalism, 1959 Early 1960 saw the final publication of L’Eurafricain. Rigonaux summarized his changing vision of the IUM from having been an organization that 80

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He recounted “an unpleasant surprise” that he endured when he returned to the airport in Dakar in 1959, after a third trip to unspecified countries in Europe. Black African policemen regarded him as a foreigner because of the color of his skin. Rigonaux elaborated that the police tried to force him to pay some type of fee to enter the country, a matter he was able to dissipate after much palavering in which he had to “make it clear that as a métis, I had the right to live in Dakar among blacks in the same manner as in Paris among whites,” “Au seuil de 1959,” L’Eurafricain, Issue 26, 2. The Eurafrican, “Cotonou and the Containment of Interbreeding,” Issue 26, 9–10. The Eurafrican, “Call to the Eurafricans of Cameroon,” Issue 26, 16–17.

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Figure 7 Photo from France visit, summer 1959.83 Source: Nicole Sarr, daughter of Nicolas and Pauline Rigonaux, personal collection.

advocated for the French and African government care of métis children to one that served as an international champion of racial equality and human rights. Rigonaux and Dilloo were able to realize their collective dream in the summer of 1959, when their respective flocks of multiracial children met each other. Additionally, Rigonaux and Dilloo convened a second International Congress of Métis, which took place in September in NeuAsel, Germany. Rigonaux conveyed optimism about the possibilities of the unified stance and actions of IUM members in francophone Africa, France, and other regions of the world. In August and September of 1959, Rigonaux, his wife, their five biological children, some of the boys residing in the foyer, and the principal teacher at the foyer, M. Diaketé, spent two weeks outside of Paris and one month at the Dilloos’ home for Afro-German children in Neu-Asel (see Figure 7). Rigonaux noted their travel to Europe was made possible by the invitation and financing of the head of the French metropolitan Department of Youth and Sports. During the children’s two weeks in France, they visited the most significant sites of historical tourism in Paris, experiencing an immersion in iconic French cultural sites, reflecting Rigonaux’s aspirations that the children would obtain 83

The Eurafrican, “The Students of the Charity for French Children at the Château de Vaugrigneuse,” 67–71.

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Figure 7 (cont.)

French cultural competence.84 The children stayed on the premises of a summer camp (colonie de vacances) for French children at the Chateau of Vaugrigneuse, forty kilometers from Paris, yet they did not interact with any French children. They visited major sites, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Invalides – where Napoleon was buried; attended a circus; ate lunch and dinner in restaurants; viewed the start and finish of a cycling race; and enjoyed a boat ride along the Seine. The children’s next stop in their European adventure was Germany. During the boys’ monthlong stay in Germany, they resided on the grounds of ASK and interacted with the Afro-German boys and girls in Dilloo’s care. 84

The Eurafrican, “The Students of the Charity for French Children at the Château de Vaugrigneuse,” Issue 27, 67–71.

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Figure 7 (cont.)

This episode fulfilled Rigonaux’s vision of his children being steeped in European culture and Dilloo’s vision of her Afro-German children coming into contact with people from Africa. The visit proved to be a venture that German Christian groups were willing to fund; donors contributed to the expenses for transportation, housing, and food for the children during their stay in Neu-Asel. Rigonaux reprinted and translated into French two articles from German newspapers whose reporters had interviewed him and the Dilloos and had observed the children.85 The newspapers provided a forum for Rigonaux to decry African and French racism against multiracial people to a German audience, publicize the new foyer in Dakar, and highlight the 85

The Eurafrican, “A Visit from North Africa to the Foyer of Dr. A. Schweitzer,” Issue 27, 63–4.

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mission to raise and educate children in African and European cultural mores so they could become productive contributors to society. In reprinting photographs of the German and Senegalese children in the bucolic setting of practicing theater for a performance, Rigonaux portrayed the children as enjoying normative and lighthearted activities – moments of childhood happiness made possible by an ecosystem of care cultivated by nurturing people and financial resources. The German accounts portrayed the visit positively: the comportment of the boys and a glowing account of the living conditions, education, and care that they perceived of the foyer. One article noted that the children received an “excellent education” and that Mr. and Mrs. Rigonaux raised the children with the same regard as their biological children.86 Another journalist commented on how the Senegalese children were well-behaved and educated, frolicking in the creeks and forests surrounding the grounds but also finding that the late summer temperatures in Germany were too cold.87 Another wrote of campfire singalongs in which “the Senegalese” sang their “melodious African songs” with the accompaniment of drums as well as French songs such as “On the Bridge of Avignon.” These songs reflected Rigonaux’s vision of the children as both French and Senegalese, to be equally versed and competent in both cultures. The German press portrayed the métis children as exotic creatures, elaborating on how the sound of the “jungle drums” reverberated over the lake where the camp was located and publishing a photograph of Nicole Rigonaux dancing alongside a campfire as the adults and children watched.88 Dilloo’s husband declared that the visit was “sowing the seeds” for what he hoped would become “an abundant harvest of brotherhood,” a sentiment shared by Rigonaux.89 In Rigonaux’s mind, L’Eurafricain, the IUM, and the French Charity for Children (which managed the foyer) were seamlessly united entities, with the success of one dependent on the others. He implored his readership: We must unite in our efforts, propagate the publication in order to make the IUM and French Charity for Children better known, take interest in these ourselves in order to interest public powers, who will have no reason to help us if they consist of the initiative of a small group of people and not the collective effort of a vast community.

He chided the various chapters and members of the IUM that he alone could not carry the organization. He signaled a shift away from his prior expression 86 87 88 89

The Eurafrican, “A Visit from North Africa to the Foyer of Dr. A. Schweitzer,” 63–4. Unidentified writer, “Nicole from Dakar Is Dancing to the Sound of a Jungle Drum Over the Ederssee Lake,” Kasseler Stadtausgabe, 193, August 22, 1959. Unidentified writer, “Nicole from Dakar Is Dancing to the Sound of a Jungle Drum Over the Ederssee Lake.” The Eurafrican, “A Visit from North Africa to the Foyer of Dr. A. Schweitzer,” 63–4.

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of hope and faith in the French to an acknowledgment that it was African political figures who held the future of métis. For Rigonaux, the second International Congress of Métis, with an emphasis on the notion of “the métis problem taking on global importance,” needed to establish a runway for the IUM to play a role as critical infrastructure in changing African futures. Rigonaux and Dilloo managed to organize and convene the congress despite the lack of French financial backing. Attendees of the first congress had initially planned for the second congress to be held in Abidjan but ultimately decided it would be better for it to be held in Paris in order to “tighten the bonds that are too slack with our European brothers.”90 Government entities in metropolitan France declined to give any funding, much to Rigonaux’s dismay. The second congress, funded with help from German donors and attended by people from Africa and beyond – but without any French metropolitan or colonial personnel, missionaries, or private citizens present – nonetheless represented the apogee of global mobilization of and for multiracial people. The congress emphasized the care of and suffering of dispossessed multiracial children, a humanitarian call that cohered associations and individuals working with disadvantaged children and promoting racial tolerance in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Rigonaux’s presence in Germany and messaging again provided a foundation for the Dilloos to claim legitimacy in the work they did as linked to a global antiracist and humanitarian effort, in partnership with people who were the victims of racism. In correspondence with German missionaries regarding donations to cover the expenses of the event, Dilloo cited Rigonaux: “The mutual contact should give us the opportunity to meet each other, to get to know our difficulties differently than just on paper, keep an eye on finding the best solutions together, and to tie the bonds tighter that unite the big mixed-race family over the whole earth.”91 The congress was held on the grounds of the ASK home from September 8 to 10, 1959. Rigonaux emphasized that the thirty people in attendance – and

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L’Eurafricain, “Discours d’ouverture du president,” Issue 27, 15. Dilloo sent a postcard to prominent missionaries detailing that the Kongress des Weltbundes der Mischlinge (Congress of World Federation of Mischlinge) would be held on the grounds of ASK, intimating that this event confirmed her legitimacy to continue as director of the home and for the home to remain open with funding from church and government sources. She detailed that Rigonaux from Dakar and president of the IUM would arrive, as well as seven IUM members who would fly in from Brazzaville and Cameroon. Rigonaux would direct the congress. Additionally, twenty French-speaking children under the direction of Mme Rigonaux and their teacher Joseph Diakité would arrive from Paris (where they had been invited for some days on August 12) to spend the holidays in Germany until mid-September. She thanked German benefactors who were helping to finance their travel and stated that money and prayers were welcome. EDWE Archives, Christine Winzler of the Diakonie/Innere Mission Central Office to Irene Dilloo, September 3, 1959, HGST 3949.

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Figure 8 Photo of Nicolas Rigonaux (third from right), Irene Dilloo (fourth from left), and attendees of the Second International Congress of Métis. Source: Nicole Sarr, daughter of Nicolas and Pauline Rigonaux, personal collection.

the numerous supporters who were not physically present – represented a broad section of the globe (see Figure 8). Rigonaux thanked the German “sympathizers” who appeared over the course of the two days in support of them, such as the minister of Education and Sports, heads of several Protestant Churches in the region, and a delegation of ten women who represented a regional association of Protestant women. Additionally, he mentioned the attendance of “several people from the United States representing American métis,” without further details. While they did not send delegates, Rigonaux stated that associations of multiracial people from the Antilles, Portugal, Chad, the Union of South Africa, El Salvador, and Vietnam had written letters in support of the congress and pledging membership in the IUM.92 Rigonaux put forth a vision of multiracial people as global peacemakers. He claimed an apolitical, middle road that avoided conflict with ongoing African and French negotiations of future political and economic structures. Delegates to the congress from Africa endeavored to demonstrate how métis could be actors for peace not only in Africa but elsewhere in the world. Emphasizing the 92

The Eurafrican, “Meeting of 9 September 1959,” Issue 27, 6.

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universal nature of challenges faced by multiracial people and that they were the same as those facing oppressed people everywhere, Rigonaux insisted that the gathering in Neu-Asel had Again made it apparent how the cause of métis extends across the world where the number has reached nearly 20 million people: if they work with each other, they can accomplish great things in the domain of harmony between races, all the while protecting their common interests and in liquidating the disadvantaged situation in which they were once – not in brewing elements of discord – but in being the branches of the same tree trunk that constitute the broader human race.93

The multiraciality of métis, their genealogy of having parents of two different “races,” equipped them with the capacity to save the human race. Unlike the first congress, in which attendees had emphasized the French as primary benefactors of métis, the second congress emphasized that the IUM needed a global vision as well as the support and cooperation of Africans: The political events that have changed the world, have created, especially in Africa, a new situation. We have to adapt to new regimes, make black Africans understand that we are their friends, their half-brothers, and that we could be of precious help to them in maintaining links to the Europeans, not in a colonial sense, but in honest and local shared work, necessary for the development and the prosperity of these young states.94

Rigonaux emphasized that the experience of children abandoned by their European fathers was a fundamental social evil that could threaten emerging African states; these states needed to alleviate the social consequences of child abandonment to thrive. He appealed to antiracist activism that was spreading across the globe, equating the “indifferent society who looks down upon a poor human being because he is mixed blood” in Africa as replicating the same spirit of racism that led to violence against African American children who desegregated the schools in Little Rock. He entreated his métis brethren: “We have suffered enough from racism to know that we constitute a living antithesis, we métis who are born in every country of the world, grafted from different colors.” Others who gave speeches at the congress mirrored Rigonaux’s vision of a singular identity that was métis or Eurafrican, across French Africa. In the new political context of 1959 – in which African political leaders assumed even greater autonomy in the management of social, political, and economic governance – delegates to the second congress pressured those leaders regarding the care of métis children as critical for African futures. Some African states had achieved territorial sovereignty, and there was increased momentum for political sovereignty in francophone Africa too. 93 94

The Eurafrican, “The Second Congress of the International Union of Métis,” Issue 27, 4. The Eurafrican, “Annex no. 1, President’s Opening Speech,” Issue 27, 18.

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Attendees at the congress maintained that métis would retain an identity as “métis” no matter what changes were made to citizenship laws, state and political configurations, or emerging borders. Unlike some other métis who sought to assimilate to European legal status and denigrated their African roots, attendees of this congress embraced their maternal parentage and belonging to African societies. Edouard Hanne, the delegate for Soudan, claimed to speak for the métis of the Republic of Soudan, not the French Community or France.95 He emphasized that he was a métis who refused to assimilate to the European elite as others had done, and he was among those who were “proud to be the son of the black woman and of the white man and has a firm will to not betray their race.” Hanne noted that métis around the world needed to meet and know each other because they had the same worries and hopes. “Colonial forces,” he argued, had “divided [métis] in order to weaken them.” The congress was thus an opportunity “to build together the large métis family.”96 Paul Betty, president of the Central African Republic branch of the IUM and the overall IUM vice president, extended Hanne’s exhortation that métis were firmly imbedded in the autonomous African states of the present and future and that African futures depended on recognizing multiracial identities. It was time for the métis “on whose future Africa depends in part ... to work together with their other African brothers and contribute to the construction of the new independent Africa.” He added that “The independence of Africa should also be the independence of the métis and we will help in the development of Africa. The métis, of course, is not a pure white nor a pure black, but the two bloods beat in the same heart.”97 However, it was the speech by Jean Valin, representing the Republic of Cameroon, that most closely captured Rigonaux’s view of the transnational identity of métis – which engendered a stateless form of citizenship rooted in multiracial kinship and a commitment to universal human rights. The historical context in which Valin made his speech is significant. Cameroon had become an independent nation-state mere months before the second International Congress of Métis and thus was not a member of the French Community. Nationalist political activists had brokered the transformation of British Cameroon and French Cameroon from their post–World War II status as United Nations territorial trustees into the multilingual nation-state of a single

95 96 97

The Eurafrican, “Exposé of Mr. Édouard Hanne, Delegate from the Republic of Sudan,” Issue 27, 33. The Eurafrican, “Exposé of Mr. Édouard Hanne,” 34. The Eurafrican, “The Eurafricans at the Service of the European Community, Report from Mr. Paul Betty, President of the Union of Eurafricans of Central Africa, Vice President of IUM,” Issue 27, 20–1.

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Cameroon. Historian Meredith Terretta argues that African nationalists in Cameroon invoked the language and declarations of human rights to legitimize their political claims for decolonization; hence, a complete global history of human rights must include anticolonial activism.98 Valin’s speech was inflected with human rights discourses, which were undoubtedly fomented during the decades of anticolonial mobilization in Cameroon. When Valin spoke at the congress, Cameroon was an independent nation-state, yet he argued that a person could be both a citizen of the nation-state of Cameroon and the nonstate entity of the global family of métis. Such a form of citizenship would engender a greater realization of human dignity in Africa. In Valin’s vision, the métis identity was an example of universal humanism that superseded manmade concepts of race and national citizenship and could unite people across social, political, and geographic divides. Valin carefully described the loyalty toward Cameroon among métis who lived there, even the few who were citizens of France or other European countries because they had been recognized by their fathers or by virtue of the decree allowing métis to acquire French nationality – which had been adapted from the 1936 decree for West Africa and extended to French Cameroon by Charles de Gaulle in 1944.99 Valin asserted that being métis was fundamentally a transnational identity: “We have all lived the same problem, and we will remain in solidarity to combat the social injustice which still weighs upon our brothers.” Being métis brought to the surface a sense of solidarity and belonging beyond nationality and binary racial identity: We will not build this solidarity based on any so-called, ordinary [idea of] race, but based on our intense thirst for justice and peace. This is why our deepest ideal will be to remain, whatever the circumstances, to be a link between all men of good will... that the métis of whichever country will never completely be a citizen of his father’s homeland, nor a citizen of his mother’s country, but a man, a citizen of the world before the meaning of citizen even came into being.100

In keeping with this sentiment, attendees voted in new officers for the IUM who hailed from the Republic of Congo, France, Brazil, and the Antilles, as 98

99 100

Since its inception in 1948, the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon party leaders and ordinary people in urban and rural areas laid claim to the right to self-determination through a multifaceted grassroots mobilization in the multiethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse region. Additionally, as in Algeria, Tunisia, and Indochina, nationalist mobilization included violence in the form of underground guerrilla resistance. The French banned the UPC in 1955 and thus many leaders went into exile or were imprisoned, though it remained popular in British and French regions. Meredith Terretta, Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), 16–22. The Eurafrican, “Exposé of Mr. Jean Vallin, Delegate from the Republic of Sudan, Secretary General of IUM,” Issue 27, 25–7. The Eurafrican, “Exposé of Mr. Jean Vallin,” Issue 27.

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well as longtime ally William Bazé from Indochina. Rigonaux was reelected as president.101 The next congress was to be held in Bangui. Mobilizing multiracial or métis internationalism as a human rights movement became the focus in the immediate aftermath of the congress. Attendees had voted affirmatively on a petition that stated métis were being subjected to violation of specific articles in the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, voted on by the General Assembly of the UN in 1948; the petition requested that their governments and the secretary general of the UN find a remedy.102 Racism, it argued, fueled such violations. The specific articles were numbers 15, 23, and 25, which declared respectively that each person had the right to a nationality, equal pay for equal work, and an adequate standard of living and security from unemployment. Delegates also noted that in African states, France, and Germany, only two identities were allowed, namely identification with either the white or the black race; those of “mixed blood” were regarded as inferior. The petition ended with the request that the UN “alert public powers under your authority to remedy this sad state of affairs according to the human resources at their disposal.” Rigonaux sent the petition to the heads of states and the UN and published the replies that he received from Chad, France, and Germany. The minister of Social Affairs of Chad, Ahmed Kotoko, writing on behalf of the prime minister, expressed sympathy for the “profoundly humane” nature of the work Rigonaux was doing and acknowledged racism as a social evil, but stated that “it [racism] is unknown in Chad where the government consisting of many diverse elements had full consciousness of the fundamental right of man.”103 On behalf of Charles de Gaulle, the secretary of his cabinet acknowledged that de Gaulle had received the letter, but insisted that equality and liberty were rights guaranteed to French people in the constitution and that no racism occurred against métis in any department, territories of Overseas France, or the states of the French Community.104 The January 1960 issue of Eurafrican detailed what had occurred at the congress and the futile efforts of the IUM to persuade African and European states and the UN to acknowledge the IUM’s conception of multiracial internationalism as a human rights issue. That was the last issue that was published, 101 102 103

104

The Eurafrican, “Séance du 9 septembre 1959,” Issue 27, 11. The Eurafrican, “Annex 6, Resolution Voted on by the Congress, Addressed to M. M.,” Issue 27, 37–8. The Eurafrican, “Letter from République du Tchad, Le Premier Ministre, Président du Gouvernement de la République du Tchad, Ministère des Affaires Sociales, Fort Lamy to M. le Président de l’Union des Eurafricains des Métis, Dakar,” Issue 27, letter 1453/AFF SOC. The Eurafrican, “Letter from General de Gaulle, Secretary to the President of the International Union of Métis, rue Président Doumer, Postal Box 473, Dakar, FWA,” Issue 27, letter 42127 CAB/SP; “Letter from Federal Minister of Family and Youth, Republic of Germany to M. le Président de l’Union Internationale des Métis, Dakar,” letter J2–1095/59.

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and the organization itself seemed to have been reduced in activity to the singular voice and actions of Rigonaux. In June 1960, Senegal became an independent country, and Senghor became its president. Yet, he and some others within the first generation of leaders of independent African nations applied the concept of France-Afrique – or Franceafrique – coined by the Ivory Coast’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. The term referred to the historical and continued bond between France and its former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.105 Although Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny often disagreed on how to arrive at political autonomy and economic prosperity in West Africa and fought each other as rivals for regional domination, they shared in common their practice of close political, military, economic, and cultural ties with France. Senghor continued to profess his identity as black, French, and African to demonstrate how Senegal could achieve autonomy and economic development in intimate consultation and alignment with France.106 However, France tried to manipulate the concept and application of France-Afrique to maintain a sphere of influence and French interests. Many African and European observers alike criticized France’s actions as neocolonial.107 Even as tensions mounted within Senegal and with its neighbors after 1960 about power-sharing, and with ongoing yet different Africa–France ties still being established, Rigonaux continued to advocate for the IUM as the vehicle for global antiracist social justice. Changing conceptions of métis (or Eurafricans) as a distinct racial, familial, legal, social, and cultural form of personhood shaped the contestations about African futures and African global futures, even as African societies became nation-states. Charity for Children in Independent Senegal: Worldmaking after 1960 From Dakar, Rigonaux continued to articulate multiracial internationalism as a framework to affirm the global universality of the human condition. For him, multiracial internationalism also countered the emerging concepts of 105

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Félix Houphouët-Boigny, “Afrique et communauté franco-africaine,” Le monde diplomatique: Journal des Cercles Diplomatiques et Des Grandes Organisations Internationales 95, November 1958, 1. Janet Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 272–300, 300–39. For analyses of France-Afrique from the 1950s to today in terms of neocolonialism, see AnneCécile Robert, ed. “France-Afrique, domination et emancipation,” special edition of Monde Diplomatique, Manière de voir 165 (June–July, 2019); Ian Taylor, “France à Fric: The CFA Zone in Africa and Neocolonialism,” Third World Quarterly 40, 6 (June 3, 2019), 1064–88; Calixte Baniafouna, Dialoguafrique – Une pierre de plus sur l’édifice Françafrique (Paris: L’Hammartan, 2021).

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postcolony, nations, and racial binaries – which he viewed as antithetical to his ideal and equitable Eurafrica. Senghor’s governance was mired in conflict and the suppression of African political activists and leaders of rival political parties who also vied for power; many in his cabinet and his closest political allies were French. The microcosm from which Rigonaux articulated a reworked relationship between Africa/Senegal and France intersected with Léopold Senghor and his political allies and foes, who engaged in similar jockeying – all of them involved in a process that Adom Getachew has described as “worldmaking.” Challenging the view of decolonization as nation-building, Getachew’s study of black Anglophone political thinkers suggests that internationalism was key to ideas about how to build “a postimperial world.”108 In addition to questions of geopolitics in Getachew’s study, questions about children were also critical to “worldmaking.” Saheed Aderinto urges historical analysis regarding a “rethinking of the oftenunacknowledged role that children played in shaping modern ideas about progress and nationhood.”109 In the 1960s, Rigonaux’s singular focus within this post-imperial worldmaking in Senegal and France was on the question of multiracial children and childhood in an international context. He initially tried to gain financial support from France for the IUM, even though similar efforts in the preceding years had failed. Writing from Dakar, Rigonaux sent a letter in November 1961 to the Ministry of Public Health and Population and the Department of Social Aid and Childhood in metropolitan France, requesting a grant for the union.110 At the time, Senegal was on paper a sovereign nation, no longer a colony, territory, or state tied to France through a formal political structure; it was now able to determine its borders, implement laws, define citizenship and nationality (to establish who belonged to the nation and the rights that came with legal status), and control and distribute economic resources to its citizenry. But Rigonaux continued to invoke the conception of métis as sharing a special, intimate connection with France, claiming that blood and parentage were supranational factors that cohered métis to France. The IUM had a new letterhead with text that detailed that it was “a foreign association founded in Brazzaville on April 28, 1957, authorized by the Ministry of the Interior” of France, and citing the specific decree. The letterhead identified the IUM’s headquarters as located in Paris and listed

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Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 2–3. Saheed Aderinto, Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 2. Letter to the minister of public health and population from Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the International Union of Métis, November 9, 1961, arrived at the Ministry of Public Health and Population, stamped November 13, 1961, Code 19780557/18, NAF.

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the bank account numbers in Paris. Rigonaux elaborated that the IUM was in a dire financial state since it survived only on the donations of its members. Rigonaux described the primary purpose of the union as encouraging mutual aid, cooperation, and harmonious relations among men and claimed that it had already actualized these goals in creating “a group home for orphans” in both Dakar and Neu-Asel. He requested that the ministry grant the IUM 100,000 francs, to be sent to its account in Paris, to expand such important efforts. Extant documents do not reveal whether the ministry gave the union any money, but it is unlikely. A letter later in the month – dated March 1962 – and sent to Rigonaux by someone at the ministry’s office noted that IUM was an organization based in Africa, with primary activity toward “Africans”; in order to assess Rigonaux’s request, the writer needed to submit a detailed report summarizing the association’s activities and specifying whether the association managed any institutions or activities in France.111 The law of July 28, 1960 that had been passed in France allowed nationals of France and their “descendants” who held French nationality during colonial rule and continued to reside in the former French Community in sub-Saharan Africa – ostensibly métis originaires or métis who had obtained French citizenship based on the 1936 and 1930 decrees – to maintain this status and thus in theory claim social rights.112 Refusing anew in the postcolonial landscape to acknowledge the paternity of French men, allow métis access to French legal status, and take on the liability of providing resources for métis children, the French government deployed the categories of “French citizen” and “citizen of an African country” to deny the legitimacy of Rigonaux’s request. These new categories replaced the colonial binaries of “indigènes” and “citoyens” – against which métis had been claiming a third category for many decades. While the colonial state had acknowledged this third category for métis in French Africa in limited numbers to claim financial resources, French schooling, and French legal status, in the aftermath of the dismantling of colonial rule the French closed off any such openings. It is unclear what happened to the IUM, but there are few archival traces of it beyond 1962. There are no signs that there was a third congress in Bangui as planned. West and Equatorial African political leaders would likely have been suspicious of members of IUM as political opponents. Yet, Rigonaux emphasized the mission of the IUM as advocating globally for multiracial children when he again traveled to Europe in 1962. Rather than insisting upon the 111

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Letter from H. Rochard to Nicolas Rigonaux, president of the International Union of Métis, arrived at the Ministry of Public Health and Population, stamped March 16, 1962, code 19780557/18, NAF. Jean-Pierre Dumas, “Effets de la décolonisation sur la nationalité française des métis,” Revue Juridique et Politique Independence et Coopération XXIV, 1 (March 1970), 45–6. Bronwen Manny, Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021), 65.

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broader vision of race, identity, and global citizenship advocated at the second International Congress of Métis, during his visit to England and Germany in August 1962 – where he met with Dilloo – Rigonaux stressed that the organization’s mission was to facilitate the care of indigent multiracial children.113 A German newspaper that chronicled his visit stated that Rigonaux was in Germany as part of his advocacy for “all the other [mixed race people/ métis] of other racial mixtures of the entire world.”114 Based on interviews with Rigonaux and Dilloo, the newspaper presented the IUM as a fully functioning global organization that encompassed a “number” of branches in locations such as Madagascar, France, Indochina, Cameroun, Belgian Congo, and Soudan, with another branch being set up in the United States. The article touted the existence of homes for multiracial children at these various locations as an indication of a country’s humanity; it also noted that the IUM possessed many foyers for métis children who received government aid. This depiction was an exaggeration, as there is no evidence that the IUM directly managed the operation of any of these homes, which were probably carryovers from colonial rule. The IUM did not receive significant financial backing from any French or African governments or private donors, which is probably why the organization finally went insolvent. However, Rigonaux’s foyer in Dakar continued to operate in politically independent Senegal in the 1960s, and he focused on managing and fundraising for the foyer as his primary work. The charity and foyer continued hold a moral sheen that attracted Senegalese and French government officials to publicly support and fund their operation. While most of the boys who resided at the foyer were métis, the home had shed this identity because of Rigonaux’s more recent advocacy emphasizing that it was a home for abandoned boys of various origins, whether métis or not. In spite of his fear that the independent government of black Africans would be hostile to his charitable work and advocacy for métis children, the government of Senegal supported the home – not only with an annual subvention but also with members of the president and prime minister’s cabinets attending the annual celebrations, which showcased the boys’ theatrical and musical performances. The French consul to Senegal

113

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The 1959 Congress and the visit of the Senegalese children to Germany had buttressed Dilloo’s crusade for Afro-German children. At the end of 1959, however, German government officials closed down the ASK home and moved the children to other state-approved homes, adoption, or their mothers. Nevertheless, Dilloo continued to use her affiliation with IUM to confer legitimacy and to collect funding for and advocate for Afro-German children among donors in Germany and the United States. “German Brown Babies,” Irene Dilloo, Ebony Magazine 15, 6 (April 1960), 20. “Métis Have a Heavy Destiny: Mr. Nicolas Rigonaux Visit to Communicate with the German Administration and the Vice-President of the International Union of Métis.” Stadt und Land Wermelskirchen 192, 74th year, Monday, August 20, 1962.

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also provided intermittent funding for the foyer and attended its end-of-year and Christmas celebrations.115 Representations of métis children and black children originating from various West African regions living in perfect harmony, as reported in the French (and French-owned) principal newspaper published in Dakar, reflected Rigonaux’s vision that investing in needy children could offer a beacon of peace for the African and French present and future. One 1962 article in Dakar-Matin, the most read and widely circulated newspaper in Senegal, advertised that the “orphans of the French Charity for Children would be performing a theatrical piece for their benefactors, friends, and invited guests.”116 The journalist described the children as “a beautiful little family. They are seventy young Dahomeans, Ivorians, Malians, and Senegalese living in perfect camaraderie.” The article touted the educational accomplishments of the “more than a dozen boys” who had left the foyer since its founding in 1952: half of them had obtained a baccalaureate degree and most of the others had finished primary school, both of which were rare accomplishments. Rigonaux appears to have adapted well to what Mamadou Diouf, MomarCoumba Diop, and Donal Cruise O’Brien describe as the political “system of clientship, brokerage, and patronage” that Senghor created as president of the Republic and head of the Senegalese Democratic Bloc.117 The performance nights, with public visits and displays of the boys, became occasions in which sparring political activists, leaders of parties, and people representing different faiths and ethnicities in Senegal expressed their common humanity through supporting the success of children of various racial origins from across West Africa during this period of détente. Another 1962 article boasted that the children had performed at the residence of President Dia, “and on that occasion, they were a great success.” Dia, a secular Muslim, held the title of President of the Council – effectively the prime minister of Dakar – in a tense power-sharing relationship with President Senghor. “The eminent marabout” and benefactor El-Hadj Seydou, the presidents of the Dakar municipal council, the chamber of commerce, and the Lions Club, as well as the minister of 115

116 117

The report on the foyer’s activities for 1965–1966 indicated that the government of Senegal paid a subvention of 288,000 francs, whereas the Consul of France had granted no monies that year but had given an unspecified sum the previous year. “Activities of the French Charity for Children during the 1965 to 1966 Academic Year,” no author, no date, private collection of papers belonging to Nicole Sarr. Article entitled “Mrs. Hettier de Boislambert Will Preside over the End-of-Year Celebration of the French Charity of Childhood 6 July 1962,” Dakar-Matin. The authors describe the political machine as a “pyramid architecture” that operated on a “vertical relationship and the submission of the center to the periphery”; in other words, there was total power of the state at the cost of “punishment” for those contradicted it. Mamadou Diouf, Momar-Coumba Diop, and Donal Cruise O’Brien, La construction de l’état au Sénégal (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2002), 51.

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Health and Social Affairs were all in attendance for the boys’ performance at the National Theater.118 The fact that the prime minister of Senegal, the wife of the highest-ranking representative of France in Senegal, and the head of the largest Muslim brotherhood were public supporters of the charity demonstrates the prestige that this endeavor held; it also indicates Rigonaux’s ability to cultivate a network of supporters in the diverse community of power brokers in postcolonial Senegal. The boys’ theatrical piece represented how they were both French and Senegalese and that quotidian life and culture in Senegal was a mixture of French and Senegalese culture. There was a humorous sketch in which they were at a restaurant in Dakar and admonished the restaurant owner that “roasted chicken is also a Senegalese dish, don’t think that we only eat rice and couscous.” In a 1966 annual report, Rigonaux emphasized that the primary goal of the foyer was to support the education of fatherless boys of various racial identities, mirroring the diversity of Senegal, so that they could achieve their full potential. The report is in the personal possession of his daughter, Nicole Sarr. The document is not addressed to anyone, making it unclear who was Rigonaux’s audience.119 Ever respectful of cultural difference, he outlined in the document that the foyer instructed the children in religious education, with catechism courses for Catholic children and instruction in Muslim education on Fridays. There was a tutor who gave supplemental lessons for those who struggled and in preparation for entrance examinations to higher levels of education. Rigonaux touted the results and success of the foyer since its founding: four orphans had been admitted to university in Dakar and thirty more to high schools; others had been placed in apprenticeships in the fields of mechanics, nursing, printing, and railroads; yet others had military careers. An unspecified number had completed some university education and went on to become teachers. In spite of financial support from the Senegalese and French governments, as well as some private donations, financial troubles followed the foyer, and the operation of the home remained tenuous. Between 1965 and 1966, the number of children it housed had diminished from seventy to fifty-four students. The charity’s annual report projected that the home would let go of ten residents at the start of the school year because it did not have enough money to sustain all its of wards.120 The annual end-of-year celebration, which brought together donors and relatives of the children, was not held that year.

118 119 120

Edou Corea, “The French Charity for Children: Big Success of the Theater Evening: The Orphans Wowed Their Invited Guests,” Dakar-Matin, July 10, 1962. Activities of the French Charity for Children, 1965–1966, personal documents of Nicole Sarr. Activities of the French Charity for Children, 1965–1966.

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Ultimately, Rigonaux and the foyer eventually encountered an obstacle that it could not surmount, and the home closed. When I interviewed her in 2014, Nicole Sarr gave her account of how the foyer was shut down and its land seized at some point in the 1960s or 1970s. The seizure was orchestrated by Jean Collin, a white man from metropolitan France and a former colonial civil servant who occupied important positions in the cabinet of Senghor. Collin occupied a critical and controversial role in postcolonial Senegalese government, such that Abdoul Balia Wane’s biography of him is entitled Collin: The African. Wane describes Collin as possessing “an impertinent anticolonial reputation” and preferring to interact with Africans.121 According to Wane, Collin was originally from Normandy and arrived in Senegal in 1947 as a colonial civil servant. In an unspecified year, he married the niece of Léopold Senghor. Collin subsequently served as a director at Radio Dakar, where he became close to powerful African political constituencies in Senegal, such as various Muslim brotherhoods, and completed tours of duty in different political administrative capacities in Cameroon. He returned to Senegal in 1957. Dia appointed Collin as the head of his cabinet, and in 1960 Collin was appointed as secretary general of President Senghor’s government. Many people in Senegal were surprised that Collin held such important positions, as he expressed that selfgovernance entailed that black Senegalese should be in positions of power. But a Senegalese government official declared “the Africanization of civil service positions (cadres) did not mean blackification (négrification),” and Collin was also accorded Senegalese nationality.122 Wane’s biography details that Collin eventually married another black Senegalese woman and had children with her. Nicole Sarr narrated a different story of Collin and his relationship with the black African mother of his children and his relationships with his multiracial children. Sarr alleges that Collin abandoned his métis children, which placed him in Rigonaux’s center of attention.123 Sarr recounted that Collin had two children with an African woman who was not his wife – children he did not legally recognize. The African woman, according to Sarr, lost her mind eventually and deposited the children like “a bag of garbage” at the foyer; her father took them in and cared for them. Rigonaux denounced fathers who had abandoned their children. It was publicly known that these were Collin’s children and their being in the foyer was a public embarrassment for him. However, Rigonaux – and hence also the foyer – may also have become entangled with an enduring French sentiment dating from the colonial era; namely, to protect French manhood and men’s public and moral standing from the “métis problem.” Specifically, men were protected regarding their 121 122 123

Abdoul Baïla Wane, Collin: l’Africain (Dakar: Les Éditions Républicaines, 1990), 23. Wane, Collin, 41. OI with Nicole Sarr, Paris, May 2014.

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dereliction in providing financial resources for their multiracial children and acknowledgment of the children’s paternity. Rigonaux’s insistent calling out of French men who did not care for their multiracial children and his mission to have the French and Senegalese governments provide financial resources proved troublesome for him amid the changing political climate in Senegal. Following an alleged coup attempt by Dia in 1962, an increasingly autocratic President Senghor had many Africans in his government and political opponents tried, convicted, and jailed on unsubstantiated charges. Senghor erased the post of prime minister altogether and ousted from his cabinet other Africans whom he viewed as not loyal to him. This entailed removing Senegalese political leaders and replacing them with people who hailed from metropolitan France, some of whom had been former colonial officials or settlers.124 Senghor increasingly relied on the French to remain in power, and the French sought to keep people in power in the Senegalese government who would maintain French economic, military, and political interests. The Senegalese public did not view these currents favorably. Collin was one of these appointees; Senghor appointed him as finance minister in 1964 after removing the Senegalese person who had occupied the post, and Collin then retained the position until 1971.125 Collin was a powerful person in his position as finance minister and a close confidant of the president. Sarr recalled that Collin succeeded in having the Senegalese government revoke the subvention that supported the foyer’s operation and for the land and building to be seized. Collin, she relayed, was angry that her father had publicly denounced him for not taking care of his children. Her father, she recounted, “nearly committed suicide over this loss. He dedicated his whole life to the children, to this work.” Ultimately, the conception of métis or multiracial internationalism – an alternative vision of racial identity, childhood, and global citizenship that upheld simultaneous claims to multiracial, African, and European identities – was an idea that had a leader, but it was a future not actualized. Conclusion In a continued articulation of multiracial internationalism, even as political currents in French Africa changed rapidly, Rigonaux and his allies advocated that the commonality of interracial parentage should cohere multiracial people to a family and feeling of belonging across the globe. To some extent, why and 124

125

Andrew F. Clark and Lucie Colvin Philips, Historical Dictionary of Senegal (London: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 90–1; Momar Coumba Diop and Mamadou Diouf, Le Sénégal sous Adbou Diouf: État et Société (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1990), 34–8. Wane, Collin.

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how the concept of multiracial internationalism failed to gain traction and be realized is explained in part by the heavy reliance on Rigonaux as the singular leader. After the apogee of the 1959 International Congress of Métis, few in attendance had amassed similar levels of Rigonaux’s social, political, and economic capital in their respective regions of – or across – Africa and elsewhere in the world. Such capital would have been necessary to attract more people and turn visions into reality. Adherents viewed multiracial internationalism as a liberatory ideology that was antiracist and anti-imperial yet affirmed the intimate interdependence between Africa, Europe, and various global regions; they believed the ideology could facilitate a more equitable world order. Yet for the ideology to gain traction, they needed to build coalitions with people in Africa of varied identities who were jockeying – within governments, political parties, unions, and organizations – to articulate and realize visions of a prosperous African future. Various constituencies in francophone West and Central Africa contested whether or how liberation could occur in the form of anticolonial nationalism, the changing and contested landscape of France-Afrique relations, or possible combinations between these extremes. Additionally, anti-imperial collective mobilization among some governments of the emerging “Global South” or “Third World” in Africa, Asia, and Arab societies was increasingly focused on navigating Cold War politics and how these countries could collaborate in what scholar-activist Samir Amin termed “a new anti-imperialist international.” These governments called for an end to the racial discrimination that lay at the core of imperialism; they vacillated between non-alignment, varied articulations of socialism, and calling out European neocolonialism.126 Multiracial internationalism did not easily cohere to these new paradigms, which demanded the dismantling of divergent identities and divisions among colonized and formerly colonized peoples. The sustainability of multiracial internationalism also necessitated recognition from the French government regarding claims that métis across French Africa had been making for decades – that they were innately French by parentage and blood. That is, French society and government should recognize métis as such and convey on them the full body of rights and privileges of French legal status, even if they resided on the African continent. As formal political colonialism came to an end, France categorized multiracial people as 126

Born in the 1930s, Amin was a French-Egyptian Marxist economist and political theorist who helped to pioneer dependency theory and world systems theory. From the 1960s until his death in 2018, Amin toggled between advising African heads of state and governments versus holding professorships and conducting research in France and francophone West and Central Africa. Samir Amin, Chapter 9 “African Socialisms, Colonial Disasters, and Glimmers of Hope” in The Long Revolution of the Global South: Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 105–86.

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African or as an individual African nationality, emphasizing jus solis (birthright citizenship) as the determiner of nationality and moral, social, and economic caretaking. Ultimately, multiracial internationalism failed to become a reality and was eroded as an ideology, because both African and French societies and governments at large rejected it. No African governments demanded that France provide financial assistance or other forms of reparations to the children and descendants of French men in negotiating political decolonization. Political instability, coup d’états, and the suppression of political parties and political dissent due to internal and external pressures marked many francophone West and Central countries, whether former colonies of France or Belgium, after independence.127 Political leaders across francophone Africa would probably have been suspicious of people articulating multiracial internationalism as political opponents. Identities based on ideas about ethnicity, religion, regional origin, or other categories of difference would destabilize notions of national identity and unity propagated by leaders of newly independent nations, and concepts of multiracial identities would do the same. Within these winds of change, some former leaders of métis organizations and adherents of the IUM, such as Antoine Van Den Reysen – who was president of the Amicale of Métis in Congo in the 1940s and 1950s and long struggled with French and African constituencies for entitlements for métis – went on to play important roles in the cabinets of postcolonial governments led by black Africans.128 Developments such as this reflect sentiments that attendees at the 1959 IUM Congress had declared: métis were loyal to their black African maternal communities and would join efforts for their political autonomy and well-being. Yet, as intimated in the Rigonaux family’s account of the closing of the foyer in Dakar, African heads of state – such as Senghor – who cultivated close ties with France and individual French political operatives to solidify their power preferred to maintain the support of the French rather than risk political precarity by calling out France’s dereliction in not providing for the 127

128

For more detailed analyses of political stressors in postcolonial francophone West and Equatorial Africa, see John F. Clark and David E. Gardinier, eds. Political Reform in Francophone Africa (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997); Calixte Baniafouna, Congo-Brazzaville: Du putsch au rideau de fer: Soutien de La France et hypnose de la Communauté international (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007); Congo Démocratie 6. After 1963, Antoine Van Den Reysen was appointed as chief of staff to Prime Minister Pascal Lissouba. His brother Joseph, who had resided in France for years and participated there in socialist and African student activism, also returned to the Congo to serve in this administration. Francoise Blum, https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article174810, “Joseph Van Den Reysen,” first posted online on July 25, 2015, modified September 3, 2020, accessed October 1, 2020. See also Calixte Baniafouna, Congo démocratie: La bataille de Brazzaville 3 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008) 25.

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descendants of French men. Nevertheless, traces of multiracial internationalism continued to exist from 1959 to the mid-1960s in West and Equatorial Africa, France, and West Germany. The public contestations that these traces generated illustrate how the concept of multiracial identity called into question the differentiation of Africa and Europe as distinct geopolitical-racial-cultural units – further revealing the emotional, social, and political import of ideas and practices about interracial intimacy, biological reproduction, and parentage and childhood to threaten the balance of power. Such contestations continued to destabilize notions about race, postcolonialism, nation, and nationality as conduits of identity formation in the twilight years of colonial rule and the dawn of independent Africa.

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Epilogue Multiracial Pasts, Presents, and Futures

In July 2020, while most of the world was in lockdown amid the global Covid pandemic, a documentary aired on television in France called “The Hidden Children of Colonial France.” It featured recent interviews with elderly men and women from the Ivory Coast, who claimed the right to French nationality on the grounds that they were métis and their biological fathers had hailed from metropolitan France.1 They had all been born before 1960, when the Ivory Coast was a colony of France, and at the time of the documentary they were members of the Association of the Foyer of Métis in the city of Bingerville, located just outside of the capitol of Abidjan. The home (foyer) was an “orphanage” opened by the colonial state in 1903 to house and educate métis children. After 1960, the Ivorian government continued to run the home as the National Orphanage of Ivory Coast, but it then housed children of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds. The experiences of the members of the association first came into public view after Edouard Assamoua, a black Ivorian, wrote a book about the orphanage’s colonial and postcolonial history.2 In referring to them as “hidden children,” the documentary explained that the French colonial state had sought keep the children out of public view to mask the moral implications of French fathers failing to provide for their African-born children. Members of the association recounted their trauma and their experiences of dispossession as wards of the state, and

1

2

Since May 1, 2022, the full 27-minute video produced for the state-owned France 24 channel by reporters Caroline Dumay and Thais Brouck has been available for viewing via serval online platforms, including France24.com, https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20200710-decades-onhidden-children-forced-into-orphanages-of-colonial-france-remain-traumatised. The YouTube version, which tracks viewership, indicates that well over half a million people, potentially all around the globe, had watched it by December 26, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Iv7tseuu8HY. Another platform showing the video is https://www.boursorama.com/videos/ actualites/exclusif-avec-les-enfants-caches-de-la-france-coloniale-666ab61e368cf55ce543 c18a2e404c04. Edouard Assamoua, De la maison des métis aux orphelinats de Bingerville et Grand Bassam de 1903 à 2018 (Abidjan: Edition Tabala, 2018). Accessed May 1, 2022, interview, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=hz2tRPIngfA.

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they expressed their desire for justice. They insisted that French legal status and, potentially, economic resources were their birthright. They described being forcibly removed from their mothers’ villages and homes by French colonial personnel. They were renamed upon arriving at the foyer, which was staffed by French people, to strip away any vestiges that their mothers had kept regarding their presumed French fathers; they were left only with African names. Only one person recalled her father maintaining an active presence in her care and education, and only until he left the colony in 1960. Interviewees relayed the information they knew about how their mothers and fathers had arrived at engaging in sexual relationships and what they knew about their fathers. One interviewee recalled hearing that her mother had been a “gift” to her father. The interviewees shared what little they had learned about their fathers: a first name, a last name, memories of his wealth. In one case, such wealth amounted to a number of cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast. In another, the interviewee relayed that she had heard her biological father was minor royalty in France and owned many chateaux. The association pressed a legal case. Members hired a lawyer named Patricia Armand, who was the daughter of a métis woman, to find documents such as their birth certificates, which would prove their filiation to the men they knew to be their fathers. This was the first step to buttressing their claims to legal status and inheritance. Sitting at her desk in Abidjan, Armand recounted in front of the camera that she had communicated with the archival organizations in France and Ivory Coast but received the same response: no documents were available. “Being the holder of a right is one thing,” she stated, but to “exercise the right” one needs documentary evidence – and the onus is on the claimant to provide the burden of proof of paternity. Calile Sahiliy, the president of the association at the time of the documentary, insisted that France has a moral obligation “to give us our rights.” As Sahiliy phrased it, it is an “aberration” that the métis children “were wards of the state thus, children of France” but did not hold French nationality.3 As was the case with the cycles of claims during colonial rule stating that “métis” was a distinct identity that made multiracial people rights-bearers as children and citizens, the resurgence of such claims in 2020 matters. Although formal political rule ended in the 1960s in French Africa, questions about the lingering aftershocks of colonialism remain – questions that Tracy Rizzo refers to in her analysis of gender and empire in global history as “detritus” and “the lasting impression, the legacy of empire – the wreckage, the leftovers, the scraps and scars that forever serve as reminders.”4 3 4

Accessed May 1, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv7tseuu8HY. Tracey Rizzo, “Gender and Empire: Intimacies, Bodies, and Detritus,” Journal of World History 28, 3/4 (2017), 313–39.

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In the case of métis who chose to participate in the documentary, they bore witness to the detritus of a whispered past that marked their colonial-era childhood, impacts their anguished present, and portends an ambiguous future. They seek avenues for their children and grandchildren to know about their French heritage. The interviewees expressed a sense of belonging in the Ivory Coast. Many had held important positions in the government of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the first postcolonial president, who was in power for thirty years. Ironically, the French education they had received at the foyer allowed them to pursue work and economic opportunities to create lives of ease. Similarly, in the French Congo and Gabon, some métis went on to occupy government posts in postcolonial governments. Yet they still felt a need to tell their stories of also belonging to France via paternity, out loud – some of them surrounded by their children and grandchildren, some for the first time. With their voices united through the membership of an association, they demanded a public reckoning from France, an acknowledgment of their existence and their legitimacy as human beings whose full histories and selves were no longer hidden. In doing so, they argued that the formal, political end of colonial rule and independence were not a sharp break from the past and that additional acts of restorative justice need to take place. These demands are part of a larger movement and series of debates in the twenty-first century about atoning for the colonial past. Other examples include the repatriation of stolen cultural and artistic artifacts from Western museums to African countries.5 Demands by multiracial people in various corners of the globe in the twentyfirst century for states to acknowledge the detritus of colonial acts toward children and make amends are not isolated. In 1960, métis from Rwanda and Belgian Congo were forcibly removed from their mothers as Belgians departed and were raised by adoptive white families in Belgium. In 2019, a group of them compelled the prime minister of Belgium to issue a formal apology and they are still seeking other forms of restitution, including identifying their biological mothers and kin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.6 Beyond 5

6

Accessed May 1, 2022: Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel Africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle, www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/38563-la-restitu tion-du-patrimoine-culturel-africain, November 2018; Cécile Fromont, Repatriation of Museum Objects, www.cecilefromont.com/videos; Artwork Taken From Africa, Returning to a Home Transformed” New York Times, Jason Farago, January 3, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2019/01/03/arts/design/african-art-france-museums-restitution.html. In 2020, a group of métis in Belgium, descended from mothers in Belgian-Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi, formed the Association of Métis of Belgium. Their aims are to assist métis in recovering their personal civil documents, such as birth certificates; discover the identities of their mothers and other kin; and advocate for métis in other issues. Accessed January 4, 2023, http://metisbe.squarespace.com/wij-zijn-nous-sommes; Accessed May 1, 2022, www.rfi.fr/en/ africa/20190405-belgian-takes-responsibility-kidnapping-mixed-race-children-africa-belgiummetis-col. See also Assumani, “Noirs, blancs, métis.”

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Africa, the government of Australia apologized in 2008 for the phenomenon of the Stolen Generation, namely the removal of multiracial and Aboriginal children from Aboriginal homes to be raised by white families.7 Apologies are but a first step, as claimants in these instances continue to negotiate a host of measures aimed at establishing their full citizenship rights and reconstituting their genealogy and finding and establishing relationships with maternal kin. Yet multiracial Eurasian adults who were removed as children from indigenous mothers have expressed ambiguous sentiments about the legacy of their removal. In 1987, Eurasians forcibly removed from Indochina and sent to France during the Vietnam War – which would eventually topple French colonialism – created the Association of the Federation of Charities of French Children of Indochina (FOEFI).8 The removals were managed by socalled child protection societies, run by French colonial settlers and Eurasian adults and abetted by colonial officials.9 Between the 1950s and 1970s, thousands of children were placed in institutions or adopted by French families; siblings were separated, and names that had been given to the children by their mothers were changed to remove any vestiges of their heritage. Most members of the association view these French actions as having saved them from destitute conditions. However, others are angry and seek to find lost siblings or mothers and reconstruct new sentiments of connectedness to Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia – beyond the lens of French nostalgia for an empire lost. For multiracial Eurafricans who remained in Africa, their struggles centered on how to affirm their belonging to France in the context of nonacknowledgment by their fathers and a tepid response by the French state to grant them socio-economic resources and citizenship status and rights; their struggles were also focused on belonging to their mothers, maternal communities, and Africa. These struggles arose even as black identity became a unifying platform from which to launch anticolonial struggle. The métis in Ivory Coast who told their stories in the 2020 documentary were also speaking to their fellow Ivorians. Multiracial Identities has recounted the overlooked yet important history of how multiracial people in twentieth-century colonial-era French Africa claimed multivalent identities. The book has also examined how these articulations illustrate the complexities and plurality of racial identities in Africa and have shaped African, French, European, and global processes related to legal,

7 8 9

Accessed on May 1, 2022, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-16283. Accessed May 1, 2022, http://foefi.net/index.html. Firpo, The Uprooted; Denéchère, Enjeux postcoloniaux de l’enfance ed.; Denéchère, “Expériences intimes et subjectivité juvénile des Eurasiennes envoyées en France à la fin de la guerre d’Indochine,” Outre-Mers, Revue d’histoire, 108, 406–7 (2020), 227–47.

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cultural, social, and familial belonging – along the spectrum of childhood to adulthood. This book has discussed the multiple and shifting ways in which some métis, whether as individuals or collectives, conceived of their identities as both black and white and African and European. It has recast biological and cultural understandings of whiteness and blackness and has articulated the concept of multiracial internationalism as cohering people around the world who were born to one white parent and one parent who was not white, in a manner that called into question geopolitical, cultural, and racial borders. Uncovering these stories involved a global research expedition into various archives and delving into individuals’ experiences of pain and possibility; the results revealed present-day reverberations of historical disparities in data collection, preservation, and erasure that silenced the histories of multiracial people. In 2018, I excitedly traveled to the Republic of the Congo to visit the newly reopened national archives in Brazzaville, which had been shut for years due to civil conflict. A few days into my stay, I arrived one morning to find that the building had fallen into a sinkhole. Yet, the archivists continued to allow me to consult documents and work next to them in the one corner of the building that was still level. People who allowed me to interview them, effectively ripping off the Band-Aid covering the wounds they sought to hide, crafted narratives of legitimacy in telling their stories and defining what being multiracial meant in their own words and experiences. Such affirmations call into question many factors that impact the construction of selfhood and peoplehood: the seemingly essentialized monoracial categories of black and white; the geographic demarcations of Africa and Europe, which have acted as proxies for racial difference; concepts such as colony, metropole, and nation; nationality, law, and citizenship; and practices and ideologies related to childhood, parenting, fostering, and education. Such articulations and the way in which they call attention to how the past informs the present continue to unsettle racialized ideas in social, cultural, and legal spheres of the postcolonial world of the twenty-first century. Multiracial Identities has also demonstrated how métis cast these interstitial selfhoods and people-hoods as liberatory projects against racial discrimination, injustice, and the negation of basic human dignity, not only in the context of colonial rule but also within African societies. Yet the multiracial projects chronicled in this book often posed the internal contradiction of transcending yet reifying racial classifications. Multiracial projects also had a complicated relationship with other movements in global African diasporas in which proponents sought to dismantle racial discrimination and injustice; many liberation projects were predicated on African and African-descended peoples emphasizing their unity, with the cornerstone of unity being black identity. Examples include Black internationalism; some articulations of PanAfricanism; various anticolonial movements; African, Middle Eastern, and

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Asian solidarity as exemplified in the 1955 Bandung conference; and Arab– black solidarity seeded by the Organization of African Unity, founded in 1963. Yet, as argued in the 2003 book by Henri Lopes – the métis writer who was prime minister of the Republic of the Congo from 1973 to 1975 – “Africa is not a race.”10 Further, Lopes elaborates that he both assumes (assumer) and moves beyond (depasser) his nègritude, so that “Today, I affirm that, all things considered, alongside my Bantu ancestors, I also possess Gaulois ancestors. Even better, I claim them.”11 Some claims have been heard, histories and people have been unhidden, and efforts at restorative justice have been offered. More often, however, the people and stories continue to be swept under the rug of postcolonial geopolitics and subsumed in frameworks of neoliberal policymaking. Yet as the members of the Association of the Foyer of the Métis have shown, their claims will not be silenced.

10 11

Lopes, Ma grand-mère bantoue, 15. Lopes, Ma grand-mère bantoue, 16 and 112.

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References

Newspapers Dakar-Matin (Senegal) L’Eurafricain [The Eurafrican] (Senegal) Kasseler Stadtausgabe (Germany) Stadt und Land Wermelskirchen (Germany)

Books, Articles, and Dissertations Aderinto, Saheed. Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism: A History. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Akpo-Vaché, Catherine. L’AOF et la Seconde Guerre mondiale: la vie politique, septembre 1939-octobre 1945. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1996. Allman, Jean Marie. The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Amin, Samir. The Long Revolution of the Global South: Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Appiah, Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Baniafouna, Calixte. Dialoguafrique – Une pierre de plus sur l’édifice Françafrique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2021. Congo-Brazzaville Du putsch au rideau de fer: Soutien de La France et hypnose de la Communauté internationale. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Barthélemy, Pascale. Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918–1957). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Barton, Nimisha. Reproducing Citizens: Gender, Immigration and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945. New York: Cornell University Press, 2020. Becker, Charles, Saliou Mbaye, and Ibrahima Thioub, eds. AOF Réalités et héritages: Sociétés ouest-africaines et ordre colonial, 1895–1960, tome II. Dakar: Direction des Archives Nationales, 1997. Bedasse, Monique, Kim D. Butler, Carlos Fernandes, Dennis Laumann, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Benjamin Talton, and Kira Thurman. “American Historical Review Conversation: Black Internationalism,” American Historical Review 125, 5 (December 2020), 1699–739.

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Index

1930s, 26–7 citizenship, 23 1950s, 23–4 abandonment, 84, 188–94 disregard for African mothers, 64–5 moral and paternal, 29–30, 189 women’s direct solicitation for financial assistance, 209 see also foyer des métis for boys in Dakar; foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new; Rigonaux, Nicolas; wards policies acte de notorieté, 51 Adi, Hakim, 237–9 African Americans, 218–19, 235–6, 247–52 Albert Schweitzer Children’s Home Association (ASK), 249–52 German reaction to request for support and funding, 250–1 goals, 250 legitimacy of work, 264 Algeria struggle for independence, 255 Vichy era, 151–2 Alouga, Adeline, 199–200 alternative African futures, 24 Aly, Joseph Assane, 114–15 Amicale des Métis, 2–3, 65–6, 86–100 advocacy for métis citizenship rights, 149–50, 170–4, 187–8 census of métis in Libreville, 89 conflict with Catholic school administration, 94 dissolution of, 241 during World War II, 149–50 goals of, 88–9, 102, 181–2 Libreville, Gabon, 86–8 membership, 1930s, 87–8 métis as plural in identity, 149–50 Port-Gentil, 86–7 rejection of Eboué’s definition of métis, 159–60

relationship with Rigonaux, 219–20 request for child protection agency designation, 170 see also Deemin, Joseph-Gaston Amicale des Métis, Brazzaville, 168–74, 219–20, 241 refusal of restaurant services to métis, 217–18 rights for métisses, 180 Amicale des Métis of Ubangi-Chari, 241 Amin, Samir, 278 Armand, Patricia, 282 Assamoua, Edouard, 281 Assice, Josephine, 85 assimilation, 30, 40, 104–6, 128–9, 267 Association of Eurafricans of Soudan, 102 Association of the Foyer of Métis (Bingerville), 281–2 Augouard, Philipe (Archbishop of Congo), 38–9 Augouard school, 183–6 Australia, Stolen Generation, 283–4 Ba, Marie, 83–4 Bacquery, Paul, 114–15 Bailly, Camilly, 210 Bamako orphanage school, 57, 65, 71–2, 74–5, 78–9 Barthélémy, Pascale, 33 Barthes, René Victor Marie, 189–91 Barton, Nimisha, 170–1, 207 Bayardelle (governor-general), 175–6 care for métis children, 157–81 Bazé, William, 214–15, 268–9 Belgian Congo, demands for acknowledgment of colonial racism, twenty-first century, 283–4 Bérguerisse, Pauline, 209 Betty, Paul, 241, 267 Beurnier (governor Senegal), 63–4 “Black Atlantic,” 18 black internationalism, 237, 240

297

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298

Index

blackness, constructions of, 17–18 “Black Peril,” 15–16 black racism, 252, 258–9 Bloc Populaire, 236–7 Blouin, Andrée, 141–3, 167–8 Boisson (high commissioner), 152–3 Bonvin, Louis (acting lieutenant governor of Gabon), 137–9 Boup, Madiguè, 120–1 Brazzaville mission-station schools, 30–1 Brazzaville, French Congo, 23, 25 Brazzaville Conference, 165–6 capital of Free France, 147–54 colorism, 1940s, 167–8, 171–2 history of, 10 International Congress of Métis, 234–7 segregation in, 166–7 shortfall of support for métis children, 169–70 see also Amicale des Métis Brazzaville Conference, 165–6 Brenan, James, 16 Brenner, Fréderic Carl dit, 128–9 bridewealth, 31, 40, 156–7 British Central Africa, 19–20 Brounga, Ducara, 25 Brown Baby plan, 249 butter, 168 Caba, Pierre, 147–8 Cadre (Governor-General FWA), 109–10 Cameroun, 245, 259, 267–9 Camiscioli, Elisa, 106 Catholic mission orphanage-schools, 2, 29–32, 37, 39, 94, 96–7 African children in, 31, 39 Amicale advocacy for, 92 Dakar, 79, 190–1 funding and purpose, 31–2 métis children in, 29–32, 38–9 mission stations, 2, 32, 51, 93 N’Gazobil, 70–1 residential, 79 wards in residence, 81–5 census of métis French Equatorial Africa, 1918, 41–2 French West Africa, 89 Césaire, Aimé, 236–7 Chad, 46, 219–20 gender differences in education, 47 human rights, 269 métis children, welfare of, 46–7 Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, 38, 63, 73–4, 225–6

childhood and citizenship determinant for French legal status, 67–9 late nineteenth century to the interwar years, 27–40 childhood as a social category, 22–3 children, interracial unacknowledged paternity, 7 as “wards of the state,” 22 Cité Enfantine (Cameroun), 245 citizenship 1930s, 23 in British colonies, 20 childhood and, 27–40, 67–9 in French colonies (see racialized hierarchies, French colonial) post–World War II, 23 Clédor, Dugay, 2–4 Cold War, 278 collective identity, 245 Collin, Jean, 276–7 colonial geographies, 8–9 colonial impacts racialized heirarchy of citizenship, 6–7 stgmatized multiracial children, 7 stigmatizing interracial sexuality, 6–7 colonial subject status, restrictions of rights, 26–7 colonial welfare state, 22–3 1930s, 65–6 attempts to limit financial obligation, 69–71 conflict with métis in Brazzaville, 23 Dakar, 1950s, 23–4 direct payments, 23–4 Gabon, 65–6, 68–9 see also wards policies Senegal, 65–6, 68–80, 86 underfunding, Senegal, 79–80 Committee for the Patronage of Métis Children of FEA, 157–81 Committee for the Patronage of the Residence for Métis in Libreville, 98, 157–81 Committee of the Union for FWA and FEA, 197–8 concession companies, 29 Congo, mission-station schools, 30–1 constitution (France, 1946), 149–50, 177–8 Cooper, Frederick, 177–8, 204 Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 143–4 Cornut-Gentil (high commissioner of FEA), 188 corps indigènes, 51–2 Cote d’Ivoire métis as distinct category, 242–5 possession d’état, 117 (table) Council for the Defense of the Empire, 147–54

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Courama, Jean, 129–30 cultural economy, multiracial identity, 16–17 Cusin, Gaston, 233–4 Dahomey actions against colonial policies, 1920s and 30s, 200–2 French naturalization, 57–8 mission-station schools, 30–1 possession d’état, 117 (table), 117–18 state-run orphanages, 35 Dakar, Senegal, 3 1950s, 23–4, 204–6 becomes capital of Senegal, 256–7 Catholic mission orphanage-school, 79, 190–1 colonial welfare state, 1950s, 23–4 direct welfare payments to mothers, 199, 204–6 foyer des métis for boys, 199, 221–9 history of, 10 office of the high commissioner, 189–91 population, 1944, 204–6 residential boarding school-orphanages for girls, 190–1 segregation, 204–6 Dauriat, Germaine Marguerite dite. see Diallo, Germaine Dauriat, Pierre, 123–8 “debt in blood,” 174, 198 Dechambenoit. see Konaté dit Dechambenoit, Paul “Declaration of Intention to Solicit French Naturalization,” 56–7 Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948), 269 Decree Regulating the Conditions for Natives of French West Africa to Attain the Quality of French Citizen (1912), 60 Deemin, Joseph-Gaston, 2–3, 86–100, 138–40, 159–60 advocacy for Catholic education for métis, 3–4, 92 advocacy for métis citizenship rights, 187–8 attempts to restrict métis access to French citizenship, 138–40 denunciation of European fathers, 87–8 funding for foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 226 pressure on French Equatorial Africa governors, 89–90 see also Amicale des Métis Territorial Assembly of Gabon, 186–7, 219–20 Deemin, Joseph-Gaston Walker, 2

299 defense of European status, 49 de Gaulle, Charles, 255 on French nationality for métis in Cameroun, 268–9 on lack of racism against métis, 269 on New Native Social Policy, 162 reform to colonial rule in Africa (see Brazzaville Conference) de la Torre (Mrs.), 1–4, 70–1 Democratic Republic of the Congo, demands for acknowledgment of colonial racism, twenty-first century, 283–4 Demonguere, Mrs. (caretaker of Maroleau), 85–6 developmental colonial state, 67–9 Dia, Mamadou, 219, 276 Diagne, Blaise, 72–4 Diakité, Joseph, 224–5 see also International Congress of Métis (Germany) Diallo, Adama, 123–8 Diallo, Germaine, 120, 123–8 Diallo, Paul, 63 Diallo, Pauline née. see Rigonaux, Pauline Diallo Diara, Tiémoko, 124–6 diaspora studies, 17–18 Dilloo, Irene, 247–52 see also International Congress of Métis (Germany) Diop, M’Bayène, 208–9 Diop, Momar-Coumba, 274–5 Diouf, Anna, 209–10 Diouf, Mamadou, 274–5 Drame, Jean Louis Lirman dit, 131 Dreyfus, Alfred, 94 Dugay-Clédor, Amadou, 64–5 advocacy for métis education by French state, 72–4 Dunand, Jean, 254–5 Eboué, Félix alliance with Free France, 23, 147–54 counter-project to de Gaulle, 158 critiques of métis decrees and education, 149 métis as indigènes, 154–5, 192–3 multiracial identities, 192–3 New Native Social Policy (1941), 156–61 pushback against Free French definitions of métis, 157–8 support for subsidizing métis education, 158–9, 163 École Blanchot, 101–2 education expansion of access for all Africans, 189–90 funding in FWA, 191–2

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300

Index

education (cont.) funding of métissage, 79–81, 85 see also métis education El Hamel, Chouki, 16 essentialized blackness, 15 Eurafrican, 214 as distinct constituency, 235–6, 266 overview, 213–14 Rigonaux on meaning of, 195–7 see also métis self-governance, 235–6 Eurafrican, The, 199, 219 black racism, 259 children of color in Germany, 250–2 collective effort among organizations, 263–4 foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 221–4, 227–8, 231–2 foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new, 254, 257–8 funding, 212–13 funding IUM, 246–7 global reach, 215–16 human rights, 269–70 International Congress of Métis, 237 management by Rigonaux, 246 Rigonaux on common work of dismantling racism, 218–19, 240–1 vision of IUM, 246–7 Euro-African Patriotic Society, 213–14 European status challenges to claiming, 25–6 changes over time, 25–6 colonial restrictions on, 26–7 évolués defined, 165–6 “notable évolué” (evolved notable), 156–61 voting rights, Free France, 183–4 Faber, Martin Johan Camara dit, 130–2 fathers colonial state critique of paternal abandonment, 189 colonial state recognition of French paternity, 68 deceased Europeans, 1 Deemin, Joseph-Gaston denunciation of European fathers, 87–8 Europeans returned to France, 3 métis, 2–3 right to file legal claim for establishing paternity, 215–17 FEA alliance with Free France, 147–54 avoidance of métis as class, 134–5

process for French recognition of métis citizenship (1936), 136–7 see also French Equatorial Africa (FEA) skin color across indigènes populations, 134–5 Federation of Charities for French Children in Indochina (FOEFI), 214–15, 283–4 Firpo, Christina, 9 First International Congress. see International Congress of Métis (Brazzaville) Fong ethno-language communities [or Fang], 86–7 Fort Lamy, 46–7, 219–20 Four Communes, 2, 8 foyer des métis Brazzaville open to children or any origin or race, 245 foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 221–9 accusations against leadership style, 231–2 accusations of segregation, 229–31 admission of black boys, 225 determination of moral conduct of mothers of boys, 232–3 family atmosphere, 222–3 funding, 221–2, 225–8, 233–4 house rules, 224–5, 232 mandate, 222–3 métis leadership, 223 mothers’ financial contributions, 232–3 quality of life, 223–4, 226–7, 231–2 see also foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new admission of abandoned boys of any origins, 253, 258, 273–4 closure and seizure of land and building, 276–7 construction, 252–3 cultivation of supporters, 274–5 educational accomplishments, 274–5 funding, 257–8, 273–6 funding for construction of new building, 253–4 land grant, 229–31 performance nights, 274–5 primary goal, 275 quality of life, 254–5 religious education, 275 France-Afrique (Franceafrique), 269–70 Free France, 147 African pressure against, 165 definition of métis, 157 disagreement about racial heirarchies and métis place in French society, 156–8 évolués voting rights, 183–4 métis census, 156–7 métis entitlements, 156–7 see also Brazzaville, French Congo

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index united FWA and FEA, 162–3 unity of FWA and FEA, 149 Free France and Free French Africa, 154–5 French army conscripted African soldiers, 55–6 mandatory service, 54–5 pathway to citizen status, 51–61 rights denied to métis and black soldiers serving in Indochina, 217–18 segregated military, 55–6 French Charity for Children antiracism, 225 collective effort among organizations, 263–4 focus, 231 founding, 199, 211, 220–1 funding, 254–5 see also foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new separation from Union, 231 French citizenship aligned with whiteness, 59 indigènes, 229–30 French colonial rule, 1 asymmetries of, 9 inclusion of black African representatives post–World War II, 150–1 French colonial statuses, 2 French Community, 255–6 French Congo, métis in post-colonial government positions, 283 French education criteria for citizenship, 62 and leadership, 44–5 see also métis education French Equatorial Africa (FEA), 26 1910s, 29 colonial political structure, 10–11 early 1900s, 29 French administrative unit, 8–9 French conceptions of, 10 indigene and métis collective identity, 8 métis census of 1935, 90–2, 90–1 (table) métis population, 4 minimal colonial state support to African population, 40 see also individual countries state support for missionary services, 38–9 French Guinea French naturalization, 57–8 possession d’état, 112, 117 (table), 117–18 state-run orphanages, 35 French legal status, 13, 23, 28, 51, 103–11 citizenship under Lamine Guèye law, 177–8 content of colonial inquiries, 131–2

301 as deriving from European parent (jus sanguinis), 4, 25–7, 59, 134–5, 144–5, 174–6 1927 debate over Eurafrican métis, 107–8 to be earned by métis of upstanding quality, 139–41 equality of rights, 145, 147–9, 174–5 FEA data after 1936 decree, 144–5 fluency in French, 130 Free France obstruction toward, 175–6 French nationality decrees, 1930-1935, 104–5 French nationality decrees, 1936, 136–8, 272 and “Frenchness,” 109–11, 114–16, 121–2 French Union citizenship, 177–9 FWA data after 1930 decree, 144–5 FWA on French legal status for métis males, 108–9 gender differences in obtaining, 143–4 as identity, 180 limitations on rights, 145–6 as a métis birthright, 139–41, 174 negative effects of, 146 petitioners’ moral and social behavior, 130–1 possession d’état, 111–12 post–World War II, 176–85 race in Free France, 156–8 racialized hierarchy, 147–9 see also possession d’état; September 1930 decree (FWA); September 1936 decree (FEA) tensions between withheld rights and owed obligations, 146 under 1930 decree, 179–80 under 1936 decree, 179–80 under 1946 constitution, 177–80 French National Assembly, 236–7 “Frenchness.” see French legal status French Occidental Africa. see French West Africa French Soudan assimilation of métis, 267 funding for foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 221 possession d’état, 112, 117 (table), 117–18 state-run orphanages, 35 see also Mutuality of Métis of French Soudan (FWA) French Union citizenship of territorial residents, 177–9 education and health care for all African children, 189–91 fight for racial equality, 219 International Union of Métis, 245

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302

Index

French Union (cont.) racialized hierarchies of citizenship, 178–9 see also French Community French West Africa (FWA) children and citizenship, 119–28 colonial political structure, 10–11 (see also individual countries) founding of, 29 French administrative unit, 8–9 French conceptions of, 10 métis population, 4 Funds for Economic and Social Development (FIDES), 227–8, 253–4 FWA. see French West Africa (FWA) Gabon, 2 Libreville (see Libreville) métis census of 1918, 41–2 métis in, 88–9 métis in post-colonial government positions, 283 métis population growth, 41 see also Amicale des Métis Urban School, Libreville (see Urban School, Libreville) Gardinier, David, 144–5 Gaulle, Charles de, 147–56 gender differences in education Chad, 47 Ubangi-Shari, 47–8 General Council (St. Louis, Senegal), 188–9 George, Abosede, 22–3, 67–9, 223 Gerbillat, Joseph, 141–3 Germany Albert Schweitzer Children’s Home Association, 249–52 International Congress of Métis, 259–70 multiracial internationalism, 247–52 number of children born of black fathers and German women, 251 Ghosh, Durba, 49 Ginio, Ruth, 151–2 Glassman, Jonathan, 16 Gold Coast, 20 Gouveia, Jaime Marques, 169 Guernut Survey, 146 Hall, Bruce, 16, 240 Hanne, Edouard, 267 Haute Volta funding for foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 221 possession d’état, 117 (table)

health care, 98–9 access for all African children, 189–91 child nutrition, 207 orphanages and schools, 81–2 reproductive health, 207 Henriques, Antoine, 169 “Hidden Children of Colonial France” (documentary), 281–3 high commissioner. see office of the high commissioner (Dakar) historiography, 17–18 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 269–70, 283 human rights Cameroun, 267–8 métis involvement with, 94 multiracial internationalism, 269–70 illegitimate children, 1 Imerina ethno-language group, 18–19 indigènes French citizenship requirements, 50 French citizenship status, 229–30 “notable évolué” (evolved notable), 156–61 shedding of status, 13 see also évolués Indochina, 49–50, 106–8, 235–6 removal of multiracial children from mothers, 214–15, 283–4 International Congress of Métis (Brazzaville), 234–7 attendees, 241–2 emphasis, 266 goals, 242–5, 252–3 métis identity, 242–5 Pan-Africanism, 237–9 International Congress of Métis (Germany), 259–70 attendees, 241–64 cooperation among Africans, 267 emphasis, 264–6 funding, 264 funding of trip and stay in Germany, 261–3 German positive account of visit, 263 lack of French financial backing, 264 métis identity, 266–9 site of meetings, 241–64 International Union of Métis (IUM), 24 collective effort among organizations, 263–4 funding, 246–7, 271–3 government acknowledgment of multiraciality, 240–1 insolvency, 272–3 officers voted in, second International Congress, 268–9

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Index see also Union of Eurafricans of Black Africa theory of multiracial internationalism, 239–40 vision, 237, 241, 245 vision, 1960, 259–70 vision, 1962, 272–3 interracial sexuality, 14–18 marriage à la mode du pays, 5–6 stigmatized under colonial rule, 7 see also métissage Isin, Engin F., 180 Ivory Coast “Hidden Children of Colonial France” documentary, 281–3 possession d’état, 117–18 (table) state-run orphanages, 35 Jondot, Charles, 1, 63, 65, 71–2 education of, 70–2, 74 eventual ward of administration, 70–1 life after primary education, 101–2 Senegal state support of, 63–4 Jones, Hilary, 6–7 jus sanguinis, 4, 25–7, 134–5, 144–5, 174–6 jus soli, 144–5, 278–9 Kaolack, 79 Kaplan, Sam, 182–3 Kelley, Robin, 237 Konaté dit Dechambenoit, Paul, 103–11 Kotoko, Ahmed, 269 Kringer (Amicale member), 171–2 Lagos, Nigeria, 67–9, 223 Lamine Guèye law (1946), 177–8, 229–30 Lasseny, Joseph Ntchoréré, 100 Laurentie, Henri, 147–9 League of Human Rights and the Citizen, 94–5 support of Amicale-run métis school, 94–5 L’École Blanchot, 70–1 Le Comte, Father, 185–6 Lee, Christopher J., 19–20, 207 “legally unrecognized métis.” see French legal status Lemke Muñiz de Faria, Yara-Colette, 249 L’Eurafricain. see Eurafrican, The Libreville, Gabon, 2, 42–6 Amicale des Métis, 86–7 boarding home-school for métis children, 97–101 census of métis, 89 history of, 10 métis and métissage boarding school, 96–7

303 métis heirarchies of class and status, 139 métis self-perception as economic elite, 86–7 mission-station schools, 30–1 see also Amicale des Métis Urban School (see Urban School, Libreville) Logan, Rayford, 218–19 Lopes, Henri, 167, 285–6 Lounda, Albert, 184–5 Lycée Faidherbe, 70 Madagascar, 18–19 1931 citizenship decree, 109–10 métis citizenship, 143–4 Mali, 16 Mali Federation, 256–8 Mann, Greg, 174 Maradi, 30–1 Maréchessou (Governor-General of FEA), 90 biocultural articulations of race, 136 response to 1935 census, 92 see also St. Louis, Senegal Marker, Emily, 178–9, 191 Maroleau, Francoise, 85–6 marriage à la mode du pays, 5–6 maternal communities, 17, 20–1, 36–7, 157–8 caregiving for métis seeking citizenship, 120–4 erasure of in male to male communications, 125 support in Senegal, 164–5 Ziguinchor, Senegal, 164–5 maternal economic status, FEA, 46 Merlin, Martial (Governor-General of FEA), 42 methodology archival research, 21, 285 fieldwork, 21–2 oral histories, 21–2 métis, 3 assimilation, 267 collective identity, 198 collective organizing for state welfare, 68–9 colonial welfare state and, 63–4 defined, 28 defined by 1930 decree, 104 defined by various groups, 88–9 defined within Free France, 156–7 demands for acknowledgment of colonial racism, twenty-first century, 281–4 differing access to European educational resources, 65–6 as distinct category, 134, 183–4, 194, 242–5, 252 equality of rights, 134, 175 European conception of métis status, 49 as French colonial category, 50–1

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304

Index

métis (cont.) French legal status, 23, 28, 56–8, 278–9 in Gabon, 88–9 generational, 2–3, 156–7 as indigènes with potential to become French, 155–6 international dimensions of community, 20–1 known and acknowledged French paternity, 25–6 Metropolitan status, 198 multiracial selfhoods, 7–8, 53–4, 178–9 originaire or indigène status, 88–9 originaires, 8 population of, 1930s, 78–9 population of, 1940s, 168–9 in post-colonial government positions, 283 post-unity questions regarding segregated métis education, 162–3 preparation for colonial wage labor employment, 33–6, 45, 73–4 questions of state responsibility for, 2–4 racialized hierarchies, 184–5 relationships to French society, 23 see also Eurafrican; métis children; métis education in Senegal, 88–9 transnational identity, 267–9 triple identity, 237–9 triple identity of, 237–9 métis associations, 13, 22 métis children, 28 abandonment disproven, 42 Committee for the Patronage of Métis Children of FEA, 157–81 “endangered” by their parentage, 29–30 forced removal from mothers, 281–4 French acculturation, 35 French obligations toward, 30, 33–4, 193–5, 242 French state intervention, 33–7 “half-white people,” 39 “models” for Christian personhood, 30–1 racist colonial heirarchies, 30–1 seen as a future elite, 33–4, 47 Senegal, 37–8 treatment as human rights issue, 94 welfare of, Chad, 46–7 welfare of, Senegal, 188–9 welfare of, Ubangi-Shari, 46 métis children, housing and schooling colonial policy of separating from African kin and culture, 200, 281–4

French acculturation, 35 see also foyer des métis for boys in Dakar; foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new métis citizenship law in FEA, 1931-1936, 133–8 use of September 1930 decree, 134–5, 272 métis education advocacy on part of Walker-Deemin, 86–100 Augouard school, 185–6 benefits of, 62 Catholic Mission Augouard, 183–4 Charles Jondot, 70–2, 74 cultural and social competencies, 44–5, 117–18 Dugay-Clédor and, 72–4 financial support by Eboué government, 158–9 foyer des métis Brazzaville, 245 funding for métis in Senegal, 188–92, 204–11 League of Human Rights and the Citizen and, 94–5 métis and African children, 185–8 métis census of 1935, 91–2 métis only, 95 métis-only boarding schools, 96–7 métissage education, 79–81, 85 post-unity questions regarding segregated education, 162–3 potential for citizenship, 57 preparation for colonial wage labor employment, 33–6, 45–7, 73–4, 96–7 primary school residential institutions, 188 state-run boarding house, Boko, 181–4 see also Catholic mission orphanageschools; foyer des métis for boys in Dakar; foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new; N’Dar Toute orphanage and school; staterun orphanages Urban School, Libreville, 96–101 métis internationalism. see multiracial internationalism “métis question,” 18–19, 136 in Vichy years, 152 métissage, 14–18, 22 FWA disregard for legal status for, 108–9 live-in at Catholic missions, 79, 190–1 subsidized education while living at home, 85 Vichy education, 152–3 as wards in residence at Catholic schools, 81–5, 204–6 Metropolitan status, 198 military service African men in French army, 177

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index 1930 decree, 104 Decree Regulating the Conditions for Natives of French West Africa to Attain the Quality of French Citizen (1912), 60 potential pathway to French legal status, 54–6, 60–1, 103 social and economic rights from, 174–5, 198 Milner-Thornton, Juliette, 20 Ministry Circular Concerning the Incorporation of Unrecognized Métis Who Fulfill Certain Conditions into the French Army (1928), 51–4 “Application of the Provisions,” 59 context, 54, 56 as qualifier to existing processes, 60–1 use by métis men, 51–9 Mischlingskinder, 248–9 missionaries, 30–1 see also Catholic mission orphanage-schools Momi, Charles Hilaire (dit Bobichon), 133–5, 140 Morlaye, Amara, 131 motherhood and family, 22 colonial view on mothers as disreputable, 207 “public motherhood,” 43 Mpongwé, 42–5, 86–7 French education and leadership of métisses, 44–5 Mudimbe, V.Y., 14 mulato, 5 mulatto, 222–3 multiracial children care of, 1–2 forced removal from mothers, 214–15, 283–4 multiracial communities, cultural elites, 6–7 multiracial identity, 7–8, 53–4, 178–9 African and Indian identities, 16–17 British Central Africa, 19–20 children, 1–3, 10, 192–3 and citizenship, 1, 10 contra uni-racial epressions of identity, 18–20 FEA (see French Equatorial Africa) FWA (see French West Africa) Ghana, 20 global connections, 13–14 Madagascar, 18–19 and racial identity, 4 twentieth century, 9–10 undermining of racialized colonial logic, 11 Zambia, 19–20 multiracial internationalism, 13–14, 24, 237 1959, 259–70 African alliances, 1950s, 255–9 black internationalism, 237, 240

305 Dakar foyer, 252–5 failure of, 277–80 fundraising, 1957-1958, 246–7 geopolitics, 270–1 Germany (see Germany) as human rights movement, 269–70 as liberatory ideology, 278 mobilization, 1957-1958, 247–52 multiracial children, 270–7 nègritude, 236–7 origins, 1957, 238–46 Pan-Africanism, 237–40 see also International Congress of Métis (Brazzaville); International Congress of Métis (Germany); International Union of Métis (IUM) theory, 239–40 Muslims Algeria, 255 Senegal, 274–6 West Africa, 257–8 Mutualité Coloniale, 36–7 Mutuality of Métis of French Soudan (FWA), 147–8, 165–6 métis as “white,” 149–50 “The Point of View of Métis,” 147–8 see also French Soudan Myèné ethno-language communities, 42 naming practices, 45–6, 62, 78–9 European filiation, 28 French rejection of, 52 law regarding indigène naming, 132–3 métis with French legal standing, 132–3 self-naming, 20, 195–7 National Constituent Assembly of African and European Deputies, 227–8 National Front for Liberation (FLN), 255 National Orphanage of the Ivory Coast, 281–2 naturalization “Declaration of Intention to Solicit French Naturalization,” 56–7 French education, 57 state barriers imposed, 58–60 N’Dar Toute orphanage and school, 32–3, 69, 79, 202 1930s, 81 determination of ward status, 82–4 métissage living at home, 85 oversight of student’s health and well-being, 81–2 nègritude, 17–18, 236–7 neo-colonialism, 269–70, 278 Neu-Asel, Germany. see International Congress of Métis (Germany)

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306

Index

Newell, Stephanie, 21 New Native Social Policy (1941), 156–61 de Gaulle on, 162 “notable évolué” (evolved notable), 162 N’Gazobil, 70–1 Niger, 16 French naturalization, 57–8 métis education, 117–18 mission-station schools, 30–1 possession d’état, 112, 117 (table) state-run orphanages, 35 “notable évolué” (evolved notable), 156–61 O’Brien, Donal Cruise, 274–5 office of the high commissioner (Dakar), 189–91 direct funding to Rigonaux, 211 direct funding to Rigonaux, concerns, 213 funding for foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 225–9, 233–4 funding for new foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 257–8 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye, 43 Olivera, Antoinette Mikidou, 187 originaires, 2, 8 attempt to unify, with colonial-era métis, 218 black Muslim communities, 8 financial support, 163–5 recognized as French citizens (1916), 72 orphanages black racism and closure of, 258–9 Ivory Coast, 281–2 renewal of funding for, 245 see also state-run orphanages orphanage-schools Bamako, 57, 65, 71–2, 74–5, 78–9 see also Catholic mission orphanageschools; N’Dar Toute orphanage and school Overseas Territories Commission of the Constituent Assembly, 178–9 Pan-Africanism definition, 237–9 difference from black internationalism, 240 Parant (Acting Lieutenant-Governor, Gabon), 158 parentage abandonment (see abandonment) determinant for French legal status, 106, 131–2 FEA citizenship requirements, 136–7 French African restrictions on paternity suits, 26–7

French citizenship strips maternal rights and names, 127–8 known and acknowledged French paternity, 25 “legally unknown,” 1 maternal rights, 119–20, 123–4, 127–8 paternal lines, 29–31 paternal rights, 123–4 and ward status, 82–4 whiteness of, as precondition for legal status, 109–11 parental rights colonial law in FWA, 119–28 Germain Diallo, 123–8 stripped if not “French” enough, 182 Passy, Odette, 208–9 paternity “legally unknown,” 1 Periere, Jean, 169 Permanent Council of FWA, 230–1 Pétain, Phillipe, 151–2 Peterson, Derek, 21 Petrocelli, Rachel, 205–6 Philanthropic Association of French Mulattos, 202–3 Pierre, Jemima, 17 political sovereignty, 266–7 Popular Front, 136 Porto-Novo, Dahomey, 200 actions against colonial policies, 1920s and 30s, 200–2 mission-station schools, 30–1 possession d’état, 111–12 application materials, 128–30 content of colonial inquiries, 129–32 correlation to state-funded schools, 117–18 Courama, Jean, 129–30 court fees, 121–2, 128–9 Diallo, Germaine, 120, 123–8 Drame, Jean Louis Lirman dit, 131 erasure of maternal kin in bureaucratic process, 119–20 Faber, Martin Johan Camara dit, 130–2 maternal kin in the legal process, 120 paternity distinctions, 114–15 right to bear specified surname, 132 Sall, Cécile Blandine, 122 successful métissage applicants, 118 successful receipt of, FWA, 116–18, 128–32 post–World War II, 13–14 citizenship, 23 inclusion of black African representatives in French colonial rule, 150–1 rights and race, 23 wards policies, Senegal, 191–2 Poujade, Juste, 25

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Poujade, Léon, 25 Priera, Madeleine, 84–5 Project of Ordinance Creating the National Charity Protecting Métis of the Empire, 155–6 “public motherhood,” 43 qualité de citoyen français, 13 from indigène, 50 race and citizenship 1928–1930, FWA, 106–18 biocultural articulations of, 106–11, 136 challenged by Vichy ideology, 151–2 FEA, 134–5 French definitions of, 106 métis, 1 racialized hierarchy, 147–9 racism and colonialism, 14–15 race in Africa, 14–15, 18 anti-Arab sentiment, 16 antiblack sentiment, 16 black (noire) métis identity, 149–50, 194 black identity, 239 intra-African racial dynamics, 16 race as a category, 14–15 racial identities, 134–5 racialization of Africans, 14–15 racism enacted by multiracial peoples, 20, 147–9, 184–5 racialized hierarchies, French colonial, 6–7, 172 black colonial subject/native (indigène), 1 Madagascar, 18–19 originaire, 2 white citizen (citoyen), 1 ration cards, 172–3 Ray, Carina, 20 registry in État Civil, 26 Representative Council of the Congo, 182–3 Republic of the Congo, archival research in, 285 “ressortissant,” 177–8 Reste, Joseph-François (Governor-General of FEA), 137–40 support for métis-only boarding schools, 95–6 Reuthe, Dr., 250–1 revocation of rights, 26–7 Rhodesian Tribune, 213–14 Rich, Jeremy, 94 Rigonaux, Nicolas, 3–4, 23–4, 195–9 advocacy for children to remain in homes of African mothers, 220 attempted unification of originaires and colonial-era métis, 218

307 black racism, 258–9 charity work of, as antiracist, 258 chracterization of mothers of métis children, 207–10 creation of safety net for mothers and children, 204–11 denunciation of fathers who abandoned their children, 276–7 direct transfer of funds to, 211 direct welfare payments to mothers in Dakar, 199, 204–6 education of, 200 Eurafrican identity, 195–7, 214 as father figure, 199 French Charity for Children, 199, 211, 220–1, 231 influence of, 211–12 influence of mother on life trajectory, 199–200 International Congress of Métis, 234–7 leadership abilities, 241 legal status of, 201–2 multiracial internationalism, 238 multiracial internationalism, Germany, 247–52 print platforms, 199 (see also Eurafrican, The) public commendations, 227–8 radio platforms, 225 relationship with African Americans, 218–19 right of Eurafricans to file paternity suits, 215–17 roles between 1957 and 1959, 246 significance of self-naming, 195–7 see also Eurafrican, The; foyer des métis for boys in Dakar; foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, new; Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa (Union) wife and family, 202, 260–1 Rigonaux, Pauline Diallo, 202 Rizzo, Tracy, 282 Robert, Edouard, 208–9 Roume, Ernest, 34 Ruffisque, 79, 84–5 Rwanda, demands for acknowledgment of colonial racism, twenty-first century, 283–4 Saada, Emmanuelle, 9, 49–50, 106–7, 143–4 Sahiliy, Calile, 282 Sall, Cécile Blandine, 120–2 possession d’état, 122 Sall, Matal, 120–1 Sarr, Nicole Rigonaux, 200, 275–7

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

308

Index

Second International Congress. see International Congress of Métis (Germany) Semley, Lorelle, 11–13, 43, 199–202, 239 Senegal, 1–3 absence of state-run institutions, 37–8 capital moved to Dakar, 256–7 Catholic orphanages, 32 Charity for Abandoned Métis Children, 38 financial support for métis and orphaned originaires, 163–5 French naturalization, 57–8 independence, 269–70 Mali Federation, 256–7 métis children, 37–8, 188–9 métis in, 88–9 Muslims, 274–6 possession d’état, 117 (table) see also Dakar, Senegal; St. Louis, Senegal Vichy years, 153–4 “Wards of the Administration,” 63–5 wards policies, 1932–1939, 76–7 wards policies, post–World War II, 191–2 welfare and educational payments, 191–2, 204–11 Ziguinchor, maternal communities, 164–5 Senghor, Léopold, 236–7, 269–70, 274–7 September 1930 decree (FWA) Amicale des Métis response to, 138–40 assignment of a French legal guardian, 119–20, 122 demonstrable Frenchness and, 114–16 described, 137–8 documentation required, 112–14 parental rights, 119–20 paternity, 114–15 see also possession d’état use in FEA, 134–5 women’s paths to citizenship, 143–4 September 1936 decree (FEA), 135, 137–8, 272 children’s paths to citizenship, 141–3 data from first year of implementation, 141 (table) 1937 report by FEA attorney general, 141 responses to, 138–43 Seydou, El Hadj, 274–5 Shankar, Shobana, 16–17 signares descendants in St. Louis, Senegal, 6–8 see also Four Communes wealth and influence, 5–6 Sisters of Notre Dame of Immaculate Conception of Castre (Soeurs Bleues), 32

Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny, 32–3 Smith, Victorine, 43–5, 100–1 social citizenship, 170–4 South Vietnam, 214–15 Spiritan fathers, male missionaries of, 32 state-run métis schools, 92–3 state-run orphanages, 34–7 Bamako, Soudan, 65, 71–2 Bingerville, Ivory Coast, 35 gender differences, 35–6 Stephen, Rhiannon, 43, 207–8 St. Joseph de Cluny, 85–6 St. Louis, Senegal, 1 capital moved from, to Dakar, 256–7 French regulation of, 10 history of, 6–7 mission-station schools, 30–1 originaires, 8, 163–4 see also N’Dar Toute orphanage and school Stoler, Ann, 9, 49 St. Pierre mission school, 43–4 criticism of conditions at, 93–4 métissage education, 96–7 Sultan Hetman, 48 Sylla, Ousmane Alioune, 229–30 Tall, El-Hadj Seydou Nourou, 257–8 Talton, Benjamin, 240 Taylor, Jean Gelman, 49 Tchitchellé, Stéphane, 184–6 terminology, 5 Terretta, Meredith, 267–8 Territorial Assemblies, 183–4 Territorial Assembly of Gabon, 186–7, 219–20 Territorial Assembly of Senegal Bloc Populaire, 236–7 land grant for foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 229–31 territorial sovereignty, 266–7 “the métis question,” 9 complicated by 1936 decree, 140–1 during World War II, 148–62 Nov. 1948 Assembly debate, 185–6 “the problem of métis,” 147 Thomann (Lt. Governor, Gabon), 41–2 Tisseau, Violaine, 18–19, 143–4 Tounkara, Jean, 132–3 trans-Atlantic slave trade, 6, 14–15, 237–9 Traoré Moreau, Jean, 51–2, 56–8, 64 Ubangi-Shari, 46–7 abandonment of métis children by French fathers, 48

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index disregard for métisses, 47–8 gender differences in education, 47–8 métis children, welfare of, 46–8 precarity of colonial rule, 48 Union. see Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa (Union) Union of Eurafricans of Black Africa, 24, 199 Union of Eurafricans of French West Africa (Union), 3, 23–4 Amicale des Métis members, 219–20 disbursements to mothers or kin raising métis children, 197–8, 211 expansion, 204 focus, 202–3, 231, 272 founding, 202–3 funding, 199, 212–13 funding for foyer des métis for boys in Dakar, 221, 225–6 separation from Charity for French Children, 231 Union of Eurafricans of FWA, FEA, and Togo, 199, 237 universal suffrage, French Union, 255–6 Urba, Yerri, 177–8 Urban School, Libreville, 97–101 French education at, 97–100 opened to black children, 186–8 oral history of residents, 100–1 support after graduation, 98–101 Valin, Jean, 245, 267–9 Vallée, Léon, 114–15 Van Den Resysen, Antoine-Marie, 169–70, 174–5, 241, 279 Vialle, Jane, 216–18 Vichy years (FWA), 151–62 National Revolution ideology, 151–2 racism and anti-semitism in Vichy thought, 151–2

309 racism and missionary education, 152–3 Senegal, 153–4 Vietnam, 214–15, 241–2, 283–4 Vital, Louis, 53 Walker-Deemin, Joseph-Gaston. see Deemin, Joseph-Gaston Wane, Abdoul Balia, 276 wards, métisses Assice, Josephine, 85 Maroleau, Francoise, 85 wards policies Ba, Marie, 84 post-wartime, 163 pressure to care for métis children, 70–80 Priera, Madeleine, 84–5 Senegalese investment in, 1932–1939, 76–7 Senegalese investment in, post–World War II, 191–2 “Ward of the Administration,” 64, 70–1 ward of the nation (Pupille de la Nation), 69 wealth, generational and maternal, 42–6 welfare payments direct, to mothers, 199, 204–6, 225–6 welfare state in France, 75–6 White, Owen, 29–30, 112–14, 143–4 whiteness, 9, 15–16, 284–5 precondition for citizenship, 59, 106, 109 questionable criteria for “European” in FEA, 134–5 Wilder, Gary, 17–18 Wood, Patricia, 180 Wouassimba, Josephine, 141–3 Yates, Robert, 144–5 Zambia, 19–20

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108773751.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press