Had Dard’s methods taken root, the future of French in Africa might have been different. But his colleagues and successors favoured the “direct method,” which consisted of teaching French from scratch to people who didn’t even know how to read and write in their own language. Dard’s method required teachers to learn Wolof, and that was too much work, so the French in Africa just used the same teaching methods they used on schoolchildren in France. In Senegal this meant banning Wolof from the schools. To do this, the French went as far as taking children away from their families and sending them to French schools in distant villages. The children were mystified, upset and alienated by the whole process.
Until the 1850s, when Britain stopped disputing France’s dominion over the colony, there was no education policy to speak of in Senegal. That was when Senegal’s first governor, General Louis de Faidherbe, put one in place. If Senegal is today the cultural capital of francophone Africa, it is no doubt as a result of his actions. Faidherbe was a modernizer. When he arrived in 1854 there were between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand French people living in the colony, but little economic activity. He transformed the economy of the colony by introducing peanut plantations (albeit based on forced labour). He developed the ports of Saint-Louis, Rufisque and Dakar, and trade tripled between 1854 and 1869. Faidherbe defined and put into practice a system to train an African colonial elite by creating the first school for sons of chiefs in 1857. Its mandate was to “train functionaries who would collaborate with France,” including administrators, teachers and merchants. The schools later spread to Gorée, Dakar and Rufisque. Faidherbe also created a local infantry force, the famous tirailleurs sénégalais (though many of them came from Upper Volta, Guinea and Mali), who numbered 180,000 by 1914. It was an important means of Frenchification, as they had to speak to their officers in French.
Faidherbe’s plan worked quite well, and the burgeoning Senegalese elite got the message that French was the key to social promotion. France tried to build on this momentum by using different measures. As Amadou Ly, professor of literature at Cheikh Anta Diop University, told us, “The Senegalese helped the French colonize other African countries. We were the auxiliaries of colonialism.” In 1916 France extended citizenship to the residents of four colonial bases: Dakar, Rufisque, Saint Louis and Gorée. The people in these four towns were referred to as les originaires (natives), a status higher than indigènes, since they were French citizens. Starting in 1946, these four cities elected representatives to the National Assembly in Paris. During the colonial era, Dakar was the capital of French West Africa, and well into the first half of the twentieth century, colonial administrators came from all over western Africa to study at the École William Ponty, which trained colonial auxiliaries, administrators and even veterinarians. After the Second World War, France established scholarships to enable young Africans to pursue higher education in France. The first university in western Africa, the University of Dakar (now Université Cheikh Anta Diop), opened in 1950.
The results were less impressive among the rest of the Senegalese, few of whom learned French. In 1903 the French government passed a decree to put in place a system of secular primary education in its African colonies. The education system had three goals: to educate the masses, to establish French culture in Africa, and to train indigenous staff and assure the rise of an elite in the colonies. In 1912 there were 13,500 boys and 1,700 girls in French-language schools in West Africa. But the results in terms of language acquisition were weak. In 1925, across French West Africa, children still left school barely able to read or write. They learned only a few French words, often without understanding their meaning. After 1925 the French introduced village schools. The idea was to single out the children who had more aptitude for learning French, and send them on to regional schools. By 1945 the number enrolled had jumped to 94,400, but the numbers in French Equatorial Africa remained negligible.
The teaching of French never overcame some basic problems in Africa. First, the French simply never spent enough money on schools—a mere six percent of the colony’s budget, at the most, was devoted to education. According to French colonial doctrine, colonies were supposed to be financially self-sufficient. In addition, there wasn’t a lot of popular support for colonialism in France, so budgets were tight. Because of this mixture of colonial doctrine and financial considerations, the French didn’t invest heavily in infrastructure, and that worked against education. France also continued to rely heavily on missionaries to teach French. The overall result was that, even at the peak of France colonial teaching efforts—just before the 1960s independence movement—no more than fifteen percent of African children went to a French school, and this was a threefold improvement over the rate from fifteen years earlier. Education rates were slightly higher in Algeria—up to twenty percent at the peak—and a bit higher in Tunisia and Indochina. And, as Professor Pascale Barthélémy of the University of Paris VII argues in an article on the question, “although France tripled the rate of schooling in French West Africa between 1945 and the end of the 1950s, only four in a hundred could continue in a secondary school.”
Teaching methods were a major stumbling block. The French lacked qualified teachers throughout the colonial period. At one point they tried to put a teacher training school in place, but they never managed to develop a satisfactory method for teaching French as a second language. Not surprisingly, they never found a way to motivate Africans either. The objective was a steep one, considering that after 1791 it had taken the French ninety years to establish universal education in their own country. It is easy to imagine how disinclined young Africans were to learn a European language when their teachers insisted on using foreign references. In Senegal we met people old enough to remember textbooks that began with the famous phrase “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (“Our ancestors, the Gauls”)!
Mass education in the colonies might have been more efficient had the French better understood, or at least better defined, their purpose. In France schools served to educate citizens by instilling the values of the Republic and teaching them skills to make them employable, and then singling out the best and brightest for elite education. But in the colonies, aside from training an elite of auxiliaries, it wasn’t clear what the French were trying to achieve, or why they applied the same education scheme as in republican France to a population who had no rights or citizenship. As in Algeria, many French settlers in Africa objected to the idea of educating the indigénat—mass education is a dangerous thing to a dominant class that needs to keep natives in their place. The problem was that the settlers were the ones who were supposed to manage the program. So, in a way, the whole scheme was destined to fail.
The case of the Belgian Congo shows this problem in even more vivid terms. The Belgians were not interested in teaching French. They tended to educate students in local African languages and favoured technical training rather than providing a general education. They feared that if they created an elite, it would rise up one day and demand independence. By 1920 only ten percent of the schoolchildren in Belgian colonies were learning French. The teaching of French there, as in the colonies of France, was done through the ineffective “direct” method.
French made more progress in the Belgian colonies than Flemish did, primarily because it became the language of social promotion (as it was in Belgium). But French wouldn’t have a large presence until after the Second World War, when the Belgians made a systematic effort to organize school systems. As a result of the Belgian preference for technical education, when it became independent, the newly formed country of Zaire (Belgian Congo) had only four native university graduates.
The most cost-efficient agents for teaching French were, by far, the missionaries. Decades, in some cases centuries, before European powers began to officially claim colonies, missionaries had been travelling to remote lands to establish their presence and convert pagans. Among the European powers, France was a leader in this work throughout the nineteenth century, sending missi
onaries to build schools and hospitals and teach French in French West Africa, Indochina and the Pacific islands. In fact, France sent more priests, nuns and monks into foreign missions in the nineteenth century than any other European country. In 1900, twenty-eight of the world’s forty-four missionary societies were French; of the seventy thousand missionaries active in the world, fifty thousand were French.
In the nineteenth century, France’s attitude towards the missionaries was in complete contradiction to the one it held towards religious organizations on the Continent. The Republic was radically antireligious, but it encouraged missionary work abroad. The French kicked the Jesuits out of France twice, in 1880 and 1901, but during the same period subsidized them heavily to continue their work abroad, particularly in Lebanon. The reason was simple: Even with the subsidies, missions cost less than public schools. As language teachers, missionaries got better results than regular teachers did because they tended to learn the local languages where they worked. Speaking the language of the people helped them convert local populations to Christianity, which was their primary goal. In effect, they applied Jean Dard’s mutual method. In addition, teaching French was usually part of their civic mission. The French state supported them financially, and expected this service in return.
In the age of imperialism, with its project to “civilize,” European rulers were very conscious of the role missionaries played as precursors of colonial expansion, and they monitored their efforts closely. Napoleon III encouraged Catholic missions in the Pacific islands in order to counteract Anglo-American colonial expansion. The missions played a crucial role in the Pacific Ocean, especially in Polynesia. Missionaries arrived in the Pacific islands of Wallis and Futuna in the 1830s, fifty years before France laid claim to them. In the decades that followed, Catholic missions were established in Tonga and New Caledonia. The French missionaries were in a hurry, since Protestant English missionaries were already well-established in the Pacific, notably in Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand. By 1854 there were already 117 Catholic missionaries in the Polynesian islands, and soon French Protestant missionaries joined the fray—which is why France today still controls the largest section of the Pacific Ocean.
According to Professor Pascale Barthélémy, the total number of children in mission schools in all of Africa was almost equal to all those in government schools. In Africa, le Levant (the Middle East) and Indochina, missionaries ran thousands of schools. In the Ottoman Empire alone, one hundred thousand students were enrolled in French missionary schools by 1900. The Belgians relied almost entirely on missionaries. When he was private owner of the Congo basin, King Leopold II paid Catholic missionaries to go to Africa and open schools. The Belgian government maintained the same approach when it took over the country in 1908; Belgian Roman Catholic mission schools were given generous subsidies to continue their work. By 1920 some 185,000 children were studying in Catholic and Protestant missions, but fewer than 2,000 were in state schools.
Missionaries were not effective everywhere, though. European missionary presence in Indonesia began in the seventeenth century when the French tried, without success, to establish spice trading. The missionaries transcribed the Vietnamese language into the Latin alphabet (chapter 14 shows how this writing system would feed anti-French nationalism). But as in Algeria, the teaching of French faced several obstacles. Indochina had a strong history of Chinese education before the French arrived, and that made the Indochinese resistant to French schools. Also as in Algeria, the local population never bought the idea that the French were bringing “civilization.” They already had civilization. The French implanted an education system in Indochina in 1919, but neither the missionaries nor the French state could overcome resistance.
Another problem in Indochina was that few French people ever migrated there. In 1937 there were thirty thousand French inhabitants in a population of twelve million, and half of them were soldiers. A great number of the rest were teachers and their families. The French writer Marguerite Duras was a daughter of one. Her famous novel L’amant (The Lover), which was made into an excellent film, tells the story of her torrid relationship with an évolué in the waning days of France’s dominion over Indochina.
But the French language made surprising progress in Indochina. As in Algeria, indigenous merchants and functionaries picked it up and it quickly became a language of social promotion. Governor General Paul Doumer (1897–1902), considered the architect of French Indochina, reinforced an aggressive French administration. His policy pushed people to learn French so they could deal with the administration, though Doumer’s actions later provoked resentment and fostered the rebellion that would lead to Indochina’s independence movement. In the 1930s, one in ten Indochinese was bilingual; most were concentrated in the cities. Some famous francophone Indochinese people include Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Norodom Sihanouk. A pidgin of French, Tay Boy, was used all over Indochina.
The situation of French in Syria, and more particularly Lebanon, was a mirror image of that in Indochina. In 1919 Greater Syria became a protectorate of France, rather than of Britain, largely because French had made so much progress there over the centuries. In a way, France’s colonial expansion had started in Syria. The French presence dated back to the Crusades in the twelfth century, when Maronite Christians in today’s Lebanon fought alongside Frankish Crusaders. In the sixteenth century King François I struck a deal with the Ottoman sultan, who made France the protector of Maronite Christians (and all Christians) living in the Ottoman Empire; this is partly why the Greeks remain strong francophiles to this day. French missionaries began working in Syria in the seventeenth century, and in 1816 France forced the Ottoman Turks to set up an autonomous territory for the Maronites in Mount Lebanon, laying the groundwork for the creation of Lebanon in 1943.
Throughout the nineteenth century France increased its commercial relations with the area—the railway line between Jaffa and Jerusalem and the digging of the Suez Canal between 1854 and 1869 were among the most spectacular of those efforts. By mid-century, French was being taught along with English at the Collège Maronite Romain in a modern languages program. At the end of the nineteenth century a dozen French congregations taught seven thousand students in some fifty schools. With funding from the French government, in 1875 French Jesuit priests opened the Saint Joseph University in Beirut, where they ran schools of medicine, engineering and law before the French Protectorate was established.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, the area was placed under the military administration of the Allies. Because of language, France was an obvious candidate for getting the League of Nations mandate over Syria (which still included Lebanon). The mandate, directly inspired by the “civilizing” colonial doctrine of nineteenth-century Europe, was meant to prepare the area for eventual independence, though the process turned out to be rockier than expected. At the beginning of the 1930s, with independence in sight, Christians made up half the population of what is now Lebanon, but feared being overwhelmed by the Muslim population. So they convinced France to create a separate state of Lebanon that would give them control over Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre and some areas in the south. France divided Syria into two states in 1943, reducing Syria’s access to the Mediterranean and sowing the seeds of future conflict between the countries.
The French presence in Lebanon led to a curious migration that has lasted to this day. Even before the protectorate, the Lebanese started to settle throughout the French colonial empire. In the colonies they were often sought as middlemen, in much the same way that the British Empire relied on Indian merchants. In Africa, in particular, Lebanese brought the settlers much-needed new blood. In Senegal at the time of independence they numbered more than seventy thousand, and in many colonies they greatly outnumbered the European settlers. The extent of this Lebanese diaspora was phenomenal—today Lebanese communities are spread across the planet. Famous members include the U.S. activist Ralph Nader, the Canadian René
Angélil, manager and husband of pop singer Céline Dion, and Carlos Gosn, a Brazilian-born Lebanese who is now CEO of Renault-Nissan.
When we visited Senegal in May 2005, our hotel in central Dakar was directly across the street from the Mission Libanaise (Lebanese Mission). To get a better understanding of the community, we met with Samir Jarmarche, an energetic businessman and head of the local Lebanese cultural organization. Jarmarche showed us his scrapbook of pictures of his family, who were part of the second wave of Lebanese immigrants to Senegal. His father was actually on his way to America in the 1920s when, as Jarmarche put it, “fortunately or unfortunately the boat stopped in Dakar, he met some people from his village and ended up staying in Senegal.”
The Lebanese had first come to Senegal in the 1880s, when they were fleeing the Ottoman Empire. In Senegal, as in all the French colonies, they ran textile and furniture factories, real estate and grocery businesses. They also reinforced the “French” presence in the country’s interior by operating peanut factories and depots where the French rarely went. The most successful opened businesses in other parts of French West Africa, and their families are spread today over the entire area. In fact, Lebanese belong to the economic elite of every African country where they are established. The richest of the Lebanese Senegalese, the Shararah family, run businesses in every country of former French West Africa.
In 1948 Senegal’s Lebanese community opened a Lebanese mission in Dakar to school children in French and Arabic and to maintain their religion, the Maronite faith. The mission became the backbone of the community. Since Senegalese independence, however, the Lebanese population has dropped from seventy thousand to twenty thousand. Although most Senegal-born Lebanese speak Wolof and Arabic, relations between the Lebanese and the Senegalese are not always harmonious. The Lebanese continue to educate their children in French and rarely intermarry with the Senegalese. The Senegalese are critical of this, and hotly contest the huge role the Lebanese still play in Senegal’s economy. But the complex heritage of French colonialism has given the Lebanese a triple identity that will probably last for many decades to come. As Mr. Jarmarche told us, “I am French, I am Lebanese and I am Senegalese, and this is my home.”
The Story of French Page 20