CHAPTER 3 Reconstructing Race in French Africa and Liberated Europe

Education and the Problem of Race at the End of World War II

The ideological battle between the Allies and the Axis called into question longstanding and widely held assumptions about the meaning of race. As Allied victory in the fight against Nazism loomed on the horizon in late 1944, European leaders and francophone Africans alike articulated hopes for a postwar order in which racism would be eliminated. The postwar conjuncture was not the first time that francophone Africans in France’s colonies made explicit appeals for racial equality, but Allied rhetoric against Nazi racism raised African expectations that those appeals might no longer fall on deaf ears. There had also been a European antiracist tradition before the war, but it was not until the Nazi regime took racial logics and racial violence to such extremes that most postwar European leaders felt compelled to publicly condemn racism and distance themselves from the concept of race altogether. However, African and European conceptions of what a postwar world without racism would look like differed markedly. Postwar racial common sense was first forged in that divergence.

Educating Africans in Postwar French Africa

In the special circumstances of the late war years, French leaders, officials, and educators seemed to acknowledge as much. The architects of French colonial education reform, in addition to negotiating African and European expectations, were also confronted with a new international climate that was, at least rhetorically, hostile to colonialism and racism. The overhaul of colonial education in French Africa was first laid out in de Gaulle’s landmark summit on colonial reform in Brazzaville in January 1944, an event that was a tool of political propaganda as much as it was an occasion for rigorous policymaking. The summit’s key goal was to justify continued French rule in Africa to an international, primarily US audience. Minister of Colonies Paul Giacobbi reminded the governor-general of AOF regarding the implementation of the Brazzaville recommendations in 1945:

If the head of the government takes pains to repeat that our colonial policy has definitely taken a new orientation, it is because it is indispensable to affirm our position vis-à-vis international opinion. The Hot Springs Conference clearly showed American interest in colonial territories.… We are no longer in 1939, when we could regulate our own affairs among ourselves without the international observer casting his glance over the wall into our backyard.⁵⁸

French planners also hoped that the Brazzaville Conference would shore up morale in elite African milieus. Although no Africans were invited to participate in the conference, its convocation was publicized widely on local African radio. That Kaziendé had interpreted news of the conference as a turning point in the march toward racial equality in French Africa was no accident—this was exactly the message the French had hoped to convey to Africans just like him. And yet, ideas about African racial difference, old and new, suffused the general outlook of the conference’s organizers, which were duly reflected in their proposals for education reform and subsequent education policy and practice in French Africa. The kind of equality men and women like Kaziendé, Senghor, and Vialle hoped for was never envisioned at Brazzaville. Given that as late as 1948 the minister of Overseas France (Paul Coste-Floret) was still invoking the Brazzaville recommendations as France’s “charter” for “the development of Africa in the interests of Africans” in heated exchanges with African deputies on the parliament floor, those recommendations merit further attention here.⁵⁹

The conference’s dual imperatives to justify continued French rule in Africa and to dissociate that rule from unsavory practices of colonial domination created a rhetorical predicament for conference participants. Though racial categories and racial logics continued to guide participants’ conversations and proposals, they were more sensitive to the impropriety of appearing racist in light of the historical conjuncture. Many participants (though by no means all) tried to shed explicitly racial terminology from their discourse, and they relied on the rhetoric of “civilization” to do so just as the members of the CAME were doing back in London at this time. Crucially, policymakers and colonial officials at Brazzaville used “European civilization” to articulate the differences and the distance separating Africans from the French. If the racial underpinnings of this concept were somewhat ambiguous in the proceedings of the CAME, they were laid bare in the colonial context of the Brazzaville Conference. “European civilization” emerged as a key conceptual referent in a new racially coded language that took shape at Brazzaville and that subsequently became the medium through which postwar colonial education reform was instituted.

The point of departure of the conference was to outline a new colonial doctrine and give the empire a political form that would be “constitutional, republican and democratic.” While Senghor and Konaté might have appreciated the implicit acknowledgment that existing colonial arrangements did not meet these standards, colonial administrators’ understanding of the standards’ shortcomings surely would have proved less palatable. As Louis Delmas, an official in Guinée and one of the conference organizers put it,

Why, we ask ourselves, did what worked for the Romans not work for us? The barbarians surrounding Rome, including our ancestors the Gaulois, as the old saying goes, were much closer to the Roman than the Frenchman is to the savage of the black continent. There were greater racial affinities between them.… The formula for the assimilation of the barbarian is not the same as the formula for the assimilation of the savage. And it should go without saying that I do not mean to be offensive with this word, which, in seventeenth-century parlance, had a connotation of being pleasant.⁶⁰

The disclaimer at the end of the passage is significant, indicating that even colonial administrators who used inflammatory racial language were not wholly unaware of the dissonance between the practical and the propagandistic goals of the conference. The analogy with Rome is also not incidental—this was another way of highlighting the racial unity of Europeans in contrast to the gulf separating Africans and the French, here represented by the well-worn figure of the “the savage.” The task at Brazzaville was to specify what the appropriate formula for assimilating “the savage” would entail.

This mindset informed discussions at Brazzaville about education reform, even when explicit racial language such as this was replaced with a civilizational idiom. According to the representatives of the education service of French Soudan (contemporary Mali), the challenge of colonial education was to find a way to balance the two “educative forces” operating on African society, African “tradition” and “European civilization.” These forces were understood not only to be different but diametrically opposed, as Africans’ customs, family structure, and traditional authorities were thought to constitute a seemingly “insurmountable barrier against the aspirations our civilization naturally awakens [in Africans].” The officials cautioned against overestimating the extent to which they could contain the interplay between these forces through education policy alone, since so much of the “civilization” the French brought with them was transmitted to the local population unconsciously—for instance, in “the tidal wave of hopes and dreams inspired by the sight of a passing truck.”⁶¹ In a similar vein, other officials warned of the unintended consequences of the French presence on African society, urging “Europeans” to behave self-consciously around “indigènes,” who were all too often inclined to “imitate” them: “The indigène observes the European … the smallest gesture of the white man is watched, commented on, and retold to others and interpreted according to some logic that escapes us. The European should be on his guard against this continual observation by the autochtone.”⁶² In this statement, European and “white” are unambiguously synonymous, and Africans’ performance of Europeans’ whiteness is construed as a racial threat.

The belief that Africans had an innate proclivity for imitation carried over into discussions about how Africans learn and shaped how administrators and educators interpreted African aptitudes for academic subjects and extracurricular activities in the late 1940s and 1950s. Sometimes this belief could take a positive form: for instance, in 1949 the head of the education service in Bobo-Dioulasso (the second-largest city in contemporary Burkina Faso) wrote, “endowed with a keen sense of observation and imitation, the Black instinctively detects the smallest particularities of human comportment.” This official therefore suggested that Africans had unique “theatrical aptitudes” that the colonial administration should actively develop by funding local theater troupes and acting programs.⁶³ More often, however, especially with regard to formal schooling, such characterizations were tied to negative assessments of Africans’ intellectual abilities. Colonial officials frequently remarked on Africans’ supposed “capacity for assimilation by simple memorization,” which, they stressed, “did not forcibly imply comprehension.”⁶⁴ The supposedly acute African ability to learn by rote, officials believed, explained why so many African students excelled in languages and literature and, once more Africans began entering higher education in the 1950s, why so many of them studied the law. Colonial observers clung tenaciously to this stereotype. A 1952 article in one of the outlets of the Colonial Lobby regretted that so many Africans obtained the baccalauréat by sheer force of memory, when “so few of them really have the capacity to pursue higher study and keep up with their European peers.” As a result, “they become bitter in their bush, which they had quitted so enthusiastically in the hopes of becoming bureaucrats.”⁶⁵

This scenario was precisely what everyone gathered at Brazzaville had wanted to avoid. The conference resolutions on education began with a question: “What are our needs?” The answer was, unsurprisingly, the same as it had been before the war: low-level functionaries and technicians on the one hand and rural artisans on the other. Thus, the Brazzaville Education Plan stipulated that schools in the territories should teach Africans French, but otherwise, the curriculum should be devoted to handicrafts, agricultural techniques, household training, and physical education—in sum, it should be “the least literary possible.”⁶⁶ Indeed, the consensus among those gathered at Brazzaville was that Africans were ill-suited for metropolitan-style secondary and university education. Cabrière, who, as we have seen, was one of the fiercest opponents of secondary schooling for Africans, claimed to speak from experience when he declared that Africans were unfit for this kind of schooling. He noted that though he had seen several Africans obtain the baccalauréat “with great discipline and memory,” he insisted that “few give the impression of having truly internalized this culture or of being able to pursue further studies.”⁶⁷ His report on educating Africans was widely circulated among the regional education services of AOF and at the Brazzaville Conference, which spread the notion that secondary education was made for “Europeans” only.⁶⁸

This opinion endured among education officials on the ground, even as political expediency encouraged the central colonial authority back in Paris to actively solicit African candidates for more advanced study in France. In late 1944, the provisional government’s minister of colonies, René Pleven, sent several missives to the governors-general of AOF and AEF announcing the availability of a handful of scholarships for Africans to study in the metropole. He was disturbed to receive a steady stream of negative responses informing him that there were no “suitable” African candidates in the territories. One response reported that the entire federation of AEF did not have any candidates at the time: three “Europeans” who might have benefited from the offer were still mobilized, and the eight best “indigènes” had been sent to the École Normale William Ponty.⁶⁹ This teacher training school had been the main institution of higher education open to African men in the interwar period; both Kaziendé and Senghor, and many other elites of their generation, were alumni. A year later, Pleven’s successor, Paul Giacobbi, was still receiving the same excuses, which he found “highly regrettable.” Giacobbi took pains to remind Pierre Cournarie, governor-general of AOF, that “the entirety of our current colonial policy consists in strengthening the French community by putting its different members on the same level.” He continued, “The first step is to elevate the intellectual level of our overseas populations and thereby bring them closer to the population in the metropole. Secondary education plays a vital role in this and will help identify an indigenous elite from the general population of schoolchildren.”⁷⁰

Cournarie was unmoved. He was deeply suspicious of educated Africans, especially those who were studying in the metropole. Shortly after Giacobbi chided him for not promoting more Africans in secondary education, Cournarie wrote a panicked missive back to the colonial ministry in Paris about a letter his surveillance service in Dakar had intercepted from an African medical student in Montpellier. In the letter, Emmanuel Franklein described his life in France to a friend back in Senegal. “Les toubabesses abondent à gogo,”⁷¹ he wrote, “all you have to do is go outside and you can pick them up in the street.” He went on to say that regrettably, he had been too busy with coursework to think about the “toubabesses” of late, but he reassured his correspondent: “Don’t worry, I will have them during the break, and then: vengeance.”⁷²

Here was the quintessential colonial nightmare coming home to roost: angry Black men coming to the metropole and pursuing sexual relations with white women. The AOF security service had informed Cournarie that Franklein wrote often to a wide circle of friends and that all his letters were of the same genre, always returning to the theme of “vengeance.” Cournarie urged Giacobbi to not only put Franklein under strict surveillance but to closely monitor the behavior of all students from AOF in the metropole. Indeed, the incident convinced Cournarie of the need for separate dorms for African students. That, he argued, would be “the only way to ensure that they do not become perverted by contact with a civilization that they do not understand, of which they are always prone to take up the worst parts.”⁷³

Colonial officials in Paris, however, were not terribly alarmed by Franklein’s aggressive rhetoric. In their internal correspondence, they suggested his letter should probably be chalked up to the general “impetuousness of youth.” They did recommend writing to the head of Franklein’s residence hall for more information on him, as well as a general assessment of the mood among other African students in Montpellier. But they rejected the idea of creating special dormitories for African students. Such a move, they worried, would further isolate young Africans from their metropolitan peers and French ways of life.⁷⁴

It ultimately fell to Henri Laurentie, who stayed on at the Colonial Ministry after it relocated from Algiers back to Paris, to respond to Cournarie. Laurentie reiterated his staff’s position that Franklein’s remarks seemed to reflect a brashness common to all youth that was not a particularly African problem. However, he did see something specifically African in Franklein’s allusion to “vengeance,” though not in Cournarie’s sense. Laurentie did not think the sentiment stemmed from any “perversion” provoked by culture shock; the sheer fact that Franklein was pursuing advanced study, one of just a handful of Africans to do so at the time, signaled to Laurentie that he must have been well acquainted with “French civilization.” Rather, Laurentie interpreted it as “that resentment that évolués often feel from not always being treated by us, in the colonies, as social equals.”⁷⁵ Laurentie was no radical, but this was an unusually candid admission for its time (or later, as the 1952 article cited earlier suggests). Taken to its logical conclusion, Laurentie’s response implies that it was precisely educated Africans’ intimacy with French values that enabled them to perceive the incongruence of French republican ideals on the one hand and Africans’ social reality at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy on the other. This reasoning comes shockingly close to confronting the central contradictions of a system of French colonial rule rooted in racial domination that was resistant to change at a time when the French were trying to rebrand their empire as democratic, inclusive, and egalitarian. Little wonder that Laurentie would be pushed out of his post two years later, with the rightward turn in colonial leadership after the collapse of tripartisme in 1947.

With that shift in political winds, Christian Democrat Paul Coste-Floret was installed at the helm of the central colonial authority. As Dadet’s admonition that only five Africans obtained the baccalauréat in AEF in 1949 indicates, Africans’ access to secondary and postsecondary education, whether in the territories or the metropole, did not dramatically expand under Coste-Floret’s tenure (1947–1949). Considering the consensus at Brazzaville that metropolitan-style secondary education was suitable for “Europeans” only, and that Coste-Floret still viewed the Brazzaville recommendations as his overarching policy framework in 1948, this is not surprising. If not in European France, educational models for French Africans would have to be found elsewhere. Tellingly, French officials looked instead to the United States and the Jim Crow South.

AEF’s inspector-general of education Vincent Fournier cited Booker T. Washington as the inspiration for the renovation of the École des Cadres in Brazzaville in 1946, which was supposed to be the premier institution of higher education for all of AEF. This was the only major initiative in secondary education in the entire federation that came directly out of the Brazzaville Conference.⁷⁶ The “soul” of the renovated École, Fournier wrote, “should be the laboratory. The era of exclusively literary and discursive education is outdated, just as theological and dogmatic education became outmoded during the Renaissance.” Fournier then paraphrased the words of another Black American who shared Washington’s educational philosophy, George Washington Carver, about how white teachers needed to be “patient” with their Black pupils. Fournier added in his own words that what was needed for the École to succeed was “much docility on the part of our autochtone students, [and] much devotion on the part of their white teachers.”⁷⁷

Despite Fournier’s clear endorsement of a Tuskegee-style education for Africans in postwar AEF, he nonetheless insisted that the overarching goal was certainly not to produce “technicians without culture.” That would not be in keeping with the “great French humanist tradition.” Some study of the French language and French literature would teach African students “how to think well.” But that would be only one part of young Africans’ broader development, which would also include physical education “to harden their will and form their characters” and participation in youth movements like the scouts to “endow them with a simple but solid moral code.” In this way, he continued, France would “contribute to the formation of an African citizen worthy of the Great French Union, fraternal and just,” and—he could not resist adding—“possibly the ultimate realization of the ideals of the Revolution which have been transforming the world since 1789.” This grand rhetoric aside, Fournier remained committed to his pragmatic vision for the École des Cadres, which he hoped would soon be valued more than a traditional lycée education and the baccalauréat. In his view, neither corresponded to the real needs of “Black Africa.” The practical education the École des Cadres would dispense was specifically designed to avoid the disquieting prospect of increasing numbers of “overeducated” Africans, whom Fournier referred to as “those monsters that carry around overly ambitious brains atop restless and malnourished bodies.”⁷⁸ Perhaps this is how he would have characterized Jean Dadet, the Congolese schoolteacher who would accuse Fournier’s administration of a deliberate “racial politics” to “maintain the black man in an animal state.”⁷⁹

Fournier’s discussion of what the formation of the whole African person would entail helps reconstruct what many French colonial officials really thought about Africans and the qualities they were perceived to naturally lack: rational thinking, physical fortitude, and a strong moral compass. These were crucial failings indeed, as indicated by Fournier’s subsequent comment that these qualities were necessary for Africans to be “worthy” citizens of the French Union. Moreover, according to Fournier, these supposed deficiencies were precisely what made educating Africans uniquely difficult; the challenges of education in Africa, he argued, were unknown in the metropole and other “countries of old civilization.” This reference was to Europe. “In Europe,” he continued, “each nation has its own school tradition; the culture has deep roots that plunge into the past,” whereas in Africa, the situation was entirely different. There, educators’ task was one of “wholesale creation.”⁸⁰ In Fournier’s estimation, then, metropolitan France and the rest of Europe had diverse educational traditions, but they all shared the same fundamental relationship to the past that ensured an enriching cultural continuity across generations. They were, in short, part of a single civilization. Africans, on the other hand, not only lacked key personal qualities as individuals; their societies seemed devoid of historicity and deep cultural roots.⁸¹ They were effectively civilizationless. What they did have, as the references to Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and the promotion of a Tuskegee-style education make clear, was race.

Fournier’s depiction of the “overeducated” African as a grotesque was a common representation of francophone Africans in the late 1940s. This caricature became more frequent as more Africans were admitted to modern middle schools (collèges), lycées, and universities in the 1950s. The “uppity” educated African became a recurrent trope for colonial education officials as well as French leaders in the metropole, who, after 1946, found themselves face-to-face with a significant number of Africans making claims as their ostensible equals for the first time. As African politicians, educators, and student and youth leaders became more aggressive in their campaigns for meaningful reform and racial justice, the image of the “arrogant” educated African prone to verbal demagoguery became a powerful weapon to delegitimize and dismiss African demands for reform in general and African accusations regarding the persistence of systemic racism in the French Union in particular.

Indeed, Fournier’s views were widely shared by his counterparts in AOF and in the central colonial authority back in Paris. Even as the number of Africans in secondary education started to rise ever so slightly over the course of the 1940s, French officials began to worry that too many young Africans were being admitted into secondary schools.⁸² These concerns were exacerbated by the fact that centralized directives to orient secondary school curricula in the direction outlined at Brazzaville were not always followed by individual school directors and teachers. In a presentation to the education committee of a colonial interest group in 1949, the colonial authority’s inspector-general of education, Gaston, recounted how he had recently learned of a class of seventeen young Africans who were receiving a classical education in a “modest middle school” in some unspecified corner of “Black Africa.” While he was “certainly moved” by the thought that the study of Latin and Greek was perhaps enjoying a renaissance in Africa even as it was dying out in France, he nonetheless questioned the utility of such an education for Africans:

Our young black Hellenists are learning French, Latin and Greek in French schools! I would prefer, for my part, less languages and more math, physics and natural sciences. The immense landscapes of Africa, where man has yet to make his mark—it is not with eloquent speeches that we will transform them; great rhetoricians are not needed for this task, but men who have received a practical education.⁸³

The key challenge they now faced, Gaston continued, was that Africans were demanding more metropolitan-style education, not less, which would only exacerbate the supposed overproduction of bacheliers when what Africa really needed were techniciens.⁸⁴ Framed in this way, Africans’ preoccupation with racial equality was itself an impediment to African development and “racial progress.”

To put all of this in perspective, it is worth noting that in the same year that Gaston delivered these remarks only a few dozen African students obtained the bac in AOF and AEF combined.⁸⁵ The overreaction verging on panic that these paltry figures produced underscores not only the intensity of French hostility toward educated Africans but a deeper ambivalence toward African equality more generally. As one member of the audience put it in response to Gaston’s presentation, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—that signifies for [Africans] the freedom to do whatever they want and equality with those who know better than they do. There is nothing wrong with having indigènes who will make their own way, participate in businesses and be our associates, our friends; but what are we seeing now? Évolués who are our rivals, who are not even grateful for the education they have received and who speak badly of France, their benefactor and educator.”⁸⁶

This blatant paternalism did not go unchallenged in the session. Algeria-born Émile Moussat, an academic (of mixed French and Italian ancestry) on the committee, generalized the problem, noting that the pursuit of certain kinds of studies for social advancement was not a uniquely African phenomenon. In France too, he asserted, “the desire to socially reclassify oneself is identical. We are in the process of becoming a nation of cadres.” They should therefore not be surprised to find that they have transmitted this sense of social ascension through a particular course of education to colonial populations.⁸⁷ Also present was Guinean youth leader Antoine Lawrence, who objected on rather different grounds. He focused on the suggestion of African ingratitude, which he characterized as a particular colonial problem rooted in a longer history of French racism. He declared, “To this I respond that the initial fault lies with certain metropolitan French who imported their opinions and doctrines to the overseas territories.” Though Lawrence defended Africans’ behavior as a reasonable response to white racism in the territories, he nevertheless insisted that Africans who possessed such a “disagreeable attitude” were exceptions to the rule. The majority of Africans, he reassured everyone, thought as he did: “We do not hate France, we love her.”⁸⁸

In the late 1940s, assurances such as these did little to lessen French hostility, suspicion, and paranoia as African nationalist movements gained momentum in the face of the slow pace of colonial reform, and the specter of armed, and possibly Soviet-backed, anticolonial uprisings loomed larger in the minds of French officials.⁸⁹ From this perspective, the trope of the bitter and ungrateful educated African became entwined with the trope of the overly “political” African. Jean Capelle noted after one of his many “tours of the bush” during his tenure as head of education in AOF at this time:

Mid-level positions are filled by Africans who have attended upper primary school or teacher training institutes; they are, in general, devoted and good at their jobs. However, some are embittered by a damaging feeling of inferiority, which gives rise to expressions of vanity and irritability and vicious criticism of Europeans.… They feel themselves to be stuck on the margins of two societies—the black and the white. Political extremism finds in them an ideal group of followers for blind and sometimes violent opposition.⁹⁰

By linking criticisms of “Europeans” to Africans’ purported vanity and irritability, Capelle construed that criticism as emotional and irrational, as a form of prejudice rather than as a legitimate political grievance. Capelle’s concluding remark extended this motive to undesirable African political engagements in general, which channeled older stereotypes of African irrationality and hotheadedness into depictions of the swelling ranks of francophone African university students and politicians.

This logic resonated strongly in the ranks of colonial officials and political elites in the metropole and colored how they perceived the most vocal African politicians and activists. Indeed, around this time we find the first instances of French officials accusing African leaders and activists of “anti-white racism.”⁹¹ Such accusations proved a powerful and enduring rhetorical strategy for French policymakers and colonial administrators to dismiss African demands for more meaningful reform. This proved especially true with regard to Africans’ calls for more secondary schools; a proper university in the territories that would grant the same degrees offered in the metropole; and, until those eventualities actually came to pass, more scholarships to send Africans to France to obtain a decent education. The ease with which those demands could be dispensed with by invoking “anti-white racism” became another key component of postwar racial common sense.⁹²

French-educated Africans were keenly aware of this new constellation of feelings and resentments toward them, which they identified as part of the reason racial tensions after the war seemed to be mounting rather than abating. To cite one much-discussed example at the time, relations between white and Black teachers in Côte d’Ivoire deteriorated in 1945–1946 when African teachers started to protest unequal lodgings provided to them and their white counterparts. In the midst of the dispute, Nazi Bony, an école normale graduate who had taught in Abidjan, wrote to a (white) fellow teacher that the tensions there were so vicious because “the white educator sees his black colleague as a big child who does not understand the subtlety of his words and gestures, and as a rival rather than a partner.” After homing in so precisely on the tropes we have seen circulating in French circles in both the territories and the metropole, he added, “the white teacher is refusing to evolve in a country that is evolving.” Bony recalled one particularly upsetting remark he overheard one of his white colleagues make to a group of fellow teachers: “Don’t believe the Black [le Noir] understands chemistry—he doesn’t understand it like we do.” Clearly exasperated, Bony wrote in response: “The Black [Le Nègre]—do I really have to say it?—possesses the full range of human qualities, and the laws that govern the human spirit change neither with the degrees of latitude nor with the skin.”⁹³

When reports of the kind of unabashed racism encountered by Bony reached the higher echelons of the colonial administration, officials were quick to condemn the individuals involved for their “retrograde” attitude but seldom considered a substantive shift in discriminatory policies. Bony’s letter was forwarded to colonial officials in Paris, who affirmed that the practice of providing unequal lodgings “formally contradicts the principles of our colonial policy, which will only provoke terrible resentment.” But the officials also characterized Bony and his eloquent letter as exceptional, evidence of “a singular level of culture and clarity of mind.”⁹⁴ Bony’s antiracist protest perversely reinforced, rather than dislodged, stereotypes about African intelligence and aptitudes.

That same year, when the federal administration in AEF proposed providing scholarships to a mere eight African students to attend a middle school class in Brazzaville that had previously been reserved for “Europeans,” several white parents threatened to withdraw their children from the school. As a result, local officials decided to send the African students to schools in other territories.⁹⁵ Minister of Colonies Giacobbi reproached the parents: “We can only regret this kind of thinking and the hostility of certain Europeans—a minority, I can only hope—who seem unable to appreciate the political consequences of their attitude.” In Giacobbi’s view, those “consequences” had less to do with local African reactions than with how the affair would play out in the international press. It was with that international audience in mind that he urged the governor general of AEF to personally intervene, to bring “the interested parties to a clearer understanding of the interests of the colony and their duty as Frenchmen.” Giacobbi had found it particularly deplorable that this incident occurred in Brazzaville, which was the site, less than a year earlier, of the great African conference announcing to the world France’s “new,” ostensibly more progressive approach to colonial policy. But the proceedings of the Brazzaville Conference make clear that French colonial officials emerged from the war at best ambivalent about and often openly opposed to providing young Africans with the same secondary education offered to metropolitan French students in the territories. In the end, Giacobbi did not forcibly desegregate the school.⁹⁶

That ambivalence stymied efforts to establish a proper university in French sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1940s. Despite the overwhelming consensus against advanced schooling for Africans, the Brazzaville Education Plan had in fact called for the immediate creation of an “African university” in Dakar. However, the plan did not offer any guidelines for this massive undertaking.⁹⁷ In 1945, the Colonial Ministry sent instructions to the federal administration in AOF that an African university should open its doors by the fall of 1946. French officials in both Dakar and Paris urged that the administration should wait until the Langevin Commission made its official recommendations for metropolitan education reform so that the institution would be in line with the new regime the officials expected to be instituted in France.⁹⁸ As concrete preparations for the university stalled in this bureaucratic limbo, colonial officials in Paris nevertheless began publicizing the “African University of Dakar” on African radio, which they proudly announced would open its doors in October 1946. This publicity campaign struck Cournarie, then still governor-general of AOF, as dangerously premature. He feared the risks of raising Africans’ expectations were far greater than a long delay. He was fully aware that African students would no longer accept special “African diplomas.” They wanted diplomas “that would give them absolute parity with Europeans,” which Cournarie, who was as we have seen a long-standing skeptic of African higher education, claimed to find “perfectly legitimate.” He therefore considered making the “African university” a real university “vitally important.”⁹⁹ Internal as well as external pressures often pushed conservative colonial officials into contradictory and inconsistent positions.

In the end, the opening was indeed postponed, and the colonial bureaucracy did everything in its power to infuse the new institution with old colonial logics. For the next three years, colonial officials, French educators, and African representatives in Paris and Dakar debated the organization of the Dakar institution. The colonial administration wanted to retain full control of the school, but most French educators supported African politicians’ demands that the new institution be integrated into the metropolitan education system and placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of National Education (MEN).¹⁰⁰ This campaign was led by Léopold Senghor and supported by Jean Capelle. In impassioned speeches on the subject before both the French parliament in Paris and the Grand Conseil in Dakar, Senghor explicitly linked race, education, and generational change. Affiliation with the MEN, he argued, “by facilitating the formation of state workers and elites worthy of the name, would lay the foundations of a Negro-French culture.” At the same time, Senghor insisted that the Dakar institution should emphasize African issues and African needs. The new African university should not “produce ‘average French people’ [des français moyens] but rather black French people [des négro-français], modern men.”¹⁰¹

Despite Senghor’s and Capelle’s efforts, the colonial administration jealously guarded its jurisdiction over every order of colonial education, including the proposed university in Dakar. Ultimately, increasing international pressures forced colonial officials to relent at least partially. In 1946, UNESCO launched its fundamental education program that targeted sub-Saharan Africa, and French colonial officials were desperate to keep the organization out of France’s African territories. That same year, the United Nations started to demand reporting on education not just in the trust territories under its supervision but all colonial possessions, which French officials recognized could be potentially embarrassing for the administration.¹⁰² The UN Trusteeship Council, which formally oversaw French governance in Togo and Cameroon, had already been fiercely critical of France for failing to develop higher education in its African territories. In 1947, the first tripartite Franco-Belgo-British Colonial Conference met in Paris in 1947 to set up an “intercolonial front” against this onslaught of international oversight in the colonial education sector. The tripartite conference met again in early 1949 in response to the inclusion of the right to education in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and recommendations out of the UN General Assembly to guarantee equal rights to equal education and a proposal to create a common university for the trust territories.¹⁰³ French officials hoped that moving forward quickly with the university in Dakar would help stave off that latter possibility. Those international considerations, combined with the campaign of the African deputies, eventually pushed the French colonial administration to make some concessions. It agreed to share responsibility for the Dakar institution with the MEN and ensure that classes would be open for the 1949–1950 school year.¹⁰⁴

The terms of joint jurisdiction stipulated that the Dakar institution would be affiliated with a university in the metropole, where students would complete the full cycle of their studies until capacity was built up in Dakar. Colonial officials, who were wary of a concentration of African students in Paris, lobbied hard for that affiliation to be with the University of Bordeaux. Senghor adamantly opposed the choice of Bordeaux, a city that had a long history of profiting from slavery and colonial exploitation.¹⁰⁵ Capelle, who had by this time resigned his post as education director in AOF in protest over the general obstructionist attitude of the colonial administration, lobbied the MEN to respect Senghor’s position and affiliate the Dakar institution either with the University of Paris system or with Capelle’s own institution, the University of Nancy. However, Capelle’s personal view of Senghor’s opposition betrays the same paternalist and resentful attitude we have seen throughout this chapter. In a letter urging Jean Sarrailh, rector of the University of Paris, to support Senghor’s bid for an affiliation with Paris or Nancy, Capelle explained: “The city of Bordeaux represents for African autochtones the logic of the Colonial Pact,” a view he characterized as “both sentimental and unjust.” Nevertheless, Capelle reported that that argument had made an impression on the Grand Conseil in Dakar, and so the administration ought to take it into consideration.¹⁰⁶

The outcome of all this bureaucratic wrangling mirrored Capelle’s ambivalent effort to take African positions seriously. When the Institut des Hautes Études de Dakar (IHED) officially opened its doors in 1950, it was formally affiliated with both the University of Paris and the University of Bordeaux. The IHED did not grant the same degrees as those delivered in the metropole, and the curriculum remained under the partial discretion of the colonial authorities.¹⁰⁷ These half measures failed to deliver on the promise of robust equality and racial justice that Senghor held so dear. They also reflected a potent combination of older habits of racial paternalism and new racial resentments in the face of postwar pressures to end racism. That toxic mixture of ambivalent feelings and unequal institutions is the essence of postwar racial common sense.

The first cohort of African students who enrolled in the IHED was painfully aware of these dynamics. They did not leave it to their elders to contest colonial intransigence and the ongoing structural inequality they felt the slipshod IHED patently embodied. In November 1953, Moustapha Diallo, president of the main student association in Dakar (AGED), sent a formal letter of complaint to AOF’s governor-general protesting conditions at the IHED. Diallo denounced the second-rate faculty hired to teach there and relayed his and fellow students’ particular outrage that the administration seemed to think it was appropriate for high school teachers to lead university-level classes for Africans in law and letters and regular doctors without any pedagogical training to teach them medicine. Diallo sent copies of this letter to the ministers of education and Overseas France in Paris, the rector of Bordeaux, and the African leadership of the Grand Conseil and the territorial assemblies in the federation. He also published his letter in the December issue of the student newspaper, Dakar-Étudiant.¹⁰⁸

In early January, the rector of University of Bordeaux issued a scathing nonresponse, in which he categorically refused to acknowledge Diallo’s letter with its “gross falsehoods” and “insulting tone.” He scolded Diallo and the AGED that they would do well to remind themselves of the “elementary rules of respect due to their masters” and, in a final condescending, paternalist flourish, concluded: “I can only assume that inexperience, due to the absence of a long-standing student tradition, can account, at least in part, for such recklessness.” This remark not only dismissed African student grievances out of hand; it questioned Africans’ understanding of what being a student entailed and implicitly undercut young Africans’ claims for their right to higher education. Indeed, the rector closed his letter with a threat that any students who “persist in this attitude that misunderstands the traditional rules of the French University” would not be admitted to metropolitan institutions to complete their studies.¹⁰⁹

This acrimonious back-and-forth continued for the next several months not only in private correspondence between African student leaders and French education officials but also in the pages of Dakar-Étudiant. In a June 1954 special issue entitled “Those Who Fight,” the journal’s editors, Thierno Diop and Samba Diarra, penned a blistering editorial that laid bare the underlying logics of postwar racial common sense. They wrote, “The great men of today are the students of yesterday. Those of tomorrow will be, God willing, the students of today. To misunderstand this is to go against history, the history of the promotion of peoples. And that attitude fatally leads to hate, whether we like it or not.” Then, citing Diallo’s exchange with the rector of Bordeaux specifically, they declared: “The time to speak the truth has come. Messieurs of Bordeaux and Paris, be serious and do not play a game in bad faith that risks costing us dearly, perhaps in the very near future.” African students would no longer accept acts of bad faith and “hollow words,” and they urged their “supposed tutors” to recall Gandhi’s caution to his own “betters” to mind the will of the youth and the danger of crossing them.¹¹⁰

The clash between African students and French colonial and metropolitan education officials over the IHED created new nodes of conflict between Black African students in Dakar and white French students in both metropole and colony. In 1954, the AGED withdrew from the National Union of French Students (UNEF) over the latter’s refusal to support African students’ battles with the French education authorities. That rift also escalated tensions between white and Black students enrolled at the IHED, which culminated in the dissolution of the AGED into two separate student associations, the General Union of Students of West Africa (UGEAO) and the General Association of French Students in Black Africa (AGEFAN). The AGEFAN, which quickly rejoined the UNEF, was exclusively white, but it was the UGEAO—which was majority Black but not exclusively so—that had to defend itself against charges of “racism.” In a 1956 editorial in Dakar-Étudiant, UGEAO president Tidiane Baïdy Ly wrote, “African students are not racist. We want to loyally collaborate with our European comrades” (emphasis added). Ly continued that if the African students were racist, they would not have appointed Christian Lamaury, a European, to a leadership position in their organization. Ly quickly explained that this was not mere tokenism; rather, Lamaury “earned the trust of the Assembly” by being a true accomplice¹¹¹ in the fight for African equality and the fact that “he couldn’t give a damn about the vicious slander unleashed on him by his compatriots.”¹¹² While French observers doggedly sought to cast African student protest and politics as being all about race, Ly powerfully located the real roots of the conflict between African and “European” students in Dakar in their opposing stances on racism.¹¹³

Toward the end of World War II, many Europeans and francophone Africans began to hope for a postwar order free of racism. However, their aspirations took on radically different forms. European intellectual and political elites in organizations like the CAME approached race as if it were a primarily discursive and conceptual problem rather than a social and political one. They concentrated their efforts on expunging race as a category from the European political lexicon and cultural repertoire, even though their hierarchical views about the world’s peoples and cultures did not necessarily change. Francophone Africans both young and old had a very different view of the matter. Their focus on robust education reform in France’s African territories grew out of a conception of race as a relation of power that was deeply woven into the social fabric and institutional arrangements of postwar Greater France. As Europeans’ turn away from racial language and conceptual categories seemed to make race disappear in Europe, francophone Africans’ tireless campaign for racial justice was a constant, unwelcome reminder that racism remained a potent force shaping everyday lives and life trajectories in the postwar republic and French Union.

This foundational tension between European and francophone African understandings of race and racism contributed to the consolidation of a new kind of postwar racial common sense. Associating race with non-Europeans only in venues like the CAME turned race itself into a boundary between Europe and Africa. This hardened racial binary between Europeans and Africans surfaced at the Brazzaville Conference and influenced how French officials thought about African intellectual aptitudes and the suitability of Africans for higher education. Such views then became part of the institutional framework the French put in place for postwar colonial education reform, as is clearly reflected in the limited scope of French financial investments in expanding and enhancing Africans’ educational opportunities after the war. What is more, francophone Africans’ rhetorical strategy to frame their demands as a racial justice issue struck a particularly discordant note at a time when Europeans were trying to avoid any and all references to race. This tonal clash reinforced an older repertoire of racist stereotypes about Africans as presumptuous and irrational, which further strengthened the notion that Africans were naturally unfit for advanced study. Dadet had accused the French of purposely pursuing a “politics of illiteracy” that reproduced structural inequality in France and French Africa. Postwar racial common sense encouraged French officials to attribute the abysmal state of colonial education to natural incompatibilities between Africans and “European” education rather than to French administrative practice, material investments, and policy choices. Acutely aware of these dynamics, young Africans at the Institut des Hautes Études de Dakar became increasingly isolated from their “European” peers in Dakar and in the student syndicalist movement in France, thus pitting Africans and Europeans, Blacks and whites, against one another. The growing number of African students in the metropole in the 1950s would experience the pernicious feedback loop of postwar racial common sense even more keenly.

1. 1. Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées.

2. 2. The audio recording of the full interview is available here: “Interview de Marie Louise Potin Gueye,” Libelabo, July 3, 2010, audio, 6:51, https://soundcloud.com/libelabo/interview-de-marie-louise-potin-gueye. For the accompanying article, see Sandrine Pacitto-Mathou, “Reportage: Génération construction,” Libération, July 10, 2010, https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2010/07/10/generation-construction_665143.

3. 3. Suret-Canale would later become one of the pioneers of modern African history. For a short personal and intellectual biography, see R. W. Johnson, “Forever on the Wrong Side,” London Review of Books 34, no. 28, September 27, 2012, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n18/r.w.-johnson/forever-on-the-wrong-side. See also Catherine Cocquery-Vidrovitch’s tribute, “Jean Suret-Canale, 1921–2007,” Outre-mers: Revue d’histoire, no. 358–359 (2008): 395–397, https://www.persee.fr/doc/outre_16310438_2008_num_95_358_4806.

4. 4. Amadou Booker Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière ouest-africaine—indépendance et développement (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 112–122.

5. 5. Johnson, “Forever on the Wrong Side.”

6. 6. Significantly, this discursive strategy is not specific to the francophone sphere. According to a Google Books Ngram Viewer search, “anti-white racism” first appears in English in 1947. A search for “racisme anti-blanc” dates the first usage to 1951, much later than the instance described here and others that I have written about in parliamentary debates from the late 1940s. See my “Obscuring Race”; “Anti-white racism, 1800–2000,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed April 12, 2021, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=anti-white+racism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Canti%20-%20white%20racism%3B%2Cc0#; “Racisme anti-blanc, 1800–2000,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed April 12, 2021, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=racisme+anti-blanc&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=19&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cracisme%20anti%20-%20blanc%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cracisme%20anti%20-%20blanc%3B%2Cc0.

7. 7. Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, 210.

8. 8. For a more theoretical reflection on postwar European racelessness, see David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

9. 9. My formulation of racial common sense and its institutional, structural basis builds on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theory of “racial formation” in their Racial Formation in the United States.

10. 10. Léopold Kaziendé, Souvenirs d’un enfant de la colonisation, vol. 4 (Porto Novo: Editions Assouli, 1998), 45–46. Kaziendé was born in 1912 in the Kaya region of Upper Volta, which was later folded into the French colonial territory of Niger. A Catholic of Mossi background, he attended the École Primaire Supérieure in Ougadougou and then the École Normale William Ponty in Gorée (Senegal). He held a number of school director posts across Niger in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s before entering the Nigerian government in the independence era.

11. 11. Ginio, French Colonialism Unmasked.

12. 12. Abdourahmane Konaté, Le cri du mange-mil: Mémoires d’un préfét sénégalais (L’Harmattan, 1990), 57. Konaté was born in 1931 in Saint Louis, Senegal. A prominent figure in syndicalist youth movements in Dakar in the 1950s, he also worked during that time in the financial and administrative services division of the federal administration for AOF, where he developed close ties with some of the leading figures in higher education in AOF. He remained in government administration after independence.

13. 13. Konaté, Le cri du mange-mil, 31.

14. 14. On the first cohort of African deputies to the Constituent Assembly and the passage of these laws, see Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, chaps. 1–3.

15. 15. In French, tutoyer means to address someone with the informal “tu” as opposed to the polite “vous” form. “Tu” is typically only used between close friends, or by adults speaking to children, but it was used by whites in the colonies to assert their authority over Africans (even educated African adults working within the colonial administration or the corps of teachers). We have seen in chapter 1 that Éboué and Laurentie had bucked the trend when they led AEF in 1940–1944, but the practice remained the norm among their colleagues as well as their successors.

16. 16. Kaziendé, Souvenirs, 49–50.

17. 17. Kaziendé, Souvenirs, 31.

18. 18. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation; Wilder, Freedom Time.

19. 19. As Harry Gamble has argued, the centrality of education reform in Senghor’s postwar politics has been consistently underappreciated in the literature on decolonization. Senghor’s very first speech before the Constituent Assembly was almost entirely about education. Contesting French West Africa, 213.

20. 20. Gamble also underscores how deeply Senghor’s wartime experience as a prisoner of war affected the evolution of his thought on this issue. Senghor wrote about how his direct experience of Nazi racism in captivity taught him the dangers of any kind of cultural and racial essentialism and the importance of bringing people together across racial-cultural divides. Senghor reported that after his release in 1942, he had been “cured of the ghetto of Negritude.” Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, 233.

21. 21. Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Préface,” in Jean Capelle, L’éducation en Afrique noire à la veille des Indépendances (1946–1958) (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1990), 7–9 (my emphasis).

22. 22. Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation, 107–108.

23. 23. Gamble, Contesting West Africa, 229–230.

24. 24. Preamble to the Constitution of October 27, 1946, art. 1. The constitution became an important rhetorical tool for African deputies in the National Assembly as they relentlessly pressed their metropolitan counterparts on these issues in the Assembly’s special commission on overseas territories in the late 1940s. I write about this at greater length in “Obscuring Race.”

25. 25. Note d’Information a/s la “Journée Mondiale Contre le Colonialisme,” Service de Liaison avec les Originaires des Territoires d’Outre-Mer, February 22, 1949, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2400. This event was organized by a Communist international youth organization (the World Federation of Democratic Youth, which will be discussed in chapter 5), but Dadet’s “anticolonialism” did not call for an abrupt rupture with France; rather, Dadet’s “anticolonialism” closely resembled that of Senghor. For biographical background on Dadet, see Claude-Ernest Kiamba, “Construction de l’état et politiques de l’enseignement au Congo du 1911 à 1997: Contribution à l’analyse de l’Action Publique en Afrique Noire” (PhD diss., Université Montesquieu-Bordeaux IV, 2008), 44, 93.

26. 26. According to statistics compiled by the French central colonial authority, in 1946, six inhabitants of AEF obtained the baccalauréat; by 1949, that number had risen to twenty-nine. I have not been able to verify how many of these bacheliers were African. Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer (December 1950): 40, ANOM: BIB AOM/20205/1950.

27. 27. Note d’Information a/s la “Journée Mondiale Contre le Colonialisme,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2400.

28. 28. Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, 223. Moutet first tried to more closely align colonial education with norms and standards in the metropole as minister of colonies during the Popular Front. In 1947, he was ousted from his post as the top colonial official in Paris with the collapse of tripartism and replaced by the much more conservative Christian Democrat Paul Coste-Floret, who encouraged local colonial administrations to resist integrationist reforms. Gamble, Contesting French West Africa, 235.

29. 29. Capelle, L’éducation en Afrique noire, 49.

30. 30. Capelle, L’éducation en Afrique noire. More on this topic follows.

31. 31. Rachel Kantrowitz, “ ‘So That Tomorrow Would Be Better for Us’: Developing French-Funded Catholic Schools in Dahomey and Senegal, 1945–1975” (PhD diss., New York University, 2015). The majority of FIDES funds went to the African federations, but allocations for education made up just a fraction. In the 1949 FIDES budget for AOF, education spending totaled 8 percent, less than half of the funding for roads and bridges.

32. 32. Eléments de rapport sur le développement de l’Enseignement dans les TOM, April 7, 1950, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/1015. Capelle provides slightly different figures in his memoir: 4.2 percent for AOF and 8.5 percent for AEF. See his L’éducation en Afrique noire, 56. Higher school attendance in AEF was largely attributable to the older presence and higher volume of mission schools (which FIDES helped fund). In 1950, there were 889 public schools and 237 private schools in AOF; in AEF, the figures were much closer: 327 public schools compared with 275 private ones. Rates of school attendance in French-controlled Togo and Cameroon, which were under international supervision as UN Trust Territories, were noticeably higher—20 percent and 22.9 percent, respectively—a strong indication of how important international pressure was in determining educational outcomes in the French Union.

33. 33. Capelle, L’éducation en Afrique noire, 79.

34. 34. Konaté, Le cri du mange-mil, 53.

35. 35. Konaté, Le cri du mange-mil, 67–68.

36. 36. For a similar argument in the Algerian context, see Fanny Colonna, “Educating Conformity in Colonial Algeria,” trans. Barbara Harshay, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 346–370.

37. 37. Liz Foster has shown the same basic ideas circulating in francophone African Catholic milieus during this period regarding the training of African clergy. She highlights how African priests like Robert Sastre (Dahomey) and Robert Dosseh (Togo) outlined a vision of African missionary training for African empowerment. African Catholic, 187.

38. 38. Seven of eight African deputies in the National Assembly’s commission on overseas territories came from the teaching corps, a point the deputies themselves made when pushing for the urgency of education reform.

39. 39. Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age.

40. 40. For “rubbish,” see Dr. Alf Sommerfelt, “Education and Racial Tolerance,” London, February 12, 1945, UNESCO Archives: CAME/Correspondence/I/12623; for “insane,” see K. Eydziatowicz, “Notes on Educational and School Broadcasting,” London, February 15, 1945, UNESCO Archives: CAME/Correspondence/I/12623. For “pseudo-scientific,” see “Notes on the Draft Resolution on the Enquiry into the Theory of Race,” appendix I, London, March 19, 1945, UNESCO Archives: CAME, London, 1942–1945, vol. III: General Series Documents II.

41. 41. Indeed, it is worth noting that after combing through the transcripts of the CAME, I encountered almost no references to Jews. Two exceptions were a reference to Jewish children as a distinct subset of children in a list of youth populations in liberated Europe who would need special “education ‘treatment’ ” after the war, and discussion of removing all “Jewish books” to Jerusalem. In the case of the former, Jewish children were listed alongside “children of quislings,” “backwards children,” and “children and young people who have been deliberately perverted by the enemy,” in light of the “the effects of race persecution [and] statelessness” (see the unsigned, undated report, “Human Rehabilitation of Children and Young People,” UNESCO Archives: CAME, London 1942–1945, vol II: General Series Documents I).

42. 42. On the particular contribution of French anthropologists to the UNESCO Race Statements, see the epilogue in Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Empire and Anthropology in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). On the transformation of the CAME into UNESCO, see Mylonas, La genése de l’Unesco. For a critical reading of the Race Statements and the specific UNESCO tradition of postwar European antiracism, see Alana Lentin, Racism and Antiracism in Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

43. 43. Sommerfelt, “Education and Racial Tolerance,” UNESCO Archives: CAME/Correspondence/I/12623.

44. 44. Eydziatowicz, “Notes on Educational and School Broadcasting,” UNESCO Archives: CAME/Correspondence/I/12623.

45. 45. Draft Minutes of the 22nd Meeting of the History Committee, June 7, 1944, UNESCO Archives: CAME, London 1942–1945, vol III: Books and Periodicals Commission, History Committees and Subcommittees.

46. 46. On “racelessness” in postwar Europe, see Goldberg, The Threat of Race, chap. 5.

47. 47. On racial hierarchies of Europeans in the 1920s and 1930s, see Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race.

48. 48. This was the title of the findings of a group of scientists at the Academy of Science in Prague whom Masaryk commissioned to refute Nazi racial theory in the early 1930s. Edited by K. Weigner, the volume was published (in Czech) in 1935. Though members of the CAME cited this work, as I show later, their own language struck an entirely different note. See “Notes on the Draft Resolution on the Enquiry into the Theory of Race,” appendix I, London, March 19, 1945, UNESCO Archives: CAME, London, 1942–1945, vol III: General Series Documents II.

CAME member (and future president of UNESCO) Julian Huxley coauthored an important work in 1937, We Europeans, debunking Nazi racial policy and scientific racism more generally, though the work also did not unequivocally disavow racial categories.

1. 49. Ernest Barker, George Clark, and Paul Vaucher, The European Inheritance: A History of European Civilization, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). I have found no evidence that the work was translated into all major European languages and used across the continent as originally intended.

2. 50. Barker, Clark, and Vaucher, The European Inheritance, vol. III, 311. The very term “inheritance” points to the deep ambiguity of such assertions and evokes the “culturalization” of race in postwar discourse. Alana Lentin identifies UNESCO as the key agent of this process in her Race and Antiracism in Postwar Europe, chap. 2.

3. 51. Announcement for the Conférence Européenne de la Culture (Lausanne, December 8–12, 1949), undated, Bureau d’études pour un Centre européen de la Culture, AHC: 1/DE/25. I discuss this event at length in chapter 2 and will return to this topic later. The Lausanne Conference was the first major European conference devoted exclusively to cultural and educational issues.

4. 52. Gilbert Giraudon, Jeunesse Européenne Circulaire C, May 19, 1949, AHUE: UEF-178.

5. 53. This racial undercurrent is obscured in the literature on early European integration and European identity, which does not critically interrogate the explosion of European civilizational discourse in the postwar conjuncture. This is especially true in the French scholarship on these questions. See, among others, Girault, ed., Identité et conscience européennes; Jean-Michel Guieu et al., Penser et construire Europe; Robert Frank, ed., Les identités européennes au XXe siècle: Diversités, convergences et solidarités (Paris: Sorbonne, 2004); Gérard Bossuat, “Des lieux de mémoire pour l’Europe unie,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 61 (January–March, 1999): 56–69, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3771459.

6. 54. I do not mean to suggest that race had not been connected to the notion of “European civilization” previously—it surely had. But there were also important countertrends—that is, the concept of civilization was mobilized against “German” notions of racial community. As race was purged from postwar discourse, however, I propose this opposition faded away as race and civilization became tacitly intertwined in both transnational European and French imaginaries—which was something new.

7. 55. Sommerfelt, “Education and Racial Tolerance,” UNESCO Archives: CAME/Correspondence/I/12623.

8. 56. Judt, Postwar, 5; Helmut Kaelble, “L’Europe ‘vécue’ et l’Europe ‘pensée’ au XXe siècle,” in Girault, ed., Identité et conscience européennes, 39.

9. 57. For an interesting comparison, see Heide Fehrenbach’s discussion of the limitations of the notion of tolerance in what she calls West German “postwar racial liberalism” in her Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

10. 58. Ministre des Colonies à GOUGAL-AOF a/s application recommandations Brazzaville, undated (c. 1945), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 5.

11. 59. Procès-verbal de la Commission des territoires d’outre-mer (Assemblée Nationale), Audition de Paul Coste-Floret, March 3, 1948, AN: C//15407. It is worth noting that African deputies also continued to cite the Brazzaville Conference in parliamentary debates into the 1950s as the framework for colonial reform and a standard, however modest, to which French officials did not even hold themselves. See, for instance, the argumentation of Jean-Hilaire Aubame (Gabon) in a tense exchange about unequal pay for African fonctionnaires in the colonial bureaucracy in Procès-verbal de la Commission des territoires d’outre-mer, January 4, 1950, AN C//15408.

12. 60. Louis Delmas, “Contribution à une doctrine de politique impériale” (1944): 15–16, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201 dossier 6.

13. 61. Rapport a/s enseignement, Colonie du Soudan, undated, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 6.

14. 62. Rapport a/s relations métropole-colonies, undated, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 6.

15. 63. Gaston Piolet, “Dans l’Union Française: créations de foyers de culture et d’amitié franco-africaine,” L’Information Pédagogique, no. 4 (September-October 1949): 163, AN: F/17/17539.

16. 64. Rapport des deuxième et troisième trimestres, Affaires Politiques Musulmanes-AOF (1948), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2259. This understanding particularly colored how French officials perceived traditional Qur’anic schools in West Africa, where instruction focused on the memorization of the Qur’an. As we shall see in chapter 5, despite the fact that this was the traditional method of Qur’anic schooling across the Muslim world, French observers interpreted the practice as further evidence of the shallowness of West Africans’ “Muslim-ness.” See Ware, The Walking Qur’an.

17. 65. Excerpt from Climats, reprinted in the Catholic African student journal Tam-Tam, deuxième année, no. 1 (November–December 1952).

18. 66. Conférence Africaine de Brazzaville, Plan d’Enseignement, undated, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 6.

19. 67. Edmond Cabrière (Chef de la section de l’enseignement secondaire, AOF), Rapport à M. Directeur-Général Instruction Publique sur l’enseignement secondaire et la question indigène, undated, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 6.

20. 68. Yves Aubineau (Directeur-Général de l’Instruction Publique), Rapport a/s de la Conférence de Brazzaville, January 10, 1944, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 6.

21. 69. Telegram from René Pleven to GOUGAL Dakar, Brazzaville, Madagascar et al., November 18, 1944; telegram received November 23, 1944, from Dakar (Digo); telegram received December 28, 1944, from Brazzaville (Bayardelle), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408. Similar responses were received from Togo.

22. 70. Letter from Ministre des Colonies to GOUGAL-AOF, May 12, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

23. 71. This is a playful way of saying “white women are everywhere.” The term toubabesse combines a West African slang term for foreign white person with a French feminine ending.

24. 72. Letter from Emmanuel R. Franklein to unknown recipient, April 3, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

25. 73. Letter from Cournarie to Ministre des Colonies, May 17, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

26. 74. Note a/s interception postale de Franklein, June 8, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

27. 75. Letter from Laurentie to Cournarie, June 29, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

28. 76. For an earlier instance of the cross-fertilization between the politics of race and education in colonial Africa and the US South, see Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Anton Tarradellas, “La formation des étudiants africains aux Etats-Unis: ‘Mission civilisatrice,’ connexions panafricanistes, et aide au développement (1880–1980),” in Repenser la “mission civilisatrice.” L’éducation dans le monde colonial et postcolonial au XXe siècle, ed. Damiano Matasci, Miguel Bandeira Jéronimo, and Hugo Gonçalves Dores (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2021).

29. 77. Vincent Fournier, “L’Enseignement en AEF en 1947,” Nos Écoles: Bulletin de l’Enseignement de l’AEF, no. 20 (October 1947), ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2135 dossier 5.

30. 78. Fournier, “L’Enseignement en AEF,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2135 dossier 5.

31. 79. Note d’Information a/s la “Journée Mondiale Contre le Colonialisme,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2400.

32. 80. Fournier, “L’Enseignement en AEF,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2135 dossier 5.

33. 81. This was of course an old colonial trope. For a classic analysis, see Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

34. 82. According to figures compiled by the central colonial ministry, there were 3,951 students in secondary schools (which included collèges [middle schools] as well as lycées) in AOF and another 623 in AEF in 1946. Those figures rose to 5,480 and 1,161, respectively, by 1949. It is, however, unclear what percentage of these students were African. Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer (December 1950): 38, ANOM: BIB AOM/20205/1950.

35. 83. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Enseignement du Comité Central de la France d’Outre-Mer, June 8, 1949, ANOM: 100APOM/933.

36. 84. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Enseignement du Comité Central de la France d’Outre-Mer, June 8, 1949, ANOM: 100APOM/933.

37. 85. Bulletin de l’Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse du Ministère de la France d’Outre-Mer (December 1950): 40, ANOM: BIB AOM/20205/1950.

38. 86. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Enseignement du Comité Central de la France d’Outre-Mer, 8 June 8, 1949, ANOM: 100APOM/933.

39. 87. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Enseignement du Comité Central de la France d’Outre-Mer, June 8, 1949, ANOM: 100APOM/933. Moussat was not the only one to make this analogy. Fournier also characterized the overvaluation of the baccalauréat as an obstacle for France and cited Édouard Herriot—a key figure in the interwar critique of the overly intellectual and elitist nature of French education—on this subject at length. Fournier, “L’Enseignement en AEF,” ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2135 dossier 5.

40. 88. Procès-verbal de la Commission de l’Enseignement du Comité Central de la France d’Outre-Mer, June 8, 1949, ANOM: 100APOM/933.

41. 89. On the Cold War in francophone Africa, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946–1958 (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007). I return to the impact of Cold War anxieties on colonial education policy in chapter 5.

42. 90. Capelle, L’éducation en Afrique noire, 100 (my emphasis).

43. 91. Rapport du Procureur-Général AEF à M. le Ministre de la France d’Outre-Mer, March 24, 1951, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2254.

44. 92. Liz Foster has identified this same rhetoric in the Franco-African Catholic world around this time. She cites one French missionary referring to African priests’ calls for the Africanization of the local clergy as “antiwhite racism” in 1952. African Catholic, 169. The term began cropping up several years earlier in parliamentary debates between white French and African deputies in the late 1940s. See my “Obscuring Race.”

45. 93. Letter from Nazi Bony to Joseph Eyraud, Tenkodogo, December 2, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

46. 94. Note pour le Directeur AFFPOL, February 19, 1946, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/3408.

47. 95. Extrait du rapport no. 514 I.G.E. du 26 juin 1945 sur la situation de l’enseignement secondaire en AEF, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2136.

48. 96. Letter from Giacobbi to GOUGAL-AEF a/s admission d’élèves indigènes en classe de 6ème des établissements secondaires, September 27, 1945, ANOM: 1AFFPOL/2136.

49. 97. Conférence Africaine de Brazzaville, Plan d’Enseignement, ANOM1AFFPOL/2201, dossier 6.

50. 98. Letter from Cournarie to Direction Enseignement et Jeunesse, MFOM, undated; Dépêche 6.900/EJ, November, 5 1945; Telegram 125/EJ, January 10, 1946, ANS: O/574 (31). See chapter 2 for a longer discussion of the Langevin Commission’s work.

51. 99. Letter from Cournarie to Direction Enseignement et Jeunesse, MFOM, March 30, 1946, ANS: O/574 (31).

52. 100. On the intense jurisdiction battle between colonial and MEN officials, see Harry Gamble, “La crise de l’enseignement en Afrique occidentale française (1944–1950),” Histoire de l’éducation 128 (October–December 2011): 129–162, https://doi.org/10.4000/histoire-education.2278.

53. 101. Rapport de Senghor a/s Projet du Décret portant création d’une Académie de l’AOF; Projet du Décret portant création d’un Institut Universitaire à Dakar, Commission des Affaires Sociales, Grand Conseil de l’AOF, Séance plénaire du 3 juin 1949, AN: F17/17641.

54. 102. The British had gotten a jump on the French in that regard. The Asquith Commission (1943) led to the creation of the first university colleges in British Africa immediately after the war. The British also had a more robust response to UN pressure on education in the trust territories. In 1947, the British issued a ten-year plan for education in its trust territory in Tanganyika and infused an extra one million pounds into the education system there. Clive Whitehead, “The Impact of the Second World War on Education in Britain’s Colonial Empire,” in Roy Lowe, ed., Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1992), 152–153.

55. 103. Matasci, “Une ‘UNESCO africaine’?” I discuss this at greater length in chapter 5.

56. 104. Letter from Gaston, MFOM Inspection-Générale de l’Enseignement et de la Jeunesse, to Donzelot, MEN, dir-Enseignement Sup, August, 18 1949: AN F17/17641. Jessica Pearson has detailed a similar French colonial response during this period to pressure from the UN family of organizations in the health sector in her The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

57. 105. In the same speech before the Grand Conseil cited earlier, Senghor exhorted: “In every case, we must refuse the tutelage of Bordeaux. It is enough that economically, this city continues the tradition of the old Colonial Pact.” Projet du Décret portant création d’un Institut Universitaire à Dakar, Séance plénière du 3 juin 1949, AN: F17/17641.

58. 106. Letter from Capelle, recteur de l’Université de Nancy, to Sarrailh, Recteur de l’Académie de Paris, October 3, 1949, AN: F17/17641.

59. 107. The IHED finally become a proper French university that was fully integrated into the MEN’s national system on the eve of Senegalese independence. On the neocolonial logics of that institutional arrangement, see Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968; Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (New York: Berg, 2002).

60. 108. The full text of this letter, the subsequent back-and-forth with the colonial administration, and published editorials about those exchanges are reprinted in Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 175–184.

61. 109. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 176.

62. 110. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 182–183.

63. 111. I use “accomplice” here instead of “ally” deliberately, inspired by the 2014 manifesto “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex—an Indigenous Perspective.” As the manifesto puts it, “the risks of an ally who provides support or solidarity (usually on a temporary basis) in a fight are much different than that of an accomplice. When we fight back or forward, together, becoming complicit in a struggle towards liberation, we are accomplices.” With this distinction in mind, I find that Ly depicts Lamaury more as an accomplice than an ally. “Accomplices Not Allies,” version 2, Indigenous Action Media, May 2, 2014, http://www.indigenousaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Accomplices-Not-Allies-print.pdf.

64. 112. Sadji, Le rôle de la génération charnière, 184.

65. 113. For an excellent discussion of this distinction, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2014).