This timely book offers readers a much-needed analysis of the role schools and schooling played in the colonial politics of French West Africa. Written for an English-speaking audience, author Harry Gamble explores the French “civilizing mission” in this vast federation of colonies established in 1895. He examines the political project, the actors who sought to implement changes in education, and the African response to the shifting contours of French educational policies. In this fashion, Gamble not only draws on and pursues earlier studies of colonial education in the region but also “tacks back and forth between French and African actors and perspectives” (p. 8). He vividly brings to light the contributions of such well-known figures as the writer and first president of the Republic of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as lesser-known African actors Ousmane Socé, who helped found the Association of West African Students, and Amadou l'Artilleur, a Senegalese schoolteacher turned politician. The result is a remarkably good read, where specialists gain insights from the attention paid to both sides of the colonial project, while nonspecialists are introduced to the broader context of French colonization. Six maps offer graphic insight into the challenges of establishing a colonial educational system over an area eight and a half times the size of metropolitan France, with some sixteen million inhabitants in 1943.

Gamble's most original contribution to the subject of French colonial schooling lies in the connections he makes between issues of citizenship and changing policies with respect to schooling: “The schools of AOF [Afrique occidentale fran çaise] were deliberately designed to educate ‘colonial subjects’ and not French citizens” (p. 7). But categories of citizenship were not uniform. As a result, he devotes careful attention to the role of rights-bearing Senegalese, known as the originaires des Quatre Communes, who acquired French citizenship in 1916 and had access to secondary education. Their presence in the oldest and most populated areas of Senegal disrupted French colonial efforts to impose a strictly segregated school system that would distinguish Europeans from African populations, urban from rural, native elites from the rural masses. One might regret that this attention to the complexities of citizenship does not extend to the treatment of girls’ education, which features little in this analysis. Still, the overall canvas is impressively broad, although tilted toward events in Senegal.

Eight chapters take the reader from the founding of the colonial school system in 1903 to African responses in the postwar period, following the establishment of the French Fourth Republic in 1946 and the granting of citizenship to all Africans in colonial territories. Although the period of independence and decolonization lies outside the scope of the book, an epilogue addresses the legacy of colonial schooling; ten years prior to independence a mere 4.2 percent of the school-age population attended schools, and the numbers of those who obtained the secondary school-leaving degree, the baccalauréat, had only reached 250 per year in the mid-1950s. As a result, the African countries that acquired independence between 1958 and 1960––Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal––were strikingly ill-prepared for independence in education, leading to a series of bilateral agreements that would continue French influence throughout the twentieth century.

The book's first two chapters focus on the Four Communes in Senegal, where the presence of missionary schools, rights-bearing originaires, European traders, and a sizable Catholic métis population posed specific challenges to the homogenizing and normalizing initiatives of colonial educational authorities. Gamble describes the conflicting visions underlying the establishment of the colonial school system, tracing the increasing success of segregationist principals. Governor General William Ponty's arrival in 1908 was an important step in this process, as he sought to link rural and regional schools with “natives,” and urban schools with Europeans. Inspector of Education Georges Hardy's reforms prior to World War I took a somewhat different tack, but nonetheless contributed to creating a system of colonial education for all of the AOF that limited originaire exceptionalism. Known for his interest in professionalizing the colonial teaching corps through inspectors and competitive exams, he promoted a hierarchical school system grounded in colonial realities. By highlighting the originaire response to these measures, particularly in the years following the war, Gamble shows how messy the situation was on the ground while revealing the importance of educational debates in the early 1920s. As the originaires acquired citizenship and Senegalese deputies acquired a voice in the French parliament, the issue of what sort of schools should serve whom could not be resolved tidily. Still, by 1924, guidelines clearly distinguished between European classes with a French curricula reserved for the “European and assimilated element” students whose “maternal language is French” (p. 69), while the vast majority of the subject population studied an “adapted” colonial curricula.

Chapters three and four explore colonial school reform in the interwar period, emphasizing how attention to the interior of the federation and on rural schools shifted the terms of the discussion, with a notable impact on how future African schoolteachers were trained within the prestigious École William Ponty, founded in 1903. Reforms in 1930 proclaimed the need to develop rural schools that addressed local realities: “It's about practical, concrete and collective education,” argued Inspector of Education Albert Charton (p. 80). In the context of the Depression, the concern to promote paysans noirs (black peasants) increased, while clamping down on the educational ambitions of the seventy-two regional schools, which were seen as encouraging unattainable ambitions. Changes in the curriculum of the École William Ponty mirrored this increasing focus on ensuring African schoolteachers would not seek assimilation. Gamble emphasizes, however, that the move to rural schools met with resistance in the coastal regions of Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Dahomey, where early colonial schools had existed. And within the École William Ponty, students and graduates took advantage of opportunities to study in France or to perform in theatrical productions, fashioning identities that failed to conform to colonial expectations.

The final four chapters situate the debates about colonial education within the shifting political context of the Popular Front government (1936–38), the conservative Vichy reaction during World War II, and then the postwar Gaullist efforts to develop a system of mass education. The figure of Senghor holds central stage as Gamble explores how Senegalese elites responded to the cultural opportunities of the Popular Front government. Although the French-educated Senghor's defense of Negro-African civilization placed him within the anti-assimilation camp, he nonetheless insisted on the importance of general education within rural schools and emphasized the importance of African agency in their educational choices. The issue of African “cultural advancement” took an increasingly polemical turn in the context of Vichy's National Revolution, as debates within the journal Dakar-Jeunes reveal. While some Africans preached forms of cultural nationalism, the defense of a more hybrid understanding of the relationship between French and African culture dominated. These debates emerged full force in postwar French West Africa as African elites increasingly demanded access to secondary education. Most interestingly, Gamble shows how African elites joined with metropolitan reformers to promote reforms that colonial officials opposed on the ground. Jean Capelle is the emblematic metropolitan figure, whose arrival in 1947 as director general of education in the AOF sparked a series of integrationist measures that dismantled the segregationist system established in the early decades of the century and incorporated the AOF into the metropolitan organization of academies in 1950. But the existence of French West Africa was by then increasingly being called into question. Educational reform was indeed a political issue and African politicians seized opportunities without buying into a vision of transforming Africans into French people, setting the stage for misunderstandings about an educated citizenry that would durably mark the decolonization process.