In April of 1956, in the midst of the upheaval of the Algerian War and increasing calls for autonomy in France's sub-Saharan African colonies, the organization of Catholic African students in France issued a declaration following their first annual convention, held in the southern university town of Pau.Footnote 1 The declaration began, ‘We, the Catholic students of Black Africa in France, reaffirm our desire to stay simultaneously entirely Christian and entirely African; we cannot, in any circumstances or under any kind of pressure, choose between these two loyalties.’Footnote 2 Yet the rest of the statement reflected how difficult it was to maintain this dual identity as tension over the future of the French African colonies mounted. Though conceived for a broader public, the declaration was aimed primarily at French Catholics and the missionary wing of the Catholic Church in French Africa. Through rhetoric that emphasized their Catholic faith, the students hoped to persuade French believers and missionary clergy of the evils of colonialism and enlist their support for African autonomy. ‘We affirm our attachment to the natural right of African peoples to self-determination’, they announced. ‘Rather than diminishing this attachment, our faith reinforces it, because it aims at the liberation and the spiritual blossoming of man.’Footnote 3 The students argued that French Catholic support of their endeavors would help them resolve the tension between their potentially conflicting allegiances: ‘We ask French Catholics to make the necessary effort to understand the demands of this double loyalty to the church and to Africa’, they affirmed. ‘Their refusal to make this effort will only reinforce the impression of some of our compatriots that we risk being less African because we are Christians.’Footnote 4 Thus, they highlighted the delicacy of their position between French and African publics, while calling for change in French Catholic attitudes.
The students closed their declaration with four statements that were highly controversial in 1956, when the majority of the French public did not support Algerian independence.Footnote 5 First, they ‘solemnly reaffirme[d] that a “duty to decolonize” exists for all colonized countries, including Algeria’, which, they claimed, rested on the right of self-determination of all peoples. Second, the students ‘deplore[d] the complicity of certain Catholics, who make the peaceful attainment of independence by colonized peoples dangerously difficult, by their writings, by their words and by their influence more generally, and who nourish an unfortunate conflation of missionary evangelism and the colonial system’. Third, they
declare[d] with emotion that the use of so-called ‘tirailleurs sénégalais’ [African soldiers] in a colonial war such as that in Algeria poses a grave moral problem; clashes profoundly with our Christian spirit and our African consciousness; creates a hostile atmosphere between brother peoples; and goes against the basic respect and justice due to African populations.
Finally, they ‘demand[ed], in consequence, that all those exercising political, social, or religious power in France and Africa try as hard as possible to end such a pernicious abuse’.Footnote 6 This attack on French colonial rule and particular elements within the Catholic Church was radical in all of its dimensions. Its stridency is all the more striking considering that its authors were a group of devout Catholics, when it is the communists who are best known for critiquing colonialism and the Catholic Church in mid-century France.
Though their numbers were small, militant Catholic African students in France were at the forefront of denouncing the persistence of French rule in Africa and of pushing the Catholic Church to distance itself from colonial regimes in the 1950s.Footnote 7 The 1956 declaration was only one example of the public dialogue they initiated in that turbulent decade. The students occupied a unique position in relation to Africa, to France, and to the Catholic Church, all three of which were coping with profound and rapid change in the postwar period. Fourth Republic France, recently emerged from humiliating defeat and occupation by the Germans in the Second World War, wrestled with domestic political polarization, with turmoil in its colonies, and with its status as a diminished power in the Cold War world. In 1954, France lost the war to keep control of Indochina, and began a bloody fight to preserve its hegemony in Algeria. The Catholic students’ declaration in 1956 appeared on the heels of Tunisian and Moroccan independence, which reduced the French Empire, apart from some small island possessions, to war-torn Algeria and a large swath of West and Central Africa.
Things were not static in French sub-Saharan Africa either, however. Beginning in 1946, France aggressively reinvested in its African possessions, increasing spending on infrastructure, health, and education through so-called FIDES funds.Footnote 8 Yet this renewed effort did not stem mounting African demands for more autonomy. Just two months after the students' declaration in 1956, the French National Assembly approved the loi-cadre (framework law), which devolved more power to locally elected assemblies in the colonies.Footnote 9 The future of Africa – political, economic, social, and religious – was a hot topic among African and French elites in the mid-1950s. ‘Black Africa is on the agenda’, noted Robert Sastre, a priest and future bishop from Dahomey who served as a mentor to Catholic African students in France.Footnote 10
The swift changes in French sub-Saharan Africa also preoccupied the leadership of the Catholic Church, which appeared to be closely tied to the colonial order there, despite a history of friction with French authorities.Footnote 11 In the 1950s, in Africa and elsewhere, the church grappled anew with an old question: whether it would stand with established powers against new social and political currents, or if it would side with restive, oppressed constituencies who were demanding that the church honor its own rhetoric of justice and universality.Footnote 12 The Vatican had long anticipated the possible departure of European powers from their colonies and had issued two interwar directives urging European missionaries to concentrate on training indigenous clergy to lead autonomous local churches in Africa and Asia.Footnote 13 Yet on the eve of independence, the Catholic hierarchy in French Africa was almost entirely composed of French prelates and the clergy were overwhelmingly European in origin.Footnote 14 In 1958, for example, there were 794 European and 127 African priests in French West Africa, and 354 European and 42 African priests in French Equatorial Africa, giving the impression that the church was still predominately a European institution.Footnote 15 Moreover, in the 1950s the church was more closely linked financially to the French colonial state in Africa than it had been since the turn of the century.Footnote 16 French authorities systematically disbursed large quantities of FIDES funds to mission schools and dispensaries. For example, in fiscal year 1956–7, FIDES allocated 8,300,000 metropolitan francs for nine health projects and 415,200,000 francs for 91 education initiatives across French West Africa, the vast majority of which were undertaken by Catholic missions.Footnote 17 The cash-strapped missions were delighted to have the funding, even if it visibly tied them to the colonial regime.
In a 1957 encyclical entitled Fidei Donum, which addressed the state of Catholic missions and placed a special emphasis on Africa, Pope Pius XII observed, ‘the greater part of Africa is undergoing such speedy changes in social, economic, and political life, that the entire future of that continent appears to depend on their outcome.’Footnote 18Fidei Donum betrayed the church's anxiety about its future in Africa, especially given what the Vatican referred to as the temptations of ‘atheistic materialism’ (communism) and ‘technological’ society. Recognizing the importance of the educated African elite in shaping that future, the encyclical exhorted European Catholics to ‘be especially careful to bestow spiritual care upon the youths from Africa or Asia, who perchance are resident in your dioceses for the purpose of continuing their studies’. The pontiff worried that the ‘Christian lives’ of these students might be ‘endangered’ if they lacked support while they were abroad, and that would have serious ramifications for ‘their present and future careers’.Footnote 19 The church was trying to maintain a delicate balance in Africa – forced to continue to rely on Europeans, it also wanted to safeguard its relationship with potentially powerful African allies as independence looked increasingly inevitable.
Meanwhile, militant Catholic African students cultivated a critical stance vis-à-vis colonial and church authorities that was born of their intertwined struggles as Africans, Catholics, and students in the often inhospitable metropole. As it turned out, many French believers did not reach out to African Catholics in their midst. Instead, the students frequently found their French co-religionists to be racist and unsympathetic to African aspirations for autonomy. At the same time, however, the students encountered clergy in the metropole, of both French and colonial origin, who were much more supportive of decolonization than many French missionaries in Africa. Together with these mentors, the students used Catholic rhetoric to push the church, and the French Catholic public, to support African independence. Their radicalism was part and parcel of their deeply personal quest to harmonize their Catholic and African identities as they self-consciously molded themselves into an elite that would return to Africa to lead.
Despite the fact that they disseminated their ideas quite widely, Catholic African students have not attracted much scholarly attention. French and African scholars have produced several studies of African students in France in the 1950s, and in particular of the secular Federation of Black African Students in France (FEANF), the largest student group active in France, yet they rarely mention the Organization of Catholic African students.Footnote 20 When Catholic students do surface in accounts of the period, they have been almost uniformly characterized as moderates. Charles-Edouard Harang, for example, describes them as ‘members of an elite focused on modernization and compromise that looked more towards emancipation within the colonial context than to veritable independence’.Footnote 21 In their assessment of Tam-Tam, the magazine of the Organization of Catholic African Students, Nicolas Bancel and Jean Devisse label its tone as ‘moderate’.Footnote 22 In his history of the FEANF, Amady Aly Dieng reproduces this conclusion, while Charles Diané also calls Tam-Tam ‘more moderate’ but does note that it was ‘firmly supportive of African liberation and African unity’.Footnote 23 The insistence that the Organization of Catholic African students in France was moderate in orientation, which is contradicted by much of the evidence, seems to result from a conception of politics that equates radicalism primarily with communism. It may also reflect a persistence of the perception, which the students mentioned in their declaration, that Catholics were somehow less authentically ‘African’.Footnote 24 In actual fact, however, the organization of Catholic African students consistently assailed French colonialism and the Catholic Church in the mid-1950s. Indeed, their statement declaring the duty to decolonize and denouncing the war in Algeria in April of 1956 preceded a co-declaration in support of Algerian independence by the FEANF and activist students in Dakar by two months.Footnote 25
The case of African Catholic students in France in the 1950s highlights the role of Catholics and Catholicism in processes of decolonization, as well as the fact that the ‘decolonization’ of the church itself in French colonial Africa has been largely neglected, with a few local exceptions.Footnote 26 Historians, particularly those outside of the church, have tended to focus on the role of religious missions as handmaidens or opponents of the establishment and maintenance of formal colonial rule rather than on how they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the French departure from the continent. Yet Catholicism is one of the most significant legacies of European intervention in Africa, and one of the most enduring avenues of continued intercontinental contact, especially now as many African clergy take up positions in European parishes. The ways that Catholics and the Catholic Church negotiated the transitions of decolonization therefore merit more scholarly attention. The Catholic Church, a multifaceted and complicated institution, was haltingly coming to terms with an emerging new world order as European colonial empires dissolved. In the case of French Africa, the prospect of decolonization sowed division among Catholics across the boundaries of metropole and colony, revealing the church's internal fragmentation and how bound it was to the temporal politics of empire. Moreover, it showed that French Catholic authorities were increasingly reacting to, rather than leading, their African ‘protégés’.
CATHOLIC AFRICAN STUDENTS IN THE METROPOLE
In the early 1950s, the relationship between Catholic African students in France and the church evolved rapidly, and not necessarily in directions envisioned by French missionaries who were working in the students’ colonies of origin. In the late 1940s, concerned about the potentially destructive effects of exposure to materialism, communism, and atheism on the faith of Catholic Africans who traveled to the metropole to study, Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, the most senior prelate and the pope's delegate in French sub-Saharan Africa, founded a ministry in Paris for Catholic students from the colonies.Footnote 27 Anticipating Pius XII's position in Fidei Donum (which he helped to draft), Lefebvre's goal was to safeguard the faith of a Catholic elite: he wrote that these students would have a great influence, ‘for good or bad, on the spiritual orientation of their homelands’.Footnote 28 In helping students maintain their Catholicism in the wilds of the metropole, the church was thus making an investment in its future in Africa, and in the future of Africa more broadly, as Lefebvre understood it.Footnote 29
Lefebvre, as his famous rejection of Vatican II would later illustrate, was a deeply conservative traditionalist who was pessimistic about that future in the 1950s, especially in the event of a European departure from the African continent.Footnote 30 In 1953, he outlined his vision for sub-Saharan Africa in Ecclésia magazine, lamenting how little the imperial regimes of France and Britain had done to advance Catholicism as a civilizing force in their domains. ‘Only religion, and the Catholic religion in particular, can bring peace and prosperity to Africa’, he wrote.
Only Catholicism can solve the problem of mutual aid and cooperation between metropoles and colonies, because only Catholicism provides the true principles that govern human societies. It is the only force that sets limits on authorities while prescribing respect and obedience to the governed.Footnote 31
Lefebvre complained that France, through its ‘laicism and favors for Islam’ and Britain, through its ‘indifference to religion’ had demonstrated remarkable incomprehension of African affairs. ‘They are reaping what they have sown’, he lectured, as anticolonial agitation mounted.Footnote 32 In Lefebvre's mind, Africa would either become Catholic, ‘realizing its aspirations of simplicity, honesty and religiosity’, or it would ‘confirm its vices of polygamy, domination of the weak and superstition, and abandon itself to Islam’.Footnote 33 In his view, continued European intervention was necessary to steer Africa towards that rosy Catholic future.
Lefebvre's strong opinions offended some French and African Catholics (not to mention Muslims), but also had many adherents, particularly among an older generation of French missionaries in the African colonies. Jacques Adande, a Catholic student from Dahomey at the University of Dakar, complained of this missionary tendency in a 1960 letter to Monsignor Robert Chopard-Lallier, the French missionary prelate of Parakou (in Northern Dahomey). Adande related that he and his peers were greatly concerned about contemporary African political and social problems, but suggested the church was not making it easy for them to engage with those problems as Africans. ‘We do not always find the comprehension we expect from certain men of the church’, Adande wrote. ‘Few of them are as open-minded as you are, and many of them harbor too many prejudices. And very often, in an Africa in the midst of upheaval, they do harm to the church. Certain mentalities must evolve.’Footnote 34 Adande's comments suggest that even by 1960, many French missionaries were professing views that were out of step with African political and social realities, and which reinforced the perception that the Catholic Church was a reactionary holdover from the colonial era.
Lefebvre's Parisian ministry for colonial students did not end up aligning with his conservative vision, however. Instead, Catholic African students and the clergy who worked closely with them transformed the ministry headquarters, on the rue Thibaud in the fourteenth arrondissement, into a hotbed of activism that decried both French colonial rule and elements within the Catholic Church that wanted to maintain it. In 1950, Lefebvre appointed his fellow Spiritan Joseph Michel, who was then running an association of educated Catholic Africans in the French Congo, to take charge of the Parisian ministry. Lefebvre may have thought that because Michel came from a very conservative Catholic milieu in Brittany, and because he had extensive experience working with African elites, he would be the ideal person to keep students from the colonies on the straight and narrow in Paris.Footnote 35 If so, the bishop miscalculated. Michel was not wholly exempt from the prejudices of his day, and he harbored a tinge of the paternalism that dominated French relations with Africans in the era. Nonetheless, he recognized and endorsed the validity of Catholic African students’ political claims, to Lefebvre's dismay. Michel, often assisted by priests of African, Antillean, and Madagascan origin, served as chief chaplain to all colonial students in Paris until 1958.Footnote 36
The office in the rue Thibaud became the nerve center of Catholic African student life in Paris and France as a whole. For most of the students, the move to the metropole was a material and spiritual struggle. Affordable lodging and food were scarce in France, especially in Paris, and many French landlords were unwilling to rent to them. Students also encountered new and unfamiliar academic settings, where they found it hard to connect socially with their French peers.Footnote 37 Many of them were profoundly bewildered and disappointed by the lax observance and indifference of many Catholics in France. The ministry provided spiritual guidance, helped them with practical matters such as finding lodging and enrolling in classes, and encouraged them to publicize their experiences in France and their aspirations for Africa. The main vehicle of this publicity was the magazine Tam-Tam, which first appeared in 1952 with the subtitle ‘Monthly Bulletin of Catholic African Students’.Footnote 38Tam-Tam helped to unite Catholic African students in various parts of France, and also eventually reached students and clergy in Africa itself.Footnote 39 Students did the lion's share of the writing for the magazine, but Father Michel served as editor-in-chief and frequently contributed articles. Tam-Tam also reproduced relevant texts from other publications or speeches by church officials, African leaders, or colonial policymakers and reported on religious and cultural questions in the francophone African world more broadly.
Tam-Tam played a crucial role in trying to help Catholic African students cope with life in France. The very first issue contained a questionnaire designed to elicit information about the difficulties of the transition to life in the metropole. Entitled ‘Were we prepared for our life in France?’, it urged its readers to study the questions with their friends and submit answers that would be published in the magazine, and, perhaps distributed as a brochure to the students who came after them. The questionnaire asked about social, religious, and academic matters, and emphasized the disconnection many Catholic African students experienced between their expectations of France and the realities they encountered there. The answer to the title's rhetorical question was no – they had not been prepared. ‘Let us do for them what we wish had been done for us’, it exhorted.Footnote 40
One handwritten response to the survey survives. Compiled by two students from Dahomey who were studying in Saumur, it illustrates some of the shock and disillusionment Catholic African students experienced upon arrival in the metropole. First of all, they found France underwhelming in a physical sense – they had expected an ‘extremely beautiful’ country, and although they saw some ‘magnificent’ places, they did not, on the whole, find them ‘extraordinary’. The students also felt disappointed by Catholicism in France. They had been warned about ‘corruption’ among both French and African students in the metropole, but were still ‘scandalized’ by Catholic African students who had followed the example of their French colleagues and abandoned their religious zeal. They felt obligated to ‘preach religious renewal’ to one such student they met in Marseille. Citing a conversation with a lapsed French Catholic student, one of them wrote, ‘I have deduced that nearly all of the Christians in France care very little about the Christian religion. We have concluded that the Catholic religion is in decline.’ Despite these encounters, however, they insisted that their own faith was not shaken.Footnote 41
The two students concluded their response with a sample letter they addressed to ‘Raoul’, whom they imagined as a fellow young Catholic African who would be coming to France to study in the fall. The letter neatly summed up the twin priorities of many Catholic African students in France by combining a passionate plea for piety with an exhortation to work for the betterment of Africa. ‘The most precious advice I can give you is … Pay attention! Listen to me! … is to never forget that you are Catholic’, it read. ‘I want you to think of God and remain as fervent as you have always been in Africa.’ It went on to recommend frequent communion, avoidance of ‘cafés, hotels, scandalous spectacles’ and women, while warning of the debauchery of students in France. It closed with ‘the intellectual question’, which it deemed of ‘capital importance’. ‘That's why you are coming to France’, the students wrote. ‘Work, work, relentlessly!’ they exhorted. ‘Keep the goal of contributing to the AWAKENING of your country, Africa, constantly in front of you. “God helps those who help themselves,” according to a famous saying. So help us better our lot and God will give us a powerful hand’, they concluded.Footnote 42
Beyond the disorientation associated with arrival in the metropole and spiritual upheaval, finding a place to live was a particularly thorny problem for Catholic African students, and house-hunting frequently exposed them to French racism. Some of the lycées in the provinces and some scholarships provided housing, but most of the African students in France had to find places to live on their own in an unwelcoming environment. By the mid-1950s, there were some officially sponsored options, such as the Pavillon de la France d'Outre-Mer in the Cité Universitaire and the Hôtel de la Porte-Dorée (both in Paris), but they could only accommodate a small portion of the demand. The Pavillon, for example, could house 250, but not all the rooms there ended up going to colonial students. In 1953, only 210 of the 4,500 students from the colonies in Paris found accommodation there. Some of the overseas territories, including French West Africa and Madagascar, purchased buildings to house their students in Paris, but they too were insufficient – there were only 74 students in the West African building in 1953, a fraction of the total in Paris.Footnote 43 Many students ended up in cheap and tawdry hotels, or renting rooms from private individuals.Footnote 44 Living in a hotel could be very isolating, and students who did not go out and build a support network could slip easily into depression. If they fell sick in the winter (a common occurrence for Africans not used to the European climate), they could end up suffering alone for days before anyone noticed. Housing was particularly challenging for female African students, as many landlords or room-renters preferred male tenants who did not ask to use kitchen or laundry facilities and tended to stay out all day.Footnote 45
The ministry in the rue Thibaud tried to improve African students’ access to housing, and to combat the prejudices that kept French people from renting to them. In the fall of 1953, it made broad newspaper and radio appeals and distributed tracts in Paris soliciting housing for its students.Footnote 46 The following year, the ministry assembled a press kit for the Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (JEC), the French Catholic Youth organization, to sensitize French Catholics to the difficulties colonial students faced.Footnote 47 Several of the component documents exposed the racism of Catholic French landlords in alternately shocking and comic terms. For example, Father Michel related how two elderly French Catholic matrons overcame their prejudices to become surrogate mothers of African students. In one case, the French woman in question reacted to Michel's initial proposal to host an African by blurting out, ‘But I've heard that they bite!’ Michel explained that because of her age, the woman had likely been told fanciful stories of cannibals from the early colonial era. Eventually she got over her fears, and became very solicitous of the student that Michel sent her, tending his health assiduously with home remedies.Footnote 48 In another case, when the potential French hostess saw that the medical student Michel sent her was black she turned him away from her door, making up a story about how she had just rented her spare room to a clergyman. Displaying a common fear among potential French housing providers she worried, ‘What will the landlord say? The neighbors?’ Two days later, however, she called Michel back and said that her grown children had told her she should take the student, who she admitted she had found very polite. Six months later, when the student moved to be closer to his university, she called Michel to ask if he could find her another African student to take care of.Footnote 49
These stories, though they ended well, nonetheless reveal the painful rejection that Catholic African students often experienced from fellow believers in the metropole. This rejection, along with the variety of other hardships that accompanied the move to France, was an important factor in the development of Catholic African student activism and political agitation. The hostility and indifference of French Catholics and the climate of laicism and skepticism in the metropole made the delicate balancing act of being both Catholic and African all the more difficult. Some individual students, feeling as though they had to choose between their African and Catholic selves, abandoned their faith. Committed Catholic African student activists responded to these challenges by working for better conditions for African students in the metropole, but also by championing decolonization. From their perspective, it was not enough to sensitize French Catholics to the ugliness and iniquity of racism. They needed to go further and persuade French Catholics and the hierarchy of the French church of the righteousness of decolonization, as well as the necessity of making the church an institution in which Africans were valued equals, not subordinates.
Though their numbers were much smaller than those of the FEANF, the knot of activists who formed the Organization of Catholic African Students, which had branches in major university towns, boasted a stunning array of intellectual firepower. Their ranks included individuals who would go on to make significant professional and political contributions in independent Africa. The most vocal of these was Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the first African to become agrégé d'histoire in France, who remained politically active and became a distinguished scholar of African history in his native Upper Volta (Burkina Faso).Footnote 50 Jean Pliya, the internationally known Beninese author, playwright, government minister, and historian, served as the group's president, as did Nicolas Toufic, who became an eye doctor and a crusader against endemic disease across West Africa.Footnote 51 Two other African medical pioneers were part of the Catholic student circle: Alexis Codjia, the first Beninese surgeon at the Centre National Hospitalier et Universitaire (originally the Hôpital Hubert Maga) in Cotonou and Raymond Johnson, who got his MD at the University of Paris in 1961 and became Togo's leading psychiatrist.Footnote 52Tam-Tam's pages feature numerous contributions from Paulin Joachim, the Beninese poet and journalist, who had gone to France to study law at the Catholic University of Lyon, but dropped out for financial reasons in the early 1950s.Footnote 53 The group also included Paul Kaya, an engineering student from Congo-Brazzaville who later served as a minister in the independent Republic of the Congo; Richard Dogbeh, the famous Beninese writer who also served as a minister in the 1960s; and Emmanuel Olory-Togbe, a Beninese who went on to become a mathematics teacher at the Lycée Behanzin in Porto-Novo.Footnote 54
These militant students interacted with broader secular and religious African and pan-African movements in France. They were in close contact with a handful of young African clergy who were studying in Europe, and who went on to be leaders within the African church. Like the students, these priests were struggling with their dual identities as Africans and Catholics, and were also pushing the church to change from the inside. Robert Sastre, the Beninese priest quoted earlier, made frequent contributions to Tam-Tam and served as an assistant chaplain in the rue Thibaud for a time. In 1956, Sastre wrote a contribution entitled ‘The Roman Liturgy and Negritude’ for a book of essays entitled Des prêtres noirs s'intérrogent. The essay collection, written exclusively by francophone African and Haitian clergy, was jointly published by Présence Africaine and the Dominican press Cerf in 1956. Présence Africaine, both a publishing house and a periodical, was the epicenter of the negritude movement in Paris. Its focus was literary and cultural, but it firmly promoted decolonization and the improvement of black fortunes across the globe. Des prêtres noirs reveals an important and often overlooked Catholic perspective on négritude. Arguing that the church should adapt its liturgy and ceremonies to African sensibilities, Sastre observed, ‘Doesn't Christianity, as it is now, involve a risk of alienation for the Negro? In other words, can the Negro be Christian without renouncing his negritude?’ he asked.Footnote 55
Sastre and his collaborators were also very concerned that missteps by European churchmen were alienating the future African elite. Together with the Togolese priest (and future archbishop of Lomé) Robert Dosseh, Sastre authored another contribution to Des prêtres noirs that was highly critical of Catholic missionaries for their role in creating and perpetuating negative European stereotypes of Africans as savage, bloodthirsty, and childish through the Catholic press.Footnote 56 Such press ‘is a source of ambiguity and misunderstanding, obscures real problems, and distances the young African elite from anything having to do with missions’, they warned.Footnote 57 European missionaries who denigrated African culture, they argued, were ‘quartermasters of a civilization and no longer the purveyors of the message of Christ, which should be incarnate in all civilizations’.Footnote 58 Their message, which was the central thrust of the book, was that Africans should become Catholics by remaining African, not by renouncing their culture and embracing a flawed European civilization that was not their own, and European priests should facilitate this process rather than obstruct it.
Catholic African students were also connected to broader black cultural networks in Paris through Alioune Diop, the Senegalese Muslim convert to Catholicism and professor of literature who directed Présence Africaine. Diop, a central figure in the black literary world, took a particular interest in Catholic African students and they referred to him as an ‘older brother’.Footnote 59 In 1952, Diop compiled a special issue of Présence Africaine entitled ‘Black Students Speak’, and included Catholic perspectives with articles by Joseph Ki-Zerbo and Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo.Footnote 60 Tchidimbo was a young priest from Guinea who had recently completed seminary in France and who went on to become the first African archbishop of Conakry.Footnote 61 In his preface to the student issue, Diop stated that students were to be Europe's primary partners as it ‘recovered its human vocation’ after ‘losing its soul’ by ‘deifying itself’ and setting itself up as superior to other peoples. Europe's task now, he argued, was to create ‘institutions’ to provide for the security of all people, and to facilitate conversation between peoples and individuals across the world. The students from the colonies in France, who formed the core of the elite of their respective territories, were to play a crucial role in representing their peoples in this new dialogue and help build institutions that were open to all – they were not there to merely adopt French ways.Footnote 62
Though he did not mention the church explicitly in the preface to the student issue, Diop's stance was similar to that of the priests in Des prêtres noirs and Tchidimbo's book, insofar that he felt that Africans could bring new perspectives that could be incorporated into global institutions. The same year, Diop wrote an open letter to the president of the Organization of Catholic African Students, published in Tam-Tam, on what he called ‘the old problem of assimilation’.Footnote 63 Though Diop did not directly confront the question of whether Africans who adopted the Catholic faith were ‘assimilating’ to European norms in a negative or traitorous way, the piece intimated that he felt there was no inherent contradiction between being African and Catholic. He argued that assimilation in itself was not a problem, as long as Africans could freely participate in institutions that guaranteed individual liberty. He argued that ‘the faith’, (by which he meant Catholicism), in Europe should not consist solely of adherence to dogma that could not be questioned or challenged by critical thinking. ‘Faith lives by confronting events and new ideas’, he wrote, suggesting that the church should incorporate the perspectives of Africans, as well as encouraging the students to hold on to their faith in the face of adversity.Footnote 64
Elite Catholic African students’ contacts with the negritude milieu surrounding Diop and Présence Africaine revealed that some of them simultaneously cultivated local, African, and pan-African identities. The rue Thibaud was also the headquarters of the Catholic student associations of the Antilles and of Madagascar, and thus the Africans were constantly in touch with black students from around the empire. Each group published its own magazine – the Antilleans put out Alizés and the Madagascans, Fehim-Pihavanana – but there was significant overlap between the publications. Indeed, Maddy (Madeleine) Lastel, a Guyanese student, served as secretary to the editor for Tam-Tam and Alizés in the mid-1950s, and frequently contributed articles to both.Footnote 65 There was some friction between Antilleans and Africans in France, which derived partially from longstanding white French perspectives (shared by some Antilleans) that Antilleans were more ‘civilized’ than Africans. In 1955, Lastel traced the history of these tensions in a lengthy article in Tam-Tam, entitled, ‘Do Antilleans and Africans Understand Each Other?’Footnote 66 She concluded that at least the Catholic representatives of both groups had forged fraternity and unity on the basis of their common faith. ‘We are members of a community that respects and absorbs differences, in which each individual can freely pursue his or her “fundamental project”’, she affirmed.Footnote 67
As both Lastel's and Sastre's writings demonstrate, Catholicism was not an obstacle, and could even be a pathway, to participation in broader pan-African circles. Ki-Zerbo, the leading Catholic African student spokesman in the mid-1950s, did not operate in a Catholic silo. He was also active in the FEANF and helped to found its sub-association of students from Upper Volta.Footnote 68 Yet his indefatigable activity for the Organization of Catholic African students revealed that his faith remained a priority as he agitated for change in Africa. Those, like him, who belonged to the Catholic African student association, wanted to change the church from within to bring it into line with their hopes for Africa, thereby resolving the tension between the ‘African’ and ‘Catholic’ aspects of their identities. They insisted that African Catholic students could be active militants for their church and their continent at the same time.
AN ‘AUTHENTIC’ ANTICOLONIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
African Catholic students’ faith was both a resource and a liability for their activism. On the one hand, they felt obliged to fend off accusations that conversion to a ‘European’ faith had diminished their African-ness, especially when French Catholics, or members of the church hierarchy, were insensitive to them personally or belittled African aspirations for independence. As Ki-Zerbo observed in the article he wrote for the student issue of Présence Africaine, as Catholicism could be considered a ‘French import’ to Africa, conversion and devotion to it was viewed in some quarters as the ‘“nec plus ultra” of “assimilation”’ and amounted to ‘suicide’ of an African's ‘own personality’.Footnote 69 On the other hand, Catholic teachings provided student activists with ammunition to criticize those who did not share their anticolonial views. Catholic rhetoric about universality and justice became a powerful weapon they could deploy against conservative and pro-colonial interests inside the church itself.
In 1954, for example, the students and their mentors got the church hierarchy's attention with a provocative publicity offensive that marshaled Catholic teachings to support decolonization. It began in February, when Father Michel delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Duty to Decolonize’ at Pax Christi headquarters in Paris, and which he subsequently published in all of the colonial Catholic student magazines.Footnote 70 In fact, the lecture repeated some themes that had first emerged in a Tam-Tam article written by an African contributor in 1952.Footnote 71 Michel offered a reading of the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria's writings on Spanish activity in the Americas as a basis for Catholic anticolonialism. His central contention was that Vitoria showed that colonizers had a duty to put the welfare of colonized peoples first and ‘tutor’ them only until they could run their own affairs. This part of the argument was not particularly radical – it still seemed to endorse a European ‘civilizing mission’ of other peoples. Michel went on to say, however, that there were scarcely any cases of historical colonization where the colonizers had actually prioritized the wellbeing or development of colonized people, an implicit condemnation of France's management of its empire. This argument, which reverberated throughout the francophone Catholic press, outraged conservative forces within the French church and embroiled Michel in an ongoing theological debate about Vitoria's writings.Footnote 72 Monsignor Lefebvre, horrified, chastised Michel for his ‘extreme’ stance in a private letter.Footnote 73
Later in 1954, in the wake of the uproar surrounding ‘The Duty to Decolonize,’ Tam-Tam produced a special issue entitled, ‘The Catholic Hierarchy and Colonial Ethics’. This hefty volume of nearly ninety pages compiled numerous speeches, writings, and protests by Catholic clergy, primarily from France and its empire between the 1880s and the 1950s. It touched on a variety of topics, including forced labor, racism, Catholic social teachings, and the emancipation of the colonies, in an attempt to demonstrate that Catholic anticolonialism had long been alive and well in the French context.Footnote 74 It embodied the tension inherent in the students’ goal to steer the church towards their anticolonial position, which they represented as its ‘true’ teachings. Readers might well have concluded from the evidence presented in the volume that the church had always been militantly opposed to colonialism, though the express purpose of the issue was to win over the numerous French Catholics who did not yet support decolonization, as well as to burnish the church's anticolonial credentials among colonized populations.
As Catholic African students and their mentors drew more public attention to their positions, they had more opportunities to interact with senior members of the church. In December 1954, in the wake of the special Tam-Tam issue on the church hierarchy, Maurice Cardinal Feltin, the archbishop of Paris, paid a visit to the rue Thibaud. Ki-Zerbo, who addressed the archbishop on behalf of the assembled students, proudly vaunted the students’ accomplishments in their internal spiritual domains, as well as their work to publicize their point of view in the press. Yet the bulk of his speech had an edge to it – Ki-Zerbo presented a much more negative view of the church than the special issue had. Ki-Zerbo openly challenged the cardinal to expand his point of view. His argument was that African Catholic students ‘lived Catholicism’ in a particular economic, sociological, and political context.
If the ambition of a true apostle is to be Greek among the Greeks, Jewish among the Jews (and therefore black or Malagasy with us), it follows that one cannot pretend to move towards colonial youth, nor to call them to the Christian ideal, without comprehending the existential climate in which they live.Footnote 75
Ki-Zerbo went on to present Feltin with a list of the church's shortcomings, as the students saw them. He cited the ‘problem of the attitude of the church vis-à-vis the fact and law of colonialism’. He criticized missionary silence on colonialism, which he defined as ‘methods of injustice and racism that too often accompany colonization’. He raised student concern over how Catholicism was presented and taught to colonized populations – what he called the ‘adaptation’ and ‘incarnation’ of Catholicism in the colonies. Much like the African priests who would soon publish Des prêtres noirs s'interrogent, he decried missionaries’ emphasis on assimilation, which led them to dismiss and denigrate indigenous culture, instead of finding ways to integrate church practice and teaching with local traditions. Ki-Zerbo also criticized French Catholics for their poor reception of African Catholic students in the metropole. Finally, he evoked the specter of the church as a ‘harlequin’ in colonial lands – wearing a coat of many colors that it adapted to circumstances, such as colonialism, rather than its ‘divine robe, without embroidery, consistent across time and place’. He called for a condemnation ‘from the highest Catholic authorities’ of the ‘sin’ of colonialism, and took aim at the French church in particular. ‘Certainly, we do not doubt that Our Holy Father the Pope is attentive to these serious problems’, he said, ‘but what of the French church, glorious pioneer of the faith – does it not have a special vocation in this regard?’Footnote 76 As Feltin was the most prominent member of the French church, this was tantamount to a personal attack.
In his response, Cardinal Feltin reproduced the student strategy by insisting on the justice of Catholic principles. He also tried to blunt student criticism by enveloping them in his portrayal of the church. He was particularly struck, he said, by Ki-Zerbo's suggestion that the church wore a ‘harlequin's coat’. ‘This accusation makes all of us suffer’, he said, ‘you and me, because we know that it is fundamentally untrue, because we are convinced that the church remains true to herself, and does not vary her Law and her principles according to circumstances.’Footnote 77 Feltin maintained that the church had always ‘condemned injustice in all circumstances’ and cited some of the same authors and prelates that had appeared in the Tam-Tam special issue. He also asserted, in response to Ki-Zerbo's call for better missionary accommodation of indigenous customs, that the church ‘had always perceived the necessary adaptations’, citing as proof ‘all of the indigenous priests and bishops, that we have had many occasions to meet and admire’.Footnote 78 Finally, the cardinal claimed that the church had ‘always’ been worried about the reception of colonial students in France, and was working towards improving it. Feltin ended his talk on a cautionary note, warning the students not to take their protests too far into the territory of hate, revolution, and bloody combat, which the church abhorred. While it was legitimate to protest grave injustices, he admitted, one had to guard against exaggeration that would spark extremism. The ‘constant view and continual instruction’ of the church was to work for evolution, rather than revolution, or, ‘change that transforms hearts and minds bit by bit, so men can become brothers’.Footnote 79 Feltin thus made it clear that he understood the students’ frustrations but did not endorse their radical stance in its entirety.
Ki-Zerbo described Feltin's visit to the rue Thibaud as ‘a consecration’ of the ministry's and the students’ efforts.Footnote 80 It was certainly evidence of the growing importance of Catholic African student activism in France, and an acknowledgment that the French church hierarchy could no longer ignore it, even if Feltin tried to exert a moderating influence. In the wake of the meeting with the cardinal, the students heightened their profile even further. In 1956, they held their first annual convention at Pau, where they issued their call for decolonization and their denunciation of the Algerian War. At Easter 1957, they made their second annual convention into a pilgrimage to Rome. Two hundred French colonial students from Africa, Madagascar, and the Antilles descended on the world headquarters of Catholicism, where they drafted a set of resolutions regarding the economic, political, social, and religious situation of Africa. Among other things, the resolutions stridently endorsed the independence and sovereignty of black Africa; rejected any French colonial reform initiatives which did not result in complete, unfettered independence; called on Europeans in Africa to stop acting as ‘masters’; called for the education of African women and the protection of African workers; denounced French economic exploitation of Africa; and accused the French FIDES funds of failing to end metropolitan economic subjugation in the colonies.Footnote 81
The students, who had become public relations experts in the course of their campaigns in France, utilized the Rome trip to bring these causes to the attention of the Vatican hierarchy and to push the highest church officials to endorse their point of view. Their primary Vatican interlocutor was Pietro Cardinal Sigismondi, the powerful secretary of the Propaganda Fide, the Vatican bureaucracy in charge of spreading the faith. On the religious front, the students’ resolutions called for a Christian message better adapted to Africa, better religious training and support for lay Catholics so that Christianity in Africa would have a more ‘authentically African’ face, and the cooperation and understanding of European missionaries, who would have to realize and enact the true universality of church by divorcing their faith from their own culture.Footnote 82 In a speech on behalf of the students, attended by Sigismondi, erstwhile spokesman Ki-Zerbo echoed these themes, calling on ‘religious authorities’ to ‘second’ colonial Catholics in their quest for political autonomy. ‘We ask from our Mother church more attentive care and more substantial nourishment’ for our cause, he said. ‘The church, which has taken the part of the weak over and over again for centuries, must be an active presence at the side of colonized peoples at this decisive moment’, he lectured. ‘Should not the church take a solemn position against colonialism?’Footnote 83
The students’ aggressive stance did not sway their listeners entirely, though the respect accorded them showed that the church felt they could not be ignored. Much like Feltin, Sigismondi responded with a call for realism and moderation, and Pope Pius XII, who did not meet personally with the students, chose the same weekend to release Fidei donum.Footnote 84 The encyclical acknowledged the rapid evolution of the situation in Africa and called on both Europeans and Africans to behave with restraint as Africans moved towards political independence, but its main thrust was a desperate appeal for more help for the African missions, before the continent slipped out of the church's grasp. It was certainly not the strident endorsement of African autonomy that the students were calling for, but it was a sign that the Vatican was watching Africa, and Africans, very closely.Footnote 85
CONCLUSION
In 1958, seismic shifts in France, French Africa, and the Vatican opened up new possibilities for Catholic African students. In May of that year, the French Fourth Republic collapsed under pressure from military supporters of the maintenance of French power in Algeria. Charles de Gaulle, who had been out of government since 1946, returned to power and oversaw the writing of a new constitution for France and its empire. This constitution reimagined the French Union as the French Community and called for each colony to hold a referendum on joining it on 28 September. De Gaulle described the community as ‘independence’ with ‘interdependence’, though full independence was not possible within it. Member states would have internal autonomy, but the French president would be the executive of the Union, and a committee of the members would collaborate on foreign policy, currency, defense, external transport, and telecommunications.Footnote 86 De Gaulle carefully lobbied and cultivated African leaders with promises of assistance if their territories joined, and withdrawal of technical expertise and financial help if they did not.Footnote 87
The referendum provided some alumni of the Catholic African Student Organization an opportunity for further radical political engagement. Ki-Zerbo and Pliya were among the co-founders of the National Liberation Movement (MLN) with Albert Tévoédjrè, a Catholic Beninese writer who had been the editor of the FEANF newspaper and Ahmadou Dicko, a student of Spanish literature in Toulouse from Upper Volta.Footnote 88 Though many of the leading personalities were Catholic, the movement was not, but rather nationalist and socialist, and looked to build its base among intellectuals and peasants while choosing nonalignment over ideological affiliation with either side in the Cold War.Footnote 89 Its initial manifesto, which surfaced on 25 August 1958 in Paris and Dakar, called for the ‘liberation of Africa, United States of Africa, African socialism’.Footnote 90 Ki-Zerbo later wrote that the movement (its manifesto rejected the label of ‘party’) privileged independence over unity, as emphasizing unity would delay independence indefinitely, and also served as a way for the colonial powers to ‘divert attention and sow confusion’.Footnote 91
The MLN campaigned furiously against de Gaulle's vision of the French Community, urging Africans to vote no in the referendum. Ki-Zerbo later recalled his intense frustration with the African elite in Ouagadougou, who countered his exhortations for independence with the claim that Upper Volta could not become independent, because ‘economically we have nothing’. Ki-Zerbo, decrying the cowardice and cravenness of African leaders who did French bidding, argued that the fact of ‘having nothing’ after seventy years of French colonization was in itself the best argument for independence.Footnote 92 The MLN's rejection of either a Marxist or Catholic identity did not prevent it from being tarred with both brushes, however. Ki-Zerbo noted that some opponents characterized the MLN leadership as crypto-communist. At the end of his journal detailing the ill-fated campaign, Dicko bitterly denounced the ‘Marxist-Leninists’ who whispered that the MLN ‘was a Catholic movement destined to serve the Vatican in Africa’.Footnote 93 Despite their anticolonial stance, then, elements on the left continued to view militant African Catholic activists as under European thumbs. In the short term, the MLN's effort was unsuccessful: Guinea under Sékou Touré was the only African colony to declare its full independence from France in 1958, but all of French Africa would be independent by 1960.
Less than two weeks after the referendum, Pope Pius XII, who had presided over the Vatican since 1939, died in office. By the end of October 1958, John XXIII took over and began moving the church in new directions. John, who as Cardinal Rancalli had been the papal nuncio to France and therefore knew the French hierarchy intimately, replaced Monsignor Lefebvre as papal delegate in francophone Africa. He accelerated the process of appointing African bishops to preside in African dioceses, and called the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) to address the church's relationship with a rapidly evolving world.Footnote 94 The Council would wrestle with the central critique that radical Catholic African students and African Catholic priests had raised: it sought to make Catholicism less European and more universal with liturgy in vernacular languages and new teachings on the place of the church in the modern world. By the early 1960s, then, Catholic African students saw some of their political and religious hopes fulfilled: African independence (but not unity) and a more inclusive church. Though the next decades would bring plenty of reversals in both the political and religious realms, they were better able to harmonize their African and Catholic loyalties.
