From 1895 to 1958, French West Africa was a federation of eight colonial territories, which stretched from the Atlantic deep into the Sahara and down to the Gulf of Guinea. This vast area had been seized by France incrementally. While France had established trading posts in Senegal already in the 1600s, the other territories the French incorporated into their empire throughout the nineteenth century. Due to the diversity of its composite parts, Paris struggled to give this federation a unifying purpose.
In his well-documented and enlightening study, Contesting French West Africa, Harry Gamble homes in on educational policy to explore the attempts to guide the federation's development. Based on the discussions about what kind of student the French West African education system should produce, Gamble argues that a drive to integrate the inhabitants into the imperial order ran up against a hardened notion of their subjugation. Throughout the federation's existence, pushes to assimilate French West African education to metropolitan France's mostly lost out to advocacy for a looser form of association between the two. But an enduring design for how this would look never emerged. It remained contested.
Broadening the existing scholarship on French imperial educational policy beyond the Parisian frame, Gamble gives voice to stakeholders in France and Africa, to Europeans and Africans. He focuses on how metropolitan reforms were received in French West Africa, describing both how colonial administrators interfered with any challenge to the racial hierarchy and how African elites pushed for greater educational access. Attuned to the diversity of the federation, he also outlines how the different (French) histories of these territories complicated the imposition of any overarching system.
In the Four Communes of Senegal—Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque—France had granted rights to local inhabitants, the originaires. Numbering in the tens of thousands by the early twentieth century, they were not colonial subjects. As such, even before becoming French citizens during World War I, they, Gamble writes, “represented a larger, more diffuse challenge to French authority than most historians have recognized” (52). He vividly describes how they resisted attempts by the local authorities to curtail their rights, and how a crucial arena for this confrontation was education. In the face of various exclusionary strategies, they demanded a French education.
Though fighting an uphill battle, their clout was unparalleled elsewhere in the federation. In the interior of French West Africa, schools were few and far between. When the colonial authorities promoted an education fitting the context, schools there duly emphasized practical skills, such as improving agricultural and gardening practices. Only a small minority of the brightest students had the chance to pursue more academic subjects—by moving to Senegal.
Through a focus on the struggles over education, Gamble makes visible the dynamic relationship between different power brokers in the French empire. He shows that the division between subject and citizen was not clear-cut. Though citizens, the Senegalese originaires were hardly on an equal footing with the European inhabitants in Dakar and Saint-Louis. And yet he also amply demonstrates that such African elites were not merely passive recipients of metropolitan dictates or local race-based schemes. They actively opposed obstructionist measures by the colonial authorities, and imaginatively discussed the various ways in which Africa should relate to France. Such initiatives caused alarm among the French authorities. So too did the lack of deference to the segregationist regime among the many young students from across French West Africa in Dakar schools.
In two particularly fascinating chapters, Gamble brings out how the relationship between African elites and local authorities shifted during the Popular Front era and under the Vichy regime. The Popular Front victory in France opened a space for Lépold Sédar Senghor to emerge as a public intellectual who intervened in the education debates in Dakar and Paris. Sensitive to how ideas translate in new contexts, Gamble argues that, though a founding member of the Paris Négritude movement, Senghor was neither essentializing African culture nor accommodating to the colonial order in Dakar. By defining civilizations as works in progress, which also took place in Africa, Senghor instead offered bold and innovative challenges of the assumptions about culture and improvement embedded in educational policy. Surprisingly, such questions continued after the fall of France and the transfer of French West African sovereignty to Vichy. Framed as a survey on cultural advancement, the Vichyite newspaper Dakar-Jeunes opened its pages for a wide-ranging discussion on how to define French West Africa. Some, such as the Paris-educated novelist Ousmane Socé, defended a position seeing it as a hybrid Franco-African civilization. Others even argued in favour of close to nationalist, anti-colonial ideas.
Since Gamble focuses on the discussions on what education should entail and how it should be organized, it is hard to appreciate what the impact was on the students’ experiences. The Dakar-Jeunes debate, for instance, was concluded when the former head of the elite École William Ponty paternalistically tempered the expectations raised by his former pupils. While Gamble notes that this provoked ire, he does not pursue the traces of such indignation. He instead states that the discontent about education during the 1930s and early 1940s “burst into full view” (227) in the post-war years. Following Senghor's lead, many prominent African intellectuals then strived to reconcile two seemingly opposing wishes. They wanted to circumvent obstructionist colonial authorities by linking the French West African education system more closely to the education ministry in Paris. But they also strived to ensure that African schools had locally appropriate curricula and textbooks.
It is unclear in what way previous debates could help them articulate this. The same is valid for education after independence, when the relationship between Paris and its former colonies, if reconfigured, continued: France concluded bilateral education agreements with most of the new francophone West African states. And yet, possibly selling his work of uncovering negotiation strategies a bit short, Gamble suggests that the previous debates had lost relevance upon independence; they had not left behind repositories of ideas with which to continue conceptualizing this relationship, which, while no longer formally imperial, kept its asymmetry. Nonetheless, Gamble has written an excellent study that both unearths the many participants in the discussion on and brings to life the unresolved issue of, education in French West Africa.
